This volume of proceedings (in a mixture of the three leading scholarly languages) of a conference held in 2001 is intended to show the kind of research that has been done on canonisation processes since André Vauchez's magisterial Sanctity in the west, which appeared twenty years before the conference. There is a special emphasis on Central and Scandinavian Europe, because the venue was Budapest and the sponsor a Swedish Bank Foundation. The main service a reviewer can perform is to draw attention to arguments that would otherwise get buried: the contributions are all serious and worthy, though the volume as a whole is hard going, and unlikely to be perused in full by many other than reviewers.

A. Kleinberg thinks that to understand medieval attitudes to sanctity we need to concentrate on the cults of the uncanonised, where popular stories contained messages possibly a long way from the official ones. He is surprised at some things, for example by the idea of implicit faith, that most medievalists take for granted, and comments on them in a rather subjective way: but his point that canonisation in its official form is unique in world history is well made. T. Head traces the rise and fall of the practice of subjecting relics to ordeal by fire as a method of detecting sanctity. D. Harrison discusses a letter of Alexander iii to a Swedish king in which the pope expresses horror at a reported veneration as a saint of a drunkard who had met a violent end. His fairly general commentary on the text does not mention the point, made a generation ago by Vauchez, that the papacy set its face against a widespread popular feeling that people killed for no good reason were saints. M. Richter elucidates the rules of papal canonisation at the point when they were crystallising, using documents relating to the canonisation of a twelfth-century archbishop of Dublin. T. Nyberg gives a straightforward empirical account of the canonisation process of Birgitta of Sweden, emphasising how far it was advanced even before the Schism. A. Froejmark does something similar for Bishop Brynolf Algotsson, who died in 1317 but whose process (which never got to the final stage at the papal curia) took place a century later. Baeaernhielm and Mrydal mine Scandinavian processes for statistical and other data relevant to social history (nothing especially dramatic emerges). Gabor Klaniczay himself (the distinguished editor of the volume) argues that canonisation processes contributed to the production of the evidence they intended to record. His analyses of particular cases are fascinating but in my view they do not quite bear the weight of his general conclusion: it is a clever idea but it is overstated. A. Witkowska deals with the history of canonisation processes of St Stanislaus and a post-canonisation Vita. P. Golinelli directs attention to witnesses in Italian canonisation processes. He notes a tendency over time to prefer churchmen or members of the upper-classes as witnesses.

The paper by Michael Goodich deserves especial attention, because the niveau of the body of it is exceptionally high and because his own summary tends to obscure his more interesting findings. He shows that a critical attitude to miracles was in the air in what one might call the ‘age of canonisation processes’. There was a ‘genuine effort to reduce the number of credible, proven miracles to a minimum’. Notaries and physicians were used as witnesses in canonisation processes. Englebert of Admont's ‘On the miracles of Christ’ attempts to find natural explanations for miracles, to set the real ones in relief: an attitude also found in canonisation processes. Interestingly, though, popes were sometimes pushed to the final step of canonisation not by the miracles analysed in the process but by some personal experience such as a dream invested with a supernatural character. A. Boureau (another of the ‘stars’ of the volume) uses processes as a source for the ‘new demonological preoccupations’ of the early fourteenth century – a theme on which he has recently published a more extended study. C. Kroetzl, from the remarkable Tampere school of medieval historians, notes the growing attention from the mid-thirteenth century to the fama of sanctity. He uses the processes as sources for the history of communication and specifically of the spread of reputation (witnesses were asked about fama, and its diffusion can be estimated from their testimony). In a lively style untypical of the volume as a whole B. Schimmelpfennig reconstructs the ritual of papal canonisation. The main lines were fixed under Pope John xxii. T. Wetzstein makes it clear that an understanding of the ius commune is crucial to the ‘Diplomatic’ of canonisation processes: commissioners obeyed the procedural law of the Roman-Canonical process as it developed from the early thirteenth century. L. Smoller argues that local promoters in canonisation processes were able to affect the procedures used and thus the image of the saint. She contrasts investigations of Vincent Ferrer in Britanny on the one hand, and in Toulouse and Naples on the other. L. Pellegrini's thesis is that local canonisation investigations could take different forms but that the curial phase became more and more rigid in the fifteenth century; she attempts to work out a pattern in the choice of saints, suggesting that there was a policy of canonising all the protagonists of the agitated Schism past. M. Boiteux goes beyond the Middle Ages to explore the ceremonial and especially the visual effects surrounding the canonisation ritual in the early modern period. A concluding paper by Vauchez deserves especial attention. He is struck by how much procedures differed from one investigation to another. He asks why so few saints were canonised, and suggests that the papacy's real aim was to hold back the tide of the ‘new sanctity’ (cults of hermits, laypeople and friars in the mediterranean regions, and of bishops and pious sovereigns in the north); however, by the mid-thirteenth century the papacy realised that it did not have the means to control the cult of the saints, and concentrated on creating a class of super-saints. Vauchez suggests that around the same time popes also tried to establish a corresponding category of negative figures (for example the Visconti for John xxii). The final essay, by B. Ankarloo, develops the rather similar thought that the late medieval witchcraft trials were a sort of photo-negative of canonisation processes. The volume as a whole shows how efficiently the charisma of Vauchez's opus magnum has been routinised by a new generation of scholars.