ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the fate of a religious figure—the saint—associated with a set of beliefs and cultic practices, when this figure comes into contact with fictional literature. In this respect, seventeenth-century French literature occupies a singular place for reasons of literary and religious history. On the literary level, the saint offers fiction, which is morally suspect, a guarantee of legitimacy. On the historical level, the confessional situation in France between the promulgation and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes invites Catholics as well as Protestants to critically reflect on their relationship to sanctity. A series of hybrid texts (novels, plays, and poetry) was then developed that attempted to articulate religious belief and literary fiction.
