Sanctorum Societas: Recits latins de saintet� (IIIe - XIIe siecles) (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sanctorum Societas: Récits latins de sainteté (IIIe-XIIe siècles) John Howe Sanctorum Societas: Récits latins de sainteté (IIIe-XIIe siècles). By François Dolbeau. 2 vols. [Subsidia hagiographica, LXXXV.] (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes. 2005. Pp. xii, 436; 437-1007. €175.) François Dolbeau is one of the world's leading critical hagiographers. His basic philological approach remains inspired by the Oratorian and Bollandist attempts to produce authoritative texts, which they envisioned as a counterweight to Protestant criticism of the cult of the saints. Indeed, Dolbeau has collaborated with the Bollandists for decades. He seeks to identify and edit the literary memorials of the saints, privileging text over questions of cult development, even over the reconstruction of the saints' historical careers. As a graduate student, in an era prior to personal computers, he began tracking Latin hagiographical scholarship with the aid of ream-size boxes of paper, each sheet marked with a text number or a hypothetical text number from the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina (BHL). Although he was once based at the École française in Rome, he has taught at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris since 1985. General readers of the Catholic Historical Review may more readily recognize him as the editor of the twenty-six lost sermons of Augustine found in a late fifteenth-century Carthusian codex in the Stadtbibliothek of Mainz, but those who are students of hagiography know him as a prolific hagiographical scholar and an unfailingly helpful expert, quick to respond to queries. Indeed, I was personally surprised to discover, when I sat for a few weeks in Dolbeau's hagiographical seminar at the École Pratique, that his kindness was sometimes a team effort: he often brought mail to class and would begin with questions along the lines of "Professor X wishes to know. . . . How might we help him?" In these two volumes, Dolbeau has collected thirty hagiographical studies, all but one previously published between 1974 and 2002. He presents them with their original pagination, but also adds sequential page references within square brackets. The original articles are now supplemented with extensive addenda [End Page 96] and corrigenda. They are grouped into five sections. Section I presents three general studies: one concerning the criteria to use to establish the attribution and authenticity of hagiographical works, another on hagiographical composition, and a third on hagiographical texts written in verse. Section II concerns Latin hagiography in the ancient world: it presents an improved critical edition and commentary for the passio of Lucius and Montanus (BHL 6009), a critical edition of a Donatist sermon on the death of Donatus (BHL 2303b), and a critical edition with French translation of the passio of Irenaeus of Sirmium (BHL 4466). The inherent logic of Dolbeau's chronological organization might lead readers to expect a subsequent section on post-Roman materials, but this is not the case: perhaps editing and close analysis of the texts of the Merovingian world and its neighbors has been pre-empted to some extent by the careful Quellenkritik of the scholars of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Instead the nine studies of Section III concern the hagiography of the ninth and tenth centuries: the editio princeps of the prose life of Marcel of Die (BHL 5247b); the editio princeps of the passio of Cassian of Imola (BHL 1626d) composed by Hucbald of Saint-Amand (d. 930); a study of the dossier of Amatus of Sens which demonstrates that BHL 363–364 is also by Hucbald; a study distinguishing, in Naples and other centers, the roles of translators from the roles of Latin writers/stylists in the creation of Latin lives from Greek sources; a partial first edition of Cyril's Latin life of Euthimius (BHL 2778d) based on a translation made by John the Deacon (early tenth century); an examination of the dossier of Bishop Canio of Atella (BHL 1541d and 1541b); an editio princeps of a sermon written for the feast of Donatianus (BHL 2280) by Rather of Verona (d. 974); an editio princeps of a panegyric delivered at Minden for the feast of Gorgonius (BHL 3621d); and an edition of a versification (no...