Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy by Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (review)

314book reviews (V); an early thirteenth-century text from Zwettl (Z); and a mid-fifteenth-century copy from MeIk (M). Each is an independent copy, but V and M are based on a common text (x) as are C and Z (y). The author of M utilized, however, according to Petersohn, an intermediary text (m) and corrected it by using another, now lost independent text (z). There have been four previous editions of the vita, including Rudolf Köpke's in the Scriptores of the MGH in 1856; but the best were Adolf Hofmeister's in the Denkmäler der Pommerschen Geschichte (1924) and Jan Wikarjak's in the Monumenta Poloniae histórica (1966). Previous editors preferred C because it is the oldest manuscript, but Petersohn argues that M is the best text, in spite of its fifteenth-century orthography. As the title of this edition indicates, it is possible to reconstruct only the text of the vita that was copied initiaUy into the legendary (A1) and not the version that was written in the 1140's. Petersohn's edition adheres to the high standards of the MGH with listings of major textual variants and a scholarly apparatus that identifies the hagiographer's sources and references. Petersohn lists in appendices the paraUels among the vitae of the monk of Prufening, Ebo, and Herbord and all the author's biblical, classical, patristic, hagiographical, legal, papal, and Uturgical sources. John B. Freed Illinois State University Writing Faith: Text, Sign, and History in the Miracles ofSainte Foy. By Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. Pp. x, 205. $27.50.) In this complex book,Ashley and Sheingorn propose a new reading of the famous eleventh-century text, the Liber miraculorum sánete Fidis, which celebrates the miracles of a female child martyr whose reUcs were kept in the monastery of Conques in southwestern France. Scholars have mined the Liber for detaUs about subjects as varied as popular culture and knightly violence. Such use of the Liber tends to erase its nature as a text, treating it as a transparent window onto eleventh-century southern France. Ashley and Sheingorn instead emphasize the Liber's nature as a text, as a rhetorical construct deploying a sign system that was sociaUy embedded and itself had historical agency. Ashley and Sheingorn are thus committed to exploring not merely the semiotics, but the "social semiotics," of this text. Their discussion focuses on the historically situated choices of sign systems made by the authors of the Liber. The first two books of the Liber were composed between approximately 1010 and 1030 by Bernard of Angers. Bernard, a northern French cleric,was an outsider to the monastic community at Conques and southern France. Ashley and Sheingorn argue that Bernard's rhetorical strategy was to depict the community at Conques and southern French culture in general as rustic, Uliterate, and Other while positioning himself as elite and highly literate. The apparently popular nature of some aspects of Sainte Foy's book reviews315 cult (especiaUy herjoca or jokes) were thus the rhetorical effect of Bernard's authorial strategy, not reflections of reality. Furthermore, Bernard played with the limits of hagiographie conventions—Ashley and Sheingorn argue that like the Sainte Foy he depicted, Bernard himself was a "trickster." I was not convinced of the relevance of this anthropological concept to our understanding of Bernard as author. Nonetheless, Ashley and Sheingorn do convincingly demonstrate that unlike other contemporaneous hagiographers, Bernard interrogated the ontological status of miracles and made himself almost as present in the text as the miracles themselves. The anonymous monk or monks of Conques who between 1030 and 1050 composed Books 3 and 4 of the Liber continued Bernard's project but rebeUed against certain of his strategies. Just as adept in classicizing rhetoric and aUusion as Bernard, the "monk-continator," as Ashley and Sheingorn dub this author or authors, positioned himself as the corporate voice of the monastery. The Sainte Foy who emerged from this "insider" perspective was a powerful celestial martyr who outranked other saints and commanded universal devotion. WhUe emphasizing how the different rhetorical strategies adopted by the differently situated authors of the Liber produced...