738 Reviews

Conradi was very popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although it cir-
culated almost exclusively in German-speaking lands.
The two other summae edited here survive in many fewer manuscripts. Quia non
pigris, written c. 1241 and extant in three manuscripts in Munich's Bayerische Staats-
bibliothek, shares much material with the Summula Conradi but is organized differently.
It makes explicit use of Raymond of Penafort and of the apparatus on Raymond's
summa written by William of Rennes (c. 1241). Other authorities cited in the text
include Peter Lombard, Praepositinus, and Peter the Chanter.
The third text printed by Renard, Decime dande sunt, is an excerpted and augmented
version of the Summula Conradi. It survives in four manuscripts in Austrian and
German libraries and was composed between 1230 and 1240. Its first thirty-nine
chapters are an abbreviated version of the Summula Conradi. Chapters 40 to 49 consist
of extensive quotations from the popular Templum Dei of Robert Grosseteste, and the
last twenty chapters are "probably extracts from one or more works that have been
impossible to identify."
We are in Renard's debt for making these three summae accessible to the scholarly-
community. Equally valuable is his painstaking examination and description of the
codices containing these texts and of the other pastoralia that circulated alongside (and
within) them. The web of lists, tables, appendices, concordances, and indices that
make up volume 1 may discourage the casual reader. But, like the unprepossessing
texts he has edited, Renard's work is meant for use. It is an invaluable research tool
for anyone interested in the popular literature of pastoral care.
JOSEPH GOERING, University of Toronto

DAVID ROLLASON, Saints and Relics in Anglo-Saxon England. Oxford and Cambridge,
Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Pp. xii, 245; black-and-white plates. $39.95.
David Rollason brings to this, his most broadly focused book, both his own research
of over fifteen years on a great variety of hagiographical sources and the recent work
of a number of other British scholars, especially Alan Thacker and Susan Ridyard.
As Rollason makes clear in his preface, he is not undertaking a "theological or spiritual
study" of the cult of the saints. Indeed, in this reconstruction both the saints and
their ecclesiastical and royal patrons appear to be driven by secular motivations. Is
Rollason writing to convince an areligious generation of students that the cult of the
saints is a phenomenon worth studying? Perhaps the older generation of students of
the saints focused too exclusively on spiritual concerns, but this is an equally narrow
secular focus.
Believing the field not yet ripe for a general overview of the subject, Rollason has
chosen to emphasize certain aspects of the cult of the saints. Although his principles
of selection are not clearly defined, two in particular receive repeated attention:
outside sources of influence on England and the ways in which the cult of the saints
served political or economic ends.
One recurring question is which external influences most affected England. Rol-
lason uses recent archaeological evidence to suggest that the Anglo-Saxons owed more
to Romano-British practices than has been realized. For the period 600-ca. 850,
Rollason proposes a variety of influences: Frankish (rather than Roman) in the trans-
lation of relics into churches and the enshrining of relics in house-shaped reliquaries
or reliquary tombs, in hagiography, and in the importance of the Hieronymian
martyrology; southern Italian in the saints listed in early calendars. One conclusion
Rollason appears to be urging is the lack of influence of the Irish missionaries in
 Reviews 739
those significant areas. Rollason finds Ottonian influence on the tenth-century reform,
a conclusion based on the picture of the saints in their relations with kings in tenth-
century hagiography (although the evidence is rather scanty.) He rejects the traditional
view that the Norman conquerors were hostile to English saints; instead Rollason
argues (especially using the recent work of Ridyard) that the Normans furthered the
cult of their predecessors' saints because it benefited their houses. Here we come to
the second of Rollason's main themes: that the cult of the saints served practical
political (or ecclesio-political) ends.
For Rollason, the cult of the saints was limited to ecclesiastics and a few kings and
nobles in the pre-Viking era. He suggests that in hagiography only the lessons of the
visions of the afterlife may have been intended to have an appeal to the laity: to kings
or nobles. The recipients of miracles, too, when not clerics, seem generally to be
nobles or the dependents of nobles. The thesis that there was little lay participation
in the early cult of the saints is an interesting one, but an argument that rests on the
hagiographical evidence is potentially treacherous. Monastic hagiographers may well
have focused on the miracles that affected the most important people they knew,
ignoring those of less important and less interesting people (as Rollason admits). More
persuasive is Rollason's demonstration that the post—Viking Age cults do show lay
involvement. Nobles possessed relics; miracle stories show all classes involved and tell
of pilgrimages to seek saintly aid; miracle stories were collected as a separate genre.
As on the Continent, saints' festivals became more important in ninth-century laws,
while relics played an important role in oaths, manumissions, and ordeals. Rollason
does not interpret the growth of the cult of saints among ordinary laity as a sign of
the success of attempts to make more informed the faith of the populace, though he
points to the Carolingian concern with such and mentions preaching and teaching in
the vernacular in tenth- and eleventh-century England. He writes rather of "the
church's seeking further to increase the influence of the cult of the saints as a means
of integrating the lives of the laity into the machinery of the church" (p. 188).
Promotion to Rollason was essential for the development of a cult. He admits that
the clergy of a church "no doubt acted as impresarios of saints' cults out of piety,"
but he is more interested in their "mundane motives" (p. I l l ) : protection of property,
for example, or assertion of an alliance to a particular dynasty or faction. After the
social disruption caused by the Vikings, the cult of saints could help monasteries
regain control of land. Possession of relics, Rollason indicates, tended to prove pos-
session of estates owned by the saint. The Historia de sancto Cuthberto, with its lists of
lands given to Cuthbert and its dramatic tales of the evils that befell those who sought
to steal Cuthbert's lands, is a prime example for Rollason of the practical aid a saint
could give a community. As he remarks, these awful punishments represent a type
of miracle which is much more prevalent in late Anglo-Saxon hagiography.
In answering the question of why there were so many royal saints in England,
Rollason proposes that the early Anglo-Saxon church may have endorsed the sanctity
of assassinated rulers to discourage such royal murder. Though a plausible factor,
this does not seem a strong enough motive to explain the abundance of royal saints
in the pre-Viking Age. Royal saints continued to be an important phenomenon in
the post-Viking Age church. Following Ridyard, Rollason suggests that these cults
were supported by the rulers to strengthen the dynasty (thus erasing the old image
of Aetheldred the Redeless shadowed by the guilt of his mother's murder of his half
brother). The West Saxon kings collected relics and visited shrines at least in part to
extend power into areas where they had limited influence, hence their great interest
in northern Cuthbert.
This overview of what appear to be Rollason's main threads cannot do justice to
740 Reviews
the rich texture of the book. Rollason uses recent research to make interesting
connections (particularly with the archaeological evidence) and intriguing suggestions.
His speculations would have been more provocative and persuasive to this reader if
the book had been organized topically rather than chronologically. Differences in
hagiography or in the audiences of cults, for instance, would be much more compel-
lingly argued without the rather artificial division into pre- and post-Viking eras.
The book seems intended by much of its content for a specialist audience, given
the denseness of its references to forgotten saints and obscure monastic communities,
a denseness which could prove unyielding to the nonspecialist. Yet the English trans-
lations (there is no Latin anywhere in sight), the explanation, for instance, that
"Hieronymian" refers to Jerome, and the review of the history of the expansion of
the kings of Wessex suggest that Rollason had a wider audience in mind. The preface's
encouragement of exploration in old churches, cathedrals, museums, and libraries
seems to suggest the amateur historian may be a part of the intended audience.
Whether lay or specialist, the reader would have benefited from a bibliography.
Citations can be extremely hard to backtrack without one, particularly in a book as
thick with helpful references to recent research as this one.
SUSAN P. MILLINGER, Roanoke College

ETIENNE SARGOLOGOS, F.S.C., ed., Un traite de vie spirituelle et morale du Xle siecle: Le
florilege sacro-profane du manuscrit 6 de Patmos. Salonika: Asprovalta, 1990. Paper. Pp.
1,027. F 590. Distributed by Florilege de Patmos, B.P. 31026, Gr-56710 Neapolis,
Greece.
Almost thirty years ago Marcel Richard resumed the work on the Greek spiritual
florilegia initiated at the end of the last century by Karl Holl, Friedrich Loofs, and
Albert Erhard. Richard published the results of his research in an article entitled
"Florileges spirituels grecs" in the Dictionnaire de spirituality 5 (1964), 475—512. Now
Stephanos Sargologos has produced the first complete critical edition of one such
florilegium. This massive work of erudition, over a thousand pages long, constitutes
a major contribution to our understanding of the history of Byzantine theology.
Unfortunately, the introductory chapters tell the general reader (or even the prac-
ticed Byzantinist) little of its importance. Although there are numerous references to
the article of Richard, Sargologos gives no general account either of the florilegia
types or of their historical context. Nor does he indicate in his general discussion or
in his description of the manuscript tradition whether or when his analysis differs
from that of Richard.
Richard posits the existence of three basic types of spiritual florilegia. The Damas-
cene type derived originally from a florilegium known as the Hiera, which was com-
piled in the eighth century, possibly by John Damascene or at least under his influence.
The place of production would probably have been Palestine. This florilegium is not
preserved today in its original form, but it can be reconstructed on the basis of other
florilegia derived directly from it. All these florilegia exhibit an encyclopedic tendency
(a literary form that grew to great popularity in Byzantium through the ninth and
tenth centuries), the abundant citation of both the Old and the New Testament, of
the ante-Nicene Fathers, of Philo and Josephus. This was the type (also referred to
under the rubric Sacra parallela) that most interested Loofs, Holl, and Erhard.
The second type is that of the sacro-profane florilegium. This category was appar-
ently slightly less popular than the first, but these productions still enjoyed a consid-
erable circulation. Such compilations set side by side the teachings of both Christian