Old English Words for Relics of the Saints

Abstract

The resources of the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) have proven invaluable to historians of the earlier Middle Ages. The Microfiche Concordance assisted Sarah Foot, for example, as she has traced how shifts in the Old English terms mynster mynster “monastery, minster” and nunne “nun, vowess” expose fault-lines in Anglo-Saxon religious life that hardly show in Latin terminology of the period. Using the more recent, electronic versions of the DOE and its searchable Corpus, I seek in this paper to explain some patterns of vocabulary in another ecclesiastical sphere, the cult of saints. This vocabulary has received little attention, despite the acknowledged importance of relic-cults in the Anglo-Saxon Church and the large quantity of relevant material in Old English. Both Latin and vernacular terms for saints’ relics repay scrutiny. They are often less transparent than modern histories assume, and, like the monastic words studied by Foot, some Old English relic-terms reveal more than their Latin counterparts about prevailing religious customs.