2 - Memory and narrative in the cult of early Anglo-Saxon saints

Summary

Medieval memory is now a burgeoning field of research, but surprisingly little has been written about the place of memory in that central plank of medieval religion, the cult of the saints. Yet for anyone living in, say, the eighth or ninth centuries saints' cults would have been one of the primary associations with the memoria – this was the word often used for saints' relics and writers of saints' lives frequently introduce them with the aim of perpetuating the memory of their subject.

This study is an enquiry into how saints were remembered in seventh to ninth-century England, concentrating upon native saints whose cults were fostered within a generation or two of their deaths and investigating the relationship between the workings of memory and the conventionalized hagiographical form in which they were commemorated. It takes four case-studies which explore the interactions between memory, literary texts and experience, with, first, the example of St Boniface whose life and death demonstrate the impact of textual models upon lived sanctity. The remaining three case-studies take the form of detailed discussion of three vitae – the two prose lives of St Cuthbert, the first by an anonymous monk of Lindisfarne and the second by Bede, and the life of the hermit saint Guthlac of Crowland by Felix.