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Book Reviews247 gauloisement, détournée (de Leonor Fini jusqu'à Cavanna, en passant naturellement par Jacques Laurent, comme le note pourtant bien Lisette Luton)? Il est vrai que Mme de Ségur ne fait que nous décrire ce qu'elle voit, que ce n'est pas de sa faute si à son époque on tapait sur les enfants, et que de toutes façons, les bons principes sont saufs puisqu'elle n'oublie pas de nous signaler qu'elle désapprouve. Il reste encore à analyser en profondeur pourquoi les punitions, les fessées ou les coups de fouet font partie intégrante de l'attrait qu'a exercé Mme de Ségur sur son public, et sans doute de celui qu'elle exerce encore. Sur les petits comme sur les grands. Laura KreyderUniversité de Milan-Bicocca Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn. Writing Faith TextSign & History in the Miracles of Sainte Foy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, July 1999. 200 pages. Hardback $27.50; ISBN: 0226029662, paperback $16.00; ISBN: 0226029670. Adorned with the punning title Writing Faith, Professors Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn's book offers a refreshing and stimulating new look at and interpretation ofhagiography. It examines the sizeable collection ofmiracle stories featuring Sainte Foy, a third or fourth-century Christian martyr from the city of Agen, between Bordeaux and Toulouse. According to the legend, this trickster saint was a pubescent girl ofabout 1 2 at the time ofher martyrdom, and her myriad miracles include many that reflect her capricious andjocular character. Foy used her powers to trick people such as in the piquant story ofthe greedy merchant who was determined to enrich himselfby selling wax. Having purchased a large amount ofwax at a heavily discounted price he "slipped (a huge candle) into his clothing in such a way that the larger part ofit projected below his belt and the smaller part jutted up towards his beard through the opening in his garment." Punishing the merchant's greed, Sainte Foy miraculously ignited the candle and the greedy businessman's beard and hair caught fire. Soon his entire body was engulfed in flames and he bellowed, kicked, grated his teeth and wildly contorted his body. She would not relent until he vowed to mend his ways. In their Introduction, the authors set about to situate the Liber miraculorum sánete Fidis in the realm of medieval hagiographie production. They trace the original text, its subsequent versions and the cult of Sainte Foy from the sixth century through modern-day scholarship. After a thorough description of the various methodologies used hitherto by scholars ofhagiography, they reveal their own eclectic approach, which includes literary analysis, stylistics, rhetoric, semiotics, and anthropology. Their self-described method of "social semiotics" entails the double step ofinterpreting a text as a coherent system ofsigns and then historicizing this system by relating it to a particular social discourse. The authors explore the performance of "writing faith" as actualized by both the writers ofthe Foy miracle stories and the scholars who have drawn on them as 248Women in French Studies the corpus oftheir study ofmedieval society and religion. They demonstrate that various agendas shaped the Liber miraculorum as separate authors added to it at different epochs. Ashley and Sheingorn show that Bernard of Anger's text cannot offer its readers a historically reliable picture of life in south France's Rouergue region. Instead, the so-called "facts" it contains become part ofan ideological portrait of the author himself, of the Conques monastery he is writing about and of the Rouergue area itself. Bernard, the first author, wrote about Sainte Foy's Congues monastery as an outsider, a northerner treating the south as the isolated and backward "other," and sought to critique popular religion in his stories while establishing his own literary reputation. The miracle collection is foremost a means to exhibit his talents and relate his spiritual journey for a northern French intelligentsia . The monks who subsequently added to the collection sought with their stories to expand the monastery of Conques' spiritual, political, and economic power in the region and later in the rest ofEurope. Here again, since their writings reflected carefully crafted rhetorical constructions rather than simply straightforward...

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