Medieval Saints: miracles, relics and pilgrimage

Greg Jenner is joined in medieval Europe by historian Dr Simon Yarrow and comedian Rachel Parris to learn all about the cult of saints and their relics. The veneration of saints still plays an important role in the lives of Catholics all over the world, but what did the cult of saints – and especially devotion to their relics – play in medieval Europe? This episode explores all aspects of the topic: who became a saint, and how the canonisation process changed over the centuries as the papacy tried to more tightly control it. What sorts of signs and miracles proved someone’s sanctity. What relics are, and how medieval churches acquired them, both legitimately and illegitimately. What people in the Middle Ages thought saints could do for them, and the pilgrimages they took to their tombs in search of aid. And it asks whether everyone believed in the power of saints’ relics – and the gruesome fate awaiting some sceptics. If you’re a fan of marvellous miracle stories, the fascinating history of the Catholic Church, and the odd gory martyrdom, you’ll love our episode on medieval saints. If you want more from Rachel Parris, listen to our episode on Eleanor of Aquitaine. And for more on the history of Catholicism, check out our episodes on the Early Medieval Papacy, Medieval Ghost Stories and Benedetta Carlini. You’re Dead To Me is the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Every episode, Greg Jenner brings together the best names in history and comedy to learn and laugh about the past. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Lily Tidman Written by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Dr Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Dr Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Gill Huggett Senior Producer: Dr Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: Philip Sellars

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Jenner?

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• 1:40Greg Jenner?

  Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today, we are polishing our reliquaries and joining a pilgrimage to medieval Christendom to learn about the cult of saints and relics. And to help us tell our aesthetics from our martyrs, we have two very special guests. In history corner, she's senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of Birmingham, where he specializes in the cult of saints, relics, miracles and religious cultures in the early and central Middle Ages. You might have read his wonderful book, The Saints: A Short History. It's Dr Simon Yarrow, welcome Simon.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  Great, thanks for having me.

• 2:18Greg Jenner?

  Delighted to have you here. And in comedy corner, she's a BAFTA-nominated comedian, actor, improviser, author and musician. What a CV. You've seen her all over the TV, on The Mash Report, Late Night Mash, Mock the Week, Q: Why Would I Lie to You? You may have seen her improv skills in the hilarious Jane Austen improv show Ostentatious, which I've seen many times and love. Maybe you've read her wonderful new book, Introducing Mrs Collins, on a sort of Austen spin-off. And you'll definitely remember her from our past episode of You're Dead to Me about Eleanor of Akitain, it's Rachel Parris, welcome back Rachel.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  Hello, thanks, a delight to be back.

• 2:49Greg Jenner?

  We did medieval history together last time.

• 2:51Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:52Greg Jenner?

  Which is helpful.

• 2:53Speaker 05

  Yes, so I should have retained some of that information.

• 2:56Greg Jenner?

  You should have. I don't want to judge you early on.

• 2:59Speaker 05

  And yet, here we are.

• 3:01Greg Jenner?

  What do you know of the medieval world? Are you comfortable?

• 3:04Speaker 05

  Am I comfortable in the medieval world? As a woman, no. I think there's little pockets of knowledge here and there.

• 3:12Greg Jenner?

  You were a chorister, right? You've sung.

• 3:14Speaker 05

  I was.

• 3:15Greg Jenner?

  You've sung medieval?

• 3:16Speaker 05

  I've sung medieval polyphony.

• 3:17Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  At university. Yeah, other people went out and got pissed. I sung medieval polyphony. So beautiful, beautiful music. I've had quite a lot to do with a lot of different churches. So I was raised Methodist, so obviously no saints. But then, I've worked in quite a lot of different denominations of the church, and I'm quite obsessed with churches, including Catholic churches and like in across Europe. The first thing I do is go to a cathedral or church.

• 3:45Greg Jenner?

  Gotcha.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  So I've probably seen a lot of statues and commemorations of saints, but I don't know much about them.

• 3:51Greg Jenner?

  Okay, well, that's fine, because that's today's job, is finding out more. And obviously, yeah, you know, today we're talking about saints and relics, which are, you know, they're hugely important to Catholics, to people in the Eastern Orthodox Church, many denominations of Christianity. So, what do you know?

• 4:10Greg Jenner?

  This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, or viewer, hello, might know about today's subject. And when it comes to the medieval cult of saints and their relics, maybe you're thinking of blood, bones and brutal deaths, because they do figure. Honestly, that would be true. Maybe you've seen reliquaries in beautiful European churches, such as Rachel's tour of Europe, or visited a medieval pilgrimage site like Canterbury, for example. And in pop culture, saints and their relics feature heavily in books, TV shows, films, such as Cadphile, Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, Conclave, of course, the novel and the movie. And then, of course, there's Rosalía's acclaimed album Lux, which is chock full of tracks inspired by women saints. But what exactly are relics? Why did medieval people venerate them so?

• 4:55Greg Jenner?

  And how many forms do you have to fill in to authenticate a saint? Let's find out. Right, Dr Simon, we'll start with some basics.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 5:05Greg Jenner?

  We're looking at medieval Christendom. What is medieval? What is Christendom?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah, good questions, good place to start. Yeah, basically, the Middle Ages is a long kind of intermission between Classical Rome and the Renaissance period. So we're thinking around kind of 500 to 1500. And it's a phrase, the Middle Ages or the medieval period or Latin Christendom, it's first sort of initially invented by this bunch of liberal kind of humanists of the 15th century Renaissance period. And they used it to distinguish themselves, to kind of emphasize a continuity with the classical past.

• 5:44Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  And so it's rather stuck, as this phrase, and it becomes a kind of mirror or a yardstick for us modern historians to kind of measure what's backwards and what's progressive about our own history. And so it gets a bad press, and it's a long period of time.

• 6:04Greg Jenner?

  It's a thousand years.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Exactly. So we might want to see where the cult of saints might fit into that, and whether we think of it as something that's relevant to us or needs to be left consigned to the Dark Ages.

• 6:16Greg Jenner?

  Don't you say Dark Ages. All the historians watching this are now terrified and angry, because we don't say Dark Ages anymore.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  What do we say?

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Early Middle Ages.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 6:27Greg Jenner?

  Rachel, what would you define a saint as? I know, obviously, you didn't grow up in Catholicism, but you know.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  Me? I'm just trying to think of the ones that I know, like, I don't know if they're medieval, but like St Francis of Assisi.

• 6:41Greg Jenner?

  Sure, yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 05

  Nice to animals.

• 6:43Greg Jenner?

  Okay.

• 6:44Speaker 05

  And was St Hilda, Hilda, was there St Hilda? Did she drive the snakes out of somewhere or something?

• 6:53Greg Jenner?

  That's St Patrick, I think, probably.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  Oh, what did Hilda do?

• 6:56Speaker 04

  She convened a great synod in the 7th century, which was there in Whitby, that's correct, she was abbess at Whitby.

• 7:02Speaker 05

  Yes, I've seen, yes, and forgotten that. It's a running theme. I think they've, oh, and there's the one who got all poles through him. Who's that one? Like, there's all the pictures.

• 7:14Speaker 04

  You thinking of Sebastian?

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, possibly.

• 7:16Greg Jenner?

  That's Arrows, isn't it?

• 7:17Speaker 05

  Loads of poles all through him, yeah. I think saints have usually had a life particularly dedicated to God.

• 7:27Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 7:28Speaker 05

  In some way. I feel like they've usually been a monk or something like that. Like, they've already had a monastic or nun-like life, and that they've done, something dramatic has happened, like poles through your body, snakes, I don't know, fought a dragon, like, or with Francis of Assisi, married an animal, no, I don't know, I just feel like something to do with animals.

• 7:52Greg Jenner?

  Is that how the medieval church defined a saint?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Pretty much. I mean, I think, I suppose there are three main elements, and one of them is, I think you've got this, which is basically to have lived a holy life, to have been a holy person in some way, and there are lots of ways of being that, including having poles stuck into you. And the other idea is that you're kind of known to God, that there is a kind of connection that you've established, in which you're recognized as a saint and by God. And then, the other element is to have a sort of public cult. So, public veneration of this person.

• 8:29Speaker 05

  During your lifetime?

• 8:30Speaker 04

  Usually after they've, after they're dead, yeah. The definition really kind of becomes solidified and made official with after death often, and with the observation of a cult.

• 8:41Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Speaker 05

  I don't think I'd trust a saint who had a cult during his lifetime.

• 8:46Greg Jenner?

  Oh.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  I feel like you should eschew that.

• 8:48Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  And not want it.

• 8:50Greg Jenner?

  You think, modesty, you think they should be.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 8:53Greg Jenner?

  Right, okay.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's the art of humble bragging, isn't it? I think it's kind of, you've got to somehow indicate to people that you're special, but without being too conspicuous about it.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, don't look at the poles through me, please. Please.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  I'm just being here with poles in.

• 9:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:13Greg Jenner?

  I'm being told by producer Steve that St Hilda did have snakes in her story, so you are, you are correct that the snakes were associated.

• 9:20Speaker 05

  Thank you, producer Steve. I went to St Hilda's college, so I should, I should know that.

• 9:24Greg Jenner?

  That's Oxford, isn't it? Yes, yes, there you go. The thing that we probably should be talking about today is the saints' relics. Do you know what a relic is? Do you know what the official definition or how do you?

• 9:34Speaker 05

  I don't know the official definition, but I think it's either an accessory or a body part of a saint that is kept in a church, sometimes in a special little box, and you can come and worship it. And it's treated as though it's imbued with holiness in itself, and sometimes they're quite gross. Is that fair?

• 9:54Speaker 04

  Any kind of body parts, arms, hands, foreskin.

• 10:00Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Eyeballs, there's an eyeball in Stonyhurst College that they keep there, the Jesuits, which is pretty special from the period of persecution in the 16th century. There is in fact a kind of a tongue of St Anthony of Padua as well, which was found in 1263. And I think, I think that the symbolism of the tongue is that he was good at preaching.

• 10:25Greg Jenner?

  Right.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Not gossiping. It was, he wasn't a scold, he was, he was a preacher.

• 10:30Speaker 05

  It was a good tongue.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a good tongue.

• 10:32Speaker 05

  Not a bad tongue.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  But you keep all these things in little boxes, caskets, but also jewellery in books. You can have, you can have kind of them encrusted on books, you can have these things called speaking reliquaries, which are shaped in the kind of, in the way, in the kind of, the form of the relic that survives. So as an arm, or busts, like a head, it's meant to stimulate curiosity. It's also usually very gruesome.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:02Greg Jenner?

  As a historian, we're talking about the medieval world, but obviously the history of Christianity begins in the late antiquity, you know, ancient world, really. So when do we first see this relic devotion being part of Christian faith, part of the community?

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, the classic example that historians cite is Polycarp. But Bishop Polycarp was the Bishop of Smyrna on the Aegean coast of Anatolia in the second century.

• 11:29Greg Jenner?

  So that's what we now call Turkey, right?

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah. And he was pushed to do cult to a kind of imperial altar and refused to do so. And for refusing to do so so conspicuously as a bishop, he was burnt. He was put on a pyre and burnt. And he was very stubborn and he refused to burn for quite some time. So they had to skewer him with a spear.

• 11:57Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  And eventually.

• 11:58Speaker 05

  It just comes up, doesn't it?

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Poles all the time, isn't it? And eventually he died and he was burnt right down to his ashes and his bones. And this is one of the earliest mentions of the collection of bones and ashes by a community after the death of a persecuted Christian. And they're venerated and there's a celebration, what's called a feast day or the birthday, which is, i.e. the death day, the martyr day of the saints. And these lay down the kind of foundations of what's to come. And it really takes off in the fourth century and the fifth century.

• 12:35Greg Jenner?

  So the fourth century will be the era of Constantine the Great, when Christianity is became, becomes an official religion in Rome.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a real, there's a real interest in martyrdom in the fourth century that's part of the cult of Constantine and the church triumphant, as it's called.

• 12:50Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. So today we're portioning up our pilgrimage in sort of chats through a series of sort of questions, you know, the who, the what, the when, the where, the why, the how, you know, all the classic questions. I think we should start with the who. Who gets to become a saint in the medieval period? And if we, if we start our period in the, in the sixth century, you know, in the 500s, who qualifies?

• 13:11Speaker 04

  I would start a bit earlier and I would say, you know, to begin with, if we think of St Paul's, St Paul's epistles, his letters to different Christian communities, he always addresses them as holy, as saints. So to Paul, anyone who's baptized in the Christian faith is a saint, is a holy person. So it's fair, you know, sociologically, that's quite interesting because it means, you know, it's, it's highly participatory and it's very kind of egalitarian. And of course, you don't get to choose whether you're a victim of persecution. So there's lots of, lots of people from very backgrounds can end up being martyrs during the phases of persecution under the Roman Empire. But then from the fifth and sixth centuries onwards, we tend to get very much elite figures

• 13:53Speaker 04

  who are in the role of bishops, they're often called confessors and figures of high status. There's even, there are even cults of kind of royal dynasties where, where holy blood runs through royal blood as well in descent lines in lineages.

• 14:10Greg Jenner?

  Saint Louis in France?

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, he's sort of king of France and he's a saint, right?

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. You could be quite kind of middle class as well. And, and so, you know, part of one of the signs of being moral is that you renounce worldly goods. And if you haven't got any worldly goods to renounce in the first place, then it's not as spectacular as if you have lots of wealth.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, you mean.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  So as you say, St Francis came from a very wealthy family and he had, he stood to inherit lots of property. He makes his name as a saint to begin with by renouncing all that. In fact, he kind of strips naked in front of the bishop and his family and renounces his inheritance to become, to become a saint.

• 14:49Speaker 05

  For me, I don't know if I'm allowed to qualify saints or not, but for me, I like the saints that are, that are not rich. That feels like, that should be necessary to be a saint.

• 14:58Greg Jenner?

  Or a saint who has surrendered being rich, someone as a saint has gone, I don't need it, you have it, I'm going to go and hang out with the goats.

• 15:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:03Greg Jenner?

  You know, that's, you know, that's, so actually, once we, once we finish the martyrdoms, right, you get the early martyrs who stand up for their faith and are horribly killed in violent ways. But once martyrdom ends and Christianity is now the official faith of the, of the Roman Empire, you then get a shift in what a saint should be, right? And it's, it's more of a kind of hermit.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:23Greg Jenner?

  What we might call asceticism?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can be an ascetic, you can be, as I mentioned, confessors, so be a kind of bishop in an administrative position, but you can also be a hermit or you can take a vow to join a monastery and observe kind of obedience and chastity and service of various sorts. You can be a teacher or a missionary. There are, there are elements of those kinds of vocations in life that, that, that show up in Vita, which saints' lives. Yeah.

• 15:53Greg Jenner?

  So you can, you can take yourself away from society?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:56Greg Jenner?

  Or you can do the opposite and go out into society to preach and to practice and spread the faith?

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's pretty much it, yeah.

• 16:03Greg Jenner?

  And putting on your David Attenborough hat, how would you spot a saint in its natural habitat? What behaviour are you looking for from a saint? Like what, you know, what, what sort of tells can you sort of go, oh yeah, that's a saint?

• 16:14Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know. I think, again, I've got, with a hermit, I feel like I've got a very particular image in my head of what a hermit looks like. I think it's quite a lot based on Monty Python, really. I see them as being quite muddy and wearing like a sort of hair sack, Hessian type thing and having no earthly goods and living in a cave. I don't know.

• 16:34Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think of them as being quite quiet and humble, but then if you're a missionary or a teacher, you've absolutely got to spread the word, haven't you? So you've got to be quite good at talking to people and being confident about that.

• 16:46Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  So that's a version of a saint that I can't imagine, i.e. motivational speaker saint, with like a sort of Madonna head mic on.

• 16:54Greg Jenner?

  TED Talk.

• 16:55Speaker 05

  TED Talk saint, yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cuthbert's a good example of that. He's, or he kind of combines the two. He's, he's an ascetic, he spends a lot of time as a hermit and he's also a bishop. And he's sort of, he's, he's famous for kind of travelling, walking on foot, not, not on a horse, but walking on foot around his diocese, preaching to people. So Cuthbert's a good, a good one for, for that.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  I remember that name.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  That job description, yeah.

• 17:20Greg Jenner?

  Are there any other types we need to mention yet? Any other things that a saint would do that people might go, aha, saint behaviour?

• 17:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's some great ones. There's, there's all the kind of repertoire of ascetic behaviour, including kind of fasting. And there, there are a group in Syria who, who go foraging, they kind of, they, they go around eating the grass like animals, like livestock as a kind of form of humility. You have to endure extremes of temperature. So people like, you know, Cuthbert used to have lots of cold baths. We've got Simon the Stylight.

• 17:52Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  Who set a trend, you know, this guy? He's, he's spent almost 40 years at the top of a pillar.

• 17:58Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  In Aleppo, which must have been incredibly hot.

• 18:02Greg Jenner?

  So we're in Syria, incredibly hot.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  He sat on the top of a pillar?

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:06Greg Jenner?

  It's like a sort of weird David Blaine thing, isn't it?

• 18:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  Did he talk?

• 18:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  Like, did he shout down?

• 18:12Greg Jenner?

  Help! Bring me a sandwich! Yeah, well, exactly. Who's feeding him, right?

• 18:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. One of my favourites is another Simon, there, there, Simon of Amessa, who's a holy fool. The holy fool type of saint is really fun. So he's, there are kind of mix of this kind of classical precedent, Diogenes and, and Jesus speaking truth to power.

• 18:36Greg Jenner?

  So the sort of philosophy type?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly, yeah. And he, he's famous for dragging dead dogs around the town, for throwing nuts at women. And, and he also did lots of funny walks as well.

• 18:51Greg Jenner?

  Oh my word, he is Monty Python.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, he is, yeah. So he's a, he's a good one.

• 18:55Speaker 05

  I did my dissertation on the holy fool archetype. But it was based in opera, but Wagner and the Holy Fool, and I talked about Parsifal.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  But with this holy fool, so is there an element of like innocence to it, but also clowning?

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely.

• 19:12Speaker 05

  A little bit of misogyny?

• 19:12Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, I mean, chucking nuts at people, this is weird.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Subversion, transgression, about making you uncomfortable and challenging you.

• 19:19Greg Jenner?

  Miraculous healers?

• 19:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the kind of basic job requirement for all of these things is being, often being, because, because it kinds of, it's a strong narrative from the Gospels and a lot of these saints' lives are, they kind of get their core from the stories of the, of, of Jesus and the apostles. So, yeah, healing is a, is an important one, yeah.

• 19:39Greg Jenner?

  Is there a name for the, for the life of a saint? Is that, you know, do we have a sort of, how you're meant to behave?

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I guess, I guess in a way that the, following the Gospels is the, is one of the key ideas. So they call it the Vita Apostolica.

• 19:54Greg Jenner?

  Ricky Martin song, no?

• 19:55Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 19:56Greg Jenner?

  La vita apostolica, it's very hard to say, hard to sing, actually, sorry.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  And I believe it says upside, inside out.

• 20:03Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  Living la vita apostolica.

• 20:05Greg Jenner?

  Exactly.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 20:06Speaker 05

  That's the word.

• 20:07Greg Jenner?

  That's inside out, presuming he's inside a cave, I don't know, or on top of a pillar. Simon, once these signs of sanctity were noticed, once someone was clearly living la vita apostolica, that's, the saintly cult builds up around them. So is this a popular thing? Does it, you know? Is that the local community going, we've spotted a saint, we like this, this guy or this woman, we're going to start treating them as a saint?

• 20:31Speaker 04

  In that early kind of moment of a massive kind of breakout of, of, of saints cults in the fourth century, often it's something that they've been described as kind of impresario bishops. So they, you have the story of, you have a story, it's this kind of subgenre of hagiography, which we'll talk about, which is the translatio or the elevatio or the, or the inventio, all these Latin fancy words for basically the, the discovery of invention, inventio means discovery of a saint's relics. And sometimes the story will tell of a, of a saint who visits often a kind of a common person in a, in a, in a, in a vision and tells

• 21:12Speaker 04

  them and nags them repeatedly, you know, you'll find my bones here. And, and then this gets notified to the authorities and there's a big kind of process of transferring them kind of ceremonial, a bit like a classical kind of Adventist into a new space. And in the fourth century, this is big business for bishops who were, who were kind of digging around catacombs in various kind of cities, mainly Rome, and pulling out bits of bodies and moving them to the centre, to the cathedral, the basilica of the, in the centre of the town, which is very, very morbid for pagan Romans, but is part of a new kind of formation of power that's, that's, that's condensing around bishops.

• 21:54Speaker 05

  What do you mean it's morbid for pagan?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  Well, in, in, in cities, in urban architecture, in, in, in the classical period, cemeteries tend to be on the outskirts of, of cities. So to bring a dead body into the centre of the community in the town is a really big kind of public statement.

• 22:11Greg Jenner?

  That process whereby the church starts to go, okay, we need to actually like start sifting through these and authenticating them. When does that happen? When do we get a kind of top-down authentication process?

• 22:23Speaker 04

  The first reference to what we might call a kind of papal canonization procedure, up to now, it's been princes and bishops that are local, local initiatives, but is in the 10th century and the late 10th century, is a bishop Ulrich of Augsburg, who is, is canonized by the Pope. So this is, this is basically a statement that Ulrich is recognized as a saint. The procedure itself becomes much more kind of regularized and systematic in the late 12th and into the 13th century.

• 22:51Greg Jenner?

  Okay. So this is an era of the crusades and so on, that sort of thing.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  What had he done, Ulrich, to merit this?

• 22:56Speaker 04

  He's been a confessor, I think. He's been just a very good boy.

• 22:59Speaker 05

  Just been a good boy?

• 23:01Greg Jenner?

  A top lad.

• 23:02Speaker 05

  Standards were quite low at the beginning.

• 23:06Greg Jenner?

  But if you were designing a process to judge if someone is a saint, so you know, not yourself, obviously, but if you're looking to see, is someone a saint and you need an authentication service, what is your judging process going to be? How do you sift out the real true saints from those who are just wannabes?

• 23:21Speaker 05

  Well, I come back to that quote, I think it's a bit like politicians. You know that quote about anyone who wants to be a politician shouldn't be a politician? I'm absolutely ruining the phrasing of that, but I feel like anyone who's seeking sainthood probably shouldn't be a saint. I do think there should be an element of humility to it, altruism and a bit of healing makes sense to me. That feels like that's a power coming from God, if you can heal the sick. I wouldn't go for the ones who are too flamboyant and wealthy and powerful. I think, I think a, a quiet saint who's doing good and, you know, sure, bring some people back from the dead if you can. I don't know if any of them could do that, but.

• 24:04Greg Jenner?

  That's the top.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  Pull a Lazarus.

• 24:06Greg Jenner?

  Lazarine power is the absolute top level saint power.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Were there many of them?

• 24:11Greg Jenner?

  Not many. That's quite a rare one, isn't it?

• 24:13Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, it is pretty rare.

• 24:14Greg Jenner?

  We'll get to one later on, I think, won't we?

• 24:16Speaker 04

  But it is, it is about getting a balance, I think, definitely. I mean, I think who, who, you can't be too quiet because, you know, which is the most successful saint? Is it the hermit who goes into the forest and is never heard of again and lives a holy life? Or is it the hermit who people keep going to ask for advice and tracking down, follow him out into the forest?

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's true. And you want to spread the word, don't you?

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it's that humble bragging thing again. It's got to sort of betray, be, be very kind of meek and, and also kind of a little wink and a nod as well.

• 24:51Speaker 05

  That's what the press want from the royals, isn't it?

• 24:53Greg Jenner?

  Yes, it is.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  Really humble and meek, but I'll give you an interview anytime you want.

• 24:59Greg Jenner?

  There is this process though, right? In the 13th century, the, the popes start to go, all right, we need a process. So like, how much form-filling do you, I mean, because bureaucracy, you know, ruins everything, right? So how much actual like filling in forms, sending in paperwork do you have to do to get someone made a saint?

• 25:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, that really kicks in in the, the turn of the 12th and 13th centuries and it's, and it's, and it's formalized legally by Innocent III, who's a, who's a, who's a kind of notorious legal pope, where you need to have what's called a vita, so a life that demonstrates holy conduct in life, the sorts of things we've been describing. You also need evidence of a holy reputation at death, which is what's called pharma sanctitatis. So people whispering, whispering campaigns happening.

• 25:49Greg Jenner?

  Pharma F A M A, so where we get the word fame from, right?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 25:52Greg Jenner?

  So that's hence the sort of celebrity overturns.

• 25:55Speaker 05

  So does that mean there's talk about you?

• 25:57Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  And then of course, if that talk can kind of extend to people actually being witnesses to miracles and reporting miracles, often miracle healings, then you need a miracle collection, you need a posthumous collection of miracles post-mortem. And the process is so bureaucratic. I mean, they, they used to have to sort of fly witnesses in from such and such a village in wherever into Rome to give official testimony, which is very, just like the same kind of process as the Inquisition and with heretics, it's an inquisitorial process. So yeah, it gets very, very kind of heavy, bureaucratic. And sometimes popes

• 26:43Speaker 04

  just die before it's done and have to start again.

• 26:48Greg Jenner?

  It's like when you fill in a form online and the website crashes, you're like, I've just done all that. We should talk about, one of my favorite saints would be Thomas of Cantaloupe.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Oh, I like the sound of him.

• 26:59Greg Jenner?

  He sounds good, doesn't he? He sounds like a sort of giant melon in a cassock. He was a real guy. He's, he's the Saint Bishop of Hereford Cathedral, where the Map of Mundi is. And he does have Lazarine powers. He does the top level saint stuff of bringing people back from the dead.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  How many people did he bring back from the dead?

• 27:15Greg Jenner?

  Well, one I'm, I'm aware of, a guy called Thomas Crag, I think, who's a Welshman. But there was a, there was an inquiry, right? To find out, okay, is he, is he a legit saint? And they sent lawyers to interrogate and to ask questions and to find out, did this miracle happen?

• 27:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  Was he really dead or was he just sleeping? Did he just wake him up?

• 27:35Greg Jenner?

  He was hanged. He was hanged. He was a criminal hanged at the gallows, Thomas Crag. And then his friends sort of asked for help from the saint who was dead by this point. And low and behold, he came back to life.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 27:46Greg Jenner?

  Proper miracle. And so this was the making of Hereford, you know, Hereford, they got a lot of, you know, glamour and money out of this, a lovely big church tower. But it's that interesting thing that the lawyers were sent to interrogate and to quiz the witnesses.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's, that's still a very strong kind of insistence today is that all miracles that happen in canonization processes today are, have that, have that kind of, they have medics and doctors witnessing and examining, scrutinizing medical records.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  It's a weird question, but the lawyers who would interrogate them, would they be wanting them to answer in the affirmative? Or would they be wanting it to be as like the, the strictures to be there?

• 28:29Speaker 04

  This is where we get this idea of the devil's advocate, is, is that they, they have to kind of disprove the miracle in order to prove it in a way. They have to, they have to demonstrate that this thing happened. And that one of the latest sort of technical terms associated with Thomas Aquinas is this notion of contra naturum. So you have to be absolutely certain that this is not something that might have occurred coincidentally or accidentally or, or by some sort of natural process of causation.

• 28:58Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, this is the supernatural, right? This has to be the intervention of God or a saint. The saint's the intercessor on behalf of God.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  But it throws up some real curious puzzles for us. So for example, there's, there's a, there's a, again, a notorious case from the 13th century of this guy called Thomas of Eldersfield, who's crops up in some of the posthumous miracles of Wollaston. And he is a bit of a naughty boy and he gets into a fight with, with somebody over a woman. And they have this kind of trial by combat, which he loses. And his punishment is to have his eyeballs and his testicles removed.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  Oh, why is it so ball-based?

• 29:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Just all the spheres of your body.

• 29:43Greg Jenner?

  Take all his balls.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. The story goes on as this kind of detailed little scene where, where, where these balls are seen rolling down the road and little children come and pick them up and play marbles with them. So he then gets kind of carted off to a, a hospital where he, where prayers are offered to Wollaston. And surprise, surprise, he has his, a full set of new balls restored to him. Yeah. How do you explain that one?

• 30:13Speaker 05

  I really can't. And I don't want to.

• 30:18Greg Jenner?

  I mean, the boys.

• 30:19Speaker 05

  I'm just thinking, well, it wouldn't, it would be a terrible game of marbles. Firstly, there's only two.

• 30:26Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't want to say anything about the size of them, but like, yeah, it doesn't seem practical to me.

• 30:31Greg Jenner?

  But there we go, you're thinking like a lawyer. You're immediately asking questions. You should be a kind of lawyer.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  What I'm doing is over imagining it and I'm not enjoying it.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  This is what historians have to do.

• 30:40Greg Jenner?

  Absolutely.

• 30:40Speaker 05

  This is the specific job of historians. What about his eyeballs? Anything about them?

• 30:44Speaker 04

  They were restored, yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 05

  They were restored as well.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:47Greg Jenner?

  Did they accidentally swap them around and he had testicles for eyeballs? Because that would be hilarious, right? Come on. I've done a miracle. It wasn't an accurate miracle, but it is still a miracle. So, okay, so we have these miracles being interrogated by lawyers who are looking to disprove, hence the phrase devil's advocate, which is an office that is, comes along in the 16th century, but it's an official position in the Vatican. You are the devil's advocate. You argue against the miracle and you have to, you have to prove that the miracle didn't happen.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  Oh, I love that. That's one of the things I'll actually remember. Amazing.

• 31:16Greg Jenner?

  But we should talk about hagiography or hagiography.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:19Greg Jenner?

  Which literally means sort of sacred writings, right? And it's, these are the writings of saints' lives and they're quite tropic. They're quite stock genre stories.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  Yes, it's literally hagiography, it just means writing about the holy. And it's a huge kind of literary tradition in the medieval period. And it's described by Edward Gibbon, who's a bit of a skeptic in the 18th century. He talks about it as having all the fiction without the genius of poetry.

• 31:44Speaker 05

  Wow, scathing.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there's a real kind of downer on hagiography. It's often seen as quite dismal and quite, as you say, repetitious, full of topoi. Nothing like a kind of modern novel, which we all feel is the kind of standard for thinking about what a good literary kind of piece of work is.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  Who would write it, the stories?

• 32:05Speaker 04

  These are written by specialist monks who work in scriptoria, who, again, they're kind of, there's a lot of kind of what you might call intertextuality. So they're writing, they're built, they're taking bits from earlier stories and kind of weaving them into their new stories. You might sort of think of it all as a kind of a mythology of Christian glory. I like to think of it that way. And, and you have these topoi, so you know, they're often a, a sign of being a saint is that you are pious in your infancy. So you don't go out and play football, you stay in and you pray and.

• 32:44Speaker 05

  What a dweeb.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Exactly, you're a bit nerdy. That's, that's one of them, that you go around and there's a kind of odor of sanctity around you. There are these kinds of topoi that you have, that you find in this literature. But the thing that fascinates me as a historian is the way that those are kind of mingled with little snippets and clues of what must be kind of repartage or actual historical detail.

• 33:10Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

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• 35:32Greg Jenner?

  So the hagiography, the hagiography is a sort of tradition of writing these, these biographies of saints. We should talk about medieval miracles and, and healing miracles because they're really, really interesting. Rachel, different saints had different medical specialisms. So you turn to each saint for their different skill, right? And so it depends on what they can do for you. I'll name a saint, I've got a little mini quiz for you. I'll name a saint, you, you tell me what medical specialism they, they handle. Okay, so Saint Apollonia.

• 35:58Speaker 05

  Apollonia could, thinking Apollo, he could lift people up.

• 36:06Greg Jenner?

  Lovely. No, he's, he's the patron saint of toothache.

• 36:08Speaker 05

  Toothache?

• 36:09Greg Jenner?

  Because all his teeth are ripped out. So he knows about toothache. Saint Margaret.

• 36:13Speaker 05

  Oh, Saint Margaret, lovely. Healing wounds.

• 36:17Greg Jenner?

  Not bad. Childbirth, that's quite, you know, so she's, she's the childbirth, she's the kind of patron saint of mid. Yeah. Saint Fiakra?

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Fiagra.

• 36:25Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, Fiakra, yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  Just being clear. Broken bone, healing broken bones.

• 36:30Greg Jenner?

  Good guess. It's hemorrhoids.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  Hemorrhoids? I'm glad there's someone for that.

• 36:33Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. Well, you know, you're all doing that. Simon, Saint Artemisius? Artemius?

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Saint Artemius, yes. He's, he's kind of in rivalry with Wollstone, I think. He's, he's for hernias and testicles.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  I was gonna say restoring testicles.

• 36:49Speaker 04

  He's a safe pair of hands.

• 36:51Greg Jenner?

  Safe pair of glands, yeah. Okay, so we, we have, you know, you, you know, if you have a medical condition, you go to a certain saint and you pray, asking for healing, for health, for restoration of your, of your wellness. You know, it's fascinating, I suppose, that each person has their, each saint has their own remit in the medical world and in the healing world. So where do people go to get these cures? You know, you don't go to the pharmacy necessarily for this, for the, for the miracle cure. You go to where? A monastery?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  You usually go to a shrine. And shrines can be in monasteries and they can be in local churches. And a shrine is, tends to be a kind of monumental structure, like a tomb with, with a roof, the kind of gabled roof or canopy over the top of it. And these house the relics. And sometimes if you're lucky, you've got the kind of the entire body and it's kind of incorrupt and you can, Cuthbert's a good example of that. Ethel Thrith in St Ely is another one. And sometimes they, they'll be in a reliquary, it's positioned on an altar or above the altar and, or on a, on a kind of, sometimes you get relic collections in cabinets. These are very kind of highly kind of curated spaces.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  And the idea is to give you an experience that is gonna, is gonna facilitate your access to the contagious kind of power of the, of the relic, the kind of holy radiation. It's a fantastic, I don't know if you've been to Santiago?

• 38:18Greg Jenner?

  No.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  So Santiago, I much recommend it.

• 38:22Greg Jenner?

  The Compostela, right?

• 38:22Speaker 04

  The Compostela, yes, in kind of, yeah, Galicia. It's fantastic place, some great wine bars, some wonderful wines, great, great seafood. And the, the church itself, the cathedral is famous because it's the, it's the kind of ultimate place to go on pilgrimage, which all other kind of places lead up to. And it's a big kind of Romanesque church. And just to the kind of east of the crossing in the nave part, there's a, there, there is this huge elaborate kind of baroque complex of passages and crypts. And you get to kind of walk around it, you go down into the crypt and you see a little kind of silver casket, which has got St James, St James's relics in it.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  And you go up some stairs and there's a huge bust of James looking down the nave and you get a very kind of intimate cozy moment with him because it's a very small little space. And you get to people giving him a hug and whisper in his ear. And then they go down and out the other side and walk around the ambulatory. So I, you know, I really recommend Santiago, the Compostela is a place to go.

• 39:26Speaker 05

  That sounds amazing.

• 39:27Greg Jenner?

  This is pilgrimage, right? People would go on it. So how does a pilgrimage differ to an ordinary journey? I mean, obviously a journey is a commute. A pilgrimage is still a commute of sorts because you're getting somewhere special. But is, is the journey itself also holy?

• 39:39Speaker 05

  You have to go in sandals.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Carry a stick and a, and a shell and a purse. And there is a classic look, which you've got to try and reconstruct.

• 39:48Greg Jenner?

  Okay, what's the look? What, you know?

• 39:50Speaker 04

  You have your kind of a script and a staff, which is like a kind of pouch with your, for your money. And you go in sandals or you, sometimes you go barefoot on parts of it.

• 39:58Greg Jenner?

  Okay, right.

• 39:59Speaker 04

  You know, to show your commitment. And it's about devotion. It's about having a reason to go that's to do with making a vow or a promise for some sort of interaction with the saint. And you, sometimes people have, have pilgrimages kind of prescribed for them by their confessor, by, by priests, say, you know, you've been naughty and the only thing that will solve it is if you go on pilgrimage to such and such a local shrine. But then you get these massive kind of international pilgrim routes which link up. And Compostela is one, is, is one of the kind of termini for this. And Canterbury is another. Cologne, another, and Rome, of course.

• 40:39Greg Jenner?

  I mean, Canterbury, we know through, you know, Geoffrey Chaucer's, you know, the Canterbury Tales, that's a pilgrimage, right? That's, people are telling stories as they go to the holy site. And that's where Becket was murdered and then very quickly canonized by, and that's sort of kings, I mean, like, I'm so, I'm so sorry. I didn't, didn't mean to murder you.

• 40:57Greg Jenner?

  So it's really interesting and people going on pilgrimage is a sort of huge important part of spiritual life of, you know, it's, it's, but it's also a kind of an economy, right? It's, it, there's commerce attached.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:09Greg Jenner?

  Do you know anything about this? Have you ever encountered this sort of notion of, of the kind of economy attached to pilgrimage?

• 41:14Speaker 05

  No, I think I've only ever thought of it as, I'm sure I've seen shrines which involve almost like a wishing well type situation with coins thrown at them. That's a way of getting money, isn't it?

• 41:26Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, sure, yeah. People could misbehave on these pilgrimages, right? They could get drunk, they could have sex and be naughty. So sometimes you'd get to the final site and be like, I'm so sorry for everything I just did on the pilgrimage. My bad. Girl's trip, went a bit wild.

• 41:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's basically a stag do.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:42Speaker 05

  Sorry.

• 41:43Greg Jenner?

  But we should say that, you know, when people get to these sites, they're spending money.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  They are, yes, they are. And, and, I mean, I think the way I would think about it is that these cults are, the people who are the custodians of relics, they have a particular kind of clearly devotional, liturgical and pastoral kind of set of priorities on this. You do occasionally get them keeping records of payments made at the shrine from the 13th century in England. We have cathedral shrines with little accounts, little ledgers of, of money offered. And I think probably a lot of these cults will pay for themselves in that sense, in terms of, you know, in, in what we would think of as a kind of profit and loss basis. But that's not the main kind of aim of it.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  The people who do benefit from it though are the, the kind of citizens of the town. Is that they're, they're a huge boost to the local economy and just kind of think of the specialist kind of jobs that people take up, they're artisans, hosteries, brewers, cobblers, people selling merch of various kinds.

• 42:49Speaker 05

  So this is like early tourism.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:52Greg Jenner?

  So before Taylor Swift comes into town, actually it's the pilgrims coming to town that brings in the money to the economy.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Sometimes they do relic tours as well and they kind of, you're kind of on, on tour with their relic and, and they can, they can collect money that way.

• 43:05Speaker 05

  That seems dicey to me. Keep it safe, what if it falls off?

• 43:09Greg Jenner?

  I mean, you say merch, what is, what is medieval relic merch?

• 43:14Speaker 04

  Pilgrim badges, little flasks of oil or holy water or, or bits of files of blood that you can, that you can take back home with you, badges to show that you've, you've been to, to the, to this place.

• 43:29Speaker 05

  I love that there has always been this, not always, but for so long, it's been this like, you can get a bit of tat to go with the experience.

• 43:37Greg Jenner?

  I don't know if it's a myth or not, but there is famously the word tawdry supposedly derives from Saint Audrey.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 43:43Greg Jenner?

  Saint Audrey of Ely, I think. And the notion that so many people just sort of bought tat, you know, that, that the word sort of evolved and now we sort of think of it as.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, we've all bought a multicoloured eraser.

• 43:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, we've all got a pencil. Yeah, yeah. Producer Emma outside, she's sort of showing us all her pencils she gets from Museum of Gottes and they're very lovely. But I think, you know, we can be cynical, right? We can sort of in our heads be like, oh, it's very exit through the gift shop, you know, all the money. But actually, you know, these pilgrimages are incredibly special, incredibly important to people. They may be going for a miracle, they may need healing, they may be concerned about their soul. And also, we still, when we go to, when we have a wonderful memory, we, we buy souvenirs so we can remember the thing.

• 44:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:26Greg Jenner?

  It's not just tat, it's, it can be meaningful.

• 44:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is a souvenir, is a nicer way to put it, a memento. And I do, you're right, I have plenty of those from trips. You, you want to bring a part of it home with you, just hopefully not a body part. Because they need them.

• 44:39Greg Jenner?

  Whose testicle is that? I'm so sorry.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  A keepsake.

• 44:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:44Greg Jenner?

  We should talk about how some of these relics ended up in these churches and in these shrines, because a lot of the time it was legitimate and, and holy. And then sometimes it was fraud and theft, right? It was some serious, some sort of dodgy dealings sometimes. Can you talk us through the translation, this, this translatio?

• 45:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. Well, I mentioned already this notion of the vision and the invention. So this is a kind of trope in which you, the saint visits somebody in a dream, tells them, you can find our relics here and it's about time you, you did something about it. And, and a discovery story is written up, et cetera, et cetera, and translation takes place. There's a nice example of acquiring relics by kind of royal patronage as well, which is the, the hand of Saint James at Reading, who is, and this is in the, in the 12th century. So Empress Matilda.

• 45:37Greg Jenner?

  Yes.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  Who was married to Henry V. When he died, she kind of, one of the first things she did was had a good look around his treasury and his relic collection and she nabbed the hand of Saint James and brought it back with her and the, and gave it to the kind of family monastery, which was Saint, which is at Reading.

• 45:55Greg Jenner?

  Yeah. We did an episode about her with Carrie Ad actually, so you know, if any listeners want to listen to that episode. And obviously sometimes things are just downright stolen, right? They're in crusades, in times of war. You know, in 1204, the Constantinople is sacked during the Fourth Crusade and the Christian crusading warriors just steal relics.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  Absolutely, yeah. In the, in the wake of the First Crusade and the Fourth Crusade in 1204, as you say, there's a lot of sacking and plundering going on and people's relic collections being plundered and being, being sent back home to various kinds of churches who, in some cases, it looks like they're almost kind of on order. It's like, if you can, if you come across a relic of Saint What's It, then we'll, we want him because he, because we've got there, we, we're dedicated to the marriage.

• 46:44Greg Jenner?

  That's how art crime works, isn't it? Like sometimes.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  I was just about to say that, yeah.

• 46:47Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, you sort of, have you, I'd really want a Picasso, could you just, yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 05

  But also the idea that art is only as valuable as what you imbue it as.

• 46:55Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 46:56Speaker 05

  So it has no particular physical value, like a load of bones to one person is just a load of bones. But if you say or believe that it is the bones of this saint, then all of a sudden it's like worth this huge amount.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  But it's sort of, really, it's, it's, it's nothing, but until someone says it is.

• 47:15Greg Jenner?

  And as well as the hagiographies, as well as these sort of saints' lives, we also have these lovely texts called a furtasacra. Do you know what that means?

• 47:22Speaker 05

  No. Or sacred something.

• 47:24Greg Jenner?

  It does, it literally means pious theft.

• 47:26Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 47:27Greg Jenner?

  They are, they are kind of stories and texts that basically say, we didn't steal this, we just feel like it should be here, not there. Like, you know, it's, it's like, we've, we morally, this should be in this church. You know, yes, we stole it technically. I mean, it's essentially a kind of confession of theft.

• 47:45Speaker 04

  It is, and it's, it's, I think it's sort of borrows from, it's a kind of narrative of abduction and consent. So if you think about parallels in, at the time, in, you know, elite families, aristocrats and the marriage of daughters, and there is, there is a tradition of abducting the daughter and the consent of the daughter is, is, is something that's added later to the story of how, of how this marriage takes place. There's this very similar kind of, of idea. It's basically like a kind of heist story. So there's some, a couple of great examples. There's one from the Miracles of Saint Foy, Saint Faith in Conk, which is one of these great kind of pilgrimage churches.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  This is in the 9th century, the story's written up much later, but in the 9th century, they send one of their monks to a rival monastery where he kind of goes undercover as a, as a mole for 10 years.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  There's a book in this, isn't there?

• 48:42Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, isn't it great?

• 48:43Speaker 04

  He spends 10 years winning over their trust. And then there's a moment where he gets an opportunity and in the dead of night, he steals, he trashes the, the relics of Saint Faith and takes them back to his own church, monastery in Conk.

• 48:58Greg Jenner?

  It's a long con.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a long con.

• 49:00Speaker 05

  Really long con.

• 49:01Greg Jenner?

  It's a long con, sorry. It's a long con for a long con. Yet you get these sort of confession documents saying like, the saint came to me in a dream and said they wanted to be stolen.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah.

• 49:10Greg Jenner?

  Which is amazing, right?

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I wonder sometimes whether money is changing hands behind the scene. There, there's a great story from the translation of Saint Edith, who, Saint Edith, who's a nun in Wilton, near Salisbury in the late 10th century. And there's a story about how a bunch of travelling, what are called pictish monks, Scots presumably, arrive and they've got with them the, a casket with the relics of Saint Hui, one of their saints. And they're seemingly, seemingly on a relic tour. And they put the casket on the altar in the church in, in Wilton and it won't budge. When it comes, they, they kind of enjoy the hospitality of the nuns in the monastery

• 49:55Speaker 04

  and then it won't budge, it won't, we won't leave when they want to go. And the story then tells us that, that Abbess, Abbess Wolfthrift, who's the, who's the mother of Edith, as it happens, she has to write a cheque for 200 shillings, which is about, you know, a hundred pounds, to, to, to tell them to go away and leave. So how, how, how do we interpret that? Whether this is a con that the Scots are perpetrating, Scottish monks are perpetrating on, on the nuns, or whether the nuns have said, right, we'll just pay for this because we want it, we like it. And so it's a really.

• 50:34Speaker 05

  Whether the nuns liken the sound of music, sneaky nuns, whether they put like massive weights in it to weigh it down. I wonder if they did.

• 50:44Greg Jenner?

  Smart nuns, none the wiser, there you go. Rachel, I think we've, we've kind of covered quite a broad spectrum of, of medieval saints' lives.

• 50:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I feel like I know them intimately, yeah.

• 50:56Greg Jenner?

  It's quite, it's, it's fascinating, isn't it? Because obviously saints' lives are still so important to people of faith now, but actually there is something quite medieval about some of this.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, definitely, especially the gruesome elements. I find, you know, this idea that you can have holy testicles and, yeah, foreskin and that, I don't know. It's funny because on the other hand, there's, the medieval period feels like, you know, there's blasphemy and there's sensitivities around this sort of thing. And then on the other hand, they're, they're playing marbles with balls in the street and throwing nuts at women. And yeah, it's a, a mixed time.

• 51:38Greg Jenner?

  Well, it's time now for the nuance window. This is where Rachel and I sit reverently at a holy person's tomb for two minutes, while Simon takes to the pulpit to tell us something we need to know about medieval saints. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Dr Simon.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  Historians study the past through its written and material traces. They go to the archive and they find sources, survivals, leftovers, what you could say, could call relics. As historians, we need to remind ourselves when we work with our sources that they don't just contain information, facts, evidence out of which to reconstruct as if scientifically some conclusive truth about the past. They are also a puzzle and a challenge to our sense of empathy and humanity. They dare us to conjure up the past and to ventriloquise the dead. And along with this, there are ethical responsibilities and repercussions for us all when historians attempt to do this.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  And this is part of the ongoing conversation of this brilliant podcast. Studying the medieval cult of saints and their relics raises the stakes further. How should historians explain miracles? Again, this is a puzzle and a challenge. Saints, relics and miracles are signs. They represent and they point to something beyond our understanding. The lives of saints have an immediate presence in our encounters with their gruesome remains. They are intriguing, disturbing, unsettling, but they also excite the imagination. They're a spur to creativity, a sense of trepidation, perhaps even awe. This is how we are made to feel in the presence of saints' relics. And this is how historians often feel when they go into the archive.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  So saints are a bit like influencers or celebrities, except they are not trying to sell us products like social influences or Luxmaxing gurus. They aren't like AI serving us up, hallucinated, slop-larded with flattery. They are teaching us about life and death and about our lives and our deaths. They don't provide any easy answers, but they do offer a reassurance that humans have been here before.

• 53:49Greg Jenner?

  Amazing. Thank you so much. Two minutes on the dot. Look at that.

• 53:52Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 53:53Greg Jenner?

  Incredible.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 53:54Greg Jenner?

  A miracle.

• 53:54Speaker 05

  A miracle. Not without the paperwork.

• 53:58Greg Jenner?

  No, exactly, yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 05

  What's come out through the discussion to me is that with all the authentication and the evidence that was required to make a saint and to authenticate a relic, really, a relic is holy because people believe in it, whether they've believed in it for 600 years or 100 years or however long. If there is faith in something, that in itself is what makes it sacred.

• 54:25Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  Not just the paper about it.

• 54:28Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it's not just a form-filling, is it? You're right. The interesting thing, actually, is that we might think of the medieval world as the era of saints, but more saints were canonized in the 20th century than in any medieval century.

• 54:38Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  Oh, really? Who?

• 54:40Greg Jenner?

  I mean, there's a patron saint of comedy writers, there's a patron saint of podcasting, you know.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  What?

• 54:44Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  What?

• 54:46Greg Jenner?

  So, yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 05

  Is it Adam Buxton?

• 54:49Greg Jenner?

  I mean, he should be, he's certainly up there, isn't he? Yeah, no, that, actually, the 20th century popes widened the scope a lot more, didn't they?

• 54:57Speaker 04

  One of the most recent ones, a guy called Carlo Acutis, who's, was a social influencer.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 55:02Greg Jenner?

  Oh, really? So there's a patron saint of...

• 55:04Speaker 04

  Of social influencers, yeah.

• 55:05Greg Jenner?

  Of, you know, YouTubers and whatever, yeah. There we go.

• 55:07Speaker 05

  That's fascinating, yeah.

• 55:09Greg Jenner?

  So we're still in the era of saints, we're still in the era of the canonization process, more so perhaps than ever.

• 55:16Greg Jenner?

  So what do you know now?

• 55:21Greg Jenner?

  It is now, of course, time for our quickfire quiz. This is the So What Do You Know Now?

• 55:25Speaker 05

  My favorite bit.

• 55:26Greg Jenner?

  Uh, this is to see what Rachel has learned. Now, Rachel, you have taken no notes.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  I just wrote some down for posterity because I felt like I owed it to the book.

• 55:34Greg Jenner?

  Sure.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  I just wrote down the marbles with testicles. That story. But apart from that, no, I haven't, so I won't be looking at my notebook.

• 55:41Greg Jenner?

  I mean, you are, you're very clever, you know, you've studied at Oxford, you have a tremendous brain, but...

• 55:45Speaker 05

  I don't think that has any bearing on any of this, really.

• 55:47Greg Jenner?

  Well, let's see how much you remember. Okay, I've got 10 questions for you. Good luck. Question one, what is a relic?

• 55:53Speaker 05

  It's a piece of or an object associated with a saint that is kept by the church for people to worship.

• 56:02Greg Jenner?

  Very good, venerate, yes. Question two, what was the earliest type of Christian saint, the first one available?

• 56:09Speaker 05

  We all are. Anyone who's been christened is a saint.

• 56:12Greg Jenner?

  Oh, very good. Yeah, that's absolutely true. That's not what I heard, but that's completely true. We did say that. Everyone who'd been christened. I've got martyrs, but I will give you that because that's excellent. Well done, you were listening. Question three, give one example of a medieval saint's relic.

• 56:25Speaker 05

  Oh, foreskin. It's the one that sticks in the mind.

• 56:29Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, you could have had Anthony's tongue, Beckett's blood as well, we had. Question four, name the most famous miracle performed by St Thomas of Cantaloupe in Hereford.

• 56:38Speaker 05

  Oh, what did you tell me? Cantaloupe. He's not the one who raised someone from the dead.

• 56:42Greg Jenner?

  He is, he is.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 56:43Greg Jenner?

  Yep, he revived a hangman.

• 56:45Speaker 05

  Hanged man, yeah.

• 56:45Greg Jenner?

  Very good. Question five, what institution took control of the canonization process in the 1100s, 1200s or so?

• 56:52Speaker 05

  What institution? The papacy?

• 56:54Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, it is the papacy, yeah. Question six, what illness was St Artemius supposedly good at healing? You wrote it in your book.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  I've written it down?

• 57:03Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 57:03Speaker 05

  Did I?

• 57:05Greg Jenner?

  Artemius, he's good with?

• 57:07Speaker 05

  Oh, testicles.

• 57:08Greg Jenner?

  Testicles and hernias, very good. Question seven, what are hagiographies and vitae?

• 57:13Speaker 05

  The stories of the lives of saints.

• 57:17Greg Jenner?

  Very good. Question eight, what keepsakes could medieval pilgrims buy at shrines?

• 57:21Speaker 05

  Badges?

• 57:22Greg Jenner?

  Yeah, lovely little badges, very good. Souvenirs of their time at the shrine. Question nine, name two ways a church might acquire a relic.

• 57:30Speaker 05

  Well, according to some of your stories, nick it.

• 57:35Speaker 05

  Or they would, someone obscure would have a vision and tell them that they know where it was buried and they'd dig it up and find it.

• 57:43Greg Jenner?

  Very good. And also plunder and theft and wars and crusades, that's excellent. This is a perfect 10 out of 10. How did the monks of Conk acquire the body of Saint Faith?

• 57:56Speaker 05

  Oh, was that the one, was that the undercover guy?

• 57:59Greg Jenner?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Speaker 05

  There was a monk that went and spied on them for 10 years in a long con, a long conk. And he, he got it.

• 58:07Greg Jenner?

  10 out of 10, Rachel, never in doubt. Incredible skills.

• 58:10Speaker 05

  I'm putting on my CV.

• 58:11Greg Jenner?

  That's very, very impressive. And you even gave me an answer that wasn't even in my quiz, so that's, that's amazing. Well, well done, Rachel, thank you so much. And of course, thank you so much, Simon, for, for teaching us that. Listener, viewer, for more from Rachel, of course, check out our episode on Eleanor Rakitin, one of the great queens of the medieval world. And for more medieval, well, medieval faith and culture, actually, we have episodes on medieval ghost stories, we've got episodes on Geoffrey Chaucer, we've got Naughty Nun, Beridetti Carini, she was very cheeky, and we have one on medieval animals, so plenty to get into there. If you've enjoyed the podcast, please subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to hear the show 28 days earlier than anywhere else. And if you're outside the UK, you can listen at bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts. But I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in history corner.

• 58:54Greg Jenner?

  We have the stupendous Dr Simon Yarrow from the University of Birmingham. Thank you, Simon.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  Thank you, it was great fun.

• 59:00Greg Jenner?

  It was good fun. And in comedy corner, we have the sensational Rachel Parris. Thank you so much.

• 59:05Speaker 05

  Thank you, I learnt so much.

• 59:06Greg Jenner?

  You did, I mean, you knew quite a lot, but you did learn some stuff too. So that's the best of both worlds. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we crack open another tomb to examine the perfectly preserved historical subjects inside. But for now, I'm off to the shrine of Saint Fiakra because these hemorrhoids are killing me. Bye.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Could you talk about being invisible or double denim? Who knows what's next on the new series of Just a Minute? Belting out a rendition of "Goldabum".

• 59:44Speaker 03

  Whatever the topic, our panel has just a minute to speak without hesitation, deviation or repetition. Join Zoe Lyons, Desiree Birch, Paul Merton and many more for the new series of Just a Minute with me, Sue Perkins.

• 59:59Speaker 03

  It's funny because it's true.

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  Listen on Radio 4 and the full box set is available now on BBC Sounds.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  How do you build a career you're proud of? It's easy to get caught up in the impact you hope to have or the legacy you want to leave behind, but how much of that is actually within your control? Something that I believe is that legacy is totally out of your control. Like, legacy is something that other people determine, but what is in your control is, is contribution and your actions around that. I really grew up, you know, into my twenties, maybe even thirties, thinking that, that like, if I didn't do something that meaningful and important, then like, I hadn't done something worthwhile. Find out how to build a career you're proud of in this episode of my podcast, Work Life, featuring actress and director Bryce Dallas Howard. And don't worry, we'll get into the nepo baby conversation.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  I'm Molly Graham and you can find Work Life, a podcast from TED, wherever you listen.