In Martyrdom, Murder, and Magic, Patricia Healy Wasyliw surveys medieval cults of child martyr saints. Although not a folklorist, Wasyliw situates these saints and their cults under the purview of folkloristic research. Saints and saints’ cults were sometimes recognized and maintained by the official church in Rome, but they were just as often sites of diverse folk religious practices. The institution of sainthood in the later Middle Ages, Wasyliw argues, consisted of an “uneasy coexistence of local, regional, and papal influences” (2). Even in the very beginnings of Christianity there existed the notion that models of sanctity and saintly power could also be applied to children in the same manner as adult saints; in several instances, Wasyliw emphasizes that the creation of child saints allowed medieval peoples to grieve for dead children, despite the doctrinal issues surrounding childhood sanctity. Children could not acquire sainthood through the traditionally adult routes of asceticism and excessive piety. Martyrdom, however, offered an avenue for medieval peoples to locate sanctity within the domain of childhood.
Wasyliw begins her study by outlining the complexities of classical and medieval conceptions of childhood. Chapter 1 considers accounts of child martyrs set during the prosecution of Christians by Roman authorities. Christians who openly professed their faith and refused to participate in the Imperial cult during this time period undermined the Roman social order. Child martyrs were doubly subversive because they also often denied family and peer relationships. A frequent image in these child martyr legends set in Late Antiquity is that of the puer senex, the precocious “old child” who made rational and heroic choices despite his young age. Although this image would persist in later accounts of child martyrs, it was complemented by ideas of childhood innocence. Wasyliw examines in chapter 2 how such innocence was emphasized in the phenomenon of infant saints, focusing particularly on the cult of the Holy Innocents. Unlike the puer senex who demonstrated remarkable intent, the Holy Innocents could not decide or affirm their willingness to die as martyrs; their sanctity derived from grace rather than deed. Chapter 3 continues the discussion of Roman child martyr cults, but here Wasyliw tracks the development of these cults in medieval European contexts, noting the interplay between official and folk practices. For example, the cult of the Holy Innocents was officially sanctioned and part of the liturgy, but folk responses to the cult include elaborate festivals and the proliferation and personalization of relics.
The next chapters turn away from Roman cults and instead deal with those child martyrs indigenous to medieval Europe. Chapter 4 surveys child martyr cults in places of pagan conversions in the early Middle Ages and orients these cults to changing conceptions of children and childhood. Cults of noble children murdered for political ends are taken up in chapter 5. Here, Wasyliw shows that these children obtained sanctity because of the fact of their deaths rather than through any excessive piety. This is contrasted by Wasyliw with the child confessors of the High Middle Ages and the reemergence of the puer senex image, the subjects of chapter 6. During this time of increasing papal control over the veneration of saints, murder for marginally religious reasons was no longer enough for a child to achieve sanctity—the child also had to demonstrate unusual piousness. In chapters 7 and 8, Wasyliw turns her attention to accusations of ritual murder levied against Jews and the cults of child martyrs that grew out of such accusations. Chapter 7 takes up the twelfth-century case of William of Norwich and chapter 8 examines the spread of ritual murder accusations throughout Europe. The volume ends with a conclusion that briefly considers child martyr saints in later time periods.
This volume’s strength lies not in its analytical acumen but rather in its scope. Most of the chapters are highly descriptive surveys and offer few original contributions to the study of child martyr saints. Rather, Wasyliw’s book is useful in its coverage of both Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as in her attention to classical and medieval conceptions of childhood. Wasyliw’s comparative efforts also yield some valuable insights. In her chapter on William of Norwich, for example, Wasyliw situates William’s legend in the context of earlier Anglo-Saxon child martyrs, an avenue largely ignored by scholars of ritual murder accusations. However, these insights are usually incidental rather than the focus of an extended argument.
Despite the occasional insights, this volume suffers from errors both typographic and conceptual, ranging from the mildly distracting proofing errors to the more serious misuse of folklore terminology. The author was poorly served by her copyeditor at Peter Lang, as egregious typographic mistakes litter the book, beyond the occasional typo expected in any published work. The typographic mistakes, however, are at worst distracting. Much more serious is Wasyliw’s treatment of folklore throughout her volume, a treatment that demonstrates a conspicuous lack of engagement with the discipline. Part of this lack is perhaps a fault of the discipline itself—there are too few trained folklorists currently working with medieval materials. However, even a cursory reading of introductory folklore texts would have disabused Wasyliw of some of her misleading characterizations. Wasyliw utilizes the term folklore uncritically throughout her work. When she makes such statements as “the legend of Melor is the most folkloric of the murdered princes, and even William of Malmesbury put uncertain value on the story” (79) and “the legend of St. Melor straddles the border between the folkloric and the fantastic” (80), she makes the mistake, common to non-folklorists, of equating the term folklore with fiction. Not only does this characterization restrict folklore to belief rather than creative process, but it also ignores narrative genres that have emic notions of truth inherent in them (such as myth or the personal experience narrative). Would Wasyliw similarly dismiss out of hand a clay pot or log cabin, claiming that they’re just folklore and hence somehow not true?
Also problematic is an argument that Wasyliw maintains throughout much of her work, that child martyr saints and their cults were the result of folk conceptions of magic applied to a religious model of sanctity, such that “these children were magical rather than holy” (87). What this argument means exactly is unclear, as the author does not define either magic or holiness, which is especially troubling considering the large body of work in folklore, anthropology, and religious studies dedicated to examining these terms. If Wasyliw’s argument sounds like a reiteration of the theory of folkloric survivals, that’s because it is, as evidenced by her acceptance of Loomis’s 1948 documentation of pagan survivals in saints’ legends (87). To suggest that folk practices were “magic” and official practices “holy” ignores the facts that such survivals existed in both folk and official religious practices in the Middle Ages, and that they were thoroughly recontextualized. The notion that folk religion is nothing more than the survival of pagan magical practices applied to Christianity is misleading and paints medieval peoples as uncritical bearers of tradition with no agency.
Although useful as a survey of the material on medieval child martyr saints, the outdated arguments and the disregard of contemporary folklore scholarship make this volume of limited use to folklorists.
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[Review length: 1201 words • Review posted on June 2, 2009]