Introduction

Summary

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that a monastic reformer in possession of a major monastery must be in want of a saint's cult. Or, as D.J. Sheerin put it in 1978, ‘the discovery or re-discovery of the neglected relics of local saints seems to have been a specialty of the reformed monasticism’. The historiography of monastic reform continues to see reformers’ enthusiasm for saints – especially local saints – as one of their essential features.

This book re-examines why reformers were so interested in (some) saints and how the mechanics of saintly power worked in practice at reforming centres. It will do this by focusing on some of these most ambitious church reformers in tenth-century western Europe: Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester and his students and associates. This subject is worth re-examining, given the huge expansion in the study of early medieval saints’ cults in the past half-century – kick-started by the work of Peter Brown, David Rollason, and others – as well as important developments in the historiography of monastic reform.

This book will examine the social contexts in which saints were venerated in order to outline how Bishop Æthelwold, his students, associates, and successors used saints’ cults to interact with groups outside their monasteries. This book does not focus on Æthelwold and his associates because they were unusual or particularly original in the way they approached veneration: on the contrary, they often interacted with pre-existing forms of veneration or pre-existing cult sites. Rather, their case is worth studying because they show how even some of the most radical reformers in western Europe had to use pre-existing saints’ cults to collaborate with external groups. Venerating practices help to explain reformers’ success in general and why Æthelwold and his associates, in particular, were able to reshape the early English kingdom and its major churches to the extent that they did.

Æthelwold and his Circle

Æthelwold was a West Saxon priest who became abbot of Abingdon around 954 and bishop of Winchester in November 963. He refounded a number of key religious houses, bringing their practice into line with his interpretation of the Rule of St Benedict.