Saint Vincent Ferrer, His World and Life: Religion and Society in Late Medieval Europe by Philip Daileader (review)

The medieval Dominican saint Vincent Ferrer, who conducted a twenty-year preaching campaign throughout continental Europe and played a decisive role in contemporary ecclesiastical and political affairs, has long attracted scholarly attention, particularly in his native Iberia. Scholars have consequently produced a relatively large collection of edited primary sources by and about the saint as well as a plethora of geographically and topically specific studies about various aspects of the saint's activities and thought. What has been notably lacking from this wealth of published materials, however, has been a single cohesive and comprehensive survey of the charismatic preacher revealed by these sources. Philip Daileader's well-researched study of Ferrer's life fills this scholarly lacuna.

The monograph recreates the events of Ferrer's life and presents them chronologically, beginning with his childhood in plague-ridden Valencia, intellectual training in the Dominican Order, and his eventual ascent through the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the service of the Avignon papacy before turning to his preaching campaign. Daileader spends the majority of the study analyzing the complex social issues surrounding his preaching, which inspired enthralled audiences to act upon several issues important to the Dominican friar, namely, moral reform, the segregation of Jews, and acceptance of the Ferdinand of Castile as the Valencian monarch, ultimately linking these ideas to Ferrer's apocalyptic thought. Finally, Daileader argues that the saint left Iberia amidst waning popularity among Valencian audiences due to his involvement in the Council of Constance, which placed him between the Spanish monarch and the Valencian pope Benedict XIII, preaching in France until his death.

It is, however, in the highly contextualized recreation of Ferrer's worldview, motivations, and intentions that this study particularly shines. Interpreting published sources by and about Ferrer through the lens of political, ecclesiastical, and intellectual history, Daileader vivifies long-standing historiographic debates about the extent of the friar's apocalyptic thought, intentions toward Jewish communities, and relationship to Iberian monarchs and Avignon popes. Notably absent from this otherwise nuanced evaluation of Ferrer's mentality, however—and one largely absent from existing historiography on the saint as well—is the friar's specifically Dominican worldview, one created by years of Dominican education, liturgical practice, and inundation in the Order's vocational propaganda. Such a perspective could have shed light, for example, on the seeming contradiction between Ferrer's letter to the Dominican master general describing the anti-heretical orientation of his activities and his apocalyptic sermons preached about the same time (pg. 49–50) as well as the saint's approach to moral reform beyond his apocalyptic thought (pp. 79–100). Nevertheless, the book successfully positions a complex and controversial preacher within the equally complex and often overlapping political, ecclesiastical, and theological pressures that shaped his life's work.

The monograph closes with some tentative conclusions about the extent to which Ferrer's story can be used to assess more general social trends from the early fifteenth century (pp. 183–187). Although full development of these tantalizing suggestions about Ferrer's relationship to the apocalyptic fears of the period and the oft-studied inter-religious conflicts that rocked the Crown of Aragon is beyond the scope of the text, Daileader's monograph nonetheless provides an important interpretation of the existing evidence on this influential Dominican preacher and a clear consolidation of the most common scholarly debates about his intentions to which research on the wider social trends pertaining to Ferrer can be related. It does so, moreover, in refreshingly fluid prose that allows the charisma of the Iberian saint so beloved by late medieval audiences to reach through the centuries and grip the modern reader.