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Reviewed by:
  • Dictionnaire des saints imaginaries et facétieux
  • David Elton Gay
Dictionnaire des saints imaginaries et facétieux. Jacques E. Merceron. (Paris: Seuil, 2002. Pp. 1293, preface by Pierre Rézeau, illustrated, bibliography, index of saints, index of places, index of gods and folkloric characters.)

In reviewing a book with a title like A Dictionary of Imaginary and Humorous Saints the temptation is to focus on the oddities. And, in fact, there are quite a few, one of the things making Jacques Merceron's book a fascinating and delightful read. The laity in France were not entirely shy about making up saints. Some, like the imaginary Saint Monday (Saint Lundi, pp. 337–44), arguably a patron of working-class resistance to imposed work discipline, accounted for the ease with which workers approached Monday work and are known in other European traditions (e.g., E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common [New York: New Press, 1993], pp. 371–8). Others were far more serious, such as the protectors of adults and children. The best known of these, because of Jean-Claude Schmitt's study of the story and cult, The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), is Saint Guignefort (Merceron, pp. 607–14). There are hundreds of saints like these two, folk saints who exist outside of the Church's approved list of saints, catalogued in Merceron's work. This is a truly original and important work on saints in folk tradition. The saints he describes are those that the laity have created, not those of the official church or even folk versions of the official saints. This is the only work of its kind of which I am aware: a dictionary/catalogue of the folk saints of a country or region.

Merceron organizes his dictionary into twelve sections according to the specific uses to which a saint is put: for instance, there are separate sections on saints who are protectors and healers of adults and those who heal and protect children. Within these sections the Dictionnaire is organized alphabetically by saint's name, with the entries themselves being primarily historical and descriptive. Merceron derives his material from an impressively broad range of literary, popular, and folk sources ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, covering all of the French-speaking regions of Western Europe. Also of interest is the mapping he does, for it shows definite regional patterns and knowledge of these saints. Merceron is careful not to make claims for general knowledge of these saints throughout the French-speaking regions; rather, his work demonstrates the localization of these cults.

The importance of Merceron's Dictionnaire can be seen when considered against the usual trends in studies of hagiography, even studies of folk cults. Research on hagiography is dominated [End Page 502] by work on saints' lives and cults, as represented by those of the canonical saints or popular forms of lives and cults derived from them. Folk cults and stories receive little, if any, attention in hagiographical research, nor are they much written about in folklore research. Indeed, it would be difficult to tell that the folk saints Merceron describes even exist by reading research on hagiography or folklore. Though local cults have occasionally been described by researchers, until now no one has undertaken the enormous task of trying to describe in a comprehensive way the saints and saints' cults created by the laity.

It is unusual as a reviewer to come upon a work that really does establish a new area for research. Merceron's Dictionnaire de saints imaginaries et facétieux is one of these rare works. Merceron has done a superb job in his dictionary. For those working on folk religion and hagiography, it will be both a sourcebook and model for future research.

David Elton Gay
Indiana University
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