Presence, Place, Period, and Principle: A Medievalist's Reflections on Robert Bartlett's Book about Saints
The title of Robert Bartlett's book on saints, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, comes from Saint Augustine, who thought of heaven as a preeminently social environment. It is thus easy to entertain a fantasy about a conversation among saints in heaven. One saint boasts that his feast day...
| Subtitles: | Forum on Robert Bartlett's Why can the dead do such great things?: saints and worshippers from the martyrs to the reformation |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
[2016]
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| In: |
Church history
Year: 2016, Volume: 85, Issue: 4, Pages: 793-802 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Bartlett, Robert 1950-
/ Martyr
/ Middle Ages
/ Reformation
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| IxTheo Classification: | KAC Church history 500-1500; Middle Ages KAG Church history 1500-1648; Reformation; humanism; Renaissance KCD Hagiography; saints |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | The title of Robert Bartlett's book on saints, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, comes from Saint Augustine, who thought of heaven as a preeminently social environment. It is thus easy to entertain a fantasy about a conversation among saints in heaven. One saint boasts that his feast day has a higher liturgical ranking than the others'. This provokes a second saint to point out that the first may have a grand feast day, but is not, like himself, the subject of a properly papal canonization. A third saint is proud of his artistic representations. A fourth points out that he is so important that he is mentioned in Robert Bartlett's latest book. But this boast backfires. All the saints burst into laughter. As one of them points out, “That's nothing special—we're all in Bartlett's book! He didn't miss any of us!” |
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| ISSN: | 1755-2613 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0009640716000809 |