The study of hagiographic literature has long formed an important subfield among scholars of Christianity, as it has too for those studying Buddhist traditions. In this careful and tightly argued book, Rondolino makes a singular contribution not only to the study of religious life writing but also to the difficult work of cross-cultural and comparative religious studies writ large. Responding to the call, raised by Canon MacCulloch more than a century ago in “Saintly Miracles: A Study in Comparative Hagiology” (Expository Times 19, no. 9 [1908]: 403–409), to develop comparative hagiology as a discipline in its own right, the author seeks to situate “religions in dialogue with each other effectively and meaningfully in a post-post-modernist perspective” (1). The book is therefore a fitting second title in Routledge's Sanctity in Global Perspective series.
Rondolino describes his work as “a method, and a first test of its applicability, for the study of the process of underpinning the creation and circulation of saintly narratives as they can be historically and philologically discerned in distinct religious, cultural, geographical, and historical contexts” (2). This comparativist approach to studying the hagiographical process focuses on the literary traditions associated with two iconic figures from distinct cultural worlds: the Italian Christian St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226) and the Tibetan Buddhist Milarepa (ca. 1028–1111). Each was the subject of a vibrant and expansive hagiographic tradition. The pair thus offer a nearly ideal framework for applying Jonathan Z. Smith's much-cited four-fold analytical approach marking “the end of comparison” (“The ‘End’ of Comparison: Redescription and Rectification,” in A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, ed. K. C. Patton and B. Ray [University of California Press, 2000]: 237–241) that Rondolino himself evokes in his introduction (2).
As indicated by the title of his work, Rondolino is interested less in the hagiographies themselves than the “hagiographical strategies” employed by authors both in the early literature and the later standard narratives. He argues that “religious traditions . . . relied on hagiographical productions as a powerful, pervasive, and holistic means for the pursuit and promotion of a complex system of doctrinal, social, and political agendas within a sophisticated network of literary religious polemics” (7). Rondolino further suggests that in studying religious phenomena, our primary concern must be the programmatic trajectories of the texts, directing him to the production, circulation, and reception of the hagiographic corpora to which his book attends. The author turns away from the historical status of hagiographical subjects in favor of the social, political, and economic worlds in which the saints and their hagiographers lived. In doing so, Rondolino's work is broadly consistent with trends in scholarship on European traditions of hagiography over the past several decades—as underscored, for instance, by Patrick Geary (“Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal,” in Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca [Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1996]). Such issues are also a primary concern for recent scholarship on Tibetan Buddhist hagiography (Janet Gyatso, Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary [Princeton University Press, 1998]; Andrew Quintman, The Yogin and the Madman: Reading the Biographical Corpus of Tibet's Great Saint Milarepa [Columbia University Press, 2014]; and Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Himalayan Hermitess: The Life of a Tibetan Buddhist Nun [Oxford University Press, 2004]; among others) and on the narrative traditions of the Buddha's life story more broadly (for example, Naomi Appleton, Jātaka Stories in Theravāda Buddhism: Narrating the Bodhisatta Path [Ashgate, 2010]; and Micah L. Auerback, A Storied Sage: Canon and Creation in the making of a Japanese Buddha [University of Chicago Press, 2015]).
Rondolino structures his study of St. Francis and Milarepa's vitae by comparing four hagiographic tropes: youth, conversion, community, and transfiguration. He reviews these, in turn, across two broad categories of literature: first, the body of early source material and, second, the narratives that comprise what would become the “standard versions” of the saints’ lives. This framework allows Rondolino to carefully track the changing representations within and across the early works. It also foregrounds the activities of the two most influential hagiographers, theologian Bonaventura of Bagnoreggio (1221–1274) and religious “madman” Tsangnyon Heruka (1452–1507), together with the institutional, doctrinal, and political agendas they served. In Bonaventure's hands, Francis became a “divinely invested agent” chosen by God from the start, whose order was “fundamentally consistent with the official doctrinal, organizational, and political positions held by the Christian Church of the thirteenth century” (146). Tsangnyon Heruka's Milarepa is instead recast as an ordinary human who attains spiritual mastery through perseverance in solitary meditation and unwavering devotion to his guru. The resulting analysis underscores points of intersection and divergence in the two literary traditions while revealing the parallel “dynamics of legitimation” underlying the hagiographic processes of each.
In charting a course for further projects of comparative hagiology, Rondolino also highlights some potential pitfalls. His use of literary materials for St. Francis and Milarepa is uneven, where discussion of the latter relies primarily on secondary sources and broadly summarizes the findings of previous scholarship. This underscores the challenges of writing authoritatively across diverse religious, historical, and cultural landscapes based on textual sources in multiple languages. Yet Rondolino's incisive treatment of Francis and Milarepa indicates we have arrived not at the end of comparison, but at its beginning.
