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524 BOOK REVIEWS The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations. By Barbara Abou-El-Haj. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xviii, 456. $90.00.) The title overpromises. This book is less about the cult of the saints than about the thirty or so surviving series of hagiographie scenes (generally six or more images) found in sculpture and manuscript before the mid-thirteenth century ; in fact, it is less about that whole tradition than about one small part of it, the three illustrated manuscripts of Saint-Amand (Valenciennes B.M. mss. 500, 501, and 502) to which three of the five chapters are devoted. The broad title does indicate Abou-El-Haj's desire to go beyond object-oriented art history. This study boasts some significant achievements. Abou-El-Haj continues a recent tendency to treat hagiographical illustrations as"texts"with their own programs , audiences, and dissonances; thus her analysis begins rather than ends with relationships to written works. She highlights the links between illustrated libelli and pilgrimage. She illustrates chronologies of cult development and saintly subjects with crisp graphs (made a bit misleading by the decision to plot church rather than altar dedications). Her 206 figures offer a sort of universal illustrated vita, presenting multiple examples of incidents such as ordinations, donations, healings, exorcisms, etc. She provides the best published inventory of series of hagiographical images (pp. 148-153). Yet the book fails to prove its thesis that "in the eleventh and twelfth centuries , ... for the first time, large numbers of saints were illustrated in painted manuscripts, on shrines and altars, and on church doors" (p. 1). A sequence of narrative pictures was already found in the fifth century in the shrine of St. Martin at Tours, the West's trend-setting cult center. How far this tradition extended is suggested by the ninth-century fragments ofthe St. Ambrose sequence on the golden altar in Sant'Ambrogio in Milan. The illustrations of the Vita Wandregisili in Le Havre B.M. ms. 1 (late tenth century) present more problems than Abou-El-Haj recognizes (p. 146), for she has not noted the different cropping and other features which indicate that the four pages ofimages, sides of a single sheet, were added from some pre-existing work. She does show that the vast majority of the surviving evidence is from the High Middle Ages, but she is unconvincing in arguing ex silentio that the proliferation of illustrated sequences began then. Also questionable is the presumption that religious artistic monuments are understandable as "calculated investments" to "generate pilgrimage" (pp. 1 and 17). Economic calculations were made, as Abou-El-Haj demonstrates in valuable notes linking pilgrimage traffic and shrine building. But can we assume that all cult developments resulted from clerical attempts to manipulate a passive laity in order to maximize profits (e.g., pp. 17, 19, and 63)? Surely piety also played some role in the glorification of patron saints. This would have been clear if Abou-El-Haj had analyzed the possible audiences more closely: for example, how would the hagiographie illustrations filling two blank folios in the back of Valenciennes ms. 500 have been used to foment pilgrimage enthusiasm? BOOK REVIEWS 525 Small defects are common. BFLL numbers would have helped identify hagiographical texts. Factual errors include the claim that Cluny was "the papacy's most powerful monastic ally" in the investiture struggle (p. 95);that the head of St. Wandrille is at Maredsous (p. 146); and that St. Peter's in Rome and St.James' at Compostela were the only "apostolic" shrines in Europe (even disregarding Constantinople, Paul and Bartholomew were allegedly in Rome, Barnabas in Milan, the almost-apostolic Mark inVenice, and a plethora ofpseudo-apostles all over France). True, such mistakes are concomitants of a bold attempt to move beyond traditional art historical boundaries. Nevertheless, one wishes that Abou-El-Haj had told her story less tendentiously and more quickly. John Howe Texas Tech University From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature . By Barbara Newman. [Middle Ages Series.] (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1995. Pp. vi, 355. $39-95 cloth; $18.95 paper.) Barbara Newman has written an erudite and...

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