Hagiography & the cult of saints

Many excellent studies have been published on the phenomenon of holy (wo)men and saints. As a rule however they focus on successful candidates for holiness who played the roles of charismatic leaders and patrons of social and religious life.

This volume offers a new perspective on ancient and medieval holiness — its main focus is holiness as defined by its peripheries and not by its conceptual centre. The contributors explore stories of men and women whose way to sainthood did not follow typical ‘models’ but who engaged with it from its outskirts. Several essays examine the strategies employed by hagiographical authors to tailor the images of candidates for holiness whose lives provided less obvious examples of moral and/or religious ideals. These include attempts to make saints out of emperors heretics and other unlikely or obscure figures. Other case studies focus on concerns with false holiness or unusual cases of holiness being ascribed prior to a saint’s death. Another concept explored in the volume is space. The spatial boundaries of holiness are discussed in relation to the transmission of relics to the opposition between urban and rural spaces holy sites and even imagined space.

Holiness and sainthood have been crucial concepts for Christianity from its inception. By exploring their ‘marginal’ and ‘peripheral’ aspects the essays in this book offer vital new perspectives on the religious world of Late Antiquity.

The body or relics of a saint could attract divine protection on the community and the place where they were kept. If in some cases the monasteries were structures of assistance to sanctuaries of certain notoriety starting from the 7th century they increasingly played the role of protagonists autonomously managing the devotional activities derived from the acquisition or translation of relics. The need to preserve the isolation of the 'clausura' and to manage at the same time an increasing flow of pilgrims led these monasteries to build new spaces for prayer communion and assistance.

This book includes the Proceedings of the International Conference held in Naples (Italy) on November 28-29 2022. The Conference - organized as part of a Marie-Curie research project by the Fondazione San Bonaventura with the contribution of the Italian Ministry of Culture - brought together historians archaeologists and art historians to discuss the theme of spatial articulation of monasteries chosen as places of pilgrimage during the Early Middle Ages in Western Europe. From this interdisciplinary discussion exciting insights have emerged on aspects of particular relevance such as the organization of the funerary space and interaction between monks and laypeople the elements of balance or clash between 'clausura' and hospitality and the comparison between male and female monasteries as devotional centers.