The Mystery of St Cuthbert’s Ducks: An Adventure in Hagiography

‘St Cuthbert’s duck’ is a folk name for the common eider (Somateria mollissima). The saint’s affinity for the black-and-white ducks has been accepted uncritically for centuries. For such a well-documented saint, however, his ducks are strangely absent from early records. His near-contemporary hagiographers, including the Venerable Bede, make no mention of waterfowl. The enduring association begins almost five centuries after his death in a piece of twelfth-century folklorismus.     

THE MEDIEVAL CHURCHYARD AS AN URBAN EMPTY SPACE: TRACING ACTORS AROUND THE CHURCHYARDS OF ST. ALBAN AND ST. CANUTE,ODENSE

The study applies the concept of ‘urban empty space’ as defined by Monica Smith to the adjacent churchyards of St. Alban and St. Canute, the latter being both a cathedral and a shrine for the royal saint, Canute the Holy. The aim is to demonstrate that the churchyard of St. Canute incorporated other temporary functions for the urban society, which subdivided the space into more labile areas or demarcations of use. The demarcations might, according to the concept, become contested areas between various users; thus, the article seeks to identify possible contestants through examining the built environment as well as the artefacts – in the present case, though, limited to the pottery. The article shows that the studied objects can shed new light on the urban empty space of the medieval churchyard. It is also a reminder that urban churchyards are not completely isolated loci of sanctity for the dead but are very much a part of urban life.     

New evidence for the Byzantine Church of the Holy Apostles from Fatih Camii, Istanbul

The Church of the Holy Apostles was one of the most important buildings in Byzantine Constantinople. The mausolea of Constantine the Great (the main imperial burial place until the eleventh century) and of Justinian I were in the complex surrounding this vast cruciform church. Nothing of this complex appeared to have survived its demolition to clear the site of the Ottoman mosque complex of Fatih Camii after 1461. Fieldwork in 2001 recorded walls pre–dating the fifteenth–century phase of the mosque complex, still standing above ground level and apparently including a large rectilinear structure. This is identified as the Church of the Holy Apostles and an adjacent enclosure may be that containing the mausoleum of Constantine the Great. The reconstructed church plan resembles those of St John of Ephesus and St Mark's (San Marco), Venice – churches known to have been modelled on the Church of the Holy Apostles, Constantinople.     

Material memory: rebuilding the basilica of S. Cecilia in Trastevere,Rome

Examining Pope Paschal I's early ninth‐century architectural project of S. Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, brings to light the diversity of functions of tituli in early medieval Rome. Not only was the church a papal basilica and site of the stational liturgy of Rome, but it was also a shrine to the saint Cecilia, a popular Roman martyr. The architectural arrangement makes clear that the papal project incorporated both the papal cult and the popular cult of the saint by manipulating the archaeology of the site and translating corporeal relics to the urban church.     

The monastic conversion of Romuald of Ravenna and the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe

Romuald of Ravenna was one of the foremost reformers of the late tenth and early eleventh century, devoting his energy to establishing monastic communities that emphasised asceticism. After his death, he was celebrated for this work in a vita written by Peter Damian that described the conditions of the conversion of Romuald, who rejected the world after an encounter with St Apollinaris in the church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe outside Ravenna. Peter Damian’s detailed account of this space not only created a fitting location for the conversion to monastic life, but in its appropriation of the visual, textual and hagiographic landscape it would have invited his eleventh-century audience who entered Sant’Apollinare in Classe to share in the same type of experience as his monastic hero, Romuald, and to connect with Ravenna’s late antique patron saint directly.     

Prison and sacrament in the cult of saints: images of St Barbara in late medieval art

This article analyses the changing visual representation of St Barbara during the later middle ages. The article identifies a shift in St Barbara's iconography: whereas earlier medieval representations of the saint almost always show her with her prison tower, a number of fifteenth-century representations show the saint holding a chalice and host. The article traces how and why this shift occurred. In particular, the article explores the ways in which medieval thinking linking incarceration and liberation were integrated into new representations of St Barbara to stress her intercessionary, sacramental functions. Overall, the article argues that the visual transformation of St Barbara's prison tower into a liturgical vessel reveals how saints like Barbara were increasingly viewed as conduits to the inclusive sort of freedom that participation in Christianity's sacramental economy invited.     

Two Exhumations and an Attempted Theft: The Posthumous Biography of St Cuthbert in the Nineteenth Century and its Historicist Narratives

The tomb, body and relics of the Anglo-Saxon St Cuthbert (d. AD 687) are best known for their miraculous preservation and migration across North East England in flight from Viking raiders throughout the period AD 795–995, before coming to rest at Durham Cathedral (Cramp 1980; Campbell 1991, 79). Their current display emphasizes their role as ‘Treasures’ of the Cathedral and as symbols of England's conversion and early Christianity. What are not mentioned are the modern interactions with the tomb that led to the creation of their modern display as a key attraction of the World Heritage Site. As this article will argue, post-medieval examinations and uses of the tomb have also been important in attempts to control and produce very particular meanings at the site of display. I offer an examination of nineteenth-century engagements with the tomb and body of St Cuthbert, showing how the saint's remains were a locus of conflicting claims of authenticity and ownership. Through antiquarian practices of exhumation and detailed publications of their findings, curator-custodians were engaged in a distinctively local struggle to produce an authoritative narrative for the saint.     

Ein Katalog chinesischer Bücher aus dem Jahre 1804, zum Verkauf angeboten durch Antonio Montucci

In this bibliographical note, the author presents the first European, i.e., 1804 sales catalogue of Chinese books, provided that we do not count the booksellers catalogues of scholars’ private libraries in which Chinese language material consisted of few items only. The owner remained anonymous, but the agent was Antonio Montucci (1762–1829) – an early Sinologist who described the collection in a letter to the editor of the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1804. The books were acquired by the Duke of Devonshire. Their present location, however, has not been established. Montucci, who planned on editing a major Chinese dictionary for Europeans and had thousands of wooden types cut for this purpose at his own cost, was not given a chance neither in Paris nor in St. Petersburg where such projects were in preparation. His own Chinese library was sold to the Holy See before his death.     

Justices and Injustices: the Order of St John,the Holy See,and the Appeals Tribunal in Rome

In the early seventeenth century it became customary for knights of Malta who committed crimes to appeal to the tribunal of the Apostolic Chamber (Audentia Camera) in Rome. The Grand Masters of the Order of St John in Malta blamed this practice on the advent of the Apostolic Visitor and Roman Inquisitor in 1574 and saw its activities as a direct infringement of their authority over members of the Order and their subjects in Malta. Therefore on occasions successive Grand Masters found ways to “protest” with the Holy See claiming that the activities of the Apostolic Chamber were a threat to their rule, but the Grand Masters could not go beyond protesting because the Order of St John was above all a Catholic religious institution and the Pope in Rome was its ultimate head.     

Devotion to St James and family identity: the Thurns of Salzburg

Miles or knight referred in twelfth-century Salzburg to a servile retainer of a ministerial or noble. In the thirteenth century the knights coalesced with the lesser ministerials, who were the vassals of the great ministerial lineages, to form the estate of knights, the lowest strata of the Salzburg nobility. The Thurns are an example of lesser ministerials who belonged to the estate of knights and who rose to prominence in the thirteenth century by serving the archbishops of Salzburg. The founder of the lineage's fortunes was Werner I of Lengfelden (1230–1268), the master of the archbishop's kitchen, who built St Jakob am Thurn, south of Salzburg. The distinguishing characteristic of the lineage was its devotion to the Apostle James, a saint associated with knighthood. The Thurns adopted Jakob as their leading name, built the church of St James next to their tower, St Jakob am Thurn, and the church of St James in Faistenau, and were buried in the chapel of St James in Salzburg, which they endowed.     

Through the eyes of a deacon: lesser clergy,major donors,and institutional property in fifth-century Rome

This is a study of the cults of two holy deacons at Rome: St Stephen and St Laurence. It is argued that the narratives associated with these saints were a medium for the resolution of two key, overlapping areas of tension: status anxiety within the clerical hierarchy, and relations between clergy and wealthy lay patrons. Controlling the ambitions of lesser clergy on the one hand, and on the other commanding the attention of major donors, absorbed a great deal of the energies of Roman priests and their bishop in this period. These issues converged on the figure of the deacon, understood in its early Christian sense as the helper/patron of the bishop. Defining the role of ‘deacons’ through the medium of saint cult was a necessary condition of the institutional development of the Roman church, and of church property.     

Practical Hagiography: James of Voragine’s Sermones and Vita on St Margaret of Antioch

Abstract

In addition to his exceedingly popular Legenda Aurea, James of Voragine wrote in another hagiographical genre: sermons on the saints. The Sermones de sanctis likewise became immediately popular, as his Dominican brothers used James’s model sermons to learn to preach about the saints in a format that would provide the laity with intelligible and practical theological instruction. James’s corpus gives us a rather unusual opportunity to compare the ways in which a single author manipulates multiple hagiographical genres, and his writings on St Margaret of Antioch allow us to explore how a medieval preacher used a historically disputed saint — a dragon-fighter — to provide a practical model of sanctity to his lay audience. I compare the representations of Margaret in James’s sermones and vita, arguing that James adapted certain features of Margaret’s saintly example in the vita to instruct the audience of his sermons about proper Christian virtues and actions. As a point of comparison, I explore a sermon by Évrard of Val des Écoliers in which the Augustinian teaches his audience a practical skill — how to pray — through Margaret’s example.     

The Heele Stone

The cancioneiro (song-collection) of São João (St John) is one of the richest manifestations of Portuguese popular culture. In this article, we review the principal bibliography—song collections and studies—devoted to the saint in popular (both traditional and non-traditional) or pseudo-popular song. We examine the symbolic and ethnographic importance of São João in the collective imagery, taking into account the relationship between literary representation and the anthropological and cultural aspects of this festivity.     

Constantius,St Germanus and fifth‐century Britain

The two visits of Germanus to Britain that Constantius included in his Life of the saint were long a staple of insular history. Recently, however, they have come under close scrutiny, leading to the second visit in particular being considered unhistorical. This essay re‐examines the two visits in the context of the whole work, concluding that Constantius had access to good‐quality information for Germanus's activities. Focusing on two episodes of the first visit, Germanus's journey to the cult site of St Alban and the ‘Alleluia Victory’, allows us to explore what the bishop achieved in Britain. Recent suggestions that Germanus effectively ‘invented’ the cult of St Alban arguably go beyond the evidence available, but the bishop's interaction with the cult was an important, planned part of his anti‐Pelagian strategy. The passages describing the two visits are also explored in terms of Constantius's wider purposes in writing the Life. In those terms his investment in stories regarding Germanus in Britain enabled him to develop his hero in ways which accord with his overall vision of an exemplary bishop. Germanus's deeds in Britain, therefore, need to be read both in terms of what they can offer in terms of British history and in the context of this author's wider agenda.     

The saint as patron in the work of Gregory of Tours

Gregory of Tours and his world have long been out of fashion; but despite modern neglect of his works, Gregory gives us access to an understanding of many important aspects of late antiquity, among which is the role of the saint as patron. Saints appear as patrons throughout Gregory's works; the focus of this study is his account of the miraculous deeds of St. Martin. The role of the saint as patron is best understood against the background of the recent work of Peter Brown on holy men in late antiquity; several other scholars have also emphasized the importance of patrons in the Roman world. Appeals to the saints in Gregory's world are to be understood as one manifestation of the Roman ritual of appeal to a patron. More important than their afflictions are the social circumstances of those who appeal to St. Martin and analyzing some others in detail, we can demonstrate that the most important elements in those appeals are the social weakness of the appellants, their need for a saintly patron, and Martin's role as a model saintly patron in Gregory's world     

Die Anfänge des Heiligen Jahres von Santiago de Compostela im Mittelalter

Since the time of General Franco the cult of the Apostle James has served to buttres the Spanish government. The Holy Years regularly held in Santiago de Compostela are the most important manifestations of this. According to Spanish tradition, this Holy Year was founded by Pope Calixtus II in the twelfth century. In what follows the author seeks to show that the tradition is based on a forgery originating in about 1500 and reflecting changes in the cult of St James during the fifteenth century. Furthermore, his research demonstrates clearly what changes in pilgrim life occurred as Rome became the most important pilgrim centre, and the obtaining of indulgences the pilgrims' principal motive.     

“Local religion” in Corfu: sixteenth to nineteenth centuries

The article discusses the changing meanings of a powerful Corfiot symbol, St Spyridon, the patron saint of Corfu. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the saint – whose cult had been bolstered by the civil rather than the ecclesiastical authorities – was venerated by both the Greek and Latin inhabitants of Corfu, thus symbolizing a unity at least on the level of the civic religion. Following the 1716 siege of the town by the Ottomans, one can clearly see that the Venetian state and its representatives did not hesitate to lavish many honours on St Spyridon in thanks for his alleged intervention during the siege, which saved not only Corfu but the whole of Western Christianity. At the end of the century though, when the island fell to the allied Russian and Ottoman forces, the old equilibrium between the two religious groups began to become unsettled. A text written by the Orthodox theologian Athanassios Parios just a few years after the Russo-Ottoman victory attempts to rewrite the behaviour of the saint towards the Catholics and present him as the defender of the Orthodox Church and the enemy of any rapprochement between Greeks and Latins.     

Politics, diplomacy and the cult of relics in Venice and the northern Adriatic in the first half of the ninth century

In early medieval Europe the cult of the saints emerged as a prominent focus for the construction of political identity. Corporeal relics became objects of importance, conferring status on their possessor; and, like other precious commodities, they frequently served as prestigious diplomatic gifts, useful for the fostering of political affiliations between donor and recipient. This strategic use of saints' cults is here examined with special regard to the region of the northern Adriatic. In the first decade of the ninth century, Byzantine attempts to maintain the allegiance of Venice and urban centres along the Dalmatian coast may have prompted the translations to the region of the relics of saints such as Anastasia, Tryphon and Theodore, all of whom became important civic patrons. Later in the century, the Byzantine mission to Moravia was focused on the relics of St Clement, while archaeological and other evidence suggests that Frankish missions into the Balkans may have stressed the cult of St Martin, a native of Pannonia. Ultimately, Venetian independence from both powers was made possible by their adoption of a new patron saint, Mark, whose cult arrived from Alexandria unencumbered by implicit political debts.     

Die Anfänge des Heiligen Jahres von Santiago de Compostela im Mittelalter

Since the time of General Franco the cult of the Apostle James has served to buttres the Spanish government. The Holy Years regularly held in Santiago de Compostela are the most important manifestations of this. According to Spanish tradition, this Holy Year was founded by Pope Calixtus II in the twelfth century. In what follows the author seeks to show that the tradition is based on a forgery originating in about 1500 and reflecting changes in the cult of St James during the fifteenth century. Furthermore, his research demonstrates clearly what changes in pilgrim life occurred as Rome became the most important pilgrim centre, and the obtaining of indulgences the pilgrims' principal motive.