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The Reception of Medieval Saints' Cults after the Reformations of...
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The Reception of Medieval Saints' Cults after the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century

A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444). This special issue belongs to the section "Religions and Humanities/Philosophies".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 March 2022) | Viewed by 13846

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Nils Holger Petersen

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Church History, University of Copenhagen, DK 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
Interests: “liturgical drama” in the Middle Ages; Biblical reception in music; the reception of medieval saints' cults after the Reformations of the sixteenth century; Mozart and the notion of the sublime

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The purpose of this Issue will be to publish research on the impact of medieval cults of saints in post-Reformation cultures. This may include Catholic cultures, but in this context, the cults of medieval saints in the post-Tridentine Catholic Church are considered mainly as continuations of medieval cults, which in themselves are not the focus of the planned Issue. By contrast, the intentions of this Issue, based also on very recent research, will be to consider how saints venerated during the Middle Ages have been received in various cultural contexts in post-medieval societies. This is about the appearance of medieval saints in the early modern and modern arts; in poetic, visual, musical, and dramatic art forms; in folklore; and in contemporary popular culture, not least for instance in film, and how they may sometimes have been brought to political use in societies.

From 2010 to 2014, a collaborative, interdisciplinary project under the European Science Foundation considered medieval cults of saints as factors in the formation of communal identities in regions and nations, and transnational groups (e.g., as monastic orders). The project also investigated how saints as markers of identity in a number of cases continued to be of cultural importance in Protestant cultures, particularly in the arts, and how they might sometimes become expressive of popular political movements. The mentioned project and its external collaborations led to numerous publications during the last decade. The planned Special Issue of Religions will hopefully take our knowledge further, extending the scope of what has already shown itself to be a fruitful topic. This topic is not only about historical interests in medieval sainthood, but opens toward a wide field regarding the ways in which cults of medieval saints have been appropriated during the last half millennium. The topic of this issue of Religions may be seen as belonging to the academic field of medievalism, just as it appeals more generally to scholars of literature, music, art history, film, as well as social and political sciences. Numerous saints cultivated during the Middle Ages have received a great deal of attention and had great impact also in later centuries, in very different ways. Medieval saints’ narratives were also communicated to people through the readings and chants of the medieval saints’ offices, which were constructed in dialogue with circulating narratives, and further inspired songs, narratives, and images. Values and ideas about Christian life and thought were communicated in such ways that were easy to relate to and which in many cases continued to live on in communities long after the actual cults had ceased to exist. Beside the most universal of all saints, the Virgin Mary, this regards (among many others) Thomas Becket, Francis of Assisi, Katherine of Alexandria, Elisabeth of Thuringia, and more locally venerated saints like Olav the Holy of Norway and St Erik of Sweden.     

I am writing to invite you to contribute to a forthcoming Special Issue of the peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal Religions entitled “The Reception of Medieval Saints’ Cults after the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century”.

Please have a look at the text (the above summary) for more information. I am addressing you because you have already published (shown interest) in this area, and I hope that you will consider this Special Issue as a way to contribute further based on your knowledge and relevant research.

Collecting articles concerning this reception history, which only recently has attracted systematic scholarly interest, is a way to draw further attention to this area, which will hopefully lead to much further interest and scholarly activity.

For your information, I include a short list of just a few recent relevant publications:

Nils Holger Petersen, Anu Mänd, Sebastián Salvadó and Tracey R. Sands, eds., Symbolic Identity and the Cultural Memory of Saints (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018). The volume includes among other contributions

Kateřina Horníčková, “Martyrs of ‘Our’ Faith: Identity and the Cult of Saints in Post-Hussite Bohemia” (pp. 59–90) and

Tracey R. Sands, “Saints and the Politics of Gotlandic Identities” (pp. 189–219).

The volume Saints and Sainthood around the Baltic Sea, ed. by Carsten Selch Jensen, Tracey R. Sands, Nils Holger Petersen, Kurt Villads Jensen, and Tuomas M.S. Lehtonen (Kalamazoo, MI: MIP, 2018) contains among other relevant contributions

Cordelia Heβ, “Medieval Cults and Modern Inventions: Dorothy of Montau, the Teutonic Order, and ‘Katholiken für Hitler’” (pp. 35–51).

Also, the volume Ora Pro Nobis: Space, Place and the Practice of Saints’ Cults in Medieval and Early-Modern Scandinavia and Beyond, ed. by Nils Holger Petersen, Mia Münster-Swendsen, Thomas Heebøll-Holm and Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen, PNM 27 (Copenhagen: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2019) contains relevant articles to the topic.

Dr. Nils Holger Petersen
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • medieval saints
  • medieval rituals
  • post-Reformation culture
  • reception history
  • the arts
  • medievalism

Published Papers (5 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 300 KiB  
Article
T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: Divine vs. Human?
by Nils Holger Petersen
Religions 2022, 13(11), 1068; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13111068 - 05 Nov 2022
Viewed by 2679
Abstract
This article discusses the relationship between the divine and the human, as it appears in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, written for and performed at the Cathedral of Canterbury in 1935. On the one hand, and most obviously, this play [...] Read more.
This article discusses the relationship between the divine and the human, as it appears in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, written for and performed at the Cathedral of Canterbury in 1935. On the one hand, and most obviously, this play about the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket in the Cathedral on 29 December 1170 owes much to a medieval Catholic as well as Anglo-Catholic tradition. On the other hand, the unbridgeable distance between the divine and the human, pronounced by Thomas Becket in all his utterances in the play, resembles the contemporary theology of the Reformed theologian Karl Barth, whose theology Eliot had been aware of since 1934. Recent scholarship has discussed the influence of Barth’s theology on Eliot’s poetry, especially the Four Quartets (1936–1940). Contemporary sources, on the other hand, show Eliot’s ambivalence towards what he understood to be Barth’s theology. However, the article does not aim at a biographical understanding; it concerns Eliot’s text and how it relates to the radical separation between God and the human world, as found in Barth’s theology. The analysis of Murder in the Cathedral emphasizes the polyphony of voices in the play, which counterbalances the radical contrast between divine and human in the play’s presentation of Thomas Becket’s voice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Reception of Medieval Saints' Cults after the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century)
24 pages, 5997 KiB  
Article
Sacred Souvenirs and Divine Curios—Lutherans, Pilgrimage, Saints and the Holy Land in the Seventeenth Century
by Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen
Religions 2022, 13(10), 909; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13100909 - 29 Sep 2022
Viewed by 1510
Abstract
This article explores the surprisingly positive attitude towards pilgrimage and saints that developed within mainstream Lutheran faith during the Seventeenth Century. To acknowledge this strand in the theology of the 1600s in some ways runs contrary to what is often stated about the [...] Read more.
This article explores the surprisingly positive attitude towards pilgrimage and saints that developed within mainstream Lutheran faith during the Seventeenth Century. To acknowledge this strand in the theology of the 1600s in some ways runs contrary to what is often stated about the period, the heyday of Lutheran Orthodoxy, and to a certain extent incompatible with what is generally perceived as ‘Lutheran’. I aim to show the 1600s as a period with a great curiosity towards the development of new devotional practice, and a time when the search for devotional tools which could help the individual to come closer to Christ led theologians to explore texts and ideas that at least superficially could be seen as belonging to the Catholic side of the confessional divide. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Reception of Medieval Saints' Cults after the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century)
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23 pages, 900 KiB  
Article
The Strange Cult of Queen Dagmar
by Tracey R. Sands
Religions 2022, 13(5), 388; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13050388 - 22 Apr 2022
Viewed by 3539
Abstract
In 1205, the Danish king Valdemar II married a Bohemian princess, known in her new country as Dagmar. Little contemporary information exists concerning this queen, who died only seven years after her arrival. Nonetheless, Dagmar is one of very few figures from medieval [...] Read more.
In 1205, the Danish king Valdemar II married a Bohemian princess, known in her new country as Dagmar. Little contemporary information exists concerning this queen, who died only seven years after her arrival. Nonetheless, Dagmar is one of very few figures from medieval Danish history whose names are familiar to a general Danish public in the present. Over the centuries, a narrative of her life has emerged, based largely on a group of ballad texts first written down in the sixteenth century, that Queen Dagmar was so exceptionally beautiful and kind that Danes (particularly common people) remained devoted to her memory through the generations. Moreover, several texts, and a remarkable early twentieth-century painting in St Bendt’s Church in Ringsted posit her as an intercessor on behalf of Denmark, in ways that come very close to portraying her as a saint, so much that one twentieth-century ballad scholar concludes that the Benedictine monks of Ringsted launched a canonization process on her behalf. This article investigates the image of Queen Dagmar as it has developed over the centuries with a particular eye toward implications or claims of sanctity, toward Dagmar’s purported role as an intercessor during and after her lifetime, and her perceived (and at times seemingly prescribed) role in the constitution of Danish identity. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Reception of Medieval Saints' Cults after the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century)
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16 pages, 368 KiB  
Article
Officials on the Scaffold: Lutheran Martyrdom in Andreas Gryphius’ Catharina von Georgien
by Niels Nykrog
Religions 2022, 13(4), 345; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13040345 - 11 Apr 2022
Viewed by 1478
Abstract
In a reading of Gryphius’ Catharina von Georgien within its political and confessional context of Silesia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, this article analyzes the transformation of the Christian martyr cult within early modern German tragedy. It argues that Gryphius [...] Read more.
In a reading of Gryphius’ Catharina von Georgien within its political and confessional context of Silesia at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, this article analyzes the transformation of the Christian martyr cult within early modern German tragedy. It argues that Gryphius used the hagiographic type of the royal martyr as a moral example and figure of governmental order. He depicted the pious Georgian martyr Queen Catharina and her devout officials as an inspiring community of civic virtue to be imitated by his fellow Silesians. This patriotic injunction of the tragedy resonates with legal concepts of public law put forward by Gryphius’ mentor, Georg Schönborner and others. The article finds that Gryphius’ martyr tragedy must be read as an aesthetic contribution to some of the legal movements decisive for German state formation around 1650. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Reception of Medieval Saints' Cults after the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century)
35 pages, 11784 KiB  
Article
‘Purest Bones, Sweet Remains, and Most Sacred Relics.’ Re-Fashioning St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458–84) as a Medieval Saint between Counter-Reformation Italy and Poland-Lithuania
by Ruth Sargent Noyes
Religions 2021, 12(11), 1011; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12111011 - 16 Nov 2021
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3835
Abstract
This article explores the Counter-Reformation medievalization of Polish–Lithuanian St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458–1484)—whose canonization was only finalized in the seventeenth century—as a case study, taking up questions of the reception of cults of medieval saints in post-medieval societies, or in this case, the retroactive [...] Read more.
This article explores the Counter-Reformation medievalization of Polish–Lithuanian St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458–1484)—whose canonization was only finalized in the seventeenth century—as a case study, taking up questions of the reception of cults of medieval saints in post-medieval societies, or in this case, the retroactive refashioning into a venerable medieval saint. The article investigates these questions across a transcultural Italo–Baltic context through the activities of principal agents of the saint’s re-fashioning as a venerable saint during the late seventeenth century: the Pacowie from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Medici from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, during a watershed period of Tuscan–Lithuanian bidirectional interest. During this period, the two dynasties were entangled not only by means of the shared division of Jagiellończyk’s bodily remains through translatio—the ritual relocation of relics of saints and holy persons—but also self-representational strategies that furthered their religio-political agendas and retroactively constructed their houses’ venerable medieval roots back through antiquity. Drawing on distinct genres of textual, visual, and material sources, the article analyzes the Tuscan–Lithuanian refashioning of Kazimierz against a series of precious reliquaries made to translate holy remains between Vilnius to Florence to offer a contribution to the entangled histories of sanctity, art and material culture, and conceptual geography within the transtemporal and transcultural neocolonial context interconnecting the Middle Ages, Age of Reformations, and the Counter-Reformation between Italy and Baltic Europe. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Reception of Medieval Saints' Cults after the Reformations of the Sixteenth Century)
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