Anti-Saints: The New Golden Legend of Sylvain Maréchal ed. by Sheila Delany (review)

This book offers a fascinating cultural find: a strong and significant text from the first phases of the French Revolution which is virtually unknown even among specialists of the period and never reprinted in modern times. The New Golden Legend was an anti-clerical parody of a medieval and early modern best-seller by Jacopo da Varazze, or Jacques de Voragine, a Dominican friar who became bishop of Genoa: a hagiographic collection written in simple Latin in the second half of the thirteenth century and then translated into many vernacular languages. It was known in France as Légende dorée. The 1790 parody was focused not on the lives of all saints like the original, but on female saints only.

The author was radical intellectual Sylvain Maréchal, well known for his atheistic works, both in verse and prose, and for his revolutionary activity as a journalist and playwright and, later, as a member of the Directory of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals. Since before the Revolution, he was also characterized, as an author, by the way he developed popular genres like the almanach and various moral or devotional formes brèves in a religiously and socially subversive direction.

Delany’s unearthing and decoding of Maréchal’s satirical lives of women saints is first of all a truly original intellectual achievement, thanks to an uncommon combination of scholarly competences in both medieval and French revolutionary history and literature. The editor and translator is particularly interested in the subject of “deconstructive appropriation” not only as an “extension of medieval literature and ideas into the modern period”, but as an actual-albeit special, of course-“instance of hagiography” (21). She includes this contrarian appropriation under the larger category of the “afterlife” of a medieval genre. Although in the introduction Delany qualifies this notion, which she proposed in previous works, stressing institutional continuities from the Middle Ages to the eve of the French Revolution, it still seems quite fitting to speak of the genre’s afterlife when the focus is on cultural and intellectual history, a dimension in which the discontinuities were already predominant before the Revolution started.

Reading Maréchal’s work, we see a perfect reversal of a model for purposes that are parallel to those of the original. Both the original genre and its later parody have, in a broad sense, educational purposes-aimed at a large public, no cultural levels excluded-although they significantly imply opposite views of what education entails, indoctrination on the one hand and teaching a critical approach on the other. Both imply uses of the past-counter-history, as the editor, citing Amos Funkenstein, calls Maréchal’s effort, versus Voragine’s mythography.

When Maréchal stated that “Religious texts are ideal for satire” (20), as the editor reminds us, he was part of a long and solid tradition, both socio-cultural and intellectual. The revolutionary period would of course add considerably to the materials and imagery involved in this tradition, although in 1790 radical views on religion and the Church like Maréchal’s could still be the object of censorship and police inquiries, as his own newspaper Tonneau de Diogène was, in the first months of the year, when he published in it extracts from his atheistic text Catéchisme du curé Meslier. Thus, Maréchal’s satirical hagiography was still a bold undertaking at the time: while he was explicitly the author of the Nouvelle légende dorée, the printer was dissimulated (the place of publication was ironically disguised as “Rome”), and in May the weekly Révolutions de Paris, advertising the book, addressed readers to a bookseller in Brussels. In other words, this rare book was a semi-clandestine publication.

This dictionary of women saints, moreover, was focused on sex. As Maréchal wrote, mocking the mystic encounters of Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica, brother and sister: “Perhaps...