À quel(s) saint(s) se vouer ?

12.5 x 18.5 cm / 544 pages / January 2022

isbn: 978-2-35137-332-3

Editors: François Pernot and Eric Vial

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We have borrowed the title of our day from the popular expression ‘À quel(s) saint(s) se vouer?’ (To which saint(s) should we devote ourselves?), in view of the number of specialised and sometimes equivalent saints in civic or political religions, and so on. The multiplicity of saints in (or ‘within’) Catholicism is thought to be the origin of the expression, in the 16th century, and in these times of epidemics when we have sometimes seen ‘saint bearers’ written down - an interesting slip of the tongue - we can remember Louis, Roch or Sébastien invoked in the face of the plague like... Jude, Lazarus or Sylvain were invoked against leprosy, as well as the existence of fanciful saints, different conceptions of what can be called sanctity according to different religions, and Gregory (the Great), Como or Damien (separately) in the case of stomachaches, even if it means deviating by recalling the cumulation of functions, as for Saint Rita, patron saint of students, which teachers and researchers have generally been, and patron saint of desperate cases, which we will not comment on.

We may also want to avoid adding Glinglin, Frusquin or Phorien, who are said to be twice saints, but we can remember Guinefort, the Greyhound saint whose story Jean-Claude Schmitt recounted four decades ago, and ask ourselves about some surprising popular canonisations that may have been frowned upon by the Catholic Church.