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The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Saint Nicholas of Myra . By Adam C. English . Waco, Tex. : Baylor University Press , 2012. xii + 236 pp. $24.95 cloth.
Book Reviews and Notes
For Anglophone readers the study of Saint Nicholas has been dominated by Charles W. Jones's 1978 magisterial Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago). Jones accepted as a starting point that all scholars can know about Nicholas--if he ever even existed--was a collection of legends, which Jones meticulously traced in his book.
Although scholars praised and used the book, many have felt uncomfortable with Jones's dismissal not just of any historical evidence about Nicholas but also of the possibility of such knowledge. In this new study English makes a case for limited historical knowledge about Nicholas.
English makes it clear that most surviving material is hagiographic if not legendary, but he also makes the case that not all of the material could have been created de novo and thus that there are historical kernels about the saint. But which ones?
English points out that the earliest account of Nicholas, a supposed bishop of Myra in southwest...