Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity by Kyle Smith (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity by Kyle Smith
• Nicole Kelley

Kyle Smith
Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity
Oakland: University of California Press, 2022
Pp. xxi + 333. $29.95.

This book is (aptly) described by its author as “a magpie’s collection of stories and scholarship” that has been distilled “into an entertaining narrative for a general reader” (273). Have you ever asked what the Jägermeister label is about, or pondered why hazelnuts are also called filberts? Did you ever wonder who came up with the b.c./a.d. idea in the first place? The answers to these and other questions await you in the pages of Kyle Smith’s Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity. It is half Eusebius’s Church History, half Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and more fun to read than either of those. It is engaging and accessible enough to work in an undergraduate classroom (it has all the good stories and none of the scholarly jargon). Its “Notes for Further Reading” and bibliography are excellent resources. Especially given its host of high-quality images, this book is a bargain.

Smith’s thesis is this: “The centrality of martyrdom to Christianity has profoundly affected the development of its cultural expression and devotion, from its art and architecture to its liturgy and literature—even its conception of time” (1). The book’s 300-plus pages are perhaps less an argument for this thesis than an illustration of it through a dizzying array of examples. Smith’s approach is simultaneously textual and materialist. In recognizing martyrdom—and martyr narratives in particular—as the beating heart of Christianity, the book belongs to the tradition of “Christian death literature” established by historiographers like Eusebius of Caesarea (3). Smith relies on familiar textual sources such as Foxe’s [End Page 471] Book of Martyrs, breathing new life into them by giving them detailed material histories of their own. At the same time, he gives significant attention to material and visual culture: calendrical systems, late medieval Florentine altarpieces featuring a porcupine-like St. Sebastian, the stained-glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral, and the bedazzled skeleton of St. Leontius all make appearances.

Of the book’s eight chapters, Chapters Two, Four, and Seven discuss practices for memorializing the dead, and their impact on Christian conceptions of time. In these chapters, Smith brings scholarly conversations about calendars, time reckoning, and textual technologies to bear upon the familiar topics of martyrdom and the cult of the saints. This is the primary scholarly intervention of the book, whose target audience is more popular than academic.

Chapter Two (“The Names of the Dead”) discusses the ancient and medieval Christian habit of recording martyrs’ names, as well as the time and place of their deaths. This practice had both ritual and narrative consequences. On the one hand, Christian liturgical practices commemorated the names and deaths of martyrs such as Polycarp. In part due to the changes wrought by men such as Gregory the Great, the ritual commemoration of Christians’ saintly deaths became the foundation of the Christian calendar. On the other hand, the fixing of such “hagiographical coordinates” was a starting-point for hagiographical narratives and Christian histories built upon saintly deaths. Throughout the book, Smith makes excellent use of modern comparanda; here he uses Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial as an example of the power of naming (and leaving unnamed) individual dead. The highlight of this chapter for me (and of particular interest for some readers of JECS) is Smith’s discussion of the colophon of BM Add. 12150.

Chapter Four (“The Feasts of the Dead”) discusses Christians’ raucous behavior during saints’ feasts and the multiform ways that commemoration of the saints has shaped the passing of time in Christian communities. Saints’ days were—indeed sometimes still are—“the cardinal points of the year” (105), and hence important markers of time’s forward march. Here we learn about why Saint Antony is associated with pigs and Saint Martin with geese. But the commemoration of martyrs also shapes the passing of time on a smaller scale, as in the daily martyrology recitations of Benedictine...