A martyr’s story is rarely a report and usually a composition, and Delehaye — a Bollandist, writing about the corpus his own order had spent three centuries editing — set out how the composing works. The first move is that the type displaces the person: what a crowd remembers of a martyr is what a martyr is, so the individual traits fall away and an abstract form is left, and the surviving passions read as a mass of repetitions. The second is amplification. A bare notice — a name, a place, a day — is filled out on the model of an older passion already in circulation, and the interrogation before the judge, the most vivid thing in these texts, is precisely the part most often supplied: Delehaye shows how a writer with no record of what was said manufactured one from the stock the genre provided. The third is borrowing outright, where one saint’s acts are converted into another’s by changing the name, the shrine and the feast and leaving the rest standing. ⚠ None of this makes hagiography worthless, and Delehaye opens the book warning against exactly that reading: pointing out the tares, he says, is to the harvest’s advantage, and the sober eyewitness accounts deserve full admiration — which is why they have to be told apart from the elaborated ones.
The Legends of the Saints: an Introduction to Hagiography · ch. II §I pp. 23–26, ch. III §III pp. 91–97 (the fabricated interrogation, pp. 93–95), and the Author’s Introduction pp. ix–xi