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Thomas A. Dubois, ed. Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia.

Article Excerpt
* Thomas A. Dubois, ed. Sanctity in the North: Saints, Lives, and Cults in Medieval Scandinavia. Toronto: Toronto UP, 2007. Pp. 399.

* Carl Phelpstead. Holy Vikings: Saints' Lives in the Old Icelandic Kings" Sagas. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 340. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Pp. 274.

Seen from the outside, medieval Scandinavia is most renowned for its pagan past. It should not be forgotten, however, that the same people who were busy rescuing this precious cargo from the past simultaneously produced a whole new literature devoted to Christian saints. The two books under consideration deal with this second endeavor. Scandinavia produced voluminous works in Latin as well as in several vernacular languages concerned with the lives of saints from the first contact with the new religion until the Reformation abolished their veneration and destroyed many of these works. The purpose of the first book is to present this literature. Thomas Dubois took the initiative, but he is not only the editor, he also wrote the introduction, contributed two articles of his own, and collaborated with a colleague on a third. In the introduction he provides a history of sainthood in the North from the conversion to the Reformation. He makes the pertinent observation that although the worship of saints was well established by the time the North entered Christianity, traditions concerning sainthood there underwent the same hagiographic evolution that preceded it, albeit in abbreviated form.

The texts themselves are the primary focus in this work; however, they need not only to be translated, but also placed in context. Therefore an essay precedes each group of original translations that often appear for the first time in English. The book is divided into four sections, the first of which devotes two chapters to missionaries who became saints; the second treats four rulers, kings or princes who came to be considered saints; the third deals with two cases from the clergy--a bishop and a nun--and the last part examines in a social context two concepts that were intimately connected with sainthood: marital celibacy and the difficult problem of miracles.

In the first section Scott A. Mellor takes a new look at St. Ansgar, the missionary to Denmark and Sweden in the early ninth century, who later became archbishop of Hamburg. Rimbert, his friend and colleague, wrote his biography about 880, a decade after his death. The text is much more than a vita, and scholars have puzzled over its form. Mellor makes the plausible suggestion that Rimbert wanted to write both a biography of his friend and a history of the church in the manner of Bede, whose work he may have known. Leaning on previous translations into English and Swedish, Mellor translates a good twenty pages of Rimbert's Latin vita. Ansgar did not obtain his wish of becoming a martyr, but Thomas Dubois treats two people, a woman and a man who both came from England to the North where they were martyred thus becoming saints. In the tenth century, Sunniva died during a landslide in a cave on the Selja Island in Norway where she had sought refuge. In the middle...