This book examines the ways in which the literary genre of hagiography and the hermeneutical paradigm of Biblical typology together entered into the construction of "the Renaissance” as a canon and period. It is not about saints’ lives in themselves, as either literary or historical phenomena, but instead addresses the structural effects of hagiography in the secular literature of the Renaissance. The central texts analyzed--Boccaccio’s Decameron, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale--all manifest key moments and aspects in the creation of a Renaissance canon for the post-Renaissance world. The epochal significance of these works, saturated in religious allusions as well as scenes of profane life and classical art, is shown to rest in neither the normative piety nor the subversive heresy of any of these writers, but rather in their crafting of myths of modernity precisely out of the religious material that formed such an important part of their daily vocabularies.

Afterlives of the Saints is a woven gathering of groundbreaking essays that move through Renaissance anatomy and the Sistine Chapel, Borges' "Library of Babel," the history of spontaneous human combustion, the dangers of masturbation, the pleasures of castration, "and so forth" -- each essay focusing on the story of a particular (and particularly strange) saint.

Afterlives of the Saints is a woven gathering of groundbreaking essays that move through Renaissance anatomy and the Sistine Chapel, Borges’ "Library of Babel," the history of spontaneous human combustion, the dangers of masturbation, the pleasures of castration, “and so forth” — each essay focusing on the story of a particular (and particularly strange) saint.

The age of miracles was not yet past on the Shakespearean stage. In the first book-length study of the English saint play across the Reformation divide, The Renaissance of the Saints after Reform recovers the surprisingly long theatrical life of the saints from a tenth-century monastery to the Restoration stage. Through a reassessment of archival records of performance and religious change, this book challenges the established history of the saint play as a product of medieval devotional culture that ended with the national conversion to Protestantism during the Reformation. Not only did saints in performance frequently diverge from the narratives of devotional literature during the Middle Ages but also saints made a spectacular reappearance in the theatre of the early modern era. In the rupture between those two eras, the English church separated itself from the Cult of the Saints, and saints disappeared from public view until sainthood transformed from a matter of theology into a matter of theatricality. Early modern saint plays document a post-Reformation culture committed to saints-but not all saints. Certain ancient martyrs and British saints returned to the liturgical calendar in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer. This limited inventory performed an initial de-Catholicization of these saints, but it did not recover their lives. Instead, the theatre produced new lives of the saints for the English public. A period of experimentation with saints and devils in the 1590s was followed by unprecedented innovation throughout the Stuart era. This book traces the transformation of sainthood in early modern drama from ambiguous supernatural association and negotiated patronage to a renaissance of miraculous theatricality and sacred place-making. By excavating saints in plays by Shakespeare, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger, and Rowley as well as plays authored by relatively unknown dramatists, this book reconfigures how we think about the legacy of late medieval religious culture, the impact of Reformation change on literary texts and social practices, and the development of English theatre and drama.

Simultaneously real and unreal, the dead are people, yet they are not. The society of medieval Europe developed a rich set of imaginative traditions about death and the afterlife, using the dead as a point of entry for thinking about the self, regeneration, and loss. These macabre preoccupations are evident in the widespread popularity of stories about the returned dead, who interacted with the living both as disembodied spirits and as living corpses or revenants. In Afterlives, Nancy Mandeville Caciola explores this extraordinary phenomenon of the living's relationship with the dead in Europe during the five hundred years after the year 1000.Caciola considers both Christian and pagan beliefs, showing how certain traditions survived and evolved over time, and how attitudes both diverged and overlapped through different contexts and social strata. As she shows, the intersection of Christian eschatology with various pagan afterlife imaginings—from the classical paganisms of the Mediterranean to the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Scandinavian paganisms indigenous to northern Europe—brought new cultural values about the dead into the Christian fold as Christianity spread across Europe. Indeed, the Church proved surprisingly open to these influences, absorbing new images of death and afterlife in unpredictable fashion. Over time, however, the persistence of regional cultures and beliefs would be counterbalanced by the effects of an increasingly centralized Church hierarchy. Through it all, one thing remained constant: the deep desire in medieval people to bring together the living and the dead into a single community enduring across the generations.