In her fascinating, creatively conceived, and elegantly crafted second monograph on the shaping and contestation of the sanctified image of the Dominican Vincent Ferrer (1350—1419) over the course of centuries and across a vast geography, Laura Ackermann Smoller has bravely and competently traversed a number of hardened lines between disciplines and sub-fields in a way that will stand as a model of innovative research for future scholarship. Her study is simultaneously the work of a medievalist and early modernist (and the final pages of the book even consider the new millennium), of a Hispanist and Latin Americanist, of a textual and art historian, of a political, institutional, intellectual, religious, and cultural historian. Although in some parts of the book she exchanges one disciplinary hat for another as she traverses her expansive topic, in many places she is able to combine them in a fashion that enables her to explore and support her thesis with an unusually rich, and thus all the more convincing, assemblage of evidence and argumentation. Her methodology reminded me of what Amy Remensnyder elaborated in her La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds (New York: Oxford University, 2014).

As Smoller is careful to point out at the outset, her book is not about Ferrer's life per se—which will be the subject of Philip Daileader's book, Saint Vincent Ferrer, His World and Life, forthcoming from Palgrave—but rather concerns the crafting of collective memory of his sanctity before, during, and after his canonization in 1455. Accordingly, Ferrer's now controversial activity as a Dominican preacher and church luminary during the tumultuous decades bracketing the turn of the fifteenth century—which witnessed his notable involvement in the violent pogroms of 1391 against Iberian Jews, the famous Disputation of Tortosa of 1413–1414, and the high political drama of the papal schism—takes center stage in the book only in so far as it remained relevant to his developing image as a saint. After some brief background on Ferrer's actual life, Smoller organizes the rest of her study around the elaborate canonization process (with ample attention to the localized liturgies of the process and the lived experiences of the participants who collaborated to secure his designation as a saint) and the formation and cultivation of narratives about Ferrer's meritorious and miraculous deeds that it engendered. Conducting a close analysis of this complicated procedure (chapters 2–3), which featured four distinct inquests at different locations in Europe over several years, might have exhausted the resources and resolve of most scholars and easily could have amounted to a respectable monograph. However, Smoller's ambitious decision to push on and consider how different constituencies manipulated their images of the saint in subsequent generations, in Europe (chapters 4–6) and even in the Catholic colonies of the Americas (epilogue), enabled her to produce a considerably more sophisticated and valuable volume that contributes to ongoing, broader discussions about the influence of non-papal agents in later fifteenth-century canonization proceedings (revising Vauchez's thesis in his Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages) and about the malleability of a saint's holiness even following canonization.

At the core of Smoller's argument throughout her study is the methodological principle that individuals’ or groups' conceptions of a saint's holiness were heavily conditioned by their conscious (or, in some cases, subliminal) agendas within their social environments, which, in turn, were empowered by their interaction with different kinds of sources of information about the saint's life. For example, each local inquest, in its procedural guidelines and in the content of its witness testimonies, tended opportunistically to underscore aspects of Ferrer's sanctity that emphasized a tie with the region or its ruling dynasty (chapter 1). Certain well-positioned parties could exert greater agency over the crafting of the saint's narrative, depending on the context, although Smoller is careful to point out how even the most carefully applied influence could fail to achieve the expected results or backfire altogether. Thus, the official life completed by the humanist-educated Dominican Pietro Ranzano around 1463 could not prevent post-Tridentine biographies from using alternative sources to emphasize aspects of Ferrer's life to defend Catholicism's divine mysteries against protestant attack (chapter 6), promote the Dominican mission in the American colonies (epilogue), or serve some other individual agenda that Ranzano had had no reason to emphasize (or had had every reason to downplay) within the political and religious context in which he wrote. Certain of Ferrer's miracles, such as the enduring chopped-up, reanimated baby story, pervaded all of the biographies, but this consistency did not signify that each re-teller or author offered the same take on the tale. Each witness, biographer, or painter, according to Smoller, projected images of the saint “with a purpose in mind, whether it was . . . to prove the reality of miracles or . . . to further the cause of regional patriotism” (261). Even though Ferrer's official image may have stabilized gradually over several centuries following his canonization, individuals and collectives continued to reshape their view of the saint's cult to conform with their needs, interests, and particular identities.

The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby is a mature and sophisticated work of interdisciplinary history with surprising insights around every corner. In spite of its readable prose, this is a book that rewards attentive reading. Smoller has carefully thought through and researched every alley and detour within the convoluted history of Ferrer's saint cult over the course of almost two decades, with extensive research in multiple archives and libraries, not to mention historical monuments, and the time and effort she has put into assembling her monograph truly shows. She has immersed herself and her study in an elaborate historiography in order to connect what might have been an esoteric, isolated examination with lively debates of great interest to a wide range of scholars. Rather than adopting facile, neat-and-tidy answers, she continually seeks out complexity and is not afraid to acknowledge the existence of contrary evidence or to pose important questions that she lacks the means to answer definitively. In sum, Smoller's book illuminates the intricate, polyvalent evolution of a saint cult in ways that force us to reassess what we thought we knew about medieval and early-modern canonization and sanctity, all while setting a new standard for interdisciplinary research.