ABSTRACT
Count Gerald of Aurillac might seem rather out of place in a gallery of medieval saints: an aristocratic warrior, a great lord, Gerald seemed very much a man of this world rather than a saint in ascetic withdrawal from it. Gerald had been his older contemporary and neither lack of information nor the presence of dialect was the problem. The problem was Gerald's life itself. Gerald was a saint because he was a lord, not in spite of it. Odo's Life of Gerald does contain straightforwardly biographical elements, example a description of Gerald's family and ancestry, his boyhood training in war and letters, his physical appearance and his moral qualities. In the text, Gerald is only slowly won over to the legitimacy of using force, 'jus armatae militiae'. Odo knew that Gerald seemed to violate the norms of sanctity. Odo's intensely monastic preoccupations made his Gerald an inappropriate model.
