Vincent Ferrer was a Dominican friar who lived through the latter half of the fourteenth century and died in 1419, bringing to an end an extensive preaching tour of western Europe. He was, as Laura Smoller notes, possibly not a very nice person (his preaching was notably antisemitic). This book is not, however, about him, but rather about Saint Vincent Ferrer – an emphasis which Smoller makes throughout the monograph. Extensive materials survive from his fifteenth-century canonisation process, encompassing investigations in Toulouse, Naples and above all Brittany; there was also an inquest in Avignon, but this is now lost. The canonisation inquests report a variety of miracles, among which perhaps the most striking is that of the book's title: a child cut in two by his mother is miraculously restored whole (albeit with a visible seam) by the saint. Some years ago Smoller produced several important articles based in particular on the Brittany material; the present monograph is the final culmination of that earlier work, and very much more besides.

This is an exemplary piece of cultural history of religion, which investigates not so much ‘how a saint was made’ but ‘what did a saint mean?’, with a very adept demonstration of how Ferrer was given different meanings in different contexts of time, place and politics. This stretches through the fifteenth century into the post-Reformation period and indeed (in a lengthy ‘epilogue’) to the Spanish Americas. Smoller's notable achievement is not simply to gesture toward interpretive heterogeneity, but to demonstrate through close and careful analysis how the changing contexts in which ‘Saint Ferrer’ was summoned up and represented – in oral culture, in texts and in visual depiction – imputed quite different emphases. During Ferrer's own lifetime, and in the lead up to his canonisation, the key context was the ducal politics of Brittany, and their attempts to hold their own politically, culturally, and in a certain sense ‘spiritually’, against the kings of France. Thus, although Ferrer was born in Valencia, and had been long connected to the Avignon papacy, it was Brittany which made the initial efforts in promoting his cult. Smoller reconstructs the canonisation process in detail, and, rather more effectively than other such studies, tracks the contextual politics around each stage. She also brings vividly to life the process of enquiry from the point of view of the witnesses, making us think about them as more than useful puppets repeating formulaic tropes, whilst also demonstrating how much ‘preparatory’ work the cathedral clergy at Vannes (where Ferrer died) and the mendicants put in to drum up enthusiasm for the cult, and what several witnesses call the ‘publicising’ of certain miracles, as part of the growing shrine's regular activity. With the Brittany inquest we are shown also a very intriguing element of canonisation, not much visible in the records which survive for other cults: the major public ceremonial spectacles that accompanied the opening of the investigative process itself, greeting the commissioners to the city with an episcopal procession to the cathedral at Vannes, preaching, sermons that narrated Ferrer's life and works, an examination of his tomb, and the assembled crowds called upon to testify ‘with their hands raised to heaven’ to the public fame of Ferrer's sanctity – all of this before any witness had formally spoken.

Looking then at the canonisation material, Smoller (as in her earlier articles) demonstrates that alongside the structured process and familiar expectations that framed miracle narratives, there was undoubtedly space for agency on the part of the witnesses. The stories that they told of ‘their’ saint were produced to fit expectations (about what constituted a ‘miracle’ for example, according to the demands of the canonisation inquest) but which also spoke to local and emergent needs and fears. This is particularly the case with the Breton evidence, and is most apparent in regard to Ferrer's status as a ‘plague saint’ (as he is quite often depicted in later times): this was not a facet being promoted particularly by the local clergy or the secular rulers, but came about because Brittany was suffering a plague during the time of the canonisation process, and thus because local people decided to turn to Ferrer for this kind of assistance in particular.

In the second half of the book, Smoller moves on from the inquest materials to the vitae produced in the aftermath of canonisation. Here, the ‘chopped-up’ baby story takes on a life of its own, clearly seizing the imagination of various hagiographers, who elaborate it in ever greater and divergent detail. There are differences of cultural expectation, but also of politics. Ferrer had been intimately involved in the Great Schism, holding allegiance for much of the fourteenth century to the Avignon papacy. This was more than a little problematic for his later cult, as he had backed the ‘wrong’ side for quite a while. Problematic also were his apocalyptic pronouncements – in particular that the AntiChrist would appear in 1433 – which had been demonstrably proved untrue by the time of his canonisation. Different hagiographers handled these issues in different ways but, as Smoller demonstrates, the narrative work of the key miracle stories – the restoration of that which was sundered apart in particular, as with the chopped-up baby – helped to smooth over the cracks.

This is an elegantly written study that should find a wide academic audience: it is important not only to those who work on medieval saints, but to anyone who is interested in the complexities of late medieval religion, the Schism, the use of witness testimony and the importance of doing properly grounded cultural history. It is also an excellent example of writing history that crosses over the notional border of the Reformation, with much to say to early modernists as well as medievalists. It is, in short, a really wonderful book.