A. Katie Harris:
"Smoller deploys an impressive and exceptionally thorough array of sources, textual and visual, print and manuscript, and her readings are skilled and insightful. Her interpretation of the inquest records is masterful, as she ferrets out the 'small cracks' that hint at the otherwise lost experiences of individuals. Her analysis of the many Ferrers in the hagiographical literature is detailed and engaging. Smoller strikes a judicious balance between a Ferrer whose image was wholly shaped by elites and imposed from the top down and a popular cult that bubbled up from the bottom, finding instead a multiplicity of Ferrers and a cult that evolved and changed over place and time. The extended time frame, spanning the medieval/early modern divide, gives her analysis a depth not found in many similar studies. All of these qualities, coupled with the author's fluid and engaging style, make Smoller's The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby a standout in religious history and a methodological model for future studies."
"The author has done well to let facts, legends, and evidentiary threads open one onto another into nets of quesetions and resources for future Ferrer studies. There is much to learn from this exemplary study of Ferrer's afterlife."
Philip Daileader, The College of William & Mary, author of True Citizens: Violence, Memory, and Identity in the Medieval Community of Perpignan, 1162–1397:
"The Saint and the Chopped-Up Baby is one of the most original books in the field of religious history that I have read in some time. It will serve as a new model for how historians might study a saint. Laura Ackerman Smoller takes all the sources—the saint of the canonization inquest, the saint of hagiography, and the saint of the fresco, altarpiece, and statue—and integrates them in a way that I cannot recall anyone ever having done before. She provides a superb reading of each individual component and a truly bravura reading of the inquest records. Smoller's fine-grained analysis of the continuous evolution of the cult of Saint Vincent is especially noteworthy. This is interdisciplinary history at its finest."
Brian N. Becker:
"In this book, Smoller takes the study of Ferrer in a new direction by focusing very little on Ferrer himself, but instead on how others (whether wealthy and powerful lay locals, ordinary town dwellers, or the invested religious) made a saint out of him and crafted his image in such ways as to further their own agendas. She tackles this task head on, demonstrating an enviable ability to work in multiple disciplines and with numerous types of sources in several different media, while communicating her research results through the graceful and lucid prose her readers have come to expect from her work. Simply put, Smoller has produced an entertaining, educational, and highly original piece of scholarship that will serve as a model for religious historians to follow for some time to come.... It is an important, thought-provoking, and entertaining monograph. Indeed, Smoller's enthusiasm for the subject radiates from the text, and she expresses her refreshing brand of humor on many occasions throughout the book."
Robert Bartlett:
"Laura Ackerman Smoller has been publishing interesting and informative articles about the cult of St. Vincent since the 1990s, and here she utilizes the larger canvas of a book to paint a more detailed and wider-ranging picture of how this Catalan friar was imagined and represented....[T]he prose is always clear and backed by wide research in sometimes arcane and difficult sources. Ending with a personal reminiscence of a visit to the church of Saint Vincent Ferrer on Lexington Avenue in New York City, this book provides a fine case study of a cult, demonstrating both the remarkable longevity of devotion to individual saints and the metamorphoses they underwent to achieve that long, posthumous life."
Simon Ditchfield:
"[W]onderfully nuanced and deftly argued.... A skilfully layered exploration of not only the politics of sanctity and canonisation but also of late medieval and early modern piety."
