medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
To bring things *slightly* back to the theme of this list, I've been struck of late by the recent stirrings of medieval saint's cults here in good old post-Reformation post-Englightenment Blighty.
One of the more remarkable is at St Albans, where the shrine of St Alban has been put back together (for the second time) using Lottery money and has become quite a place of pilgrimage. Local people of no clear faith resort to it as a 'quiet healing space'; the vergers tell me they get through tens of thousands a candles. I sat for an hour and watched a steady flow of people come in an linger and pray: all ages, all types. Yet this is nothing but a shrine base; the relics themselves are of course long gone.
Except that the Chapter have also done much to revivfy the cult in a more official way; there is now an annual and rather theatrical diocesian pilgrimage, and the reconstructed shrine does I understand now include a small fragment of the saint, leant by a church in Cologne.
Over at Hereford, St Thomas Cantilupe's former tomb-shrine in the north transept, long an easily-overlooked (if attractive and art-historically interesting) object, has been given a new shrine canopy, candles, etc and re-incorporated into the liturgy, again with official pilgrimages being organised. And again, a small piece of Thomas is involved, this time leant by a British Catholic college. The little white fragment sits in a little glass cone-thing atop the tomb-shrine, surrounded by the faintly gaudy new canopy.
Such things would have been (to coin a phrase) anathema to mainstream Anglicanism not very long ago. Yet they seem to tap into a very real popular interest, an interest in spite of the relative (modern) obscurity of some of these saints.
Jon
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