When Medicine Failed
Barbara Newman: Saints, 7 May 2015
Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation
by Robert Bartlett.
Princeton, 787 pp., £27.95, December 2013,978 0 691 15913 3 Show More
by Robert Bartlett.
Princeton, 787 pp., £27.95, December 2013,
“... displays a happy balance between scholarship and readability. Its directness shows that Bartlett read Augustine in Latin (cur et mortui tanta possunt?) – the published translations are much wordier. Bartlett identifies the three essentials for a saint cult as ‘name, body, text’. Names might be confused and texts could be commissioned, but a body, or at ... ”