medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Thursday, July 9, 2009, at 6:34 am, Meg Cormack wrote:
> of course, my text doesn´t specify which . . . but tangling with secular
> authority would appear to be a good line.
Your text wouldn't have to specify which, as D. of Paris was at this point pretty much the default D. in the Latin church outside of areas where one of the others had a significant cult (e.g. the archdiocese of Milan, the diocese of Augsburg).
Tangling with secular authority is something that can be said of most Christian martyrs of antiquity, who are rather regularly said to have been put to death by civil officials. If one is looking for a reason for specifying D., as opposed to one of the numerous other well known martyrs who fell afoul of secular authority, a perhaps more likely one would be his association, through the royal abbey of St.-Denis, with the kings of France, one of whom (Louis VII) had been Becket's sponsor in exile and none of whom will have been the king who ordered or inspired Becket's murder.
Although the book is dated, there is some fairly granular information on D.'s cult in England in Frances Arnold-Forster, _Studies in Church Dedications, or England's Paton Saints_ (London, 1899), II, 474-83, esp. at pp. 479ff., available in Google Books at:
http://tinyurl.com/kmvcue
But there are subscribers to this far more familiar with saint's cults in England than am I who could doubtless point you to better sources.
The places in France that I associate with Becket's exile are the abbey of Pontigny and the nearby cities of Sens and, to a lesser degree, Auxerre. For the very little this is worth, I'm not aware of any special veneration (as opposed to the general national one) of D. at any of these.
Best,
John Dillon
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