Medieval Saints: miracles, relics and pilgrimage

26:43How many people did he bring back from the dead? Well, one I'm aware of, a guy called Thomas Crach, I think, who is a Welshman. But there was an inquiry, right, to find out, okay, is he a legit saint? And they sent lawyers to interrogate and to ask questions and to find out, did this miracle happen? Yeah. Was he really dead or was he just sleeping? Did he just wake him up? He was hanged. He was a criminal, hanged at the gallows, Thomas Craig. And then his friends sort of asked for help from the saint who was dead by this point. And lo and behold, he came back to life. Oh, okay. Proper miracle.

27:16And so this was the making of Hereford. They got a lot of glamour and money out of this, a lovely big church tower. but it's that interesting thing that the lawyers were sent to interrogate and to quiz the witnesses yeah exactly yeah and that's just that's still a very strong kind of um insistence today is that all miracles that happen in canonization processes today are um have that uh have that kind of they have medics and doctors witnessing and examining scrutinizing medical records a weird question but lawyers who would interrogate them would they be wanting them to answer in the affirmative or would they be wanting it to be as like the strictures yeah there you know this is where we get this idea of the devil's advocate is is that they're they they have to kind of disprove the miracle in order to prove it in a way they have to they have to demonstrate that this thing happened and that one of the latest sort of technical terms associated with thomas aquinas is this notion of contra naturum.

28:14So you have to be absolutely certain that this is not something that might have occurred coincidentally or accidentally or by some sort of natural process of causation. Yeah, this is the supernatural, right? This has to be the intervention of God or a saint. The saint is the intercessor on behalf of God. But it throws up some real curious puzzles for us. So for example, there's again a notorious case from the 13th century of this guy called Thomas of Eldersfield who crops up in some of the posthumous miracles of Wolfston and he is a bit of a naughty boy and he gets into a fight with somebody over a woman and they have this kind of trial by combat which he loses and his punishment is to have his eyeballs and his testicles removed.

29:08Oh, why is it so ball-based? Yeah, exactly. Just all the spheres of your body. Take all these balls. Yeah. The story goes on as this kind of detailed little scene where these balls are seen rolling down the road and little children come and pick them up and play marbles with them. So he then gets kind of carted off to a hospital where prayers are offered to Wolfston. And surprise, surprise, he has his full set of new balls restored to him. Yeah. Yeah. How do you explain that one? I really can't. And I don't want to. First, I'm just thinking, it would be a terrible game of marbles. First, there's only two.

29:55I mean, I don't want to say anything about the size of them, but like, yeah, it doesn't seem practical to me. But there we go, you're thinking like a lawyer. You're immediately asking questions. You should be a canon lawyer. What I'm doing is overimagining it and I'm not enjoying it. This is what historians have to do. Absolutely. This is a specific job of historians. What about his eyeballs? Anything about them? They were restored. They were restored as well. Did they accidentally swap him around and he had testicles for eyeballs? Because that would be hilarious, right? I've done a miracle. It wasn't an accurate miracle, but it is still a miracle.

30:25So, okay, so we have these miracles being interrogated by lawyers who are looking to disprove, hence the phrase devil's advocate, which is an office that comes along in the 16th century, but it's an official position in the Vatican. You are the devil's advocate. You argue against the miracle and you have to prove that the miracle didn't happen. Oh, I love that. It's good, isn't it? That's one of the things I'll actually remember. Amazing. But we should talk about hagiography or hagiography. Yeah. Which literally means sort of sacred writings, right? And these are the writings of saints' lives and they're quite tropic.

30:53They're quite stock genre stories. Yes, it's literally hagiography. It just means writing about the holy and it's a huge kind of literary tradition in the medieval period and it's described by Edward Gibbon, who's a bit of a sceptic in the 18th century. He talks about it as having all the fiction without the genius of poetry. Wow, scathing. Yeah, so there's a real kind of downer on hagiography. It's often seen as quite dismal and quite, as you say, repetitious, full of topoi, nothing like a kind of modern novel, which we all feel is the kind of standard for thinking about what a good literary kind of piece of work is.

31:33Who would write it, the stories? These are written by specialist monks who work in scriptoria, who, again, they're kind of, there's a lot of kind of what you might call intertextuality. So they're writing, they're taking bits from earlier stories and kind of weaving them into their new stories. You might sort of think of it all as a kind of a mythology of Christian glory. I like to think of it that way. And you have these topoi. So, you know, often a sign of being a saint is that you are pious in your infancy. So you don't go out and play football. You stay in and you pray. What a dweeb. Exactly.

32:15You're a bit nerdy. That's one of them. You go around and there's a kind of odour of sanctity around you. There are these kinds of topoi that you have that you find in the literature. But the thing that fascinates me as a historian is the way that those are kind of mingled with little snippets and clues of what must be kind of reputage or actual historical detail. Yeah. Pop quiz. What's in your kid's lunchbox? At Whole Foods Market, they've already done the studying. Over 300 food ingredients are banned from their shelves. No hydronated fats in the peanut butter and no high fructose corn syrup in the cookies.

32:55And for sandwiches, there are no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in any of their deli meat. So you can pack lunchboxes with peace of mind. Get back to school ready at Whole Foods Market. So the hagiography, the hagiography is a sort of tradition of writing these biographies of saints. We should talk about medieval miracles and healing miracles because they're really, really interesting. Rachel, different saints had different medical specialisms. So you turn to each saint for their different skill, right? And so it depends on what they can do for you. I'll name a saint. I've got a little mini quiz for you.

33:30Oh, I love it, yeah. I'll name a saint. You tell me what medical specialism they handle. Okay, so Saint Apollonia. Apollonia could, thinking Apollo, he could lift people up. Lovely. No, he's the patron saint of toothache. Toothache? Because all his teeth are ripped out. Oh. So he knows about toothache. Saint Margaret. Oh, St. Margaret, lovely. Healing wounds. Not bad. Childbirth. That's quite, you know, so she's the childbirth. She's the kind of patrician of me. St. Fiagra? Fiagra. Yeah, Fiagra, yeah. Just being clear. Broken bone, healing broken bones. Good guess. It's hemorrhoids. Hemorrhoids.

34:10I'm glad there's someone for that. Yeah, we all need that. Simon, St. Artemis, yes. St. Artemis, yes. he's kind of in rivalry with Wolston, I think. He's for hernias and testicles. I was going to say, restoring testicles. He's a safe pair of hands. Safe pair of glands, yeah. Okay, so we have, you know, if you have a medical condition, you go to a certain saint and you pray asking for healing, for health, for restoration of your wellness. You know, it's fascinating, I suppose, that each person has their, each saint has their own remit in the medical world. and in the healing world. So where do people go to get these cures?

34:52You know, you don't go to the pharmacy necessarily for the miracle cure. You go to where? A monastery? You usually go to a shrine. And shrines can be in monasteries and they can be in local churches. And a shrine tends to be a kind of monumental structure, like a tomb with a roof, the kind of gabled roof or canopy over the top of it. And these house the relics. And sometimes if you're lucky, you've got the kind of the entire body and it's kind of incorrupt and you can, Cuthbert's a good example of that. Ethel Thryth in St Ely is another one. And sometimes there'll be in a reliquary, it's positioned on an altar or above the altar or on a kind of, sometimes you get relic collections in cabinets.

35:37These are very kind of highly kind of curated spaces. And the idea is to give you an experience that is going to facilitate your access to the contagious kind of power of the relic, the kind of holy radiation. It's fantastic. I don't know if you've been to Santiago. No. So Santiago, I much recommend it. De Compostela. De Compostela, yes, in Galicia. It's a fantastic place. Some great wine bars, some wonderful wines, great seafood. And the church itself, the cathedral is famous because it's the kind of ultimate place to go on pilgrimage, which all other kind of places lead up to. And it's a big kind of Romanesque church.

36:24And just to the kind of east of the crossing in the nave part, there is this huge elaborate kind of Baroque complex of passages and crypts. And you get to kind of walk around it. You go down into the crypt and you see a little kind of silver casket, which has got St. James's relics in it and you go up some stairs and there's a huge bust of James looking down the nave and you get a very kind of intimate, cosy moment with him because it's a very small little space and you get to, people give him a hug and whisper in his ear and then they go down and out the other side and walk round the ambulatory.

37:00So I, you know, I really recommend Santiago, Compostela as a place to go. Yeah, that sounds amazing. This is pilgrimage, right? People would go on. So how does a pilgrimage differ to an ordinary journey? I mean, obviously a journey is a commute. A pilgrimage is still a commute of sorts because you're getting somewhere special. But is the journey itself also holy? You have to go in sandals. Yeah, I think that's right. You carry a stick and a shell and a purse and there is a classic look, which you've got to try and reconstruct. Okay, what's the look? You have your kind of a script and a staff, which is like a kind of pouch for your money and you go in sandals or sometimes you go barefoot on parts of it to show your commitment.

37:39and it's about devotion. It's about having a reason to go that's to do with making a vow or a promise for some sort of interaction with the saint. And sometimes people have pilgrimages kind of prescribed for them by their confessor, by priests. They say, you know, you've been naughty and the only thing that will solve it is if you go on pilgrimage to such and such a local shrine. But then you get these massive kind of international pilgrim routes which link up and compostella is one is is one of the kind of termini for this and canterbury is another yeah cologne another and rome of course i mean canterbury we know through you know jeffrey chaucer's you know the canterbury tales that's a pilgrimage right that's people are telling stories as they go to the holy site and that's where beckett was murdered uh and then very quickly canonized by sort of king something like i'm so sorry i'm so sorry i didn't mean to murder you um so it's really interesting and people going on pilgrimage is a sort of huge important part of spiritual life of you know it's it's but it's also a kind of an economy right it's it there's commerce attached yeah do you know anything about this have you ever encountered this sort of notion of of the kind of economy attached to pilgrimage no i think i've only ever thought of it as i'm sure i've seen shrines which involve almost like a wishing well type situation with coins thrown at them.

39:03That's a way of getting money, isn't it? Yeah, sure, yeah. People could misbehave on these pilgrimages, right? They could get drunk, they could have sex and be naughty. So sometimes you'd get to the final site and be like, I'm so sorry for everything I just did on the pilgrimage. My bad. Girl's trip went a bit wild. Yeah, it's basically a stag deal. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. But we should say that when people get to these sites, they're spending money. They are, yes, they are. And I mean, I think the way I would think about it is that these cults are the people who are the custodians of relics. They have a particular kind of clearly devotional, liturgical and pastoral kind of set of priorities on this.

39:43You do occasionally get them keeping records of payments made at the shrine. From the 13th century in England, we have cathedral shrines with little accounts, little ledgers of money offered. and I think probably a lot of these cults will pay for themselves in that sense in terms of you know in what we would think of as a kind of profit and loss basis but that's not the main kind of aim of it the people who do benefit from it though are the the kind of citizens of the town is that they're a huge boost to the local economy and just can think of the specialist kind of jobs that people take up. They're artisans, hostelries, brewers, cobblers, people selling merch.

40:27So this is like early tourism. Yeah. So before Taylor Swift comes into town, actually it's the pilgrims come into town that brings you the money to the economy. Sometimes they do relic tours as well and they're kind of on tour with their relic and they can collect money that way. That seems dicey to me. Keep it safe. What if it falls off? I mean, you say merch. What is medieval relic merch? Pilgrim badges, little flasks of oil or holy water or bits of files of blood that you can take back home with you, badges to show that you've been to this place. I love that there has always been this. Not always, but for so long, it's been this like you can get a bit of tat to go with the expatries.

41:15I don't know if it's a myth or not, but there is famously the word tawdry supposedly derives from St Audrey. Yes. Oh, really? St Audrey of Ely, I think. And the notion that so many people just sort of bought tat, you know, the word sort of evolved and now we sort of think of it as... Yeah, we've all bought a multicoloured eraser. Yeah, we've all got a pencil. Yeah, yeah. Producer Emma outside was showing us all her pencils she'd get from museum guest shops and they're very lovely. But I think, you know, we can be cynical, right? We can sort of in our heads be like, oh, it's very exit through the gift shop, you know, all the money.

41:45But actually, you know, these pilgrimages are incredibly special, incredibly important to people. They may be going for a miracle. They may need healing. They may be concerned about their soul. And also, we still, when we go to, when we have a wonderful memory, we buy souvenirs so we can remember the thing. Yeah. It's not just tat, is it? It can be meaningful. Yeah, it is a souvenir, is a nicer way to put it, a memento. And I do, you're right, I have plenty of those from trips. You want to bring a part of it home with you. Just hopefully not a body part because they need them. Whose testicle is that?

42:19I'm so sorry. A keepsake. We should talk about how some of these relics ended up in these churches and in these shrines because a lot of the time it was legitimate and holy. And then sometimes it was fraud and theft, right? It was some serious, some sort of dodgy dealing sometimes. Can you talk us through the translation, this translation? Yeah, sure. Well, I mentioned already this notion of the vision and the invention. So this is a kind of trope in which the saint visits somebody in a dream, tells them you can find our relics here and it's about time you did something about it and a discovery story is written up, etc, etc.

43:00And translation takes place. There's a nice example of acquiring relics by kind of royal patronage as well, which is the hand of St. James at Reading, who is, and this is in the 12th century, so Empress Matilda, who was married to Henry V when he died. She kind of, one of the first things she did was had a good look around his treasury and his relic collection, and she nabbed the hand of St. James and brought it back with her and gave it to the kind of family monastery, which was at Reading. We did an episode about her with Cariad, actually. So, you know, if any listeners want to listen to that episode.

43:39And obviously sometimes things are just downright stolen, right? They're in crusades, in times of war. You know, in 1204, Constantinople is sacked during the Fourth Crusade and the Christian crusading warriors just steal relics. Absolutely. Yeah, in the wake of the First Crusade and the Fourth Crusade in 1204, as you say, there's a lot of sacking and plundering going on and people's relic collections being plundered and being sent back home to various kinds of churches who in some cases it looks like they're almost kind of on order. It's like if you come across a relic of St. Watsit, then we want him because we're dedicated to the martyrdom.

44:22That's how art crime works, isn't it? I was just about to say that, yeah. I'd really want to pick Asso. So could you just, yeah. But also the idea that art is only as valuable as what you imbue it as. Sure. So it has no particular physical value, like a load of bones. To one person, it's just a load of bones. But if you say or believe that it is the bones of this saint, then all of a sudden it's like worth this huge amount. Yeah, yeah. But it's sort of, really, it's nothing until someone says it is. And as well as the hagiographies, as well as these sort of saints' lives, We also have these lovely texts called a furtasacra.

44:59Do you know what that means? No. Or sacred something. It literally means pious theft. Oh. They are kind of stories and texts that basically say, we didn't steal this, we just feel like it should be here, not there. Yeah. It's like we morally, this should be in this church. Yes, we stole it technically. I mean, it's essentially a kind of confession of theft. It is. I think it sort of borrows from, it's a kind of narrative of abduction and consent. So if you think about parallels at the time in elite families, aristocrats, and the marriage of daughters, and there is a tradition of abducting the daughter.

45:42And the consent of the daughter is something that's added later to the story of how this marriage takes place. There's this very similar kind of idea. It's basically like a kind of heist story. So there's a couple of great examples. There's one from the miracles of St. Foy, St. Faith in Conch, which is one of these great kind of pilgrimage churches. This is in the 9th century. The story is written up much later, but in the 9th century, they send one of their monks to a rival monastery where he kind of goes undercover as a mole for 10 years. There's a book in this, isn't there? Yeah, isn't it great?

46:21He spends 10 years winning over their trust. And then there's a moment where he gets an opportunity. And in the dead of night, he steals, he trashes the relics of St Faith and takes them back to his own church monastery. It's a long con. Yeah, it's a really long con. It's a long con. It's a long con. It's a long con for a long con. Yeah, you get these sort of confession documents saying like, the saint came to me in a dream and said they wanted to be stolen. Exactly, yeah. Which is amazing, right? Yeah, and I wonder sometimes whether money is changing hands behind the scene. There's a great story from the translation of St Edith, St Edith, who's a nun in Wilton near Salisbury in the late 10th century.

47:05And there's a story about how a bunch of travelling, what are called Pictish monks, Scots presumably, arrive. And they've got with them a casket with the relics of St Ewy, um one of their saints they're seemingly seemingly on a relic tour and um they put the casket on the altar in the church in uh in Wilton and it won't budge when it comes they kind of enjoy the hospitality of the nuns and the monastery and then it won't budge it won't we won't leave when they want to go and the story then tells us that the abbess uh abbess wolfrith uh who's the who's the mother of Edith, as it happens, she has to write a cheque for 200 shillings, which is about, you know, 100 pounds, to tell them to go away and leave.

47:56So how do we interpret that? Whether this is a con that the Scots are perpetrating, Scottish monks are perpetrating on their nuns, or whether the nuns have said, right, we'll just pay for this because we want it, we like it. Whether the nuns, like in The Sound of Music, sneaky nuns, whether they put like massive weights in it to weigh it down. I wonder if they did. Smart nuns. Nun the wiser. There you go. Rachel, I think we've kind of covered quite a broad spectrum of medieval saints' lives. Yeah, I feel like I know them intimately. It's fascinating, isn't it? Because obviously saints' lives are still so important to people of faith now, but actually there is something quite medieval about some of this.

48:41Yeah, definitely, especially the gruesome elements. I find, you know, this idea that you can have holy testicles and, yeah, foreskin and that, I don't know. It's funny because on the other hand, there's the medieval period feels like, you know, there's a blasphemy and there's sensitivities around this sort of thing. And then on the other hand, they're there playing marbles with balls in the street and throwing nuts at women. And yeah, it's a mixed time. The Nuance Window!

49:17It's time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Rachel and I sit reverently at a holy person's tomb for two minutes while Simon takes to the pulpit to tell us something we need to know about medieval saints. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Dr Simon. Historians study the past through its written and material traces. They go to the archive and they find sources, survivals leftovers uh what you could say could call relics as historians we need to remind ourselves when we work with our sources that they don't just contain information facts evidence out of which to reconstruct as if scientifically some conclusive truth about the past they are also a puzzle and a challenge to our sense of empathy and humanity they dare us to conjure up the past and to ventriloquize the dead.

50:07And along with this, there are ethical responsibilities and repercussions for us all when historians attempt to do this. And this is part of the ongoing conversation of this brilliant podcast. Studying the medieval cult of saints and their relics raises the stakes further. How should historians explain miracles? Again, this is a puzzle and a challenge. Saints, relics and miracles are signs. They represent and they point to something beyond our understanding. The lives of saints have an immediate presence in our encounters with their gruesome remains. They are intriguing, disturbing, unsettling, but they also excite the imagination.

50:44They're a spur to creativity, a sense of trepidation, perhaps even awe. This is how we are made to feel in the presence of saints' relics. And this is how historians often feel when they go into the archive. So saints are a bit like influencers or celebrities, except they are not trying to sell us products like social influences or looks maxing gurus. They aren't like AI serving us up, hallucinated, slop larded with flattery. They are teaching us about life and death and about our lives and our deaths. They don't provide any easy answers, but they do offer a reassurance that humans have been here before.

51:28Amazing. Thank you so much. Two minutes on the dot. Look at that. Wow. Incredible. Amazing. A miracle. A miracle. Not without the paperwork. No, exactly. What's come out through the discussion for me is that with all the authentication and the evidence that was required to make a saint and to authenticate a relic, really a relic is holy because people believe in it. Whether they've believed in it for 600 years or 100 years or however long. if there is faith in something that in itself is what makes it sacred yeah not just the paper about it yeah it's not just a form filling is it you're right um the interesting thing actually is that we might think of the medieval world as the era of saints but more saints were canonized in the 20th century than in any medieval century absolutely oh really who i mean there's a patron saint of comedy writers there's a patron saint of podcasting you know what yeah so so yeah it's Is it Adam Buxton?

52:27I mean, he should be. He's certainly up there, isn't he? Yeah, no, actually, the 20th century popes widened the scope a lot more, didn't they? One of the most recent ones, a guy called Carlo Acutis, who was a social influencer. Wow. Oh, really? So there's a patron saint of... Of social influencers, yeah. Of YouTubers and whatever. Yeah, there we go. That's fascinating, yeah. So we're still in the era of saints. We're still in the era of the canonization process. More so, perhaps, than ever. So what do you know now?

52:59It is now, of course, time for our quickfire quiz. This is the So What Do You Know Now. My favourite bit. This is to see what Rachel has learned. Now, Rachel, you have taken no notes. I just wrote some down for posterity because I felt like I owed it to the book. Sure. I just wrote down the marbles with testicles story. But apart from that, no, I haven't. So I won't be looking at my notebook. I mean, you're very clever. You know, you've studied at Oxford. You have a tremendous brain. I don't think that has any bearing on any of this. Well, let's see how much you remember. Okay, I've got 10 questions for you.

53:28Good luck. Question one. What is a relic? It's a piece of or an object associated with a saint that is kept by the church for people to worship. Very good. Venerate, yes. Question two. What was the earliest type of Christian saint? The first one available. We all are. Anyone who's been christened is a saint. Oh, very good. Yeah, that's absolutely true. That's not what I heard, but that's completely true. We did say that. Everyone who'd been christened. I got martyrs, but I will give you that because that's excellent. Well done, you were listening. Question three, give one example of a medieval saint's relic.

54:04Oh, foreskin. It's the one that sticks in the mind. Yeah, you could have had Anthony's tongue, Beckett's blood as well we heard. Question four, name the most famous miracle performed by St Thomas of Cantaloupe in Hereford. Oh, what did you tell me? Cantaloupe. He's not the one who raised someone from the dead. He is, he is. He revived a hanged man. Hanged man, yeah. Yeah, very good. Question five, what institution took control of the canonisation process in the 1100s, 1200s or so? What institution? The papacy? Yeah, it is the papacy, yeah. Question six, what illness was St. Artemius supposedly good at healing?

54:39You wrote it in your book. I've written it down. Yeah. Did I? Artemius, he's good with? Oh, testicles. Testicles and hernias. Very good. Question seven, what are hagiographies and vitae? The stories of the lives of saints. Very good. Question eight. What keepsakes could medieval pilgrims buy at shrines? Badges. Yeah, lovely little badges. Very good. Souvenirs of their time at the shrine. Question nine. Name two ways a church might acquire a relic. Well, according to some of your stories, nick it. Yeah. Or they would, someone obscure would have a vision and tell them that they know where it was buried and they'd dig it up.

55:21Very good. And also plunder and theft and wars and crusades. That's excellent. This is a perfect 10 out of 10. How did the monks of Conch acquire the body of Saint Faith?

55:34Oh, was that the one, was that the undercover guy? Yeah. There was a monk that went and spied on them for 10 years in a long conch and he got it. 10 out of 10, Rachel, never in doubt. Incredible skills. I'm putting it on my CV. That's very, very impressive. And you even gave me an answer that wasn't even in my quiz. So that's amazing. Well, well done, Rachel. Thank you so much. And of course, thank you so much, Simon, for teaching us that. Listener, viewer. For more from Rachel, of course, check out our episode on Eleanor Akitain, one of the great queens of the medieval world. And for more medieval, well, medieval faith and culture, actually, we have episodes on medieval ghost stories.

56:10We've got episodes on Geoffrey Chaucer. We've got naughty nun, Benedetti Carlini. She was very cheeky. And we have one on medieval animals. So plenty to get into there. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear the show 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can listen at bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We have the stupendous Dr Simon Yarrow from the University of Birmingham. Thank you, Simon. Thank you. It was great fun. It was good fun.

56:39And in Comedy Corner, we have the sensational Rachel Parris. Thank you so much. Thank you. I learnt so much. I mean, you knew quite a lot, but you did learn some stuff too. So that's the best of both worlds. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we crack open another tomb to examine the perfectly preserved historical subject inside. But for now, I'm off to the shrine of St Fiacra, because these hemorrhoids are killing me. Bye!

57:11Could you talk about being invisible or double denim? Who knows what's next on the new series of Just a Minute? Belting out a rendition of Goatabans. Whatever the topic, our panel has just a minute to speak without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Join Zoe Lyons, Desiree Birch, Paul Merton and many more for the new series of Just A Minute with me, Sue Perkins. It's funny because it's true. Listen on Radio 4 and the full box set is available now on BBC Sounds. Thank you.