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KLEINBERG, A., Flesh Made Word. Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination. Translated by J.M. Todd. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)/London, 2008. XII,340p. Half cloth wrps. 'Aviad Kleinberg's Flesh Made Word examines the work of hagiography in Christian culture from the time of St. Perpetua in the second century to the composition and reception of the Golden Legend at the end of the thirteenth century. His central thesis is that although hagiography was ostensibly created to further the political and doctrinal goals of the Catholic Church, ecclesiastical elites were unable to control the content and reception of saints' lives sufficiently to entirely serve the church's needs. As a result, hagiography became a site of alternative Christian theologies, a space for ambiguity and multiplicity of belief. To provide evidence for his thesis, Kleinberg examines several saints' lives in detail while spending intervening chapters analyzing changes in the genre of hagiography. For instance, Athanasius' Life of St. Antony is described as a textbook of asceticism written in the form of a biography. The role of early ascetics, existing both inside and beyond society and between spiritual and secular worlds, is discussed, as is the growing institutionalization of the practice. Next, Kleinberg emphasizes the change that occurred in the use of saints' lives, from the early Middle Ages, when hagiographic texts were written and kept in monasteries and had little impact on the practices and beliefs of laypeople who venerated saints, to the high Middle Ages, when saints' lives became popular first as tools for preaching and then as texts used for personal devotion. Using the examples of the vitae of St. Francis of Assisi and Fra Ginepro, Kleinberg demonstrates both how hagiographical texts reiterated official doctrine, as in Bonaventura's Legenda maior, and how they presented radical challenges to that doctrine, as in the remembrances of Francis's life found in the Legend of the Three Companions. Kleinberg suggests that it is precisely because Francis's official life, authored by Bonaventura in 1263, demonstrated that the saint's way of living could be imitated (unlike Ginepro's too-radical humility), that the earlier lives, demonstrating affective piety and spontaneity, presented 'a radical, dangerous power' (p. 238). Kleinberg's final example is Jacobus de Voragine's immensely popular Golden Legend. While most modern commentators on this text suggest that the saints' lives abbreviated in it are repetitive and stereotypical, Kleinberg instead suggests that the saints in the Golden Legend are, in fact, profoundly problematic, often acting in ways that challenge normative patterns of behaviour and belief in the high and late Middle Ages.' (DONNA TREMBINSKI, in Canadian Journal of History, 2009). € 27.50 (New) ISBN: 9780674026476