The Festschrift often fails to live up to its promise. Although most begin with a theme carefully delineated to encapsulate and honor a life's work, they often transform into volumes crammed full of rehashed essays that seem hurriedly dashed off and which have only the most tangential connections. This collection, published in two separate volumes, does manage to rise above the normal problems inherent in the genre, yet it does so cleverly by transforming the normative Festschrift theme into a series of papers loosely grouped under headings that explore various kinds of "medieval paradigms," an umbrella broad enough to encompass the great variety of work contained therein.
Intended to honor the distinguished career of Jeremy Duquesnay Adams, this project has been published in two volumes. Taken as a whole, this two-volume set is a fitting commemoration to the depth and breadth of Adams's scholarship. Even as a whole, it manages to present a great deal of new research. In the first volume thirteen papers were arranged under three topical headings that examined various medieval models of authority, community, and morality. That book, which also appeared from Palgrave in 2005, included essays from a distinguished group of medievalists. The high standard evidenced in it continues in this second volume, which includes twelve papers that examine medieval paradigms of devotion as well as attempts to revive certain medieval models of belief and practice in the modern era.
Part One, "Paradigms of Devotion," consists of eight chapters treating the medieval devotional life; these pieces are roughly arranged in chronological fashion. Most treat French subjects; all are carefully delineated case studies of important sources that reveal the development of major cults or of more widely experienced religious practices, particularly at major shrines. In the first contribution the collection's editor, Stephanie Hayes-Healy, examines the theme of alienation and the ascetic abandonment of society, a topic that is echoed in several of the other pieces in the volume. In her chapter Hayes-Healy carefully unravels the various meanings the term peregrinatio had in the early Middle Ages, concluding that the word was more frequently used in the early medieval period to describe a permanent separation from society, a perpetual pilgrimage, than it was to denote the journey to a fixed place or object, the usage that became more normative in the later Middle Ages. Similarly, Patrick Geary's contribution that follows is concerned with the question of ancient origins, as he explores the survival of certain saints' cults in early medieval England and Austria and concludes that these shrines helped to keep alive a Christian syncretism in the early Middle Ages that eventually provided a focus for missionary renewal.
Contributions by Elizabeth A.R. Brown and Grover Zinn, as well as a collaborative piece by Thomas Waldman and William Clark, explore medieval saintly devotion in and around the city of Paris from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Brown accomplishes a tour de force in her narrowly focused, yet fascinating examination of Abbot Hilduin (r. 814-840) and his impact on the development of the liturgies commemorating Saint Denis. While concluding that the surviving evidence for ninth-century practice is fragmentary and still leaves unanswered many questions about Hilduin's influence, her contribution manages to show just how far a skilled scholar can go in reconstructing the development of a key saint's cult through a disciplined analysis of fragmentary evidence. Similarly, the collaborative effort of Thomas Waldman and William Clark carefully combs a newly re-discovered source, a charter of Louis VII and links that documents to Abbot Suger's own account of the rebuilding of St. Denis in the twelfth century, carefully reconstructing just what Suger took from royal language concerning the new church, the famous saint, and his biblical origins. Grover Zinn's chapter returns again to pursue the theme of alienation evidenced in the Hayes-Healy piece as he explores Hugh of Saint-Victor's foundation of the famous Left Bank abbey as an exile community in the early twelfth century. Zinn argues that the experience of separation remained of primary importance for the definition of the new Victorine order that developed from that exodus. Yet it was a routinized, spiritualized notion of exile, rather than an ideal of ascetic alienation that now came to dominate in the spirituality of the twelfth century order.
The three remaining pieces in this first section on devotional models move beyond Paris to explore cases of devotion elsewhere in France, in Italy, and Northern Germany. Donna Mayer-Martin's chapter illuminates the history of the royal abbey at Soissons and its place within the larger society of Picardy, examining the history of the region, its abbey, and commune from the early Middle Ages to the twelfth century. Her excursion through these themes sets the stage for the subsequent examination of the career of the famous monk-trouvère, Gautier de Coinci (1177/78-1236), author of a widely disseminated collection of Miracles of Our Lady. For his part, Richard Kay takes up a subject of more limited scope, but one that strikes an important cautionary note about the perils of translation. He treats the English rendering of the word fulgore in Dante's Paradiso (33.141), the word used to describe the mental illumination that accompanied Dante's visions of God in the Empyrean heaven. Although long translated into English as "flash," Kay persuasively argues that it should be rendered as "effulgence," a brilliant radiance, a notion that he demonstrates is more in keeping with the Augustinian psychology that generally informs Dante's Divine Comedy. Caroline Bynum's, "A Matter of Matter," concludes the section on paradigms of devotion by analyzing the histories of two of the most controversial, yet popular shrines in late-medieval Germany, the holy blood pilgrimages at Wilsnack and Sternberg. Her piece shows just how fine the line could come to be in the later Middle Ages between accepted piety and superstition and between heresy and orthodoxy. At the same time she manages to illuminate the deeper impulses that reposed in holy blood devotion, by examining its relationship to medieval theories of atonement as well as to more generally held views concerning the processes of salvation, a subject she has now examined at far greater length in her recent book-length study, Wonderful Blood (Philadelphia, 2007).
The second section of this volume, "The Medieval Paradigm Revived," treats the medievalisms of twentieth-century Europe and America. These contributions may be of less immediate interest to specialists who will likely be concerned with mining this collection for its specific insights into medieval social realities and texts, yet these pieces still make for interesting reading. Here Walter Goffart's short piece explores the case of a daring forgery, a map of the Carolingian empire donated to the Società geografica italiana at Rome in 1933, while Peter Williams treats the importance that Romanesque and Gothic architecture had for defining notions of community for Progressive-era American Episcopalians. Amelia Rutledge's literary criticism of the novels of Jack Whyte and Bernard Cornwell here argues that these authors' nostalgic notions of medieval militarism resonated with the cult of masculinity popular in the later British Empire. Yet of all these pieces on the "persistence" of the Middle Ages, readers may find that of the late Charles Wood the most interesting and charming. In it, he explores the fate of Joseph of Arimathea across the centuries, tracing the New Testament figure's ever-expanding roles from a character in the Grail Legend to his transformation into the Apostle of Britain through the careful tending of his cult by Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset. Wood's examination does not stop here, but follows the trail of Joseph into the world of nineteenth- and twentieth-century New England and concludes with the saint's embrace by New Age devotees. The result is a thoroughly engaging and creative piece of scholarship, which while managing to escape the confines of chronology, nevertheless points to the malleability and mutability of the devotional models that this volume has elsewhere so carefully delineated. As a result, Wood's piece is a fitting tribute to the book's dedicatee, Jeremy Adams, and a lighter, yet provocative conclusion to a collection of high quality.