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This article offers a pedagogical approach to introducing undergraduate students to hagiology by comparing medieval sanctity to modern celebrity. The bodies of saints and celebrities are important loci for the transmission of sanctity or celebrity from a person to the public and for the continuity of identity. Examples include St. Faith, St. Cuthbert, Kim Kardashian, and Marilyn Monroe. Using a comparative method allows students who are non-religious to better apprehend the unfamiliar practices and beliefs around the cult of saints and relics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamic relationship that exists between a religious rite and its territory is interpreted and analysed by religious anthropology as a form of protection, offered by the sacred to the place in which it resides. According to this interpretation, passage through the territory of what is reputed to be sacred or even its very presence as a sanctuary, drives evil away and is believed to perform a generally stable protective function. Within such a dynamic, the rite that actually creates this sacred passage, i.e., the procession of relics, lays the foundations for an analysis of the two specific variables that are, in actual fact, intwined: on the one side is the rite, and on the other, the territory. Such a relationship appears all the more problematic due to the progressive rationalisation of the religious dimension, extensively dealt with by Max Weber (Weber 1920) and accepted by contemporary sociology on religion, as it is now a supernatural phenomenon that is only considered to have a representational dimension. The internal secularization at the festival of Saint Rosalia happened in 2023, with the landing of the triumphal cart in New York. The rite moves to another new territory and transforms it. The cart of Saint Rosalia, preserved in the Columbus Citizens Foundation in New York, represents the identity of Sicilian immigrants but also a new form of ritualization on a new territory through an "ancient" ritual. When the sacred is located within the institutional dimension of a salvation religion presided over by an institution, it appears separate from any purely mechanical (and therefore magical) dimension, while the territory becomes a variable in which a multiplicity of factors are contained. These factors not only give importance to the very aspects of the ritual itself, boosting its civil and secular parts, but also to the religious programme, which undergoes unexpected transformations introduced by the presiding institution. The main object of this analysis is, therefore, to establish an interactive path whereby, on the one hand, the territory, through its various cultural components (both secular and religious), shapes the religious rite and how it places restrictions on those protective functions, while on the other, how the rite places its own constraints on the cultural transformations that take place in the fabric of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 11th–12th centuries, extreme ascetic practices reappeared in Western Europe, in particular, the wearing of hauberks and heavy iron chains, associated with penitence and eremitism. This article discusses the charisma of three ascetic saints of the 12th century: Bernard the Penitent (d. 1182), Wulfric of Haselbury (d. 1154/55), and Godric of Finchale (d. 1170). Their hagiographies were written shortly after their death. The authors emphasize that they were revered as holy men already in their lifetime. Their charismatic power was revealed by miracles of healing and prophecy, sometimes in visions. The manifestations of their charisma continued and even increased after their death and were transmitted and spread through their relics. Their mortifications and the signs of their holiness are comparable to those of the stylites and other hermits of Syria of late Antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Counter-Reformation medievalization of Polish–Lithuanian St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458–1484)—whose canonization was only finalized in the seventeenth century—as a case study, taking up questions of the reception of cults of medieval saints in post-medieval societies, or in this case, the retroactive refashioning into a venerable medieval saint. The article investigates these questions across a transcultural Italo–Baltic context through the activities of principal agents of the saint's re-fashioning as a venerable saint during the late seventeenth century: the Pacowie from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Medici from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, during a watershed period of Tuscan–Lithuanian bidirectional interest. During this period, the two dynasties were entangled not only by means of the shared division of Jagiellończyk's bodily remains through translatio—the ritual relocation of relics of saints and holy persons—but also self-representational strategies that furthered their religio-political agendas and retroactively constructed their houses' venerable medieval roots back through antiquity. Drawing on distinct genres of textual, visual, and material sources, the article analyzes the Tuscan–Lithuanian refashioning of Kazimierz against a series of precious reliquaries made to translate holy remains between Vilnius to Florence to offer a contribution to the entangled histories of sanctity, art and material culture, and conceptual geography within the transtemporal and transcultural neocolonial context interconnecting the Middle Ages, Age of Reformations, and the Counter-Reformation between Italy and Baltic Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]