REVIEWS 

The cult of the saints. Its rise and function in Latin Christianity. By Peter Brown.
Enlarged edn. Pp. xxxv + . Chicago–London: University of Chicago
Press,  (first publ. ). £. ($) (paper).     
JEH () ; doi:./S
It is not evident how to review the new edition of a book which was published thirty-
four years ago, was then much discussed, raised vivid criticism and even more vivid
applause, and profoundly influenced studies on late antique religiosity. All the
more so as in the new edition the core of the book has not changed. The
content of the six chapters, including notes, is as it was in . They are preceded
though by a new preface of twenty pages on which the reviewer should focus his
attention, since most readers are probably familiar with the first edition. Yet
since the title of this book, which is quoted in virtually every study on the cult of
saints, seems to have a life quite independent of its contents, it is perhaps not
out of order to start with a short summary of Brown’s argument.
In chapter i Brown shows how profoundly new was the phenomenon which
emerged in Christianity in the fourth century. This demonstrates that the tradition-
al notion of the banality of the cult of saints, perceived as just a manifestation of a
perennial and unchanging ‘popular religion’, cannot really explain this phenom-
enon, for it deprives it of its history and makes it an impossible object of historical
research. The rest of the book shows specific religious, political and above all social
conditions which gave rise and shape to the cult of saints. The story told by Brown is
focused on two groups whose role was essential for this development. The first of
these was the aristocrats who found in the cult of saints an ideal pattern of patron-
age, clientage, friendship, community and power, which not so much reflected
earthly society as showed how this society should look. The second group was
the bishops whose position demanded an acceptable way of spending some of
their swiftly growing wealth. The social background to the cult of saints is the
leading theme in the book, but Brown shows also purely religious changes which
contributed to its rise: the growing fear of death, the awareness of sin and the
need for intercessors who would be efficient in connecting earth and heaven.
In the  preface Brown presents the background to his writing of the book at
the end of the s when new studies on popular religion, the Roman aristocracy
and the saints in Islam became available, making him try to heal a split between the
extensive Bollandist, textual knowledge of the cult of saints, and the ignorance of
its role in late antique society. Brown also tells us what we have learnt since .
We know that the cult of saints should be studied against a wide geographical back-
ground, since it differed locally more that we suspected. We know that it was less
unanimously accepted than we thought. We know that the cult of saints and its
specific practices satisfied diverse needs, and, for instance, common people, feast-
ing on the saints’ laetitiae, did not necessarily follow the theological ideas of the
bishops. We know more, though still little, about the private dimension of the
cult of saints, which was certainly more important that the extant evidence sug-
gests. Brown admits that he put too much stress on the role of the aristocratic
impresarios of cult; not that their role should be reduced, but that it should not
obscure a more shadowy presence of ordinary people. He also recognises that
he was too ready to claim that the cult of saints ‘humanised’ the supernatural,

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  JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
ignoring the survival of miraculous springs, trees and other objects at the end of
antiquity.
Brown’s book had two essential merits. First, it linked the cult of saints with social
history, showing not only that cults of specific saints were popular in or destined for
specific social groups, which medievalists had been aware of for a long time, but
that the very phenomenon was deeply rooted in concrete social conditions. Even
if Brown’s vision of the link between the cult of saints and social reality was not
unanimously accepted, it enhanced reflection in this field. Even more important,
Brown showed that the cult of saints as such had its history, and that its evolution
can be studied.
The cult of the saints was not meant as an all-comprehensive study of the phenom-
enon, even in the West (the subtitle which specifies that the author’s interest is
focused on Latin Christianity seems often to pass unnoticed). Thus, it would be
unfair to criticise what Brown did not write about. Yet it is worth naming some
issues, important for our understanding of the cult of saints, which, years after
the first edition of the book, still need investigation.
One of them is the evolution of the phenomenon. If Brown made the develop-
ment of the cult of saints an object of historical research, the history presented in
this book is somehow limited to the big change at the end of the fourth century.
This change is also illustrated by the later evidence, for instance from late sixth-
century Gaul, but this only suggests that after the big shift not much happened,
and this seems to me to be not entirely true. The evolution of the phenomenon
in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries needs to be documented and explained.
Another issue which demands further study is the cult of holy monks, the super-
heroes of early hagiography. In the West, as in most regions of ancient
Christendom, they did not have any cult, at least not until the very end of the
sixth century. What was the link between the two phenomena, namely admiration
for living monks and for dead martyrs? Why did the former, when alive, function in
a similar way to the latter, but cease to do so after death?
There is also the question of the relation between the cult of saints and the cult
of relics. It is true that few cults developed without relics, and that most of those
which did subsequently ‘produced’ holy objects. But it seems that there was a per-
ceptible shift between the start of saintly cult and the emergence of relics. For a
while many saints could do without relics. Also, the cult of relics cannot be consid-
ered to be simply an aspect of the cult of saints, for the bones of martyrs were not
the only holy objects which started to be venerated and considered to be sources of
power.
Another topic which is only touched upon in the book is the re-emergence of the
belief amongst Christians that miracles could still happen (and that these were not
confined to biblical times). Brown deals with this phenomenon seriously, but does
not ask how this started in a society in which there is little evidence of an expect-
ation of miracles. Once this phenomenon began it kept working by itself, but how
did it start if people who knew about the miracles of old did not expect them to
occur in their lifetime?
Thus the image presented by Brown, thirty-four years after the publication of his
book, certainly can be both discussed and completed. But it is still inspiring. When
reading The cult of the saints again for the purpose of this review I found there

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 REVIEWS 
several quotations and ideas which I was sure I had discovered myself and was not
entirely happy to realise that it was probably not so.
UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW ROBERT WIŚNIEWSKI

Strange beauty. Issues in the making and meaning of reliquaries, –circa . By
Cynthia Hahn. Pp. xiv +  incl.  colour and black-and-white ills and 
frontispiece. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, . £.
(paper).     
JEH () ; doi:./S
Since the mid-s Cynthia Hahn has been one of the principal voices in the
study of relics and their containers (known as reliquaries) and the questions that
relic cults – a central aspect of medieval devotion – raise for both art historians
and historians of religion. Major exhibits, preeminent among them ‘Treasures
of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe’, mounted in
Cleveland, Baltimore and London in , and recent scholarship on the saints,
most importantly Robert Bartlett’s Why can the dead do such great things?
(Princeton ), have made the role in European history of holy people and
the holy places associated with them a topic of increasing urgency. It is therefore
hard to understand why Cynthia Hahn’s intelligent and important book, Strange
beauty, which sums up and carries forward her work of the last two decades, has
been neglected in the review sections of journals of general medieval and ecclesi-
astical history.
Hahn’s book is an extremely useful survey of reliquaries, organised according to
type or genre. Hence it provides a partial update of Joseph Braun’s classic Die
Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung of . But Strange beauty is
much more. It raises questions that every medievalist and every art historian of
the period between  and  needs to consider – questions not only about
the nature of relics but also about how bodies, objects and matter itself become
holy; about how the form of an image structures devotional response; and about
the fundamental issue of the nature of representation. Hahn’s study has implica-
tions for art historians and historians working well beyond her cut-off date of .
Organised chronologically and according to type, Hahn’s book moves from
early Christian reliquaries, such as purse-shaped or casket-shaped containers,
which often worked to obscure the nature of their contents, to the thirteenth
century, when what she correctly calls ‘shaped reliquaries’ (in contradistinction
to the German term ‘redende Reliquiare’ or ‘speaking reliquaries’) became
more common but by no means universal. She underlines the newer approach
to relics, pioneered by Julia Smith and others, that rejects older definitions of
relics as body parts and understands them instead as bits of holy matter that
have been in contact not only with the tombs and bodies of the saints but with
holy places – such as the Holy Sepulchre or the Field of Blood (Akeldama) in
Jerusalem – as well. In line with the new art historical interest in materiality, she
considers not only the form but also the materials of reliquaries. See, for
example, her discussion (p. ) of why objects that image resurrection are made
of ivory, a substance that reflects as well as contradicts the nature of flesh and
thus explores what it would mean for body to endure for all eternity. In a

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