Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages by André Vauchez

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER frequent enough to be disconcerting, as are the inconsistent practices for providing translations and the unacknowledged repetition of both material and references throughout its chapters. Such inconsistencies accurately indicate that this book, despite the merits of its derail, is a stitching together of previous work under the fashionable rubric of translation, rather than a concerted study of Chaucer as a translator. KATHLEEN DAVIS Bucknell University ANDRE VAUCHEZ. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell, with a foreword by Richard Kieckhefer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xxviii, 645, 43 plates, 34 tables, 3 maps. $95.00. This publication is a complete, elegant, and most welcome translation of the revised edition (1988) of Vauchez's classic, La saintete en occident aux derniers siecles du moyen age, d'apres !es proces de canonization et !es dorn­ ments hagiographiques (Rome: Ecole Frans;aise, 1981). Vauchez's book, which has also been translated into Italian, is one of the regrettably small number of studies that not only draws on scholarship in most of the major relevant languages (especially French, Italian, German, and English) but has gained a worldwide academic readership, providing a basic reference point for all scholars of hagiography for the last two de­ cades. Like its two predecessors-La spiritualite du moyen age occidental: Vllle-Xlle siecles (1975), and Religion et societe dans !'occident medieval (1980)-and like Les lafrs au moyen age: Pratiques et experiences religieuses (1987), Vauchez's next book-Sainthood in the Middle Ages is a rich mix of archival work and carefully considered synthetic analysis, written with a Bair for language and a hopeful, but far from naive, understand­ ing of medieval ecclesiastical politics. All this brief review can do is to explain what is and is not here, and suggest some of its uses to scholars of Middle English. Despite its overgeneralized English title, what Vauchez's book is not is a consideration of all aspects of sainthood and sanctity in later medi­ eval culture. There is little about the saints medieval people spent most of their time venerating: the early Christian apostles, martyrs, and con394 REVIEWS fessors, whose feasts were long-established events in the liturgical year, and whose lives and usually violent deaths are the subject of the vast majority of medieval hagiographic writings. This is, rather, a study of how medieval people came to be venerated as saints themselves or de­ cided to venerate one another, how the Church (especially the papacy) tried to regulate and channel these decisions, and how sainthood was defined and imagined in both the official and the popular mind. Book 1 describes from various angles the growth (from the eleventh century on) of the idea that moderns could truly be considered as saints and of the canonization process itself, the thirteenth-century heyday of processes and canonizations, and the decline in canonizations in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (apart from an upsurge during the Great Schism), as the length and expense of processes grew, and as the papacy redefined formal sainthood in more and more explicitly political terms. Book 2, building on an earlier discussion of the increasing number of figures venerated as saints despite their failure to achieve canonization (chapter 5), provides typologies of three kinds of sainthood, "popular," "local," and "official," focusing (in the hundred-page chapter 12) on how the criteria for official sainthood changed between 1100 and 1400, espe­ cially in favor of members of the mendicant orders, mystical women religious, and the laity. (Chapter 11, pp. 249-84, previews this discus­ sion with a long series of charts and maps, which usefully distinguish canonization processes by various criteria, including date, geographical origin, and profession). Book 3 describes the relative importance given to pre- and posthumous miracles, personal virtues, and career achieve­ ments in popular and official attitudes to sanctity, and how these, too, both evolved and became increasingly dichotomized in the centuries after 1100. Finally, two appendices provide editions of documents con­ nected with the canonization of Thomas Cantilupe (the bishop of Here­ ford who died in 1282 on his way to Rome to plead against his excom­ munication by archbishop John Peckham), while a...