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I am not sure about the sentence in the first paragraph of the Biography section “The spring (the Feunteun Sant Goulven), now near the saint’s church, still cures people miraculously.” It seems a bit weird for the miraculous cures to be stated as a fact rather than as something some people believe, but I cannot read the source and am a bit wary of re-writing it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Biskitty ( talk • contribs) 02:33, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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Reviewer: Whiteguru ( talk · contribs) 01:40, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
Starts GA Review; the review will follow the same sections of the Article. -- Whiteguru ( talk) 01:40, 19 April 2021 (UTC)
The bells are easy: there is nothing more to be said on these. I don't mean this in a dismissive way, but what's cited in the sources is pretty much all there is--the scholarship here is pretty comprehensive. The sources simply don't comment on them, neither the old (hagiographic/semi-historic) ones nor the new (critical, historiographic) ones.
The biography section indeed relies pretty much on one source, the oldest one available--and that's really because that's the only one, as explained in the "Textual" section. So there isn't really much to cite: there are no critical editions of the vita that can have a set of different texts from which to compile an authoritative one, or make comparisons. And obviously there is no material that's historical in the modern sense of the word.
The relics are addressed in the text: there aren't many left, except for the pieces noted in 1889. Scholars of the cult of saints know that the whole relic business is fraught with difficulty to begin with, and it is very rare that we have a set of remains with what one might call an uninterrupted chain of custody for those early saints. I can't find Patrick Geary's Furta Sacra on my bookshelf right now, but it lays out pretty clearly why this is so. Bottom line is, for most early saints there just isn't enough solid information; we're pretty sure about Saint Boniface's remains, but he's an exception.
That leads me to the cult of the saints: I'm not quite sure what you are looking for. Discussing those cults over the course of a couple of centuries, or a millennium and a half, is well outside the scope of this article, nor is there any direct sourcing that discusses this saint in relation to the larger topics--except for what's already in here, about places and names and such. There simply is no more. For some saints (see Mark_the_Evangelist#Relics_of_Saint_Mark, where the real miracle is that Geary isn't cited) there are interesting things to say, that touch upon the cult of the saints, but for this guy there just isn't.
And to that I'd add that other articles on saints don't stray from the specifics of their subject either-- Oda of Canterbury, Clement of Alexandria, Saint Walstan are all GAs and this article conforms very closely to the focus and structure of those articles. And it's similar with placing this article on this saint in the larger tradition of the Christian Church, whether of the 6-7th century or later: saints, until well into the second millennium, were typically "local", and while they were frequently recorded in church documents and lists, they were celebrated, for the most part, only in the localities they were associated with--so you find this saint in Brittany and Cornwall, but nowhere else, so for the Christian church as a whole he's really meaningless, except as generalized evidence of the ongoing concern of God with the world. So I also don't really see how Paul VI comes in, for instance.
Yes, the list of bishops of Quimper doesn't mention him, but that can't be helped. We do not have the record. In this case, the vita says he was a bishop, and that's all we have to go on, which is why I've tried to be careful in the phrasing--"According to that vita, he was the bishop of ..." And yes, it may have been rare for a hermit to become bishop, but there again, all we have is the vita, and no other historical sources--or modern commentary on the rarity of that fact. I hope you will take these comments into consideration; thank you in advance. Drmies ( talk) 16:23, 30 April 2021 (UTC)