Hagiographic Tradition Research Articles

F. THOMAS LUONGO. The Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2006. Pp. xiii, 233. $39.95

F. Thomas Luongo's book follows in a distinguished line of scholarly research that has attempted to free Catherine of Siena from the hagiographical shrine in which she has been encased ever since Raymond of Capua, her confessor, spiritual advisor, and biographer, wrote the Legenda maior, the vita meant to serve the cause for her canonization, which occurred in 1461. Beginning in 1921, and followed up with subsequent publications in 1930 and 1948, French scholar Robert Fawtier launched his attack on the Catherinian hagiographical tradition. More recent scholars such as Sofia Boesch Gajano, Odile Redon, Suzanne Noffke, and Karen Scott, while abjuring Fawtier's polemics, also have argued in various ways that Raymond's Catherine is a hagiographical construct composed with an agenda, not a historical portrait. In search of the historical person rather than the saint, they have read Raymond's vita against Catherine's own letters in an attempt to reconstruct her life and reassess her spirituality, along with the public nature of her mission or apostolate. In this slim volume of five chapters, Luongo does this, too, but he moves the discussion forward in a welcome and innovative way by historicizing Catherine in the social and political culture of late medieval Siena. Luongo also intends his work to stand as a critique of the voluminous scholarship on female sanctity that has appeared in the wake of Caroline Walker Bynum's influential book, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (1987). He argues that much of the recent work on sanctity privileging gender as the primary category of analysis has had the unfortunate effect of deracinating holiness from its local context, simplifying and reifying it rather than complicating our vision of it. To rectify this problem, his study plants Catherine Benincasa firmly back into the Sienese soil of the fourteenth century.

The Double Life of Anne: John Bale's Examinations and Diue Anne Vitam (sic)

Perhaps mistakenly, and governed by a critical project that requires the veracity of the female voice, the Examinations of Anne Askew has been read as part of the canon of history. Renewed engagement with this text as one forming part of the canon of saints allows us to comprehend its social construction and purpose: Askew is made a ‘saint’ for others and by others. Such a reading also sheds light on the question that has most concerned scholars of the Examinations: is Askew's word hers alone? Traces of John Bale's editorial interference in the Examinations are discernible, allowing us to explore the work as one in which there is a theoretical intersection between a social theory of the text and a concern for the ways in which a non-autonomous voice is represented. For the first time a possible analogue for Bale's re-packaging of Askew's narrative, his Diue Anne Vitam( sic), is suggested. Comparisons with this work help us to identify some techniques used by Bale in assembling fictional narratives. Rather than being an articulation of an ‘authentic, deeply personal’ voice, then, we might have to content ourselves with the sceptical assumption that Askew's Examinations are an artificial construction based on Bale's first-hand knowledge of residual hagiographic and martyriological traditions.

Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (review)

Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy. By Alison Knowles Frazier. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 527.) Alison Knowles Frazier's Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy is a scholarly twofer: it is both a monograph on the important and ground-breaking subject of humanist hagiographers and their literary production of saints' lives, as well as an invaluable research tool, a hand-list of texts dating ca. 1420-1520 in both manuscript and printed editions, which by itself is an impressive piece of scholarship that comprises approximately onethird of the book's length. Frazier's intent is to recover and explore the variety and significance of this ignored aspect of Renaissance scholarship, which by virtue of its uncomfortably close relation with the medieval hagiographical tradition no doubt explains in part why this literature has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Happily, however, Frazier is a scholar of Renaissance humanism who is well trained in the discipline of medieval hagiography and sympathetic to its concerns. Consequently, this serendipitous meeting of mind and material has produced a study that reveals the refashioning of the hagiographical genre according to Quattrocento preoccupations and taste, but is always mindful of continuities with the Middle Ages. The erudition and scholarship upon which Possible Lives is built is formidable, but lightly worn. Indeed, the author's tone is refreshingly modest, but no mere humility topos- it is instead the welcome frankness of a scholar who recognizes and wishes to share with her readers the limits of her material, analyses, and generalizations. Her method is the case study whereby each chapter presents problems that engaged hagiographers of the period. Topics include the Renaissance treatment of martyrdom; Bonizio Mombrizio's Sanctuarium, a celebrated legendary whose compositional circumstances remain problematic; saints' lives as humanist teaching texts; the representation of female sanctity, exemplified in Giacomo da Udine's Vita Helenae utinensis; and the hagiographical works of Raffaele Maffei, quondam scriptor of the papal chancery. Before turning to the textual problems that each of these topics presents, Frazier first situates the matter at hand in its proper bio-historico-political context which perforce shaped the text itself.That context is often revealing. For example, Frazier suggests that the simmering fear of Islamic expansion, fear that became all too concrete after the events at Constantinople, Negroponte, and Otranto in the second half of the Quattrocento should not be overlooked as shaping forces at work in texts such as Tommaso d'Arezzo's Tractatus de martyrio sanctorum. …

Imaging a colonial Saint: Reflections on representation and the individual

Marie Barbier (1663-1739) was a Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Montreal nun, superior and mystic. The story of her life remains in the form of two biographies. The first biography was written by Charles de Glandelet, her confessor and spiritual advisor, some time before his death in 1725. The second biography is an edited version of the Glandelet manuscript, almost 40 years after Marie Barbier's death. This article examines the many challenges faced in the attempt to construct a biography of this woman. It will explore not only the physical difficulties involved in interpreting these hand-written manuscripts, the obstacles presented by their hagiographical and 18th-century scholarly tradition, but also the barriers presented by post-modern scholarship with respect to the accession of "truth" and "voice."

La Passio di Firmina, martire di Amelia e il suo riuso nella Passio di Digna e Merita. Edizione critica

Study of manuscript tradition and critical edition of the two versions of the Passio sanctae Firminae. The oldest one (BHL 3001b) was reemployed to be used for other hagiographical traditions: for Firma of Civitavecchia (who was eventually identified with Firmina of Amelia), as well as for the Roman saints Digna and Merita, whose Passio (BHL 2160) is used here for the first time to establish the text that was its model.

Les vertus cardinales dans l'hagiographie latine du Moyen Âge

Allusions to the cardinal virtues have been a hagiographic tradition since the beginning of the Middle Ages. Over one hundred Latin Vitae written before 1500 refer to the four virtues. Most of the references date from the 11th and 12th centuries; from the 13th century on the number of sources declines as the right to canonize is restricted to the popes and the Rota displays an apparent indifference to the cardinal virtues. After 1400 the theme of the four virtues once again becomes common in hagiography mostly because of mendicant Italian friars and is eventually included in the process of canonization in modern times.

Europa Sacra: Raccolte agiografiche e identita politiche in Europa fra Medioevo ed Eta moderna (review)

Europa Sacra: Raccolte agiografiche e identita politiche in Europa fra Medioevo ed Eta moderna. Edited by Sofia Boesch Gajano and Raimondo Michetti. (Rome: Carocci Editore. 2002. Pp. 432. euro26.40 paperback.) The papers reproduced in this volume were originally presented at a symposium of the Associazione Italiana per lo studio dei Santi, dei Culti e delI'Agiografia (Italian Association for the Study of Sanctity, Cults, and Hagiography). The meeting was convened to discuss late-medieval and early-modern hagiographical collections and the role they played in the sanctification of states and territories. This volume consists of twenty-two essays and a foreword and introduction from the volume's co-editors Sofia Boesch Gajano and Raimondo Michetti. In total, it presents the research of twenty-six scholars in some 430 pages. Although the focus inevitably falls on Roman Catholicism, particularly on Italian Catholic Reformation works, the collection is also augmented with pieces on early-modern Protestantism and Orthodox Russia. The geographical limits of the study are quite broad, ranging from Ireland in the west to Central and Eastern Europe and to Calabria in the south. But while the geographical view is quite extensive, the chronological scope is relatively limited, with most of the papers being firmly fixed in the period of a little more than two hundred years between the late fifteenth and the early eighteenth centuries. One advantage of this particular time-frame has been to illuminate the continuities that exist between the hagiographical traditions of the later Middle Ages and the work of Caesar Baronius and other great early-modern hagiographers, who have long been identified as major forces in the Catholic Reformation's reassessments of hagiography. As a result, the accomplishments of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries now stand out, not so much in stark contrast to the earlier period, but as the logical continuation and extension of fifteenth-century change. Given the large group of scholars that participated in these meetings, one would not expect to find a common viewpoint in a conference proceedings of this nature. The book does not present a single, or even several points of view. Instead the collection shows a variety of perspectives on the problem of hagiography and its use as a force in and territorial sacralization in early-modern Europe. The wide-ranging approach is also mirrored in the volume's use of languages. Fourteen of the twenty-four papers are written in Italian, four each in English and French, one in German, and one in Spanish. Such inclusiveness, though,has an unhappy downside: this will likely be a collection used only by specialists. Those hoping to find a state of the art presentation of current issues in the study of hagiography will be disappointed. Instead the book is a bonanza for the expert who hopes to mine it for new approaches to the problems surrounding the late medieval and early-modern cult of the saints, for information about certain textual traditions, and for insights into the interrelated themes of hagiography and sacralization. To bring order to these pieces, the editors have arranged them into three sections. The first treats case studies in which hagiographical collections became a vehicle for elaborating upon the character of the late-medieval and earlymodern territorial as a Holy Land. The case studies here present examples from Irish, Belgian, Polish, Bavarian, Russian, Spanish, and Italian sources. For readers in the Anglo-American world, the contributions of Padraig O Riain on late sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Ireland and that of Trevor Johnson on early-modern Bavaria may be of special interest. O Riain recounts the efforts of expatriate Irish scholars to collect and reconstruct the island's late-medieval hagiographical collections following the destructions of the country's monasteries as a result of English-sponsored dissolution. …

The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (review)

200 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Austen attempts to counteract the cultural stereotype of the voracious and threatening widow in order to preserve her social rank and personal autonomy. Like Carey and Trapnel, Austen purposely denies her agency and figures herself as helpless in order to forge a permissible poetic voice with which to defend and enhance her position as a woman without a male protector. Most interesting about the analysis of ‘Book M’, however, is Hammons’s focus upon the interplay between gender and social class, and, specifically, upon Austen’s poem ‘On the Situation of Highbury’, ascribed here to the country house poem tradition. Examining the poem alongside country house poems by Jonson, Carew, and Lanyer, Hammons considers its departures from generic convention as specific to Austen’s self-presentation as a virtuous but independently wealthy widow. As a female poet, her relationship with the estate defied convention on numerous levels. Reading the poem as a social and literary negotiation of this relationship, Hammons suggests the complexity of Austen’s position as an independent widow authoring the worthiness of an estate which she hoped to own. In resisting cultural and religious stereotypes of what constituted acceptable behaviour for a woman, Austen, like Carey and Trapnel, appropriated the essentially male traditions of lyric poetry and reworked them from a feminine perspective. Though this study is valuable simply because it brings to light additional texts relevant to the study of Early Modern women writers, it also examines complex relationships between the social role of the writer and the text as vehicle for cultural comment and change. Poetic Resistance will appeal, therefore , not only to scholars of Early Modern women’s writing, but also to anyone interested in the intersection between social and literary culture, and in the strategic self-presentation of poets during this turbulent period of English history. Alison V. Scott English Department Macquarie University Harbus, Antonina, The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry (Costerus New Series 143), Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2002; paper; pp. ix, 220; RRP US$54.00, EUR45.00; ISBN 9042008148. Old English studies have changed over the last few decades from a mainly philological perspective to a more subtle understanding of the complexity of Reviews 201 Parergon 20.2 (2003) the society which produced such a comparatively large extant corpus. Adding to an awareness of the sophistication of the Anglo-Saxon writers, and of their uniqueness, is the new volume by Antonina Harbus which draws attention to the way Old English poetry emphasised and privileged the life of the mind. This is an important work and complements the increased interest over the last decade in how earlier cultures viewed memory, mind and psyche. Harbus claims two aims to her book: ‘to investigate the emphasis on the mind in the poetic traditions of Anglo-Saxon England, and to outline the model of the mind on which this poetic discourse was structured’ (p. 13). The first claim is fully realised as she convincingly shows how the poets repeatedly used words associated with the mind (mod, gemynd, hyge, sefa, breostsefa etc). In the hagiographical tradition, where Latin and European counterparts exist, Harbus identifies how the Old English texts added references to mind and thought which were not present in the original. The identification of this uniqueness of perception of the mind as the locus of personality and action will surely stimulate more research into the comparative European traditions of mind. The second aim of the book is ambitious; the paucity of the material, and the medieval refusal to classify terminology in a manner appropriate to the twenty-first century, must inevitably lead to some speculation rather than a definitive taxonomy of psychological terms. Nevertheless, Harbus draws together evidence to show that the Anglo-Saxon writers described the mind as ‘an entity participating in the control of the self in a bipartisan manner. This dual and inherently fraught basis of agency, individual identity and consciousness is presented as a dynamic shaper of personal development’ (p. 186). Emotions occur in the mind, and the mind is also ‘the chief mechanism of an individual’s commerce with the divine’ (p. 187). Importantly, Harbus eschews the simplistic definition of...

Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order and the Written Word, 1000–1200 by Adam J. Kosto (review)

REVIEWS 248 Hungarian ruling class as a whole toward their past. The fifth chapter discusses a completely different model of holiness: the princesses and queens of the Hungarian ruling dynasty, starting with Elizabeth, daughter of Andrew II of Hungary and wife of Louis IV of Thuringia, and their imitators (often blood relatives) in the neighbor dynasties of the Piasts (in Poland and Silesia) and the Premysls (in Bohemia) or the German princely families of the thirteenth century. Klaniczay finds the reason behind the immediate success of these cults in their importance for the aggrandizement of the dynasties to which they belonged (209). He sees this in the elaboration, by the Hungarian ruling houses, of the notion of “hereditary sanctity” (228), and in the conscious emulation of the older, Anglo-Saxon, Bohemian, and Hungarian models (233). Klaniczay does not neglect the gender implications of the holy princesses’ sainthood, which fits into the male prejudice that “woman’s nature” consists of an unpredictable wavering between extremes (199), and discusses the character of the princesses’ chastity and renunciation in light of the contemporary phenomenon of the Beguines in the Low Countries. Yet, using an approach similar to Le Goff’s in his study of St. Louis, the author draws attention specifically to the general movement, throughout the thirteenth century, among religious orders and the laity to bring closer together the “heavenly” court and world authority (244). The last chapter is dedicated to the construction of the memory of the Central European “holy rulers and blessed princesses.” Klaniczay sees as essential promoters of the saintly cults the successful dynasties of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially the in Naples and, after 1301, Hungary and Bohemia. Manipulation of hagiographic material; pilgrimages by kings and queens around Europe and the establishment of churches and abbeys in honor of ancestors; recultivation of forgotten traditions; and generous artistic patronage of the arts: all were part of a conscious policy of appropriation, by a new dynasty, of the prestige and spiritual heritage of their predecessors. This led to the presumable establishment of a continuity between all royal saints of the Latin West. In the end, however, this appropriation would, in Klaniczay’s view, erase the dynastic essence of the saints’ cults and transform the holy rulers into national saints who could be used against the present monarch himself (389 ff.) The abundance of facts, the extensive case studies of objects of art or hagiographical traditions, as well as the rich illustrative material make Klaniczay ’s monograph a substantial contribution to the history of Christian saints and of medieval European political ideology. In addition to its scholarly merits, the complete index, the twelve genealogical tables, the files of the hagiographical tradition and canonization “files” of the five most important Hungarian saints, the ninety-one illustrations, and the extensive bibliography make the book an essential reference tool for any student of the history of Central Europe or the field of royal sainthood. BORIS TODOROV, History, UCLA Adam J. Kosto, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia: Power, Order and the Written Word, 1000–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001) 366 pp. In his first monograph, Making Agreements in Medieval Catalonia, Adam REVIEWS 249 Kosto approaches the subject of medieval social and political transformation from a unique perspective. By focusing on a single type of document, the convenientia , Kosto uses text, that is, he investigates the development, use and evolution of a specific textual format, as a lens through which to view medieval society. The convenientia, written agreements which began with the phrase “hec est convenientia” were made for a variety of purposes: to settle disputes, to establish terms of castle or land tenure, and to create bonds of fidelity. Approximately 1000 convenientia from the eleventh and twelfth centuries originated in Catalonia and survive within the crown and provincial archives in which Kosto conducted his research (3). This rich archival survival corresponds with the period of shifting political structures and increasing authority of the counts of Barcelona. While acknowledging that regional studies should not automatically be presented as proof of general European trends, since they “run the risk of isolating an area under consideration from its wider context”(4), Kosto examines the convenientia of...

Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes (review)

Scholarly in what it delivers, but delightful in how it delivers what it delivers, Cogito Ergo Sum is highly informative and fun to read. Touching on all the key places, players and events in the philosopher's life, Watson tells us (at least) everything we wanted to know about Descartes as he cuts through the myths that have been passed down to us about him. Cutting through the myths meant dissociating his biography ("the first biography of Descartes since 1920 that is based on substantial new research, and the only one ever written for general readers"; p. 23) from the two still-operative hagiographic traditions: the French Catholic apologetic tradition and the scientific apologetic tradition. The result is a skeptical biography, full of distrust toward tradition and authority, written very much in the spirit of methodical doubt practiced by its subject.

Sacred Romance: Silence and the Hagiographical Tradition

The tradition of vitae , specifically of crossdressing female saints, serves as an important source and point of reference for this didactic romance.

Juan Ponce de León and the Spanish Discovery of Puerto Rico and FloridaAn Early Florida Adventure Story: The Fray Andrés de San Miguel Account

These two tales of adventures in sixteenth-century La Florida make available in able English translations two early-seventeenth-century Spanish texts, but in other respects they are quite different. Fuson’s work is a self-described (p. xi) demythologizing life-and-times biography of Juan Ponce de León, with emphasis on his early life as well as his two voyages to La Florida (1513, 1521). Fuson’s principal sources are Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas’s account of the Florida voyages (1601), which is translated in full, and the biographic and documentary works of Vicente Murga Sanz (1959), Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois (1960), Aurelio Tío (1961), and Anthony Q. Devereux (1993). Fuson did not undertake his own archival research.Fray Andrés’s book, in contrast, is a first person account of his voyage as a sailor to Mexico in 1593, his shipwreck on the coast of Georgia when returning to Spain in 1595, and the English capture of Cádiz in 1596. The description of the Native Americans he met in La Florida and of life at St. Augustine occupy 27 of 71 pages. John H. Hann produced this translation after carefully comparing Genaro García’s 1902 published transcription with the original manuscript, now held by the University of Texas. García’s brief introduction to Fray Andrés’s life and writings is included in translation. Notes clarify obscure points or identify especially problematic syntax in the original. The exact date that the work was composed is unknown but it clearly was written from memory many years after the fact.To say that Fuson’s work is primarily valuable for the translations of the Spanish sources (principally Herrera) is in some ways a disservice to a very able, enjoyable synthesis of the extant secondary literature. Also, the book is very well illustrated with photographs of places Ponce knew. The problem is that Fuson’s account of Ponce de León is too heavily influenced by the Puerto Rican hagiographic tradition, which makes the man a kindly encomendero both before (on Hispaniola) and during the conquest of Puerto Rico. This hardly seems credible.Hann’s translation lets the author speak for himself, except to correct his errors of fact (in notes). A comparison of the texts shows that it is superior to the late Albert Manucy’s translation of just the Florida portion of the account (in America’s Ancient City, Spanish St. Augustine, 1565–1763, ed. Kathleen A. Deagan [New York: Garland, 1991]). Still, there are places where Hann’s rather literal translation, like the underlying Spanish syntax, is wooden and unclear. One wishes for a bit of Manucy’s flair.Neither Fuson nor Hann examine the literary genres of their early-seventeenth-century sources. That examination might help a reader to understand the silences as well as the inclusions in these accounts and help to guard against taking the ethnography too literally.In sum, these works make available in English translation two very different Spanish encounters with coastal peoples of La Florida. But each offers more, a context that tells part of the larger story of the Spanish empire, from its early expansion in the Caribbean to the beginning of its decline in the late sixteenth century.

“Greater Love”: Wilfred Owen, Keats, and a Tradition of Desire

Wilfred Owen is still, to some extent, prisoner of his saintly reputation. Though the most recent biography of Owen, by Helen McPhail, adds helpful maps delineate Owen's precise movements in battle, the book is thoroughly in the hagiographic tradition. As Samuel Hynes notes, Edmund Blunden's 1931 Memoir assembled the saintly, doomed Owen. The memoir is, in Hynes's words, a classic myth-making text. It created, Hynes writes, what Owen himself never had--a poetic character of his (437). Blunden beatifies Owen by deploying Keats. Memoir is misnomer; Blunden never actually met Owen. Blunden's text self-consciously creates an Owen myth to match the myth of Rupert Brooke. If Brooke could be the early twentieth century's Byron, dying conveniently in the Mediterranean, Blunden establishes Owen as its Keats, both because Owen's lushness derived from Keats's lushness because Owen's fate seemed similar to Keats's fate. It is impossible to be deeply acquainted with Owen's work, Blunden writes, and not to be haunted by the comparison between his genius his premature death the wonder tragedy of his beloved (3). Owen's early death fascinates Blunden, Blunden intuits circular explanation for it: because Owen died young he was like Keats, because Owen was like Keats he died young. And why did Keats Owen die young? Blunden uses figure common in Keats biography exploited during Keats's lifetime to explain his illness. This story places responsibility for Keat s's death on his unresolved desire for Fanny Brawne. Keats's friends Joseph Severn Charles Brown introduced this notion in their letters even as the poet was still living. But you I well know, wrote Brown to Severn, that Keats's disease is in the mind, he is dying broken-hearted (Rollins 1:201). In addition, both Severn in his recollections Milnes in his biography elided the object of Keats's desire, never mentioning Fanny by name. She survived until 1865, Severn Milnes were anxious to preserve her from embarrassment or blame. As result, Keats in their texts is laden with desire can never be satisfied whose object-Fanny--cannot be named. Blunden, then, is dropping enticing hints about Owen s sexuality in literary terms. The men who were beginning to recognize their attraction to other men in the nineteenth early twentieth centuries (and who faced legal prosecution for the practice of this sexuality after 1885) identified with this received version of Keats even though he was heterosexual. Keats's sexuality was figured in the terms with which their practice actually was restricted. Blunden's memoir creates two Owens: an outward an inward. The hidden or inward part of Owen is the Keatsian poet, the outward kind, practical man. Because Owen contains this hidden Keatsian poet he is marked out for suffering an early death. A quality located inside Owen--figured as gift or spark--dooms him. Blunden quotes letter of Mary Gray, who knew Owen while he was recovering from shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital: Throughout his trial he kept alight the of divine fire--the steadfast belief through suffering do we attain to the only true spiritual beauty (30). That spark of divine fire conflates poetic gift with physical illness; one cannot help but hear the suggestion of spark's consuming the self, as in consumption' Keats's tuberculosis. Because it emphasizes suffering--and mental rather than physical suffering--that figuration suggests another hidden burning: unresolved desire. The suffering of Blunden's Owen/Keats suggests the suffering of the closeted gay male. [1] The connection between Keats Owen's reading of his own sexuality has been suggested by the most perceptive of Owen's critics but not yet fully explored. Dominic Hibberd notices Owen's response to William Michael Rossetti's account of Keats's death seems partly sexual (9). …

Sacred Places and ‘Public’ Narratives: The Shrine of Amad Yasav? in Hagiographical Traditions of the Yasav?ūf? Order, 16th‐17th Centuries

Sacred Places and ‘Public’ Narratives: The Shrine of Amad Yasav? in Hagiographical Traditions of the Yasav?ūf? Order, 16^th‐17^th Centuries

THE IDENTITY OF A MYSTIC: THE CASE OF SA'ID SARMAD, A JEWISH-YOGI-SUFI COURTIER OF THE MUGHALS

AbstractSa'id Sarmad's dargah (saint's tomb) dominates the entryway to Delhi's imposing Jama Masjid. But Sarmad was a Jew, both by birth and affirmation. He was also, according to his Rubaiyat, "a follower of the Furqan (i.e., a Sufi), a (Catholic) priest, a (Buddhist) monk, a Jewish rabbi, an infidel, and a Muslim." Indeed, it is hard to imagine a mystic with a more complex confessional identity. This paper explores both Sarmad's apparently contradictory religious self-identification and the complex religious context which Sarmad found in seventeenth-century North India. It will trace Sarmad's spiritual path as it meandered between Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, as recorded in his poetry and in the hagiographical (taskira) traditions which surround him, and will contribute to the discussion of the relationship between the mystic and his or her religion of birth or adoption.

Blessed Bodies: The Vitae of Anglo-Saxon Female Saints

Blessed Bodies: The Vitae of Anglo-Saxon Female Saints Phillip Pulsiano Especially within the last decade hagiographical research has shi notably, even dramatically, away from a positivist approach toward historiography that sought to authenticate a claim for historical veracity in the establishment of a canon of saints' lives. The notion of causality and the search for empirical and verifiable data and h o w such 'facts' stand compatible with 'the seriousness of true religion'— constructions that inherently underscored the philosophical framework of Delahaye's influential analyses (although certainly he well understood the biographer as agent of mythmaking)1 — h a v e been challenged by a view of vitae as documents that operate within a different conceptual frame of narrative construction. This 1 See Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Legendes hagiographiques (Brussels: des Bollandistes, 1905; 3e ed. 1927), translated as The Legends of the Sain (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962). 2 Phillip Pulsian conceptual frame, while borrowing from and refashioning received tradition, is characterized by the generation of typology, a unique notion of what constituted the heroic (as opposed to, say, that in romance), and the presentation, not of the unique and individual, but of the saint subsumed within the communitas of the divine, as a (non-) personality functioning as a membrane through which virtus is presented in action. More recently, the saints' lives have been profitably read as gendered literary-cultural productions that reveal a developing hagiographical tradition with distinct aspects of male and female religiosity.2 Although the vitae of religious w o m e n are grounded within the conventions of sacred biography generally,3 their distinctive nature as gender-specific narratives, as Thomas J . Heffernan and others since have noted, requires treatment separate from that of their male counterparts: childbirth, food, lactation, sexual 'indebtedness,' virginity and the idea of the sponsa Christi, social forc See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: Univ of California Press, 1987), and her Fragmentation and Redemption: Es on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zo Books, 1992). Other pertinent studies include Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, Body & Soul: Essays on Medieval Wome and Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). See Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints & Society: The T Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000—1700 (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1982) y Blessed Bodies: The Vitae ofAnglo-Saxon Female Saints and boundaries distinct from male experience—all mark and shape the female religious experience in unique ways.4 Recent hagiographical study has focused, in the main, on either early saints' legends (third to sixth century, generally) or late medieval continental saints of the twelfth-fifteenth centuries. The study of Insular Anglo-Saxon saints, however, has been generally overlooked, or, at best, treated sporadically, and with attention focused primarily on selected prominent male figures, such as ^thelwold, Cuthbert, Dunstan, and most recently Oswald.5 Apart from specific collections of articles devoted to each of these figures, 4 I do not fully subscribe here to the view put forth by Thomas Heffernan (Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Ages [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988]) that such documents are 'reflective of a collective mentality' (p. 59) or necessarily 'serve as guides to behavior which exist within the popular imagination as cultural paradigms' (p. 87). Support for such a position depends greatly upon an understanding of both authorial intention and audience reception and must take into account the notion that textual meaning i s continually negotiated. One cannot speak with authority about the cultural paradigms of even the twentieth century much less the Middle Ages: the categories are too broad, the circumstances of intention, production, dissemination, and reception too vague, and our own perceptions too much the product of our own age to allow sweeping generalizations to stand. This does not mean, of course, that the lives cannot be read as literary-cultural productions through which can be charted...

Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (review)

288 Reviews formulation in which m e n are the carnal, morally weak creatures while w o m e n are inherently chaste and spiritually inclined, while Parmer's witty deconstruction of Medieval versus Early Modern Subjectivities in scholarly discourse should evoke genuine laughter. As an example of the growing corpus of studies of premodern sexualities, Desire and Discipline testifies to the fruitful work emerging in this field. Stephanie Tarbin Department ofHistory Australian National University Nagy, Joseph Falaky, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1997; paper; pp. xi, 356; R.R.P. US$17.95. Nagy's latest book provides a complex and nuanced literary reading of early medieval Irish hagiographical traditions. As such it is a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship in this fascinating area of Irish medieval studies. The device on which Nagy centres his enquires is essentially a rereading of the wellk n o w n hagiographic topos of speech with older or divine authorities to provide legitimation for the missionary enterprise of early Christianity. In the case of Irish hagiography, Nagy argues that this was done using the topoi of dialogue, though speech and the written word, with angels and with ancients, both pagan and older Christian. A significant amount of space is devoted by Nagy to Patrician hagiography. Chapter One discusses the Confessio and other works of the historical Patrick. Chapter T w o moves on to the seventhcentury reworkings of the stories of Patrick by Muirchu, Tirechan Reviews 289 and the Tripartite Life. Adomnan's vita of Columba is discussed in the third chapter and it is only in the fourth chapter that there is any extended discussion of any of the other Irish saints. In Chapters Four and Five, the discussion shifts from individual saints to discussions of themes within a variety of texts, including hagiography, the early law tracts and some vernacular literature, particularly concerning C u Chulainn. The themes which are addressed are that of the role of the charioteer in both heroic and hagiographical texts in Chapter Four and the theme of outsiders such as brigands in Chapter Five. This concentration on Patrick is understandable, Patrician hagiography has always held the greatest appeal to scholars of Irish hagiography and Patrick is the saint with perhaps the most scope for an analysis of the interactions between the old order, the ancients, and the new Christian one. Both Patrick and Columba have lengthy discussion with angels which m a k e them important to Nagy's central themes. Columba with his special affinity with poets provides a different sort of bridge between old and n e w from the missionary Patrick. Columba becomes both old and Christian in a w a y that Patrick couldn't, (p. 197) Patrick, w h e n he needed the authority of ancients, of necessity had to call upon the pagan past, and find ways to reconcile it with his Christian mission. Nagy argues that this is done with varying degrees of success, but mostly that it is an inherent project within the texts of both the historical Patrick and Muirchti and Tirechan. Although the concentration on Patrick and Columba is logical and would have been understandable to the medieval Irish writers themselves, Nagy's choice is not transparent. The earliest hagiographic text from Ireland is in fact not from the Patrician or Columban dossier, but is the seventh-century vita by Cogitosus of Brigit. Brigit, in fact, is rather curiously neglected in Nagy's book. 290 Reviews Although she is used by Nagy in interesting discussions on the role of charioteers and brigands, and the complexities of her role as a w o m a n in the male dominated world of hagiography are briefly discussed [pp. 232-36] there is no extended layering of discussion such as that devoted to Patrick and Columba. This is perhaps surprising given the indisputable pre-Christian origins of her cult and the ways that these are dealt with in the early corpus of her hagiography. The method which Nagy uses in his analysis is to delineate a particular episode and then weave his analysis around it, often...

The Christianity of Constantine the Great by T. G. Elliot

The Christianity of the Great. By T. G. Elliot (Scranton: University of Scranton Press. 1996. Pp, x, 366. $24.95 cloth; $19.95 paper.) Such is the place of in history that interest in him, on the part of both scholars and the reading public, continues to run high, although the available literature on the subject long ago became so abundant that no scholar can truthfully claim to control it all. The book here under consideration does not pretend to be comprehensive study of all aspects of Constantine's life and reign. Rather, as its title suggests, it is limited to an examination of Constantine's religious beliefs and ecclesiastical policies, while the secular aspects of his reign receive, justifiably, much less attention. T. G. Elliott of the University of Toronto, no newcomer to Constantinian studies, displays considerable erudition and draws upon wide range of primary sources and secondary literature. Unfortunately, his interpretation of the evidence at times seems to be less than objective, and his arguments do not always flow easily. Knowing that some of his conclusions are counter to prevailing scholarly opinion, he sometimes assumes defensive tone (p. 67) or, worse, dismisses the views of other scholars as a quack theory or as figments of their own imagination (p. 328). It is the principal thesis of this book that was raised as Christian by Christian parents, Constantius and Helena (pp.18-25), that he may have compromised his Christian faith at the time of the Great Persecution (pp. 84-85 and 214), that it was the Great Persecution rather than the miracle of 312 that was the critical experience of his life (p. 331), that his entire career as an emperor, beginning not in 312 but in 306, was Christianizing mission (pp. 34-35, 50, and 127), although he was quite capable of playing double game (p. 193), and that the conversion of 312 was an invention of Eusebius (pp. 36 and 67-68). Elliott has not made convincing case; he misinterprets key passage, Theodoret, HE 1.18.1 (pp.18-19); he is obliged to explain away the Apolline vision of 310 (p. 51). Many scholars in the past have reached the conclusion that Constantine's understanding of the Christian gospel was quite imperfect. Elliott holds otherwise, contending that was familiar with theological argument (pp. 181 and 271) and understood the Arian controversy very well (p. 283); he even calls theologian (p. 284). In 324 addressed letter to Alexander and Arius, calling upon them to settle their dispute and showing little understanding of, or even patience with, the theological issues. Elliott thinks that this letter is quite insincere, rising from the need to assume neutral stance (pp.179-180 and 185). We are also assured that the emperor's thinking and policy remained consistently and genuinely anti-Arian and that there was no vacillation (pp. 217, 221, 279, and 333). On this point, too, Elliott is at odds with prevailing scholarly opinion. Among Christians in the Roman there existed supposedly special kind of army Christianity, more tolerant and less rigorous than in civilian life (p. 37). Perhaps so, but it certainly is not true that there were few martyrs among Christians in the (p. 26). The hagiographical traditions, however unreliable, give evidence to the contrary: we learn of soldier saints such as Theodore, George, and Demetrius, of the martyrs of the Theban Legion, and of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. In an interesting chapter on Constantine's legislation Elliott correctly holds that Constantine does not seem to have considered legislation the best means of Christianizing the empire (pp. …

MENTAL CULTIVATION IN GUTHLAC B

The poet of Guthlac B is often admired by critics for infusing Felix's Latin original with Anglo-Saxon sensibilities. Yet these qualities do not derive so much from the native hagiographic tradition as from the elegiac. In particular, it is the psychological interest of the poet which strikes us as typically Anglo Saxon. The Anglo-Saxon concept of the mind differs from ours in several ways. A term such as mod signifies both emotional and mental faculties; moreover, one's mod is located in the chest. Proper cultivation and control of the mind is an ongoing concern of Anglo-Saxon poets, whether expressed in self-contained maxims or in incidental remarks about a protagonist's readiness for appropriate action. In Guthlac B, however, the poet's systematic use of mind-terms to describe the saint's beatific state is the most distinctive feature of his hagiographic rhetoric. The relationship between Guthlac and his servant is also most tellingly expressed by comparing their respective mental attainments. This paper examines the poet's use of the Anglo-Saxon psychological vocabulary to portray the states of mind respectively of Guthlac and his thane and seeks to clarify both the nature of the poem and of Anglo-Saxon spirituality.

The psalms of Islam: al-Saḥīfat al-Kāmilat al-Sajjādiyya (review)

148 Reviews dispossessed poor and found the 'fourth sort' to be negligent office-holders, as well as far too interested in dangerous Presbyterianism. As such, he straddled the fence Hughes tries to construct and was therefore perhaps as typical of educated Englishmen in the 1640s as he was in the 1570s. Glyn Parry Department of History Victoria University of Wellington Imam Zayn al-'Abidin, The psalms of Islam: al-Sahifat al-Kdmilat alSajjadiyya , trans. William C. Chittick, London, The Muhammadiyya Trust, 1988; pp. xlvi, 301; R.R.P. AUS$175.00 [distributed in Australia by Oxford University Press]. This is an attractively produced bilingual, Arabic-English, edition of a most highly regarded collection of Shfa Muslim supplications. The text, or rather most of it is attributed to the fourth ShTa Imam, 'All ibn al-Husayn ibn 'AIT, known as al-Sajjad and as Zayn al-'Abidln (ca. 658-713 A.D.), great grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. A proper understanding of Islamic spirituality, law, theology, and philosophy would be incomplete without some familiarity with the rich ShTa religious literature of which this text is a precious specimen. Because of its supplicatory form and intent and the nature of the tradition within which this text has been preserved, it would be out of place to dwell on questions of authenticity and textual criticism. This is a collection of private prayers that have been piously transmitted and somewhat amplified on the basis of a text that purports to go back to the fourth Imam who, together with his ancestors and descendants, is regarded with the utmost veneration and devotion in the Shfa tradition. The Arabic text particularly the bulk of it containing thefifty-fourmain supplications, reflects a coherent and weU balanced structure that would conceivablyfitinto the style of the time of Zayn al-'Abidin and his two immediate successors, his son al-Baqir and grandson Ja'far al-Sadiq, as known from therichShTa hagiographic tradition. As the translator acknowledges, the Zayn al-'Abidin of tradition may be considered by critical scholars to be different from the Zayn al-'Abidin of 'historical fact'. Apart from its value of introducing a ShTa dimension of Islamic spirituality and piety, the text can provide some insights into the thought world of ShTa spiritual leaders from the times of the early imams to the Reviews 149 present with then emphasis on the strong bond with the descendants of "Ah" and Fatima as the holy family of M u h a m m a d . B y deliberately shunning politics in the mundane sense, Zayn al-'Abidin and his descendants, particularly al-Baqir and Ja'far al-Sadiq, were able to devote their time to teaching, contemplation, and spirituality. It is in this context that the text needstobe understood. Although the spiritual and mystical dimensions of Islam have received some attention from scholars of Sufism, more work needs to be done in the area of popular spirituality and private devotion. Readers w h o are familiar with medieval Christian texts of this spiritual type, whether emanating from the Eastern Orthodox or Western Catholic tradition, for example, should be able to relate easily to this text. At another level, this book also provides a counter balance to the usual emphasis on politics, law, warfare, and economics in the encounter and parallelism between the medieval Christian and Islamic worlds. Historians of culture, anthropologists, and all those interested in the comparative study of spirituality m a y find useful insights in this and similar Islamic texts. The Arabic text would lend itself to new studies of structure, content and social semiotics, particularly if considered with other texts from the first two centuries or so of Islamic history, including early Sufi traditions. The translator provides a useful, though deliberately non-critical, introduction explaining aspects of the text and the place of supplication, as distinct from formal 'prayer', in the Islamic tradition. His translation, on the whole, keeps to the original in literary accuracy, style, rhythm, and poetic flavour. In addition to the fully vocalized and attractively executed text in Arabic calligraphy which should appeal to students of Islam, Chittick's excellent translation makes this unusual text accessible not only to the spirituaUy...