This chapter offers a survey of the principal Merovingian narrative sources. It covers the key chronicles: Gregory, the Chronicles of Fredegar, and the Liber historiae Francorum, plus their relatives. It also offers a guide to the production of hagiography in the period. Throughout the emphasis is on how we might read the stories in these sources, drawing on the competing arguments that have been put forward by scholars about the nature of the texts. Only by understanding some of the strengths and weaknesses of the common approaches to the narrative sources can readers be armed to approach the complexities of Merovingian history.

The public worship of Christian saints started to spread in Egypt in the fifth century CE. This was particularly the case in the Nile Delta, which is characterised by its unique location. This phenomenon is a multi-layered practice that is difficult to explore in full; nonetheless, the object of this chapter is to grasp some of the dynamics behind the growth or decline of a saint’s cult and the overall alteration of Christian saints’ glorification in the Delta between the fifth and ninth centuries. The dynamics in this context suggest that the evolution or decline of saints’ popularity were due to religious, cultural and social practices. A large variety of literary texts were witness to the presence of a saint’s cult and bear information about saints’ veneration in different periods. Selections from these sources are explored in this chapter. Other complex factors to be discussed include the topography and location of cults, the nature of the religious landscape where the veneration started, cultural exchanges and language barriers, socio-economic growth and political and institutional rivalries and shifts.

Chapter 4 examines one of the most spectacular music-liturgical programs of the fourteenth century: the narrative office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition. A work of enormous rhetorical ingenuity and historical imagination, the Apparitio office, I argue, was a product of the state’s heightened attention to and generative engagement with the cult of relics. Found as a late addition to Basilica San Marco’s thirteenth-century antiphonal (VAM¹), the office celebrated the present-day virtue of the state’s most cherished possession: the body of its patron saint, the Evangelist Mark. Careful comparison between the Vespers office chants and the legend source from which the story derives reveals an inventive process of selection, omission, and invention of texts, and as well as a high degree of sensitivity in musical setting. The result was a compelling public ritual that represented the contract between the body of Mark and the Venetians who venerated him and, at the same time, made a self-reflexive bid for music and liturgy as the means for that contract’s renewal.

This chapter shows how the material and ritual legacies of apostolic Rome provoked debate among Protestant travellers and called attention to the intertwined legacies of early Christianity and imperial Rome. We demonstrate how one site (St Peter’s Basilica) became a battleground for sectarian readings of the apostolic past. Previous scholarship has demonstrated how anglophone travellers constructed their modernity in opposition to an imagined archaic Italian Other. Yet critics have paid insufficient attention to how religious difference and sectarian identity shaped such attitudes. Catholics had a special commitment to validating the early history of the Roman Church, but Protestants also had an active interest in apostolic legacies. By demonstrating that the earliest Christians practised a simple and earnest form of worship – anathema to the splendour of medieval Catholicism – Protestant commentators vindicated their faith as a return to apostolic authenticity. Yet if British and American travellers wanted to put Catholicism in its place, some Catholics sought to win over Protestant sceptics by appealing to a shared antiquarian epistemology, combining the aesthetic appeal of Catholic ritual with an historicizing emphasis on the material legacies of apostolic antiquity.

Chapter 12 explores Augustine’s Christocentric speculations on the beatific resurrection of the saints to eternal life. Particularly in Book 22 of De ciuitate dei, Augustine displays both moderation in his tentative articulations and generosity in his allowance of a wide range of eschatological prospects within the parameters set by Scripture and the resurrected Christ. Considering the spiritual body and the ecclesial body of the beatific resurrection, Augustine discusses the perfection of human freedom, the vigor and beauty of the saints’ resurrected flesh, the vindication of history in their resurrected bodies and memories, and the unity and diversity of the resurrected Church. Augustine develops his understanding of the beatific vision to articulate the prospect that it will come not only after, but also from within the beatific resurrection. Enjoying forever the insatiable satisfaction of God, the resurrected community of the saints will indefatigably celebrate and praise the God of the resurrection.

This chapter provides a cultural history of the wicked advocate from the tenth to the nineteenth centuries in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices of justice and protection reflect deep-rooted problems in the history of local administration. It starts with monasteries’ miracle stories about advocates suffering in death as punishment for their crimes in this life. It then turns to the Swiss legend of William Tell and analyzes the earliest versions of the legend in order to demonstrate that Tell’s rival, the wicked advocate Gessler, abused his position in ways similar to those of other advocates. This chapter then discusses Friedrich Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell to show that concerns about corrupt practices of justice and protection extended into the early nineteenth century. Local legends about bad advocates, some of them preserved today on the Internet, provide additional evidence for the enduring value of stories about wicked advocates who are punished for their bad deeds.

This chapter seeks to provide an explanation for the earliest Insular cult of St Katherine of Alexandria, which grew in popularity despite the absence of primary relics or an Insular pilgrimage site. Knowledge of St Katherine likely arrived in England prior to 1066, but her cult achieved widespread appeal following the Norman Conquest. This chapter proposes that this appeal was rooted in the congruencies between aspects of St Katherine’s character, which can be conceived of as generally ‘civilised’, and descriptions of ‘Englishness’ that rested on a conception of a cultural, rather than biological, national community. These depictions are evident in the circulating historical chronicles written during the twelfth century, which amalgamated English and Norman identities and differentiated the ‘English’ nation from its ‘barbarous’ neighbours. These same characteristics find expression in the vita of St Katherine and were highlighted liturgically, through music and text, testifying to their valence.

The Spanish conquest of the Basin of Mexico largely succeeded in eradicating its indigenous religion. The Nahua responded by worshipping the Catholic saints, embracing the Day of the Dead, and turning to figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared to a poor Indian peasant. The chapter also points to Nahua empowerment through education and a written vernacular that the missionaries provided. The Maya and Inca are also briefly considered.

Visions of the afterlife in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) circulated in collections of saints’ legends and sermons, in religious manuals, mystics’ writings, stand-alone pieces, and literary works. Along with the stories inherited from earlier centuries, there were many new accounts. Together they demonstrate how the medieval Church’s teachings on heaven, hell, and purgatory, as well as on prayers and masses for the dead, on engaging in the sacrament of penance, on accruing merit, on fighting against the demonic realm, and on devotion to the saints, were conveyed to, assimilated, and adapted by the laity. This chapter draws on several categories of these otherworld narratives, including visitations by ghosts, demons, and saints, and explores three primary spiritual dynamics illustrated by the visions:purgatorial ‘transactions of satisfaction’ with the ghosts, spiritual warfare with the demons, and ‘reciprocated devotion’ with the saints. The glimpses of the otherworlds and their inhabitants shored up the religious beliefs and practices of the late medieval laity.

Between AD c. 400 and c. 1100, Christian ideas about the afterlife changed in subtle but important ways. This chapter outlines broad trends in thought about the afterlife in this period in the Latin West, and examines the concomitant changes in thinking about the post-mortem fates of souls. Ongoing contemporary discourse around topics such as sin and penance or baptism contributed to developments in the way that contemporaries understood the afterlife, including heaven, hell, and an interim state between death and universal judgement. Significantly, as Christians came to be more certain about some aspects of the afterlife, the possibility of salvation for individual souls was perceived to be less certain. As a result, by the end of the period there is much greater evidence for concern about the post-mortem fate of the soul than there had been at the beginning, laying the foundations for high medieval theological discussions and developments.

This chapter considers how the English Reformation was, or, mostly, was not recalled in official liturgical documents. The first section surveys the evolution of calendars of saints from the 1530s to the version that became fixed in the Book of Common Prayer from 1562 onwards, which included a great many ancient and medieval commemorations but none from later than the thirteenth century, and cites alternative commemorative models which Tudor regimes could have embraced but chose not to. It then discusses why the Book of Common Prayer so pointedly ignored the upheavals of the Reformation, unlike the Scottish Book of Common Order, arguing that this reflects the need to unite a bitterly divided nation through ‘common prayer’ which was also an act of oblivion. The final section traces how a new myth of the English Reformation was created by occasional services of national prayer during Elizabeth I’s reign, a myth in which the Reformation’s central event was Elizabeth’s own accession, providentially delivering her people from Mary Tudor’s tyranny. This myth faded from the liturgy with the queen’s death, to be replaced by a new liturgical emphasis on popish cruelty based around a new commemoration.

This chapter looks at cultural expressions of dynastic consciousness. Some dynasties associated themselves with a particular saint, on occasion one drawn from their own family, as in the case of Wenceslas and the rulers of Bohemia or St Louis and the Capetians, and such family connections were publicly celebrated in images and writing. Murals and statues of forebears conveyed a message of dynastic continuity, and examples can be found from the Carolingian period down to the late Middle Ages, with notable cases being the forty-one statues of kings of France in the royal palace in Paris and the nineteen of the counts of Barcelona and kings of Aragon in the royal place in Barcelona. The development of heraldry in the twelfth century presented a new, public and visual, way of expressing dynastic identity, and royal families adopted them early. By the end of the Middle Ages, elaborate coats-of-arms conveyed elaborate genealogical information. Simultaneously, graphic family trees were devised and developed, with sophisticated illustration and layout. In late medieval England they often took the form of long parchment rolls, ideal for expressing descent through time. Bernard Gui’s Tree of the Lineage of the Kings of the French is analysed in detail.

In the spring of 2015, I found myself standing outside the walls that led to a courtyard in front of a local church. The doors were supposed to be open according to the hours provided by the tourist office; after waiting a while, I went in search of help. Around the corner was a municipal library, where a librarian offered assistance. As he attempted to find more up-to-date information about the church (which was in the custody of a confraternity), he asked: “Why do you want to go inside the church?” I told him that I was writing a book about black saints and that I wanted to see the image of Benedict of Palermo inside. Before I finished talking, the man began shaking his head: “No, no, no, there is no black saint in that church.

Accounts of miracles and visions feature prominently in each of Flodoard’s histories. Notably, he recorded a huge number of wonders that occurred during his own lifetime. This constitutes a striking contrast with contemporary authors of history and hagiography, many of whom doubted whether miracles still happened or whether they were necessary. This chapter examines Flodoard’s attitude to the supernatural, asking in particular how it evolved over the course of his lifetime. I argue that Flodoard came to perceive miracles as validation of the work carried out by monks, clerics and bishops, and that he heeded seriously reports of visions and other phenomena as divinely inspired responses to moral failings. Flodoard contrasted the earthly vices of the leaders of the West Frankish kingdom with the greatness of spiritual power, thus providing a rationale for episcopal authority in a time of political upheaval.