other · 397
Before this, a saint's life in Latin meant a martyr's passion: arrest, interrogation, death. Sulpicius wrote about a man who died in his bed, and had to invent the shape of the thing — the ascetic youth, the renunciation, the miracles, the confrontation with power, the holy death — which is the shape every medieval hagiographer afterwards worked in. He was a Gaulish aristocrat and a trained advocate who had given up the law, and he wrote it while Martin was still alive, which is unusual enough to be worth stating. The year here is Wikidata's and matches the works shelf; the standard scholarly date is 396, because the book was circulating before Martin died in November 397, and neither Gennadius nor the NPNF prolegomena settles it. The curation note says so instead of choosing quietly.
To write down what Martin had done while people who had seen it were still alive to contradict him.
The first Latin life of a non-martyr saint, and the template for a thousand years of hagiography.