Nothing can quite beat Storyland, Wild was alright although it didn’t stand out for me in the way Storyland did, regardless of this, there’s no way I’m not reading Amy Jeff’s latest anthology of kooky Saints and miraculous happenings. This one was a preorder and yet again bypassed all other books on the TBR pile.
Here’s the blurb:
Saints’ legends suffused medieval European culture. Their heroes’ suffering and wonder-working shaped landscapes, rituals and folk beliefs. Their tales spoke of men raised by wolves, women communing with flocks of birds and severed heads calling from between bristling paws.
In Saints, Amy Jeffs retells legends born of the medieval cult of saints. She draws on ‘official’ lives, vernacular romances, artworks and obscene poetry, all spanning from the fourth to the sixteenth centuries. The legends’ heroes originate from as far east as Turkey and North Africa and as far west as Britain and Ireland. Saints includes such enduring super saints as Brigid, George, Patrick and Michael, as well as some whose legends are less well known (ScoithÃn, Euphrosyne and Ia) or else couched in prejudice (William of Norwich).
The commentaries following the stories offer a history of each saint and, together, trace the rise and fall of the medieval cult of saints from the first martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. And all this maps onto the passing year: from St Mungo in January to St Thomas Becket in December.
Jeffs guides her readers from images high on the walls of medieval churches, through surviving treasures of the elite and into the shifting silt of the Thames, where lie the lowly image-bearing badges once treasured by pilgrims. She opens manuscripts that hold wondrous stories of the lives and deaths of wayfaring monks, oak-felling missionaries and mighty martyrs. With tales of demons and dragons, with the stubborn skull of a giant, with stories of sleepers in a concealed Greek cave, Saints will enchant and transport readers to other worlds.
This book is full of gossip, legends and tales of the men and women we now refer to as saints. They weren’t always saints of course, sometimes they were people who just seemed to have their aura together. Sometimes they were highly principled people that became martyred as they refused to bend to the will of those in power. And sometimes they were people that stuff just happened around.
Some of the saint’s stories are more entertaining than others, some are just tragic and others are odd anecdotes of hermits and people who lived on the periphery of society, but all of them are historical figures who have days dedicated to them in the various calendars of Europe.
The book follows the months of the year, starting in January and each chapter/month contains the stories and history of some of the saints that are celebrated within that month. The stories are very short as you might expect for anecdotal miracles and medieval happenings, but in addition you get some very comprehensive research (as you might expect from Jeffs) on the background of the saints, the time in which they were living, the medieval cults and why they may now be celebrated.
At the beginning of this review I stated that ‘nothing can quite beat Storyland’, and I stand by that statement. Storyland is a masterpiece, so if you pick up this book expecting another Storyland, you will be disappointed. This book feels far more academic and historical, as Jeff brings the history and context to the stories of the saints which we have often lost touch with or which we simply know nothing about. As a secular person following a nature based faith, this is certainly the case of me. There are only a handful of saints in this book that I am familiar with and so it was a real education and one I enjoyed.
I read this book over a week or so each night but I think it’s more of a coffee table book than a bedtime read. I would recommend dipping in and out of it as the background can be dense and daytime brain cells are required.
You can buy Saints in all good bookshops. If you would like to buy a copy online, please consider visiting my page on Bookshop.org where I have gathered some of the books I read and recommend. Here you will find a plethora of myth, legend and folktale.
And don’t forget to support your local library too. See if they have a copy to borrow.
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Review coming soon …
