Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages by André Vauchez

Abstract

Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. By Andre Vauchez. Translated by Jean Birrell. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xxvii, 645. $95.00.) Andre Vauchez originally published La saintete en occident aux derniers si&cles du moyen age d'apres les proces de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (his these d'etat) in 1981. It became on its publication, and remains today, the benchmark for all study of hagiography and the cult of saints in the later Middle Ages. In it Vauchez examined the records of the formal processes initiated for the canonization of saints between 1198 and 1431 in the hope of illuminating the practices of western Christianity-and the attempted control of those practices by the papacy-during those centuries. Vauchez thus implicitly took up the challenge issued over fifteen years earlier by Frantisek Graus (Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit [Prague, 1965]) to use neglected genres of hagiographic works as sources for the history of western Christianity Tellingly, however, Vauchez opened his work with a reference not to Graus, but to a 1929 review of Hippolyte Delehaye's Sanctus:Essai sur le culte des saints dans l'Antiquite (Brussels, 1927) by Marc Bloch. He thus managed simultaneously to pay tribute to both the Bollandistes and the annalistes. Vauchez' work from 1981 to the present, can be read as a respectful critique of the immense resources made available through the efforts of the former by a scholarly sensibility schooled in the methods of the latter. This book is, quite simply, a masterpiece. In a quirk of fate it was published in the same year as Peter Brown's The Cult of the Saints:Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981). In the intervening years these two books have helped, more than any others, to shape a vibrant and growing subdiscipline in what might be called the social history of sanctity. Despite its monumental scope and size (765 pages in the original edition),Vauchez crafted a text which was both elegant in its style and remarkably concise in its argumentation. With the exception of a few passages (mostly those in which the author attempted analysis based on quantification), this book still reads with immediacy and freshness. Its translation makes available to Anglophone students a study of medieval religious ideals and practice which is of the highest-indeed one might say canonical-stature. Vauchez's scholarship is also exemplary in its catholicity, in terms of its breadth of scope, scholarly standards, and intellectual openness. The most important source material for Vauchez's study comes from the inquests conducted by ecclesiastical officials into the authorization of saints' cults, that is (to use a term which itself evolved from these very procedures), canonization. Its most important theme is the relationship between the Roman Curia and local officials. (My reading of Vauchez differs subtly, yet significantly from that of Richard Kieckhefer-himself a distinguished scholar of late medieval sanctity-who states in his foreword to this translation that the bookhas as its central explicit focus the relationship between curial and lay perceptions of sainthood [p. …