The stuff of miracles : materialising English bishop saints’ shrines in the twelfth to sixteenth centuries

Abstract

Between the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, new episcopal saints and their miracle-working cults emerged across England as direct responses to St Thomas Becket’s murder and canonisation in Canterbury Cathedral. While each church used hagiographies and miracle accounts to legitimise their saints’ divinity, they also relied on objects, specially made and promoted for pilgrims’ physical engagement, to make those holy reputations material too.

In this dissertation, I examine St Thomas Becket’s Canterbury Cathedral pilgrim souvenirs, St William Fitzherbert’s York Minster tomb shrine, and Bishop Edmund Lacy’s beeswax votives, comparing and contrasting their function within their respective cults’ establishment, miracle work, and growth. Whether inspired by St Thomas Becket’s cult success or fashioned in direct competition with it, each of these saints’ cults relied on material objects other than their relics to encourage pilgrim belief in their holy legitimacy and power to heal.

I argue that these objects, previously overlooked as inert and secondary shrine ephemera, were instrumental to their related saint’s emergence and their perceived divinity’s foundation and development. I achieve this via three interdisciplinary case studies examining how each object’s cult promotion, historic inspirations, materials, designs, religious symbolism, monetary value, miraculous functions, and communal reception shaped pilgrim belief in and interaction with their respective saints and their miracle working cults. Where primary source evidence is lacking, I also draw comparisons throughout with other contemporaneous English or continental shrines and their cult objects.

Via a combination of visual, use-wear, historic, textual, economic, and anthropological analysis, I present a new perspective on the multivalent ways pilgrim souvenirs, tombs, and wax votives supported saints’ production and miracles in the middle ages. I also a uncover a new, material story for how Canterbury, York and Exeter’s episcopal saint’s and their cults emerged and grew in relation to each other too.