Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (review)

Alison Knowles Frazier's Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy is a scholarly "twofer": it is both a monograph on the important and ground-breaking subject of humanist hagiographers and their literary production of saints' lives, as well as an invaluable research tool, a hand-list of texts dating ca. 1420-1520 in both manuscript and printed editions, which by itself is an impressive piece of scholarship that comprises approximately one-third of the book's length.

Frazier's intent is to recover and explore the variety and significance of this ignored aspect of Renaissance scholarship, which by virtue of its uncomfortably close relation with the medieval hagiographical tradition no doubt explains in part why this literature has not received the scholarly attention it deserves. Happily, however, Frazier is a scholar of Renaissance humanism who is well trained in the discipline of medieval hagiography and sympathetic to its concerns. Consequently, this serendipitous meeting of mind and material has produced a study that reveals the refashioning of the hagiographical genre according to Quattrocento preoccupations and taste, but is always mindful of continuities with the Middle Ages.

The erudition and scholarship upon which Possible Lives is built is formidable, but lightly worn. Indeed, the author's tone is refreshingly modest, but no mere humility topos– it is instead the welcome frankness of a scholar who recognizes and wishes to share with her readers the limits of her material, analyses, and generalizations. Her method is the case study whereby each chapter presents problems that engaged hagiographers of the period. Topics include the Renaissance treatment of martyrdom; Bonizio Mombrizio's Sanctuarium, a celebrated legendary whose compositional circumstances remain problematic; saints' lives as humanist teaching texts; the representation of female sanctity, exemplified in Giacomo da Udine's Vita Helenae utinensis; and the hagiographical works of Raffaele Maffei, quondam scriptor of the papal chancery. Before turning to the textual problems that each of these topics presents, Frazier first situates the matter at hand in its proper bio-historico-political context which perforce shaped the text itself. That context is often revealing. For example, Frazier suggests that the simmering fear of Islamic expansion, fear that became all too concrete after the events at Constantinople, Negroponte, and Otranto in the second half of the Quattrocento should not be overlooked as shaping forces at work in texts such as Tommaso d'Arezzo's Tractatus de martyrio sanctorum. Equally telling is the context for the creation of Mombrizio's Sanctuarium, which Frazier dates ca. 1477 (based on the dedication and the inclusion/exclusion of certain vitae), a date marking the interim regime in Milan that followed the assassination of Galeazzo Maria Sforza.

Close attention to historical context is only one aspect of her finely nuanced approach to the texts; as is fitting, she is equally attentive to the rhetorical technique and invention of her humanist hagiographers. One of the most inventive was Giacomo da Udine (d. 1482), canon of the cathedral of Aquileia, who composed a saint's life in the form of a symposium to honor his compatriot, Elena de Valentinis (d. 1458). Giacomo's narrative conceit is that God has invited fourteen esteemed orators—pagans and Christians alike—to offer eloquent speeches to mark the occasion of Elena's advent in heaven. Among those commanding the speakers' rostrum to laud the impending saint's virtues are Plato, Cicero, John Chrysostom, Jerome, and Leonardo Bruni. It was a learned hagiographical experiment, one which would not be repeated. Indeed, Frazier ultimately concludes that many of the texts that she has analyzed seem to be no more than "a sheaf of failures" (p. 316). That may be true insofar as the humanists neither produced a better or more enduring template for hagiographical production than had the Middle Ages. Nor did they devise a critical method for editing historical vitae such as the Bollandists would do in the seventeenth century. But her "sheaf of failures" might have been fruitfully contrasted...