ANDRE VAUCHEZ
The Middle Ages did not invent the cult of saints, which already, by the end of Christian Antiquity, played an important role in the religious life of the faithful, through the cult rendered to the martyrs and the confessors. Yet this devotion was boosted in the Middle Ages to the point of making it one of the keystones of human relationships with the divine, as we still see today from the innumerable works of art of this period - paintings, sculptures, gold and silver work, windows - dedicated to the menservants and maidservants of God. This cult first took the form of festivals and liturgical ceremonies, which became steadily more numerous between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries. By the Carolingian period, in every church, the clergy celebrated the feasts of the Apostles and the Evangelists and also several universal feasts such as AH Saints (i November), St John the Baptist (24 June), St Laurence (10 August), St Michael (29 September), St Martin (ii November) and the Holy Innocents (28 December), added to which were commemorations specific to each church, that is, of its dedicatee and its patron saint or saints. From the eleventh century on, the commemoration of the faithful dead (sometimes called festum animarum (AH Souls) and celebrated on 2 November), which had been introduced at Cluny by Abbot Odilo (994-1048), was widely adopted; so was the feast of the Conception of the Virgin, which had started in Normandy and England and spread aH over the Continent in the twelfth century, in spite of the protests of St Bernard, who was personally hostile to this devotion. Around 1140, the Decretum of Gratian contained a first official list of the feasts that were obligatory for aH the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church, which was repeated more or less unchanged in the Decretal Conquestus est promulgated by Gregory IX on the same subject in 1232.657 However, these two
Normative texts also recognised the right of the bishops to celebrate in their own dioceses other feasts of saints they believed to be important, a freedom they used so freely that the authors of all the various church reform projects that proliferated from the end of the fourteenth century demanded that the institution of new feasts should be banned, so numerous had they become. In parallel, the very wide circulation ofhistorical martyrologies, in particular that written by Usuard in the Parisian abbey of St Germain des Pres around 875, provided the monks and canons with a basis for the composition of rhythmic offices and hagiographical texts in Latin (Vitae et miracula); in the most important churches these were collected into enormous legendaries per circulum anni covering the whole liturgical year.
World History
