The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine

Jacopo da Varagine (c. 1228–1298) is remembered today primarily for his immensely popular work The Golden Legend, a massive collection of stories about the saints. Compiled over the years 1260–67, The Golden Legend quickly eclipsed earlier collections of saints' lives. One indication of its popularity is the fact that so many manuscript copies of the work have survived—more than one thousand according to some estimates. Despite the enduring influence of The Golden Legend, Jacopo remains an elusive figure because he left behind so little information about himself. In The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine, Steven A. Epstein sets out to remedy this situation through a careful study of all Jacopo's works, including many hundreds of sermons and his innovative chronicle of Genoese history.

In Epstein's sure hands, Jacopo emerges as one of the most active and talented minds of his day. Indeed, Epstein argues that one needs to read all of Jacopo's books, in a Genoese context, in order to understand the original scope of his thinking, which greatly influenced the ways generations of people across Europe experienced their Christianity. The rich sources for Jacopo's sermons, saints' lives, and history illuminate the traditions that inspired him and shaped his imaginative and artistic powers. Jacopo was also one of the inventors of social history, and his writings reveal complex and new perspectives on family life as well as the histories of gay people, slaves, Jews, and the medieval economy. Filled with impressive insights into the intellectual life of the thirteenth century, The Talents of Jacopo da Varagine will be of interest to a wide range of medieval scholars and students of religious history, church history, and hagiography as well as intellectual history and Italian history.

Steven A. Epstein is Ahmanson-Murphy Distinguished Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kansas. He is the author of several books, including Speaking of Slavery: Color, Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy, also from Cornell, and The Medieval Discovery of Nature.

In this book, Epstein set out to 'overcom[e] the barriers separating the students of [Jacopo's] books by genre'; to show 'how deeply Jacopo had thought about Genoese political and social history' (272), despite its absence from his sermons and the GL; and to uncover the breadth and originality of his thinking from beneath the density of his citation of others.... Epstein masterfully succeeds in his goals and reminds us of the insights to be gained in restoring this exemplary figure to his full complexity.

Any reader of this volume will be impressed by what Epstein himself knows.... The relaxed prose and self-conscious explanation of choices seem appropriate to a study dedicated by one scholar to another. The book serves as a guide to intellectual trajectory, a companion to preaching for liturgical feasts and an updated account of how Genoese society functioned in the late thirteenth century from one of the city's best historians.