From time to time, it is no bad idea for historians to peep over the high wall of critical theory within which the literary experts have parked their discipline. Such a glimpse is all the more revealing in the case of hagiography, where the materials are so abundant yet, by the historians, so little read. The present study attempts to construe collective meanings from a body of texts defined as some 240 Lives written in old French, dealing with the careers of some 101 Christian saints, 140 of these Lives dating from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries and a majority of them emerging in Anglo-Norman dialect, from Anglo-Norman manuscripts.

Through a combination of theoretical musing and textual exposition, the author arrives at the by no means revolutionary conclusion that renunciation and the putting off of old identities, the abandonment of ‘normal’ family or community relations, and the construction of a new community of the Christian faithful can be identified as significant hagiographical stereotypes. Unfortunately, from the historian's perspective, the basic materials here, strung out over more than two hundred pages, are so inflated with the phlogiston of theory as to be rendered toxic to all save the most cast-iron of digestions. Thus, where a historian might write of Christian community or ideas of Pauline conversion, the author is bound to relate this to ‘queer’ theory (in the sense, most often though not exclusively, of the ‘odd’ and that which defies the norms, rather than specifically of the homosexual), in the process introducing us to such exhibits from the post-modernist museum of the silly as Althuser's theory of ‘interpellation’, Jean-Luc Nancy on self perception, or the magniloquent banality of Giorgio Agamben on community.

At p. 223, for example, from Agamben, ‘The outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space, but rather, it is the passage, the exteriority that gives it access – in a word, it is its face, its eidos’: codswallop, and all the more walloping for its claim that ‘face’ and ‘eidos’ together constitute ‘a word’. At p. 11, in one of her less abstract musings, the author promises that she is about ‘to elucidate how vernacular hagiography's interest in social and sexual economy subtends a more practical – and communal – imperative’. Yet even here, the false personification and the geometrical terminology (‘subtend’, itself so arcane that it is inevitably re-employed at p. 12 and again at p. 20), declare that the author is addressing herself principally to the priesthood of theory rather than to the general congregation of scholarship. There is, I fear, all too much of this (including at p. 17 the concept of ‘hermeneutic promiscuity’, thankfully, though inexplicably, left unexplored thereafter). Only about a dozen saints' Lives are considered in any detail. The readings here are sensitive and acute (as for example on renunciation in Julian the Hospitaller or, at p. 139, on the use of ‘feudal’ vocabulary within the French Life of St Alban), supplying a taste of what might have been, had the author been steered into less vogueish waters. Even such readings, however, are too often overlaid with interpretative exaggeration (again pp. 138–9, where, appropriately enough for analysis based upon Freudian concepts of sexual psychology, the interpretation of dreams is confused with the process of reading), or rely upon translations that are themselves over-interpretative (i.e. once again at p. 139, where ‘sermun, doctrine u language’ is rendered into English as ‘discourse, teaching or speech’). Some very broad claims are stated, yet virtually no effort is made (or perhaps, given language skills, could have been made) to locate these Lives in the twelfth- or thirteenth-century contexts or to discuss the ways in which they diverge from the Latin exemplars out of which so many of them emerged. The list of thirty-two saints and their Lives which forms appendix iv is not without usefulness, but seems to bear no relation to the statistics (240 Lives of 101 saints, p. 4) cited earlier in the book, and exhibits only a scanty familiarity with the manuscripts listed. Thus p. 248 ‘Paris BN, ms 2039’, or pp. 245–6 where the Biblioteca Laurenziana appears under two distinct guises, or p. 250 where the reader is misleadingly informed that Guernes's Life of Becket is based upon those in Latin by William of Canterbury and Edward Grim, and where the most modern edition cited is that by Walberg.

As with much else in this book, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that some rather fusty old clothes from the wardrobe marked ‘history’ drape a PhD thesis best received in full post-modernist nakedness. In her conclusion, Campbell rises to heights of rhetoric in her critique of the limitations that the positivist search for ‘evidence’ places upon historical discourse. Literary theorists will delight. Historians may conclude that, were they ever to succumb to such use of language, their discipline too might be in danger of vanishing into the queer and gaseous realms of pretence that lie beyond either grammar or meaning.