This volume is a collection of thirty-two conference papers delivered at several meetings of Britain's Ecclesiastical Historical Society in 2009 and 2010. In the volume's introductory essay Andrew Louth remarks, “Anyone reading through the papers presented here will discover that [‘Saints and Sanctity’] is a subject of very great diversity; no general message emerges from these pages” (xix). Indeed; yet that does not make this volume any less a delight to read. As Louth notes, the most obvious lesson that one draws from this collection is that the study of saints and sanctity invites a variety of approaches (xxii). Yet equally obvious is the extent to which sanctity here is configured as a topic appropriate for every time and tradition of ecclesiastical history. By my inexact count, six of these essays deal with the ancient period (that is, through the sixth century), eight with the medieval, ten with the early modern, five with the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and three with the twentieth century. Geographically, these essays gravitate somewhat toward England—as one might expect—but the volume also has papers centering on saints and saint-making in France, Italy, Ireland, Wales, Russia, Malta, and Australia.

In the essays on the early church, the ghost of Peter Brown looms large. Louth's “Holiness and Sanctity in the Early Church” expresses an appreciation of Brown's works on the holy man in late antiquity, yet also a critique on several fronts. One, for example, is that Brown—for all his brilliance at emphasizing the late Roman social context that gave rise to the holy man—failed to emphasize yet another crucial context: that of the early church's ever evolving understanding of sanctity—an understanding that grew out of its identification with Israel, developed through its early experience of martyrdom, and was transformed by the Constantinian settlement. Likewise, Peter Turner's essay, “Hagiography and Autobiography in the Late Antique West,” takes as its starting point a critique Brown made of his own early work, namely, that it focused so much the holy man's impact on his society that it neglected his own personal quest for sanctity. Turner then goes on to compare third-person and first-person early Christian narratives in order to explore how, just to take one example, Augustine's first-person narrative in his Confessions reveals the ways in which that famous third-person narrative, The Life of Antony, took hold of Augustine's early imagination. Turner's piece thus does a fine job of showing what Brown admittedly ignored: how both the saint and his or her Life might influence the religiously minded individual. Finally, Alexis Torrance, while not mentioning Brown by name, opens his essay, “Repentance as the Context of Sainthood in the Ascetical Theology of Mark the Monk,” with a 1981 quotation by Henry Chadwick, who gives a not so gentle ribbing to scholars whose instinctive response to reading the lives of the early saints is to offer “trendy non-religious explanations for the social needs that created them” (80). Surely Chadwick has Brown in mind here and, taking Chadwick's critique to heart, Torrance promises that his essay will keep religious or theological motivations firmly in mind.

One rightly expects such a collection to include studies on saints mostly from traditions that formally canonize their saints, and so it does. Yet there are also some worthwhile essays on “unofficial” saint veneration both from the canonizing traditions and those that tend not to revere formally their own, at least not in their liturgies. In particular, several essays deal with the veneration of unofficial saints by pious biographers. These include Robert Andrew's essay on Sir James Allan Park's reverential biography of High Anglican hosier William Stevens (d. 1807) and Martin Wellings's essay on Methodist luminary Benjamin Gregory, whose reverential biographies of entrepreneur Walter Powell and Methodist minister Alfred Gregory, his own son, pushed the boundaries of conventional Wesleyan hagiography—the former by praising prosperity and the latter by extolling self-cultivation and an Oxford education as new hallmarks of Wesleyan sanctity. Interestingly, one of the most hagiographic of all the essays—by which I mean an essay that, along with its fine scholarship, expresses a palpable sense of the author's admiration and affection for his subject—is Clyde Binfield's piece on the late nineteenth-century English Congregational minister Henry Roberts Reynolds (d. 1896).

Yet the warm and admiring tone of Binfield's piece proves more the exception than the rule for this volume. Typically these essays show more interest in the political ambition and intrigue that led to a saint's canonization than to that saint's pre-eminent virtue. Alan Thacker, for example, shows how deftly Ambrose raised the status of the see of Milan first by “finding” and interring the remains of the martyrs of Sts. Gervasius and Protasius under the altar of his new church, the basilica ambrosiana, and then by collecting and distributing apostolic relics to other western sees that he hoped to bring under Milan's influence. In a similar vein, Patrick Preston concludes that despite a loyal cult following, Savonarola has never even been beatified because he dared to attack the papacy—a fact that the post-Counter Reformation church, which so values conformity and obedience, will never overlook. And it will be difficult for some to reflect on St. Therese of Lisieux with the same artless devotion after reading Sophia Deboick's account of how, practically from the moment of her death, her sister Céline connived to retain complete control over the editing and commercial distribution of her sainted sister's images.

This volume's charm and its weakness lie in its potluck nature. In terms of the diversity of methods it deploys as well as its wide-ranging subject matter there is something of interest here for almost everybody. Then again, there is probably more about which a reader with more focused interests will be indifferent. Its most enduring value may lie in the record it leaves of how early twenty-first century mostly British scholars approached the study of Christian sanctity and saint making.