Reviewed by: Crossing Confessional Boundaries: Exemplary Lives in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Sources by John Renard Adam Bursi John Renard Crossing Confessional Boundaries: Exemplary Lives in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Sources Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020 Pp. xii + 345. $34.95. With this monograph, John Renard completes a trilogy of books on the general subject of “hagiography,” or (as Renard glosses the word) “stories of holy ones” (1). In two earlier works (Friends of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008], and a companion edited collection, Tales of God’s Friends: Islamic Hagiography in Translation [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009]), Renard offered thematic investigations of the varieties of venerated persons memorialized within Islamic texts and contexts across the world, and from the emergence of Islam up to modernity. Here, Renard moves away from his previous exclusive focus on Islamic materials to studying “exemplary figures” (viii)—i.e., saints, rabbis, ascetics, and prophets, among other overlapping types of holy men and women—found in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic texts from roughly 300 to 1300 c.e. Opening with an evocation of Peter Brown’s seminal role in the formation of “Late Antiquity studies” and his work in that field on the “rise of the holy man” (vii), Renard positions his work here as a “contribution to this burgeoning scholarly effort” in the form of a “study in comparative hagiography” (ix). In order to cover this breadth of material from 1,000 years of history of three different religious traditions, Renard has immersed himself in the huge body of contemporary scholarship on late antique and early medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While references to primary texts such as saints’ lives appear throughout the book, Renard pursues a much broader and more synthetic viewpoint than could be afforded by exhaustive analysis of specific texts. Instead, he largely relies upon and summarizes a great variety of recent scholars’ arguments and conclusions regarding the literatures, traditions, and geographic areas under investigation. His goal is “to offer a large narrative on the basis of recent publications by scores of scholars in Late Antique and early medieval sources” and thus “distill [. . .] from their remarkable contributions the outlines of a more expansive picture” (ix). The result is a broad overview of several areas related to [End Page 455] the study of late antique holy persons, the texts about them, and the utilization of these figures by different religious communities. Among the topics addressed are the literary genres of hagiographic texts, common narrative topoi deployed by their authors, and the social functions served by these texts and the variant representations of holy persons contained within them. Renard’s framing and his choices of what material to include may irk specialists within the various disciplines that fall under the umbrella of late antiquity. For example, in his coverage of Christian hagiographical materials, Renard draws almost exclusively from self-contained narrative biographies produced from the third century onwards, such as Athansius’s Life of Antony. Renard seems to regard such long-form biography as “true hagiography” (11, 96), and he focuses throughout the book on such texts, extending also into his coverage of Jewish and Islamic traditions. Yet this genre of long-form biography was generally deployed later (or in different ways) by Jews and Muslims than it was by Christians. This leads Renard in some cases to juxtapose late antique Christian texts with significantly later Jewish and Islamic biographical collections, such as the thirteenth-century Book of the Pious Ones (Sefer Hasidim). More chronologically proximate comparanda might have been profitably used: Talmudic and Midrashic literatures have increasingly been read in dialogue with late antique Christian hagiography by scholars like Ra‘anan Boustan, Daniel Boyarin, Rachel Neis, Jeffrey Rubenstein, and Holger Zellentin, to name only a few. Similarly, Renard focuses a significant part of his examination of “Islamic hagiography” on Sufi texts that emerged in the ninth and tenth centuries and later, rather than engaging with other Islamic literatures. He is aware of (for example) the large body of biographical collections that early medieval Sunni Muslims produced related to the transmission of hadith, but does not see these as “truly hagiographical...
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Oct 31, 2023
GERALD BRAY 
