Unlike Beth Kreitzer's Reforming Mary, published in the same series, Reforming saints is not concerned with the Protestant reception of traditional hagiography. It is nearer in spirit to Alison Frazier's study of the hagiography of the Italian Renaissance. David Collins's thesis is that, thanks to Erasmus, we tend to assume that humanists would have regarded vitae sanctorum as vehicles of the worst excesses of medieval superstition. In fact, ‘of the forty vitae of German saints composed new or revised between 1470 and 1530, … the most common kind of author was a humanist’ (p. 19). Collins's study analyses this corpus by the type of saint memorialised, proceeding from the largest group, bishops (ch. i), through hermits (ch. ii), to monks and nuns connected with local cults (ch. iii), and finally to Swiss vitae, which assisted in the process of state formation by promoting Nicholas of Flüe to the status of pan-Helvetic patron (ch. iv). Collins identifies as the characteristic traits of these humanist lives, in addition to a genuine devotional spirit, a classicising style, an interest in patriotic history (which for some centred on their own local or regional patria, for others involved the idea of a wider national identity), and a desire to present their saint, especially if a bishop, as a champion of church and social reform. This is an extremely valuable and carefully documented contribution to German religious history. It also illuminates developments in hagiography between the apparently credulous Voragine and the apparently scientific Bollandists, although Collins would deny any notion of a simple progression from one to the other. Perhaps at times the contrast between Erasmus' ideal of sainthood (exemplified in his Life of St Jerome) and that of other humanists is over-emphasised: Georg Witzel's Hagiologium, for instance, set about in an impeccably Erasmian manner to prune the legends of superstitious accretions. And more explanation is required of why some saints became victims of confessional crossfire (for example Benno), while others did not (for example Nicholas of Flüe, whom even Zwingli admired). Aside from some strange turns of phrase (what does ‘to dredge up a boilerplate disparagement’ mean? [p. 127-]), and the consistent but odd decision to treat colons as full stops and follow them with capital letters, this is an attractively produced volume.