Rewriting Holiness: Reconfiguring Vitae, Resignifying Cults ed. by Madeleine Gray (review)

Madeleine Gray's edited collection is a significant contribution to the study of the transformations undergone by saints' hagiographies, and how they relate to wider, contemporary cultural and political changes. The book's aim is to bring to attention the importance of the variations present in the Vitae as sources of information on mentalités: 'what people wanted to have happened is arguably more illuminating than what "actually" happened' (p. 2). The introduction provides an extensive overview of literature on the subject, engaging with different approaches to the study of the lives of saints and representing a helpful tool for the uninitiated. Most of the thirteen contributions that make up the collection address one aspect of the book's general project. The sources employed range from the textual (hagiographies to parodies) to visual, archaeological, and, in one case, musical. Nearly half of them focus geographically on England, Scotland, Wales and/or Ireland, while two chapters (Jayita Sinha, James M. Hegarty) analyse the lives of holy men from non-Christian traditions.

The book is subdivided in four sections. The first, 'Rewriting Monasticism', looks at the tensions extant between different religious lifestyles and how they influenced the rewriting of saints' lives. The asceticism of Serapion the Sindonite and its different interpretations are the focus of Svitlana Kobets's paper. John R. Black looks at English textual and visual depictions of the lives of Saints Mary of Egypt, Guthlac, and Cuthbert, to show how elements related to coenobitic life were systematically emphasized in texts written after the Norman Conquest. Kate Helsen and Andrew Hughes consider cases of rewriting of new chants and texts dedicated to saints, by looking at Thomas Becket's office, its Benedictine origins, and its link with the later rewriting and promotion of John Peckham's Trinity Office.

In the second part, 'Re-Gendering', Gray analyses the Vitae of Saint Gwenfrewi. She traces the origins and the innovation of Gwenfrewi's defining characteristics, to exemplify how they were informed by different conceptualizations of female sanctity, and how they interacted in a contact area of Welsh and Anglo-Norman influences. Karen Casebier draws a comparison between the hagiographic text La Vie de Sainte Euphrosine and the more parodic Frère Denise, by considering how they both display the tensions between the older, lay, model of marriage, and the emerging ecclesiastical one.

The third section, 'Translating Cultural & Religious Identities', begins with a chapter on Irish saint Darerca and the developments that made her into Anglo-Norman Modwenne. Diane P. Auslander shows how Darerca's asceticism, following the transformation of Irish Christianity from admired to disparaged, is subjected to a different interpretation, which makes it the mark of female, not Irish, holiness. The function of the cult and beatification of Florentine Umiliana de' Cerchi, to establish the endurance of her family's power through the city's changing political landscape, are the focus of Anne Schuchman's essay. Jayita Sinha tackles the concept of 'saint' in a non-Christian setting by analysing the figure of Kabir, a holy man venerated by Muslims and Hindu alike, who moulded his image and the accounts of his life to better fit their needs and support their beliefs. Adam Coward expands the applicability of the conceptual framework when he considers the 'saint-like attributes' (p. 205) of Independent minister Edmund Jones, and how they fit or rejected common elements of Welsh expressions of holiness.

Slavia Barlieva's contribution on Saints Cyril and Methodius opens the fourth part, 'Appropriating Political & National Identities', by looking at how their cults, initially Slavic and supranational in nature, have undergone 'intense "nationalization"' (p. 229). In the following chapter, Gray delineates Henry VII Tudor's devotion to a minor Welsh saint, Armel, and how his figure was used to display support to the previous dynasty. James M. Hegarty shows how the Sikh...