In this well-researched interdisciplinary study, McCluskey shows that there is still, surprisingly, more to learn about both the history of saints and the history of medieval Venice. The author premises her study by stating: “Despite the phenomenal growth in scholarship on saints’ cults and popular piety in late-mediaeval Europe, and Italy particularly, no large-scale treatment of saintly typologies in any European city has been accomplished” (5). McCluskey undertakes a project, therefore, that is significant not only for the religious history of Venice but also for our understanding of the European cult of the saints. Acknowledging the scant medieval sources, the author builds on previous local hagiographies of Venetian saints, examines neglected textual and visual sources, and creates a detailed table of typologies. The thirteen new saints (santi novellini) examined were selected according to precise criteria: “I interpret Venetian new saints as citizens of Venice whose field of action in life was largely the lagoon and who were exalted by their compatriots through visual or written hagiographies and were venerated at sepulchres or other votive sites” (10).

The book is organized into seven chapters. After introducing the new saints of Venice, McCluskey provides a sweeping overview of Venice as locus sanctus, a divinely ordained polity that prospered thanks to an array of heavenly benefactors who were acknowledged in public artistic works and elaborate processions. The author then examines the dynamic between Venetian mythmaking and the religion of everyday life in four chapters organized by typologies: cults in the state, cults in the cloister, cults in mendicant communities, and cults in the parish. The author argues that the new saints functioned “as tools in the glorification of the Republic rather than as objects of glorification themselves” (97). The chapters demonstrate how the new cults may have been similar to other universal Catholic devotions but were shaped by the specific historical circumstances and the lived religious experience of late medieval Venetians, who, for example, expressed their particular anxiety to protect children against drowning in a lagoon city.

McCluskey meticulously reconstructs a lost world of medieval Venetian piety through her interpretation and reading of some of the most remarkable yet understudied artistic projects of medieval Venice. She clearly shows the Venetian peculiarities of these new saints, who were all associated with the zentilhomeni (gentlemen) of the patrician elite. Rather than celebrate these local saints, Venetians downplayed the local cults as part of the mythical expression of political equality. McCluskey argues that Venetians “were incapable of celebrating the very group from which their saints were naturally drawn—the indigenous patrician families—without compromising their long-standing civic ideals” (182). Comparing the new Venetian saints to cults throughout Italy, the author points out the relative lack of mendicant and family saints in Venice. Venetian sanctity was fundamentally shaped by a state wary of potential political rivals, whether powerful mendicant orders or individual noble families. The author adroitly traces the mechanism of manipulation and control, showing that the Venetian “government seemed to quash a local cult through apathy” (224).

In the conclusion to her intensely Venetian study, McCluskey is surprised that the Venetians were not that exceptional: “The most surprising conclusion noted from the evidence is that, although the Venetians were often described as inhabiting a mundus alter (another world), a society fundamentally different to peninsular Italy, they in fact were not at all different when it came to religious devotion” (212). This seemingly unremarkable conclusion raises a number of important historical questions regarding the construction of local, regional, and Italian devotions in the medieval and early modern periods. New Venetian saints might have their cults quashed at home, but to what extent did Venetian saints and devotion spread and influence Catholic piety outside of the lagoon? Why did the Venetian government deem it safe to appropriate and develop certain universal Catholic devotions—for example, Saint Mark and Saint Roch—and not others? McCluskey's book, like the processions she describes, is carefully crafted and well organized. Guiding the reader through medieval Venetian history, the author demonstrates that, like the city itself, when one leaves the well-trodden historiographic thoroughfares, there are many extraordinary byways to be explored.