In this meticulous and engagingly written study, David Collins examines the phenomenon of humanist hagiography. Renaissance humanism has often, with good reason, been associated with the rejection of traditional forms of devotional literature. Collins points, by way of example, to Erasmus's manifesto against the objectionable—in his view superstitious and fantastical—elements of saints' lives in his 1516 Life of Saint Jerome. We might think also of the criticisms levelled at Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend, the hugely popular thirteenth-century collection of saints' tales that was famously condemned by Juan Luis Vives as “written by a man with a mouth of iron and a heart of lead.” Using a source base of forty Latin descriptions of saints from the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire dating from between 1470 and 1520, Collins demonstrates the need to revise this stereotype. There was, he shows, a “resurgence of saintly life writing that began in the 1470s after half a century of its scarcity” (11). Early German humanists clearly devoted considerable time and energy to telling stories about the saints.

Collins locates the explanation for the German humanists' creative vigour in the field of hagiography in their desire to use saints' lives as vehicles for the reforms of religious and moral life that they sought to promote. The book's first chapter is dedicated to the vitae of holy bishops, figures who provided the most obvious models for contemporary church reform. He explores in detail a number of vitae, including Jerome Emser's account of Benno, the eleventh-century bishop of Meissen in Saxony who became a figurehead for the renewal of Catholic piety in southern Germany after the Reformation. Collins analyzes, with great sensitivity, the authors' attitudes toward their sources and the style and structure of their texts. The vitae were, Collins demonstrates, intended to convey certain lessons—above all, the importance of missionary activity within the context of Catholic reform. In chapter 2 Collins examines Lives of holy recluses, showing the ways in which these humanist texts were integrated into the broader religious culture of the period, in particular into debates about monasticism and the values and dangers of the solitary life.

In chapter 3, Collins examines the impact of chorography—the historical chronicling and descriptive geography beloved of humanist scholars—on the vitae, demonstrating the importance of regional loyalties in constructing the stories of these saints. Chapter 4 continues the theme of the saints in the service of “regional patriotism,” examining humanist accounts of the life of the Swiss saint, Nicholas of Flue (1417–1487). Although Nicholas' patria was described, Collins is careful to emphasize, as Unterwalden and not the Swiss Confederation, humanist authors allowed this contemporary saint to “be shaped by and to shape developing Swiss political and cultural identity” (115). Throughout, Collins effectively illustrates the diversity that existed within the humanist movement. Many of his vitae include, for example, what he sees as non-Erasmian elements—patriotism and sympathy for popular devotion.

Collins's study effectively challenges the impression left by previous scholarship, that “Catholic authors fell asleep one evening appending newly concocted, miracle-laden vitae to The Golden Legend and woke up the next morning to begin critically editing the January lives of the Acta sanctorum” (11). The transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern era was, as the author rightly points out in his conclusion, in part a story of continuity, and the early German humanists emerge as key participants in a renewal of writing about the saints that began in the late fifteenth century. Collins ends by casting a brief glance at the hagiography of the post-Reformation period, highlighting in particular its polemical functions and the philological precision and documentary thoroughness that characterized the Bollandist enterprise.

This is, appropriately for the series in which it is published, a work of historical theology. Though the recent work of scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum is cited where appropriate (the lack of a full bibliography is a minor complaint), the socio-cultural study of the cult of saints is not Collins's primary objective. Yet through the detailed attention he pays to questions of patronage and audience, the saints' lives and their authors are contextualized effectively. These were, of course, elite texts, but were also, Collins convincingly demonstrates through his individual case studies, shaped by popular pressures and by the devotional and cultic requirements of their patrons. From the perspective of a Reformation historian, the glances that Collins casts at the post-1520 hagiographical world are tantalizing—a full and equally nuanced account of the hagiographical works of Peter Canisius, Laurentius Surius, and others would be most welcome.