Word of the Day: Hagiography

hagiography, writing devoted to recording and glorifying the lives of saints and martyrs. This form of Christian propaganda was much practised in the Middle Ages but has few equivalents in modern literary equivalents apart from G. B. Shaw's play Saint Joan (1923). By extension, the term is now often applied to modern biographies that treat their subjects reverentially as if they were saints. A writer of such works is a hagiographer.