Recommendations from our site
“He sees the materiality, the devotion, the emotional investment as a great lurching forward of a society. It’s not just the elites and the church structures but it’s also the people. It’s a transformation, a moment of radical change that all of Christian society is invested in. This book is looking at the context in which that change is taking place. The book has been criticised on a number of levels but it’s still revolutionary in the way that it offered us a functionalist account of what’s going on with the cult of saints. It’s about, among other things, the way that private customs of veneration of the dead were made public by bishops, how the very special dead were given central positions within civic space in the cathedral. It’s about how bishops acted as the impresarios of this rewiring of patronage networks of friendship, of support, spanning different sections of society in the Roman world. And, of course, heaven and saints as the pivotal figures in these relationships. He’s showing how what might be written off as populist, superficial forms of the cult of saints are actually immensely fundamental to the way that society is working its way through different problems at this time.” Read more...
Simon Yarrow, Historian
