Li Seint Confessor: édition critique, ed. Ariane Pinche. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2024, pp. cl, 463.

This critical edition of a collection of saints’ lives written at the beginning of the thirteenth century by Wauchier de Denain is a revision of the doctoral thesis of the editor, Ariane Pinche. Parts of the collection, circulating in various manuscripts, have been the object of study since the early twentieth century, beginning with a pioneering article by the great scholar, Paul Meyer, in 1903. However, internal evidence suggested to scholars that a few of these texts may have circulated together, that is, as part of a thematic collection of the lives of early confessors. Subsequently, three manuscripts bore this theory out. Known now as Li Seint Confessor, the collection includes several of the author’s hagiographical writings that do not appear to have circulated individually. The contents of the collection, in the order of their appearance, consists of nine texts: the Life of Saint Martin, the Dialogues on the Virtues of Saint Martin, and the Lives of Saints Brice, Giles, Marcel of Limoges, Nicholas, Jerome, Benedict, and Alexis. There may be an underlying meaning in this order as to the geography of the cults, according to the editor, but the case is not strongly argued (p. xlvii). It was the seminal work of John Jay Thompson that brought the abovementioned three manuscripts to scholarly notice in an article in 1993. That article drew on Thompson’s earlier doctoral work at Yale University. The influence of Thompson’s research and findings is evident throughout the 150-page Introduction accompanying Pinche’s edition. Indeed, it was Thompson’s idea that the order of the texts had geographical significance.