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21 - Saints and pilgrimages: new and old

from PART V - CHRISTIAN LIFE IN MOVEMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2010

By
André Vauchez
Edited by
Miri Rubin  and
Walter Simons
Miri Rubin
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
Walter Simons
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

The Middle Ages did not invent the cult of saints, which already, by the end of Christian Antiquity, played an important role in the religious life of the faithful, through the cult rendered to the martyrs and the confessors. Yet this devotion was boosted in the Middle Ages to the point of making it one of the keystones of human relationships with the divine, as we still see today from the innumerable works of art of this period – paintings, sculptures, gold and silver work, windows – dedicated to the menservants and maidservants of God. This cult first took the form of festivals and liturgical ceremonies, which became steadily more numerous between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. By the Carolingian period, in every church, the clergy celebrated the feasts of the Apostles and the Evangelists and also several universal feasts such as All Saints (1 November), St John the Baptist (24 June), St Laurence (10 August), St Michael (29 September), St Martin (11 November) and the Holy Innocents (28 December), added to which were commemorations specific to each church, that is, of its dedicatee and its patron saint or saints.

Keywords

Carolingian legislationChristian pilgrimsChristian WestpapacyRoman sanctoralsainthoodRoman churchholy placesmartyr sanctuaryMarian cult
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Christianity , pp. 324 - 339
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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References

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Citterio, F. and Vaccaro, L., eds., Loreto crocevia religioso tra Italia, Europa e Oriente, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1997.
Constable, Giles. ‘The Opposition to Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages’, in his Religious Life and Thought (11th-12th Centuries), London: Variorum Reprints, 1979.Google Scholar
de Nogent, Guibert, De sanctis et eorum pigneribus, ed. Huygens, R. B. C. (CCCM 127; Turnhout: Brepols, 1996).
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France, J., ed. and trans., Rodulfus Glaber: The Five Books of Histories, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Friedberg, Emil, Corpus iuris canonici, 2 vols., Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1879–81.
Maleczynski, K. ed., Galli Anonymis cronicae, Monumenta Poloniae historica, n.s., vol. 2 (Krakow: Academia litterarum Poloniae, 1952)
Meech, S. B. and Allen, H. E., eds., The Book of Margery Kempe (Early English Text Society, Original Series 212; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940).
Vielliard, J. ed., Le guide du pèlerin de Saint-Jacques de Compostelle, (Mâcon: Protat Frères, 1963)

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