Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation by Robert Bartlett (review)

The intellectual world of Robert Bartlett is dominated by a preoccupation with lines of demarcation. He has made a career of exploring the points where communities and individuals collide, jostle, and slip past one another. He is perhaps best known for his work on the relationship between the Anglo-Normans and the Celtic peoples in the period between circa 1066 and 1300. His biography of Gerald of Wales, for example, dissects the hybrid culture of Britain in the twelfth century. Similarly, his England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 situates Britain within its broader cross-Channel, European (and cosmological) context.

In his most recent work, Bartlett tackles a question first posed by St. Augustine of Hippo: Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? In it, Bartlett continues to explore points of correspondence, but shifts the terrain entirely to the cosmic level, to the place where the antipodal worlds of the living and the dead regard one another across the chasm of death. He wants to know why a certain class of superlative — but dead — human beings, the saints, so thoroughly dominated the devotional culture of Medieval Europe. Bartlett has written on the saints before, but here he addresses medieval hagiography in a far more systematic manner. In answering the book’s titular question, this capacious study (almost 800 pages) divides the response into two parts. The first, “Developments,” is chronologically arranged, while the second, “Dynamics,” is thematic, exploring in each of its chapters a distinct element of the cult, including relics, miracles, dedications, and so on. With its meticulous research, exhaustive bibliography, and attractive presentation (including maps, figures, tables, glossary, and ten gorgeous colour plates), this ambitious and expansive survey will no doubt become a critical introduction for both scholars and enthusiasts.

Part one, divided into four chapters, traces the cult from its origins in Christianity’s earliest encounters with the Roman state to the Protestant Reformation. While Bartlett occasionally casts his gaze eastward toward Byzantium, his focus is primarily on Western Europe. At little more than ninety pages, part one covers an immense amount of terrain. Bartlett admits his pace is “brisk,” but states that he merely intends to offer “signposts in [a] vast landscape.” Nevertheless, he adroitly rehearses the familiar (and not so familiar) contours of medieval sanctity. In chapter one he locates the origins of the cult in the sufferings of the martyrs, looks at the shift from the martyr-saint to the confessor-saint, explores the origins of hagiography as a literary genre, and identifies “revolutionary” changes to the cult in the fourth century. In subsequent chapters, Bartlett is similarly comprehensive, tracing, among other things, the conceptual elaboration of the saint as Christianity moved beyond its classical cradle, the institutionalization of holiness under papal auspices in the Gregorian era, the development of mendicant sanctity, and the political uses of the cult. The final chapter of part one explores the ideological collision between the cult of the saints and the architects of the Reformation.

At more than 500 pages, part two offers a substantial analysis of the salient characteristics of medieval sanctity. Its eleven chapters can be loosely divided into four thematically related sections. Between chapters five and seven (“The Nature of Cult,” “Saints’ Days,” and “Types of Saints”), Bartlett approaches a taxonomy of medieval sanctity. He delineates the structural, temporal, and functional characteristics of medieval cultus and shows how medieval people (and indeed, modern scholars) have erected an informal, but widely understood saintly “hierarchy.” This is a critical group of essays as much of the discussion in later chapters emanates from the proposition articulated in chapter five that “saints are people who are treated as saints.” Chapters eight to eleven (“Relics and Shrines,” “Miracles,” “Pilgrimage”) contextualize devotional encounters with the holy dead. The section is largely spatial, centring on questions...