Late Middle Ages

Medieval relics and the cult of saints

The cult of the saints was the heart of late medieval popular religion. To the orthodox theologian, the saint was the friend of God who, having been received into the visio beatifica in the heavenly Jerusalem, interceded with the Lord for the living; the relics of the saint were the physical remains of that intercessory body, and the miracula that occurred at the shrine were the visible signs of a grace that was already present in the body. To the layman, the saint was the local patron of a city or a trade, the healer of the plague, the protector of the harvest, the patron of the pilgrimage, the advocate of the dead in Purgatory, the friend at court who could be relied upon to put in a word with the unfailing succour of the Virgin. The difference between the two pictures is the difference between the theology of the saints and the religion of the saints, and the difference is the subject of this article.

The historiography has been transformed since 1975. The older view — that the cult of the saints was a corruption of primitive Christian monotheism, an inheritance from paganism, a symptom of the credulity of the dark ages — has been replaced by a more careful reading. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981), the founding text of the new view, treats the cult as a coherent religious response to the new social world of late antiquity, in which the saint is the patronus, the mysticus patronus, of a Christian community that had lost its Roman patrons. André Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (Rome, 1988), and Donald Weinstein and Rudolf Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Berkeley, 1982), trace the institutional changes that the cult underwent in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries — the rise of the papally-regulated causa of canonization, the spread of local cults, the development of the great urban shrines. Peter Brown’s later work (The Body and Society, 1988; The Rise of Western Christendom, 1996) and the Robert Bartlett work on the social gesta of the saints (Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, 2013) have given the cult its current shape. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992), is the indispensable work on the late medieval English cult, and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (1991), is the indispensable work on the cult of the reserved sacrament, the Sanctissimum, of the late medieval parish.

The theology of the saints

The theological foundation of the cult of the saints is the doctrine of the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints, the Credo of the Symbolum Apostolorum and the Symbolum Nicaenum. The doctrine was a construction of the patristic period: St. Augustine (354–430), in the Tractatus in Iohannis Evangelium and the Enchiridion ad Laurentium, distinguished the corpus Christi mysticum of the church, the visible body of the baptized, from the corpus Christi verum of the eucharist; the saints were the exempla of the union of the two bodies in the vita of the contemplatio. The doctrine was developed by the scholastics: Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in the Summa theologiae III, qq. 8, 25, 26, treats the cultus duliae of the saints (the latria of God, the dulia of the saints) and the utilitas of the reliquiae, the reliquiae of the saints as instruments of the grace that is mediated through the sacraments. The doctrine was corrected by the Venerable Bede (c. 673–735) in the De schematibus et tropis and the Explanatio Apocalypsis, and Bede’s Vita of St. Cuthbert (c. 720) is the first great vita of a Northern English saint and the model for the vita of Edmund by Abbo of Fleury (c. 985) and the vita of Edward the Confessor by Ailred of Rievaulx (c. 1163).

The cult was given a sharper theological edge in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Decretum Gratiani of c. 1140, the first systematic compilation of canon law, made the cult of the saints the subject of a title of the Decretum (C. xxiv, q. 1, c. 13–17); the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, in canon 62, regulated the relics in the altars of the churches; the bull Quia vir of Innocent IV of 1243, the Quia quorundam of John XXII of 1319, and the Super illius specula of John XXII of 1323 regulated the causa of canonization. The practical effect was to centralize the cult in the papacy and the curia: from 1234 onwards, the causa of canonization was a causa of the papal camera, and the local cult was, in principle, subordinate to the causa of Rome. The local church was, as the chronicles show, free to venerate its own saints, and the great shrines of the late medieval period — Thomas Becket at Canterbury, Edward the Confessor at Westminster, the Three Kings at Cologne, St. Sebaldus at Nuremberg, St. Mark at Venice, St. James at Compostela — were the civitatis of the late medieval church.

Relics: the body’s economy

The relic was the material remains of the saint. The Prima Reliquia was the body of the saint, the reliquiae corporis; the Secunda Reliquia was the tunica or the vestimentum, the reliquiae indumentorum; the Tertia Reliquia was the instrumentum of the passio, the sword of the martyr, the gridiron of St. Lawrence, the column of the flagellation. The reliqua was set in a reliquiarium of precious metal, often a theca or a capsa of gold or silver, often in the form of an arm or a head or a foot, the caput and the brachium being the most common forms. The great reliquiaria of the late medieval church are the armilla of the Capella of Cologne, the caput of the Domschatz of Aachen, and the Sancta Sanctorum of the Lateran at Rome. The reliquiaria were carried in the processio of the festum of the saint, were displayed on the altare of the dies of the festum, and were the principal treasures of the camera of the cathedralis.

The economic and political importance of the relics was considerable. The capella of the Domschatz of Cologne held the relics of the Drei Könige, the Three Kings of the East, the Magi of the gospel of Matthew, which had been brought from Milan by Rainald of Dassel in 1164; the capella of Aachen held the relics of the Heiligtumsfahrt, the great pilgrimage of c. 1350, which displayed the Säulen, the Kleid Mariens, the Lendituch of Christ, the Gürtel of the Virgin, the Schürze of John the Baptist, and the Haupt of Charlemagne. The canon of the capitulum of the Domschatz of Aachen, the Heiligtumsfahrt, the Heiliger Rock of Trier — the seamless coat of Christ, the tunica inconsutilis of the gospel of John, displayed in 1512 and 1844 and 1933 and 1996 — were the principal pilgrimage sites of the German-speaking lands.

The relics were also the occasion of the furta sacra, the sacra rapina, the pious thefts of relics that are the subject of Patrick Geary’s Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (1978, rev. 1990). The furta sacra were a literary genre — the Vita of the furtum, the translatio, the elevatio, the miracula — and a legal institution, the causa of the furtum in the iudicium of the civitatis of the capitulum. The most famous of the furta sacra is the Translation of St. Mark from Alexandria to Venice in 828, the foundation legend of the Basilica of San Marco; the most consequential is the Translation of the Three Kings from Milan to Cologne in 1164. The literature is summarized in Julia Smith, Portable Objects: Medieval Treasure, Relics, and the Politics of Display (2017).

Plague saints

The cult of the saints was transformed by the Black Death. The pestis of 1347–49, the pestis secunda of 1361–62, the pestis tertia of 1369, the pestis of 1375, and the pestis of 1380–81 were the occasion of a great new wave of cults, the plague saints of the late medieval church. The principal plague saints were St. Roch (a Provençal layman, d. c. 1379/80, whose cult is recorded at Montpellier and Voghera from the 1380s, the San Rocco of the scuole of Venice); St. Sebastian (the Roman soldier martyred c. 288, whose cult, originally the cult of the plague of the Pestis Antonina of c. 166, was revived in the late fourteenth century — the great Sebastian of the Sistine Chapel of 1481, painted by Botticelli and the Pollaiuolo, is the image of the saint as the late medieval protector against the plague); St. Christopher (the legendary giant who carried the Christ child across a river, the Christoferos of the legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine of 1260); and the Mater Misericordiae, the Virgin of Mercy, the Schutzmantelmadonna of the German lands, the Madonna della Misericordia of the Italian. The cult of the Quattuordecim Sancti Auxiliatores, the Fourteen Holy Helpers — Acathius, Barbara, Blaise, Catherine of Alexandria, Christopher, Cyriacus, Denis, Erasmus, Eustace, George, Giles, Margaret, Pantaleon, and Vitus — is recorded in the Rhineland from the late thirteenth century and is a notable product of the pestis of the 1340s. The treatment is in M. L. Ehrlich, Plague Saints and Plague Doctors (Ph.D. diss., 1988), and in the more recent C. D. Becker, The Cult of the Fourteen Holy Helpers (2013), and the standard Donald Weinstein and Rudolf Bell, Saints and Society (1982).

Critique and reform

The cult of the saints was the object of considerable criticism in the late medieval period, from inside the church and from outside it. The Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) had treated the cult in the Summa theologiae III, q. 25, and his treatment of the fictae relics, the reliquiae fictae, was a sober statement of the limits of the cult. The Franciscan Peter of John Olivi (c. 1248–1298) had, in the Tractatus de perfectione evangelica, been more critical still. The English John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1384), in the De reliquiis et de veneracione sanctorum of c. 1379, the Trialogus of c. 1382, and the Wycliffite Wicket of the 1380s, attacked the cult root and branch: the relics, the miracula, the festum of the saints, were all suspect; the vita of the saint was to be secundum scripturam, and the scriptura of the saint was to be the scriptura of the vita of Christ. The Bohemian Jan Hus (c. 1372–1415) had developed the Wycliffite line in the De sanguine Christi and the De ecclesia. The critiques were the principal source of the Protestant Reformation’s treatment of the cult: Martin Luther’s Von den lieben Heiligen of 1522, Huldrych Zwingli’s Von göttlicher und menschlicher Gerechtigkeit of 1523, and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion of 1536/1559. The Catholic response was the Council of Trent’s twenty-fifth session of 3 December 1563, which treated the relics and the cultus of the saints in the decreta of the de invocatione, veneratione, et reliquiis Sanctorum. The standard treatment of the late medieval cult in English is Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (Yale, 1992), and the standard treatment in Continental is Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, 1981); the wider context is in the overview of pilgrimage, saints, and popular religion and in The Black Death and its aftermath.

A short reading list

The four indispensable modern works are Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints (Chicago, 1981), André Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident (Rome, 1988), Donald Weinstein and Rudolf Bell, Saints and Society (1982), and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992). On relics and the furta sacra, Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra (rev. ed., Princeton, 1990). On the plague saints, the cited Ehrlich and Becker. On the late medieval critique, R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989). The context is in Thomas Becket and medieval pilgrimage to Canterbury and The cult of the Virgin Mary in the Late Middle Ages; the wider context is in Pilgrimage, saints, and popular religion and in the overview of the late medieval church.

References and further reading

  • Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (University of Chicago Press, 1981).
  • André Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (École française de Rome, 1988).
  • Donald Weinstein and Rudolf M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (University of California Press, 1982).
  • Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (Yale University Press, 1992).
  • Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (rev. ed., Princeton University Press, 1990).
  • Michael Goodich, Miracles and Wonders: The Development of the Concept of Miracle, 1150–1350 (Ashgate, 2007).