Espace sacré, mémoire sacrée: Le culte des évêques dans leurs villes (IVe–XXesiècle). Actes du colloque international de Tours 10–12 juin 2010 ed. by Christine Bousquet-Labouérie, and Yossi Maurey (review)

All bishops were religious leaders, but many bishops also became saints. In this volume, the proceedings of a conference held at Tours in 2010, nineteen articles in French or English discuss holy bishops and their connection to their cities. The span is broad, from late antiquity through recent times, and from Iceland to Italy to Hungary, but the largest concentration concerns medieval France. The most original articles focus on how a see’s earliest bishops were remembered and commemorated centuries later.

The overarching theme is of sacred space. Such a broad theme, coupled with the geographic range and a period of 1600 years, results in a volume of very disparate pieces. The organization does not help, as the articles are grouped thematically under four broad and rather awkward headings: tensions and rivalries; the ideology of the urban community; relics, art, and architecture; and finally cults in both urban and rural communities. One cannot but feel that a chronological or geographic grouping would have worked better.

But there is much here of interest in the individual articles. One of the most intriguing points to emerge is the role that the memory of holy bishops could play in rivalries between churches. Samantha Kahn Herrick discusses the supposed apostolicity of several sees’ “founding bishops”; their vitae were used by both bishoprics and monastic houses, because the bishops were buried in suburban monasteries, not the cathedral. Similarly, Yossi Maurey describes the creation in the cathedral of Tours of a special liturgy for St. Gatien, its supposed first bishop, to compete with St. Martin, the much better-known sainted bishop of Tours, who had been appropriated by local regional houses. Alternately, citizens might feel pride in and a real attachment to “their” saint, as Antoine Coutelle demonstrates in the case of seventeenth-century Poitiers, where civic leaders and churchmen together worked in the aftermath of the Wars of Religion to restore the central position of St. Hilary, their fourth-century bishop.

Other articles focusing on the bishops of late antiquity and their influence include Dominique Barbe’s on early bishops as church builders and promoters of the cult of the saints; Stéphane Mouré’s on how the church and city of St.-Denis, dedicated to the martyred founding bishop St. Denis, became France’s political capital; and Bruno Judic’s on the ninth-century papal initiative to promote the sanctity of Pope Gregory I (d. 604), who was revered in England long before his cult grew in Rome. These all develop the theme that the way that an early bishop was remembered and commemorated indicates both how sanctity was conceptualized at the time that that memory was constructed and the extent to which control of memories of the past led to control of the present.

The other articles have a more scattered approach. They are more descriptive than analytic and touch on such varied topics as architectural decoration, archaeology, bishops’ relations with women, bishops as promoters of education, Gregorian chant, missions to Eastern Europe, and how bishops were commemorated over the centuries. Maureen Miller proposes an interesting solution to the puzzle of why Florence is dedicated to St. John, rather than to Zenobius, its first bishop.

Overall, this volume should find a home in research libraries, but because the topics are so varied, few scholars will decide to own it themselves.