Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages.

Bynum, Caroline Walker

By Andre Vauchez (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xxvii plus 645pp. $95.00).

Basing himself primarily on seventy-one "processes" (inquiries) for canonization from 1198 to 1431 and supplementing these often lengthy documents with much other material about persons revered as holy, Andre Vauchez studies the complex procedure by which popular enthusiasm and clerical orchestration cooperated or failed to cooperate in fashioning saints. At the heart of his work is the awareness that "saint" is a relational, not an absolute, term. In other words, a Catholic saint is not so much a holy person as a person declared "holy" by the pope after exploration of a reputation that arises among the saint's adherents. Hence canonization is, as we say today, "political;" saints are "constructed."

Vauchez's enormous study falls into three parts. The first treats the development of canonization (which was in the early Middle Ages usually a matter of popular cult followed by episcopally authorized re-burial of the saint's body) into an institution controlled by the papacy. The second contrasts three types of saints the author calls "popular," "local," and "official." Here Vauchez argues that ordinary people in the later Middle Ages tended to revere as martyrs individuals (often children) who were unjustly murdered in horrible circumstances, but that there was no clerical support for such cult. To these "popular saints," he contrasts "local saints" - that is, those for whom accounts (or "lives") were written and small-scale cults developed but who did not gain processes. Among these local saints, he sees a sharp divergence between a northern European model, where saints were from the ruling classes (kings, nobles or bishops), and a Mediterranean model, where saints were more varied in social recruitment and characterized by lives of suffering, voluntarily assumed. "Official saints" - those seventy-one individuals for whom processes were granted - tended, he argues, to fit the Mediterranean model favored by the papacy. Over time, the percentage of bishops among saints declined, the percentage of those in religious orders who received canonization grew, and the percentage of lay women who gained processes (but not canonization) increased markedly. The curia tended to oppose both martyrs and charismatic office-holders and to favor clerical penitents, but the model purveyed to the laity was of a monasticized (not an inner-worldly) spirituality. Whereas parts I and II reveal a certain tension between popular cult and clerical orchestration and response, part III focuses on the signs of sanctity recognized by both prelates and people. Especially interesting here is the change from miracles at the saint's tomb to miracles at a distance and a growing tendency on all sides to see saints as superhuman in virtue, racy and fantastic in appeal.

The reception of Vauchez's book from its publication in 1981 to the appearance of this English translation in 1997 reflects in microcosm much that has been going on in medieval religious history. The work was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, in part because the appearance of scientific rigor and the many tables giving percentages of saints by social class, gender, type of charismatic authority, etc., appealed to a profession enthusiastic about quantification. A provocative article in The New York Review of Books in 1970 had called for quantification as a panacea for a field in methodological confusion;(1) and within a year of Vauchez's study two other major works appeared with the agenda of quantifying not just canonization processes but also the lives of the saints.(2)

In the 1990s, things have changed. The study of hagiography has moved first to micro-history and then, after the linguistic turn, to the problem of "voice." Scholars such as Sharon Farmer and Thomas Head have focused in great detail on the social world of single cults; others such as Anne Clark and John Coakley have explored how far we can ever know a saint - hear his or her "own voice" - through the documents produced by confessors or inquisitors. In 1992, Aviad Kleinberg challenged the value of generalizing or quantifying from such chronologically diverse and at the same time formulaic materials as vitae and canonization processes.(3)

There are indeed some problems with the quantified portions of Vauchez's study. Especially in the long section on local saints, the exact nature of the evidentiary base is unclear. Although Vauchez claims to use broader materials in this section, he relies on Weinstein and Bell's faulty list for Italy, and anyone who has worked on hagiographical materials will find noticeable omissions in what he has considered for the North. Moreover the number of successful processes (thirty-five) for a period of 230 years seems too small for percentages to be meaningful.

Nonetheless the epithet "masterpiece" still seems, after almost twenty years, deserved. For Vauchez's work was not primarily a work of quantification; it was - in advance of its time - a work that included micro-history and social construction. A study of the growth of papal monarchy, it opens windows as well into dozens of communities organizing to foster the cause of local saints. Exactly because Vauchez understands that saints are fashioned by people and prelates in concert and in conflict, his examination of sanctity is a brilliant study of the full range of late medieval Christianity.

Caroline Walker Bynum

Columbia University

ENDNOTES

1. Geoffrey Barraclough, "What is to be Done about Medieval History?" The New York Review of Books (June 4, 1970), pp. 51-57.

2. Michael Goodich, Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth Century (Stuttgart, 1982) and Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago, 1982).

3. Aviad Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country (Chicago, 1992).