Native Saints Research Articles

Interannual variation in spawning success of striped bass (Morone saxatilis) in the Saint John River, New Brunswick

AbstractBarriers such as dams have been cited as a serious threat to striped bass survival, especially when they affect or impede migration and access to spawning grounds. On the Saint John River, New Brunswick, the installation of the large Mactaquac Dam in the immediate vicinity of a historic striped bass spawning location was suspected to have caused the arrest of striped bass reproduction and the collapse of the native striped bass population. In 2014, juvenile striped bass of confirmed Saint John River origin were documented in the river for the first time since 1979. In the current study, we examined juveniles from 6 years of sampling to determine corresponding years of successful recruitment. We also tracked adult striped bass matching the ancestry of native Saint John River juveniles to determine the timing and location of spawning. Over 5 years, we observed an annual upstream migration by adult striped bass to historic spawning areas near Fredericton, identified a dominant year class of Saint John River origin juveniles reproduced in 2013, and linked the apparent successful production of year classes to definable discharge conditions, that is, extended periods of sustained flow >36 hr downstream from the Mactaquac Dam. The results of this study suggest important first management actions towards recovering and sustaining the re‐discovered striped bass population in the Saint John River, New Brunswick.

The Misunderstood Striped Bass of the Saint John River, New Brunswick: Past, Present, and Future

AbstractThe Striped Bass Morone saxatilis of the Saint John River, New Brunswick, is an enigma, having now existed in a state of uncertain species status for more than four decades. Despite a well‐established historical record of adult occurrence in large numbers, the available literature, historical accounts, and status reports contain no evidence for the persistence of a native, reproducing Striped Bass population. In 2012, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada listed the Saint John River Striped Bass as endangered as part of the Bay of Fundy designatable unit. This listing lacked current peer‐reviewed literature and based its conclusions predominately on restatements of findings and opinions from the 1970s and 1980s. After the apparent failure of Striped Bass spawning in the 1975, the decline of native Saint John River Striped Bass was accredited to many factors ranging from chemical pollutants to overfishing to the installation of a sizeable hydropower facility. Modest attempts to locate eggs and juveniles of the native species have been taken; however, the results have been inconclusive due to ineffective, infrequent, and poorly timed sampling. Here we reviewed all available information, literature, reports, and data to effectively describe the Saint John River Striped Bass population in an effort to help manage and recover (if required) this apparently missing population.Received March 8, 2016; accepted September 14, 2016Published online January 24, 2017

Moradas del castillo interior de Santa Teresa de Jesús entre la enseñanza doctrinal y la reescritura vivencial.

Moradas del Castillo Interior is Saint Teresa of Jesus’ greatest seminal work. In this book the native saint of Avila collects the manifestation of her own experiences and several doctrinal teachings. Both dimensions are the fruit of her life anchored in God.

Introduction and General Acknowledgments: Inaugural St. Magnus Conference

This collection of diverse papers constitutes the legacy of the Inaugural St. Magnus Conference, held at the Centre for Nordic Studies, UHI, in Kirkwall, Orkney’s Royal Burgh, on the 14 and 15 April 2011. This 2-day international conference was structured around the theme of the cultural and historical links between Scotland and Scandinavia. Papers were delivered by speakers from fourteen countries including Scotland, the UK more generally, Canada, and the Nordic World. The date was chosen to coincide with the Feast of St. Magnus, the native saint

Angelina Branković – święta władczyni w hymnografii. Zarys problemu

The aim of this article is to present the idea of divinity of power on an example of the medieval service, dedicated to the Serbian despotess Angelina Branković. The image of a ruler and a concept of power presented in the text are based on the perception of Angelina as a participant and a heiress of the sacred tradition of Branković dynasty. The service has played an important role in the creation and strengthening of the ruler image in the spiritual culture of the Orthodox Serbs. In addition to strictly liturgical function, it also served as a way of transmission of the elementary set of national religious and political ideas. Hymnography dedicated to St. Angelina was a response to the social and religious needs to canonize the native saints who certify God’s care for Serbia in the period of slavery, strengthen the national spirit, contribute to stabilizing the situation in the country.

<i>Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615 Juliet Mullins Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St Æthelthryth in Medieval England, 695-1615. By Virginia Blanton. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 350. 16 illustrations. $65. Although Signs of Devotion is no longer unique in offering a "longitudinal study of an early Anglo-Saxon cult" (p. 5), it is nevertheless a welcome addition to an area which is gaining increased currency in Anglo-Saxon studies. In this monograph, Virginia Blanton emphasizes the multi-disciplinary nature of hagiology and offers an examination of the cult of Æthelthryth that, although primarily concerned with the intersection of textual and visual culture, also places the cult within its historical and liturgical context. The book is chronologically ordered and yet each chapter could be read quite independently; in fact, it is the depth of coverage within each chapter rather than any sense of the chronological development of the cult that is the strength of this study. For this reason, I shall offer a review of each chapter in turn in what follows. As is so often the case with figures from the early Anglo-Saxon church, the story of Æthelthryth begins with Bede, whose account is the focus of the first chapter. In sharp contrast to the other native saints portrayed in the Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede pays little attention to Æthelthryth's success as an abbess or her monastic career; rather, Blanton argues, it is the virgin's control of her body and her successful suppression of all physical desire that draws the interest of her hagiographer. The longest part of the vita is dedicated to the dramatic recounting of Æthelthryth's deathbed scene and the translation that subsequently confirms her saintly status. Blanton highlights the manner in which Bede positions himself at a distance from this account, adopting the stance of the objective historian and allowing [End Page 241] the doctor, Cynefrith, to speak. The first-person narrative is a rare occurrence in the Historia, and, as Blanton points out, therefore worthy of note. Bede allows the doctor to assign meaning to the saint's healed wound and scar, which is perhaps one of the most enduring of the many signs, visual and rhetorical, by which the cult of Æthelthryth is defined. The scar is a mark of identity, a recollection of vanities past, but also an indication of God's present forgiveness: it is the sign of a body tested, punished, and perfected. Blanton suggests, moreover, that the scar is a sign of the sealed body, "of her continued virginity, of what cannot be seen (or what should not be revealed) . . . Literally, it becomes the site of investigation and ultimately the evidence for the abbess" purity (p. 45). Bede's interest in the scar as a visual sign of invisible sanctity is then placed within a wider context: Bede's account of Æthelthryth is compared to Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina, and the enduring importance of Æthelthryth's wound in late medieval iconography is demonstrated. In the subsequent two chapters, Blanton examines the way in which in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, texts and imagery portraying Æthelthryth were adapted so as to suit the needs of a male monastic audience. Under Æthelwold, Æthelthryth-as virgin and abbess-became "the premier female saint of the Benedictine reform" (p. 74). Her position as a link between the universal and native saints, which Blanton notes in the previous chapter when discussing Bede's metrical Life, is developed by Ælfric in his Lives of Saints, where her conjugal chastity links her to established universal saints such as Daria and Chrysanthus and Julian and Basilissa. Likewise, Blanton notes similarities in the Benedictional of Æthelwold between the portrayal of Æthelthryth and the image of Christ that work to place the female saint in the highest echelons of the choir of saints and establish her position in the church hierarchy. The use of a male face for the image of the saint in the Benedictional de-sexualizes and androgynizes Æthelthryth, transforming her from the historical woman, wife, and queen into a symbol or sign of monastic virginity, a...

The Sword and the Prayerbook: Ideals of Authentic Irish Manliness

As the Catholic Church responded to secular models of the nineteenth-century hero by refurbishing its saints, the Irish Church promoted its native saint, Colmcill, as the sole authentic positive stereotype deserving of the Irishman's emulation. At a time when the concepts of Irishness and manliness were being contested, the League of St. Columba proposed that the physical, psychological, and spiritual characteristics of Colmcill be materialized in the new Irish youth. By folding the mystical rhetoric of Catholicism into the search for national identity, the League altered the course of Irish nationalism and inflected the trajectory of Irish masculine development. While Colmcill's ascendance as an emulatory type was brief, the qualities he was shaped to embody were reinscribed in the Catholic priest, who became installed as the aspirational model for the youth of Ireland.

Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England (review)

Reviewed by: Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England Nancy Bradley Warren (bio) Catherine Sanok . Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007. 280 pp. ISBN 0-812-23986-5, $55.00. Catherine Sanok's book is a welcome contribution to the currently vibrant study of hagiography in later medieval English culture. Her Life Historical adds some important new considerations to the conversation. In particular, as [End Page 463] her title suggests, she directs our attention to the ways in which hagiography provides a locus for thinking historically in later medieval Eng land. The history with which Sanok is concerned is both literary and sociopolitical; indeed, one of the book's greatest strengths is the ways in which it attends to the mutually informing dimensions of these types of history. Sanok begins by exploring the complicated, flexible functions of exemplarity as a mode of interpretation. Considering a wide range of Middle English texts, in her first chapter she analyzes diverse figurings of relationships of past and present, examining the implications of such representations for ethical practice. She argues that "hagiography and its exemplary hermeneutics did not . . . provide one model of history but a vehicle for exploring and contesting a variety of such models" (19). Sanok's second chapter addresses the processes through which, and the reasons for which, female saints' lives invent a feminine audience. She presents a diverse body of evidence, including textual accounts of patronage or commission and testamentary records, for the strong association of female saints' lives with female readers. This association is not, however, necessarily "proof" of women's "agency in the genre." Rather, it attests to an association between women and the genre "in the late medieval cultural imagination" (37), an association that the texts themselves work to produce. Female saints' lives create "if only in theory . . . an interpretive response proper to female readers. Female saints' lives . . . ask women to read as women" (25, emphasis in original). In doing so, they do not fully control reception, but they do create expectations. In her third chapter, Sanok turns to Osbern Bokenham's Legends of Holy Women to examine the feminine audience it creates in "a political context" (51). She argues that Bokenham crafts "fables of commission and reception" (55, a concept she borrows from Seth Lerer) that elide both class differences and differences of political allegiance among women. He seeks to create a unified feminine community sharing devotional commitments and literary interests during an era of political strife. His agenda, therefore, is not to regulate women's devotional activities or reading practices, but rather to foreground a stable community in the face of contemporary political division. Chapter Four, entitled "Exemplarity and England in Native Saints' Lives," centers on Henry Bradshaw's Life of St. Werburge. Sanok reads Bradshaw's text through the lens of the work of Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha on "the nation." Like Bokenham, Bradshaw figures a unified feminine audience for his vernacular legend; his aim is to represent "the transhistorical continuity and coherence of English identity" by linking a native English saint with contemporary English women. The Life is concerned, as Sanok notes, [End Page 464] not only with national issues but also with local ones concerning Chester and Bradshaw's abbey; Chester becomes, however, a metonymic representation of England. Chapter Five turns to The Book of Margery Kempe. While Bradshaw's mobilization of exemplarity upholds "fictions of community" (116), the Book of Margery Kempe illustrates the ways in which imitating female saints can serve as a mode of social criticism. Sanok considers Margery's imitation of various saints, especially Mary Magdalene, Katherine of Alexandria, and Margaret. Her reading of the scribe's refusal to acknowledge likeness between Margery Kempe and Mary Magdalene, whom he replaces with Marie d'Oignies as "a more proximate example of a late medieval holy woman," is particularly interesting. Margery's imitatio is disconcerting because it highlights troubling similarities between the past of saints' lives and her present moment. Margery Kempe also exposes incoherence within her community by calling attention to the ways in which it privileges ideals of feminine sanctity in...

Centralism and uniformity or localism and diversity: the Virgin and native saints in the English monastic reform

Recent work on the cult of the saints in the late Anglo-Saxon church (Ridyard, Rollason, Clayton) seem to be at variance on the issue of the importance of the cults of the Virgin and those of the native saints. This is an attempt to read the cult of the Virgin against those of other saints, exploring similarities and differences in the ways in which the cults developed and by whom, and to demonstrate that the cult of Mary functioned as a symbol of solidarity and corporate unity in the Benedictine reform period. This ideal did not last long, however, and its breakdown is mirrored in a movement towards local cults.

Towards Post-Soviet Pre-Modernism: on recent approaches to early Rus(s)ian hagiography

The appearance of Paul Hollingsworth’s book of translations, The Hagiography of Kievan Rus’ (Hollingsworth 1992), provides the pretext for this survey. Tales of saints, or of candidates for sainthood, constitute a substantial proportion of the extant native literature of pre-Mongol Rus, comparable in volume only with the chronicles. This in itself has ensured that the study of hagiography has had a prominent place in the study of early Rus literature and culture, and hence in the wider field of byzantinorussica. In recent years native saints have benefited additionally from changes in the cultural and political climate: the advent of glasnost (from 1985), one of whose main themes was the recovery of the past; the millennium of the Conversion of the Rus, whose celebration in 1988 became a test and a manifestation of glasnost; and eventually, at the end of 1991, the collapse of the USSR and the sharpening of competition between national mythologies (competition for the same cultural space) both within and between the newly independent East Slav states of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. The surge of ‘native’ interest has been matched, only in part fortuitously, by an increase in western publications.