The Life of St Giles in Scripture

Detail - Saint Giles from The Hermit Saints Triptych by Hieronymus Bosch

If we wanted to meditate on the Life of St Giles using scripture, which passages might we choose?

The different accounts of the Life of St Giles (summarised in a post at this link) offer a number of possibilities:

The Life of St Giles - a Living Text

The Mass of Saint Giles, by The Master of St Giles c1500 (The National Gallery)

My parish church is dedicated to St Giles whose feast day is September 1st. Surveying recent scholarship on surviving manuscripts shows how the ‘Life of St Giles’ is a living text - how his story has evolved as he inspired each new generation. How do we respond to the text today?

A Bouquet for Saint Giles

Saint Giles and the Deer by The Master of Saint Gilles, c1500 (National Gallery)

‘Saint Giles and the Deer’ by the mysterious ‘Master of Saint Giles’ originally formed one section of a multi-panelled altarpiece dating from the early 1500’s. 

The painting and its companion piece ‘The Mass of St Giles” depict two of the three most popular stories about the saint mentioned in the accounts of his life, the most recent of which being The Golden Legend, a famous medieval hagiography.

 

Both paintings can be seen in The National Gallery and their website allows us to zoom in to see minute detail. The commentary for St Giles and the Deer states: “The different types of plants and flowers in the wilderness are perhaps a reference to the legend that the desert flowered around Giles’s hermitage.” Tantalisingly no description of the flora or what it might symbolise is offered - nor in The Golden Legend or other versions of the Life of St Giles - so I have attempted to make an educated guess!

Sermon - Forgiving the Unjust Steward

Fraternal Forgiveness, Andrey Yanev

A sermon given during Holy Communion at St Giles-in-the-Fields on Sunday 6th August 2023 (The Ninth Sunday after Trinity) based on readings from 1 Corinthians 10.1-13 and Luke 16.1-9