Saints and Cults

The saints were at once the superheroes and the celebrities of medieval England. They pervaded the landscape: their names, images and narratives were attached to buildings, geographical features, parishes, guilds and towns. Saint-cult was multimedia and interactive. Every church displayed paintings and sculptures of the saints; their feast days were celebrated with liturgies, readings, plays, processions and feasts. They were represented in images ranging from great public objects, such as the 350cm-high stone carving of St Christopher from Norton Priory, Cheshire, to personal clothing and jewellery such as ‘þe reyng wyth þe emage of Seynt Margrete’ which the pregnant Margaret Paston sent her absent husband ‘for a rememravnse’. If the body of Christ, simultaneously absent and present, was the centre point of late medieval culture, then it was regularly imagined and depicted within a frame formed of the bodies of his imitators, the saints. They were both in heaven and ever-present; utterly and concretely present in their relics, but also, more complexly, present in their images and embodied in dramatic representation. Saints were locations of paradox, who could establish their sanctity by conformity to societal values or in opposition to them. They were both role models and intercessors, alien and distanced; their bodies stretched across the spaces between life and death, heaven and earth.

The company of saints was a multicultural assembly, bringing together various textual traditions and seamlessly mingling history and fiction. Saints from all the times and places of Christendom rub shoulders in the calendar. The Bible and its apocrypha are the original sources for several important saints from the earliest days of Christianity, in particular the apostles and Christ’s presumed earthly relatives such as St Anne and her family, whose legends were much elaborated in later medieval narratives. From a modern perspective, the former were historical figures and the latter pious fictions, but this distinction was not obvious to most medieval writers and devotees. Some native British saints may be Christianisations of pre-Christian deities or spirits of place. It is frequently argued that Bridget or Brigid of Ireland, for example, was such a figure, but it is possible that there are many more, disguised more or less convincingly as historical persons.