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Cover

The Saints

A Short History

Simon Yarrow

September 2016

ISBN: 9780198784388

192 pages
Hardback
Othermm

Price: £10.99

The Saints examines the history, traditions, and cultural impact of the saints. Looking at their origins and the cultural definition of saints and sanctity, Yarrow moves on to consider interpretations of saints in literature and art, and the role gender plays in sainthood.

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Description

The Saints examines the history, traditions, and cultural impact of the saints. Looking at their origins and the cultural definition of saints and sanctity, Yarrow moves on to consider interpretations of saints in literature and art, and the role gender plays in sainthood.

  • Offers a historical interpretation of the saints, looking at key traditions and stories and the role saints have played in ancient, medieval, and modern society
  • Looks at contemporary experiences of the cult of saints, including the role of relic veneration in the modern world
  • Studies the presence of saints in material culture, art, and literature
  • Considers the saints in a global context
  • Explores how gender informs our understanding of saints.

About the Author(s)

Simon Yarrow, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Birmingham

Dr Simon Yarrow graduated from the University of Newcastle in 1994 with a First in History. After staying on to take an MA, Simon moved to St Cross College, Oxford, where he completed his PhD under the supervision of Professor Henry Mayr-Harting in 1999. Since then, he has been Past and Present Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, London, and worked at St Mary's University College, Strawberry Hill, Birkbeck College, London, and the University of Liverpool before taking up a Lectureship at the University of Birmingham in 2004. He has published several articles and is the author of Saints and their Communities: Miracles Stories in Twelfth-Century England (OUP, 2006).

Table of Contents

    List of Illustrations
    1:Introduction
    2:Inventing the Saints
    3:Saints in the Middle Ages c.500-c.1500
    4:Early Modern Sainthood
    5:Gendering the Saints
    6:The Blessed Virgin Mary
    7:Writing the Saints
    8:Globalizing Sanctity
    9:Saints in a Secular World
    Further Reading
    Index

Reviews

"Illuminating [and] very readable." - Jakob Rinderknecht, Reading Religion

"The story of how the notion of sainthood was "constructed, contested and embodied" remains a fascinating subject [...] and Yarrow offers a pithy, even-handed introduction." - Jonathan Wright, Catholic Herald

"Remarkably wide-ranging over time and geography in a short compass, this is a reliable, elegant and comprehensive introduction to the bizarrely varied members of the holy company of Heaven." - Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church, Oxford University

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