7 - Promoting Sanctity: The Vita S. Waldevi, Canonization and Cistercian Saintly Cults

Summary

The second discovery of Waltheof's incorruption at Melrose Abbey in mid-1206 seems to have been the event that reinvigorated interest in the saint's cult and reopened older questions surrounding its promotion. The community's response was to commission Jocelin, a fellow Cistercian, to write an official account of Waltheof's life and deeds, a work that was begun during the brief abbacy of Abbot Patrick from 1206 to 1207.The main intention of the Vita was to raise the profile of Waltheof's cult. The possession of an incorrupt corpse was, as the text makes clear, no common claim. Waltheof joined a select group of only six English saints, the shrines of whom were major sites of pilgrimage in the religious landscape of Britain: Canterbury, Bury St Edmunds, Durham, Ely and London. Yet despite the possession of such a rare gift, evidence in the Vita suggests that Melrose had still to make a significant impact on the wider pilgrimage circuit. Although the text records the journeys of two English pilgrims to the shrine, that this marked the extent of outside interest in the half century following the saint's death indicates the cult's rather limited appeal. At its most fundamental level, therefore, the primary function of the Vita was to raise wider awareness of Waltheof and his intercessory powers.

The relatively recent nature of the cult also had significant implications for the intentions of the text. The cult's novelty, its limited dissemination and the changing requirements of canonization procedure over the course of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries meant that the Vita had more to prove than Jocelin's other works. Despite the necessary presumption of sanctity behind the text, the Vita had to provide clear evidence to substantiate its claims for Waltheof's saintly status. The holiness of the abbot's life and deeds was, therefore, reinforced by the posthumous expression of this sanctity in the form of visions and miracles. In accordance with changes made to canonization procedure under the papacy of Innocent III, some of these miraculous accounts were given the added authority of eyewitness testimony. Indeed, the presence of what had now become obligatory eyewitness accounts, as well as the inclusion of narratives that show a certain level of anxiety over the lack of papal approval for the cult, strongly suggest that the Vita was written with official canonization in mind.