Simon Yarrow

The task of covering the history of the concept of saints in Christianity from the origins of the faith to the present day in a single book is a mammoth undertaking, and one whose difficulty increases in direct proportion with the brevity of the text. In about 160 pages—not fine print, either—Simon Yarrow attempts to pull that off. I'm loathe to critique a short introductory book like this one for the things it doesn't include, because it's always easier to list the topics omitted than it is to come up with an alternative list that's more representative and yet no lengthier.

Yet even setting that consideration to one side, I didn't find Saints: A Short History particularly successful. I picked the book up hoping that I would find in it a reasonably-priced text that I could assign to students in an introductory survey class. Alas, Yarrow seems to presume that his reader is from a Christian background and possesses a least a passing familiarity with Christianity and with Late Antique/medieval history. Students would need a lot of scaffolding in order to read this book successfully, since Yarrow chooses to explain theological concepts or historical events only occasionally. I get that word count likely told against him, but dropping terms like "Christomimetic" and moving right on isn't a successful narrative or pedagogical strategy. In fact throughout, I got the sense that Yarrow was straining to remind himself to write for a popular audience and not for fellow academics. His prose style would be far more at home, albeit no more fluid, in a monograph. (Yarrow's prose wasn't well served by OUP's editing, which was as shockingly haphazard as I've come to expect from them in recent years. Several sentences made no grammatical sense, and there were some silly typos, like "avowed" religious instead of vowed.)

There were also some framing choices which I found very problematic. Communism is explicitly referred to as evil, yet the genocidal series of colonial conquests embarked on by Europeans from the sixteenth-century onwards is referred to as "the occidental breakout." More than once, Yarrow details the admittedly gruesome deaths inflicted on missionaries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas which resulted in them being declared martyr saints—but similar space is not granted to the awful abuses inflicted on indigeneous peoples in the name of conversion. Yarrow does consider how some converts could find a source of strength and anti-colonial resistance in the faith of their colonisers, like Kateri Tekakwitha or Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, but no mention is made of Pope Francis' decision to canonise Junípero Serra despite his appalling treatment of indigeneous Californians. Saints are made by the communities they inhabit—sometimes that's reflective of the good in humanity and sometimes it's not. Yarrow's failure to get to grips with the latter means this isn't a book I can really recommend.… (mer)

Throughout Christian history individuals have been endowed with sainthood due to miracles that they supposedly performed during their life. Veneration of saints has been a huge part of worship for 2000 years and also big business for the Church. In this book Simon Yarrow looks at the changing views on sainthood through time and geography.

Although this book doesn't go into exhaustive details about the life and actions of many individuals, it offers an interesting perspective on the ideas of 'mortal' people being able to perform miracles because of their faith and the implications of this. The historical perspective is well-handled but I particularly liked the section that looked at the adoption of Christianity across the globe and the development of 'saints' to fit different societies. This is a short but powerful book.… (mer)