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Hubert of Liège

Christian saint, first bishop of Liège (c.656-727)

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ159834
Source-derived summary

Hubert of Liège (Latinized: Hubertus; c. 656 – 30 May 727) was a Christian saint who became the first bishop of Liège in 708 A.D. He is a patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers. Known as the "Apostle of the Ardennes", he was called upon, until the early 20th century, to cure rabies through the use of the traditional Saint Hubert's Key.

Hubert was widely venerated during the Middle Ages. The iconography of his legend is entangled with the legend of the martyr Saint Eustace. The Bollandists published seven early lives of Hubert (Acta Sanctorum, November 3, 759 – 930 A.D.); the first of these was the work of a contemporary, although it offers few details.

Hubert died 30 May 727 A.D. in or near a place called (in Latin) Fura. In the later Middle Ages, this location was claimed to have been identified as Tervuren near Brussels; recent scholarship, however, considers Voeren (Fourons), a location much closer to Liège than Brussels, to be the saint's likelier resting place. His feast day is 3 November.

Etymology of "Hubert"

Hubert of Liège was a Frank; the Franks were originally a Germanic people.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hubert of Liège” is christian saint, first bishop of Liège (c.656-727). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hubert, Liège and Christian, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 193-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 0655. For this dossier, Hubert, Liège and Christian is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “christian saint, first bishop of Liège (c.656-727)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q159834. VIAF identifies the subject as 70602369. The Library of Congress control number is n93045286. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Hubert of Liège”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Hubert of Liège primary sources, Hubert of Liège archive and Hubert research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Hubert of Liège” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.