The “Changeling Saint” Revisited: Medieval Hagiography, Zeno , and the Afterlife of a Motif

ABSTRACT

This article examines the transmission of the changeling motif—a child replaced by a demonic double—in medieval hagiographic literature. While scholars have identified changeling legends in the apocryphal Vitae of SS. Stephen, Lawrence, and Bartholomew, the article proposes the inclusion of the fourteenth-century Middle Low German poem Zeno within the medieval changeling corpus. The Zeno narrative demonstrates how changeling motifs migrated from saints’ lives to chivalric romance while preserving core narrative structures. The article conceptualizes this appropriation of hagiographic narrative conventions for secular audiences as the “hagiographesque.” It further traces the origins of medieval changeling hagiography to twelfth-century central Italy and explores the relationship between written texts and oral tradition. Drawing on manuscript, iconographic, and folkloric evidence, it shows how hagiographically influenced child-substitution narratives were transmitted, adapted, and reinterpreted across centuries, including in the form of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European ballads and prose tales.