Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages by André Vauchez (review)

BOOK REVIEWS539 century, the wealth of Cistercian abbeys, their possession of tithes, villages, and churches, made them virtually indistinguishable from Benedictine foundations and led spiritually hungry youth to seek entrance into the ranks of the new mendicant orders. Other valuable, often profound papers are also included: Ulrich Kopfs "Monastische und scholastische Theologie" (pp. 96-135), Otto Langer's "Affekt und Ratio in der Mystik Bernhards von Clairvaux" (pp. 136- 1 50), M. Assumpta Schenkl's "Bernhard und die Entdeckung der Liebe" (pp. 151-179), Peter Dinzelbacher's "Bernhards Mystik: Eine Skizze" (pp. 180-193), Ulrich Kopfs "Schriftauslegung als Ort der Kreuzestheologie Bernhards von Clairvaux" (pp. 194-213), Bernhard Vosicky's "Bernhards Leben mit der Eucharistie" (pp. 214-228), Gerhard B. Winkler's "Bernhard von Clairvaux: Reformer oder Reformator ? Oder: Die Art und Weise, mit der Kirche umzugehen" (pp. 229-234), Johannes Rauch's "Die anderen im Menschenbild Bernhardsjuden, Heiden, Ketzer " (pp. 235-261), Hans-Dietrich Kahl's "Die Kreuzzugseschatogie Bernhards von Clairvaux und ihre missionsgeschichtliche Auswirkung" (pp. 262-315), and Jean Leclercq's "Der heilige Bernhard und Deutschland" (pp. 316-328). Even this mere listing shows the wide range and importance of the volume. My only quarrel is with the bibliography (pp. 329-344). It does not include many of the works cited in the footnotes or listed in the bibliographies of the papers. It is also the only place in the volume where errors, inconsistencies, and typos abound. John R. Sommerfeldt University ofDallas Sainthood in the Later MiddleAges. By André Vauchez. Translated byJean Birrell . (NewYork: Cambridge University Press. 1997. Pp. xxvii, 645. $95.00.) André Vauchez originally published La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge d'après lesprocès de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques (his thèse d'état) in 1981. It became on its publication, and remains today, the benchmark for all study of hagiography and the cult of saints in the later Middle Ages. In it Vauchez examined the records of the formal processes initiated for the canonization of saints between 1 198 and 1431 in the hope of illuminating the practices of western Christianity—and the attempted control ofthose practices by the papacy—during those centuries.Vauchez thus implicitly took up the challenge issued over fifteen years earlier by Frantisek Graus (Volk, Herrscher und Heiliger im Reich der Merowinger: Studien zur Hagiographie der Merowingerzeit [Prague, 1965]) to use neglected genres of hagiographie works as sources for the social history of western Christianity. Tellingly, however,Vauchez opened his work with a reference not to Graus, but to a 1929 review of Hippolyte Delehaye's Sanctus:Essai sur le culte des saints dans l'Antiquité (Brussels, 1927) by Marc Bloch. He thus managed simultane- 540BOOK REVIEWS ously to pay tribute to both the Bollandistes and the annalistes. Vauchez' work from 1981 to the present, can be read as a respectful critique ofthe immense resources made available through the efforts of the former by a scholarly sensibility schooled in the methods of the latter. This book is, quite simply, a masterpiece. In a quirk offate it was published in the same year as Peter Brown's The Cult ofthe Saints:Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981). In the intervening years these two books have helped, more than any others, to shape a vibrant and growing subdiscipline in what might be called the "social history of sanctity." Despite its monumental scope and size (765 pages in the original edition),Vauchez crafted a text which was both elegant in its style and remarkably concise in its argumentation . With the exception of a few passages (mostly those in which the author attempted analysis based on quantification), this book still reads with immediacy and freshness. Its translation makes available to Anglophone students a study of medieval religious ideals and practice which is of the highest—indeed one might say canonical—stature. Vauchez's scholarship is also exemplary in its "catholicity," in terms of its breadth of scope, scholarly standards, and intellectual openness. The most important source material for Vauchez's study comes from the inquests conducted by ecclesiastical officials into the authorization of saints' cults, that is (to use a term which itself evolved...