Abstract
This chapter treats the emergence and the dissemination of the saints’ cult and focuses on Anne’s veneration as a part of the cult of this phenomenon.
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Notes
- 1.
Among those and the books quoted in this volume, that by Matthew Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 is also to be mentioned.
- 2.
St. John Chrysostom, The Cult of the Saints, Selected homilies and letters introduced, translated, and annotated by Wendy Mayer with Bronwen Neil, Crestwood, NY, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006, p. 11.
- 3.
Averil Cameron, Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity: AD 395–700, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 71.
- 4.
Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its rise and function in Latin Christianity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
- 5.
James D. Howard-Johnston, “Introduction”, in J. Howard-Johnston and P. Anthony Hayward (eds.), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, reprinted 2014, p. 3.
- 6.
Dana Stehlíková, The Holy Breast of St Anne, relics and reliquaries in mediaeval Prague: The Pleasure of touching, paper presented at the twentieth International Congress of Mediaeval Studies in Leeds, July 2013.
- 7.
Louth, “Hagiography”, pp. 358–361.
- 8.
Grégoire le Grand/A. de Vogüé (ed.), “Dialogues de Grégoire le Grand”, trans. P. Antin, vols. 1–3, SC, 251, 260, 265, Paris: Cerf, 1978–1980; the critical edition. See also Odo John Zimmerman, Saint Gregory the Great: Dialogues, The Fathers of the Church vol. 39, Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1959; see also Gilbert Dagron, Emperor and Priest: The Imperial Office in Byzantium, trans. J. Birrell, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, reprinted 2007; on p. 95 it is written that Constantine Porphyrogenitus kissed the altar cloth within the sanctuary, and on p. 101 that on another occasion, the same emperor was “presented with the liturgical vessels and relics” and was again given “the cloth to kiss”. We can see that the relics were not only under the altar but also on the table where the sacraments are kept; also there is a point in the history of the Byzantine Church when relics where sewn into the antemison, a cloth kept on the altar, kissed by the priests at the beginning of the Liturgy, and when the necessity arose for such services to be held outside the building of a church, spread by the priests on any table, which could in this way fulfil the function of an altar. The practice has been kept in the Orthodox Church. More on the issue of relics may be found in: The Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla, Société des Bollandistes, Brussels, 1978 and Marie-France Auzépy, “Les Isauriens et 1’espace sacre: 1’eglise et les reliques”; in M. Kaplan (ed.), Le sacré et son inscriptions dans l’espace à Byzance et en occident, University of Sorbonne, Paris, 2001, 13–24, reprinted in M-F., L’histoire des iconoclastes, Paris: ACHC Byz-Association des Amis du Centre d’Histoire et Civilization de Byzance, 2007, pp. 341–352. For competition between rationalist and miraculous aetiologies in the Byzantine period, see John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- 9.
Matthew Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- 10.
Peter Sarris, Matthew Dal Santo, and Phil Booth (eds.), Age of the Saints. Power and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011.
- 11.
St. John Chrysostom, The Cult of the Saints, Selected homilies and letters introduced, translated, and annotated by Wendy Mayer with Bronwen Neil, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2006.
- 12.
Baudoin/Baudouin de Gaiffier d’Hestroy, “L’hagiographie et son public au XIe siècle”, in Miscellanea Historica in honorem Leonis van der Essen, Brussel: Éditions universitaires, 1947, [vols. 1–2],vol. 1, pp. 135–166, reprinted in Études critiques d’hagiographie et d’iconologie, Brussels: Société des Bollandistes (Subsidia Hagiographica, 43), 1967, pp. 475–507; “Une collaboration fraternelle: La dissertation sur S. Ignace par les pères Jean et Ignace Pinius in 1675”, Acta sanctorum, Institutum historicum S. I., Rome, 1956; “A propos des légendiers latins,” Analecta Bollandiana 97, 1979, pp. 57–68; “Études critiques d’hagiographie et d’iconologie”, Subsidia hagiographica 43, Brussels, 1967; Baudouin de Gaiffier, “Les thèmes hagiographiques. Est-il possible d’établir pour chacun d’eux une filiation?”, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 77, 1982, pp. 78–81.
- 13.
Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great, Oxford University Press, 2012. On the same topic, see Peter Sarris, Matthew Dal Santo, and Phil Booth (eds.), Age of the Saints. Power, Conflict, and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2011. On the alternation between belief and scepticism in respect to saints in Byzantium, see John Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, revised edition.
- 14.
Matthew Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult in the Age of Gregory the Great, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. On the same topic, see Peter Sarris, Matthew Dal Santo, and Phil Booth (eds.), Age of the Saints Age of the Saints. Power, Conflict, and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2011 draw explicitly and have Brown’s ideas as a background. Haki Antonsson and Ildar H. Garipzanov, Saints and their lives on the periphery. Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200), Turnhout: Brepols, 2010; Ildar H. Garipzanov, “The cult of St. Nicholas in the Early Christian in the Early Christian North (c. 1000–1150)”, Scandinavian Journal of History, vol. 35, no. 3, 2010, pp. 229–246. I have edited myself a book containing the papers about St. Anne presented at the Congress of Medieval Studies in Leeds in 2013, see Elena Ene D-Vasilescu (ed.), Devotion to St. Anne in Texts and Images. Byzantium to the Middle Ages, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
- 15.
Antony Eastmond, “‘Local’ Saints, Art, and Regional Identity in the Orthodox World after the Fourth Crusade”, Speculum, vol. 78, No. 3 (2003), p. 707.
- 16.
I. H. Garipzanov, “The cult of St. Nicholas”, pp. 229–246.
- 17.
Karl Meisen, Nikolauskult und Nikolausbrauch, Schwann, Düsseldorf, 1931, reprinted 1981; Garipzanov speaks about Maisen’s theory in Garipzanov, “Novgorod and the Veneration of Saints in the eleventh-century Rus’: a comparative view”, in Antonsson and Garipzanov, Saints and their lives on the periphery, pp. 137–138. In order to elaborate on it, he uses as sources (in his footnote 115, p. 142) Andrzej Buko, The Archaeology of Early Medieval Poland: Discoveries-Hypothesis-Interpretations, East-Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450, n.s., 1, Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. 213 and 253–254; and Henryk Paner, “The Spatial Development of Gdansk to the beginning of the 14th century: The Origins of the Old and the Main Town”, in Urbanczyk, Polish Lands at the Turn of the First and the Second Millennia, pp. 23–27 [pp. 15–32].
- 18.
Garipzanov, “The cult of St. Nicholas”, p. 230; Werner Mezger, Sankt Nikolaus, Ostfildern: Zw. Kult u. Klamauk, 1993. When Myra (in today’s Turkey) passed into the hands of the Saracens, some saw it as an opportunity to move the saint’s relics to a more hospitable location. According to the justifying legend, the saint, passing by the city on his way to Rome, had chosen Bari as his burial place. There was great competition for the relics between Venice and Bari. When the latter won, the relics were taken by cart in under the eyes of the lawful Greek custodians and their Muslim masters, and on 9 May 1087 they landed at Bari. A new church was built to shelter Nicholas’s remains and Pope Urban II was present at the consecration of the crypt in 1089. The edifice was officially consecrated in 1197, in the presence of the Imperial Vicar, Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim. Elias, abbot of the nearby monastery of St. Benedict, was named as first archbishop. For information on other saints from the same part of Europe, see Antonsson and Garipzanov, Saints and their lives on the periphery and H. Antonsson, “Saints and Relics in Early Christian Scandinavia”, in Mediaeval Scandinavia, 15 (2005), pp. 51–80.
- 19.
Haakon Christie, “Old Oslo”, Medieval Archaeology, 10 (1966), pp. 45–58 (pp. 48–50), and Lorentz Dietrichson, Sammenlignede Fortegnelse over Norges Kirkebygninger I Middelalderen og Nutiden, Kristiania: Malling, 1888, p. 6.
- 20.
Garipzanov, “Novgorod and the Veneration of Saints in the eleventh-century Rus”, p. 138. MSS 163 and 391 from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; the section dedicated to the twelfth century contains litanies in which St. Nicholas is mentioned. See Michael Lapidge (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Litanies of the Saints, London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1991.
- 21.
Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.
- 22.
Garipzanov, “Novgorod and the Veneration of the Saints in the Eleventh Century Rus”, p. 142. See also Haakon Christie, “Old Oslo”, Medieval Archaeology 10 (1966), pp. 48–50, and Lorentz Dietrichson, Sammenlignede Fortegnelse over Norges Kirkebygninger I Middelalderen og Nutiden, Kristiania: Malling, 1888, p. 6.
- 23.
Haki Antonsson and Ildar H. Garipzanov (eds.), Saints and their lives on the periphery. Veneration of Saints in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe (c. 1000–1200), Turnhout: Brepols, 2010.
- 24.
H. Antonsson, “The early cult of saints in Scandinavia and the conversion: a comparative perspective”, in Antonsson and Garipzanov, Saints and their lives on the periphery, pp. 32–34.
- 25.
Garipzanov, “The cult of St. Nicholas in the Early Christian in the Early Christian North”, p. 230.
- 26.
Gábor Klaniczay, “Conclusion: North and East European Cults of Saints in Comparison with East-Central Europe”, in Antonsson and Garipzanov, Saints and their lives on the periphery, p. 293. Karol Modzelewski, L’Europe des barbares, Paris: Aubier, 2006; he has published also an article on the topic: “Europa romana, Europa feudale, Europa Barbara”, in Bullettino dell’Istututo Storico per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano, vol. 100, 1995–1996, pp. 377–409.
- 27.
Peter Brown, “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” JRS 61 (1971), 80–101; in idem. (reprinted), 1982, p. 148. See also Évelyne Patlagean, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982, pp. 2, 7.
- 28.
Dal Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cult, p. 5.
- 29.
Cameron, The Byzantines, p. 17.
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Ene D-Vasilescu, E. (2018). Anne’s Veneration as a Part of the Cult of the Saints. In: Heavenly Sustenance in Patristic Texts and Byzantine Iconography. New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98986-0_4
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