Although saints wish to aim their devotees toward heaven, this book about the respective canonization processes of two fourteenth-century saints keeps its focus squarely on earth. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa mines the documents that each canonization process generated for clues about how roles that have been constructed in terms of gender, social position, age, geographical location, and other factors. Such factors reveal themselves at every stage: from the invocation of the saint in a time of need (chapter 2), to the tokens and gestures of gratitude offered in response to the saint's miraculous help (chapter 3), to the memories of miracles offered up, not immediately after the event, but years later at the canonization hearings—long enough afterwards that one can sometimes glimpse the major shapers of that memory and their motives for remembering it as they do (chapter 4). Of course, it is crucial to remember that all of the testimony offered up at this later stage was filtered through clerical authorities, who conducted the hearings and recorded the testimonies. The author rightly considers their activity in selecting which witnesses to depose, which memories to record, how to record them, and how to evaluate their significance before she turns to the testimonies themselves. The two canonization processes under scrutiny here, which reflect very different social worlds, are those of Thomas Cantalupe, bishop of Hereford, whose cult developed in the west of England shortly after his death in 1282; and Nicholas of Tolentino, an Augustinian friar of urban central Italy whose ascetic life, tireless preaching, and miracle-working before his death in 1306—and afterwards—soon inspired canonization efforts.

Katajala-Peltomaa's ostensible interest here is in gender, but she realizes that gender only becomes meaningful when it is refracted through a specific cultural prism. So she notes, just to take one example, that whereas fathers in Hereford took as much initiative as mothers in calling upon St. Thomas's help in reviving ill children (and even reputedly dead ones), in Tolentino mothers typically took the lead. Indeed, there are very few generalizations that the author applies to women or men broadly. One of the few exceptions is in Hereford and Tolentino where women were almost never sought as witnesses for the life and character of the saint-to-be in question, but were questioned only about miracles that they had personal knowledge of or investment in (52).

This book has much to commend it to medievalists interested in the plethora of details associated with the high medieval cult of the saints. One of its many virtues is its accessibility to the non-Latin reader, opening the often colorful texts of the canonization processes. Here we encounter a girl drowned by a playmate, a father who unknowingly rolled a wagon wheel over his boy's head, and worried parents measuring the “corpse” so a wax replica can be made as an oblation to be burned at the saint's shrine. The book grows out of a 2006 doctoral dissertation at the University of Tampere (Finland). As such it is copiously documented, with many of its notes containing not just source citations but also significant elaborations.

While the book's strengths are many, these very strengths, because they need tempering, breed certain weaknesses. The author is rightly concerned to let her empirical data speak for itself. That data almost always tends to call into question what she thinks her reader will expect. She affirms, for example, that whereas the written records kept by clergy, who controlled the canonization process, might lead us to expect that women would express their grief over losing a child more tearfully than men, examples can nevertheless be found to show that such was not necessarily the case (87). Or again, “the right to name a child was generally seen as the father's privilege,” yet “this was not the case in examples of Nicholas' [canonization] records” (232). Or yet again, whereas the myth of the Fall, and Eve's role in it, may have led the clergy to construct gender relations hierarchically—women always submitting to men's authority—the records of the canonization processes “emphasize more often collaboration [of men with women] than strict hierarchy” (294). While this debunking of conventional wisdom is certainly a useful aspect of a study so intent on bringing into bolder relief the concrete voices of the medieval laity, the author spent enough time doing so that it is difficult to pinpoint many bigger takeaway messages. Finally, the book seems inaptly titled. While the construction of gender is certainly one very important concern here, it so fully shares the stage with the construction of so many other social distinctions (including age, class, wealth, and geography) that gender does not emerge, at least to this reviewer, as the book's dominant concern.

In all, however, this very attractive book was inspired by very good instincts. We possess few enough sources for medieval popular piety that this book earns its keep largely by bringing these two into the limelight. Yet by attending to the quotidian and mundane details that went into the making of a saint, the author also offers a valuable glimpse into how socially constructed polarities—such as male/female, old/young, highborn/lowborn, urban/rural, and lay/clerical—helped to shape, and were in turn shaped by, devotions to saintly intercessors.