3. Saints in the Middle Ages

Abstract

The Church’s triumphal collaboration with the Roman Empire had ended by 500 ce. Political authority hung on in the West through the accommodation reached between two new forms of leadership, the holy man bishop and the Christian king. Saints and their relics—venerated at cathedrals, the court chapels of kings, and monasteries—fostered a new civilization, Latin Christendom. ‘Saints in the Middle Ages’ discusses the Carolingian reform of the cult of saints; the roles of saints in religious life in the Byzantine Empire; the changing relationship between church and saints in the later Middle Ages as a result of papal-led reformation; and the vernacularization of saintly patronage from the 13th‒15th centuries.