Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe by Gábor Klaniczay (review)

REVIEWS 246 countering Goliath” are to be found illustrating particular Psalms). Given the traditional identification of David as the author of the Psalms, it is natural that many artworks depicting him should be connected to the Psalms, and while obviously a full investigation of medieval Psalter decoration is beyond the boundaries of this book, these short notes on context are very helpful for understanding the ways that David’s story is read alongside and in terms of the Psalms. As Hourihane indicates in his introduction, there has not been a comprehensive art-historical survey on David—and while this volume is not intended to fill that void, it is certainly a very useful starting point for scholars, providing an extensive catalog of representations of this central biblical figure. REBECCA BLUSTEIN, Comparative Literature, UCLA Gábor Klaniczay, Holy Rulers and Blessed Princesses: Dynastic Cults in Medieval Central Europe, trans. Éva Pálmai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) xviii + 494 pp. The English edition, revised and supplemented, of prominent Hungarian historian G. Klaniczay’s study of the medieval cults of the saintly rulers in East Central Europe, originally published in Budapest in 2000, is an indispensable monograph in the field of hagiography and political ideology of the Later Middle Ages. It deals with a complex subject which encompasses, over a span of 400 years, the appearance, cultivation, propagation, development, and transformation of the cults of the canonized kings and princesses belonging to the Hungarian, Bohemian, and Polish ruling houses. The monograph is the result of twenty years of research and is rich with individual case studies, primarily of the history of the religious cults of the early Arpad kings—St. Stephen, St. Emeric, and St. Ladislas—and those of their thirteenth-century descendants, the princesses St. Elizabeth and St. Margaret of Hungary. The history of these cults is followed in close detail involving interpretation of both the hagiographical traditions and the artistic representation of the saints’ images. No less significant is the consistent effort by the author to treat these particular issues within the general context of the medieval hagiographical tradition of holy kings, and to confront it with the pre-Christian notions of sacral kingship and deification of the ruler. As the introduction to the study makes manifest, Klaniczay sets his research within a long-established tradition of study starting in the earlier decades of the twentieth century with G. Frazer, F. Kern, and M. Bloch, and continued later in the century by F. Graus and R. Folz. Yet, the author builds a methodology closest to those of A. Vauchez, whose historicizing approach he praises for pointing out the “stamp of the cultural milieu” on “the putatively timeless stereotypes” (11–12), and J. Le Goff who, in his extensive study of the life and saintly memory of St. Louis, published in 1996, devoted half of the text to, in Klaniczay ’s words, “an enviably complex analysis of the ‘producers’ and mediators of ‘the memory of the king.’” (14) The first chapter is devoted to the pre-Christian traditions of sacral kingship and ruler cults. Klaniczay asserts that “the cult of dynastic saints is a medieval Christian variant of the ruler cult” (43), which encourages him to present the reader with a succinct overview of the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Per- REVIEWS 247 sian, and Roman traditions of deification of the monarch or of building dynastic cults to particular deities. This, not immediately evident, connection between ancient and Christian ideologies Klaniczay substantiates with his discussion of Jesus Christ’s royal imagery in terms of ancient ideological topoi. He regards Christ the King as one of the four heirs of the sacral attributes proper to the imperial cult (60). At the same time, Klaniczay avoids interpreting the king’s sacral functions of the pre-Christian period, especially among the barbarian tribes of Western Europe, as merely reproduced by the sanctification of early medieval kings (79). He regards the Christian policy of building the image of the holy king as a competitor to the ancient sacral kingship and imperial cults. The second chapter follows the development of the “ephemeral Byzantine idea of the sacral ruler” (61) in the early medieval kingdoms in the West. The...