The martyrs of Lyon

 Sanctity is constantly redefined.  What is holy to one group of people in one place will not seem holy at all to others in another time or place.  Think about, even today, the difference between the plain interior of a Presbyterian church, where nothing is supposed to interfere with the contemplation of God, and the ornate decoration of a Catholic church, where the decoration is done to glorify God.

 

(The above is a chapel in Peru.  Different Presbyterian and different Catholic churches will of course differ from each other as well.)

 Similarly, the role of saints did not stay the same throughout the Middle Ages.  Saints, present in their relics, ready to help (or punish) the deserving (or the wicked), now seem like a standard feature of medieval Christianity, but it was not always that way.

The martyrs of Lyon are a good example of the evolving role of the saints.  Supposedly in the year 177 AD a whole group of Christians were martyred in Lyon (traditionally forty-eight of them).  Lyon was a major Roman provincial capital in what is now France, over toward the east side, about three-quarters of the way down.  It's still a major French city.

The emperors of the first few centuries AD were noted for trying to stop the spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire, and there are numerous stories of Christians put to death for refusing to give up their faith and subscribe to Roman state paganism by sacrificing to Jove (Jupiter).  The Lyon martyrs all refused to denounce Christianity and were, it was said in the fourth century, put to death.  Enough Christians escaped to tell the sad story.

So much for the original account.  But this story lacked relics, which by the late fifth century were becoming a part of the stories of most saints.  Christianity was now widely tolerated, and the Christians of Lyon had to explain why, when other cities were discovering the remains of their Christian martyrs, they had nothing beyond the memory.  They explained that when their martyrs were killed, the bodies were burned, and their ashes were dumped in the river

A hundred years later, in the sixth century, things had changed again.  Christianity was now the official religion of the Empire, and saints were widely revered, not just as holy people worthy of remembrance but as figures still active in the present.  Now the Christians of Lyon not only said they had the relics of their martyrs, but they had always had them.  The surviving Christians of 177 were said to have gone downstream, miraculously located the water-soaked ashes, and reverently brought them back to be set in a fitting memorial.  And the martyrs, who had been nameless in the original account, now had names.

Some of the names might seem a little odd to us, such as Rhône River (the river into which the ashes were dumped), or Mature, or Maternal, or Bibles, or Fourth, or October.  They could have originally been nicknames or descriptors, but by the sixth century they were the martyrs' names.  A church was erected to honor them, complete with their  ashes.

We may chuckle now over this story, but for the sixth-century Christians of Lyon, in a time when other churches around Gaul were  finding and honoring the remains of their local martyrs, it was important that the (more or less) historically attested martyrs of their own past be properly acknowledged and revered.  After all, they worked miracles!

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

 For more on medieval Christianity, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

 

Miracle stories

 Medieval people, like modern people, believed in miracles, as I've discussed previously.  But miracles were not free floating events, being usually attached to a place, a relic, and a saint.

Miracles were one of the chief attributes of saints.  All saints worked miracles, and from the twelfth century onward one could not become a saint without sufficient post-mortem miracles, all properly verified.  (This is still the case for the modern Catholic church.)  Throughout the Middle Ages, an account of a saint's life and activities, his or her vita as it was called, was routinely accompanied by a second volume, stories of the miracles the saint worked after death.

Major shrines to particular saints all had collected stories of miracles their saint had performed.  By far the majority of these miracles involved healing, everything from the pox to a broken arm to gout, even an infected toe.  In an era without modern medicine, when few people could expect to live past their 50s, they turned to whatever healing procedures might be available.  And they may well have worked!  Who are we to dismiss their testimony, when we weren't even there? (and are in a society that has seen some, well, unlikely "cures" promoted for Covid-19).

Miracle stories tended to be very detailed.  The person who was healed was named, as was the specific ailment for which they had suffered.  We often learn a lot about such a person, their social status, their occupation, even which friends and relatives helped them reach the shrine if they did not walk there themselves.  (Pilgrims on the Santiago route, from Burgundy to northwestern Spain, walked 20 miles a day, pretty impressive considering a lot of them were sick and seeking healing or redemption.)

The specificity of the miracle stories added a note of verisimilitude that would not have been possible if they just spoke of generic people being healed of generic diseases.  The stories always stressed that saints were ready to help even the poorest petitioner, and that even the mightiest might need their help.  The miracle stories also tended to stress one particular kind of healing if the saint had a specialty; Saint Foy of Conques, for example (village seen below), was noted for cures of the eyes.

 

Often the miracle stories would speak of someone who had long suffered from an ailment, had visited shrines to other saints without relief, but had finally found healing when appealing to this particular saint.  Those healed were expected to be suitably grateful.  They needn't make a monetary offering (though it was never refused), but they would leave their crutches as a marker of being able to walk again or the like, and they were expected to live a properly virtuous life in the future.  A sinner who had been cured of an ailment was likely to sicken again if he returned to his sin.  And of course it was hoped that those healed would spread the good word about the saint's power.

The miracle stories then could be seen as a form of advertisement for a particular shrine, but they also stressed that the saints listened to people of all economic or social status, and that a moral, virtuous life was needed to accompany a healthy life.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022


For more on religion, saints, and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available as a paperback.

Competition Between Churches

It's easy to think of medieval priests and monks and nuns as other-worldly, focused on spiritual issues, above the normal strife of life.  And indeed this was their own ideal.  In practice, different churches were often in fierce competition with each other, "survival of the fittest," "red in tooth and claw."  (Not quite that bad, but...)

For starters, bishops and the monasteries/nunneries in their regions always differed on who was the most holy.  The bishop claimed, with a certain plausibility, to be "apostolic," to be the successor of a first-bishop in the region, who had been sent out by a bishop of Late Antiquity who had been ordained by a bishop who had been ordained by a bishop who had (etc.) back to Saint Peter, leader of the apostles.

The monks couldn't claim a similar apostolic heritage (since monasticism only began a few centuries AD), but they certainly could assert that by living in common, sharing their possessions, they were following the life of the earliest Christians, as described in the Bible, in Acts of the Apostles.  Hah!  Apostolic after all!  This meant they felt they really shouldn't be judged by a bishop who lived like an aristocrat, with his own house, his own servants, his own meat for dinner rather than bread and stewed leeks (plus maybe some nice lentils).

The monastery of Cluny, for example, spent much of the eleventh and twelfth centuries claiming exemption from their local bishop, the bishop of Mâcon.  The bishop was not convinced, even when the monks got the pope on their side.

Even if a bishop and monastery were not fighting about oversight, they often disagreed over which one the saints of the region loved best.  At the city of Auxerre, for example, all the bishops, starting with the fifth-century Bishop Germanus, were buried at the monastery soon named St.-Germain for him.  So obviously the early sainted bishops must love the monastery best.  The bishops at the cathedral differed.  (The image below is the cathedral, though the current structure  dates to the thirteenth century, not the fifth.)

At Tours, there was comparable competition between three churches, the cathedral, where Saint Martin had been a bishop at the end of the fourth century; the monastery (Marmoutier) he founded outside of town; and the basilica where he was buried.

Within a particular region, different monasteries would compete for which one had precedence.  In Ghent in eleventh-century Flanders, on what was then the border between the Holy Roman Empire and the French kingdom, two monasteries both claimed to have been the original foundation of Saint Amand, who first brought Christianity to the region centuries earlier.  Saint Peter's, up on the hill above town, rewrote the vita (a saint's biography) of Amand, explaining how he came wandering into pagan Ghent and decided that up on a hilltop was the perfect place for a monastery.

Amand had named his house, the monks of Saint Peter's continued confidently, for the leader of the Apostles.  Obviously, they continued, the monastery down by the river in town, Saint Bavo's, was named for some later, clearly inferior saint.  Now archaeology indicates that Saint Bavo's was in fact the first monastery in town, and the monks there had records to prove it! (or so they said).  For a generation the two Ghent monasteries had the same abbot when they were both recovering from Viking raids, and this was an excellent chance for the monks of both to paw through the other's archives and steal or rewrite what they found.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Religion as comfort?

These days most people who follow a religion find it comforting.  They take it as reassurance that, as bad as things may be here, a better world awaits.  It also tells them that the universe is not just a series of random events but has an overall plan, or at least direction, even if we can't always recognize the plan.

These days, most Christians assume they will go to heaven when they die.  Studies suggest that most don't even really believe in the devil or in hell.  A lot feel assured that they are saved.

While medieval and modern Christian theology are actually not radically different, the way the religion was perceived and the message it conveyed were very different.  Medieval religion was not comforting.  It was scary.

No one would have tried to comfort someone whose family member had just died by saying they had gone to a "better place."  Instead they would offer to arrange for prayers for the soul of the deceased, to see if they could possibly get them out of purgatory, if not indeed hell.  The liturgy for the dead wasn't sweet songs about passing over to the "other side."  Instead it was the Dies Irae, a poem about the "day of wrath."  Judgment was coming, and everyone was in trouble.

No one would have assumed they were saved.  Instead they would have assumed they were damned.  This was, not surprisingly, very worrying.  Religion did not comfort.  Rather, it provided tools to use against the horrors that it also provided.  But everyone knew how weak these tools were.  Demons roamed the world, seeking the destruction of souls, and even the most holy person was never safe.

One had a better shot at salvation if one were a member of the organized church, as a priest, monk, or nun.  Medieval churches are still thick across Europe, many with very tiny congregations, if any.  But didn't they have a big medieval congregation? you ask.  No, not really.  The churches might minister to the locals, but for an awful lot of them, they primarily served the body of monks or nuns or canons who lived there and spent much of their day in liturgy and prayer. A much larger proportion of the population went into the church than is the case today.

Families who sent their sons (or to a lesser extent daughters) into the church weren't trying to get rid of excess mouths.  They were hoping to have an insider praying for them.  And a lot of people in the church had "converted" (as it was called) to the religious life by their own decision, often against parental wishes.

Protestants tend to think of Jesus as their savior.  Medieval Christians of course assumed that Christ dying on the cross gave them at least a shot at avoiding hell, but they held Him in too much awe to get "personal" about it.  Rather they turned to the saints, who might help them avoid hell, even though they all knew they deserved it.

Note that all these concerns were concerns of the well educated.  It was the uneducated peasant or urban worker who was likely to tell you they didn't believe in religion.  Marx in the nineteenth century called religion the "opiate of the masses," but he was definitely not talking about medieval religion.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on the medieval church and religion, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Stigmata

Stigmata seem weird to the modern person, even most devout Christians:  marks that suggest the wounds of the Crucifixion appearing on a living person who isn't Jesus.  And yet the stigmata were (relatively) common in the late Middle Ages.

The first person to display stigmata was Saint Francis of Assisi (d. 1226).  The story was that Christ appeared to him on a mountain top and marked his hands and feet with wounds that looked like wounds from being nailed to the Cross.  He was also supposed to have a wound in his side that would not heal.  Francis, who was an extremely humble person (much more so than the Jesus of the Bible, who told people very firmly what-was-what), seems to have hidden these wounds, which kept on bleeding intermittently.  His closest followers, however, found out about them, which is why we know about them now.

The above image is a picture of Francis painted about a century later by Cimabue.  It shows stigmata.

Francis was considered a saint immediately upon his death, though it took another two years for him to be officially so declared (the current Pope Francis took his name from him).  He was buried deep, because his followers were concerned that otherwise people might want to get a relic, a finger bone or toe bone or the like.

He was however exhumed in the nineteenth century during some renovations of the church at Assisi.  The story is that he had bones looking like nails (though made of bone) protruding from the wrists of his skeletal hands.

Fact?  Fiction?  Hard to say about any of this, because we aren't there to see for ourselves.  But in a way it hardly matters.  What matters is if people believe and if they act on their beliefs.

In the centuries after Francis, a number of other highly religious people were marked with stigmata and frequently were declared saints.  The vast majority of them were women.  For example, Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), the other patron saint of Italy (besides Francis), was said to have received the stigmata.  She also wrote chiding letters to the pope and brokered peace treaties between warring Italian city-states.  Though stigmata have become far less common in recent centuries, there are still cases.  Many are denounced as frauds, but at least one twentieth-century case was declared to have baffled doctors.

Declaring stigmata a result of hysteria or easy bruising sort of misses the point.  Stigmata are supposed to show that the person is truly trying to imitate Christ, and that Christ recognizes that they are succeeding.  Certainly some people have injured themselves deliberately in a pathetic effort to get attention, but if a religious person devoutly believes that her strenuous efforts to be holy have been recognized by God, it does neither her nor us any good to tell her that she brought it all on through hysteria.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

Saint Martin

It's November, time to talk about Saint Martin.  Between the election and Veterans' Day it's easy to lose track, but his feast day was November 11, and that day was an important one for medieval people, as rents and the like were often due then (at the end of the harvest).  In parts of Belgium they still have parades in his honor, and some children get presents from him, rather than having to wait for Saint Nicholas almost a month later.

As I noted earlier, although Gaul (France) by the late sixth century had a lot of saints, many of these are not quite as historical as one would like (and had not been revered until sixth-century bishops conveniently discovered their burial places).  But Martin (d. 397) is a historical figure, probably about the first historical saint of Gaul.

He originally came from what is now part of Hungary and was then part of the Roman Empire.  He appears to have converted to Christianity as a youth, just as Christianity was becoming widely tolerated and indeed encouraged in the Empire, but he was still expected to join the army, as all sturdy lads were supposed to do.  He traveled great distances with the troops, getting as far as Amiens, in northwestern France.

Here, according to legend, he had his most famous experience.  Riding along on a wet, cold night, wrapped up in his military cloak, he spotted a poor, ragged beggar.  Feeling sorry for him, Martin cut his cloak in two to share, as depicted centuries later in El Greco's famous painting (where, incidentally, Martin doesn't look anything like a Roman soldier).

To his surprise and understandable shock, the beggar turned into Christ.  This got his attention, as it would certainly have gotten mine, and Martin decided to give up the army life for the religious life.

Monasticism at this time was just starting in the West, although it had been around in the eastern Mediterranean for a century.  Martin founded the first known monastery in Gaul in Tours.  He also became bishop of Tours; the story is that he didn't want to become bishop and tried hiding so they couldn't make him, but the geese among which he was hiding gave him away by honking.  He appears to have been a somewhat disturbing bishop, who followed a rough and simple life rather than the more comfortable life many of his contemporaries chose.

After his death, at least three churches in Tours all claimed precedence over the others on the grounds that Martin loved them best:  Marmoutier, the monastery he founded (the name is a variation of Martini monasterium, Martin's monastery); the cathedral where he had been bishop; and the basilica outside of town where he was buried.  Pilgrims would rub his stone sarcophagus to get saint-dust, until actual holes started appearing in it.

His cape (or at least the half that remained) became an important relic in its own right.  Around the year 900, in the aftermath of Viking invasions, the ancestors of the French Capetian dynasty became titular abbots of Martin's monastery and took the cape as their special possession.  Hugh Capet, first king of the dynasty in 987, got his nickname from the cape.

Martin is the patron saint of beggars, of clothing makers, and of geese-keeping.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Martyrs

A martyr is someone who dies for their faith.  Originally in the early Christian church, only a martyr could be a saint.  Once Christianity became the dominant religion, however, it became much harder to die for one's faith, and "confessor" saints became the norm, people who "confessed" their religiosity through the holiness of their life and the miracles they worked (especially after death).

Interestingly, in the US after 911 "martyr" has become a pejorative term.  Those who crashed planes into the World Trade Center claimed they were willing to die for Islam.  (Many Muslims point out that this sure doesn't look like the faith they know, but that's a separate issue.)  Thus "martyr" and "terrorist" have been linked for many in the twenty-first century.  But in the Middle Ages martyrs were greatly admired.

The New Testament itself tells the story of Saint Stephen "protomartyr" (i.e. first martyr), put to death for believing in Christ.  Many churches in the West were dedicated to him, starting in the fifth century.

The West had very few saints before the sixth century, but in the sixth century a great many bones of early martyrs were discovered.  These people, it was universally agreed, had died while trying to convert the pagans of the Roman Empire, or else had been rounded up and put to death by pagan emperors like Nero or Diocletian.  The catacombs of Rome were full of bones, and the Christians were sure that a great many of these were the bones of Christian martyrs put to death in the Coliseum.

Elaborate accounts of the lives and deaths of those who had first brought Christianity to the provinces of the Empire were put together.  The city of Lyon traditionally had 177 martyrs, all supposedly put to death for their faith in the second century.  Attempts were made to name them all, though some of their names, like "Rhône River" or "Mature," seem at best odd.  Other missionaries to the pagans were sent out from Lyon, including Marcellus and Benignus, who in essence had a saint-off contest--they headed north, one on either side of the river, to see who could be martyred first (Marcellus won, or lost depending on your point of view).

By the late sixth century, elaborate explanations were being given for why the martyrs of the second and third centuries were forgotten for a few centuries, only to be rediscovered in the fifth or sixth.  The 177 martyrs of Lyon, for example, were said to have been burned and their ashes thrown in the river--though by the end of the sixth century a church in Lyon would tell anyone interested that it had those ashes, and indeed had had them all the time, since Christians (apparently too timid to be martyred themselves) had secretly pulled them from the river and buried them suitably.

It is easy to doubt the historicity of most of the West's martyr-saints, even though most western dioceses had a (supposed) martyr for their first bishop.  By the fifth and sixth centuries, with religious persecution far in the past, the West instead started producing historically verifiable confessor saints.

Martyrdom was still preferred, however.  Someone practicing extreme asceticism (living in the desert alone, eating almost nothing) was described as almost like a martyr.  Those who left the ordinary world for the monastery were said to be practicing a "bloodless martyrdom."  A priest or monk who was killed by a layman was presumed to be a martyr, though he would still need some good posthumous miracles for real proof.

When knights headed off on Crusade, starting at the end of the eleventh century, it was suggested that they might wear the crown of martyrdom if they died in the Holy Land.  However, dying of disease or shipwreck (as many did who did not make it back) was hard to construe as martyrdom, and even those killed in battle with Muslims didn't look all that saintly to those who might otherwise have declared them saints.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Relics and reliquaries

As I discussed in an earlier post, saints acted as mediators between humans and the divine in medieval Christianity--as indeed they still do in modern Catholicism.  Saints were not distant figures, because medieval churches would still have a piece of them, their relics.

The early church was slightly leery of the idea of preserving body parts of the holy dead.  Certainly they buried them reverently, but the first time that a bishop put bits of the bones of a saint into an altar was at the end of the fourth century.  Saint Augustine, initially uncertain about the practice, became an enthusiastic supporter in the fifth century.

He was convinced because he believed they could work miracles.  The bones of Saint Stephen, who is mentioned in the New Testament as the first martyr (someone killed for his faith), gained a great deal of attention at this time, and churches all over Europe were dedicated in his honor.  Stephen was soon joined by other saints, both "universal" saints like Mary and local holy men and women, who would be revered where they were buried and who would be considered likely to listen to the prayers of their neighbors.

A relic trade quickly grew up, bringing bones especially from the Roman catacombs to churches that needed relics.  Medieval people did not automatically believe every bone was a relic.  If there was any doubt, they would test it, for example by throwing it into a fire and seeing if it hopped out, or trying to see if it would work a miracle.  Scientific method in action.  (Click here for more on medieval miracles.)

Similarly, medieval people were suspicious of people willing to sell relics--who would want to get rid of a real relic?  So if a church did buy a relic, they would usually do so from someone who claimed to have stolen it.  These "holy thefts" were considered only to be possible if the saint was willing to leave--probably because the church where their relics were located was not treating them right.  If someone wanted to steal relics which did not want to go, they would become enormously heavy, or the thief would find it impossible to leave town.

Relics could be classified as first-class or second-class.  First-class relics were actual pieces of the dead saint.  Second-class relics were things the saint had touched or used, like items of clothing.  Some of the  best-known second-class relics were the (supposed) Crown of Thorns, brought from the Holy Land to Paris in the thirteenth century (it is still preserved at the Ste.-Chapelle), and the "chemise" of the Virgin, kept at Chartres, supposedly the nightgown Mary was wearing when she gave birth to Jesus.

Relics were generally kept in reliquaries.  These boxes were beautifully decorated, often inset with jewels.  Sometimes the reliquary would be in the shape of the body part--for example, an arm bone might be kept in a reliquary shaped like an arm.  Sometimes the reliquary portrayed the saint herself.

For important festivals and councils, the reliquaries would be taken out of the church and become part of the procession.  A conference between the abbots and bishops of a number of different churches would also be considered a conference between the saints who had been brought along.  Although saints (like God) could be accessed anywhere, they were considered to be most present with their relics.  Just because they were dead didn't mean that they weren't still alive and part of the community.

A late medieval French king (Louis XI) wouldn't go out without a certain number of relics pinned to his clothes.  This sort of thing strikes many moderns as "superstition," but it is important not to be so dismissive.  As I discussed earlier, superstition is an action unrelated to the desired outcome (like wearing lucky socks), whereas the saints helped protect the king.

One may think of saints and their relics as something for days of long ago.  But during World War II, when American fighters were bombing the French city of Amiens (held by the Germans), the priests of the cathedral took out their saint's reliquary and showed the saint the danger.  The last bombing run stopped just short of the gorgeous fourteenth-century cathedral.  Hard to argue with success!

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on medieval religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Joan of Arc

Joan of Arc is the only Catholic saint who was originally declared a heretic and burned at the stake by the Catholic church.

She was certainly a remarkable person by any criteria.  She was a village girl, born in Domrémy in Lorraine (France) around 1412.  By this time, the fifteenth century, people had last names; hers was d'Arc (so she has nothing to do with Noah's Ark, some student exams to the contrary).  From girlhood, she had visions of saints who spoke to her.

There is no question that she heard voices.  In the Middle Ages, the question was whether these were the voices of saints or angels.  Angels were decided on definitively in the early twentieth century, when she was declared a saint, but for many historians the question has been which psychological condition she suffered from.  Different eras seek different explanations.

At the age of 17, under the inspiration of the angelic voices (as she certainly considered them), she set off to meet with Charles VII.  He was living in exile, not yet crowned, because the Hundred Years War was going on, and the English held northern France, including Reims, where French kings were traditionally crowned.  She managed to persuade him that the saints wanted him crowned, and he provided her with armor and knights and sent her off to Orléans, which was held by the English.

Here, to everyone's surprise except perhaps her own, she inspired a great victory.  (You can still buy Jeanne d'Arc refrigerator magnets in the gift shop of Orléans cathedral.)  With this victory, it was now possible for Charles to cross the Loire into northern France, and Joan got him to Reims and got him crowned.

She continued to have success against the English, enough that Charles may have become jealous of her reputation.  When she was captured in battle, he made no attempt to ransom her.  The English tried her for heresy, based in part on the voices and in part on a charge of cross-dressing, found her guilty (no surprise), and had her burned at the stake in 1431.  She was still only nineteen.  (How many of us have led victorious armies in our teens, defying all gender expectations?  It would be good to skip the part about being burned at the stake, however.)

The French never believed she had been a heretic, and in the following years, inspired in part by her example, they finally drove the English out of France and ended the war.  The pope was persuaded to reopen the case in the 1450s and declared that it had not been a fair trial, although she was not officially made a saint until 1920.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on medieval saints and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

What happens when we die?

As I discussed in an earlier post, rather than denying death as does modern western society, medieval Christianity embraced it.  Death was good, they asserted often enough and loudly enough that they may have almost believed it.

There was at any rate a fairly clear idea of what happened after death.  Interestingly, the Bible never actually says that if we are all good little boys and girls we will go to heaven and become angels when we die (the New Testament talks about overcoming death, but there are no pearly gates or halos to anticipate).  But once it became clear that the New Age that the Messiah was supposed to usher in seemed rather slow to appear, people settled on expecting a glorious afterlife, not a glorious life here on earth.

The straightforward version was that we would all lie in our coffins until Judgment Day, when the trumpet would blow (see the trumpeter on the right) and we would be judged, the sinners sent straight to hell for punishment by demons (as in this image), and the righteous gathered into Abraham's bosom.  From the twelfth century on, those in the middle were sent to purgatory so that they could purge themselves from their sins through various sufferings.  The idea of a third place, halfway between heaven and hell, had been around for a while, but it only became formally accepted in the twelfth century.

When you rose again, you got your body back.  Although these days one expects to be a disembodied spirit after death, medieval people knew that when we rise, we rise in the flesh.  (This is still orthodoxy; ask your pastor.)  And it wasn't just any flesh, but specifically yours, all the dust and bits gathered up and reassembled.  You would still be yourself, male or female as the case may be, but improved.  Someone who had been lame would now be able to walk.  Someone who had been obese would now just be pleasantly plump.  Someone who had been anorexic would just be slender.  The one thing that worried them was cannibals.  Since "we are what we eat," they wondered whether the parts of a person which had been absorbed into a cannibal would be part of the original person's body in the afterlife or of the cannibal's.

Now all this happened at the end of Time, but saints were alive and with us right now, rather than having to wait around.  Exactly how this worked was deliberately not contemplated.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval saints

Although of course in medieval Christianity (as in modern Christianity) God the Father was the judge and God the Son was the savior, in day to day religious practice the saints got a lot more attention.

Originally there was no procedure for becoming a saint.  If one had lived a holy life, being recognized as a "living saint," and then worked miracles after death, one was a saint.  These are indeed the criteria still used, but before the twelfth century these determinations were made locally, whereas since the twelfth century they have been centralized in Rome.

Western Europe was Christianized slowly, as indeed was the whole Roman Empire, but by the fifth century all provincial capitals in the Empire had bishops.  However, the west had very few saints.  The city of Rome had by far the most, for its catacombs were full of bones, many of which were identified as Christians put to death under pagan emperors like Nero and Aurelian.  (Early Christians had indeed met for religious service in the catacombs.)

Europe's shortage of saints was solved by the sixth century, for not only were there a number of fifth-century holy bishops who could be declared saints, as well as such holy women as Genovefa of Paris, but Europe's bishops were constantly finding new ones!  Cemeteries outside of town (where the Romans had always put their dead, as discussed here) were as full of bones as were the catacombs.  A few visions would identify a set of bones as someone who had been martyred back in the second or third century while trying to spread Christianity, and once the bones started working miracles, their identity was proven.

Soon churches began being dedicated to saints, as they had not been earlier, and all churches needed relics, bits of bone of a saint, although in some cases a piece of clothing might do.  The cathedral of Chartres, for example, had the "chemise" of the Virgin Mary, the nightgown she was supposedly wearing the night she gave birth to Jesus.

One should of course be very careful, even if one does not believe in saints oneself, in calling them "superstition," as discussed more here.  Medieval people did not automatically believe in every story of a saint.  Bones about which there was doubt would be scientifically tested, as for example being thrown into a fire.  If they jumped back out, they were clearly saints' bones.  Saints were also not some manifestation of "folk" religion, for they were discovered, validated, and promoted by the elite.  They were also not polytheism in disguise, because all agreed that God gave them their power, as His agents.

Although there were some "universal" saints, like the Virgin or Stephen, who appears in the New Testament being put to death for his faith, most saints were local.  They were closer to the people of the region than some universal saint, much less God (who could be frightening), more likely to listen to their concerns.

Saints could be subversive.  They blasted anyone who harmed "their" churches--which usually meant the wealthy and powerful.  They also provided hope--no matter how horrible you had been, if you completely changed your ways, did penance, and made restitution, saints could help you achieve salvation.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on the medieval church, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Death

Part of life in the Middle Ages is death in the Middle Ages.  Modern society essentially deals with death through denial.  "As long as I eat healthy and exercise, nothing bad will happen to me."  Most people die in the hospital, accompanied by last ditch efforts to give them a few more moments of life.

Humans haven't figured out yet what to do about death.  The medieval response, not being able to deny it as we do, was heart-breaking:  they embraced death.

This did not mean they wanted to die, because they didn't.  But they insisted, loudly and repeatedly, that death was good.  You could go to heaven, be reborn in an improved version of your own body, and be very happy.  The saints were dead, but that didn't keep them from being an active part of people's lives.

Alternately, of course, you could go to Hell.  Just as most modern Christians don't worry very much about Hell, most medieval people didn't either, unless they realized they had committed some major sin or were actually dying.  Priests tried to remind them, and the frequency and enthusiasm with which they were reminded suggests few were paying attention.

The requiem mass included the "Dies irae," a poem about God's wrath and begging for mercy.  It's a terrific poem, with a strong melody, composed by an unknown author, incorporated shamelessly into more recent Requiems such as Mozart's and Verdi's.

Dies irae, dies illa,
Favet saeclum in favilla,
Sicut David et Sibilla.

That's the first verse.  It basically can't be translated into English.  In translation it goes, "Day of wrath, on that day, Heaven and earth shall pass away, as David and the Sybil say."  See what I mean?  (The Sybil was a Greek prophetess who, a couple of centuries AD, was supposed to have predicted all the events of the New Testament.)

But in practice medieval Christianity asserted that the dead were not in Hell but were their friends.  This was very different from pagan Rome, which feared the dead and made sure to bury them outside the city walls, so they couldn't sneak in at night.  Above is an image of a sarcophagus, a stone coffin from the early Middle Ages.  Hand-carved from a single piece of stone, a sarcophagus probably cost as much as we'd pay for a Buick.  And it was not just the elite who wanted such a coffin.  Medieval churches were surrounded by them and often built literally over dozens of sarcophagi in their crypts.

Click here for more on medieval Christianity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014