Pilgrimage, Saints, and Popular Religion in the Late Middle Ages
The three articles in this section look at the religion that ordinary men and women actually practised in the century and a half before Luther. They focus on three interlocking practices: the long-distance pilgrimage, with Canterbury as the worked example; the cult of saints and the trade in relics that grew up around it; and the cult of the Virgin Mary, which by 1400 had become the dominant devotion of late medieval Europe. The section takes seriously the revisionist case made by Eamon Duffy in The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and by Ronald Finucane in Miracles and Pilgrims (1977), that the religion of the laity was neither the naive superstition of older polemic nor a thin veneer over a secular mentality, but a coherent system of belief, practice, and feeling centred on the parish church, the local shrine, and the calendar of the sanctoral year. It also engages with the older, more austere reading of Henri Bremond and Jean Delumeau, who treated late medieval piety as a psychological crisis, and with the gender-focused work of Caroline Walker Bynum and Piroska Nagy on the bodily and affective dimensions of the saints’ cults.
Going on pilgrimage
The first article centres on the cult of St. Thomas Becket, the chancellor turned archbishop whose murder in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170 was described in the Canterbury Tales by the Wife of Bath. It traces the long history of the shrine from the early miracles compiled by Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury, through the rebuilding of the east end of the cathedral by Henry of Eastry in the 1180s and the destruction of the shrine by Henry VIII in 1538, to the archaeology and relic inventories recovered since the 1990s. The article situates the Canterbury pilgrimage within the wider network of European shrines: Compostela and Rome, Cologne and Aachen, Einsiedeln and Walsingham. It uses Chaucer’s pilgrims, Margery Kempe’s Book (c. 1430–40), and the surviving pilgrim souvenirs — the signa of pewter and lead, the ampullae of the schoonjans, the scallop shells of the Camino — to recover the experience of the road, the hospice, and the ritual climax of the churching and indulgence at the shrine.
The commerce of the saints
The second article maps the institutional and economic history of the cult of the saints. It covers the formal procedure of canonization after the decretal Audita tremendi (1234) and the cases of Thomas of Hereford (canonized 1320) and Thomas Cantilupe; the rise of the great mendicant saints Dominic (canonized 1234) and Francis (canonized 1228) as devotional templates; and the explosion of the plague saints in 1348–50 — St. Roch of Montpellier, St. Sebastian the soldier, and St. Christopher the giant. It also follows the side of the relics trade: the translation of the remains of Edward the Confessor to Westminster in 1269, the gift of Christ’s blood to Mantua, the pilgrim trade in ampullae of milk from the Virgin’s tomb at Walsingham, and the place of relics in parish churches, where a community would gather around its patron on the feast day. The discussion engages with André Vauchez’s La sainteté en occident aux derniers siècles du moyen âge (1981) and with the empirical work of Jean-Michel Pic calle and Julien Durand on the relic economy of southern France.
Mary in the late medieval church
The third article turns to the devotion that scholars from Thomas H. Bestul to Miri Rubin have treated as the single most distinctive feature of late medieval lay religion: the cult of the Virgin Mary. It traces the explosion of Marian liturgy, art, and preaching from the time of the cathedral chapters — Notre-Dame of Paris rebuilt from 1163, Santa Maria del Fiore of Florence with Brunelleschi’s dome of 1436, the Frauenkirchen of Regensburg and Munich — through the theological synthesis of the Marian feasts codified in the liturgy of the Sarum Use and the Roman Curia, to the great vernacular and Latin Marian literature. The article reads the Meditationes Vitae Christi, the Mirror of Our Lady by Edmond of Abingdon, the Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X (c. 1270s), and the Mariale sermon cycles of the Dominican and Franciscan preachers. It also notes the place of the Rosary, whose fifteen mysteria of joy, sorrow, and glory were codified by the Carthusian Dominic of Prussia in the 1430s, and the connection between the Marian cult and the catena of heretic-baiting that culminated in the bull Malleus maleficarum (1487) of Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger.
What this section covers
- Thomas Becket and medieval pilgrimage to Canterbury
- Medieval relics and the cult of saints
- The cult of the Virgin Mary in the Late Middle Ages