Medieval sanctity

This thesis explores modalities in two hagiographical collections from the late Middle Ages; the Legenda Aurea and the Gilte Legende, by drawing inspiration from post-colonial hybridity theories. It conducts a close textual analysis by studying the use of pronouns in five saints’ legends where female saints transcend traditional gender identities and become men, and focuses on how they transcend, live as men, and die. The study concludes that the use of pronouns is fluid in the Latin Legenda Aurea, while the Middle English Gilte Legende has more female pronouns and additions to the texts where the female identity of the saints is emphasised. This is interpreted as a sign of the feminisation of religious language in Europe during the late Middle Ages, and viewed parallel with the increase of holy women at that time. By doing this, it underlines the importance of new words and concepts when describing and understanding medieval views on gender.

The remarkableness and sanctity of Francis of Assisi is not an indication that he was immune to the same human fragility that we share. This is borne out if we refuse to settle for the piles of modern-day biography and go directly to the most important medieval source literature. In particular, Francis did not experience his stigmatization to be a confirmation of his perfect configuration to Christ, but rather a mercy from God who  was rescuing him from self-absorption.

"Jutta of Sangerhausen. A ‘new saint’ in the wake of Elizabeth of Thuringia?

Jutta of Sangerhausen (Thuringia/Germany) is a less known representative of the religious movements of the 13th Century Western Europe, a lay woman who spent the last four years of her life as anchoress in the neighborhood of the town Kulm in Prussia (today: Poland) and probably died in 1260. There is no reference to her neither in HERBERT GRUNDMANN’s standard work about the “Religious movements in the Middle Ages” (Berlin 1935/Darmstadt 1977) nor in the books written by KURT RUH and BERNARD MCGINN about the history of mysticism in Western Europe (see Geschichte der abendländischen Mystik, Vol. 2, München 1993 and The Flowering of Mysticism, New York 1998). Not even ANNEKE B. MULDER-BAKKER mentioned Jutta in her recent publication about the “Lives of the anchoresses” (Philadelphia 2005). The reason for this ignorance may be the lack of a modern edition of the sources about Jutta. Now, that a new edition appeared last year (ed. by PETER GERLINGHOFF, Sangerhausen 2006) we finally have the opportunity to situate Jutta in her historical context. Some scholars are of the opinion that Jutta modelled herself on the Hungarian princess and Thuringian countess Elizabeth, a contemporary and compatriot of Jutta who died in 1231 and was canonized as early as 1235. The purpose of this paper is to prove the validity of this claim. My methodological procedure will be a textcritical one. Such an approach is inevitable because all the sources came from the 16th and 17th century. The question is: Couldn’t have been Jutta a ‘new Elizabeth’ before the 17th century? Or do we have to do with a ‘falsification’? In other and less provocative words: Is Jutta a ‘sainte construite’?"

Estudo sobre o reconhecimento institucional da santidade na Idade Média ocidental, a partir de uma análise comparativa dos casos de Domingo de Silos e Domingo de Gusmão, fundamentada em leitura crítica e análise discursiva das documentações de época relacionadas aos reconhecimentos prestados a esses dois santos ibéricos.

The main point of Parallel Lives is that by looking at medieval saints' lives as expressions of ideas about God, man, society and the Church, we may gain an insight into medieval mentalities. This is illustrated through a study of two vitae (saints' lives) concerning the same saint, Willibrord. One was written by Alcuin of York in the late eighth century at the behest of the abbot and abbey of Echternach, where Willibrord lay buried. The other was composed by Thiofrid, abbot of Echternach, around 1104/5, basing himself on Alcuin’s vita. This research is innovative inasmuch as a comparison of saints’ lives on the basis of their values, theology and discussion of relics had not yet been undertaken in this way. It has shown that there was far more variation in the ideas about sanctity and relics in the Middle Ages than has so far been thought, and deeply indebted to equally variant ideas from Late Antiquity.
To Alcuin Willibrord was both a bishop and a monk, both roles being closely intertwined. To Alcuin, Willibrord’s primary tasks were praying and preaching. Thiofrid, however, emphasized the monastic element of Willibrord’s career, and focussed on Willibrord’s life as contemplative. Thus not only the values associated with the saint differed between both authors, but also the picture of the saint’s career itself. This also has repercussions for the way in which the Church is described: Thiofrid is far more focussed on the monastic community as the essence of Christian life, almost to the exclusion of lay religious people.
Furthermore, the way in which sanctity is linked to the divine is different theologically. Both authors held that the capacity of a human being to live a saintly life was the product of divine predestination. However, the way in which this is explained is different. Alcuin focussed on the saint as a person who was filled by the Holy Spirit, and whose sanctity was primarily shown by his perseverance, his prayer and his preaching. To Thiofrid, on the other hand, the saints were vessels of the Holy Spirit, similar in some ways to the Eucharist. Sanctity is also far more strongly expressed in the form of miracles, which the saint is said to work – another contrast with Alcuin, to whom miracles were performed by God without direct interference of the saint.
The same pattern of different ways of sanctification and different forms of access to the divine emerges from a comparison of the discussion of the saint’s posthumous holy matter, or relics. To Alcuin relics are focal points for prayer, which work because the examples of the saints and the souls of the saints in Heaven can help the faithful to get their prayers through to the divine. The relics themselves, however, are only conduits. Thiofrid argued that relics had become one in nature with the saint’s soul and therefore with God, making relics divine matter on earth, capable of working miracles regardless of the intentions of men.

This book (written in Italian) concetrates on the spiritual guides of Catherine of Siena in the period including her life and cca 40 years after her death (1347-1417). The study concerns on the construction of a saint: during her lifetime and after her death. Her close friends and collaborators, especially members of the dominican order, helped her not only in practissing her strict ascetics and mysticism during her lifetime, but also produced and coppied important texts, including hagiography and Catherine´s mystical letters and tractate in order to guide her saint model to the final canonisation. The main interest of the book points to the construction of Catherine´s saint model, to its main features (proposed to be imitated or reather hiden) and changes that this model could passed through in few decades after Catherine´s death.

In every period in history the definition of insanity is pertinent, and its meaning is different. We owe this perception to a large movement in the scholarship of the nineteen-sixties and seventies that changed our concept of what constitutes sanity and insanity. This scholarship examined the ways in which such concepts were formed as part of the medical, mental, social, cultural, but above all political settings. A number of important studies on psychology and psychiatry, whether in the fields of social sciences, the humanities or medicine (by Michel Foucault, Roy Porter, William Bynum, Gladys Swain, Marcel Gauchet, Franco Basaglia, among others), has radically changed the way we look at insanity. These studies brought insanity out of the individual dimension, and made it a social, cultural and political phenomenon. In a way, the wave of study of psychiatry of the sixties and seventies was a reply to the development of psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth century, which concentrated on the psychological dimension in the individual. These new directions of thought shifted the understanding of what constitutes insanity from the individual to the social and political dimensions. Nevertheless, they still placed the individual in the center, affected by the social settings, mental constructs and politics. This perspective was conditioned by the link between psychology and medicine, according to which the insane person was perceived as sick.
The present study chooses a different line of investigation. In a way, it goes in the opposite direction in focusing on societies which sanctified what we consider today as insanity. These societies looked for spiritual values in abnormal, in-sane, behavior, and legitimized it by attributing a unique spiritual character to figures who portrayed it. In this they were changing the social and cultural norms related to abnormality and normality. A parallel process can also be detected in contemporary societies. Only few decades ago, people in Western societies who turned to healers, clairvoyants, and mediums were considered to be themselves not in their right mind. Today, not only is such behavior legitimized, but this is even becoming a norm. These so-called ‘new age’ phenomena express the invasion of the religious sphere into modern secular societies. We do not call them ‘religious,’ but ‘spiritual’ in order to reject the religious establishment and its historical framework. However, such expressions of spirituality have long been the realm of the religious sphere. The question is why secular societies today have become more and more inclined to adopt and legitimize these expressions of spirituality, and justify their functionality.

In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development.

Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior-like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr-to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity.

A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.

This paper was delivered at Duke University at the invitation of Caroline Bruzelius, April 2005. It compares the two very different ways in which Clare of Assisi and Elizabeth of Hungary, both inspired by Francis,  expressed their quest for "evangelical poverty."

The Christian conquest of Lisbon in 1147 encouraged the writing of numerous testimonies since short analytic registers to long and detailed narratives, destined to transmit and appraise, in the latin Christianity, the memory of one of the few military successes of the Second Crusade. Coming from the registry of Monastery of Saint Vincent, one of these texts, probably from teutonic origin, detaches the martyrdom of crusaders dead in battle against Islam, focusing mainly in Henry of Bonn and in the description of his miracles in the context of the city's conquest and posterior rule by the king of Portugal. The aim of this article is to depict from the scarce available information in coeval texts and beyond, the mechanisms of construction of a sacred memory of this knight, also named Popteto Ulvinga in Frisian chronicles of XIII to XIV centuries, and recollect the traces of an eventual cult dedicated to him.

A common objective of saint veneration in all three Abrahamic religions is the recovery and perpetuation of the collective memory of the saint. Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all yield intriguing similarities and differences in their respective conceptions of sanctity. This edited collection explores the various literary and cultural productions associated with the cult of saints and pious figures, as well as the socio-historical contexts in which sainthood operates, in order to better understand the role of saints in monotheistic religions.

Using comparative religious and anthropological approaches, an international panel of contributors guides the reader through three main concerns. They describe and illuminate the ways in which sanctity is often configured. In addition, the diverse cultural manifestations of the cult of the saints are examined and analysed. Finally, the various religious, social, and political functions that saints came to play in numerous societies are compared and contrasted.

This ambitious study covers sanctity from the Middle Ages until the contemporary period, and has a geographical scope that includes Europe, Central Asia, North Africa, the Americas, and the Asian Pacific. As such, it will be of use to scholars of the history of religions, religious pluralism, and interreligious dialogue, as well as students of sainthood and hagiography

The cults of the German emperor Henry II (973-1024) and his spouse Cunigunde (c. 980-1033) had been established for three centuries when their images entered the symbolic language utilized by Frederick III of Habsburg (r. 1440-1493). In this article, I analyze several visual representations devoted to Saint Henry and Saint Cunigunde, all commissioned at the end of the fifteenth century by or under the auspices of Emperor Frederick III and his successor Maximilian I. These items of medieval heritage, namely the murals from Aachen Cathedral and two altarpieces from Nuremberg and Flanders, have not previously been analyzed in relation to each other in the context of the political communication of the late-medieval Holy Roman Empire. In this paper, they are studied in their iconographic and performative contexts – as inanimate participants in imperial ceremonies and devotional actions. It is argued that these representations featuring Henry II and Cunigunde together with other holy rulers not only performed a personal devotion to the sacred rulership on the part of Frederick III but also promoted a symbolic continuity of imperial rule and conveyed a specific political agenda. This agenda, being pursued from 1471 onwards, revolved around the establishment and grounding of Frederick’s imperial authority in the German principalities.

Happy, rich, blessed, saint..... The article presents semantic characteristics of the adjective beatus in the Polish medieval Latin and its European background. So firstly, the meaning, collocations and syntax are described on the basis of the Dictionary of the Polish Medieval Latin. In addition, the quotations gathered in the file of the Dictionary are analyzed, mainly from the point of view of frequency of occurrences of given meaning or phenomenon. Besides, taking into consideration the dominant role of the connection between beatus and the name of the person worshiped as a blessed or saint in the catholic church, the small corpus of a medieval Polish hagiography (constructed as a subdivision of the Electronic Corpus of the Polish Medieval Latin) is scrutinized in order to study this aspect of the meaning. The first results of the queries show the frequency of the lemma beatus in this collection of texts in comparison with other frequent lemmas and interesting coocurrence patterns. The second part of the article is focused on the lemma beatus in the classical period, the Latin of the Church Fathers and medieval Latin of different nations of Europe. This part of the study draws on the lexicographic data gathered in various lexicons and dictionaries. As a result, it can be said that the word in question maintained ancient meanings, even if some of them are less represented than the others, some of them broadened  or shifted following Christian Latin to describe concepts absent in ancient times. Generally speaking, Polish use of the adjective beatus in the Middle Ages is the testimony of the long historical development of the word and of sharing lexical, but also conceptual heritage with other nations of Europe.

Tagungsbericht: Heiligkeiten. Konstruktionen, Funktionen und Transfer von Heiligkeitskonzepten im europäischen Früh- und Hochmittelalter, 27.10.2016 – 29.10.2016 Kiel, in: H-Soz-Kult, 23.02.2017, <www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-7018>.

Early Christianity appears to be dominated by strong eschatological expectations which reoriented social roles and norms against the wider background of a new temporality. Since the end of times was approaching, especially during the first two centuries of Christian era chastity was conceived as a means of purifying the body in order to gain salvation. That being the case, traditional life-rhythms were replaced by a new subversive trajectory, and women in many cases gave up the roles of wives or mothers. Early Christian ideals of female sainthood and piety are to be read against this background, as the well-known example of Thecla in the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla demonstrates. However, eschatological expectations slowly started to decline, and at the same time new notions of secular temporalities, emphasizing linear progression within history, emerged. This restoration of a historical time led to a reassessment of social norms and women’s roles within society, with a renewed emphasis on the backbones of a traditional ancient society, such as marriage and family.
The present paper attempts to discuss the image of women in two Byzantine Lives of female saints, the Life of Mary the Younger (11th century) and the Life of Thomaïs of Lesbos (10th century), against the wider theoretical background of temporality as it was perceived and construed through the texts. More specifically, I focus on how the turn from an early Christian eschatological temporality to a restored notion of historical time proved to be a key factor in shaping women saints’ agency as this is reflected more generally in the Byzantine Lives of female saints, and in the two above-mentioned Lives in particular. The Life of Mary the Younger and the Life of Thomaïs of Lesbos represent a significative case in this regard. In both texts an emphasis on marriage as a backbone of a traditional society is evident. Added to this is a tendency to stress the importance of the management of the household property. Chastity here is still a very significant Christian precept, but sanctity can be achieved also in married life. All of these details reveal the influence of a changed sense of time.
By looking at time as a key factor in shaping female religious agency in these Byzantine Lives, I aim to identify a set of key features that may define the relationship between a specific notion of time – a linear progression of life stages - and the construction of female holiness as it is represented in the Life of Mary the Younger and the Life of Thomaïs of Lesbos. In this sense, the present paper sheds new light on a widely debated topic – female holiness – by looking specifically and in a new way at social and gendered constructions of temporality in hagiographical narratives. To that end, I focus on details in the description of religious agency revealing a direct influence of different notions of time on women’s life and on a consequent construction of female sanctity.

L'iniziativa ha il duplice scopo di favorire lo scambio scientifico tra gli studiosi e di far emergere i principali o più innovativi campi di ricerca e orientamenti metodologici degli studi agiografici attuali. Per favorire il dialogo fra i vari panels e offrire un comune denominatore alle proposte presentate, la IV edizione dei Cantieri sarà dedicata al tema Comunicare la santità: un contenitore nel quale le indagini potranno declinarsi in senso diacronico e pluridisciplinare, illustrando gli strumenti, i percorsi, le interazioni fra soggetti che, nel corso dei secoli e fino ai nostri giorni, hanno accompagnato i processi comunicativi della santità.

In Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested.  She scrutinizes the papacy’s toleration of unofficial saints’ cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult’s merits or the saint’s orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority.

Local and unsanctioned saints were spiritual and social fixtures in the towns of northern and central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some cases, popes allowed these saints’ cults; in others, church officials condemned the saint and/or their followers as heretics. Using a wide range of secular and clerical sources—including vitae, inquisitorial and canonization records, chronicles, and civic statutes—Peterson explores who these unofficial saints were, how the phenomenon of disputed sanctity arose, and why communities would be willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate a local holy man or woman. She argues that the Church increasingly restricted sanctification in the later Middle Ages, which precipitated new debates over who had the authority to recognize sainthood and what evidence should be used to identify holiness and heterodoxy.  The case studies she presents detail how the political climate of the Italian peninsula allowed Italian communities to use saints’ cults as a tool to negotiate religious and political autonomy in opposition to growing papal bureaucratization.

L’Europe centrale n’est pas une aire, c’est un monde. Les contributions de ce volume aident à en prendre la mesure. Elles posent la question de l’existence d’un modèle de sainteté centre-européen au Moyen Âge. La géographie de la sainteté proposée voici trente ans par André Vauchez dans sa thèse sur La sainteté en Occident s’en trouve passablement bouleversée : celle-ci rangeait l’Europe centrale dans la partie « froide » de la christianitas, réfractaire au changement en matière de dévotions. Or, à l’examen, cet espace s’avère à la fois inventif en matière de figures saintes, particulièrement au XVe siècle, et réceptif par rapport aux nouveaux cultes.

This paper presents the exemplary case of Saint Francis of Assisi, highlighting the role that one man may have played in the evolving religious and social understandings of leprosy after the turn of the thirteenth century. Saint Francis’s interactions with the lepers constituted unprecedented transgressions of social boundaries and taboos. While Francis’s vitae followed in a long tradition of saints’ interactions with lepers for highlighting their piety, his actions were not merely a hagiographic topos. The kiss Francis bestowed upon a leper in the plains below Assisi came at a decisive moment in the Middle Ages where society was at a crossroads between two perceptions of the disease. This paper will show that Francis’s effect on the social perception of leprosy in this period is undeniable.

In the last quarter of the 13th century, a group was formed in Milan around memories of Guglielma, considered as a holy woman. Besides mainstream forms of cult, esoteric beliefs about Guglielma came into being, and a small network of people began to claim that Guglielma was a female incarnation of the Holy Spirit. Her followers had the project of establishing a new order in the Catholic church with new gospels, new apostles, a new hierarchy and a female pope. This article aims at a reconstruction of the group in the process of its emergence, reconsiders the source basis of various statements in existing literature, and arrives at the following conclusions: (1) by her way of life, Guglielma stimulated the birth of a congregation venerating her memory, but she was not the author of teachings associating her with the Holy Spirit; (2) in spite of the obvious importance of Andrea Saramita and Mayfreda da Pirovano, there are also other devotees of Guglielma who creatively contributed to the group’s conversations and activities, but were overshadowed by the inquisitors’ search for heresiarchs and by subsequent historiography; (3) there is no other evidence for the Bohemian and royal origin of Guglielma besides the trial records, and this alleged origin is likely to be a pious legend of her followers; (4) contrary to the suggestions of several historians, the devotees of Guglielma did not intend to establish a purely female hierarchy in the Church; and (5) in their conversations, Guglielma’s followers discussed the question of why the Holy Spirit could not incarnate in a man, and for the most part, they saw the female incarnation of the Holy Spirit as a logical outcome of the process of human salvation. In addition to our assessments of these issues, we use the records to draw some conclusions about the precarious process of group formation.

In every period in history the definition of insanity is pertinent, and its meaning is different. We owe this perception to a large movement in the scholarship of the nineteen-sixties and seventies that changed our concept of what constitutes sanity and insanity. This scholarship examined the ways in which such concepts were formed as part of the medical, mental, social, cultural, but above all political settings. A number of important studies on psychology and psychiatry, whether in the fields of social sciences, the humanities or medicine (by Michel Foucault, Roy Porter, William Bynum, Gladys Swain, Marcel Gauchet, Franco Basaglia, among others), has radically changed the way we look at insanity. These studies brought insanity out of the individual dimension, and made it a social, cultural and political phenomenon. In a way, the wave of study of psychiatry of the sixties and seventies was a reply to the development of psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth century, which concentrated on the psychological dimension in the individual. These new directions of thought shifted the understanding of what constitutes insanity from the individual to the social and political dimensions. Nevertheless, they still placed the individual in the center, affected by the social settings, mental constructs and politics. This perspective was conditioned by the link between psychology and medicine, according to which the insane person was perceived as sick. The present study chooses a different line of investigation. In a way, it goes in the opposite direction in focusing on societies which sanctified what we consider today as insanity. These societies looked for spiritual values in abnormal, in-sane, behavior, and legitimized it by attributing a unique spiritual character to figures who portrayed it. In this they were changing the social and cultural norms related to abnormality and normality. A parallel process can also be detected in contemporary societies. Only few decades ago, people in Western societies who turned to healers, clairvoyants, and mediums were considered to be themselves not in their right mind. Today, not only is such behavior legitimized, but this is even becoming a norm. These so-called ‘new age’ phenomena express the invasion of the religious sphere into modern secular societies. We do not call them ‘religious,’ but ‘spiritual’ in order to reject the religious establishment and its historical framework. However, such expressions of spirituality have long been the realm of the religious sphere. The question is why secular societies today have become more and more inclined to adopt and legitimize these expressions of spirituality, and justify their functionality. In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development. Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior-like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr-to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity. A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.

Résumé

La figure de Jean Discalcéat, curé de paroisse au diocèse de Rennes puis frère mineur à Quimper, mort de la peste en 1349, présente de larges zones d’ombres. Tout ce qui a été écrit à son propos depuis le XVIIe siècle provient d’une Vita dont il ne subsiste aucune mention ancienne et qu’une seule version écrite. Datée de 1613, celle-ci est tenue pour la transcription fidèle d’un modèle médiéval depuis sa découverte et son édition en 1910 par le postulateur général de la cause de Jean Discalcéat en Curie. L’article propose de passer le texte de la Vita au crible de l’analyse linguistique et terminologique afin de s’assurer de son caractère authentiquement médiéval. Il s’efforce dans un second temps de cerner le profil de son auteur – qui semble appartenir à la mouvance spirituelle de l’Ordre franciscain, à l’appui des suppositions formulées il y a vingt ans par Jean-Christophe Cassard à partir d’une poignée d’indices. Enfin, il tente de comprendre pourquoi la mémoire de Jean Discalcéat a été oblitérée pendant plus de deux siècles, jusqu’à l’épanouissement de la Contre-Réforme.


Abstract

The figure of John Discalciatus – a parish priest in the Rennes diocese then a Minor friar in Quimper who died of the pestilence in 1349 – remains largely obscure. The single source used by every author since the seventeenth century is a Vita that survived only in an unique version and lacks any old mention. Dated 1613, this text is considered the faithful copy of a medieval text since the moment it was discovered and edited around 1910 by the main postulator of John’s cause in Rome. This article aims to screen the Vita by means of linguistic and terminological tools, in order to be sure that one really faces a medieval opus. It also tries to draw the profile of the unknown author, who seems to belong to the « spiritual » dissident movement, as already suggested twenty years ago by Jean-Christophe Cassard with much fewer arguments. Lastly, it searches the reason why John Discalciatus’ memory has been overshadowed up to the Counter-Reformation, i.e. for more than two centuries.

Guest lecture on the sanctity of medieval kings between Magna Carta and the usurpation of Richard II in 1399. This lecture includes an examination of the holiness of the royal office, the collaboration between Church and Crown, and examples of public piety such as building projects, cults, touching for the king's evil, and alms giving.

Food and drink played an important part in medieval piety, but to date most studies of this topic have focused on the food practices on medieval women. This paper seeks to redress the balance by considering the significance of food and drink to religious men, through a case study of a culturally significant and well-documented group: the saintly bishops of medieval England. The food practices of these men were shaped by religious thought, but also by contemporary ideas about the body, gender and social status. Ultimately, a holy man’s relationship with food and drink would influence his chances of canonisation.