My research on saints was, to put it nicely, half-assed: disorganized, noteless, frustrating. I couldn’t seem to find what I needed, either visually or literally, so what I wound up with was a giant mess of opinion, speculation, and Wiki-sponsored biographical tidbits. In other words, my book on Imaginary Saints is about 90% nonsense. “Written with a shovel”, my father-the-history-major would say.

            (On the other hand, I have always been more interested in fiction than fact. To me, shovels are not necessarily that objectionable.)

            My main visual reference for the saints’ illustrations was John Beckwith’s “Early Medieval Art”, which has color plates of all kinds of saint-related art: reliquaries, paintings, illuminated manuscripts, statuary. I did a lot of sketching based on the manuscript pictures, which feature heavy drapery, stylized hair, and long faces. I decided my saints were going to have that same flat, expressionless face that indicated holiness to those artists, so I drew all twenty-four with enormous eyes and thick sad eyebrows.

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Because the Imaginary Saints are sort of automatically anachronistic – they never existed, and therefore my author may have mixed up a few details of their lives – the details of costume and hairstyle are not necessarily indicative of the period when they were supposed to have lived; I bet you didn’t know people could draw with shovels, too, huh?

            Technical details: the Saints are painted on bristol index cards, in black and white acrylic with pen details. The white spot around their heads will be filled in with gold paint before they are bound into signatures.

I like them a lot. Here are some of my favorites:

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        The text of the book begins with a foreword from Mr. Thaddeus Windrow, the editor-in-chief of The Absent Classic. (I imagine him to be fiftyish, balding, afraid of cars, and living in a New York brownstone with his perpetually nagging wife and several rooms full of books like “Fordyce’s Sermons” and rubber plants.) You can tell he loves books – almost as much as he loves the sound of his own voice. Here is what he has to say about “A Compendium of Imaginary Saints”:

 The Absent Classic is very pleased to present the work of Eleanor Hofstead in this fine edition. Miss Hofstead, a second-grade teacher and amateur hagiologist, spent her lifetime absorbed in the rich tradition of Christian saints. She published three articles about the lives of various saints in Catholic Historic Review; collaborated with Julius French on his “Life Of St. Bernadette” wrote the well-received “Child’s Guide To Holy Saints”; and inspired countless students to take an interest in the history of the Church through her enthusiasm for the saints.  

            Following her death in 1954, the manuscript of “A Compendium of Imaginary Saints” was found among her papers. It is not known what inspired Miss Hofstead to create a set of fictional saints, and the only mention she made of the project was in a letter to her brother dated May 1953: 

“How nice of you to remember my birthday with such a pretty lamp! I have just the spot for it, on my desk, where it will be a great help in a piece I’m writing for my own amusement…It is called “A Collection Of Imaginary Saints”, and I think it may be an invaluable tool for my little girls in Advanced Level Religious History – fun for them to spot the theological / historical difficulties in my pet Imaginary Saints – you know how children love a little storytelling, and I look forward to using the book to discuss how saints’ biographies can become distorted by well-meaning embellishments and embroideries.” 

Unfortunately, the manuscript was rejected by several Christian presses, on grounds of blasphemous material, and was never published until a friend suggested it to our little press. With the addition of a specially commissioned series of “imitation- medieval” portraits by renowned illustrator Gloria Glass, the manuscript is now a work of art indeed, and I imagine the author would be as well-pleased as I am to see it on the American bookshelf.  

            The rest of the book – about three thousand words – is a small biography on each Imaginary Saint. Miss Hofstead, a passionate if slightly macabre writer, makes special note of each Saint’s death (crushed to death by boulders, eaten by crocodiles, poisoned by mistake) and any attendant suffering. She is precise with dates but vague with geography; there are some obvious parallels between Miss Hofstead’s saints and actual ones, most notably Rose of Lima, Joan of Arc, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Others, however, have little or no relation to any historical figure whatsoever.

 

St. Clement was a brother at the Dominican Friary in Cluny. Although he was not a gifted scholar, he devoted his life to the order and performed the most menial and humble jobs for the monastery. For six years, from 1579 – 1585, he was in charge of the laundry, and washed robes and linens with his own hands. God rewarded his humble devotion in 1584 by revealing an image of the crucified Christ on a stained bandage, which can still be seen today in the monastery’s chapel. St. Clement died the following year in a terrible bleaching incident. He is the patron saint of laundry workers. 

Some are not even terribly gifted:

 

St. Therese the Obscure is a mysterious miracle-worker. Very little is known about her life, which ended in 730 due to a virulent spider-bite. However, when her coffin was opened some hundred years later, it was discovered that her body and clothing had not decayed in the least, and even gave forth the smell of fresh flowers. Re-enshrined in a magnificent sarcophagus in Rheims Cathedral, the faithful pilgrims who laid hands on her coffin were said to be cured of illnesses from leprosy to madness. Therese is the patron saint of taxidermists.

 

When writing these profiles, my main resources were the online version of the Catholic Encyclopdia, Phyllis McGinley’s “Saint-Watching”, and a few other odds and ends I came across but didn’t cite in my notes. I used Wikipedia for dates. 

            As I said above, working on this book was a learning experience. Making the raw matter into a book – an elegant, hand-sewn, gold-covered book – is the next stage of the process. “The hard part is over!” I whisper to myself as I make yet another attempt to glue in a practice text block. “The rest is gravy!”

            Ha ha ha. I’ll show it off when the gravy is cooked, believe me, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we may be some weeks / reams of paper / tears of frustration away from that happy event. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed your exclusive preview into The Absent Classic, Part Two: Is It Sophisticated Art, or Lowbrow Tomfoolery? Stay tuned for more!