Donald Weinstein (1926–2015)

Saints and Society is a macroscopic survey of the lives of almost nine hundred saints of the Catholic Church who lived between 1000 and 1700. As a gathering together of data, it's a very useful resource, and some of the methodologies which they employ are things which might be useful for me in my own work. The text which the authors derived from their statistics, however, is something of a disappointment. They seem to miss a number of opportunities to tease out the links between social and religious history, and I think some of their conclusions about the interstices of class, gender and ethnicity are plain wrong. I suppose part of that is a function of the fact that this was written in the early 80s, and that such an area of research was still very much in its infancy; this was a very important book then, but must be read with a lot of caution now. It must be read with something of a tolerance for clunky language—at times, the syntax verges on the tortuous, and there is no excuse for that much use of the passive voice.… (altro)