Several decades in the making, with almost 1000 pages and over 1600 footnotes, this book is the fruit of a lifetime of work on one figure: the popular medieval Saint Roch. Pierre Bolle, a historian recently retired from his day job as Director of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Charleroi, Belgium, leaves no stone unturned in his quest to find the true Saint Roch. But wait! There are three saints depicted on the book’s cover, all of them Saint Rochs, of different origins and natures, poised to coalesce into the beloved pilgrim saint, the plague victim, accompanied by his faithful dog, assisted by an angel and pointing to the plague bubo on his thigh. However, this well-known iconography is just one element in the journey that takes the reader through Northern Italy, France, modern-day Belgium, and Germany, and from the seventh-century bishop of Autun Saint Roch to the courtly Saint Roch and finally to the pilgrim supposedly born in Montpellier. We quickly learn that except for the bishop no Saint Roch actually existed. There is no birthplace, no tomb, no genuine relics. Out of this void Bolle has conjured an enormous tome that is overwhelming in its richness. He analyzes the fabrication of a new saint and the construction of a new cult in the second half of the fifteenth century, not by ecclesiastical authorities but, at least at the beginning, by lay people in several areas on both sides of the Alps. Bolle’s study thus perfectly illustrates the concepts of Jean-Claude Schmitt’s seminal article “La fabrique des saints” [1]. One hundred thirty-seven figures feature the images, tables, and maps that support Bolle’s intricate arguments on the creation and cult of the saint that never lived. The structuring principles of this vast book are the sources (vitae, liturgy, accounts of relics, and iconography) and geography. Each source is analyzed for France, Northern Italy, and German-speaking regions.
The first part of almost 200 pages takes us through previous research on Saint Roch, beginning with the vita cobbled together in 1737 by Jan Pien in the Acta Sanctorum, which is wholly imaginary. We then traverse the centuries with many stops in the nineteenth, where every attempt to come to grips with the many divergent bits of information on Saint Roch ends in an impasse and is dismissed by Bolle as nonsense, often with a good dose of sarcasm. This book could have been much shorter and more focused if the author had not decided that every last item he discovered in his many decades of research needed to be laid out and critiqued. It is interesting to see here the creeping in of some nationalist ideas, as Bolle analyzes the divergence between Italian and French (mainly from Montpellier) historians, each group laying claim to the saint. On the whole though, most of the historians explored by Bolle seem to exist in a political and scholarly vacuum. How, for example, did the rise of theAnnales School influence research in the area of hagiography and saints’ cults? In his singular focus on Saint Roch, Bolle does not address many ideological changes, though he does so for some methodological issues. For instance, he analyzes in great detail the history and practice of important techniques, such as the establishment of stemmata, to which he devotes fifty-five pages in Appendix A. These pages would provide an excellent guide for a seminar on codicology. The relationship between manuscripts and incunables containing the imaginary vita is an important area where Bolle offers some revisionist thinking. He argues against the fetishization of manuscripts as always offering superior versions of texts, showing that the incunables (many pages are reproduced in color) often are more reliable.
Bolle’s close reading of documents of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice opens yet another perspective, illuminating how Saint Roch’s cult developed with relics supposedly stolen from the town of Voghera (the imagined place of death of the imaginary Saint Roch), thus helping to recruit new members and increase the business of bringing in pilgrims. Here, Heinrich Dormeier, one of the few researchers Bolle approves of, serves as a guide by showing how one family, the German Imhoffs, helped expand the cult to Southern Germany, culminating in the splendid Saint Roch altar in the Church of Saint Lorenz in Nürnberg (1493), reproduced here in color (fig. 13).
Part Two offers a philological analysis of the five principal texts that constitute the “dossier littéraire” and that are edited in both a synoptic and a synthetic version in Appendix A. The date of 2004 as a turning point of Saint Roch studies is mentioned again and again, for it was at the 2004 conference in Padua that Bolle first revealed his discovery of an Italian vita (the Proto-dal Bovo of ca. 1469) and Francesca Lomastro discovered an English origin of Saint Roch in a hitherto unknown manuscript (245). Many pages of intricate stemmata and filiations culminate in figures 54-56 which show the evolution and geographical locations of the various versions. As readers make their way (with a magnifying glass) through these pages, it becomes clear that this book cannot be read as a continuous narrative but should rather be used as a reference book or encyclopedia, so overwhelming are the thousands of details assembled here.
Part Three delves into the “dossier documentaire” with an emphasis on liturgical sources revealing that prior to the second half of the fifteenth century all references to a Saint Roch were to the seventh-century bishop of Autun. Eventually, through a process of “dédoublement” the figure of the pilgrim appeared alongside the bishop and finally eclipsed him (379). The similar-sounding terms “peste” and “tempeste” brought together these saints in charge of protection against both calamities. Bolle believes that the 1478 plague in Brescia motived the author Francesco Diedo to compose his Life of Saint Roch the pilgrim a year later (308). His version came to dominate the tradition. That lay devotion, in particular that of confraternities in Italy, preceded any official cult and was at the origin of the promotion of the new Saint Roch is one of the important arguments that runs through the entire study. It was thus through lay devotion that a new saint came into being through “rénovation” and “dédoublement.” Two other examples of French bishops transformed into Italian pilgrim saints buttress Bolle’s argumentation: Saint Rémi (d. ca. 532), the famous bishop of Reims was reborn as the Italian San Romeo/Romedius, and the third-century bishop of Auxerre Saint Germanus reemerged as San Pellegrino in Italy (370-375). And, most important, here as well images preceded texts.
Before approaching this crucial insight in Part Five we need to traverse Part Four, dealing with the relics of the pilgrim saint. Since he did not exist, they are all fraudulent, which does not mean, however, that they were useless. Bolle’s analysis of the many texts that deal with these relics is meticulous and exhaustive (paleographic analysis, stemmata, and other deep dives into documents abound) and culminates in a table (fig. 90) spanning the years 1485 to 1858, offering different versions of one of the main events concerning the relics: the supposed theft of the relics from Voghera perpetrated by the Venetians. That this theft or furta sacra was actually a purchase in 1483 meant to boost the business of the confraternity of San Rocco introduces a dose of economic reality into the cult of this invented saint.
Part Five concentrates on the saint’s iconography with many color illustrations of paintings and of incunable illustrations but of just a few sculptures. Bolle points out that previous studies have missed about 80% of available images. The 2004 conference is again mentioned as a turning point. Three images of Saint Roch competed against each other: the bishop, the courtly chevalier, and the pilgrim saint, at first without the dog and angel and finally with these companions. An intriguing “doublet” was discovered by Bolle: the figure of the bishop whose pilgrim’s hat was erased and only recovered in a restoration of the church of San Giovanni in the Piedmont (fig. 123). (A 1936 photo from the Frick Art Reference Library in New York helped solve the puzzle). Over sixty Italian paintings from the second half of the fifteenth century are listed in table 127 to illustrate the images’ diffusion--linked more to merchants’ routes than those of pilgrims (562)--and to make the point that they preceded the textual tradition and helped in fact to produce it. (One rare typo crept in on p. 515 where fig. 106 should read fig. 102.) Thus the results of this extremely detailed iconographic study, spanning many different regions and locales, confirm the points Bolle is making throughout: that the laity and popular local cults confused the bishop and the pilgrim, created “doublets,” and even added the courtly chevalier to the mix (537), all this before any sustained textual or liturgical tradition emerged. Local crises around the spread of the plague and destructive storms (peste/tempeste revisited) also determined which manifestation of Saint Roch came into play. These conclusions are summarized once more in a forty-two-page Conclusion (Part Six).
Part VII comprises two editions (synchronic and synthetic) of the five texts Bolle considers the most important (including the detailed treatise on stemmata mentioned above); a list and partial edition of liturgical texts for December 5 and August 16 from Autun, Toulouse, and Die citing Saint Roch; excerpts from the Acts from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice relating to the relics; and two more texts from 1483 and 1501, the first about the sale of the relics by brother Theotonicus (disguised as a furta sacra), the second about a transfer of some relics from the Trinitarians of Arles to those of Granada. A list of sources and bibliography of another seventy pages is followed by a useful index of manuscripts, incunables, names of saints, people, and places.
This book is an impressive achievement, unearthing thousands of pieces of the Saint Roch puzzle, many of them hidden away for centuries in incunables, manuscripts, local archives, and tiny mountain chapels. Bolle constructs coherent and intersecting lines of argument, analyzing in extraordinary detail and depth the myriad methods employed by a vast cast of characters that came together in order to fabricate this saint and his cult.
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Notes:
1. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “La fabrique des saints,” Annales. Economies. Sociétés. Civilisations 39.2 (1984): 941–953.