One of the
several challenges when researching the cult of saints is to assess the
relative importance and popularity of any given saint. There are various
parameters for assessing whether a saint had a large cult, and in those cases
there is often source material that allows us to flesh out some of details
concerning the saint’s popularity. For instance, miracle collections teach us where
some of the pilgrims came from, which in turn makes it possible to map the
extent of the cult, albeit incompletely. Church dedications outside of the cult
centre provide similar nodes when tracing the cult, and so do the spread of
manuscripts containing legends or liturgy for the saint in question. Calendar
entries are likewise important sources, especially when later hands add further
information, to the names that indicate which saint is to be celebrated on that
particular day.
In the case of saints that are less
well attested in the source material, the questions of importance and
popularity become more complicated. Granted, most saints are not universally
important. However, some saints might appear more important than they were due
to the state of the surviving source material – both for that saint and for
other saints venerated in the same church province – and some saints might have
been important for certain social echelons rather than for the populace as a
whole. Despite these uncertainties, it is relatively easy to ascertain that saints
with a widespread cult and a strong cult centre were both important and popular
within a particular geographical area or within a particular time frame.
The minor saints, however, are even
more complicated. These are saints that might be ubiquitous in calendars and
might be attested throughout the Middle Ages, but where there was no particular
cult centre where their relics were housed and from where their cult was
promoted. Or if they did have a such a cult centre, the institution in question
did not attempt, or perhaps did not mange, to disseminate their cult abroad. In
some cases, these are old saints which are found in later medieval sources
because they were introduced into the martyrologies that were copied and
expanded from Late Antiquity and into the Carolingian period. In other cases,
they are local saints that emerged later and were incorporated into the liturgical
year of a diocese or a church province, and were then copied into later
calendars or breviaries without much regard for the saint or their legend. Such
saints might have been minor, but that does not mean that we can unequivocally
say that they were unimportant. Especially local cults with little imprint on
the surviving source material might have been far more important to the non-ecclesiastical
populace than the patron saint of the diocese – especially of the smaller cult
was venerated in smaller villages or parishes outside the episcopal see. Moreover,
popularity often comes and goes in waves, there are surges and ebbs, and
sometimes there never comes a second surge. Consequently, we need to employ
very careful parameters assessing whether a minor saint was, indeed, minor.
In the
present blogpost, I provide you with one case where the surviving source
material allows me to designate three saints’ cults as neither important nor
popular, at least not at the time and in the place of the source in question. This
source is a vernacular collection of saints’ legends, printed in Lübeck by Lucas
Brandis around 1478. Such collections were common in fifteenth-century Germany,
and were ultimately modelled on the liturgically organised collection Legenda
Aurea by Jacobus Voragine, compiled sometime in the 1260s. Unlike Legenda
Aurea, however, which was put together in order to provide preachers with material
for their sermons, collections such as Lucas Brandis’ Passionael were printed
and sold to merchants and other literate social groups whose livelihood – such as
artisans – allowed them to accumulate more money.
Lucas Brandis’ Passionael allowed
ordinary citizens to read and listen to the stories of saints, some of whom
they knew well while others were no doubt new to them. It is important to note
that when Brandis put together his collection, he had to reflect on his
audiences and their tastes. In some cases, saints would be included practically
out of necessity, since they were expected in such collections – for instance
the biblical saints. Moreover, Brandis must have been aware of the cult of
saints in Lübeck: which were venerated in the city’s various churches, and
which were popular. As for the saints he included in collection, some of them
were likely gathered from similar collections elsewhere in Germany, whether in the
vernacular or in Latin, which he then had translated into Low German.
The chapters were typically introduced with a
woodcut vignette that depicted the saint or saints who were the protagonists of
the chapter, or an episode from the legend. In many cases, the woodcuts were
made specifically for the saint in question and demonstrate familiarity with
their iconography, or reliance on the text which is introduced. In other cases,
however, the saint or saints were less well known, and their legend was
sufficiently generic to be summarised in the same way as other saints whose
legends, or whose basic iconographical features or elements, were similar. For saints
like these, woodcuts could often be reused. Such reuse constitutes fairly solid
evidence that the saint or saints introduced in this generic way was to all
intents and purposes a minor saint.
In Brandis’ Passionael, there are several woodcuts that are used in this way, but for the present blogpost I will focus on three of them, simply because they are placed at the top of consecutive chapters, meaning that the reader leafing through the book will encounter these images uninterrupted by others. We should imagine that Brandis made this decision consciously and was aware of the effect it would have on the reader and on their impression of the saint. That he nonetheless went through with this organisation of the woodcuts suggests that the saints were, indeed, neither popular nor important in Lübeck around 1478.
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The first example comes from folio 324v, which contains the opening of the chapter on Nazarius and Celsus, two saints allegedly exhumed by Ambrose of Milan and venerated there throughout the Middle Ages. Their legend was included in Legenda Aurea, and can also be found in several calendars used in Scandinavia. I have written about their legend here. The legend tells of a pair of male saints who were martyred together. The woodcut summarises the climax of the martyrdom, with both saints placed in a hilly or craggy landscape, shown mid-execution as the head of the one lies on the ground facing the executioner who is preparing to strike the head of the other. It is a dramatic and graphic scene, and it is one that can summarise the fate of several other male martyr-pairs, of which there are quite many in the Latin medieval cult of saints.
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The third example is found on folio 326r, the page opposite that of the previous vignette, which introduces the chapter on Abdon and Sennen (here written “Sennes”, which is not uncommon). These martyrs were killed during the Decian persecution, and I have written about them here. They were Persians who were brought to Córdoba, from whence they were brought to Rome and killed following the discovery that they were evangelising. Their feast-day was on July 30, and it is likely that they, too, were eclipsed by the feast of Saint Olaf on the preceding day.
The woodcut used for these vignettes are also employed elsewhere in Brandis’ Passionael, but I have not seen them in such an uninterrupted sequence as this one. To use the same woodcut for all of them was a deliberate decision, as there were elements enough in all of these legends to provide something different for the engraver. That no such effort was taken is a fairly good indication that these saints were included because they were expected – as part of the regular liturgical cycle – but that they were also known to be practically unimportant to Brandis’ intended audiences. Consequently, in this one instance we can be fairly certain that these were minor saints, at least for the time and place in question. Often, this is as much certainty as we can hope for when researching the cult of saints.
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