The Italian Hagiographic Library (BAI), taking inspiration from the Bollandiste model of the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (BHL), surveys for the first time an immense textual heritage relating to over 500 saints. In total more than 1700 texts – both prose and verse – have been surveyed, covering vernacularisations and hagiographies written directly in the vernacular, spanning from the origins through the 15th century. In addition to the print editions and the bibliography, around 1000 manuscripts were catalogued, among which many unpublished. Thus a hidden vein of medieval and renaissance culture came to light, demonstrating the importance of this literary tradition for the study of popular religiousness, as well as the language and literature of these early centuries.

The repertory is also available in electronic format, with a CD-ROM that allows structured research on every aspect of the tradition, crossing the search criteria with respect to all the data contained in the electronic archives and in the two print volumes: authors of Italian and Latin texts, incipit and explicit, Latin and Romance sources, chronological and dialectal zones, typologies of saints and of hagiographic texts, copyists and owners of the codices. Special searches can also be carried out on the records pertaining to the manuscripts, in this way also reconstructing the features of the different hagiographic collections.