Saints Alive: Word, Image, and Enactment in the Lives of the Saints by David Williams (review)

Does it matter that visual depictions of the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket often show the saint murdered by a dagger through the head when the historical record states that he was killed with a sword? Why is it significant that visual representations of Maximilian Kolbe almost universally call attention to the saint’s eyeglasses? In Saints Alive, David Williams seeks to answer questions like these, arguing that the saints’ lives integrate historical record, iconographic representations, and enactments through liturgy and drama. The result – what Williams calls the ‘holistic text’ – exists outside of any of these three as the written, visual, and gestural combine to produce a transcendent text that calls readers to lives of imitation and holiness.

Williams’s approach in Saints Alive is relatively straightforward. His introduction offers a theoretical overview of the holistic text, explaining how we must find meaning in the saints’ lives in the interaction between written text, visual representation, and enactment. Williams then applies this theory to the lives of three saints: St. Anne, the mother of Mary; St. Thomas Becket; and St. Maximilian Kolbe. The disparate nature of the chosen lives is intentional. Williams notes that the lack of a written record in the case of St. Anne enables us to see the importance of the visual and the gestural while the extensive written record in the case of St. Thomas Becket illustrates how image and enactment ‘extend word into the full holistic text.’ Finally, St. Maximilian provides a test case as a saint canonized relatively recently. For each of these saints, Williams begins with the written record before moving on to consider the visual and gestural texts that complete the holistic text.

Williams’ most important contribution with this book is his insistent challenging of the written text’s primacy. Accordingly, he gives special attention to those lives where image and ritual reinterpret the historical record. Thus, for instance, Williams focuses on the iconography of St. Anne that shows her educating Mary at home, a detail that veers from the written tradition. He argues that the discrepancy between the visual and the textual arises because the visual narrative communicates an idea that goes beyond the written text: that Anne’s life becomes the bridge between the Old Testament and the New as she looks back to the written word while anticipating Christ, the Word of God. By paying careful attention to the visual record and to the ways in which the saints’ lives are enacted through drama and liturgy, Williams challenges the authority of the written historical record, showing that the meaning of the lives comes about through a complex interaction of three different ways of representing the saint.

If there is a weakness in this book, it is in the author’s sometimes shifting authorial stance. At times, as in his astute reading of the political implications of Anouilh’s Becket, Williams maintains a critical distance from his subject matter. At other times, he seems to situate himself within a community that accepts religious tradition uncritically; explaining that the saints’ lives ritually re-enact the life of Jesus, for instance, Williams writes, ‘Jesus is the consummate text, and he provides the model for all other texts.’ It is unclear whether Williams describes here the way in which the medieval community understood Jesus’s life or whether he makes a larger claim about who he himself believes Jesus to be. Readers would have been well served, I think, by having a clearer statement about the author’s relationship to his subject matter.

This minor concern aside, Williams’s work is a significant contribution. In 1848, John Henry Newman argued in ‘A Life of St. Gundleus’ that the saints’ lives come to us through fragments and images and that over time, ‘by the sympathy of many minds, and the concert of many voices … a certain whole figure is developed with words and actions.’ Saints Alive offers a nuanced...