Hagiography

hagēˈägrəfē | noun | One of my favourite obscure words. Strictly speaking, a hagiography is a biography of a saint or ecclesiastical celebrity. However, it’s also “a pejorative reference to the works of biographers and historians perceived to be uncritical or ‘reverential’ to their subject,” and this is arguably the more common usage in a non-specialist context. For instance, I used it to refer to a hagiography of the psoas muscle.