The saints have proved many a time has that they are able to bring together scholars of diverse background and interest. This Festschrift for Gabor Klaniczay is one of such occasions. The articles published in the book cover the field from late antiquity to the eighteenth century, but the bulk is about Middle Ages. All except one of the authors study western Christianity, especially Italy and central Europe: Hungary, Poland and Bohemia. The main themes are hagiography (its goals, techniques, relation to iconography), cult (mechanisms of its development, its religious, social and political background) and iconography (its significance, emergence and spread of iconographic types).
Marianne Saghy, "Pope Damasus and the Beginnings of Roman Hagiography" (1-15), analyzes the image of Roman martyrs promoted by Damasus in his epigrams. Considering hagiography a by-product of ecclesiastical conflicts, she emphasizes the link between the epigrams and church policy. This is interesting, but not always convincing: for example, Damasus certainly stressed the unity of his community, but the sola fides in the epigram on Lawrence can be translated in context as "faith alone" rather than "one faith" as Saghy proposes. The author demonstrates that in spite of the paucity of their factual material Damasian epigrams provided Roman hagiography with one important element: the list of martyrs' names, which became widely known and fixed in the topography of the City.
Ildiko Csepregi, "Theological Self-Definition in Byzantine Miraculous Healing" (16-31), deals with the role that incubatory shrines, and the collections of miracles performed in them, played in the doctrinal controversies of late antiquity. She presents cases in which a religious frontier separated the staff of a sanctuary from its clients, the author of the collection of miracles from the other visitors of the shrine, and even the saint from his/her sanctuary. The most interesting question, although only signalled in the article, is the change of doctrinal affinity of the Miracles of Cosmas and Damian, which shifted from Monophysite to Chalcedonian orientation (or vice versa).
Cristian Gaspar, "(Re)claiming Adalbert: Patristic Quotations and Their Function in Canaparius' Vita S. Adalberti" (31-9), presents part of his research on the literary culture of the author of the Life of St. Adalbert, bishop of Prague. Gaspar proposes to identify three passages in Canaparius as quotations from Cassian and Ruricius of Limoges. If the latter is much more astonishing than the former, it seems more dubious as well. Gaspar argues that these quotations served the author, an erudite monk in the Aventine monastery of Sts. Alexius and Boniface, not just to emphasize his education, but also to construct the image of his hero in relation to famous protagonists of the monastic life. This raises the question of whether his audience was able to appreciate, or at least notice, these literary devices.
Patrick Geary, "Pull, You Sons of Whores! Linguistic Register and Reform in the Legend of St. Clement" (41-49), explains the use of the vernacular in a scene depicted in the lower church of San Clemente in Rome. The fresco presents the story of the patron saint of the church, and is famous because of the words considered the earliest text written in Italian (Traite, fili dele pute, traite). Geary interprets them in the context of the Gregorian reform and demonstrates that their aim was not to make the scene understandable to uneducated visitors, but to emphasize the distance between Clement, the first pope after Peter and the founder of the Roman liturgy, who speaks in the fresco a hyper- correct Latin, and his potent lay adversary, whose language is vulgar in both senses of the term.
Janos Bak, "Hagiography and Chronicles" (51-8), studies hagiographical episodes in the anonymous Deeds of the Princes of the Poles and the Chronicle of the Czechs by Cosmas of Prague. Both authors declare their wish not to recount such episodes, but to a certain degree both do it: the Anonymous to point the God-chosen rulers, and Cosmas to honour the saints connected with Prague cathedral, where he was dean. One may remark that majority of the presented miraculous episodes are of historiographical kind, with parallels in biblical and ancient historiography. Caveat lector--it is easy to confound the Polish Boleslaui (three of them appear on p. 52 without clear distinction).
André Vauchez, "Hagiography and Biography: The Case of St. Francis of Assisi" (59-67), returns to the person of Il Poverello, to whom he devoted his last book. He shows that the hagiographical corpus of Francis was deeply influenced by the conflict between the Spirituals and the Friars of the Community, both of which claimed to be the true heirs of the saint. For both the life of the founder was of fundamental importance and served to justify the model of monasticism they proposed. Subsequently, Vauchez asks what the novelties of Francis' life and teaching actually were.
Péter Bodoky, "Idolatry or Power: St. Francis in Front of the Sultan" (69-81), explains the role of winged statuettes on the top of one of the buildings represented in the fresco of St. Francis in the Court of the Sultan, in the Upper Church in Assisi. Analyzed against iconographic and hagiographical background they seem to be not pagan idols, as is often assumed, but victories, and so symbolize the power and glory of the monarch rather than his idolatry.
Stanko Andric, "Blessed John the French, the First Franciscan Minister Provincial in Hungary, and his Miracles" (83-102), examines the modest but intriguing hagiographic dossier of the first Franciscan provincial in Hungary (d. 1288?), who is known mainly from the catalogue of Franciscan saints composed c. 1335, and the Speculum vitae beati Francisci et sociorum eius, printed in Venice in 1504. Andric compares the accounts of the saint's posthumous miracle in both texts, and tries to determine the relation between the two legends, leaving for further investigation the curious question of John's kinship to the mysterious Philip the Little, king of France, claimed by the Speculum Vitae.
Jozsef Laszlovszky, "Fama Sanctitatis and the Emergence of St. Margaret's Cult in the Rural Countryside: The Canonization Process and Social Mobility in Thirteenth-Century Hungary" (103- 23), shows what can be learned about a Hungarian village in the late Arpadian age from the canonization acts of St. Margaret, daughter of Béla IV. Laszlovszky examines three testimonies to a miracle performed in the neighbourhood of Pest in the light of other contemporary documents and new archaeological data in particular, and presents the evolution of the rural life, the social mobility and the ways that people in the countryside used to get informed about the events in the world. The essay is most interesting and instructive.
Viktoria Hedvig Déak, "The Techniques of a Hagiographer: The Two Legendae of Saint Margaret of Hungary" (125-36), writes about the hagiographic skills of Garinus of Giaco, who in 1340, on the occasion of the reopening of the canonization process of St. Margaret, made an attempt to present her life in accordance with the ideals of contemporary piety. By means of amplification and reinterpretation of the material he had in his hands, and--rarely-- of invention of new elements, he created an image quite different from the original, but conforming to the expectation of the readers, and Avignon curia, of the day.
David Falvay, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary in Italian Vernacular Literature: Vitae, Miracles, Revelations, and Meditations on the Life of Christ" (137-50), presents texts which both resulted from and contributed to the spread of the cult of St. Elizabeth (d. 1231) in Italy, where the stories about her miracles started a life of their own. In the second part of the paper Falvay defends the traditional dating of the Book of Revelations of the Virgin, and in consequence of the Meditaciones Vitae Christi, to the beginning of the fourteenth century.
Stanislava Kuzmova, "Division and Reintegration of the Body of St. Stanislaus: A Political Analogy in Sermons?" (151-63), deals with the most popular episode in Polish medieval hagiography. In the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries the story of the dismemberment of the body of the bishop of Cracow and its subsequent miraculous reintegration was considered a portent of the reunification of the Kingdom. Interestingly, references to the motif and its political significance appear in only three of the eighty sermons on St. Stanislaus. Kuzmova explains it by the pastoral aim of the sermons, the richness of diverse material from which later preachers draw, and the fact that after reunification the prophecy became anachronistic. The latter solution seems hard to verify, especially as the author does not provide dates for all the sermons.
Balazs Nagy, "Saints, Names, and Identities: The Case of Charles IV of Luxemburg" (165-74), studies the role played by the cults of Czech saints in the life and politics of the Luxemburg kings of Bohemia. He presents what can be called an interiorisation of Charles IV's devotion to the Czech saints, and especially to St. Wenceslas, whose name he received at baptism and gave to his two sons, the life of whom he wrote, and whose liturgical commemoration he used while dating events in his own autobiography.
Erno Marosi, "Saints at Home and Abroad: Some Observations on the Creation of Iconographic Types in Hungary in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries" (175-206), deals with ways of creating the iconographical models of saints--especially Hungarian royal saints- -and, even more interestingly, of their diffusion in Hungary, Angevin Naples and Luxemburg Bohemia. Marosi shows the political background to the spread of these cults and their iconography and demonstrates the complexity of the process, whose medium could have been both image and text.
Bela Zsolt Szakacs, "Palatine Lackfi and His Saints: Frescoes in the Franciscan Church of Keszthely" (207-25), analyzes the iconographical programme of the wall-paintings discovered in the church founded by Istvan Lackfi at the end of the fourteenth century. Szakacs discusses the identification of the saints presented in the fresco (women, bishops, Franciscans and kings), the original plan of the decoration (a part of which is lost), and seeks to explain the religious, political and personal reasons that determined the choice of the saints for the mural.
Gerhard Jaritz, "Late Medieval Saints and the Visual Representation of Rural Space" (227-43), studies those infrequent occasions on which late medieval artists depicted the countryside and its people, such as the labours of the months, miracles of saints, scenes from their lives, the rural background of biblical episodes (more often in rural churches), and the journey of the Magi. Such images served above all to convince the onlookers that, being a part of mankind, peasants too can experience miracles, witness God's power and take part in the great events of the history of Salvation.
György Galamb, "Sainthood in the Propaganda of Mendicant Orders: The Case of the Dialogus contra fraticellos of James of the Marches" (245-59), presents the fifteenth-century polemic of an Observant preacher against the competitive current in the Franciscan movement. James' aim was not only to discredit his rivals, already regarded with distrust by many of his readers, but also to prove that the identification of the Observants with the fraticelli by the Conventual Franciscans was unjustified, and to demonstrate how different they were from each other in their morality, poverty, miracles, and unity with the Church.
Otto Gecser, "Sermons on St. Sebastian after the Black Death (1348- ca. 1500)" (261-72), explores the reasons why the number of sermons on the saintly defender against plague dropped after 1348 instead of growing. The probable reasons are: first, there was no need of new sermons, because the old ones were still in use and there were many sermons of a highly general nature which could be preached on any feast of any martyr; second, the fact that Sebastian's feast day, 20 January, was the yearly nadir of the epidemic; and third, the scarcity of the evidence that could be used by preachers--in the Middle Ages there were very few plague miracles. In his explanation of Sebastian's career as a plague saint Gecser plays down the role of his attribute, the arrows, which were not associated with plague before the Black Death. He is probably right for the Middle Ages, but it is hard to forget what Apollo's arrows did in the Achaean camp at Troy.
Emoke Nagy, "'Had She Born Ten Daughters, She Would Have Named Them All Mary Because of the Kindness of the First Mary': St. Anne in the Sermons of Two Late Medieval Hungarian Preachers" (273-82), compares the sermons on St. Anne preached by two prominent Franciscans at the end of the fifteenth century: Pelbartus de Themeswar and Osvaldus de Lasko. The author's analysis makes her question the existence of a direct link, often taken for granted, between promoting the cult of St. Anne and the idea of the Immaculate Conception.
Petra Mutlova, "The Cult of the Saints in the Bohemian Reformation: The Question of Images" (283-90), demonstrates that the Hussites' attitude toward images was more complex than is normally assumed. Their theoretical views were diverse, but even more interesting is the question of putting these views into practice. Mutlova argues that the Tabulae veteris et novi coloris by Nicholas of Dresden, an avowed iconoclast, were in fact conceived as a richly illustrated book and that the images were an integral part of his preaching.
Marina Miladinov, "The Madonna of Loreto as a Target of Reformation Critique: Peter Paul Vergerius the Younger" (291-303), presents spirited attacks by Vergerius (1498-1564), a former bishop of Capodistria and a Protestant writer, on the Marian cult and its centre in Loreto. Vergerius' observations on the functioning of the sanctuary (which he visited thrice), the psychology of pilgrims and the methods of influencing them are most pertinent. One may add that his remarks vividly resemble the way in which Lucian of Samosata presented, in the second century, the rise and development of the cult of Glycon in Abonuteichos. I wonder whether Vergerius knew this author, who seems to have been quite popular among humanist writers.
Benedek Lang, "Saint Christopher, the Patron of Treasure-Hunters" (305-10), examines the beginnings of this secondary aspect of St. Christopher's activity, which appeared in eighteenth-century specialist manuals, mostly in Hungary and Germany. It remains unclear why this particular saint was chosen to be the holy helper of treasure seekers.
The book perhaps does not shake profoundly the foundations of our vision of the cult of the saints, but is definitely interesting and one would wish it to be longer--some articles, which summarize or present small parts of major research projects, seem too short to assess the conclusions drawn by their authors. This can be regarded as a shortcoming of the book, but it is good in that it signals research work which might otherwise remain unknown to a wider public.