Search

'Contested heritage' and 'cancel culture' have specific meanings and points of reference in our culture today, but these are by no means new phenomena in the life of cathedrals. At the time of the Reformation and the Civil War, all evidence of traditional Catholic culture was considered fair game for iconoclasts, who systematically destroyed saints' shrines and tombs with their relics. In recent years, in association with the revival of the practice of pilgrimage and in unstated rejection of Reformation tradition, shrines of saints in many cathedrals have been restored, some including relics. It is unsurprising that saints and their shrines can be controversial, since saints themselves are 'signs of contradiction', those whose lives lived according to the standards of the kingdom of heaven challenge the values of earthly kingdoms and cultures. Norwich Cathedral is unusual among the ancient cathedrals of England in never having had a great saint enshrined within it. This study will consider the cases of two figures locally revered as martyrs, William of Norwich and Edith Cavell, whose lives and witness have been causes of international controversy and yet who still merit commemoration by Christians today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the year 1000, judges from the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne (southern France and Catalonia) crafted judicial strategies that reinforced the region's Visigothic Code with the power of saints – conceived as gatekeepers to God's heavenly courtroom – to validate the oaths of witnesses. This practice merged liturgically grounded ideas about supernatural forces and space with a law code that prioritised secular authority. To forestall opposition to rulings, officials sometimes held proceedings in churches. This paper examines two unusual cases illustrating the challenges such strategies faced, given the perception that saints were not omnipresent. These disputes raise questions about the nature of saints, the degree of agency humans attributed to them and the utility of sacred spaces for legal ritual. In the province, saints were powerful, but constrained by their inability to act beyond the walls of consecrated sanctuaries housing their relics. This relegated saints to supplementary roles in law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

St Leocadia, a fourth-century Toledan Christian virgin and patron saint of the city, miraculously emerged from a sepulchre in the presence of Ildephonsus, Archbishop of Toledo, and the Visigothic King Recesvintus, in the 7th century. After this wondrous event, in which a fragment of her veil was cut as proof of her public visitation, her body was removed from Toledo to be preserved from the Muslim conquest, taken to Flanders and eventually repatriated to her home town at the request of Philip II as the Lutheran threat to the Spanish northern territories escalated. A wave of literature and images concerning her figure was produced in the wake of three events: the return of her relics to Toledo in 1587, those of Ildephonsus in 1596 and the inauguration of the chapel of Our Lady of the Tabernacle, also in Toledo, in 1616. The following essays consider why and how this virgin saint became instrumental in cementing the alliance of Church and Monarchy as well as buttressing the Archbishop of Toledo's status as Primate of Spain in the early seventeenth century. Focusing on the historical, visual and literary portraits of Leocadia, they examine the manner in which Early Modern Spanish authors—Miguel Hernández, Lope de Vega, José de Valdivielso and Pedro Calderón de la Barca—and artists—Francisco Merino, Blas de Prado, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Antonio de Lanchares and Pedro Orrente—imagined and recreated the narrative of her sanctity paying particular attention to the function of public witness as effected by their works as well as by their readers and viewers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]