Oxford Dictionary of Saints (review)

This Oxford University Press volume with 1500 alphabetically arranged entries on saints with bibliographies is now available in a third edition paperback. The dictionary was first published in 1978 and with a second edition in 1987.

In his excellent introduction, David Hugh Farmer provides a brief but valuable review of British sources for saints and their cults from Anglo-Saxon times. Farmer’s work in amassing the hundreds of little known saints of Britain is a work of real scholarship and love. Particularly good are the entries about the real historical personages of the church and their contribution to theological and dogmatic issues. One could almost structure a course in the history of Christian thought around these biographies.

Farmer notes the addition of some saints of Europe, prominent ones of the Eastern rite, including some Greek and Russian saints, and recently canonized saints. But with the exception of “others of historical importance from around the world” this volume is still essentially a British phenomenon, focusing on English saints and saints venerated in the calendars of the Sarum Rite, the Book of Common Prayer and the Roman Church, as well as the better known saints of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In itself, this would not be objectionable, but when one intent of the volume is “to make it the standard one volume work on its subject (saints) in English” objections to its parochial selection process are in order. A more accurate title for the book might have been Christian Saints Known to the British and Other English-Speaking Western Christians. The fact is that today Britain is far from the exclusively Anglo-Saxon Christian country that it once was. There are Eastern Orthodox Churches in major cities of England, not to mention Edinburgh and even Dublin, and the two English-speaking countries of North America have several million Eastern Orthodox parishioners.

The introduction also provides a concise discussion on the historical development of the Roman church decision-making process and the criteria applied in determining who is a saint. Farmer rightly notes the importance of the hagiographic work of the Bollandists, and the late Herbert Thurston, S. J., who produced critical editions of hagiographic materials, and he describes with approval the modernizing Roman Church revisions of the calendar in 1969. “Where historical scholarship has shown that there is no solid foundation for believing them to be martyrs, they are no longer venerated as such.” Happily, however, although dropped from the Roman calendar, Farmer does include the “Great martyr” Catherine of Alexandria, patroness of philosophers and students, Thecla, Philomena and Margaret of Antioch (Marina), and the Maccabean martyrs in this dictionary. Their vitae may not live up to the “scientific” methodological scrutiny of modern textual criticism, but there are 62 churches in England dedicated to St. Catherine and 200 to Margaret, indicating, among other things, their large cult following, centuries after they supposedly lived. Placing hagiography in its historical context is important, but it does not necessarily follow that hagiography identified as mythological, legendary or romantic, or simply unverifiable should be discredited. Indeed, hagiographical texts of this type can and do provide historical, theological and spiritual information, as well as providing models or “imaging” of ideal types of Christian behavior during a particular period. And there does seem to be something unsportsmanlike, if not irreligious, in going back and “correcting” the work and ideas of the past.

Male and female ascetics, virgin martyrs and church hierarchs dominate in this dictionary, as with many saints’ dictionaries, synaxaria, or calendars. Only 32 of the 1500 saints in this collections are identified as mothers and most entries focus on the woman’s royal or aristocratic family connections rather than on their Christian maternal role. Only one, Monica, Augustine’s mother, is identified as the model mother. Farmer presents Augustine’s accounts of his mother’s words to him before she died: “. . . all my hopes in this world are now fulfilled. All I wished to live for was to see...