New Saints in Late-Mediaeval Venice, 1200-1500

‘Partly inspired by innovative studies by French scholar André Vauchez on saints’ cults and popular piety in late medieval Europe, McCluskey offers an original intervention on saintly typologies and their cultic expressions in Venice. Shifting away from broad geographical and chronological spans, the author narrows her focus to investigate how Venetian communities perceived, remembered, and interacted with their saints in their daily lives. To reconstruct the lived and multilayered relationships between devotees and their saints, the author analyzes a multitude of visual and textual sources, including hagiographic portraits painted in vita panels, written vitae, votive images, relics, sermons, sepulcher monuments, and as archival records. By doing so, the author offers a clear picture of the Venetian social groups that created new saints and endorsed them.’

- Giulia Giamboni, PhD, University of California, EuropeNow Jounral

“This book should prove useful for scholars working on the broad topic of sainthood and society as well as for specialists of medieval and early modern Venice. Purely as a city-specific study, it fills a lacuna in the historiography of medieval Italian religious devotion, and many may find this book valuable simply for its profiles of several underanalyzed late medieval saints and their cults.” - Daniel W. Morgan, Independent Scholar

Karen E. McCluskey is Senior Lecturer and Discipline Head (History) at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney, where she teaches mediaeval and Renaissance history, art history and historiography.