Making and Unmaking of a Saint - (Middle Ages) by Mathew Kuefler (Hardcover)

About the Book

The Making and Unmaking of a Saint traces the rise and fall of devotion to Gerald of Aurillac through a millennium, from his death in the tenth century to the attempt to reinvigorate his cult in the nineteenth century.

Book Synopsis

A crusader, a hermit, a bishop, a plague victim, and even a repentant murderer by turns: the stories attached to Saint Gerald of Aurillac offer a strange and fragmented legacy. His two earliest biographies, written in the early tenth and early eleventh centuries, depicted the saint as a warrior who devoted his life to pious service. Soon Gerald was a venerated figure, and the monastery he founded was itself a popular pilgrimage site. Like many other cults, his faded into obscurity over time, although a small group of loyal worshippers periodically revived interest, creating sculpted or stained glass images and the alternate biographies that complicated an ever more obscure history.

The Making and Unmaking of a Saint traces the rise and fall of devotion to Gerald of Aurillac through a millennium, from his death in the tenth century to the attempt to reinvigorate his cult in the nineteenth century. Mathew Kuefler makes a strong case for the sophistication of hagiography as a literary genre that can be used to articulate religious doubts and anxieties even as it exalts the saints; and he overturns the received attribution of Gerald's detailed Vita to Odo of Cluny, identifying it instead as the work of the infamous eleventh-century forger Ademar of Chabannes. Through his careful examination, the biographies and iconographies that mark the waxing and waning of Saint Gerald's cult tell an illuminating tale not only of how saints are remembered but also of how they are forgotten.

Review Quotes

"All historians of medieval monasticism know about Gerald of Aurillac-or at least we think we do. Mathew Kuefler has written a very original work on Gerald, redating and reattributing the vitae that form the basis of his fame. The book is gracefully written, well argued, and well documented."-- "Constance Brittain Bouchard, University of Akron"

"Kuefler's completely convincing redating and reattribution of all the earliest writings about Gerald will need to be taken on board by everyone who works on Western Europe in the Central Middle Ages. His careful rethinking of received views on the subject not only tells us much about important figures of the era (above all Odo of Cluny and Ademar of Chabannes), but also serves as a model of historicized textual criticism. . . . This is an important book."-- "American Historical Review"

About the Author

Mathew Kuefler is Professor of History at San Diego State University, editor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and author of The Manly Eunuch: Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity.