Lives and Miracles of the Saints: Studies in Medieval Latin Hagiography (review)

This welcome volume brings together twenty previously published essays by Michael Goodich, one of today's most prolific and interesting scholars of medieval hagiography. Sixteen of the essays appear in the original English, one each in Italian and German, and two in English versions of articles originally published in Italian and German respectively. The articles are grouped into three sections (each arranged roughly, but not exactly, according to the chronological order of publication): "The Childhood and Adolescence of the Saint," "Hagiography and the Politics of Canonisation," and "Medieval Miracles and Their Uses." (The only article that defies easy categorization, an essay on the competing Christian and Jewish traditions of analyzing dreams found in Hermann of Scheda's [or Cologne] account of his conversion, is assigned to the first group.) An eight-page index provides a very useful concordance to the whole. According to Ashgate/Variorum's commendable practice, each article retains its original pagination, allowing readers to cite them easily and accurately.

I began by using the well-worn topos of "welcome" to describe this volume of "collected studies." The adjective is well merited here, and for at least two reasons beyond the common value of all Ashgate/Variorum volumes, that is, granting medieval scholars convenient access to works that originally appeared in a wide variety of publications, many of them difficult to obtain. First, although there is an obvious relationship between the articles printed here and three of Goodich's monographs (Vita perfecta: The Ideal of Sanctity in the Thirteenth Century [1982], From Birth to Old Age [1989], and Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation [1995]), the overlap is surprisingly small. In a welcome move, Goodich has not included articles that have later been in essence incorporated directly into one of those monographs. Thus there is much description and analysis available here that would not be found through reading those books. Secondly, these articles span three decades, from 1973 to 2003. Those decades have, as Goodich notes in his brief introduction, witnessed a virtual revolution in the degree and manner of the use of hagiographic sources by medievalists. Thus these articles chart not only the development of a single scholar's work, but, even more importantly, that of an increasingly prominent and creative subdiscipline of medieval studies. This collection will be useful to all serious students of medieval hagiography in providing the articles of an important and influential scholar in convenient form. The book, moreover, demands their attention as a whole as evidence for the development of their craft. It should be acquired by all college and university libraries.