John,
I'ld like to chime in here on the notions of political aspects of
sainthood. My impression is that at certain levels all cults have
politics and are therefore political, the literateurs who wrote
hagiographical texts were often writing more annalistic or cartulary
materials, often in the same manuscripts. Since there were a lot of
kinship ties between kings and the leaders of English abbeys, and also
ties of people going backwards and forwards between "court" and "abbey"
functions, it shouldn't be all that surprising that similar ways of
rehabilitating, or more often letting people know about the saintly
reputation of someone were tried for kings as well as saints.
Though they did view themselves as divided by function, there were no
exclusively monolitihic groups of church and state for the anglo-saxon
period at least, so much so that the labels themselves, are possibly a
bit misleading for us to use. I wouldn't really want to hive off the
"political" for the one group, either.
It is a pretty subtle political, too - I suspect AEthelred II,
ill-counselled as he was, could still make use of the fact that his
brother had been murdered when he was too young to be the sole
instigator (all right by his mother though, but I think Pauline Stafford
has shown how her hold onto power into the 990's was not necessarily
something her son welcomed - article in the collection edited by John C.
PArsons, St MArtin's Press 1994 or 5 I believe). Having saintly kin was
after all as others have noted a good thing (and possibly easier when as
with Edward and his half-sister Edith (remember David mentioned Edgar's
randy behaviour?), you died young) and the embarrassing aspects of those
cults might well coincide with a point when they were of political
advantage to the king.
but I begin to wander too far from the military, I suspect.
Georges Whalen
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
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