This is a very detailed account of every reference to English saints in liturgical books and fragments from medieval Scandinavia. These sources record seventy-four such saints, some of them obscure even in contemporary English manuscripts. Toy describes their presence as a ‘curious indicator of insular influence’: references to these saints seem to reflect an enduring English influence on early Scandinavian Christianity. Rather than a narrative, the book consists of a set of records, organised by saint, which document material in kalendars, martyrologies, litanies and vitae sanctorum. Toy has also transcribed the proper texts, where given, for mass and office. Accompanying these tables is a register of manuscripts with the saints they contain. There is a useful list of textual incipits. The volume retains manuscript spelling and format and supplies complete texts where available: these are editorial decisions that demonstrate aptly the variation among manuscript copies of liturgical texts. To his credit, Toy has used all of the available evidence, with interesting results. He is able to report, for instance, that evidence for a cult of Bede is ‘confined to kalendars and martyrologies’. Similarly, ‘the date, rather than the saint, was what made Botwulf so universally popular … [His feastday] was obviously a useful date in the agricultural calendar’. Such references evoke a long-standing question: what a fleeting reference to a saint might signify in a liturgical book. Cautiously, Toy omits ‘comment or assessment’ on the grounds that such work would necessitate more extensive comparisons with English and continental patterns. This may be wise, but general observations restricted to the existing data would surely have been possible. The reader is left without answers to seemingly obvious questions: according to the surviving evidence, which saints were most widely venerated within Scandinavia? Which saints tend to appear together? Can manuscripts or their kalendars be assigned to tentative groups? How frequently are passing references to saints supported by proper texts? Such observations could be made, without inferences, on the strength of the present evidence. Despite his reservations, the author does make attempts, especially in the collation tables, to show where patterns in the Scandinavian corpus coincide with known insular liturgical patterns. Since these comparisons are sometimes based on single, allegedly representative sources on the English side, it might have been better to wait for the anticipated wider comparisons. Toy describes this work as a ‘record and a resource’: it is more the former than the latter. Liturgical specialists will be well served and information of a specific nature is readily available, once the rather opaque method of presentation is mastered. But, like some other books produced by the Henry Bradshaw Society, it could not be digested easily by anyone else. This is disappointing, since this volume, imitable in its completeness, is a valuable contribution to English and Scandinavian hagiography and liturgical studies.
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