Miraculous

The modernisation of the Roman sanctoral was one of the principal manifestations of this new attitude to the cult of saints on the part of the church. Up to the middle of the twelfth century, almost only the traditional feasts of the Apostles, the Evangelists and the martyrs of the first centuries were celebrated at St John Lateran, the pope's cathedral, and at St Peter's, together with a few great figures in the life of the church such as St Augustine, St Benedict and St Gregory the Great. From 1170 on, their liturgical calendars began to include the feasts of very contemporary saints such as Thomas Becket, whose feast spread rapidly throughout Christendom, Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) and Dominic (d. 1221), founders of the Friars Minor and Preachers, Antony of Padua (d. 1231), the Franciscan preacher and theologian, Elisabeth of Hungary (d. 1231), a princess and lay penitent who had distinguished herself in Thuringia by her love of the poor and her zeal in the service of the sick, and Peter Martyr, the Dominican inquisitor murdered near Milan in 1252 and canonised the year after. In most cases the popes were not content with canonising these persons, but intervened actively on their behalf - for example, when Gregory IX and Alexander IV affirmed the authenticity of the stigmata of St Francis, contested by his detractors - and urged local churches and the religious orders to adopt their cult. This drive to renew the sanctoral was not equally successful everywhere; it was rapid and very marked in the Mediterranean, but much less effective in countries such as Spain, northern France, the Germanic world and England, where the traditional intercessors - in particular local saints - retained aU their prestige until the end of the Middle Ages, and where the new saints had difficulty in becoming established. This can be seen in the case of St Thomas Cantilupe (d. 1282), Bishop of Hereford, whose canonisation in 1320 was greeted by a great outburst of fervour in the west of England, yet whose pilgrimage soon declined, to the point of insignificance by the eve of the Reformation.667 Yet even where the forms of sanctity that were revered remained immutable, a shift can be detected, through the medium of hagiography, in the way in which the saints were represented, and also an increase in their role in the religious life of the faithful. This change owed much to the success of the abbreviated legendaries, such as those of the Dominicans Jean de MaiUy, Bartholomew of Trent and Thomas of Cantimpre, and, most influential of aH, that of James of Voragine whose famous Golden Legend, of around 1265, survives in innumerable Latin manuscripts and was translated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries into every vernacular language in Christendom. It was through texts such as these, which were discussed by the clergy in their sermons and illustrated by artists in many paintings and frescoes, that the saints really penetrated the religious life of the faithful. The exempla - colourful and moralising stories, often taken from the Lives of saints and designed to fire the imagination of, while at the same time edifying, the listener - quoted by the clergy in their sermons helped to make them better known, if not in their historical reality at least as models of faith and piety. The saints remained, admittedly, in the majority of these works and in the hagiographical texts of the age, both astonishing and admirable persons, in their life and in their miracles, and their behaviour often went well beyond the bounds of human nature. In the thirteenth century, however, the marvellous biography tended to replace the thaumaturgic marvel: we remain always in the sphere of the marvellous (or rather the mirabilis) but the admirable element is found in the life of the saint (conversatio), which was presented as a series of heroic or extraordinary actions. This tendency strengthened in the fourteenth century, when new aspects of sanctity, such as prophesy, visions and revelations, were incorporated by the hagiographers into their writings; the image of the stigmatic St Francis, meanwhile, disseminated throughout Christendom by the Friars Minor, revealed a new expression of the supernatural in the miraculous identification of the body of a man with that of Christ crucified. By the end of this process of the popularisation of sainthood, the servants of God were still exceptional beings, gifted with abnormal merits or powers, but their persons, which had become familiar to everyone, now inspired affectionate devotion rather than reverential fear.