This collection of thirty-two papers treats subjects spanning the late antique period to the twenty-first century, although it is understandably weighted toward the earlier part of these centuries. Contributors include professors emeriti, independent scholars and postgraduate students. A preponderance of the papers address saintly individuals and the commemorative traditions forged in association with them. Other papers address definitions of sanctity and its functions, and the appreciation of saintly figures in Reformation and non-Catholic confessional contexts. The book strikes out geographically from the core Mediterranean and northern European regions of western and Orthodox Christianity (including such contrasting localities as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Malta, nineteenth-century French colonial Algeria, Sarov in Russia and Leeds in West Yorkshire) to southern and western Australia. Andrew Louth is correct to emphasise the varied – almost to the point of arbitrary – profile of the saintly population through the ages, even after successive systematic refinements to the apparatus of papal canonisation beginning in the thirteenth century. Individuals often had to do more than lead blameless, exemplary lives to become saints; they depended on strong familial or institutional backing to get their cases promoted, and even then were canonised because of combinations of circumstances, interests and agendas with which they might have had only limited association during their lives. Chapters by Bernard Hamilton, Alan Thacker and Michael J Walsh illustrate particularly well this combination of forces, or their absence, that lay behind the historical traction exerted by saints and their promoters.