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The hagiographic rhetorics of the Kingdom of Sicily in the 12th century is little studied due to the lack of sources, with the exception of the hagiographic cycle of the mosaics of the cathedral of Monreale. Recently studied by Sulamith Brodbeck in a ponderous and magisterial monograph, two heuristic indications emerge: the already known medieval link between body and holiness; and the political-theological importance of the image of Saint Gerlando of Besançon, the first Norman bishop of the re-founded Church of Agrigento. The present study assumes these two principles to analyse the literary hagiographic sources of the saint, which in their oldest core remain the oldest agiological attestations of Norman Sicily. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Saint Gerland of Besançon († 1100), patron of the diocese of Agrigento and Norman bishop, enjoys a fame almost exclusive to Agrigento. In his time, however, his sanctity was well known in Norman Sicily to the point of being portrayed in the mosaics of the cathedral of Monreal. Moreover, at Besançon, he was also magister scholarum and the corpus of works which circulated in medieval Europe under the name of Gerland, described by modern criticism as the Computist, could be ascribed to him. In this case, the bishop of Agrigento would have to be esteemed also for the value of his teaching within the debates of the eleventh century concerning the use of dialectic in theology. However, the saint's biography does not resolve all the doubts about this identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]