| Summary: | By retaining of the two Lives of Saint Roch published by the Bollandists, scholarship had hitherto endeavored to construct a probable biographical portrait of a miracle-working pilgrim from the second half of the 14th century. In addition to new vitae, the author exhaustively investigates all the other neglected dimensions of a complex hagiographic file: those of the liturgy, the civil archives, the relics and the iconography. He reveals and analyzes an exceptional corpus of unpublished documents, some of which predate the accounts by several decades. What emerges is an unexpected figure that is very different from that resulting from the traditionalist and overly exclusive exploitation of literary sources. It is rooted in that of a Merovingian bishop of Autun, is reconditioned under the effect of the plague in the Languedocian liturgy of the end of the 14th century, then is duplicated in the Italian iconography of the first half of the 15th century. Finally, it is part of a novel from the last third of the century, reworked several times, which the new medium of printing will propel throughout Europe in barely two decades. This vast heuristic inquiry, conceived in the strict heritage of critical hagiography, brings yet another original methodological and epistemological contribution to the stemmatics of rewritings, to the study of false "pious thefts" of relics and to the contribution of iconography. It also intends to fuel reflection on the notion of popular devotion and on the phenomena and social groups that generate it.
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