Medieval Saints: A Reader

Book Overview

This text includes a number of writings by or about women saints, as well as a large percentage of material which, prior to this book, was not available in English.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1551111012
• ISBN13: 9781551111018
• Release Date: November 1998
• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Length: 637 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

good introduction to a newly popular old genre

This is a good book (with a really nice cover, by the way) from a sympathetic publishing house. Forced to choose from an overwhelming number of saints and their stories, Stouck manages to give fair coverage to characters and topics. Its nine chapters (including "Early Christian Martyrs," "Relics," and "Hagiographic Romances") present a sound selection of primary texts in good translations. I have a few minor objections. The index is difficult to use since it has document and section numbers, rather than page numbers (note to publishers around the world: will you STOP doing that, unless you have those numbers indicated on every page!). I also think a book tackling a literary/historical genre so important, yet so little studied these days, could do with a brief annotated bibliography, not just a list of suggested readings. And the final chapter, "Epilogue" (and that doesn't sound right, for the epilogue to be chapter nine), which intends to give us a more modern perspective on hagiography, could have been better, more informative, if it had more than a little bit of Wycliffe and a lot of Erasmus. I guess ending with Erasmus is a move to give closure to the "Medieval" part of the title, but in so many ways Erasmus is no longer medieval that Stouck might as well have put some Calvin in here. Besides, this book is intended, I think, to introduce the (lay) modern reader to the genre--if so, a small selection of secondary, more recent, readings would have served that reader well. All in all, though, I am pleased with this book and hope to use it in a class soon. For $30 it's a lot of book for the buck, and I think it serves the student/reader who presumably is new to the genre very well: it's certainly recommended for those who enjoyed Geary's Furta Sacra or Brown's Cult of the Saints and want to get their hands on the real thing.