Images of sainthood in medieval Europe (review)

Reviews 119 the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes'. Revisionary play attempts to place the critic at stage-centre, the deuteragonist to the sixteenth-century poet. Berger tries to write something as interesting and important as Spenser's own achievement. Each individual Spenserian who reads this book will have to decide whether this is a feasible, or even desirable, function of literary criticism. David Ormerod Department of EngUsh University of Western Australia Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Renate and Timea Szell, eds, Images of sainthood in medieval Europe, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth/paper; pp. x, 315; 24 illustrations; R.R.P. US$37.50 (cloth), $12.95 (paper) + 1 0 % overseas. The essays in this volume focus mostly on western European saints' lives from the eleventh to thefifteenthcentury. T w o examine early medieval iconography of sainthood: Cynthia Hann on the Augustinian inspiration to illustrations (ca. 900) within a life of the martyr Romanus, and Magdalena Canasco on eleventhcentury illustrations from western France to the lives of Albinus and of Radegunde. White all the essays demonstrate the inherent interest of saints' lives from the medieval period, few concentrate on exploring more than one or two texts. One notable exception is the opening essay of Andr6 Vauchez, 'Lay people's sanctity in western Europe: evolution of a pattern (twelfth and thirteenth centuries)'. His comments on the sociology of sainthood summarize much more detailed studies that he has published in French. While the division of the volume into 'Hagiography and history', 'The language of religious discourse' and 'Saintliness and gender' gives some indication of the variety of view points adopted by the authors, no common perspective emerges from the collection. Lester Little's study of spiritual sanctions reported in the Book of Llandaff has little in common with Klaus Janofsky's enthusiastic presentation of the imagined historicity of the South English Legendary. Evelyn Birge Vitz, 'From the oral to the written in medieval and Renaissance saints' lives' attempts to be all-encompassing, but in fact concentrates on The Golden Legend, which she argues (not convincingly to m y mind) to be a degenerate form of an ill-defined oral tradition. By contrast Kevin Brownlee's analysis of the central role of St Christine in Christine de Pisan's Cite" des dames makes no such broad claims. Rather he explains with admirable skill how an original writer like Christine can use the figure of a female martyr to challenge a misogynistic tradition. The attempted deconstraction of Chaucer's text by Gail Berkeley Sherman, 'Saints, nuns and 120 Reviews speech in the Canterbury Tales' is less focussed as an essay, perhaps because stories about saints do not have such a primary function for Chaucer as they do for Christine de Pisan. The essay of Jo Ann McNamara, 'The need to give: suffering and female sanctity in the Middle Ages' matches that of Vauchez in breadth of scholarship and vision. She looks at the way in which communities of religious women were gradually transformed from being centres of active care-giving to being relatively impoverished communities in which women pursed a vocation of spiritual purification on behalf of the wider community. In a restrictive society, ambitious women turned to setf-imposed deprivation to continue to be the caregivers of society. The essays of John Coakley, 'Friars as confidants of holy women in medieval Dominican hagiography', Elizabeth Robertson, 'The corporeality of female sanctity in The life of Saint Margaret' and indirectly that of Richard Kieckheffer 'Holiness and the culture of devotion: remarks on some late medieval male saints' all draw attention to the differences between male and female saints. Here is a subject worthy of a volume on its own. As with so many volumes that emanate from conferences, this coUection is a mixed bag. It contains sufficient treasure, however, for it not to be missed. Constant J. M e w s Department of History Monash University Brend, Barbara, Islamic Art, London, British Museum Press, 1991; paper; pp. 240; 105 colour and 60 black and white illustrations; R.R.P. AUSS49.95 [distributed in...