Interacting with Saints in the Late Antique and Medieval Worlds ed. by Robert Wiśniewski, Raymond Van Dam, and Bryan Ward-Perkins (review)

Reviewed by: Interacting with Saints in the Late Antique and Medieval Worlds ed. by Robert Wiśniewski, Raymond Van Dam, and Bryan Ward-Perkins Michelle Freeman Robert Wiśniewski, Raymond Van Dam, and Bryan Ward-Perkins, editors Interacting with Saints in the Late Antique and Medieval Worlds Hagiologia 20 Turnhout: Brepols, 2023 Pp. 282. €95.00. Interacting with Saints in the Late Antique and Medieval Worlds includes a selection of papers from a 2018 conference at the University of Warsaw, a final act of the ERC Advanced Grant The Cult of the Saints: a Christendom-wide study of its origins, spread and development (340540). Specialists will be most familiar with this collaborative grant project through its resulting database, The Cult of the Saints in Late Antiquity (http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/), an expansive, easily searchable collection of Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Georgian, and Armenian End Page 311 evidence for the cult of saints. This volume exemplifies the profits reaped from the grant team's accomplishments. The essays demonstrate the database's success in making old and new evidence more accessible, as well as the new paths of research it has opened for scholars. Wiśniewski's introduction explains that as the cult of saints grew, spread, and developed, it "constantly changed and adapted to new conditions and demands" (10). This volume "wants to show how various elements of cult evolved in response to changing needs and circumstance, and in constant interaction between the established saints and new generations of believers" (10–11). He also explains the book's division of essays into three sections. The first, "Seeing and Hearing the Saints," focuses on "evidence that has been largely overlooked" by previous scholars (11), namely material culture, ritual, and sensory experience. The second, "Local and Cosmopolitan Saints," presents regional studies of saint veneration and its contribution to local politics and identity. And the third, "Constructing Paradigms," explores how late antique Christians used saints and their power to meet ecclesial, social, and political ends. While the conceptualization of saint veneration as a diverse cultic and literary phenomenon dependent on local circumstances is laudable, brief explanations of the historiographical trajectories that led to these three distinct approaches to the cult of saints would have helpfully situated the essays—and thereby the impact of the Cult of the Saints research team and their database—within the contours of the field. Nonetheless, it is difficult to write a cohesive introduction to such a diverse group of articles, and minor quibbles with the introduction should not detract from the volume's excellent essays. While the editors have categorized the articles according to their thematic approaches, I will here group and explain them according to their methods of presenting and evaluating evidence, highlighting the contributions they offer. Note that fuller abstracts of each essay are helpfully located in the back of the book. Several essays offer broad surveys of evidence for a particular facet of the cult of saints. Stephanos Efthymiadis, for example, collects sources and offers preliminary observations on the Constantinopolitan cult of saints from the sixth to twelfth centuries. Readers will be interested in his claim that the cult of saints in Constantinople "was a manifestation of highly localized, popular religiosity" of particular ethnic groups, private benefactors, and individual emperors rather than a "centralized policy continuously promoted by the imperial and ecclesial authorities" (180); but they will also appreciate his accumulation of examples and textual sources, each of which could comprise a study in and of itself. Xavier Lequex's article collects evidence for the phenomenon of oil-exuding relics, the first step toward a history of this prominent cultic phenomenon. Ian Wood also presents a list and preliminary observations on fifth- and sixth-century hagiographies of non-monastic bishops from late Roman Gaul. These essays present troves of understudied evidence to be explored in more detail. Other essays offer thick descriptions of material or literary evidence. Maria Lidova explores depictions of martyrs in late antique church apses, categorizing them into various types and offering rich interpretations of these depictions within their architectural, ideological, and ritual settings. Anna Lampadaridi End Page 312 studies in detail the hagiographical dossiers of the Sicilian martyrs Agatha...