Holy Blood devotion in later medieval Scotland

Of the Christocentric devotions which achieved widespread popularity in later medieval Scotland, the cult of the Holy Blood gained the greatest prominence. Strong Scottish connections with the blood-relic centres at Bruges and, to a lesser extent, Wilsnack, primarily established by Scotland’s urban merchant class, provided the conduit for the development of the cult in the east coast burghs from the second quarter of the fifteenth century. The cult remained principally an urban phenomenon and was associated closely with the guildry of those burghs in which Holy Blood altars were founded. Holy Blood devotion, while by no means exclusively associated with members of the merchant community, provided a vehicle for expression of guild identity and, as in Bruges, a mechanism for the regulation and control of guild members’ public behaviour. That regulatory function, however, was secondary to the cult’s soteriological significance, its popularity in urban Scotland reflecting the wider late medieval European lay quest for closer and more direct personal connections with God.