Patricia Ranft has crafted a portrait of Peter Damian, based on critical editions done in the 1980s of his letters and sermons. A religious reformer, preacher, spiritual director, hagiographer, papal legate and cardinal, Peter began his career in the schools of north Italy, then joined a community of hermits at Fonte Avellana; but he was soon called to play a role in ecclesiastical politics – a role that he filled with both energy and regret. Ranft argues that recent work on Damian has focused too much on selected issues important in modern theology and polemic, such as his views on homosexuality, his characterisation of marriage as ‘squalor’, his doubts about the pursuit of secular learning by monks, and his letter 165, often cited as a premier example of contemptus mundi literature. She attempts to give an overview of the full sweep of his concerns, using the concept of ‘witness’ as her central theme. The term as she uses it has a slightly twentieth-century, almost evangelical ring; ‘example’ or ‘pattern for imitation’ might be a better phrase, given the fact (which Ranft admits) that Damian speaks often of exemplum or exemplar, of forma or imitatio, but uses testor only once in the sense of witness. None the less, despite Peter's own ambivalence about his activist role, the phrase in Ranft's subtitle does serve to give a broader and more accurate picture of the religious concerns at the heart of his interventions in such late eleventh-century controversies as the struggles over lay investiture and simony, sacerdotium versus imperium, the place of extreme ascetic practices (for example, self-flagellation) in monastic routine, and the relative appeal of monastic, canonical and eremitical forms of religious life.

Ranft's writing is clear and upbeat, and the book will undoubtedly be useful to theology students and beginning medievalists who wish to make the acquaintance of an important eleventh-century figure. None the less, for scholars, there are limitations to what we are given here. The claim to provide a full assessment of Peter's spiritual teaching would be more convincing if more attention were given in the analysis to the sermons, which are very seldom referred to in the footnotes and omitted from most of the appendices. The tone is often odd. Ranft seems to see her task as primarily hortatory and justificatory, but her sweeping claims for Damian are not supported in her text. We are told repeatedly that Peter is a turning point and that his ideas influenced the course of western culture, but we are given no proof – no description of ideas that were prevalent before he wrote, no evidence of who read or cited him, no discussion of how manuscripts of his works were diffused. For example, on pp. 79–80 Ranft says she ‘believes’ that Damian's insistence on women's ‘full … member[ship] of God's household’ prepared for new opportunities for women over the next two hundred years, and that Damian's conception of the eucharist ‘contributed greatly’ to the dissemination of ideas about the corpus mysticum (for which the footnote is to a modern encyclical). Such claims need to be demonstrated, not merely asserted. Moreover, the bibliography is seriously out-of-date. We find no reference to Rachel Fulton on piety, no reference to Giles Constable's reformation of the twelfth century, no citations of the exciting new work on the history of Italian cities.

We have in Peter Damian's letters a wealth of material for social history. Ranft's task is admittedly theological, not historical; none the less the significance of Damian's spiritual insights needs to be situated in the context of the tumultuous spiritual and civic scene of north Italy with its rapidly proliferating forms of religious life. To list only a few examples: these letters give us glimpses of the problem of wandering monks and the social and religious conditions that caused them, of the emergence of new conceptions of prayer and meditation, of striking changes in attitudes toward, even in the occurrence of, miracles. Imbedding Peter in his context not so much to defend him from modern criticism as to illuminate the religious and social world about which he tells us so much would make for a richer analysis. Ranft ends her book by pointing out that Peter was ‘not perfect’. It seems a defensive and somehow irrelevant conclusion to a study of an eleventh-century figure. Ranft's study will provide a useful starting point for students who wish for a more extensive summary of Damian's letters than is available in some of the specialised literature on him. But we still await a full investigation of Peter's writings both for their historical evidence about social and religious life and for their place in the crucial changes in piety and theology between the years 1050 and 1150.