Review of The Private Lives of the Saints: by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2025

[sheenaghpugh]

The full title first, "The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, Passion and Politics in Anglo-Saxon England by Janina Ramirez, pub. W H Allen 2025", which really is terribly misleading. For one thing, much of it deals with pre-Anglo-Saxon times; for another, anyone hoping to find out what St Patrick liked for breakfast or whether St Dunstan had a hobby (still less a steamy sex life) would be heading for disappointment, because of course that sort of information, certainly for the early saints, just doesn’t exist. When she remarks of St Alban, “it is still uncertain which phase of Roman persecution he died under”, one is tempted to add “or indeed if he ever lived”, for the only testimony that he did comes from monks like Bede, who had a vested interest in the cults of saints, and whose attitude to historical truth we shall see later. As for Brigid, demoted by Pope Paul VI on the ground that there was no proof she existed, it can’t have helped her cause that she shared a name and feast day with a pagan Irish goddess. The unfortunate St Ninian, meanwhile, appears to be a typographical error for Finnian. We are on surer ground with St Patrick, who left writings; he certainly existed, though there do seem to have been two of him, whose stories somehow got conflated.

The more interesting question, in fact, is why people felt the need of saints, and why they chose the ones they did, and on this the book is more enlightening. It seems clear that early monotheists missed the pantheon, not only of gods with specific functions, but of well-deities, divine heroes and spirits of place that had enlivened and localised polytheistic worship. Saints provided a more human, intimate way of interacting with an impossibly distant and impersonal god.

As to who became saints, as she points out, the notion of sainthood, to a mediaeval person, “encompasses notions of piety, virtuous living and generosity, but it is also wrapped up in celebrity, public profile and social status”. She gives Princess Diana as an example of a person who in earlier times might well have attracted a cult of sainthood after her death.  She could equally well have named an actual modern example of a sainted person, Teresa of Calcutta, whose public profile was very much that of a media celebrity and who shared with the likes of Columba and Dunstan a certain ruthlessness and taste for power that seem to have characterised many of the saints described here. Columba, the “Dove”, was a killer; Wilfrid a power-hungry accumulator of wealth. Gregory “the Great”, hearing a monk from his monastery confess on his deathbed to stealing some coins, ordered him to die alone and then be thrown on the rubbish heap. Most saints in fact, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t sound like very comfortable companions, though Hild of Whitby would have been an interesting one (Ramirez, rather irritatingly, insists on calling her Hilda, which to my mind makes her sound like a character from Coronation Street). The power that could be wielded by the church, and the wealth it attracted, is evident in the way Anglo-Saxon kings manoeuvred their spare daughters into the position of abbesses. One suspects the daughters, with access to learning and influence they could never otherwise have attained, rather enjoyed it.

The conflict between Roman and Irish Christianity, and the determination of people like Gregory to enforce the Roman version on Britain, plays a large part in the book. There are some fascinating stories, like that of the mission that failed because Augustine had no manners: “They [the British bishops] had sought his advice on whether to bend their views to the Roman missionaries, and were told that, if Augustine rose to meet them when they reconvened their meeting, then he was honouring them and they should follow his guidance. However, Augustine did not get up, preferring to stay seated in the presence of bishops. This single act of apparent arrogance set the Christian mission back by many decades, and may have coloured relations between native and Continental Christians long-term. This says much about both Augustine and the Gregorian mission.”

Another fascinating anecdote concerns Bede’s notion of translation. He worked on editing the Codex Amiatinus, a copy of Jerome’s Vulgate Latin bible made at Jarrow by the abbot Ceolfrith. “The original Vulgate, in the story of Noah’s Ark, has the raven, like the dove, returning to the ark. But Bede has added a small ‘non’ before ‘revertebatur’. It flies in the face of the Vulgate translation, but instead creates a negative action for the raven – he goes away and does not come back.”  Bede of course did this because for Saxons, and indeed almost anyone from Northern Europe, the raven was the bird of Odin and had strong pagan associations.  The fact that for reasons of dogma he allowed himself this freedom should be borne in mind when assessing the evidence of mediaeval scholars.

There are a few typos, most unfortunately “the level of animosity between he and Wilfrid”, but full marks for “Peter Cubicularius met a particularly grisly end”. I have recently read two history books which assured me that people had met “grizzly” ends when they had not, in fact, been eaten by bears. I’m glad to see that this is not a universal error!