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D e c o r a t io n s f o r t h e H oly D ead

Visual Embellishments
on Tombs and Shrines o f Saints

Edited by

Stephen Lam ia
&
Elizabeth Valdez del A lam o

BREPOLS
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

© 2002, BREPOLS§5PUBLISHERS , Turnhout, Belgium

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2002/0095/37
ISBN 2-503-51088-4
Transferred to Digital Printing 2008
 We dedicate this volume to
Constando del A lam o and M im i Costa Lamia
 Contents

Abbreviations ix

List of Illustrations XI

Foreword XVI l
DOROTHY GLASS

Acknowledgements XIX

Introduction XXI
STEPHEN LAMIA & ELIZABETH VALDEZ DEL ÁLAMO

Prolegomenon
Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 3
PETER BROWN

Part I. Pilgrims, Piety, and Cultic Practice

Imagery and Interactivity: Ritual Transaction at the Saint’s Tomb 21
ROCÍO SÁNCHEZ AMEIJEIRAS

The Cross and the Crown, the Tomb and the Shrine: 39
Decoration and Accommodation for England’s Premier Saints
STEPHEN LAMIA

A Shrine in its Setting: San Vicente de Avila 57

DANIEL RICO CAMPS

Caput sancti regis Ladislai:

The Reliquary Bust of Saint Ladislas 77
and Holy Kingship in Late Medieval Hungary
SCOTT B. MONTGOMERY & ALICE A. BAUER
 Part II. Cloister - Holy Place for the Holy Dead
The Bishop-Saints of Galicia and León, 93
their Cults, and Material Remains (Ninth to Eleventh Centuries)
EDUARDO CARRERO SANTAMARÍA

The Saint’s Capital, Talisman in the Cloister 111

ELIZABETH VALDEZ DEL ÁLAMO

A Reliquary Capital at Moissac: 129

Liturgy and Ceremonial Thinking in the Cloister
LEAH RUTCHICK

Cloister as Shrine to a Patron Saint: 152

Perpetuating the Memory of Saint Pontius at Saint-Pons-de-Thomières
LESLIE BUSSIS TAIT

Part III. Shifting the Saint, Moving the Faithful

The Representation of Physician Saints 167
in the Katholikon of the Monastery of Hosios Loukas, Phokis
NADEZHDA GUERASSIMENKO

The Vanni Altarpiece and the Relic Cult of Saint Margaret: 179
Considering a Female Audience
LEANNE GILBERTSON

The Sepulchre of Saint Juliana in the 191

Collegiate Church of Santillana del Mar
FRANCESCA ESPAÑOL

Civic Promoters of Celestial Protectors: The Arca di San Donato 219

at Arezzo and the Crisis of the Saint’s Tomb around 1400
ULRICH PFISTERER

List of Contributors 233

Index 235

Plates 253

viii Contents
 Abbreviations

AA. SS. Acta Sanctorum

(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1643—1996)

Bibliotheca Sanctorum Bibliotheca Sanctorum

(Rome: Città Nuova, 1961-70)

BHG Bibliotheca Hagiographka Graeca

(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1909)

BUL Bibliotheca Hagiographka Latina

(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1898-1911)

BUO Bibliotheca Hagiographka Orientalis, ed. by Paul Peeters

(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1910)

LCI Lexikon der christlischen Ikonographie, 8 vols

(Rome, Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna: Herder, 1994)

Patrologia Graeca Patrologia Graeca, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 161 vols

(Paris, 1857-66)

Patrologia Latina Patrologia Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols

(Pans, 1879-1963)

Syn CP Hippolyte Delehaye, Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae.

Propylaeum ad Acta Sanctorum
(Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1902)
 List of Illustrations

Colour plates PL 9. Christ in Majesty, late twelfth century,

polychromed limestone. Santillana del Mar
PL 1. Effigy of Santo Domingo of La Calzada,
c. 1210—25. Cathedral of Santo Domingo de la PL 10. Virgin and Child under canopy, frag­
Calzada ment of an Epiphany, late twelfth century, poly­
chromed limestone. Santillana del Mar
Pi. 2. Ethelreda of Canterbury Taking the Cure
at the Tomb of Thomas Becket, late twelfth PL 11. Saint Juliana Taming the Devil, late
century, stained glass window. North aisle, twelfth century, polychromed limestone.
Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral Santillana del Mar

PL 3. Blind Men Cured at the Shrine of Saint

Edward, La estoire de seint Aedward le reí, Figures
c. 1250—60 (Cambridge, University Library, MS
Ee. 3.59, fob 30r) SÁNCHEZ AMEIJEIRAS
Fig. 1. Cenotaph of San Millán, c. 1200.
PL 4. Stone effigies of Saints Vincent, Sabina, Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, Suso
and Cristeta. Church of San Vicente in Avila
Fig. 2. Cenotaph of San Millán, detail of upper
PL 5. The cenotaph of Santa Eufemia as repre­ half of effigy, c. 1200. Monastery of San Millán
sented on her reliquary. Museo de la Catedral de la Cogolla, Suso
de Ourense
Fig. 3. Cenotaph of San Millán, side view, c.
PL 6. Reliquary bust of Saint Ladislas, between 1200, former installation, undated photograph.
1357—78, silver, partially gilded, enamel. Györ Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, Suso
Cathedral
Fig. 4. Reliquary of San Millán, detail of men
PL 7. Cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos, view setting fire to the saint’s bed, eleventh century.
from stairs of Romanesque south transept to Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, Yuso,
north gallery, c. 1100, with original burial site Monastic Museum
of Domingo marked by cenotaph
Fig. 5. Reliquary of San Millán, detail of the
PL 8. Saint Margaret and Stories of Her Life, miracle of the blind men, eleventh century.
manner of Turino Vanni, c. 1349—1438, tem­ Monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, Yuso,
pera on wood panel. Vatican Collection Monastic Museum
 Fig. 6. Tomb of San Pedro of El Burgo de c. 1250—60 (Cambridge, University Library, MS
Osma, c. 1258, photograph before 1967. Ee. 3.59, fol. 36r)
Cathedral of El Burgo de Osma
Fig. 7. The Sun and Moon, detail of the
Fig. 7. Santo Domingo freeing captives, c. 1200, Crucifixion of Christ, The Gospel Book of
cloister. Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos Judith of Flanders (The Weingarten Gospels),
c. 1050-65 (The Pierpont Morgan Library,
Fig. 8. Woman embracing a column, Liber de New York, MS M. 709, fol. lv)
vita et virtutibus Rudesindi episcopi, mid-thirteenth
century (Lisbon, National Library, MS
Iluminado 184, fol. 14v) RICO CAMPS
Fig. 1. Shrine of San Vicente in Avila, east side,
Fig. 9. Tomb of San Pedro of El Burgo de Epiphany
Osma, detail of the healing of the innkeeper,
c. 1258. Cathedral of El Burgo de Osma Fig. 2. Shrine, west side, Christ in Majesty

Fig. 10. Tomb of San Pedro of El Burgo de Fig. 3. Shrine, north side, the Persecution
Osma, detail of a monk reading, c. 1258. and Flight of Saints Vincent, Sabina, and
Cathedral of El Burgo de Osma Cristeta

Fig. 11. Tomb of San Pedro of El Burgo de Fig. 4. Shrine, south side, the Martyrdom and
Osma, detail of posthumous miracles of San Burial of the Saints
Pedro, c. 1258. Cathedral of El Burgo de Osma
Fig. 5. Shrine, central vessel, north side, Dacian
Sentencing Saint Vincent
LAMIA
Fig. 1. Matilda of Cologne Swooning at Beckets Fig. 6. Map of Avila, northeast area, showing
Tomb, stained glass window, late twelfth cen­ church of San Vicente and West Gate
tury. North aisle, Trinity Chapel, Canterbury
Cathedral Fig. 7. Shrine, central vessel, south side, Episode
of the Converted Jew
Fig. 2. The Dream of Becket’s Chronicler,
stained glass window, late twelfth century. North Fig. 8. Shrine of San Vicente, central vessel,
aisle, Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral north side, the Three Saints’Arrival in Avila

Fig. 3. Drawing of the wooden cover for the Fig. 9. Church of San Vicente, plan of the
feretory of Thomas Becket, before 1538 choir with the disposition of the Romanesque
(London, British Library, Cotton MS Tib. E. shrines and of the tomb vestiges in the crypt
viii, fol. 269r) below

Fig. 4. Simultaneous Occurrences: The Burial Fig. 10. Saint Paul, wood panel. Museum of
of King Edward the Confessor and Seekers of Avila Cathedral
Cures at his Tomb, La estoire de seint Aedward le
rei, c. 1250-60 (Cambridge, University Library, Fig. 11. Reconstruction of the Romanesque
MS Ee. 3.59, fol. 29v) shrine of Sabina and Cristeta

Fig. 5. Pilgrims Praying and Giving Thanks at

the Site of Saint Edwards Tomb, La estoire de MONTGOMERY AND BAUER
seint Aedward le rei, c. 1250—60 (Cambridge, Fig. 1. Reliquary bust of Saint Ladislas, profile,
University Library, MS Ee. 3.59, fol. 33r) between 1357-78, silver, partially gilded, enam­
el. Györ Cathedral
Fig. 6. The Opening of Saint Edwards Tomb Fig. 2. Hungarian gold denar from reign of
and Reverence Paid at the First Translation of Louis the Great, 1342-82, reverse, Saint
his Body, La estoire de seint Aedward le rei, Ladislas

Xll List o f Illustrations

Fig. 3. Reliquary bust of Charlemagne, c. 1349, Fig. 2. Pier with Paul and Peter, reliquary pro­
silver, partially gilded, semiprecious stones, gramme, southeast corner of cloister
antique gems, and cameos. Aachen, Cathedral
Treasury Fig. 3. Saint Paul, Saint Peter, and Martyrdom
capital, southeast pier
Fig. 4. Giovanni d’Aquila, Saint Ladislas, detail,
1378, fresco. Velemér, church Fig. 4. The Martyrdom of Peter, capital 20, east
gallery, Moissac, cloister
Fig. 5. Márton and Gyôrgy Kolozsvári, Saint
George (detail) 1370s, bronze. Prague, National Fig. 5. The Martyrdom of Paul, capital 20, east
Gallery gallery

Fig. 6. Peter in Chains with Angel, capital 17,

CARRERO SANTAMARÍA south gallery
Fig. 1. Plan of Santiago de Peñalba
Fig. 7. Peter and Angel outside the Prison, cap­
Fig. 2. San Pelayo’s crosier, eagle side, cedar(?), ital 17, south gallery
1045-85
Fig. 8. Introit Trope for Peter, The Moissac
Fig. 3. San Pelayo s crosier, figure side, cedar(?), Troper-Proser, c. 1100 (Paris, BN, lat. 1871, fol.
1065-85 24v)

Fig. 4. Crosier from the Treasury of San

Rosendo. Museo de la Catedral de Ourense TAIT
Fig. 1. Governor Claudius Commanding
Fig. 5. Chess set from the Treasury of San Torture on Rack, martyrdom capital 1, 1160s.
Rosendo. Museo de la Catedral de Ourense Société Archéologique de Montpellier, Musée
languedocien
Fig. 6. Liturgical comb of San Atilano. Parish
Church of San Ildefonso and San Atilano, Fig. 2. Pontius in Prison, martyrdom capital 1,
Zamora 1160s. Société Archéologique de Montpellier,
Musée languedocien
Fig. 7. San Froilán and San Alvito(?), reliefs from
the cloister of León Cathedral. Museo Fig. 3. Pontius Led to Torture, martyrdom cap­
Diocesano de León ital 1,1160s. Société Archéologique de Mont­
pellier, Musée languedocien

VALDEZ DEL ÁLAMO Fig. 4. Pontius on the Rack, martyrdom capi­

Fig. 1. Plan of the Romanesque cloister of Silos tal 1, 1160s. Société Archéologique de Mont­
pellier, Musée languedocien
Fig. 2. View of north gallery and saint’s ceno­
taph, c. 1100 Fig. 5. ‘Old Testament Sacrifice’, capital, 1160s.
The William Hayes Fogg Art Museum, Gift of
Fig. 3. Capital 23, northeast corner, c. 1100 A. Kingsley Porter

Fig. 4. Capital 23, gallery side, c. 1100 Fig. 6. Governor Claudius Commanding
Torture of Pontius, martyrdom capital 2
Fig. 5. Capital 23, west side, c. 1100 (double), 1160s. The Toledo Museum of
Art, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey,
Fig. 6. Capital 23, east side, c. 1100 29.203

Fig. 7. Witnesses, martyrdom capital 2 (dou­

RUTCHICK ble), 1160s. The Toledo Museum of Art, Gift
Fig. 1. Plan of the Moissac cloister, c. 1100 of Edward Drummond Libbey, 29.203

List o f Illustrations xin

 Fig. 8. Pontius with Bears, martyrdom capital 2 Fig. 5. Saint Mokios. South vault, narthex,
(double), 1160s. The Toledo Museum of Art, Katholikon, 1030s
Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey, 29.203
Fig. 6. Christ washing the feet of an apostle.
Fig. 9. Governor Claudius Commanding Mosaic at the north end of the narthex. Katho­
Torture of Pontius, martyrdom capital 3 (dou­ likon, 1030s
ble), 1160s. The Toledo Museum of Art, Gift
of Edward Drummond Libbey, 29.207 Fig. 7. Five martyrs from Persia, mosaic. West
wall of narthex, Katholikon, 1030s
Fig. 10. Witnesses, martyrdom capital 3 (dou­
ble), 1160s. The Toledo Museum of Art, Gift Fig. 8. Holy women, Saints Irina, Katherina,
of Edward Drummond Libbey, 29.207 Barbara, Euphemia, and Marina, mosaic. West
wall of narthex, Katholikon, 1030s
Fig. 11. Pontius Beheaded, capital 3 (double),
1160s. The Toledo Museum of Art, Gift of
Edward Drummond Libbey, 29.207
GILBERTSON
Fig. 12. Pontius Converts Emperor Philip, frag­ Fig. 1. Master of the Saint Cecilia Altarpiece,
ment of capital, 1160s. Saint-Pons-de-Tho- Santa Margherita, early fourteenth century, fres­
mières, Chapelle des Penitents co. Santa Margherita a Montici

Fig. 13. Knights on Horseback, capital (dou­ Fig. 2. Detail of colour pi. 8, gold punchwork
ble), 1160s. Société Archéologique de showing motif of marguerites
Montpellier, Musée languedocien
Fig. 3. Detail of colour pi. 8, upper half of Vanni
Fig. 14. Saint Pontius as Defender of the Altarpiece
Monastery, capital (double), 1160s. Société
Archéologique de Montpellier, Musée langue­ Fig. 4. Ambroise Paré, illustration of surgical
docien instruments from Ten Books of Surgery, 1564

Fig. 15. Baptism of Pontius, capital (double), Fig. 5. Barna da Siena, Flagellation of Christ,
early thirteenth century. The Toledo Museum 1350-55, fresco. San Gimignano, Collegiata
of Art, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey,
29.205 Fig. 6. Detail of colour pi. 8, Pilgrims and ex­
votos at the tomb of Saint Margaret
Fig. 16. Pontius Refusing to Worship Idol, cap­
ital (double), early thirteenth century. The
Toledo Museum of Art, Gift of Edward ESPAÑOL
Drummond Libbey, 29.205 Fig. 1. Plan of the collegiate church of Santillana
del Mar

GUERASSIMENKO Fig. 2. Interior of the collegiate church of

Fig. 1. Plan of Katholikon with tomb site of Santillana del Mar. Tomb and west choir
Saint Loukas Stiris, 1030s
Fig. 3. Present tomb of Saint Juliana, slab with
Fig. 2. Saint Loukas Stiris, mosaic. Naos, Saint Juliana Taming the Devil, c. 1453.
Katholikon, 1030s Santillana del Mar

Fig. 3. Saint Panteleimon, mosaic. Naos, Fig. 4. Presbytery and high altar with apostle
Katholikon, 1030s reliefs. Santillana del Mar

Fig. 4. Saints Cyrus, John, and Cosmas. North Fig. 5. Early photograph with the reliefs of the
vault, narthex, Katholikon, 1030s apostles on the frontal of the old altar

X IV List of Illustrations
Fig. 6. Epiphany, right tympanum, Puerta de las PFISTERER
Platerías, Santiago de Compostela Fig. 1.Arca di San Donato, front. Arezzo, cathe­
dral, after 1362-c 1375
Fig. 7. Antependium of the altar, Saint Paul
(detail). Santillana del Mar Fig. 2 .Arca di San Donato, rear. Arezzo, cathe­
dral, after 1362-c. 1375
Fig. 8. Relief of Saint Paul. Santo Domingo de
la Calzada (La Rioja) Fig. 3. Ground plan of Arezzo Cathedral, indi­
cating the locations for the Arca di San Donato
Fig. 9. Capital with the Maiestas Domini, and the tombs of Pope Gregory X and Bishop
Tetramorph, and apostles. South gallery, clois­ Guido Tarlati
ter, Santillana del Mar
Fig. 4. Iconographie scheme of the Arca di San
Fig. 10. Fragment of the baldachin of the saint’s Donato, front
tomb, fifteenth century(?). Cloister, Santillana
del Mar Fig. 5. Iconographie scheme of the Arca di San
Donato, rear
Fig. 11. Hypothetical reconstruction of the
tomb of Saint Juliana in the fifteenth century Fig. 6. Agostino di Giovanni and Agnolo di
Ventura, tomb of Bishop Guido Tarlati (detail).
Fig. 12. Altar of Saint Gilbert, fifteenth centu­ Arezzo, cathedral, 1327—30
ry. Daroca (Saragossa). Museum of the
Collegiate Church Fig. 7. Resurrection of Souls at the Last
Judgment, detail of the Area di San Donato, after
Fig. 13. Capital of the baptismal font. Santillana 1362-c 1375
del Mar
Fig. 8. Tomb of Pope Gregory X. Arezzo, cathe­
Fig. 14. Hypothetical reconstruction of Saint dra, c. 1300-10
Juliana’s Romanesque sepulchre in Santillana
del Mar

List o f Illustrations XV
 Foreword
D O R O T H Y F. G L A SS, P R E S ID E N T
IN T E R N A T IO N A L C E N T E R OF M E D IE V A L A R T

or many years, the International Center of Medieval Art has been pleased to sponsor ses­

F sions at the International Medieval Congress held at Leeds each summer. The papers col­
lected in this volume truly reflect both the intent and spirit of the Center, an international
organization dedicated to the study of medieval art.
Décorations for the Holy Dead: Visual Embellishments on Tombs and Shrines of Saints is a special cause
for celebration because it marks the first time that the papers given in a series of sessions spon­
sored by the Center at Leeds have been published in a single volume. The publication is the result
of the vision and hard work of its editors, Stephen Lamia and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo, who
have brought together thirteen stimulating papers on the decoration of saints’ tombs. Geograph­
ically widespread and chronologically diverse, the papers appearing in this volume were written
by a cadre of distinguished scholars from both Europe and North America. They offer new insights
into a fascinating theme. The International Center of Medieval Art is thus both pleased and hon­
oured to have sponsored the sessions on which this collection of essays is based.
 Acknowledgements

he editors wish to thank the following for their interest in and support of the project: the

T International Center of Medieval Art for sponsoring our sessions at the international
Medieval Congress held at the University of Leeds in 1999; Axel E. W. Müller, Director
of the Congress; Paula Gerson of the ICMA and the IMC Programming Committee. For their
help with the production of this volume we thank Simon Forde and Ann Matchette of Interna­
tional Medieval Research and Brepols Publishers. We also benefitted from our respective institu­
tions in the form of released time, travel, research, and publication subventions dispersed through
the Long Range Planning and Development Committee at Dowling College, and, through Mont­
clair State University, from the Offices of Global Education and Research and Sponsored Pro­
grams. We wish to express our gratitude to the following individuals: Michael Abcug, Rasheeda
Cline, Francie Davis, Kathleen Eder, Diane Holliday, Susan Katz Karp, Kenneth Kaplan, and
Diana Reeve. Special thanks are due to Elizabeth’s parents, Norbert and Elizabeth Wirsching.
The Prolegomenon ‘Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity’ is reproduced, by permission, from
Early Medieval Europe, 9 (2000), 1-24. Finally, we would like to thank each other and all con­
tributing authors for a fruitful and felicitous collaboration.
 Introduction
S T E P H E N L A M IA & E L IZ A B E T H V A L D E Z D E L Á L A M O

evotion to saints, their cult, and their While the literature associated with hagiog­

D memory was a central force of life in

medieval Europe. Factual and material
evidence in the form of tombs, shrines, reli­
raphy and art is vast, it is only now beginning
to examine the reciprocal relationship between
saint, supplicant, and site. Recently, many and
quaries, pilgrimages, vitae, and souvenirs is varied publications about tombs and shrines for
legion and attests to the all-pervasive nature of the holy dead have begun to emphasize cultic
the phenomenon. In an attempt to seek out pat­ practice, but very few book-length studies are
terns of similarity or temporal variations, this devoted to the broad category of saints’shrines
volume focuses on visual images carved and as interactive artworks. To facilitate reference,
painted at specific loca sancta in the Latin West we have included a short selected bibliography
and the Byzantine East, Naturally, one would at the end of this introductory essay. Needless
expect to find narrative, symbolic, legendary, to say, a fully international study of saints’buri­
and iconic representations of the holy dead, but als has not yet been carried out—perhaps
is there a corpus of less predictable, more unusu­ because the subject is so immense—and it is our
al motifs that has appeared at saintly sites? If hope to make a contribution to that much need­
so, do they expand our understanding of devo­ ed domain with the present volume.
tional and cultic practices at these holy places? Useful overviews of saints’ burials include
Does any particular visual typology dominate work by David Sox, Sabine Komm, Ben Nil-
the terrain of the sacred departed? son, and John Crook.2 Their research concen­
Decorations for the Holy Dead takes as its sub­ trates upon either a chronological or geographic
title Visual Embellishments on Tombs and Shrines context and emphasizes the important taxo­
of Saints, and this compendium of essays explores nomic and evolutionary nature of saints’tombs
the ways in which embellishment heightens the and shrines. Sox surveys several widely known
experience of the faithful at a saint’s resting medieval loca sancta, though not necessarily as
place. Our inquiry into this topic was prompt­ art. Komm concentrates on a select number of
ed by our recent work on Memory and the important French eleventh- and twelfth-cen­
Medieval Tomb wherein sepulchral monuments, tury monuments, proceeds to classify them into
or images of them, were considered with regard three groups—sarcophagi, shrines, and minia­
to the active role they assumed in relation to ture structures resembling chapels—and dis­
their audience.1 The present volume carries cusses their placement within the physical space
forth that investigation of interactivity between of the church. Among the tombs she includes
visitor and tomb, sharing the burgeoning schol­ are those of Saint Remigius in Saint-Rémi,
arly interest in the topic. What sets it apart from Reims; Saint Menulphus in Saint-Menoux;
the previous volume, however, is the focus Saint Guilhem at Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert; and
exclusively on saints’ real or symbolic burial Saint Lazarus at Autun. Komm also discusses
places. specific forms of veneration at holy sites includ­

Introduction XXI
 ing physical aspects such as access, touch, cir­ favourite, the Pilgrim}s Guide to Santiago de
cumambulation, and ensconcement, and her Compostela is a treasure trove of information
focus is the sepulchre itself, not any decorative on twelfth-century relics, saints’shrines, and the
embellishment that may prompt such behav­ regard in which they were held.7 The embell­
iour. Nilson offers a regionally oriented study ishment of saints’burial places as part of an envi­
on English shrines dated between 1066—c. 1540, ronment for liturgical and cultic practice is the
skilfully combining historical accounts of the focus of recent substantial studies in addition to
canonization of saints, the means by which those cited above. Thomas Dale s Relics, Prayers,
churches came into the possession of relics, and and Politics in Medieval Venetia: Romanesque Paint­
the financial implications for ownership of ing in the Crypt ofAquileia Cathedral is one exam­
shrines with art historical data such as the design ple, while the work of Sible de Blaauw, Cultus
and structure of these feretories and their rela­ et decor: liturgia e architettura nella Roma tardoan-
tionship with the ecclesiastic buildings which tica e medievale. Basilica Salvatoris, Sanctae Mari­
housed them. Crook, similarly, examines the ae, Sancti Petri, as its title suggests, interweaves
relationship between architecture, the cult of three Early Christian ecclesiastic structures with
relics, and saints’ tombs and shrines but with a liturgical developments in Rome.8
wider chronological and geographic swath. He Our project, Decorations for the Holy Dead,
surveys monuments in Italy, France, and Britain began as three sessions on the artistic setting for
from the Early Christian period to the late saints’burials in the Latin West, held at the 1999
twelfth century, charting the various architec­ International Medieval Congress at the Uni­
tural accommodations to the growing popular­ versity of Leeds, and sponsored by the Inter­
ity of relic cults. These include the earliest simple national Center of Medieval Art. The original
subterranean crypts and their subsequent elab­ group of papers focussed on monuments in
oration into shrine-crypts during the Carolin- Spain, France, and Italy, and discussed the active
gian era. He then discusses the tenth- and role saints’ tombs and their embellishments
eleventh-century phenomenon of whole-body assumed within the fabric of medieval society.
cults and the change in their location to the In order to widen the geographical and historic
church proper, which, he argues, ultimately distribution of topics, essays covering monu­
contributes to their evolution into shrines. ments in Greece, Hungary, and England have
Included in his analysis are many of the cultic been added to this volume. The contributing
practices our authors treat, but, like Komm, authors focus their articles on images carved and
he situates these activities as responses to the painted at specific loca sancta in medieval Europe.
tomb qua tomb. Most of the above-mentioned And so it is that they have discovered rich and
works, however, focus on typology more than often unusual narrative, symbolic, apocryphal,
on the psychological implications embedded in and iconic representations of the holy dead. But
sepulchral monuments and their decor—a it is also true that they have interpreted their
dimension which our volume offers. findings so as to situate the tombs, shrines, altar-
In the broad category of art historical litera­ pieces, and artefacts in direct relationship to
ture about saints and their memoria, Barbara spectators, visitors, and pilgrims who came to
Abou-El-Hajs book, 77le Medieval Cult of Saints: these revered resting places for devotion and for
Formations and Transformations, presents valu­ penance, for healing and for supplication. The
able insight into cults by means of manuscript means by which this dialogue between relic and
illustrations of saints’ vitae? In a similar vein, individual ensued was via visual embellishments,
Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, edited by that is to say, decorations for the holy dead.
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, To decorate is to grace with something that
focuses upon literary and visual images of holy adorns or honours.9 In adorning the burial
women and men.4 The classic works on tombs places of saints, medieval Christians maintained
by Erwin Panofsky and Henriette s’Jacob the ancient tradition and human instinct to hon­
emphasize tomb effigies and memorial portrai­ our the heroic dead.10 Decoration, as Oleg
ture, without, however, focusing specifically on Grabar propounded, mediates between artwork
saints.5 The studies that are most informative and audience.11 The ornament of a saints tomb
on that account are those concerned with pil­ formulated the saint’s memory, conditioned the
grimage and reliquaries, but these do not nec­ response of the faithful visitor, and signalled the
essarily treat the saint’s tomb.6 That all-time comportment appropriate for that sacred place.

X X II STEPHEN LAMIA & ELIZABETH VALDEZ DEL ÁLAMO

For example, the important relationship be­ from the saint’s vita emblazoned on their tombs
tween the sense of sight and the decor of tombs and shrines (sight), kinesthetic activities at, and
and shrines in the Byzantine East and Early osculation of the sepulchre (touch), drinking
Medieval West as a persuasive means to manip­ potions and elixirs composed of holy remains
ulate pilgrims’ faith has been carefully studied (taste), and burning candles and incense before
by Cynthia Hahn.12 And while contemporary sacred resting-places (smell)—were involved
scholarship is providing a much needed exam­ during their visit. These folkloristic rituals were
ination about the emphasis of sight in the sup­ just the sort of thing that the Church Fathers
plicants’ experience, it should be recalled that, found suspiciously pagan, but they nurtured
for the faithful, a visit to a shrine involved a both the economy of the soul and that of earth­
complete sensory experience in the realm of ly institutions as well. On the one hand, by
synaesthesia.13The papers included in this vol­ involving the loca sancta for all of these goings-
ume examine that reciprocal relationship on, medieval women and men vicariously
between saint and spectator in the Middle Ages. engaged the saints themselves and incorporat­
Saints’relics brought heaven and earth togeth­ ed them into their own lives. On the other hand,
er; their embellished monuments provided the the holy dead also benefited, for not only was
strategic area of confluence. One might even the memory of their existence perpetuated, but
venture to say that the Early Christian practice their cults were promoted through the frequent
of ‘enjoying the saints’never went away, much attention and embellishment they received. The
to the chagrin of theologians who would have ornamental environment at these tombs, shrines,
preferred less ‘pagan’ manifestations of faith altarpieces, and artefacts reinforced the prae­
instead of the feasting, drinking, dancing, sentia and potentia which the saints possessed and
singing, and games that worshippers carried to which, thereby, effected the supplicants’ wish­
excess.14 Augustine sought to sanctify Christ­ es.
ian festivals by insisting that they existed solely The arrangement of a saint’s burial, or con­
to promote imitation of the martyrs, but—as struction of a shrine, was also the construction
Peter Brown points out in the Prolegomenon of a cult. Many of the essays collected here cast
to this volume—such statements were a means light on the aspirations, successes, or failures
to control vulgar behaviour. As medieval Chris­ of relic guardians, the churchmen who sought
tianity shifted its initial focus from persecution to promote a saint’s cult, or ignored its possi­
and martyrdom to proselytization and then bilities. As becomes clear from several essays, the
reform, the type of saint changed, but not pop­ contemporary distinction between saint’s ceno­
ular faith in the thaumaturgie power of relics.15 taph and actual burial place has been too strict­
The joy of being in the real presence of a ly applied. In her essay, Francesca Español
saint—the desire to transform pain into delight, documents that translations of saints’ bodies
as characterized by Brown—is a constant in often made provisions to recognize that an ear­
Christian cults. Augustine and his like were lier burial place not only maintained its sancti­
fighting a losing battle. Popular devotional prac­ ty, but also frequently retained some relics. In
tices thus prevailed, and were, in fact, necessary addition, the long-standing belief in secondary
to sustain the churchly community. relics, items that had been in contact with a
The sacred site of a saint’s burial prompted all saint’s body, would have, in itself, rendered the
kinds of activities, from the predictable acts of original or even a secondary burial ground
prayer or votive offerings, to performative rit­ sacred. A valuable contribution has been made
uals such as circumambulation, entering the by Daniel Rico to our understanding of the
tomb space, imbibing or ingesting part of the relationship between the Christian and Jewish
relic-tomb or its dust, and even the witnessing communities of Avila, and particularly the role
of legal transactions. By their embellishments that Jews played in the creation of a saint’s
and designs, many of the loca sancta analyzed shrine, not just once, but over centuries.
in this volume induced and prompted the sort Whether similar roles were played by Jewish
of behaviour on the part of seekers of cures, artisans in other cults and other regions would
contrite penitents, and the purely devout that be a valuable field for further research. One of
can be characterized as synaesthetic since a num­ the essential elements of sainthood is Chris-
ber of sensory experiences—chanting or pray­ tomimesis, visualized in many ways in the art­
ing aloud (sound), viewing and reading episodes works discussed here. One finds not only the

Introduction
 traditional device of parallel poses, as in Saint and shrines of Edward the Confessor and
Margaret’s altarpiece or on cloister capitals, but Thomas Becket. This immediacy was facilitat­
also in copies of Christs tomb with its open­ ed through special arrangements at these mon­
ings, several examples of which are provided in uments: openings, or fenestellae, provided for
this volume. The synaesthetic power of cultic intimate ritual and thaumaturgie access to the
ritual and faith in the saint is engineered by their saints’ relics on the part of pilgrims. Crawling
monuments and artistic surround. into such a tomb space could only have been a
The papers presented in this volume have been transformative experience for many faithful. Pre­
subdivided into three categories that reflect the cious documents for these lost shrines are their
general tenor of their emphasis, though clear­ representations in stained glass and manuscripts.
ly, as the many cross-references between articles Lamia traces the changes in the images of the
indicate, much overlapping exists. In the first shrines to record not only their conjectured
group of papers, Pilgrims, Piety; and Cultic Prac­ appearance and devotional practice there, but
tice, the authors examine the processes by which also the sense of history on the part of the
embellished tombs and shrines activate physical image-makers. Daniel Rico Camps, in ‘A Shrine
delight in the presence and power of a saint. in its Setting: The Tomb of San Vicente de
That delight was channelled into action by the Avila’, describes how the cultic space of the
design of the saint’s space. Performative monu­ saint’s tomb expands outward from the origi­
ments incite ritualistic movements or journeys, nal burial site to the city walls where the mar­
whether of a specifically circumscribed space or tyrdom of Vincent, together with his sisters
of a somewhat more expansive nature. The rit­ Sabina and Cristeta, took place. Vincent’s tomb
ual of circumambulation around a tomb affords is designed as a microbasilica picturing the saints’
the faithful multiple points by which to view passion and the story of the Jew who charita­
the sepulchre and its various decorations—recall­ bly buried their broken bodies. By extending
ing the saint’s story and posthumous potency. the locus sanctus to the larger urban environment,
Such praxis in turn could form new memories the shrine becomes the vehicle through which
of saint and site for the visitor. The first essay by a metatransformation is achieved. Everything
Rocío Sanchez Ameijeiras provides several about the shrine of Saint Vincent—its iconog­
important examples of cultic practice in raphy, orientation, and location within the
medieval Iberia, establishing a broad-based plat­ church—has a symbolic rationale which con­
form for the more specific studies to follow. verts the basilica of San Vicente into a
Sanchez surveys the active relationship between macrosepulchre into which even the city of
figures carved on saints’ tombs and pilgrims, Avila is incorporated. Vincent’s was not the only
documenting the ways in which images affirm shrine in the church’s south transept : Sabina and
the power of the tomb’s occupant. At San Mil- Cristeta were also honoured, as was the Jewish
lán de la Cogolla, the saint’s relics had been founder. Rico traces the afterlife of these memo­
removed from his pre-Romanesque church, ria, and reconstructs the women’s shrine, of
located on a steep mountainside, to a newer, which significant fragments remain. In ‘Caput
more conveniently located monastery downhill. sancti regis Ladislai: The Reliquary Bust of Saint
The thirteenth-century cenotaph designed for Ladislas in Late Medieval Hungary’, Scott B.
the old church includes figurai representations Montgomery and Alice A. Bauer discuss the
of miracles that took place there, affirming the political and cultic significance of a reliquary
continuing potency of the place. Transactions bust now in the cathedral of Györ. They demon­
between the devout and the saint at other thir­ strate how the power of this reliquary protect­
teenth-century tombs such as those of San Pedro ed the kingdom and its own physical safety as
at the Cathedral of El Burgo de Osma and San­ well. Unlike tombs bound to their architectur­
to Domingo at the Monastery of Silos are al spaces, this reliquary head has mobility; it per­
depicted through narrative—serious and com­ forms the rituals together with the faithful.
ic—to provoke an empathetic response from the Instead of being at the centre of a circumam­
visitor. Stephen Lamia, in ‘The Cross and the bulation, it moves with the populace in pro­
Crown, the Tomb and the Shrine: Decoration cession around its protectorate city. In times of
and Accommodation for England’s Premier war, the relic disappears from its shrine to do
Saints’, describes the immediacy of experience battle, then returns. The transaction with Saint
granted to visitors to the now-destroyed tombs Ladislas supersedes any individual, or even a city,

X X IV STEPHEN LAMIA & ELIZABETH VALDEZ DEL ÁLAMO

to embrace an entire nation. lacking the full body of a saint, makes known
The second section, Cloister —Holy Placefor the presence of his relics at his eponymous
the Holy Dead, positions a little-studied func­ monastery in ‘Cloister as Shrine to a Patron
tion of the pre-Gothic cloister—that of burial Saint: Perpetuating the Memory of Saint Pon­
place—as a major function for this part of an tius at Saint-Pons-de-Thomières’. The excep­
early medieval monastery. Eduardo Carrero San­ tionally extensive cycle of twelfth- and
tamaría, in ‘The Bishop Saints of Galicia and thirteenth-century capitals representing the life
León, their Cults and Material Remains (Ninth of Saint Pontius evokes ways in which the
to Eleventh Centuries)’, reviews the stories of monks could identify with his struggle against
nineteen bishop-saints who had been monks idolatry, a problem contemporary with these
and who all chose to be buried in their monas­ carvings. The saint, patron and guiding light,
teries rather than in their cathedrals. The bur­ personifies his monastery.
ial of a saint could produce prosperity for a Our third group of essays, Shifting the Saint,
monastery, but the popularity of these individ­ Moving the Faithful, examines the contextual-
uals varied according to local political concerns. ization of the saint’s imagery at the locus of ven­
In analyzing the circumstances of each saint’s eration, and the changing needs of cults towards
cult and the objects associated with him, Car­ the end of the Middle Ages. An excellent exam­
rero provides a fundamental survey of early ple of contextualization is provided by Nadezhda
medieval sainthood in relation to the Recon­ Guerassimenko in ‘The Representation of
quest of Spain. In ‘The Saint s Capital, Talisman Physician Saints in the Katholikon of the
in the Cloister’, Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo Monastery of Hosios Loukas, Phokis’. The
examines one decoration created in the clois­ thaumaturgie saint Loukas Stiris was original­
ter of Silos for the holy dead, the patron saint ly buried in the crypt of the Katholikon at
Domingo, originally buried there and later Phokis. Subsequently, his relics were translated
translated into the church. The location of the to a shrine within the church proper, and his
sanctified grave site was marked in the cloister healing power and saintly status invoked by
gallery by a large ornamental capital on which locating images of him among other physician
the saint’s epitaph was inscribed. The words and saints, especially in the narthex of the church—
ornament order the viewer’s experience and the public entrance. In this way, the content of
define the entire north gallery as a funerary the church decoration as a whole integrates the
space. The epitaph not only signals the area of regional saint into the larger family of saintly
Domingo’s first burial, but also invokes the saints healers. Another advocate for physical well­
power to protect the faithful. The fearsome being is Saint Margaret: Leanne Gilbertson, in
sirens and ferocious animals in combat carved ‘The Vanni Altarpiece and the Relic Cult of
on the capital zoomorphically and metaphori­ Saint Margaret: Considering a Female Audi­
cally underline the ordinary mortal’s need for ence’, traces an altarpiece to its original loca­
the saint as guardian advocate. Another capital, tion at the cathedral of Montefiascone, where
in this instance at Moissac’s cloister, specifies a the tomb of this holy heroine was installed.
program to honour Saints Peter and Paul with Because the church was temporarily rededicat­
ornamented sculpture, painting, and song, as ed, in 1262, to another saint, Flaviano, Mar­
analyzed by Leah Rutchick in ‘A Reliquary garet was shifted, a fate similar to that of the
Capital at Moissac: Liturgy and Ceremonial other saints in this section. The images of Mar­
Thinking in the Cloister’. Unlike Silos, Moissac garet, object of veneration, now include a his—
could not claim a whole body, but nevertheless toriated vita as an encoded message to the
celebrated the relics of their patron, the apos­ viewing populace. The operation of her cult,
tle of Rome. At the time the cloister was especially as related to childbirth and the pos­
designed, the monastery was creating new sibilities for self-identification on the part of the
hymns to Saint Peter, and these received ornate various types of female viewers, are embedded
decoration in the monastic service books. In the in the pictures painted on her retable.
cloister, a capital dedicated to Peter and Paul The end of the Middle Ages transformed the
displays a cavity clearly intended to contain relics visual language of the saint’s tomb, and this is
which must have played a part in the rituals charted in the last papers of our volume. For
enacted for the saints. Leslie Bussis Tait also reasons eloquently expressed in a fifteenth-cen­
underscores the ways in which a monastery, tury document, Saint Juliana’s Romanesque

Introduction XXV
 sepulchre was dismantled by Alonso de Carta­ so turned to beings more potent than them­
gena, Bishop of Burgos, and a simpler Gothic selves, their ‘special friends’. The powerful sense
tomb, also no longer extant, was substituted in impression made upon the pilgrim by visual
the same location. Francesca Español, in ‘The decor and active participation in the sacred pres­
Sepulchre of Saint Juliana in the Collegiate ence imprints both mind and body—a sensa­
Church of Santillana del Mar’, begins with two tion that can only be described as awe.16 Nor
documents and a handful of sculptural fragments is this power a thing of the past. Only a few
scattered around the Colegiata. In the course of years ago, prayers, flowers, and photographs
her systematic detective work, she reconstructs implored Saint Radegonde in her crypt tomb
not just one, but both tombs for the saint. The at Poitiers for aid in finding a child who had
Romanesque feretory, the ornamental housing disappeared. Even today, the experience of
of the actual sarcophagus, was later deemed an Bede’s massive sarcophagus at Durham Cathe­
obstruction by the devout bishop—a modifi­ dral, however modern, does not fail to impress
cation of taste that exemplifies the changing with its solemnity.
reception of elaborate saints’tombs on the part The nature of this volume, the commemo­
of officialdom. Apparently, the canons did not ration of the holy dead of the medieval past,
reduce the ornamental surround of the sar­ has prompted us to connect it with recent
cophagus as much as the bishop would have events. The void where once stood the World
liked, and the new Gothic shrine demonstrates Trade Center has become a locus sanctus. As New
the enduring nature of popular cultic practices, Yorkers, we have witnessed the creation of new
despite the translation of most of Juliana’s relics shrines and cults in the aftermath of Septem­
to the high altar. This phenomenon runs par­ ber 11, 2001. In a few weeks since then, the
allel with trends in Italy identified by Ulrich vigils at the 1913 Firemen’s Memorial in River­
Pfisterer in ‘Civic Promoters of Celestial Pro­ side Park, the impromptu memorials in Union
tectors: The A rea di San Donato in Arezzo and Square and other parts of the City, and the many
the Crisis of the Saint’s Tomb around 1400’. visitors to the site of the Twin Towers all
Richly historiated tombs for saints in Italy in demonstrate the currency of the phenomena
the late thirteenth century were objects of civic described in this book. The urge to decorate a
pride and envy. The Arca di San Donato, begun sacred site, the desire to order chaotic experi­
after 1362, represents a culmination of escalat­ ence through the arts, is not something exclu­
ing tomb decoration. However, the nearly half- sive to the misty past. It is ours.
century period between c. 1380-1430/40
witnesses the development of more simplified Stephen Lamia
tomb shrines. This situation is explained by Pfis­ and Elizabeth Valdez del Alamo
terer as a result of the combination of formal All Souls Day; 2 November 2001
(excessively sumptuous), economic (financial
collapse in the wake of the plague), ecclesias­
tical (a quest for ecclesia primitiva), and political
concerns (a crisis of the institution of the com­
mune itself). Postscript
The interdisciplinary nature of the thirteen
studies along with the changing aspects of the International saints’ names have been Angli­
medieval cult of saints are important dimen­ cized, but for local, regional saints we have
sions of this volume. We offer this compendi­ retained their traditional names in order to
um to document the ways in which saints’ maintain a clear distinction—thus, Saint Domi­
burials were experienced and enjoyed by the nic, founder of the Dominican Order, but San­
medieval faithful. What is clear from their prac­ to Domingo de Silos. Moreover, in order to
tices is that those who sought aid from the holy avoid the jarring effect of mixed languages with­
dead were little interested in imitating those in a given article, we retain regional use of
saints. They wanted protection and healing, and spellings such as Castilla, Navarra, and the like.

XXVI STEPHEN LAMIA & ELIZABETH VALDEZ DEL ÁLAMO

NOTES

1. Memory and the Medieva! Tomb, ed. by Elizabeth Valdez Calixtinus and the Shrine of St James, ed. by John Williams
del Alamo with Carol Stamatis Pendergast (Aldershot: and Alison Stones (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1992).
Ashgate, 2000). The volume includes an essay by Stephen 8. Thomas E. A. Dale, Relics, Prayers, and Politics in Medieval
Lamia, ‘Souvenir, Synaesthesia, and the sepulcrum Domini: Venetia: Romanesque Painting in the Crypt ofAquileia Cathedral
Sensory Stimuli as Memorial Stratagems’, pp. 19-41.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Sible de
2. David Sox, Relics and Shrines (London and Boston: G. Blaauw, Cultus et decor: liturgia e architettura nella Roma tar-
Allen and Unwin, 1985); Sabine Komm, Heiligengrabmäler doantica e medievale. Basilica Salvatoris, Sanctae Mariae, Sancti
des !í. und i 2. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich: Untersuchung zu Petri (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1994).
Typologie und Grabverehrung (Worms: Wernersche 9. Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2nd edn (Spring­
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990); Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of field, MA: Merriam, 1956), s.v. ‘decorate’.
Medieval England (Rochester, NY:Boydell Press, 1998); John
Crook, The Architectural Setting of the Cult of Saints in the Early 10. For a contemporary example of this impulse, see
Christian West, c. 300-c. 1200 (Oxford: Oxford University Janice Mann, ‘Malice Green Did like Jesus: A Detroit Miracle
Press, 2000). Story’, Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art, ed. by Dawn Perlmutter
and Debra Koppman, SUNY Series in Aesthetics and
3. Barbara Abou-El-Haj, The Medieval Cult of Saints: Philosophy of Art (Albany: State University of New York
Formations and Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1999), pp. 117-27.
University Press, 1994).
11. Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament, Bollingen
4. Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. by Renate Series, 38 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1991). 12. Cynthia Hahn, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Con­
struction of Sanctity in Early-Medieval Saints’ Shrines’,
5. Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Eectures on its Speculum, 72 (1997), 1079-1106. Although we were not
Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (1964; repr. able to consult her recent book, Portrayed on the Heart, we
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992); Henriette s’Jacob, have added it to our bibliography.
Idealism and Realism: A Study of Sepulchral Symbolism (Leiden:
Brill, 1954). In this category may be included Hans Belting, 13. On synaesthesia, medieval tombs, and visitors to their
Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of sites see Lamia, ‘Souvenir, Synaesthesia, and the sepulcrum
Art, trans, by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Domini’ and his article in this volume, as well as Valdez del
Chicago Press, 1994) Alamo and Pendergast, ‘Introduction’, in Memory and the
Medieval Tomb.
6. Amy J. Remensnyder, ‘Legendary Treasure at Conques:
Reliquaries and Imaginative Memory’, Speculum, 71 (1996), 14. Peter Brown, ‘Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity’,
884—906; Gesta, 36 (1997) is exclusively devoted to a study in this volume; idem, ‘Images as a Substitute for Writing’,
of reliquaries and contains articles by Caroline Walker East and West: Modes of Communication, ed. by Evangelos
Bynum and Paula Gerson, Barbara Drake Boehm, Cynthia Chrysos and Ian Wood (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 15—34; Ian
Hahn, Ellen M. Shortell, Scott B. Montgomery, and Thomas Wood, ‘Images as a Substitute for Writing: A Reply’, in East
Head. See also Marie Madeleine Gauthier, Highways of the and West, pp. 35-46.
Faith: Relics and Reliquaries fromJerusalem to Compostela, trans, 15. Brigitte Cazelles, Le Corps de sainteté d'aprèsJean Bouche
by J. A. Underwood (Secaucus, NJ: The Wellfleet Press, d’Or, Jehan Paulus et quelques vies des Xlle et XlIIe siècles
1986). (Geneva: Droz, 1982); André Vauchez, Saints, prophètes et
visionnaires: Le pouvoir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris: Albin
7. Most recently, Paula Gerson, Jeanne Krochalis, Annie Michel, 1999); idem, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages ,
Shaver-Crandell, and Alison Stones, The Pilgrim s Guide to trans, by Jean Birrell (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
Santiago de Compostela: A Critical Edition (London: Harvey University Press, 1997); idem, La Spiritualité de l’Occident
Miller, 1998); Anne Shaver-Crandell and Paula Gerson, The
médiévale (VlIIe-XIIIe siècle), 2nd edn (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela:A Gazetteer (London:
Harvey Miller, 1995); Santiago, Camino de Europa. Culto y 16. For a discussion of imprinting the mind in connec­
Cultura en la Peregrinación a Compostela, exh. cat., ed. by tion with funerary monuments, see Valdez del Alamo and
Serafín Moralejo and Fernando López Alsina (Santiago: Pendergast, ‘Introduction’, in Memory and the Medieval Tomb,
Monasterio de San Martin Pinario, 1993); The Codex pp. 5-8

Introduction X X V ll
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medievales, 5 (1995), 209-43 Early Christian Studies, 3.3 (1995), 325-55
Hahn, Cynthia, ‘Picturing the Text: Narrative Santità, culti, agiografia: temi e prospettive: atti del I
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voir surnaturel au Moyen Age (Paris: Albin crum Domini: Sensory Stimuli as Memory
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Weinstein, D., and R. M. Bell, Saints and Soci­ limard, 1988)
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1000-1700 (Chicago: University of Chica­ Prayerfor the Dead in Early Medieval France
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Morrison, Karl E, History as a Visual Art in the
Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Princeton:
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Oexle, Otto Gerhard, ‘Memoria und Memo-
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sentation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University et les morts dans la société médiévale (Paris: Gal­
Press, 1996) limard, 1994)
Frank, Georgia, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims Valdez del Alamo, Elizabeth, with Carol Pen­
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2000 )
Freedberg, David, The Power of Images (Chica­
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Compostela, trans, by J. A. Underwood Codex Calixtinus and the Shrine of St James
(Secaucus, NJ: The Wellfleet Press, 1986) (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1992)
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ing Reliquaries’, Gesta, 36.1 (1997), 20-31 muerte en la Baja Edad Media hispana’, in
Herklotz, Ingo, Sepulcra e monumenta del medio­ La idea y el sentimiento de la muerte en la his­
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1985) Compostela, 1992), II, 95-117
Jacob, Henriette s’, Idealism and Realism:A Study
of Sepulchral Symbolism (Leiden: Brill, 1954)
Jacobsen, Werner, ‘Saints Tombs in Frankish SPECIFIC TOMBS AND SHRINES
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zwischen Antike und Aufklärung (Darmstadt: románico hispano, Actas del Simposio en San­
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(1995-97), 13-84 du corps de saint Ebrégisile’, Bulletin mon­
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de saint Lazare et la sculpture romane àAutun Ormrod, Lucy, ‘The Wenceslas Chapel in St
après Gislebertus (Autun: Ville d’Au tun and Vitus’ Cathedral, Prague: The Marriage of
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PR O LEG O M EN O N
 Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity
PETER BROWN

he discovery at Mainz by François Dol- Augustine addressed a congregation that need­

T beau of a new collection of sermons of

Augustine has enabled us to study, in far
greater detail, the attitude of Augustine to the
reform of the cult of the martyrs between 391
ed little encouragement to enjoy such occasions.
The Christians of Carthage and elsewhere came
from societies which had, for millennia, iden­
tified religious festivals with moments of frank
and 404. This study aims to understand Augus­ remission. In the words of Strabo:
tine s insistence on the need to imitate the mar­
although it has been said that human beings
tyrs against the background of his views on
then act most like the gods when they are doing
grace and the relation of such views to the
good to others, yet one may better say that they
growing differentiation of the Christian com­
are closer still to the gods when they are feel­
munity. It also attempts to do justice to the views
ing good—when they rejoice and hold high
of those he criticized: others regarded the tri­
festival.2
umph of the martyrs over pain and death as a
unique manifestation of the power of God, in For Plutarch, the high cheer of festivals proved
which believers participated, not through imi­ conclusively that the Epicureans were wrong.
tation but through celebrations reminiscent of The gods were not, as the Epicureans claimed,
the joy of pagan festivals. In this debate, Augus­ mere persecutory projections of human fears,
tine by no means had the last word. The arti­ chill Superegos characterized by vengeance and
cle attempts to show the continuing tension wrath. The relaxed mood of a religious feast
between notions of the saints as imitable and proved the exact opposite. On such occasions,
inimitable figures in the early medieval peri­ human beings stood in the real presence of
od, and more briefly, by implication, in all lat­ serene and eminently fun-loving beings.3 Greek
er centuries. etymologists derived the verb methuein, ‘to be
drunk’, from meta to thuein, ‘to be in on the sac­
Let us begin with Augustine, preaching in rifices’, even from methienai, ‘to participate’—
Carthage in 412: to share, for a blessed moment, in the heady,
joyous essence of the gods.4
Brethren, see how it is that when a feast of the Given such long-established expectations, it
martyrs or some holy place is mentioned, to is not a matter for surprise that, in every region
which crowds might flow to hold high festival. and in every period of Late Antiquity, Chris­
See how they stir each other up, and say, ‘Let tians, too, should just want to have fun. They
us go, let us go’. And each one asks the other, also were philheortoi, impenitent ‘lovers of high
‘Where to?’ They say, ‘To that place, to that festival’. In southern Gaul, at saints’ festivals in
holy place’. They speak to each other, and as the countryside outside Arles, crowds would
if each one of them were set alight, they form stream in from the surrounding villages. They
together one single blaze.1 sung songs, they danced, they drank heavily,

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 3

 with many toasts for the saints. The young men Catholic piety, especially as it related to the cult
fought each other, and their elders settled law of the martyrs.10 The Mainz collection of ser­
suits.5 It would have been a scene not unlike mons of Augustine, discovered and now edit­
the great patterns that were still to be seen in ed by François Dolbeau, has added precious
early nineteenth-century Ireland, named, sig­ evidence to the dossier of a reform of Christ­
nificantly, from the patrún, the patronus, the ian worship that may have been unique for its
patron-saint of the region. Such a one was the time in its determination and trenchancy.11
Pattern of Cloghane, in the Dingle peninsula: It is certainly the most fully documented
‘a day of games, athletics, vaulting over horses, example of such a reform in Christian Late
dancing, singing and courtship, of faction fight­ Antiquity. The new sermons have provided us
ing and feasting’. It was a day renowned, also, with an unexpected glimpse of Augustine in
for its fine meat pies.6 action, when faced with the long-established
At the other end of the Christian world, at religious habits of his fellow Christians. It is a
the great pilgrimage site of Qala’at Sem’an, the disturbing glimpse. Here was a Christian preach­
peasants danced around the column of Saint er who was quite prepared to bring to bear,
Symeon Stylites. When the first outriders of the within his own, Catholic congregation, a
Muslim armies fell upon the pilgrims, in 637, searching critique of ‘superstition’and of imperi­
Christians of stricter views thought that it had tia, of culpable ignorance in matters of religious
served them right: they had angered God by practice, such as had usually been deployed, by
their drunkenness at the festival.7 Christians, only against the cultic practices of
As this last, sharp remark shows, the enjoy­ pagans outside the Church.12 In a sermon
ment of the cult of the saints remained a prob­ preached on 23 January 404, Augustine rejoiced
lematic issue in Christian circles, as it had not that, through the firmness of Aurelius and his
been, to so great an extent, among pagans. colleagues, the exuberant practices (the singing,
Preachers at such festivals, even at the most the drinking, and the easy mingling of the sex­
euphoric of them, were careful to point out es in night-long vigils) associated with the shrine
how little Christian occasions resembled what of Saint Cyprian—the greatest cult-site in
they considered to be the coarser junketings of Christian Africa—had been brought to an end:
Jews and pagans. Preaching at Christmas, Gre­
Where in those days the din of dirty songs was
gory Nazianzen enumerated in quick succes­
heard, nowadays it is the singing of hymns that
sion twenty two different ways in which the
lifts the roof [...] in a word, where God used
feast was not to be enjoyed.8 Twenty-two neg­
to be offended, God is now being propitiated.13
ative clauses in one paragraph is a lot of nega­
tives—even for a Cappadocian father. Yet, when In other regions of the late antique Christian
it came to the issue of control of the festivals of world, language such as this would only have
the saints in Late Antiquity (in effect, in this been used to celebrate the victory of Christ­
case, control of the feasts—the natalia, the ncital­ ian over non-Christian, pagan cult.14
iota—of the martyrs) the most prominent fig­ Faced by what he considered to be disorder­
ure is, without a doubt, Augustine of Hippo. ly and irreligious behaviour, associated with the
We have long known of the determination cult of the martyrs, Augustine repeated, over
which Augustine showed, from the moment of and over again throughout his life, variations of
his ordination to the priesthood at Hippo, in a single, basic formulation: festivals occur, he said,
391, to reform the manner in which the cult of
ut per eas congregatio membrorum Christi
the martyrs was celebrated in Hippo and
admoneatur imitari martyres Christi. Haec
Carthage. As a priest, he abolished the songs
omnino festivitatis utilitas. Alia non est.
and solemn drinking associated with the Laeti­
tia, the day of solemn good cheer, that accom­ (so that through those festivals the congrega­
panied the memory of Leontius, a former tion made up of members of Christ should be
Bishop of Hippo.9 At the same time, he had prompted to imitate the martyrs of Christ. That
gone out of his way to obtain the collaboration is the one and only raison d’être of a festival.
of his senior colleague, Aurelius of Carthage There is no other.)15
and, by implication, of the other Catholic bish­
ops of Africa, in undertaking what was noth­ For a religious historian, the problem with
ing less than a thorough-going reform of Augustine is that he is almost invariably entire-

4 PETER BROWN
ly right. It is difficult to gainsay a statement that imitation as the only permissible alternative to
is the condensed essence of a religious system the rambunctious scenes that we have already
which has, to a large extent, formed the reli­ described, in connection with saints’festivals in
gious common sense of Western Europe. Seen Arles and in the surrounding countryside.17
in its eschatological context—that is, as Augus­ With Caesarius (and also with many phrases of
tine tended to see it, from the lofty but ultimate the Roman liturgy) one gets the impression that
standpoint of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the City the idea of imitating the saints was interposed,
of God—it was obvious that those who wished like a screen, to hold the believer back from
to join the martyrs in heaven must, in their own more exuberantly physical forms of worship. In
way, follow Christ as the martyrs had done. In much the same manner, Gregory the Great had
the words of the Visigothic liturgy of Toledo, insisted that religious pictures should be read,
those frail worshippers who had tended, in the ut scriptura. In so doing, he attempted to substi­
dangers of the present life, to look to the saints tute a more detached, intellectual activity—the
as guardians and as patrons, as comités and act of reading—for the more direct, physical
patroni—as sources of help in day-to-day mat­ manifestations of adoration-—the bowing, the
ters rather than as models of behaviour—must kissing, the candles, and the heavy whiff of
also strive to live in such a way as to be wel­ incense—usually associated with sacred paint­
comed into heaven by the saints as their sodi. ings.18 In both cases—in the insistence that the
They had to become true companions of the martyrs should be ‘imitated’ and that religious
saints, worthy of the company of Christ, paintings should be ‘read’—we are dealing with
because transformed by Christ’s grace in the a formula of control that privileged the intel­
same manner as his grace had once, to a high lectual over the physical, and that insisted that
degree, transformed the martyrs of old.16 contemplation of the meaning of objects of
But heaven is a long way off, and Western Christian worship was superior to all other
Christendom is a complicated phenomenon, forms of access to them—whether this was
made up of many currents of belief and prac­ unmediated participation in the joy of festivals
tice, spread over an extensive geographical area or loving ‘adoration’ of holy images.
and subject to constant change over the mil­ We must, therefore, make an effort of the
lennium of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. imagination to recover something of the full reli­
The clear intuitions of one religious genius can gious weight of the expectations of those who,
not be expected to embrace such diversity, still in fourth-century North Africa and, indeed, in
less should Augustine’s standard of correct wor­ all subsequent centuries of the western Middle
ship be allowed, by scholars of late antique and Ages, enjoyed the saints without necessarily feel­
medieval religion, to act as the tacitly agreed ing obliged to imitate them. I use the word ‘reli­
yardstick by which to judge the intrinsic reli­ gious’ advisedly. The effect of Augustine’s
gious worth of the many, various ways in which rhetoric has been to drain away from our image
late antique and medieval persons conducted of such feasts the heavy charge of sacrality that
the cult of the saints. lay at their centre. He singled out for denunci­
What strikes the historian of medieval reli­ ation the elements of moral disorder and of
gion is the fact that the notion of the imita­ inappropriate excitement associated with the
tion of the saints, though it may seem eminently cult of the martyrs. The impression that he leaves
sensible from a religious point of view, fits awk­ is that the hommes moyens sensuels of Carthage
wardly into the overall development and elab­ came to the feasts to have fun, when they should
oration of the cult of saints in Europe. The ideal have come to have religion. As a former jeune
of the imitation of the saints was usually invoked homme sensuel, Augustine knew of what he
so as to place a check upon powerful opposing spoke. I never dreamed, until the publication of
notions. Often, it was invoked to spoil the fun— the Dolbeau sermon On Obedience, that I would
to criticize what were presented, by preachers hear Augustine, the Catholic bishop in 404,
and moralists, as the more ‘earthy’, less religious speak with such candour about his own behav­
forms of Catholic worship. iour in the 370s:
In the case of Caesarius of Arles, in the ear­
ly sixth century, the notion of the imitation of When I went to vigils as a student in this city,
the martyrs was invariably invoked by him so I spent the night rubbing up beside women,
as to attack current practices. He presented such along with other boys anxious to make an

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 5

 impression on them and, who knows, should Let there be no day, dearest brothers, on which
the opportunity present itself, to ‘make it’with we do not meditate on these stories. This one
them.19 did not pale before the tortures [...] this one
greedily swallowed the flames [...] another was
But such engaging candour on Augustine s part cut to pieces, yet remained whole.23
should not cause us to forget that such ‘hap­
penings’belonged to the highly specific excite­ Those who came to the feasts of the martyrs
ment of a specific occasion: disorderly though came to participate in the unearthly ‘glory’ of
they were, they were only the outermost shock a moment of total triumph over pain and death.
waves, on the fringes of the martyr’s festival, Men and women alike, the bodies of the mar­
that registered the detonation, in its midst, of tyrs stood out as the centre of attention. For the
a heavy charge of religious feeling, associated martyrs had been rendered immune by God
with a particular notion of the sacred. Let us to the horrors inflicted on their flesh. In the
attempt to measure the mass of this charge, set words of an inscription of the martyrs at Hai-
up by a structure of distinct imaginative asso­ dra (Ammaedera), they were the ones ‘cui
ciations, connected with the cult of the mar­ divinitus inspirare hoc in animo dignatus est’
tyrs throughout the fourth-century Christian (to whom God has deigned to place in their
Mediterranean. soul the breath of divine spirit).24
It is best to begin with a remark of the wry The emotion which the sight of the violat­
pagan, Ammianus Marcellinus. Everyone, so he ed yet unmoved bodies of the martyrs evoked
implied, knew what Christian martyrs had been was not one of sympathy and admiration for
like: though forced to abandon their beliefs, they human courage. It was, rather, a sense of awe
had found their way to a ‘glorious death’ such as had always fallen heavily on the hearts
brought about by cruciabiles poenae—by ‘excru­ of ancient persons, when confronted with a fel­
ciating torments’.20 It is the image of the cru­ low human being in whose strangely altered
ciabiles poenae, of the excruciating torments body they sensed the presence of a mighty god.
which had accompanied the deaths of the mar­ This is what made Saint Eulalia so stunning to
tyrs, that surged forwards, in the late fourth cen­ the readers of the Peristephanon of Prudentius
tury if not earlier, to take centre stage. We move, (written in around 400). In applying to the
within a century, from the curt, judicial records words of Eulalia before her persecutors the clas­
of the martyrs of the time of the Great Perse­ sical phrase infremuit [...] spiritus, ‘her spirit
cution—where torture is used only to discov­ raged’, Prudentius chose to use the language of
er information, in the ‘aseptic’manner of a late the ancient oracles, to describe the raw ‘fren­
Roman cognitio procedure—to a world awash zy’of a young girl’s spirit, that had ‘breathed in’
with blood.21 To Shenute of Atripe, in the first the power of God.2:5
part of the fifth century, it was easy to distin­ Prudentius, I suspect, shared with many of
guish between authentic and unauthentic his contemporaries what has been somewhat
accounts of the martyrs. Any account that did unfairly labelled (in comparison to the Neo-
not recount how the martyr had died under great Platonic notions of Augustine) as a ‘material’
torments, that did not report that the martyrs view of the soul. It is better to talk of a ‘local­
eyes had been torn out, that the martyr’s body ized’view of the soul. For Prudentius, the soul
had been chopped limb from limb, that did not lay in the depths of the body, beyond the reach
describe how scorching fires had been applied of human probing. With the martyrs, this inner
to the martyr’s sides, and that did not conclude soul finally ‘leapt free’, unscathed, to regain its
with an account of how the martyr had been home beyond the stars.26 The notion of a ‘local­
weighted down with stones and thrown, in vain ized’soul gave rock-like, ontological solidity to
of course, into the River Nile—such an account the belief that the martyr, possessed by God,
could not be authentic: it was a martyros ñnoudj, had remained throughout inviolate: ‘There is
an account of a martyr based on lies.22 It was another, within the body, whom no man is able
the same for Victricius of Rouen when he to outrage [...] free, undisturbed, unharmed,
preached in around 396 (that is, at the time exempt from grievous pain’.27 The body of
when, in distant Africa, Augustine and his col­ Eulalia was ‘painted scarlet with new blood’.28
leagues had embarked on their reforms): But that blood had touched her hidden, inner
self as little as a wash of red paint affected the

6 PETER BROWN
cool, smooth surface of a wall down which it God. The sufferings of the martyrs were offered
dripped. to believers—in a manner that I am tempted to
The miracle of impassivity, associated with speak of with a term more usually applied to
the torments of the martyrs, tilted over into a late medieval Eucharistic devotion—as a heil­
yet greater miracle. So great was the disjuncture bringende Schau, a sight which in and of itself
between the observed, outside state of the mar­ unleashed salvation. It was a spectaculum, also, in
tyr, brought into contact with sources of excru­ that the believers were drawn by the deeper
ciating pain, and the inviolate state of his or her imaginative logic of the occasion to participate
inner being, that the associations of human pain, in the glory of the martyrs rather than to imi­
as it were, passed through the looking glass: pain tate them. They gathered so as to share, for a
was transformed into its very opposite. The sear­ time of high celebration, in the original, death-
ing flames outside became like cooling water to defying moment of ‘glory’associated with God’s
the soul; or they came to seem as cold as ice triumph in the saint. In that way, the cult of the
compared to the firestorm of the spirit of God saints took up, and rendered that much more
that raged within the martyr.29 In a dream-like physical, more local and more frequent the
moment of God-possessed dissociation, all supreme moment of Christ’s triumph over
meanings became reversed. The martyrs lay death, celebrated every year at the feast of East­
upon the burning coals of their bonfire as if er. Easter, also, was an occasion for a frank explo­
they were reclining ‘amid red roses’.30 sion of physical joy and, among some believers,
We can catch a hint of the crackle of awe for heavy use of the bottle.33 As with Easter,
generated by so total a disjuncture between there was a strong, non-verbal element in such
observed torment and the miracle worked by participation. One was expected to join, body
God’s presence in the martyr if we look at and soul, in a great event that shook, for a
Byzantine illuminations of just such scenes. moment, the boundaries of the possible. The
Leslie Brubaker has remarked, most acutely, of high cheer and ‘oceanic’ feelings induced by
ninth-century renderings of the deaths of the wine; the chanted songs (songs whose wild
martyrs, that these were models of classical pitch, rather than their words, may have shocked
restraint: ‘the dying saints [...] seem to us stricter, ancient ears as ‘obscene’); the poten­
detached; they do not elicit our sympathy’. Yet tial for the breaking of the boundaries between
Byzantines expected that to contemplate just the sexes; and, above all, the gravity-defying
such illuminations would provoke an outburst leaps of the dancers: these were physical expres­
of ‘warm tears’.31 For in the miniatures, one sions of a moment of vast release, that marked
was given a glimpse of the bodies of the mar­ the passing of a great soul, through torments,
tyrs as they appeared, at the time of torment, to beyond the stars. Equally non-verbal and
to the souls of the martyrs. The believer would equally dramatic were the healings which the
supply the rest. We are dealing, here, with an saint was believed (in all later centuries) to
exquisitely late antique structuring of the emo­ bestow on the faithful, throughout the year but
tions, by which a scene in which one element most especially at the high moment of the fes­
is uncannily absent acts as a trigger, to unleash tival of the saint. For this was the moment when
the full horror and wonder of a moment the iron constraints of pain and death, that held
charged with the presence of God. For this was the lives of the faithful in their grip, had sud­
how martyrs were thought to feel their own denly sprung open, for the martyr, at the touch
martyrdom. His mind and soul filled with God, of God.34
the martyr Dativus (from Abitina, near It was to the isolation of the martyrs from
Carthage, in 304) ‘viewed the ruin of his body other members of the faithful, implied in this
all the while like a spectator, rather than feel­ powerful model—and hence to the essentially
ing its pain’.32 participatory relationship established between
What matters, in such an imaginative struc­ the martyrs and their devotees—that Augustine
turing of the cult of the martyrs, is that the mar­ addressed the full force of his own, most deeply
tyr (as, later, the ascetic or the saintly bishop) meditated religious convictions. He aimed to
stands isolated. He or she is sheathed in the leave the imprint of a very different notion of
majesty of the full presence of God. The mar­ God’s grace—a notion equally dramatic but
tyrs festival was a spectaculum in the most pro­ more evenly distributed between martyrs and
found and ancient sense: it was a showing of faithful—on the burgeoning cult of the saints.

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 1

 Put very briefly, while never denying for a ers, in their different ways, strained to conform
moment the majesty of God’s presence in the themselves:
martyrs, he went out of his way to insist that
The martyrs followed Christ right up to the
the martyrs did not enjoy an outright monop­
shedding of their blood, up to a likeness of His
oly of the overwhelming grace of God. The
own Passion.
working of God’s grace in every heart was, in
itself, a miracle. It was surrounded by the same They followed him, but they did not do so
sense of amazement as was the blood-soaked alone. It is not as if, once they passed, that bridge
glory of a Lawrence, a Cyprian, or a Eulalia. would be lifted; nor, once they had drunk of
Much recent scholarship, now ably inter­ the fountain [of God’s grace] that fountain had
preted by Carole Straw, has stressed the extent dried up.40
to which, from his very first years as a bishop,
Augustine’s thought on grace grew out of the Augustine’s notion of the ‘imitation of the mar­
deep taproot of his daily involvement in the tyrs’, therefore, was founded on the need to
African cult of the martyrs.35 The martyrs were throw a bridge across the crevasse that appeared
spectacularly visible creatures of God’s grace. to separate the martyrs from the faithful. It was
They owed their ‘glory’to God alone. Nobody based, in part, on his extraordinary ability to
doubted that for a moment. They were the ‘pre­ reduce the spiritual struggle to a universal com­
destinate’ members of the elect par excellence, mon denominator. On that theme, Augustine
made plainly visible on earth by the nature of could be trusted to wax eloquent:
their lives and by the glory of their passing.36
We have always drawn attention to this,
Everyone agreed with that. What Augustine
brethren. We have never ceased to say it. We
went on to say, as often as he could, was that
have never been silent: life eternal is what we
exactly the same grace might stir—-discreetly at
should love; this present life, what we should
first but eventually, perhaps, triumphantly—in
scorn.41
the hearts of every one of his hearers:
Before grace had worked upon them, the hearts
God who gave grace to them can give it to us
of the martyrs had been divided by just such a
[...]. By that grace they became his friends;
conflict between two loves as was the heart of
we can, at least, by the same grace become his
the simplest Christian. It was not the distant,
servants [...] and, why not, then also his friends:
blood-stained bodies of the martyrs that spoke
through his grace, that is, not through our own
most directly to the faithful: the martyrs, rather,
will.37
spoke heart to heart to every believer of a strug­
At one stroke, Augustine had taken possession gle that they also had experienced—the strug­
of the reservoir of raw charisma, associated with gle between the love of God and the deep, fierce
the persons of the martyrs, and had led it, along love of the soul for its own body and for the
innumerable, hidden paths, into the lives of present life.42
every Catholic Christian. He did it, largely, by Thus, when it came to the issue as to how
placing the martyrs in the larger context of the exactly each individual saint might be imitat­
Church. All Catholics were subject to the com­ ed, Augustine remained gloriously unspecific.
mand to ‘follow’ Christ. All were bound to Apart from the occasional praise of women mar­
Christ—even if with widely varying degrees of tyrs, so as to shame the men and to prove that
prominence—as ‘members’ of his body, the any woman might expect to enjoy the full mea­
Church.38 At Upenna (Henchir Chigarnia in sure of God’s grace;43 apart, also, from a point­
modern Tunis), a list of otherwise unknown ed reference to martyrs who had been married
and local martyrs was given new majesty, at women and mothers of children, so as to rebuke
some time in the fifth century, by being copied nuns who were tempted to despise married per­
on to a mosaic, in such a way that they now sons,44 Augustine never offered the behaviour
appeared ranged on either side of a great, jew­ of any specific saint for imitation by any spe­
elled cross.39 In the same way, in Augustine’s cific group. He felt that he did not need to do
vision of the Church, the faithful were encour­ so. All the faithful should admire and imitate all
aged to crowd in behind the martyrs, because the saints, for they all had faced the same, basic
equally dwarfed by that great Cross, ranged struggle as they faced themselves. The struggle
behind the image of Christ to which all believ­ of the love of God to overcome love of the

8 PETER. BROWN
world was the only confrontation that mattered. itation about writing of her as if she were already
All must face it, as the martyrs had faced it, irre­ in heaven, with the martyrs, and even hinted
spective of class, race, or gender; and no one that, from heaven, she now brought comfort
could hope to triumph in that struggle unless to her entire family.49 At Thabarka, in North
they came as utter paupers, stripped of social Africa, the deacon Crescentinus was portrayed,
and cultural particularity, to the rich banquet in the mosaic above his tomb, trotting jauntily
of God’s grace.45 across the countryside. But the inscription speaks
We should remember that Augustine, for all of him in such florid terms, as ‘guest of the
his brilliance and considerable idiosyncracy, was angels, companion of the martyrs’, that it is only
a man of his generation and the inheritor of a recently that Yvette Duval has struck him from
dense Christian tradition. His insistence on the register of saints, placing the young deacon,
Christ as the primary model and the only help firmly, in an appendix devoted to ‘faux mar­
of the martyrs both followed the teachings of tyrs’.30 Crescentinus had been ‘martyrized’ by
Cyprian and also echoed faithfully the Epi­ his loved ones, much as his pagan predecessors
grammata of his near-contemporary, Pope had ‘heroized’ their dead. Furthermore, the
Damasus: 'possit quid gloria Christi ' (believe then increasing practice of depositio ad sanctos points
what Christs glory can achieve).46 What is sig­ in the direction of a sincere wish on the part of
nificant, however, is the difference between the the deceased (and not only on the part of those
physical setting in which such piety was shown. who preserved their memory) to draw closer to
The piety of Damasus was elaborated in little the martyrs by imitation. Burial beside the saints
masterpieces of calligraphic style, discreetly dis­ was not only an occasion for the rich and for
played in quiet burial chambers for the benefit the clergy to show their special status in the com­
of literate visitors of meditative disposition.47 munity: for some pious persons, it marked the
Augustine wished to impose such views also on end of a life characterized by continuous effort
large, tumultuous assemblies. to imitate their chosen saints.51
One can sense, in Augustine’s insistence on Altogether, religious history would be immea­
the personal workings of grace that made the surably poorer if it were not for the unflagging
examples of the martyrs directly relevant to pretentiousness of members of the sub-elites.
ordinary persons, the groundswell of an African Augustine’s world was marked by the constant
Christian community that had become ever presence of relatively well-to-do persons, inhab­
more complex in its social and intellectual struc­ itants of the fluid urban worlds of Carthage and
tures. Differing groups of the laity pressed for­ of Hippo—women, quite as much as men, mar­
wards for special attention. Among the well- ried persons quite as much as celibates; and
to-do, especially, one may suspect that there members of the laity quite as much as those
were many who did not want to feel as distant associated with the clergy. The discreet upward
from the martyrs as everybody else, because pressure of so many little groups of men and
equally deprived of the supreme charisma of women ensured that Augustine’s system of grace
their unearthly death. They did not wish to lose maintained a strong ‘democratic’ flavour. For
their identities by sinking back into the crowd, Augustine’s insistence on the accessibility of the
in great, participatory rituals. They wanted their grace that rendered possible the spiritual strug­
own, more personal share in the ‘portion of the gle and, so, the imitation of the martyrs, was a
saints’. challenge addressed to all categories of per­
To take one small but revealing example of sons within the Catholic Church. There were
these pressures, in the higher Empire, the edu­ always some persons, at least (often from a sur­
cated gentry began to accord to their own prisingly wide range of social and cultural back­
beloved forms of funerary remembrance mod­ grounds: by no means invariably educated or of
elled on the cult of the gods and of the heroes clerical background), who took Augustine at
of old. Private ‘heroization’ became wide­ his word.
spread.48 It is possible to talk, for the late fourth It is necessary to linger upon Augustine so
century, of a similar drift towards a ‘martyriza- as to conjure up the distinctive profile of his
tion’ of the deceased. Take the example of the attitude to the cult of the martyrs. It is, indeed,
young Christian lady Proiecta. Proiecta may have so distinctive that it should come as no surprise
been buried, in Rome, in a chamber as impres­ to learn that, in the centuries immediately fol­
sive as that of any martyr. Damasus had no hes­ lowing his death, Augustine had considerably

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 9

 less influence on the religious behaviour of Latin And so may God [the bishop would proclaim],
Christians than many modern estimates of his who once covered her naked body with a drift
work would lead us to suppose. He was a strik­ of pure white snow, make you all snow white
ing figure, but one figure only, in a large and and pure from every sin and misdemeanor?3
well-populated landscape. Without being in any
way less intelligent or spiritually more obtuse In such prayers, one is struck by a contrast. On
than the Bishop of Hippo, many Christians, in the one hand, the prayers evoked insistently, in
many regions, thought very differently on how language worthy of Prudentius, the unparal­
they might relate to the saints. leled sufferings of the bodies of the martyrs.
If we turn, for instance, to the Visigothic These sufferings marked out the saints as unique
liturgies of the late sixth and seventh centuries, and utterly otherworldly beings. On the other
we find ourselves among the nameless authors hand, the prayers called upon the saints to
of great prayers. These men were acquainted answer all and every prayer for safety and for
with the works of Augustine and Caesarius. success in this life.54 Confronted by so stark a
They were masters of the art of sacred rhetoric. juxtaposition between otherworldly heroes and
They came from a world not so very different the impenitently earthly desires of their devo­
from the studiolo of Augustine?2 But what they tees, one cannot help but being reminded of
offered, in the prayers preserved in the Mozara- the rituals by which modern Buddhist monks
bic Sacramentary of Toledo, was nothing less in Sri Lanka bless the peasantry. The chants of
than a weighty evocation of the sheer ‘magic’ blessing, the parittâ, consist of recitations, in
of the feasts. Imitation of the martyrs, such as Pali, of the melodramatic scenes that accom­
Augustine proposed, had its place in these litur­ panied each stage of the renunciation of the
gies, as was also the case, and to a greater degree, Buddha. Yet these chants are performed so as to
in the Roman-Frankish liturgies of the eighth bestow ‘long life, good health and a fair com­
and ninth centuries. But the notion of imita­ plexion’.
tion was a recessive colour. It was overshadowed
The intriguing paradox [writes Professor Tam-
by the vibrant phrases that gravitated incessantly
biah] is that the conquests of the Buddha which
around themes that came straight from the
relate to the withdrawal from life are in the
poems of Prudentius and from the glory days
process of transference transmuted into an affir­
of the fourth-century cult of the ‘unconquer­
mation of life.55
able’, inimitable martyrs.
Reading the Mozarabic Sacramentary, we are Anyone who wishes to understand how and
left in no doubt that we are dealing with a book why the saints came to be enjoyed in Late
of potent rituals. These rituals derived their Antiquity and in the early Middle Ages must
power from an incantatory deployment of grapple, at some time or other, with that para­
charged metaphors, associated with the mirac­ dox. When I wrote my own book on the Cult
ulous circumstances of the sufferings of the great of Saints, now almost twenty years ago, I had
martyrs. In these prayers, the believers did not not done that. I had entered with gusto into one
strain to join their hearts to the martyrs, as if to aspect of the cult of the saints in late antique
prototypes for their own hope of victory. Italy and Gaul. My book attempted to do jus­
Rather, they offered their souls (and, often, the tice to the impressive religious, cultural, and
souls of their dead kin) as passive objects, on artistic energy deployed around the notion of
which God would work the great transforma­ the saints as patroni, as protectors and interces­
tion of pain into delight, of constraint into free­ sors, on a frankly late Roman, aristocratic mod­
dom, as he had done in the miraculous bodies el of the exercise of spiritual power.56 I
of the martyrs: explained how the saints worked, as patroni, in
terms that were easily available to contempo­
Eternal God, by whose grace the virgin Eulalia
raries, and that were, for that reason, easy for
stood protected and blushed not to confess
them to verbalize. On looking back, I realize
amidst the flames, for, through your promise,
that I did not delve as deeply as I might have
you caused her to be scorched by the fire of
done into the other side of the problem, for
your love. So may you protect us, through her
which late Roman contemporaries did not have
prayers, amidst the treacherous wall of flame
a ready language. I did not address the deeper,
that is this world f...].
more implicit imaginative structures that

10 PETER BROWN
 explained not only how the saints worked (a sub­ tation of the saints was often combined with a
ject on which late Roman Christians could be sharp sense of their uniquely sacred qualities.
trusted to wax eloquent) but why the saints Much can be learned from figures who com­
worked and, above all, on what objects. bined such a strong sense of sacrality with fer­
Why was it that those whose lives and deaths vent belief that heroic sainthood could and
were associated with such prolonged suffering should be replicated in their own times.
that they had been, as it were, drastically ‘cau­ Gregory of Tours was one such person. He
terized’ from all contact with the ‘world’, re­ insisted that the faithful should imitate the mar­
entered the same ‘world’, after death, not only tyrs. ‘O homo mortalis [...] non agonizashuman
as lordly figures, but as figures deeply implicat­ beings, in fact, must always struggle against the
ed in all that was most earthy and most irre- allurements of the world.59 And they could
ducibly profane in the life of the world? One struggle successfully. All that the Christian need­
can understand how a Roman patron might be ed to do was to make the sign of the Cross with
interested in the welfare of his clients. But over­ serious intent—viriliter et non tepide (the two
whelming and meticulous concern for semi- words speak volumes on Gregory’s view of
feral pigs, for horse herds, for the wombs of life)—and to trust in Christ: ‘For, as I have often
women, and for the thick, rich mud of the Nile said, the Lord himself struggles and triumphs
are not interests one automatically associates in the martyrs’.60
with late Roman aristocrats. d7 A different mod­ Christ would ‘struggle and triumph’ once
el has to be invoked to explain that aspect of again in those who were faithful to him.Gre­
the relation between the saint and the world. gory felt that he lived in a world that dearly
For the evidence appears to show that it was needed saints, to challenge the complacency of
precisely by keeping the saints inimitable—and, modern times. When he stated, in the Preface of
above all, inimitable in their physical suffer­ his History; that he wrote ‘propter eos, qui
ings—that the Christians of Late Antiquity and adpropinquantem finem mundi disperant’, we
the early Middle Ages kept the saints sacred. misunderstand late Latin if we translate the
For, in keeping the saints sacred, they felt able phrase, as we so often do, as if it meant that Gre­
to bring them back into worldly affairs, as invul­ gory wrote for those ‘who are losing hope [or:
nerable presences, capable of reaching into the who are driven to despair] as they see the end
deepest, most potentially polluted and pollut­ of the world coming nearer and nearer’.61 In
ing levels of daily life. To build a frail bridge of fact, disperare means, rather, ‘to give up all hope’,
imitation between oneself and such persons was ‘to expect no longer’.62 What worried Grego­
the exact opposite of what one wanted from ry was that, apart from himself and his few pious
them. It did far more than destroy the fun of friends—persons who took the approach of the
the festivals. It brought the saints down to the end of the world with deadly seriousness—
level of their imitators, and, in so doing, it nobody seemed to give any thought to that dis­
undermined the fundamental antithesis between tant event. Their conduct showed this only too
the sacred and the profane. For if sacred fig­ clearly. Gregory, then, did not look out at a soci­
ures such as the saints were no longer seen as ety shrinking beneath the chill shadow of the
utterly, inimitably different from the profane, approach of the Apocalypse. What he saw,
then the very life-force of the profane world, rather, was a Merovingian Gaul more like the
which depended on intermittent contact with world that recent scholarship has presented to
the sacred, would wither away.-'18 us. He surveyed, with religious disquiet, a basi­
In her study of certain, extreme forms of late cally secure and sophisticated post-Roman soci­
medieval hagiography, Brigitte Cazelles has sug­ ety, still confidently profane in many of its
gested that the working of such imaginative reflexes, the majority of whose members were
structures—above all, the need to establish a stolidly indifferent to the approach of the Last
clear antithesis between the sacred and the pro­ Judgement. A large part of his literary work was
fane—accounted for the continued demand for devoted to making the saints ‘stand out’. They
lives of inimitable, heroic saints. Her insights were the only truly active and vibrant figures in
can be fruitfully applied to the late antique and a world where nothing else moved, becalmed
early medieval periods. But a historian of the as it was in the windless, moral doldrums of the
cult of the saints in the early Middle Ages can saeculum.
not be content with a clear cut either/or. Imi­

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 11

 Not only was sanctity needed; it was possi­ deeply internalized a sense of clerical decorum!
ble. But this was an ancient sanctity, modelled The gesture showed the ‘wealth of grace’ that
on the martyrs and on the great ascetics. For God had ‘heaped’ upon the bishop’s soul.
nobody had yet told the Bishop of Tours about With Gregory we can glimpse how a religious
the Adelsheiligen. He did not know that such person of the late sixth century strove to make
creatures existed. He did not believe that aris­ his own the awesome qualities of the saints of
tocratic lineage, nor even that a well-established old. Their sacrality and fierce deaths did not
family tradition of episcopal rule, conveyed hold them at a distance from him. Gregory grew
sanctity. Indeed, like any pensive observer of the up talking about saints with his mother at the
Roman governing class, from Seneca to Ammi­ fireside.66 His first lessons in reading and writ­
anus Marcellinus, Gregory had a low view of ing from the Scriptures enabled him to copy
the moral fibre of the majority of his peers. out a remedy with which to heal his father’s
Violence, sensuality, and a weakness for the bot­ gout.67 He lived among persons whom he
tle seemed to characterize only too many of his admired especially for the reverent awe with
well-born contemporaries. Descent de stemmate which they would pass on stories of the saints.68
Romanorum was no guarantee in itself that a He wrote profusely so as to do the same him­
bishop would show the high degree of physi­ self. He was an active member of what we might
cal courage, the integrity, and the self-control call a ‘hagiological subculture’.
that were necessary for a bishop s tasks. Faced by a man such as Gregory and his many
What conveyed these qualities was grace, and tales of the saints, we must remember what the
a somewhat old fashioned grace at that. For Gre­ cognitive psychologists tell us. The very act of
gory had inherited from Augustine, perhaps thought contains a strong narrative element.
through Augustine’s Gallic admirers, that streak ‘Asleep and awake it is just the same: we are
in the Augustinian system that emphasized that telling ourselves stories all the time’.69 There
the saeculum still needed heroes—persons is no reason not to suppose that the stories told
endowed with the gift of perseverance: ‘strong so often by Gregory did not become part of his
figures who could tame the unjust powers of own story to himself about himself. The raw
the world’.63 dramas of the lives of the saints entered the
This was not the fluid, bubbling grace that had thought flow of an entire group of men and
encouraged so many humble groups—women women, such as Gregory himself, who had cre­
as well as men, married as well as celibate, lay ated for themselves a ‘hagiological subculture’.
persons as well as clergy—to strive towards the Ethnographers can see this happening, over the
martyrs, as in the churches of Augustine’s Africa. years in a living society, as the Buddhist monks
It was the grace required by a human ice-break­ in modern Sri Lanka absorb dramatic tales of
er, before whose solid prow the ice floes of the the trials of the Buddha. Even as lay persons,
saeculum broke and gave way. they had taken these archaic narratives, set in a
But, for Gregory, such grace was still active distant time, often characterized by redundant,
in Gaul. It was a matter of pride to him that it barely explicable violence against the self, into
had come to members of his own family. their own thought flow and, hence, into their
Ni ceti us, Bishop of Lyons from 552 to 573, was own inner narrative about themselves. O f the
the uncle of his mother. Here, plainly, was a great monk Pafmânda, Michael Carrithers can
man predestinate. He had been blessed from the write: ‘having so much hagiography about him
womb. Nicetius was one of those who had to begin with, he easily became the stuff of
received ‘the first and basic act of pity shown hagiography itself’.70
by a merciful God, who heaps the wealth of One such person, perhaps, was the lady Blat­
grace upon the undeserving and who sanctifies ta, who was buried in Rome in the church of
the one who is not yet born’.64 And how did Saint Anastasia in 688:
Gregory know this? Nicetius had picked up lit­
et quia martyribus Christi studiosa cohaesit
tle Gregory, then aged eight, and had sat him
Christigeri meruit martyris esse comes
on his knee, but not before adjusting his robe:
‘holding his fingers on the edge of his garment (And because with zeal she clung to the mar­
he covered himself with it so well that my body tyrs of Christ, she has deserved to be the com­
was never touched by his blessed limbs’.65 panion [perhaps through ad sanctos burial] of
Would that all clergymen had such cautela—so the Christ-bearing martyr herself).71

12 PETER BROWN
Historians should not underestimate persons empowerment of each group in medieval soci­
like the lady Blatta, although they barely appear ety to an appropriate ‘role model’ saint.
in the sources for the religious history of the This juxtaposition, within the same high
early Middle Ages. But they were there. Sixty medieval society, of two very different images
years old, Blatta had been loyal to priests and of sanctity, calls for a few, necessarily brief, con­
generous to the poor. She had instilled pudici­ cluding observations. The first is that the tenac­
tia in all her children. She was the sort of grand­ ity of ‘late antique’ forms of the image of the
mother, a true nonna, who would have fostered saints, revealed in studies such as those of
many a little Gregory of Tours. Ethnographers Brigitte Cazelles, should cause us, perhaps, to
of living Buddhist societies still find themselves redefine the boundaries of Western Europe.
challenged to understand ‘the actual replica­ Throughout this period, Catholic Western
tion of a living tradition’.72 Medievalists, I Europe was flanked by Christian societies that
think, face a similar challenge. Persons such as had not lost touch with the late antique imag­
Gregory and the lady Blatta are so welcome inative structures that had favoured, on the
to us, as they give a hint of how a section of whole, the emergence of mimi table saints. No
the religious world of the early Middle Ages Augustine had come to spoil the fun of the fes­
set about the ‘replication of a living tradition’ tivals, and to cause the shadow of his austere
by establishing a constant, warm relation with insistence on the imitation of the saints to fall
the saints. between the faithful and more ancient forms of
With a date such as 688, we have reached the the enjoyment of the saints, through heady par­
end of Late Antiquity. But recent studies of the ticipation in their triumph. Such post-Augus-
hagiography of the medieval West indicate that tinian developments did not occur in Greece,
the story continues. The medieval cult of the in the Balkans, in Ethiopia, and in medieval and
saints owed its contours to the continued grind­ early modern Russia. And yet Western and East­
ing together of two massive tectonic plates— ern Christendom never became entirely sepa­
the urge to imitate and the urge to admire. The rate worlds. Both were the heirs of Late
monumental study of André Vauchez, La Sain­ Antiquity. In the year 1400, in a continuum that
teté en Occident, published in 1981, dealt with stretched from Novgorod to London, the Chris­
the change in attitudes to sanctity in the later tian imagination continued to be fed by legends
Middle Ages, that led to the emergence, in the whose dramatic structures, whose insistent phys-
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of ‘les saints icality and whose notions of the sacred still car­
imitables’—of imitable saints, cut to a more ried with them the distinctive flavour of fifth
human measure, presented as models of Chris­ century Syria and of Coptic Egypt.75
tian behaviour appropriate to a more complex We should not isolate the hagiography of
and urbanized society.73 Within a year, howev­ Western Europe, by privileging only its more
er, the brilliant analysis of vernacular saints’lives distinctive and original features. There is no
in northern France, Le Corps de sainteté by denying that the sudden development of the
Brigitte Cazelles, drew attention to a strong cur­ notion of imitable saints in the later medieval
rent of devotion that flowed in the opposite West was a notable phenomenon. In recent
direction. She pointed out the extent to which years, the notion that late medieval saints were
an ‘archaic’image of sanctity continued to feed expected to function as ‘role models’ has stim­
the imagination of believers on utterly inim­ ulated a series of historiographical endeavours.
itable figures, conjured up from the distant, late Historians of literature and society have attempt­
antique past. Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, ed to do justice to the full complexity of the
Saint Christina, and Jehan Bouche d’Or—Saint relationships between saints, their patrons, and
John Chrysostom as the wild hermit—are trou­ their audiences in the differing regions of West­
bling revenants. They are avatars from a very ern Europe. But, seen from the viewing point
ancient Christian East.74 They fit awkwardly of a wider Christian world, the notion of
into our image of a tidy, bourgeois Gothic imitable sanctity is a theme as vivid and as
Europe, where each group can be supposed to colourful, but as superficial, as a growth of
have enjoyed its own, made-to-measure saint, lichen across an ancient rock. If we listen to
and where the cunning of the medievalist can what Byzantinists and students of medieval and
be fruitfully deployed in matching the aspira­ early modern Russia (and even students of
tions, the social codes, and the needs for medieval and modern Ethiopia) can tell us about

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 13

 how the saints were perceived in those Chris­ the formidable Desert Fathers of early Byzan­
tian regions, western medievalists may find an tium, transferred to the West in all their archa­
answer, through the valid comparison of cog­ ic ferocity in books such as the Golden Legend
nate imaginative structures, to many of the mys­ of Jacobus de Voragine] not only was he con­
teries which still perplex them. soled when he had these thoughts, but even
Last but not least, the greatest mystery of all after putting them aside, he remained content
remains: how do saints produce saints? That is, and happy.77
how, for many religious persons, does the inim­
itable come to be absorbed in such a way as to Heroic saints, their unearthly image transmit­
provide a glimpse of wider, heroic horizons ted from the days of Prudentius, were still avail­
beyond the cramped confines of their normal able, also, to give courage and a sense of drama
life? On this issue, it is a relief to learn that the to the lives of lesser figures. In 1576, a young
saints tend to give as many different answers to girl from Seville, recruited as a nun by Saint
that question as do professors. For they also were Teresa of Avila, confessed to Teresa that while
products of very different spiritual landscapes, she was being brutally battered by her parents
formed by the differing pressures of the tec­ for refusing to marry, ‘she had felt almost noth­
tonic plates to which we have referred. To take ing, for she thought of what Saint Agnes had
a few examples, in the months before the death suffered, a thought which the Lord brought into
of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, in 1897, the com­ her memory’.78 Somehow, Ignatius and the
panion of her bedside, Sister Agnès de Jésus (in unknown nun from Seville had, like Gregory
fact, Thérèse’s elder sister), spoke to her of cer­ of Tours a thousand years before them, absorbed
tain saints who had lived extraordinary lives, the inimitable. By the manner in which they
such as Saint Symeon Stylites. Thérèse was had remembered the saints, they had con­
unimpressed. She wished, rather, for saints who tributed to ‘the actual replication of a living tra­
had fear of nothing in this world, such as Saint dition’.
Cecilia, who had not feared even to be mar­ It is the purpose of this article to suggest to
ried.76 The late antique historian (who tends to medievalists that the continuous tension, evi­
have a soft spot for Syrian holy men of melo­ dent in medieval hagiography, between imita­
dramatic disposition) is chastened by such words. tion of the saints and other forms of imaginative
Thérèse of Lisieux was an exquisite exam­ appropriation of their power, goes back direct­
ple of a very modern Catholic piety. For when ly to the late antique period. It is a tension that
we draw nearer to the culture of the later Mid­ can be traced back to the fact that, for men such
dle Ages, we meet persons for whom the as Augustine and the poet Prudentius, differing
ancient, inimitable saints had lost nothing of images of the martyrs and differing attitudes
their appeal. In his autobiography, Ignatius of to their festivals implied divergent views, also,
Loyola describes how, when still at Manresa, on the relation between grace and human
in 1522, he had tested his mind. Always the fine nature, on the possible relations between mem­
psychologist, he observed that: bers of the Christian community and its shared
heroes, and, ultimately, on the nature of the
When he was thinking about things of the
boundary between the sacred and the profane.
world, he took delight in them, but afterwards,
These were weighty topics. A debate upon
when he was tired and put them aside he found
them, begun around the year 400, was by no
that he was dry and discontented.
means concluded by the year 1500. It is this
But when he thought of going to Jerusalem unresolved, late antique debate that goes some
barefoot and eating nothing but herbs and way to explain the remarkable diversity in func­
undergoing all the rigors that he saw the saints tion and in imaginative content that charac­
had endured [and by these saints, Ignatius meant terized the medieval cult of saints.

14 PETER BROWN
NOTES

1. Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 121.2, ed. by Eligius 12. Peter Brown, ‘Qui adorant columnas in ecclesia’. Saint
Dekkers and A. Fraipont, Corpus Christianorum, 40 (Turn- Augustine and a Practice of the ‘imperiti’, Augustin Prédicateur
hout: Brepols, 1956), III, 1802. (395-411), ed. by Goulven Madec (Paris: Institut d’Études
Augustiniennes, 1998), pp. 367—75 (pp. 371—74).
2. Strabo, Geography 10.3.9, ed.by H.L.Jones, Loeb Clas­
sical Library, 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 13. Augustine, Sermon Mayence 5/ Dolbeau 2, 5.95, Vingt-
1961), p. 92. six sermons, p. 330, trans, by Hill, Sermons, p. 334.
3. Plutarch, A Pleasant Life Is impossible, 1101E—1102D, 14. See the inscription of the church that claimed to have
ed. by B. Einarson and P. H. de Lacy, Loeb Classical Library, replaced a pagan temple at Azra’a in Syria: ‘Where God was
14 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. angered once, now God is made content’. Corpus Inscrip­
114. tionum Graecarum, 4, no. 8627 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1977), p.
295; see Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom
4. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistac 2.11 (40 A), ed.by G. Kaibel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 98.
(Stuttgart: Teubner, 1965), p. 93; and Philo, De plantatione
163, ed. by J. Pouilloux (Paris: Le Cerf, 1963), p. 100; see 15. Augustine, Sermon 325.1, Patrologia Latina 39, col.
esp. A. Dihle, ‘La fete chrétienne’, Revue des études augus- 1447.
tiniennes, 38 (1992), 323-35.
16. Liber Sacramentorum 23.208, ed.by Marius Férotin, Le
5. Caesarius of Arles, Sermons 13.3-4; 47.5 and 55.2, ed. Liber Mozarabicorum Sacramentorum (Paris: Firmin-Didot,
by Germain Morin, Corpus Christianorum, 103 (Turnhout: 1912), col. 96.
Brepols, 1953), I, 66-67, 214, 242.
17. See above note 5 and Sermon 233. 1—2 , p. 882.
6. Maire MacNeill, The Festival of Lughnasa (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1962), II, 104. 18. Peter Brown, ‘Images as a Substitute for Writing’, in
East and West: Modes of Communication, ed. by Evangelos
7. Evagrius, Historia Ecclesiastica 1.14: Patrología Graeca, 86,
Chrysos and Ian Wood (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 15-34 (pp.
col. 2461 A; Michael the Syrian, Chronicle 11.6, trans, by Jean
23-25).
Baptiste Chabot, Le Chronique de Michel le Syrien (Paris: E.
Leroux, 1901), II, 422. 19. Augustine, Mayence 5/Dolbeau 2, On Obedience 5.79,
8. Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 38.5: Patrologia Graeca, 36, Vingt-six sermons, p. 330; Hill, Sermons, p. 333. On the
cols. 316A-317B; trans, by C. G. Browne, Library of the Nicene strength of a discreet mention in Confessions 3.3.5, I had
and Post-Nkene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MLEerdmans, 1974), proposed (as befitted a young Oxford don of the early 1960s)
VII, 346. See esp. M. Harl, ‘La Dénonciation des festivités a considerably more chaste interpretation: see Peter Brown,
profanes dans le discours épiscopal et monastique en Ori­ Augustine of Hippo (London: Faber, 1967), p. 41.
ent chrétien à la fin du IV siècle’, in La fête, pratique et dis­ 20. Ammianus Marcellinus, Res gestae 21.11.10, ed. by
cours, Annales de l’Université de Besançon, 262 (Paris: Belles John C. Rolfe, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols (Cambridge,
Lettres, 1981), pp. 123-47 (p. 129). MA: Harvard University Press, 1956), II, 262. Ammianus
9. Augustine, Ep. 29, to Alypius of Thagaste: see Peter wrote as he did so as to ensure that the lynching of George,
Brown, The Cult of the Saints. Its Rise and Function in Latin the high-handed Christian Bishop of Alexandria, would
Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), not be considered as a ‘true’martyrdom: see Timothy David
pp. 26, 34-35; and Victor Saxer, Morts, Martyrs, Reliques en Barnes, Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of His­
Afrique chrétienne aux premiers siècles, Théologie Historique, torical Reality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998),
55 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1980), pp. 133-47. It is perhaps p. 236. His criteria, therefore, were not dissimilar from those
important that Leontius was not a martyr: he was celebrat­ of Shenute!
ed as builder of the basilica. Thus, the Laetitia may have orig­ 21. As is shown in the newly discovered Acta Callonii: P.
inated as a more ‘social’event than was the cult of a martyr.
For that reason, the Laetitia may either have been more row­ Chiesa, ‘Un testo agiografico africano ad Aquileia. GliHcfii
di Gallonio e dei martiri di Timida Regia , Analecta Bollan-
dy than those at the feast of a martyr, or, alternately, Augus­
diana, 114 (1996), 241-68 (p. 252). On judicial torture in
tine may have found it easier to abolish.
the later Roman Empire, sec now Jill Harries, Law and
10. Augustine, Ep. 22, to Aurelius of Carthage. Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge Universi­
ty Press, 1999), pp. 122—29. A similar, curt original account
11. Now edited by François Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons of an Egyptian martyrdom has been discovered among the
au peuple d’Afrique (Paris: Institut d’Etudes Augustiniennes, papyri of Duke University: P. Van Minnen, ‘The Earliest
1996)—using the French title, Mayence, for Mainz—and Account of a Martyrdom in Coptic’, Analecta Bollandiana,
trans, by Edmund Hill, The Complete Works of Saint Augus­ 113 (1995), 13-38. It is significant that, in a tantalizingly
tine: A Translation for the Twenty-First Century. Sermons III/1: incomplete letter, newly discovered by Johannes Divjak,
New Discovered Sermons (Hyde Park, NY: City Press, 1997). Augustine expressed his strong preference for such Acta, over
The most relevant of these are Mayence 5/ Dolbeau 2: On against contemporary attempts to re-write the tales of the
Obedience, first edited in Revue des études augustiniennes, 38 martyrs: Ep. 29*, Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 46B: Lettres
(1992), 50-79; and Mayence 62/ Dolbeau 26: Against the 1*-29*, Bibliothèque Augustinienne (Paris: Etudes Augus­
Pagans, first edited in Recherches augustiniennes, 26 (1992), tiniennes, 1987), pp. 414-16; trans, by Robert B. Eno, Saint
69-141; now edited in Dolbeau, Vingt-six sermons, pp. Augustine. Letters VI (L*—29*), Fathers of the Church, 81
315-44 and 345-417, and trans, by Hill, Sermons, pp. 331-42 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press,
and 180—237 respectively. 1989), pp. 193-95.

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 15

 22. Jürgen Horn, Studien zu den Märtyrern des nördlichem 36. Augustine, Sermon 312.6, 1422, on Saint Cyprian;
Oberägyptens, I:Märtyrerverehrung und Märtyrerlegende im Werk compare the mid fourth-century Donatisi Passio Marculi 2,
des Schenute, Göttinger Orientforschungen, 4, Aegypten, 15 ed. by Maier, in Dossier du Donatisme, p. 278: ‘Ille [...] olim
(Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1986), p. 8. See in general praeelectus et praedestinatus a domino’.
Theofried Baumeister, Martyr Invictus (Münster: Regens­
berg Verlag, 1972). 37. Augustine, Sermon 335H, in Revue bénédictine, 68
(1958), 103 —Patrologia Latina Supplementum, II, 831.
23. Victricius of Rouen, In Praise of the Saints, 12, Patrolo­
38. Augustine, Sermon 280.6, 1283.
gia Latina, 20, col. 456CD; trans, by J. N. Hillgarth, Chris­
tianity and Paganism, 350-750, The Conversion of Western 39. Duval, Loca sanctorum, no. 29, fig. 42 at p. 65.
Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986),
pp. 27-28. 40. Augustine, Sermon 304.2.2, 1396.
41. Augustine, Sermon 302.9, 1389.
24. Yvette Duval, Loca sanctorum Africae. Le culte des mar­
tyrs en Afrique du IVc au Vile siècle, Collection de l’École 42. For example, Augustine, Sermon 284.4, 1279 and Ser­
Française de Rome, 58 (Rome: Palais Farnese, 1982), nos mon Frangipane 6.2, ed, by G. Morin, in Miscellanea Agos­
51A and 52 at pp. 108, 110-12. tiniana (Rome:Tipografìa Poliglotta Vaticana, 1930), I, 221.
25. Prudentius, Peristephanon 3.31—34, ed. by H.J. Thom­ 43. Augustine, Sermon Denis 13.2, ed. by Morin, p. 56.
son, Loeb Classical Library, 398 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
44. Augustine, De virginitate 44.45.
University Press, 1961), II, 144.
45. Augustine, Mayence 24/Dolbeau 9, 5.123, Vingt-six
26. Prudentius, Peristephanon 1.30, p. 100. See esp.Jacques Sermons, p. 33, Hill, Sermons, p. 51.
Fontaine, ‘Images virgiliennes de l’ascension céleste dans la
poésie latine chrétienne’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christen­ 46. Damasus, Epigrammata 8.9, cf. Vergil, Acneid 11.386:
tum : Ergänzungshand 9. Gedenkschriftfür A . Stuiber (Münster: possit qui virida virtus. See esp. Jacques Fontaine, ‘Damase
Aschendorff, 1982), pp. 55-67. The notion of a ‘material’ poète théodosien: l’imaginaire poétique des epigrammata’,
soul was more widespread than we realize: see Ernest L. in Saecularia Damasiana (Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di
Fortin, Christianisme et culture philosophique au Ve siècle. La Archeologia Cristiana, 1986), pp. 115-45 (p. 134). Ori
querelle de l’âme humain en Occident (Paris: Études Augus- Cyprian, see esp. Simone Deléani, Christum Sequi. Etude
tiniennes, 1959); and Michele Di Marco, La polemica sul­ d’un thème dans l’oeuvre de saint Cyprien (Paris: Études Augus­
l’anima tra [Fausto di Riez] e Claudiano Mamerto, Studia tiniennes, 1979), pp.75—95 and 106—110.
ephemeridis Augustinianum, 51 (Rome: Augustinianum,
47. J. Guyon, ‘Damase et l’illustration des martyrs. Les
1995). The effect of this notion on late antique Christian
piety has not been fully explored. accents de la dévotion et l’enjeu d’une pastorale’, in Mar­
tyrium in a Multidisciplinary Perspective. Memorial Louis Reek-
27. Prudentius, Peristephanon 5.157, p. 178. mans, ed. by Mathijs Lamberigts and P. Van Deun (Leuven:
Peeters, 1995), pp. 157-77.
28. Prudentius, Peristephanon 3.143, p. 152.
48. Henri Irénée Marrou, MOYCIKOCANHP Étude sur
29. For example, Liber Sacramentorum 47.880, ed. by les scènes de la vie intellectuelle figurants sur les monuments
Férotin, col. 393: an image constantly employed on the mar­ funéraires romains (Grenoble: Didier et Richard, 1938), pp.
tyrdom of Saint Laurence. 231—57; Henning Wrede, Consecratio informam deorum. Vergöt­
tlichte Privatpersonen in der römischen Kaiserzeit (Mainz:
30. John Chrystostorn, De sanctis martyribus 1, Patrologia Deutsche Archäologische Institut, 1981).
Graeca, 49, col. 708.
49. Guyon, ‘Damase’, pp. 177-79.
31. Leslie Brubaker, ‘Byzantine Art in the Ninth Centu­
ry: Theory, Practice and Culture’, Byzantine and Modern 50. Duval, Loca sanctorum, nos 208-09, fig. 281 at p. 431.
Greek Studies, 13 (1989), 23—93 (pp. 24—25); see now Vision 51. Yvette Duval, Auprès des saints corps et âme. L’inhuma­
and Meaning in Ninth-Century Byzantium. Image as Exegesis tion ‘ad sanctos’ dans la chrétienté d’Orient et d’Occident du IIle
in the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (Cambridge: Cam­ au Vile siècle (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1988), pp.
bridge University Press, 1999), p. 260. 154-62.
32. Passion of the Martyrs ofAbitina 10, ed. by Jean-Louis 52. Manuel C. Díaz y Diaz, ‘Literary Aspects of the Visig-
Maier, Le Dossier du Donatisme (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, othic Liturgy’, in Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, ed. by
1987), I, 72. Edward James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 61—76;and
J, N. Hillgarth, ‘Popular Religion in Visigothic Spain’, in
33. Gregory the Great, Dialogues 4.33.1-2, ed. by A. de
Vogüé, in Grégoire le Grand: Les Dialogues, Sources chréti­ Visigothic Spain, pp. 23-25.
ennes, 265 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1980), p. 108, gives an example 53. Liber Sacramentorum 11.95 and 100, ed. by Férotin,
of drunkenness after the Easter Vigil and of its chilling con­ cols 47, 49.
sequences.
54. For example, Liber Sacramentorum 28.247, ed. by
34. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, pp. 80—85. Férotin, col. 113—to Saint Vincent of Saragossa.
35. Carole Straw, s.v. ‘Martyrdom’, in Saint Augustine 55. S. J. Tambiah, ‘The Magical Power of Words’, Man,
through the Ages. An Encyclopedia, ed. by A. D. Fitzgerald 3 (1968), 175-208 (p. 181).
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 538-42. See also 56. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, esp. pp. 54—68.
Pierre-Marie Hombert, Gloria Gratiae (Paris: Institut d’É-
tudes Augustiniennes, 1996), with Peter Brown, Augustine 57. See Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred. Aspects of
of Hippo, reprint with Epilogue (London: Faber, forthcom­ the Christianization of the Roman World (Cambridge: Cam­
ing), and ‘The New Augustine’, New York Review of Books, bridge University Press, 1995), p. 76, where I attempt to
24 June 1999, 45-50 (p.49). address this problem in relation to Eastern hagiography.

16 PETER BROWN
 58. On this issue, see Brigitte Cazelles, Le Corps de sain­ 66. Gregory ofTours, Degloria confessomm 3, ed. by Krusch,
teté d’après Jean Bouche d'Or, Jehan Paulus et quelques vies des p. 300; trans, by Van Dam, Gregory ofTours, p. 20.
Xile et XlIIe siècles (Geneva: Droz, 1982), esp. pp. 64 and 78.
I am indebted to Professor Caroline Bynum for having urged 67. Gregory of Tours, De gloria confessorum 39, ed. by
this book upon my attention. Krusch, p. 322; trans, by Van Dam, p. 51.

59. Gregory of Tours, De gloria martyrum 105, ed. by 68. Gregory ofTours, Vita Patrum 17, ed. by Krusch; trans,
Bruno Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores by James, p. 114.
rerum Merovingicarum, 1.2 (Hanover: Hahn, 1885), col. Il l ; 69. Liam Hudson, in Times Literary Supplement, 25 Janu­
trans, by Raymond Van Dam, Gregory ofTours; Glory of the ary 1980, p. 85, cited by Michael Carrithers, P'he Forest
Martyrs (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1988), p. Monks of Sri Lanka. An Anthropological and Historical Study
132. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 86.
60. Gregory of Tours, De gloria martyrum 106, cd. by
70. Carrithers, The Forest Monks, p. 88.
Krusch, p. I l l , trans, by Van Dam, p. 133.
61. Gregory ofTours, Liber historiarum 1, praef., ed. by 71. Ernestus Diehl, Inscriptiones latinae christianae veteres,
Bruno Krusch, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores no. 208B.3 (Zurich: Weidmann, 1970), I, 49.
rerum Merovingicarum, 1.1 (Hanover: Hahn, 1951), col. 2; 72. Carrithers, The Forest Monks, p. 74.
trans, by L. Thorpe, Gregory ofTours.The History of the Pranks
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 67. A. H. B. Breuke- 73. André Vauchez, La Sainteté en Occident aux derniers siè­
laar, Historiography and Episcopal Authority in Sixth-Century cles du Moyen Age, Bibliothèque des Ecoles Françaises
Gaul. The Histories of Gregory ofTours Interpreted in Historical d’Athènes et de Rome, 241 (Rome: Palais Farnese, 1981);
Context, Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, see also his most illuminating second thoughts on the sub­
57 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994), esp. p. ject, ‘Saints admirables et saints imitables: les fonctions de
300, n.23, pp. 52-55 and 169-74; and Martin Heinzeimann, l’hagiographie ont-elles changé aux derniers siècles du
Gregorvonlburs (538-594). ‘Zehn Bücherder Geschichte’. His­ Moyen Age?’, in Les Fonctions des saints dans le monde occi­
toriographie und Gesellschaftskonzept im 6fht. (Darmstadt: Wis­ dental (IlIe—XÌIÌe siècle), Collection de l’Ecole Française de
senschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1994), pp. 69—101; both Rome, 149 (Rome: Palais Farnèse, 1991), pp. 161—72. See
accept the conventional translation. now Patrick Geary, ‘Samts, Scholars and Society. The Elu­
sive Goal’, in Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. by Sandro
62. For Gregory’s use of disperare to mean ‘not expect, Sticca, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 141
lose hope of’, cf. Liber historiarum 4.12, ed. by Krusch, p. (Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 1-22.
142, n. 2, citing Sidonius Apollinaris, Letter 2.1 : nec accipiebat
instrumenta desperans, trans, by Ormonde Maddock Dalton, 74. Cazelles, Le Corps de sainteté, p. 19.
The Letters of Sidonius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), I,
35: ‘nor does he trouble to furnish himself with deeds, 75. For example, Thomas J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography.
knowing it hopeless to prove a tide’. See also Series Sangal- Saints and their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford
lenses 33, R.8: Habebis spem ftdei, sed de disperato, in Alban University Press, 1988), pp. 280—92, on the English ver­
Dold, Die Orakelsprüche im St. Galler Palimpsestcodex 908, nacular legends of Saint Christina; and Gail LenhofF, The
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Sitzungs­ Martyred Princes Boris and Gleb, UCLA Slavic Studies, 19
berichte, 225.4 (1948), p. 24, with note on p. 110: ‘from (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989), pp. 60—61, on the cult of
someone you do not expect’.By contrast to the insouciance Saint Christina in Novgorod, later replaced by the equally
castigated by Gregory, expectation of the coming end of dramatic Passion of Boris and Gleb.
the world was the attitude expected of religiously minded 76. Sainte Thérèse de Jésus et de la Sainte Face, Le carnet
persons: e.g. the formula for a legacy to a pious foundation: jaune 30.6.1, Derniers Entretiens (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer
Marculf, Formulae 2.3, ed. by Alf Uddholm (Uppsala: Era- and Le Cerf, 1971), p. 233, cf. 21.8.3*, p. 390, on the Vir­
nos, 1962), p. 178. gin Mary: ‘On la montre inabordable, il faudrait la montrer
63. Steven Muhlberger, The Fifth Century Chroniclers, imitable’.
ARCA Monographs 27 (Leeds: F, Cairns, 1990), p. 131. 77. The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola, ed. by John C.
64. Gregory of Tours, Vita Patrum 8, ed. by Krusch, p. Olin and trans, by Joseph F. O ’Callaghan (New York: Harp­
241 ; trans, by Edward James, Gregory oflburs. Lfe of the Fathers er Torchbooks, 1974), p. 24.
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1985), p. 65.
78. Teresa of Ávila, Las Fundaciones 26.8, ed.by T. Alvarez,
65. Gregory ofTours, Vita Patrum 8.2, ed. by Krusch, p. Obras Completas (Burgos: Editorial Monte Carmelo, 1998),
242; trans, by James, p. 67. p. 1006.

Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity 17

 PART I.

Pilgrims, Piety,
and Cultic Practice
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
"Show my men how," she said, and squatted regally on the turf.
"Please," he said, "could I have something to eat first?"
She nodded indifferently and one of the men loped off into the
brush.

His hands untied and his face greasy with venison fat, Charles spent
the daylight hours instructing six savages in the nomenclature,
maintenance and operation of the jeep and the twin-fifty machine
gun.
They absorbed it with utter lack of curiosity. They more or less
learned to start and steer and stop the jeep. They more or less
learned to load, point and fire the gun.
Through the lessons the girl sat absolutely motionless, first in
shadow, then in noon and afternoon sun and then in shadow again.
But she had been listening. She said at last: "You are telling them
nothing new now. Is there no more?"
Charles noted that a spear was poised at his ribs. "A great deal
more," he said hastily. "It takes months."
"They can work them now. What more is there to learn?"
"Well, what to do if something goes wrong."
She said, as though speaking from vast experience: "When
something goes wrong, you start over again. That is all you can do.
When I make death-wine for the spear blades and the death-wine
does not kill, it is because something went wrong—a word or a sign
or picking a plant at the wrong time. The only thing to do is make
the poison again. As you grow in experience you make fewer
mistakes. That is how it will be with my men when they work the
jeep and the guns."
She nodded ever so slightly at one of the men and he took a firmer
grip on his spear.
Death swooped low.
"No!" Charles exploded. "You don't understand! This isn't like
anything you do at all!" He was sweating, even in the late afternoon
chill. "You've got to have somebody who knows how to repair the
jeep and the gun. If they're busted they're busted and no amount of
starting over again will make them work!"
She nodded and said: "Tie his hands. We'll take him with us."
Charles was torn between relief and wonder at the way she spoke.
He realized that he had never, literally never, seen any person
concede a point in quite that fashion. There had been no hesitation,
there had been no reluctance in the voice, not a flicker of
displeasure in the face. Simply, without forcing, she had said: "We'll
take him with us." It was as though—as though she had re-made
the immediate past, un-making her opposition to the idea, nullifying
it. She was a person who was not at war with herself in any respect
whatever, a person who knew exactly who she was and what she
was—
The girl rose in a single flowing motion, startling after her day spent
in immobility. She led the way, flanked by two of the spearmen. The
other four followed in the jeep, at a crawl. Last of all came Charles,
and nobody had to urge him. In his portable trap his hours would be
numbered if he got separated from his captors.
Stick with them, he told himself, stumbling through the brush. Just
stay alive and you can outsmart these savages. He fell, cursed,
picked himself up, stumbled on after the growl of the jeep.
Dawn brought them to a collection of mud-and-wattle huts, a corral
enclosing a few dozen head of wretched diseased cattle, a few
adults and a few children. The girl was still clear-eyed and supple in
her movements. Her spearmen yawned and stretched stiffly. Charles
was a walking dead man, battered by countless trees and stumbles
on the long trek. With red and swollen eyes he watched while half-
naked brats swarmed over the jeep and grownups made obeisances
to the girl—all but one.
This was an evil-faced harridan who said to her with cool insolence:
"I see you claim the power of the goddess now, my dear. Has
something happened to my sister?"
"The guns killed a certain person. I put on the skull. You know what
I am; do not say 'claim to be.' I warn you once."
"Liar!" shrieked the harridan. "You killed her and stole the skull! St.
Patrick and St. Bridget shrivel your guts! Abaddon and Lucifer pierce
your eyes!"
An arena formed about them as the girl said coldly: "I warn you the
second time."
The harridan made signs with her fingers, glaring at her; there was
a moan from the watchers; some turned aside and a half-grown girl
fainted dead away.
The girl with the skull on her pate said, as though speaking from a
million years and a million miles away: "This is the third warning;
there are no more. Now the worm is in your backbone gnawing.
Now the maggots are at your eyes, devouring them. Your bowels
turn to water; your heart pounds like the heart of a bird; soon it will
not beat at all." As the eerie, space-filling whisper drilled on the
watchers broke and ran, holding their hands over their ears, white-
faced, but the harridan stood as if rooted to the earth. Charles
listened dully as the curse was droned, nor was he surprised when
the harridan fell, blasted by it. Another sorceress, aided it is true by
pentothal, had months ago done the same to him.
The people trickled back, muttering and abject.
Just stay alive and you can outsmart these savages, he repeated
ironically to himself. It had dawned on him that these savages lived
by an obscure and complicated code harder to master than the
intricacies of the Syndic or the Government.
A kick roused him to his feet. One of the spearmen grunted: "I'm
putting you with Kennedy."
"All right," Charles groaned. "You take these cords off me?"
"Later." He prodded Charles to a minute, ugly block house of logs
from which came smoke and an irregular metallic clanging. He cut
the cords, rolled great boulders away from a crawl-hole and shoved
him through.
The place was about six by nine feet, hemmed in by ten-inch logs.
The light was very bad and the smell was too. A few loopholes let in
some air. There was a latrine pit and an open stone hearth and a
naked brown man with wild hair and a beard.
Rubbing his wrists, Charles asked uncertainly: "Are you Kennedy?"
The man looked up and croaked: "Are you from the Government?"
"Yes," Charles said, hope rekindling. "Thank God they put us
together. There's a jeep. Also a twin-fifty. If we play this right the
two of us can bust out—"
He stopped, disconcerted. Kennedy had turned to the hearth and the
small, fierce fire glowing on it and began to pound a red-hot lump of
metal. There were spear heads and arrow heads about in various
stages of completion, as well as files and a hone.
"What's the matter?" he demanded. "Aren't you interested?"
"Of course I'm interested," Kennedy said. "But we've got to begin at
the beginning. You're too general." His voice was mild, but
reproving.
"You're right," Charles said. "I guess you've made a try or two
yourself. But now that there are two of us, what do you suggest?
Can you drive a jeep? Can you fire a twin-fifty?"
The man poked the lump of metal into the heart of the fire again,
picked up a black-scaled spear head and began to file an edge into
it. "Let's get down to essentials," he suggested apologetically. "What
is escape? Getting from an undesirable place to a desirable place,
opposing and neutralizing things or persons adverse to the change
of state in the process. But I'm not being specific, am I? Let's say,
then, escape is getting us from a relatively undesirable place to a
relatively desirable place, opposing and neutralizing the aborigines."
He put aside the file and reached for the hone, sleeking it along the
bright metal ribbon of the new edge. He looked up with a pleased
smile and asked: "How's that for a plan?"
"Fine," Charles muttered. Kennedy beamed proudly as he repeated:
"Fine, fine," and sank to the ground, born down by the almost
physical weight of his depression. His hoped-for ally was stark mad.
 XIII
Kennedy turned out to have been an armorer-artificer of the North
American Navy, captured two years ago while deer-hunting too far
from the logging-camp road to New Portsmouth. Fed on scraps of
gristle, isolated from his kind, beaten when he failed to make his
daily task of spear heads and arrow points, he had shyly retreated
into beautifully interminable labyrinths of abstraction. Now and then,
Charles Orsino got a word or two of sense from him before the rosy
clouds closed in. When attempted conversation with the lunatic
palled, Charles could watch the aborigines through chinks in the
palisade. There were about fifty of them. There would have been
more if they hadn't been given to infanticide—for what reason,
Charles could not guess.
He had been there a week when the boulders were rolled away one
morning and he was roughly called out. He said to Kennedy before
stooping to crawl through the hole: "Take it easy, friend. I'll be back,
I hope."
Kennedy looked up with a puzzled smile: "That's such a general
statement, Charles. Exactly what are you implying—"
The witch girl was there, flanked by spearmen. She said abruptly: "I
have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?"
He gawked. The only thing that seemed to fit was: "That's such a
general statement," but he didn't say it.
"Answer," one of the spearmen growled.
"I—I don't understand. I have no brothers."
"Your brothers in Portsmouth, on the sea. Whatever you call them,
they are your brothers, all children of the mother called Government.
Why are you untrue to them?"
He began to understand. "They aren't my brothers. I'm not a child of
the government. I'm a child of another mother far away, called
Syndic."
She looked puzzled—and almost human—for an instant. Then the
visor dropped over her face again as she said: "That is true. Now
you must teach a certain person the jeep and the guns. Teach her
well. See that she gets her hands on the metal and into the grease."
To a spearman she said: "Bring Martha."
The spearman brought Martha, who was trying not to cry. She was a
half-naked child of ten!
The witch girl abruptly left them. Her guards took Martha and
bewildered Charles to the edge of the village where the jeep and its
mounted guns stood behind a silly little museum exhibit rope of
vine. Feathers and bones were knotted into the vine. The spearmen
treated it as though it were a high-tension transmission line.
"You break it," one of them said to Charles. He did, and the
spearmen sighed with relief. Martha stopped scowling and stared.
The spearman said to Charles: "Go ahead and teach her. The firing
pins are out of the guns, and if you try to start the jeep you get a
spear through you. Now teach her." He and the rest squatted on the
turf around the jeep. The little girl shied violently as he took her
hand, and tried to run away. One of the spearmen slung her back
into the circle. She brushed against the jeep and froze, white-faced.
"Martha," Charles said patiently, "there's nothing to be afraid of. The
guns won't go off and the jeep won't move. I'll teach you how to
work them so you can kill everybody you don't like with the guns
and go faster than a deer in the jeep—"
He was talking into empty air as far as the child was concerned. She
was muttering, staring at the arm that had brushed the jeep: "That
did it, I guess. There goes the power. May the goddess blast her—
no. The power's out of me now. I felt it go." She looked up at
Charles, quite calmly, and said: "Go on. Show me all about it. Do a
good job."
"Martha, what are you talking about?"
"She was afraid of me, my sister, so she's robbing me of the power.
Don't you know? I guess not. The goddess hates iron and machines.
I had the power of the goddess in me, but it's gone now; I felt it go.
Now nobody'll be afraid of me any more." Her face contorted and
she said: "Show me how you work the guns."

He taught her what he could while the circle of spearmen looked on

and grinned, cracking raw jokes about the child as anybody
anywhere, would about a tyrant deposed. She pretended to ignore
them, grimly repeating names after him and imitating his practiced
movements in loading drill. She was very bright, Charles realized.
When he got a chance he muttered, "I'm sorry about this, Martha. It
isn't my idea."
She whispered bleakly: "I know. I liked you. I was sorry when the
other outsider took your dinner." She began to sob uncontrollably.
"I'll never see anything again! Nobody'll ever be afraid of me again!"
She buried her face against Charles' shoulder.
He smoothed her tangled hair mechanically and said to the
watching, grinning circle: "Look, hasn't this gone far enough?
Haven't you got what you wanted?"
The headman stretched and spat. "Guess so," he said. "Come on,
girl." He yanked Martha from the seat and booted her toward the
huts.
Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led
back to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole.
"I was thinking about what you said the other day," Kennedy
beamed, rasping a file over an arrowhead. "When I said that to
change one molecule in the past you'd have to change every
molecule in the past, and you said, 'Maybe so.' I've figured that what
you were driving at was—"
"Kennedy," Charles said, "please shut up just this once. I've got to
think."
"In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you're
a rational animal and therefore that your being rather than essense
is—"
"Shut up or I'll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!" Charles
roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before
his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his
head in his hands.
I have been listening to you.
Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines.
Drives that never succeeded.
I'll never see anything again.
The way the witch girl had blasted her rival—but that was
suggestion. But—
I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?
He'd said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy.
He thought vaguely of psi force, a fragment in his memory. An old
superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded
psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But—
I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?
Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He
was going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl—and Martha—
have hereditary psi power? He mocked himself savagely: that's such
a general question!
Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought
vaguely. Things that go bump—and crash and blooie and whoo-oo-
oo! in the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around
fleshed-up middle-aged men and women. You take a hyperthyroid
virgin, isolate her from power machinery and electric fields, put on
the pressures that make her feel alone and tense to the bursting
point—and naturally enough, something bursts. A chamberpot sails
from under the bed and shatters on the skull of stepfather-tyrant.
The wide-gilt-framed portrait of thundergod-grandfather falls with a
crash. Sure, the nail crystallized and broke—who crystallized it?
Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down
cards and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies
in a railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away,
in a bombing overseas.
Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them.
Burned them and then made saints of them.
A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the
loopholes and flopped on the sand.
I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner.
Three days ago he'd dozed off while Kennedy broiled the meat over
the hearth. When he woke, Kennedy had gobbled it all and was
whimpering with apprehension. But he'd done nothing and said
nothing; the man wasn't responsible. He'd said nothing, and yet
somehow the child knew about it.
His days were numbered; soon enough the jeep would be out of gas
and the guns would be out of ammo or an unreplaceable part lost or
broken. Then, according to the serene logic that ruled the witch girl,
he'd be surplus.
But there was a key to it somehow.
He got up and slapped Kennedy's hand away from the venison.
"Naughty," he said, and divided it equally with a broad spearblade.
"Naughty," Kennedy said morosely. "The naught-class, the null-class.
I'm the null-class. I plus the universe equal one, the universe-class.
If you could transpose—but you can't transpose." Silently they
toasted their venison over the fire.

It was a moonless night with one great planet, Jupiter he supposed,

reigning over the star-powdered sky. Kennedy slept muttering feebly
in a corner. The hearthfire was out. It had to be out by dark. The
spearmen took no chance of their trying to burn down the place.
The village had long since gone to sleep, campfires doused, skin
flaps pulled to across the door holes. From the corral one of the
spavined, tick-ridden cows mooed uneasily and then fell silent.

Charles then began the hardest job of his life. He tried to think,
straight and uninterrupted, of Martha, the little girl. Some of the
things that interrupted him were:
The remembered smell of fried onions; they didn't have onions here;
Salt;
I wonder how the old 101st Precinct's getting along;
That fellow who wanted to get married on a hundred dollars;
Lee Falcaro, damn her!
This, is damn foolishness; it can't possibly work;
Poor old Kennedy;
I'll starve before I eat another mouthful of that greasy deer-meat;
The Van Dellen kid, I wonder if I could have saved him;
Reiner's right; we've got to clean up the Government and then try to
civilize these people;
There must be something wrong with my head, I can't seem to
concentrate;
That terrific third-chukker play in the Finals, my picture all over
town;
Would Uncle Frank laugh at this?
It was hopeless. He sat bolt upright, his eyes squeezed tensely
together, trying to visualize the child and call her and it couldn't be
done. Skittering images of her zipped through his mind, only to be
shoved aside. It was damn foolishness, anyway....
He unkinked himself, stretched and lay down on the sand floor
thinking bitterly: why try? You'll be dead in a few days or a few
weeks; kiss the world good-bye. Back in Syndic Territory, fat, sloppy,
happy Syndic Territory, did they know how good they had it? He
wished he could tell them to cling to their good life. But Uncle Frank
said it didn't do any good to cling; it was a matter of tension and
relaxation. When you stiffen up a way of life and try to fossilize it so
it'll stay that way forever, then you find you've lost it.
Little Martha wouldn't understand it. Magic, ritual, the power of the
goddess, fear of iron, fear of the jeep's vine enclosure—cursed, no
doubt—what went on in such a mind? Could she throw things like a
poltergeist-girl? They didn't have 'em any more; maybe it had
something to do with electric fields or even iron. Or were they all
phonies? An upset adolescent girl is a hell of a lot likelier to fake
phenomena that produce them. Little Martha hadn't been faking her
despair, though. The witch-girl—her sister, wasn't she?—didn't fake
her icy calm and power. Martha'd be better off without such stuff—
"Charles," a whisper said.
He muttered stupidly: "My God. She heard me," and crept to the
palisade. Through a chink between the logs she was just visible in
the starlight.
She whispered: "I thought I wasn't going to see anything or hear
anything ever again but I sat up and I heard you calling and you
said you wanted to help me if I'd help you so I came as fast as I
could without waking anybody up—you did call me, didn't you?"
"Yes, I did. Martha, do you want to get out of here? Go far away
with me?"
"You bet I do. She's going to take the power of the goddess out of
me and marry me to Dinny, he stinks like a goat and he has a
cockeye, and then she'll kill all our babies. Just tell me what to do
and I'll do it." She sounded very grim and decided.
"Can you roll the boulders away from the hole there?" He was
thinking vaguely of teleportation; each boulder was a two-man job.
She said no.
He snarled: "Then why did you bother to come here?"
"Don't talk like that to me," the child said sharply—and he
remembered what she thought she was.
"Sorry," he said.
"What I came about," she said calmly, "was the ex-plosion. Can you
make an ex-plosion like you said? Back there at the jeep?"
What in God's name was she talking about?
"Back there," she said with exaggerated patience, "you was thinking
about putting all the cartridges together and blowing up the whole
damn shebang. Remember?"
He did, vaguely. One of a hundred schemes that had drifted through
his head.
"I'd sure like to see that ex-plosion," she said. "The way she got
things figured, I'd almost just as soon get exploded myself as not."
"I might blow up the logs here and get out," he said slowly. "I think
you'd be a mighty handy person to have along, too. Can you get me
about a hundred of the machine gun cartridges?"
"They'll miss 'em."
"Sneak me a few at a time. I'll empty them, put them together again
and you sneak them back."
She said, slow and troubled: "She set the power of the goddess to
guard them."
"Listen to me, Martha," he said. "I mean listen. You'll be doing it for
me and they told me the power of the goddess doesn't work on
outsiders. Isn't that right?"
There was a long pause, and she said at last with a sigh: "I sure
wish I could see your eyes, Charles. I'll try it, but I'm damned if I
would if Dinny didn't stink so bad." She slipped away and Charles
tried to follow her with his mind through the darkness, to the silly
little rope of vine with the feathers and bones knotted in it—but he
couldn't. Too tense again.
Kennedy stirred and muttered complainingly as an icy small breeze
cut through the chinks of the palisade, whispering.
His eyes, tuned to the starlight, picked up Martha bent almost
double, creeping toward the smithy-prison. She wore a belt of fifty-
caliber cartridges around her neck like a stole. Looked like about a
dozen of them. He hastily scooped out a bowl of clean sand and
whispered: "Any trouble?"
He couldn't see the grin on her face, but knew it was there. "It was
easy," she bragged. "One bad minute and then I checked with you
and it was okay."
"Good kid. Pull the cartridges out of the links the way I showed you
and pass them through."
She did. It was a tight squeeze.
He fingered one of the cartridges. The bullet fitted nicely into the
socket of an arrowhead. He jammed the bullet in and wrenched at
the arrowhead with thumb and forefinger—all he could get onto it.
The brass neck began to spread. He dumped the powder into his
little basin in the sand and reseated the bullet.
Charles shifted hands on the second cartridge. On the third he
realized that he could put the point of the bullet on a hearth-stone
and press on the neck with both thumbs. It went faster then; in
perhaps an hour he was passing the re-assembled cartridges back
through the palisade.
"Time for another load?" he asked.
"Nope," the girl said. "Tomorrow night."
"Good kid."
She giggled. "It's going to be a hell of a big bang, ain't it, Charles?"
 XIV
"Leave the fire alone," Charles said sharply to Kennedy. The little
man was going to douse it for the night.
There was a flash of terrified sense: "They beat you. If the fire's on
after dark they beat you. Fire and dark are equal and opposite." He
began to smile. "Fire is the negative of dark. You just change the
sign, in effect rotate it through 180 degrees. But to rotate it through
180 degrees you have to first rotate it through one degree. And to
rotate it through one degree you first have to rotate it through half a
degree." He was beaming now, having forgotten all about the fire.
Charles banked it with utmost care, heaping a couple of flat stones
for a chimney that would preserve the life of one glowing coal
invisibly.
He stretched out on the sand, one hand on the little heap beneath
which five pounds of smokeless powder was buried. Kennedy
continued to drone out his power-series happily.
Through the chinks in the palisade a man's profile showed against
the twilight. "Shut up," he said.
Kennedy shivering, rolled over and muttered to himself. The
spearman laughed and went on.
Charles hardly saw him. His whole mind was concentrated on the
spark beneath the improvised chimney. He had left such a spark
seven nights running. Only twice had it lived more than an hour.
Tonight—tonight, it had to last. Tonight was the last night of the
witch-girl's monthly courses, and during them she lost—or thought
she lost, which was the same thing—the power of the goddess.
Primitive aborigines, he jeered silently at himself. A life time wasn't
long enough to learn the intricacies of their culture—as occasional
executions among them for violating magical law proved to the hilt.
His first crude notion—blowing the palisade apart and running like
hell—was replaced by a complex escape plan hammered out in detail
between him and Martha.
Martha assured him that the witch girl could track him through the
dark by the power of the goddess except for four days a month—
and he believed it. Martha herself laid a matter-of-fact claim to
keener second sight than her sister because of her virginity. With
Martha to guide him through the night and the witch-girl's power
disabled, they'd get a day's head start. His hand strayed to a pebble
under which jerked venison was hidden and ready.
"But Martha. Are you sure you're not—not kidding yourself? Are you
sure?"
He felt her grin on the other side of the palisade. "You're sure
wishing Uncle Frank was here so you could ask him about it, don't
you, Charles?"
He sure was. He wiped his brow, suddenly clammy.
Kennedy couldn't come along. One, he wasn't responsible. Two, he
might have to be Charles' cover-story. They weren't too dissimilar in
build, age, or coloring. Charles had a beard by now that sufficiently
obscured his features, and two years absence should have softened
recollections of Kennedy. Interrogated, Charles could take refuge in
an imitation of Kennedy's lunacy.
"Charles, the one thing I don't get is this Lee dame. She got a spell
on her? You don't want to mess with that."
"Listen, Martha, we've got to mess with her. It isn't a spell—exactly.
Anyway I know how to take it off and then she'll be on our side."
"Can I set off the explosion? If you let me set off the explosion, I'll
quit my bitching."
"We'll see," he said.
She chuckled very faintly in the dark. "Okay," she told him. "If I
can't, I can't."
He thought of being married to a woman who could spot your
smallest lie or reservation, and shuddered.
Kennedy was snoring by now and twilight was deepening into
blackness. There was a quarter-moon, obscured by over-cast. He
hitched along the sand and peered through a chink at a tiny noise. It
was the small scuffling feet of a woods-rat racing through the grass
from one morsel of food to the next. It never reached it. There was
a soft rush of wings as a great dark owl plummeted to earth and
struck talons into the brown fur. The rat squealed its life away while
the owl lofted silently to a tree branch where it stood on one leg,
swaying drunkenly and staring with huge yellow eyes.
As sudden as that, it'll be, Charles thought abruptly weighted with
despair. A half-crazy kid and yours truly trying to outsmart and out-
Tarzan these wild men. If only the little dope would let me take the
jeep! But the jeep was out. She rationalized her retention of the
power even after handling iron by persuading herself that she was
only acting for Charles; there was some obscure precedent in a long,
memorized poem which served her as a text-book of magic. But
riding in the jeep was out.
By now she should be stringing magic vines across some of the huts
and trails. "They'll see 'em when they get torches and it'll scare 'em.
Of course I don't know how to do it right, but they don't know that.
It'll slow 'em down. If she comes out of her house—and maybe she
won't—she'll know they don't matter and send the men after us. But
we'll be on our way. Charles, you sure I can't set off the explosion?
Yeah, I guess you are. Maybe I can set off one when we get to New
Portsmouth?"
"If I can possibly arrange it."
She sighed: "I guess that'll have to do."
It was too silent; he couldn't bear it. With feverish haste he
uncovered the caches of powder and meat. Under the sand was a
fat clayey soil. He dug up hands-full of it, wet it with the only liquid
available and worked it into paste. He felt his way to the logs
decided on for blasting, dug out a hole at their bases in the clay.
After five careful trips from the powder cache to the hole, the mine
was filled. He covered it with clay and laid on a roof of flat stones
from the hearth. The spark of fire still glowed, and he nursed it with
twigs.
She was there, whispering: "Charles?"
"Right here. Everything set?"
"All set. Let's have that explosion."
He took the remaining powder and with minute care, laid a train
across the stockade to the mine. He crouched into a ball and flipped
a burning twig onto the black line that crossed the white sand floor.
The blast seemed to wake up the world. Kennedy charged out of
sleep, screaming, and a million birds woke with a squawk. Charles
was conscious more of the choking reek than the noise as he
scooped up the jerked venison and rushed through the ragged gap
in the wall. A hand caught his—a small hand.
"You're groggy," Martha's voice said, sounding far away. "Come on—
fast. Man, that was a great ex-plosion!"
She towed him through the woods and underbrush—fast. As long as
he hung on to her he didn't stumble or run into a tree once.
Irrationally embarrassed by his dependence on a child, he tried
letting go for a short time—very short—and was quickly battered into
changing his mind. He thought dizzily of the spearmen trying to
follow through the dark and could almost laugh again.
Their trek to the coast was marked by desperate speed. For twenty-
four hours, they stopped only to gnaw at their rations or snatch a
drink at a stream. Charles kept moving because it was unendurable
to let a ten-year-old girl exceed him in stamina. Both of them paid
terribly for the murderous pace they kept. The child's face became
skull-like and her eyes red; her lips dried and cracked. He gasped at
her as they pulled their way up a bramble-covered 45-degree slope:
"How do you do it? Isn't this ever going to end?"
"Ends soon," she croaked at him. "You know we dodged 'em three
times?"
He could only shake his head.
She stared at him with burning red eyes. "This ain't hard," she
croaked. "You do this with a gut-full of poison, that's hard."
"Did you?"
She grinned crookedly and chanted something he did not
understand:

"Nine moons times thirteen is the daughter's age

When she drinks the death-cup.
Three leagues times three she must race and rage
Down hills and up—"

She added matter-of-factly: "Last year. Prove I have the power of

the goddess. Run, climb, with your guts falling out. This year, starve
for a week and run down a deer of seven points."
He had lost track of days and nights when they stood on the brow of
a hill at dawn and looked over the sea. The girl gasped: "'Sall right
now. She wouldn't let them go on. She's a bitch, but she's no fool."
The child fell in her tracks. Charles, too tired for panic, slept too.
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