The Audiences for the Medieval Cult of Saints
By Barbara Abou-El-Hai
Gesta, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1991)
Abstract: The medieval cult of saints is generally examined through its organizers, their texts and the spatial and visual environments they sponsored. None the less, whether it emerged spontaneously, as the clergy claimed, or was assiduously cultivated, the cult of saints required an audience. When the audience appears, however, it is often the same one-dimensional, enthusiastic but docile public mentioned in accounts by clergy who complain that their churches are too small to accommodate “countless thousands,” all the while they set up dazzling shrines to encourage still more pilgrimage. Scholars have tended to ignore the complexity of these audiences and their volatile relations with organizers and sponsors.
This paper examines four revealing instances spanning the period of intensive cult activities, from the early eleventh to the late twelfth centuries. The conclusions to be drawn from these four examples-and perhaps by extension for other sites of pilgrimage-suggest that public ceremonies were volatile and by no means guaranteed the authority of sponsors or the consensus of their audiences; that local people and visitors were two distinct constituencies; that images and ceremonies attempting to assimilate the two often failed to create consensus, partly because revenues from the pilgrimage trade did not outweigh the burdens imposed by landlord clergy. Strategic appeals to saints and relics in magical ceremonies, in fact, tended to conceal the rational and pragmatic pursuit of the same objectives through compromise, litigation, and a spectrum of economic schemes.
Introduction: In the Middle Ages the cult of saints was quintessentially a public phenomenon. Its arena was not a private sphere of spirituality but a public orchestration of ceremony. The earliest sustained audiences for the cult of saints were apparently mobilized for the Peace Assemblies in late tenth-century Aquitaine during the disorders following the Viking and Magyar invasions. Clergy faced the living with the dead, warriors and their victims with the relics and bodies of saints, in liturgical postures backed by hierarchical splendor. The Peace Assemblies failed to guarantee peace, but they were spectacularly successful in creating mass audiences.
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