The Late Medieval Cult of the Saints. Universal Developments within Local Contexts. By Carmen Florea.

Abstract

The Late Medieval Cult of the Saints. Universal Developments within Local Contexts by Carmen Florea was published within the series Global Sanctity under the aegis of the Hagiography Society. The author is a lecturer at the Department of Medieval History and Historiography at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. Her mono-graph explores the dynamics of sanctity in late medieval Transylvania. The investigation of the cult of saints has been a popular topic in the last few decades. Several scholars have scrutinized the different aspects of sanctity on a macrohistorical level, such as the genesis of this phenomenon and the changing of saintly models through the centuries. At the microhistorical level, there are different options for a scholar: one can investigate a certain saint or type of saint within a specific geographical-and/or timeframe or examine the cult of saints in a region in a narrow period. There are advantages and disadvantages to all approaches. If one deals with a saint or a type of saint, one can track the changes within the cult and compare them to the European parallels, but it is hard to put this into a bigger frame and see the real position of the holy figure(s) among other saints. While if someone investigates the cult of saints in a region, they may generate a more complete picture, but it is difficult to concentrate on the details. Carmen Florea has chosen the latter option. The author investigated the late medieval (from ca. 1300 to the Reformation) cult of the saints in Transylvania with excellent results: she has been able to sketch a complete picture