Translocating Devotion to Female Saints in England through Liturgical Prescription and Practice, c. 1330–1500
This thesis examines the variety of ways saints became localised through liturgical practices, and the actors involved in these processes, most especially the bishops who promoted their feasts, the monasteries that adopted them, and the laity who participated in their celebration. Historians often discuss saint veneration in terms of their cults’ geographical influence, often expressed in binary divisions between the cults of ‘local’ saints and a supra-local designation, such as ‘regional’, ‘national’, or ‘universal’ saints. However, the devotion to saints in late medieval England often took forms that are not easily explained in such geographic or cultic terms. This was especially true in the celebration of female saints’ feasts in late medieval liturgy. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the feast days of several holy women received some form of recognition in liturgical calendars that caused their feast days to move and become re-localised in disparate locations beyond their original cult centres. In eight case studies conducted over six chapters, this thesis examines the different means through which their feasts were adopted, moved, and adapted to new circumstances. In the case of St Sidwell of Exeter this resulted from a single bishop adding her feast to his cathedral’s liturgical calendar. Other feasts, such as those of St Winefride of Wales, St Frideswide of Oxford, and St Etheldreda of Ely, were mandated for celebration throughout the province of Canterbury in the fifteenth century with differing results. The Scottish saints Queen Margaret of Scotland and St Ebba of Coldingham were not promulgated widely in England, but they found varying acceptance in the liturgy at Durham Cathedral. Finally, two imported saints’ feasts developed localised expressions in England, the Oblation of the Virgin Mary in individual monasteries and convents, and St Zita of Lucca, or St Sitha as she was known in England, among the laity with monastic support. The results were different for each saint’s feast, but they all resulted in multi-local configurations in which the saint was venerated in discrete locations beyond their original cult centres.
liturgy, medieval, religious history, saint veneration
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