This is the sort of book that I’d really really like to get my hands on . Unfortunately, it’s a bit expensive (40 bucks even in paperback), so I’ll have to look around to find a copy in a university library around here.

It seems to figure that a lot of favorite medieval amulet-texts including Jesus, and a lot of healing sayings that essentially sound like pseudoepigrapha, are modelled on the devotion to the Letter of Abgar from the pilgrimage town of Edessa. There also seems to be quite a bit of interaction with private revelations, etc.

The sad thing is that a lot of these things would be common prayers and devotions one century, and would be denounced by the next. Of course, sometimes devotions really do go bad or overpopularity makes people go gaga for them. But there also seem to be a lot of cases where people…