Nalivaiko, Andrii O.Налівайко, Андрій ОлександровичНаливайко, Андрей Александрович2022-09-272022-09-272021Scientific Journal of Polonia Universityhttps://dspace.onu.edu.ua/handle/123456789/33788Leonid Nikolaevich Berkut (1879-1940), an outstanding Ukrainian medievalist. He studied the Western European medieval historiography and culture. L. Berkut’s reseach considers in this article, which dedicated to the Christian hagiography of the pre-Merovingian and Merovingian periods in Western Europe. Despite the special specificity and tendentiousness of the hagiographic material, L. Berkut was not a skeptic in the matter of using the lives of the saints as a historical source. For the Ukrainian professor, the lives of the saints, as well as the Christian legend, revealed the social and spiritual picture of medieval society and they were a special area of socio-cultural research. Trough his own research, the professor makes it clear to the reader that the genre of hagiography itself always has a certain pronounced specificity. The main task of the hagiographer is not to provide a historically accurate biography, but to create an image of a person who has achieved holiness and serves as a role model for others. Therefore the author deprived his hero of individual “earthly” traits and left him in the form of a supernatural “heavenly”, legendary, mythical role. In a hagiographic work, first of all, a certain “ideal of holiness” plays a role, and then specific information about the character's life. Therefore, a researcher, when studying this kind of sources, must be able to separate one from the other. Do not forget that the biography of saints occupied a special place in medieval literature. For the majority of the population of medieval Europe, hagiography was the main source about the Christian picture of the world, the relationship between the earthly and the heavenly, about the influence of providence in everyday life.enL. Berkutlives of saintsChristian legendsmiraclesthe Middle Ageshagiographyhistorical-critical methodArticlehttps://doi.org/10.23856/4411