"There is much to appreciate in what Renard has produced. . . . Renard’s book will provide a concise overview of a significant corpus of recent scholarship on late antiquity, and the significance therein of holy persons. His juxtaposition of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literatures will provide readers with an awareness of these religious traditions’ interconnections that many may not have otherwise realized."
"[Renard] shows amazing range while displaying the promise of comparative hagiography."
— Religious Studies Review
"Renard offers for the first time a diachronic, comparative, and insightfully theorized account of hagiographical writing across the premodern Abrahamic traditions. This book not only synthesizes disparate source material; it also analyzes the sociopolitical and literary functions of hagiography in an Islamic context, a much-needed contribution to religious studies."—Nancy Khalek, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University
"This book is a pioneering comparative study of hagiographical traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Distilling fresh analytical perspectives from his comprehensive survey of key primary texts and modern scholarly works, Renard establishes comparative Abrahamic hagiography as a new field—a landmark achievement in religious studies."—Ahmet T. Karamustafa, Professor of History, University of Maryland
"Crossing Confessional Boundaries is an effort to write the history of religion on a grand scale. It is nothing short of a comprehensive 'grammar of the sacred' among the three monotheistic traditions of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."—Christian C. Sahner, Associate Professor of Islamic History, University of Oxford
