Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe.

The three volumes under review are collections of essays which stem from three conferences on hagiography and the cult of saints held respectively at Barnard College in 1987, at the Ecole francaise de Rome in 1988, and at the Konstanzer Arbeitskreis fur mittelalterliche Geschichte in 1990 and 1991. They contain fifty-eight articles by fifty-six scholars covering the full geographical and temporal extent of medieval Europe. The contributors come primarily from four national academic traditions: American, French, Italian and German. The volumes differ considerably in organisation, in the topics considered, and in the theoretical approach taken. One thing which they do share, however, is a generally high level of scholarly quality.

The sheer bulk of the volumes and the number of the congresses which they record attest to the steady growth over the past two decades of medieval historians' interest in appropriating and using hagiographic sources to study a wide range of phenomena well outside that explored by earlier generations of able scholars associated with such venerable scholarly institutions as the Bollandists and the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Indeed the articles well document the development of new directions within hagiographic scholarship. These have their roots in the pioneering work of Frantisek Graus (Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger : Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit, Prague 1965), who grounded his research into early medieval social history in the results of traditional- that is largely philological - hagiographic scholarship. Their more immediate context, however, was provided by the work of three magisterial scholars which appeared over the course of the 1980s. Peter Brown investigated the function of sanctity as a form of social or political power in a series of works, most notably The cult of the saints: its rise and function in Latin Christianity (Chicago 1981). Andre Vauchez interrogated the ways in which hagiographic sources themselves were produced and how this process in turn formed ideas of sanctity, first in his monumental La saintete en occident aux derniers siecles du moyen age d'apres les proces de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (Rome 1981), and later in many articles. Caroline Bynum highlighted gender as a crucial category in the analysis of hagiography and sanctity in Holy feast and holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women (Berkeley 1987). The importance of these works to recent developments is revealed not only in the repeated references to them in the text and notes of the works under review, but more deeply in the ways in which the three …