Hagiography synonyms

The hagiography of the Eastern and the Greek church also has been the subject of important publications.

Already, only eighty years after More's execution, hagiography had taken possession of the facts and was transmuting them into an edifying legend.

In the literature as it survives many different branches of writing are represented - homilies in prose and verse, hymns, exposition and commentary, liturgy, apocryphal legends, historical romance, hagiography and martyrology, monastic history and biography, general history, dogmatics, philosophy and science, ecclesiastical law, &c. But the whole is dominated by the theological and ecclesiastical interest.

He was a churchman in Alfred's employ, so it is not surprising that he wrote more hagiography than biography.

Why has early medieval hagiography survived better than other types of writing?