Medieval Christianity: Saints

Hagiographical texts and reports of the processes of canonization - a mode of investigation into saints' lives and their miracles implemented by the popes from the end of the twelfth century - are here used for the first time as major source materials. The book illuminates the main features of the medieval religious mind, and highlights the popes' attempts to gain firmer control over the wide variety of expressions of faith towards the saints in order to promote a higher pattern of devotion and moral behavior among Christians. The importance of this papal program is emphasized, as is its partial failure - owing to the opposition of a section of the clergy and laity which remained attached firmly to traditional models of Christian sainthood, embodied by martyrs, pilgrims, hermits and other healer saints. The book also refers throughout to the iconography of the period, and contains many images which illustrate the growing importance of saints in western art at the end of the Middle Ages.

Following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the cult of the saints was the dominant form of religion in Christian Europe. In this elegantly written work, Peter Brown explores the role of tombs, shrines, relics, and pilgrimages connected with the sacred bodies of the saints. He shows how men and women living in harsh an sometimes barbaric times relied upon the merciful intercession of the holy dead to obtain justice, forgiveness, and to find new ways to accept their fellows. Challenging the common treatment of the cult as an outbreak of superstition among the lower classes, Brown demonstrates how this form of religiosity engaged the finest minds of the Church and elicited from members of the educated upper classes some of their most splendid achievements in poetry, literature, and the patronage of the arts.

This timely book reflects and advances recent scholarship on medieval sainthood in its diverse contexts and functions, bringing together fourteen previously unpublished essays by a group of contributors representing a number of scholarly disciplines. "Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe" illuminates such key questions as the place of sanctity in society, issues of gender in the representation of sainthood, and the use of hagiographic conventions in other genres. After an introductory essay by Brigitte Cazelles, the book is divided into three parts. Chapters on historical and sociological aspects of hagiography focus on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the laity and common people came to play a more important role in the Church. The following essays examine the language of religious discourse, pursuing questions of how such discourse was shaped by oral traditions and the vernacular, how it was used to authorize or question the legitimacy of the temporal order, and how it was represented in art. The final chapters address the issue of gender in male and female spirituality and saintliness.

The Medieval Cult of Saints: Formations and Transformations explores the political economy and visual topography of the cult of saints in Medieval Europe. Especially in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, liturgies for the veneration of saints were incorporated into public spectacles staged in sumptuous architecture and coordinated with market fairs that attracted audiences of locals and pilgrim visitors. Using more than thirty picture cycles of saints' lives in a range of media, published together for the first time, Abou-El-Haj examines a spectrum of cult practices. She argues that repeated and emphasized subjects visualized renewal, expansion, and fierce competition among cults, whether displayed in private or in public spaces. She then applies her results to the history of one monastery and its cult, St. Amand d'Elnone, where three distinct illustrated versions of its patron's life, produced over a hundred years, document how the covent shifted the visual record of its patron as it devised economic strategies to protect its property and privileges. Charts, a map, lists, iconographic and comparative analyses, and 206 plates survey the statistical, temporal, and spatial distribution of the cults, as well as the sources for the St. Amand manuscripts.

The book deals particularly with saints who withdrew to the desert to live a life of sanctity and purity , including such figures as Anthony, Jerome, Paul of Thebes, Thecla, Macarius, Mary the Egyptian, Onuphrius, and Paphnutius. Using sophisticated literary analysis, Elliott develops an anthropological and semiological model that relates these narratives to myth, folklore, and romance. She traces a mythic structure of initiatory passage, wherein the saint, like a questing hero, leaves behind the accouterments of civilization, ventures into a marginal state between bestiality and divinity, and regains a lost paradise of harmony with the beasts. Throughout the stories, there is recurring symbolism of death and rebirth, descent and return, communion with animals, helpful animal guides, and angelic and other supernatural companions. In the course of identifying this comprehensive structural model in heterogeneous and widely dispersed narratives, Elliott makes accessible to the general reader a fascinating body of texts usually studied only by specialists in early Christianity.

Pope John Paul II famously canonized more saints than all his predecessors combined. Several of these candidates were controversial. To this day there remain holy men and women "on the books" of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints whose canonization would provoke considerable debate. This was no less true during the period covered in this pioneering study by renowned medieval historian Ronald C. Finucane. This work, which forms an important bridge between medieval and Counter-Reformation sanctity and canonization, provides a richly contextualized analysis of the ways in which the last five candidates for sainthood before the Reformation came to be canonized. Finucane uncovers the complex interplay of factors that lay behind the success of such campaigns; success that could never be taken for granted, even when the candidate's holy credentials appeared uncontroversial and his backers politically powerful.

Working from the actual documents by which candidates for sainthood are judged, Woodward shows how the lives of mystics and martyrs, popes and laymen, are investigated and interpreted, how miracles are proved or rejected, and how politics - both papal and secular - play an integral role in determining who becomes a saint. Woodward describes the political and theological controversies surrounding such recent cases as that of Archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down at the altar in El Salvador by right-wing vigilantes, and of Edith Stein, a Jewish nun gassed at Auschwitz, whose proposed canonization has outraged Holocaust survivors. He explores the ongoing rivalry between groups promoting the causes of the popular Pope John XXIII and his austere predecessor, Pope Pius XII.

The Mass and the Saints is a work both of deep spirituality and profound insight into the glories of the Church's liturgy. It brings together passages from great spiritual writers throughout the ages, from all centuries in which the Mass has been offered. Every aspect and part of the Mass is covered, the quotations forming a continuous commentary on the central action of the Church's worship. Most of the authors are canonized saints of the Church, and many are doctors of the Church. Included are Church Fathers such as St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory the Great; great scholars of the Middle Ages such as St. Anselm, St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas; and more modern figures such as Prosper Gueranger and Pope John XXIII. The quotations have been selected and freshly translated by Fr. Thomas Crean. These writings will nourish understanding and appreciation of the Mass, and also aid prayer and contemplation.

Saints' cults, with their focus on miraculous healing and pilgrimmage, were a vital force in political and social as well as religious life in fifth and sixth century France. This study describes the origins of the cults surrounding the saints Martin, Julian and Hilary.

Abbe Omer Englebert has taken Joan of Arc, Martin of Tours, Brother Giles of Assisi, Pete Chanel and Juniper Serra and chosen to concentrate on one great bond which links them together. Despite widely varying talents and temperaments, they were all adventurers. Each merits the title by his travels, his bold undertakings, the hazards of his existence, the dangers he faced. Joan marched across France to crown a king and died at the stake; Martin's peregrinations led him through Dalmatia, France, Switzerland and the Germanic countries. Brother Giles visited Africa as well as Spain, and Peter Chanel left Bresse to meet his death on an exotic island in Oceania. The Spanish Serra pushed north from Mexico, leaving behind him a chain of missions, the repositories of early California history. In exploring the personalities of these five, the author points out that left to themselves they would probably have lived out quiet, uneventful lives. They did not look for adventure - they were seized by it and snatched out of familiar surroundings to be thrust into situations they would not have dreamed existed.

In Saints and Society, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell examine the lives of 864 saints who lived between 1000 and 1700 and the perceptions of sanctity prevalent in late medieval and early modern Europe. They also provide a substantial body of information on the people among whom the saints lived and by whom they came to be venerated. In the first part, the authors give close consideration to what the saints' lives reveal about childhood, adolescence, and adulthood; the impact of religious inspiration upon family bonds; and family influences upon religious behavior. The second part provides a composite picture of piety and its changing configuration in Latin Christendom. With the assistance of statistical analysis, the authors answer questions involving the popular perception of holiness, social class, and gender.

Sacred Biography demonstrates that to characterize the genre as fiction is to misunderstand the intentions of medieval authors, who were neither simply credulous nor blinded by piety. Concentrating on Latin and English texts, Heffernan reconstructs the medieval perspective, arguing that such biographical writings presupposes an entirely different view of the world and the self, and presents new ideas of sin and guilt, of what real and what imaginary, and for what one should live and die. Calling on a broad range of scholarship, Heffernan proves that sacred biography was not only the most popular form of religious writing during the Middle Ages, but the most important in that it proposed new ideals of human behavior. He gives full attention to the community for whom the biography was written, identifies the genre's rhetorical practices and purposes, and demonstrates the way in which the life of the medieval saint was transformed from oral tale to sacred text.

"Our Sunday Visitor's Encyclopedia of Saints" separates historic fact from pious legend as it provides a wealth of information, including: Original and alternately spelled versions of names, Dates of birth and death, Details of the saint's life in the context of his or her times, Companion martyrs and family members, A glossary, a calendar of feast days, and a history of the canonization process from the first century to the twenty-first.

When the recent furor arose over the "death" of the many saints,someone commented that Rome was indeed touching a raw nerve.People were now more disturbed than they had been earlier over "the death of God"movement.In "The Saints Who Never Were" the famous liturgical scholar,Lancelot Sheppard,shows clearly how the Church acquired so much excess baggage down through the centuries.History is one thing,but hagiography is another. The author's plea to the Church to clean house is fully documented with facts and interesting sidelights.Sometimes,as recent news releases indicated,an a new saint entered the calendar.Sheppard provides typical examples of the way legends have arisen and the way in which the rivalry between local churches or monastic bodies often led to the perpetration of fraud.-Jacket.