The saints are alive and well. The leading roles they played in the belief structures and religious practices of many late ancient and early medieval women and men has granted them the power to attract attention and shape discourse among scholars of this transformative age. Consequently, this engaging book joins several other edited volumes of recent vintage as witness to the vitality of the late ancient saints and their cults. [1] While these volumes may differ in emphasis (as their titles suggest), they share the multi-disciplinary approach favored by this collection of papers as critical to shedding further light on the rationale and techniques that elevated the cults of Christianity’s martyrs and ascetic heroes to prominence in the aesthetics as well as practices of piety in the post-Constantinian empire and its various successor polities from the Germanic kingdoms of the west to Byzantium and Caucasia in the East.
Interacting with Saints, which began life at a conference held in 2018 at the University of Warsaw, consists of 11 carefully curated chapters distributed among three sections. The volume is prefaced with a synoptic Introduction (9-14) by Robert Wiśniewski that frames the origin and rise of the cult of the saints as a response to the need felt by some Christians for personal heavenly intercessors. Part I: Seeing and Hearing the Saints, then begins with a paper by Robin M. Jensen that explores the sometimes-tense relationship between the veneration of relics and the veneration of painted portraits of the saints, two practices that emerged together across the fourth century as key features of martyr piety. [2] While the two practices share many features of ritual function, e.g., materiality and portability, they were, Jensen argues, nevertheless often carefully distinguished in contemporary discourse, particularly as suspicions about the idolatrous associations of the latter, which differed in kind from bodily or contact relics, increased. Jensen’s stimulating paper is followed by Maria Lidova’s survey of the evidence for the representation of martyrs in church apses--e.g., the Roman churches of Cosmas and Damian in the Forum and Agnes on the Via Nomentana, Ravenna’s Sant’ Apollinare in Classe, and the Euphrasian basilica at Poreč. Lidova organizes her inventory according to a three-fold typology based on the number of figures placed in the apse and their dispositions, but occlusions are thin and hampered by the failure to incorporate catacomb art, which in some cases--such as the representations of Felix and Adauctus at Commodilla--is coeval if not chronologically prior while also being papally sponsored. Likewise, Lidova is overly dismissive (78) of the role saints’ lives and passions will have played in the reception of visual representations. Julia Doroszewska prefers a sharp focus on two miracle collections, those of Thecla and of Artemios, with the intent of demonstrating how those collections emphasize the “liminality” of the two saints through ecphrasis as well as narrative and so position them on the threshold between “God and ordinary people” (80). It is this “vague ontological status” (95), of course, that underwrites the saints’ ability to act as mediators and intercessors. Greek miracle collections are also at the center of the essay by Arkadiy Avdokhin, who floodlights the dense soundscape of “liturgical hymn-singing and prayer” (98) that, in his estimation, “lay at the very heart of the cult of saints as it was practiced and experienced.” (121). Although it is still not possible to isolate the particular hymns “that were sung by pilgrims,” (122), Avdokhin persuasively argues that scholars should listen attentively for the sounds, too often underplayed in scholarship (98-100), that enlivened these “sonorous” as well as odiferous “places.” Part One concludes with an olfactory paper as Xavier Lequeux reports on work in progress devoted to cataloging and analyzing evidence for the fragrant liquids and oils exuded by or associated with tombs and shrines that were cherished for their therapeutic and miraculous power. This is an important project, philologically and historically savvy. As the argument builds, the papiri of Monza are likely to find themselves enlisted as further evidence of the universal appeal of lessaints myroblytes. [3]
The three papers of Part Two explore “Local and Cosmopolitan Cults.” András Handl traces the development under papal patronage of the Roman cult of the city’s early third century bishop Callixtus. The story proceeds through Callixtus’s denunciation as a heretic to his rehabilitation through the material interventions of several fourth-century bishops of Rome. By mining the full range of available evidence--epigraphic, documentary, literary, and archaeological--Handl models an approach that warrants broad application. From Rome, Stephanos Efthymiadis leads readers to Constantinople, observing that as a city without a deep Christian past Constantinople relied upon benefactors to import relics or establish the veneration of more recent monastic and ascetic heroes. While emperors sometimes played this patronal role, much of this work was done by ecclesiastical and lay elites or immigrant communities. Yet the paucity of good sources and the long shadow cast by veneration of the Virgin often disguises the late antique origins of cults that eventually did flourish. What is clear, Efthymiadis observes, is that late antique and early Byzantine Constantinople lacked the kind of centralized programming evident elsewhere and exhibits a relative “democracy” in terms of its saints and their cults (189). Finally, Anna Lampadaridi offers an exemplary examination of the hagiographic dossiers of the Sicilian martyr-saints Agatha, Lucia, and Euplus. Her treatment deftly spans the Mediterranean by tracing the caroming of their passiones, relics, and cults between Italy and Byzantium as well as between Latin and Greek from the fourth through the twelfth centuries. Implicitly, the cycles of “re-semantization” evident in the migratory histories of these saints emerge as an illuminating facet of interaction with the saints in this age of notable geopolitical and demographic realignments.
“Constructing Paradigms” concludes the volume with three papers. Ian Wood maintains the hagiographic focus that characterized Ann Lampadaridi’s essay. Wood assembles and analyzes a “remarkably coherent” (220) dossier of fifth- and sixth-century vitae of largely non-monastic holy bishops in Gaul, among which perhaps the “best known” (221) is the vita of Germanus of Auxerre. Analysis reveals the degree to which these vitae took strong positions in current religious controversies--the Pelagian debate, for example--and modeled appropriate episcopal political “crisis management” (228). Michal Petranik then moves “sacred objects” to the forefront by highlighting the emperor Maurice’s innovative use of relics in warfare. When Maurice supplemented relics of the Cross with relics of Simeon Stylites and Demetrius, Petranik argues, the emperor initiated a new phase in the use of relics in battle. Although Maurice’s decision to do so was “in line with the overall trend” of recourse to relics in many areas of life, their “special accumulation” (243) in warfare under him marks a departure as relics begin to accompany the emperor into battle (245). Finally, Nikoloz Aleksidze takes readers from the early Byzantine battlefield to the cultural crossroads of late antique and medieval Caucasia (249) to examine how the recovery of saints’ relics replaced the discovery of material treasure as a sign of divine support for a new monarch’s “royal investiture” (250).This substitution testifies to the assimilation of Christan saints into a traditional motif of “Iranian art and religious writing” (250).
Interacting with Saints is well stocked with delights and insights that are bound to lure scholars to its pages for years to come. Its papers document forms of interaction with the holy across a broad geographical and chronological span. This is one of the strengths of the volume and amply justifies Robert Wiśniewski’s introductory remarks on the historical and regional variety that distinguished veneration of the martyrs in the late -and post-Roman polities of the Mediterranean and its hinterlands. The papers collected here also substantiate the claim that any attempt to characterize this variety must consider the full range of sources, languages, and media that preserve its traces (10-11). Finally, as my synopses above may have suggested, with the partial exception of the essays by Jensen and Aleksidze, this volume’s papers seldom directly engage “theory,” lived religion or the agency of objects, for example. Nevertheless, well-tried historical, art historical, and philological approaches demonstrate anew their power to reveal aspects of the cult of the saints that beg for further illumination.
--------
Notes:
1. E.g., Cities, Saints, and Communities in Early Medieval Europe, ed. Scott DeGregorio and Paul Kershaw, Turnhout: Brepols, 2020; and Constructing Saints in Greek and Latin Hagiography, ed. Koen de Temmerman, Julie Van Pelt, and Klazina Staat, Turnhout: Brepols, 2023. See also several chapters in The Recruiting Power of Christianity: The Rise of a Religion in the Material Culture of Fourth-Century Rome and its Echo in History, ed Sible De Blauuw, Eric Moormann, and Daniëlle Shootjes, Rome: Quasar, 2021.
2. More extensively at Robin Jensen, From Idols to Icons. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022.
3. E.g., D. Trout, “Theodelinda's Rome: Ampullae, Pittacia, and the Image of the City,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 50 (2005) 131-150.