This richly illustrated volume is a collection of twelve studies preceded by an introduction by the editor, Alison K. Frazier. It is divided into two sections (‘Lay Sanctity between Manuscript and Print’; ‘Saints of the Religious Orders between Manuscript and Print’) that together cover the broad field of sanctity in early modern Italy. It is well known that the proliferation of cults led, in the aftermath of Trent, to the creation of the Congregation of Rites, whose main purpose was to ascertain the cases for sanctity and to promote – or to arrest – canonisation processes. Italian saints were divided into a number of categories among which were immemorials, whose cult had developed before canonisation was formalised (but they could be newly introduced, for example, when relics where discovered or acquired) and new saints (often belonging to the Franciscan or Dominican orders). Saints could also be invented, as is the case of St Roch, who is the focus of the exemplary philological contribution by Pierre Bolle (‘Archival documents, early printed books, and manuscripts: the backwards text-tradition of St Roch “of Montpellier”’), a double of an original Raco or Rachus who developed into an autonomous figure. The most intriguing and problematic category was perhaps that of living saints, people who had a reputation for sanctity and were therefore held in high esteem in courts as spiritual and sometimes political advisors. Examples are the famous cases of Caterina Vigri (Serena Spanò Martinelli and Irene Graziani, ‘Caterina Vigri between gender and image: La Santa in text and iconography’) and Lucia da Narni (Gabriella Zarri, ‘Blessed Lucia of Narni [1476–1544] between “hagiography” and “autobiography”: mystical authorship and the persistence of the manuscript’). This category also included controversial figures such as Girolamo Savonarola, never officially canonised and yet venerated as a saint (Stefano Dall'Aglio, ‘“Everyone worships Fra Girolamo as a saint”: Savonarola's presumed sanctity in sixteenth-century manuscripts and prints’).

The book addresses crucial issues such as how (and to what purpose) sanctity was built, as often saints were central to the fostering and shaping of local identities and the tightening of social bonds. In many cases, as the studies collected here eloquently show, the promotion of a saint was more a matter of politics than of devotion. This is the case with two rather obscure figures, the Milanese saints Veronica Binasco and Arcangela Panigarola, studied by John Gagné (‘Fixing texts and changing regimes: two holy Lives in French-occupied Milan’): the two had a prophetic reputation and became part of the complex political situation of French-occupied Milan.

The time-span of the volume, encompassing the whole Italian Renaissance, allows us to assess the changes in the definition and perception of sanctity over two centuries. At the same time, the studies collected here enable us to understand the impact that print had on the rise and perpetuation of new or traditional cults, and how, and in what respects, manuscript and printed sources differed from each other in fashioning sanctity.

This volume challenges the idea of sanctity as fixed and all the essays show – to different degrees – how the construction of sanctity was a lengthy process in which many interest groups were (or could be) involved: local civic and religious authorities, mendicant orders, writers, printers. Nor did print fix once and for all the image of a saint. As Laura Ackerman Smoller brilliantly shows in her article ‘The unstable image of Vincent Ferrer in manuscript and print Vitae, 1455–1555’, many biographies of the saint circulated, both in manuscript and print, that differed in numerous details, often stressing or overlooking certain aspects of the saint's life. As Alison Frazier writes in her introduction, ‘In the case of saints, fixing or standardizing images or texts has less to do with manuscript or print, with vernacular or Latin, than with the context of the effort’ (p. 48). The context often influenced the very essence of the cult attributed to a saint. Barbara Wisch (‘Seeing is believing: St Lucy in text, image, and festive culture’) shows how the cult of St Lucy was a public and civic one in Venice – where the saint had nearly the same distinction as St Mark, the patron saint. Yet, in Rome the saint was venerated as protectress of unwed girls. This essay also engages with the unsuccessful attempt by the post-Tridentine Church to eradicate the spurious belief in Lucy's blindness. The belief remained deeply rooted in popular devotion as well as in devotional practices. The failure to regulate this and other cults testifies not only to the difficulties that the Counter-Reformation Church faced in its attempts at a renewal of Catholicism. It also shows how the production of more historically and philologically accurate biographies and Lives of saints hardly reached the vast public, who continued to mould their beliefs on the basis of cheap books and fly-sheets. The volume offers a vast and fascinating glimpse precisely into the world of popular print, presenting a rich documentation of fly-sheets, prints and chap-books. However, we should not excessively emphasise the distance between different levels of culture, as the article by Stephen Bowd demonstrates (‘Tales from Trent: the construction of “Saint” Simon in manuscript and print’). The murder of a child in Trent, Simon or Simonino, was turned into a political case against local Jews, as humanists seeking patronage described it as a ritual murder. The new cult, however suspiciously it was viewed by the Church, nevertheless found the support of political authorities in Venice, Brescia and Trent. If it was the humanists who shaped this cult in their works, it was the vast circulation of woodcuts and fly-sheets that made it immensely popular in Italy and beyond the Alps.

It might have been useful to have had a stronger focus on the second half of the sixteenth century, when, especially in peripheral areas, new saints (often living saints, later canonised) appear regularly. It would also have been interesting to explore more systematically the continuities and changes in the creation and perception of sanctity. However, this is a most useful and welcome volume that provides readers with a wide range of well investigated case studies.