Book review: Saints and Sanctity, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge: The Boydell P., for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 2011; pp. xxii + 437. £45)

Until relatively recently, scholarly misgivings about the nature of hagiography, and perceptions of the uneasy relationship that it bore to ‘History’, meant that judgements of ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’ predominated in discussions of saints and sanctity. However, this recent volume of Studies in Church History, produced by the Ecclesiastical History Society, attests admirably to the enormous value which representations of saints, and the dynamics of their cults, hold for historians. They are crucial sources for manifestations of spirituality and patterns of belief, of course, but they also constitute an excellent means of understanding the individuals, communities and societies who venerated particular saints. The essays collected here embody a now commonplace approach which is influenced by sociological and social anthropological methods, focusing on perceptions of sanctity and the means by which it was constructed at different times, and in different places, by particular authors and for particular audiences.