Liturgy and Healing in an Early Medieval Saint's Cult: The Massin honore sancti Sigismundifor the Cure of Fevers

Abstract

InThe Glory of the Martyrs, a collection of miracle stories completed by the early 590s, Bishop Gregory of Tours included a chapter on the Burgundian king Sigismund. A Catholic convert from the Arian Christianity of his father, Sigismund had founded a monastery at Agaune, the present St.-Maurice, Switzerland (Wallis/Valais), in the year 515. After he died in 523, at the hands of Chlodomer, one of the sons of Clovis, his body lay in a well at St.-Péravy-la-Colombe near Orléans (where the Franks had thrown it) until the abbot Venerandus brought it back to St.-Maurice in 535/36 for burial. Over the next fifty years or so, Sigismund gained the reputation as a saint and as a source of healing power over fevers. About Sigismund's posthumous fame, Gregory recorded that “whenever people suffering from chills piously celebrate a mass in his honor and make an offering to God for the king's repose, immediately their tremors cease, their fevers disappear, and they are restored to their earlier health.” Gregory's reference to a mass in honor of Sigismund is as unusual as is the very existence of such a celebration, for theMissa sancti Sigismundiis an early and peculiar example of a new development in the Latin liturgy in late antiquity, themissa votivaor votive mass. Votive masses differed from traditional forms of eucharistic celebration because they could be offered for a particular purpose and at the special request of a member (or members) of a congregation. Unlike theMissa sancti Sigismundi, however, most other early votive masses had generalized titles such asmissa votivaormissa pro vivorum et mortuorum.The mass in honor of St. Sigismund is, as far as I can tell, unique in its appeal to the intercession of a particular saint for a specific purpose—the cure of fevers.