For all their importance to Bede, and hence to the Norman conquerors who used Bede as a blue-print from which to rebuild northern English monasticism, the saints of the North are assumed to have been largely excluded from southern English discourse thereafter. In particular, they attracted scant notice from the Sarum kalendar, where only the top three (Cuthbert, Oswald and Bede himself ) obtained so much as a mention. Most of the nineteen essays here do little to challenge this dour prognosis. As Christiana Whitehead explains in her introduction, however, they do shed considerable light on a series of cults otherwise eclipsed by the cosmopolitan fame of Cuthbert and Oswald. In the process, they further challenge any concept of ‘the north’ as a unified region, in reality sundered by its various internal frontiers: the Pennines, Tyne, Tweed and the ancient distinctions between northerly Bernicia (the diocese of Durham) and southern Deira (the archbishopric of York). Where Denis Renevy (on Aelred of Rievaulx and the saints of Durham, Galloway and Hexham) suggests that Walter Daniel deliberately wove northern motifs into his life of Aelred, Julian Luxford, writing with a subtle eye for detail, remains sceptical that anything so regionally specific as a ‘northern’ art of the saints can be identified. Cynthia Turner Camp contributes a useful survey of native saints included in late medieval books of hours, emphasising the contribution of Yorkshire (John of Beverley, William of York and later both John of Bridlington and Richard Scrope) at the expense of Bede’s Bernician pantheon. Using the late twelfth-century legendary compiled at Holm Cultram, now divided between two Cottonian manuscripts, Christiana Whitehead suggests similar Cumbrian resistance to the saints of Durham, and more broadly (and despite the inclusion of John of Beverley) a general reluctance from the north-west to look east of the Pennines. David Thornton’s survey of the hagionymic bynames adopted by fifteenth-century monks, recovered from ordination lists, reveals a number of Cuthberts, but on the whole confirms that southerners were unlikely to look north of the Trent for role models, with even the ‘Oswalds’ commemorating St Oswald of Worcester rather than his Bedan namesake. In an essay that would have benefited from reference to English devotion to the oil both of Saydnya and St Thomas of Canterbury, John Jenkins notes the peculiarly oil-exuding (or ‘myroblytic’) shrines of the Yorkshire saints Robert of Knaresborough, William of York and John of Beverley, here perhaps serving as inspiration for the similar miracles worked further south at Lincoln, first by St Hugh (from the 1280s) and thereafter by Robert Grosseteste (from 1288). Other essays offer case studies of particular saints, or individual vitae. Thus both Hazel Hunter Blair and Joshua Easterling deal with Robert of Knaresborough, at first presented by his probably Cistercian biographer as a distinctly northern figure, thereafter redirected into a wider mainstream thanks to the incorporation of episodes borrowed from the life of St Norbert of Xanten. The intention here, Easterling argues, was to reinvent a saint now situated half way between the older eremitic tradition of Godric of Finchale and the newer fashion for religious poverty introduced by St Francis. Even so, one is left to wonder whether the hagiographers were themselves foreshadowing, or (as seems more likely) merely recycling Franciscan tropes. As in other essays, one may also lament the failure to identify texts by BHL number, leaving the reader on occasion confused as to which text is being discussed. Godric himself is the object of two studies, the first by Margaret Coombe dealing with Reginald of Durham’s Vita, perhaps (as Tom Licence has cleverly argued) intended to prevent a Cistercian take-over at Finchale: a text that by the 1190s had already been superseded, refashioned into the less polemically-charged Lives attributed to the otherwise unidentified ‘Walter’ and ‘Geoffrey’, with subsequent distinctively Cistercian circulation. Fresh from her edition of the later Anglo-Norman Life of Godric, Anne Mouron deals with a French Life of Godric, preserved uniquely in a legendary from Longchamp, in all likelihood made for Isabelle, the sister of King Louis ix: the only English Life included amongst forty-eight others in this particular manuscript, where Reginald’s materials are repurposed to supply both a model of holy life and an entertaining sequence of ‘marvels’. The female saints Aebbe of Coldingham and her purported niece, Etheldreda of Ely, feature in essays by Ruth Salter and Jane Sinnett-Smith, whilst Christiane Kroebel contributes a fine survey of church dedications to St Hilda of Whitby, herself advertised as an earlier kinswoman both of Aebbe and Etheldreda. Pointing to a network of devotion amongst powerful northern baronial families – Percy, Brus, Mowbray – this once again suggests a north-south divide. A London guild (mentioned only once, in 1369), and the claim to possess Hilda’s relics advanced by the monks of Glastonbury (hooverers up of pretty much every saint in the kalendar) offer the only suggestions that her cult (elsewhere spread as far afield as Finland and Sweden) reached south of York. In the process, we learn of Whitby’s promotion of Hilda as local patron, and the theft of an otherwise lost ‘Life of St Hilda’ reported in legal proceedings of 1375.

Whether or not we join the volume’s editors in considering this stray reference ‘tremendously exciting’ (p. 28), it is a pity that the reference itself is supplied in garbled form (‘TNA, JUST 3.79.3.014’, p. 331, in reality JUST 3/79/3 m.7, whence the online AALT image 0104, recording that on 25 September 1375 John del Hole feloniously burgled the chamber of Matthew de Dawe, prior of Whitby, making off with a number of items including a ‘librum de vita sancte Hilde’ valued at ten shillings). Hints here, as in the author’s inability to consult the Whitby Missal of c.1400, now in Oxford, of the dread impact of Covid on archival research. Trailing in the wake of Janet Burton and Richard Sharpe, Daniel Talbot revisits the circumstances in which both St Mary’s York and Whitby Abbey emerged from a group of would-be imitators of Bede, albeit themselves then riven by faction, broadcasting rival narratives. James Clark’s useful exploration of the cult of St Oswine of Tynemouth, promulgated by the monks of St Albans, Tynemouth’s mother house, in rivalry with St Cuthbert at Durham, reveals at least one northern saint who did indeed break the north-south sound barrier. Indeed so much so that, together with Oswald, he was one of only two ’northerners’ who, according to Matthew Paris, could be named by King Henry iii in his listing of his sainted royal ancestors (Chronica majora v. 617, not noticed here). Clark suggests that Edward i made no recorded offerings at Oswine’s shrine (pp. 371–2). But this is to offer hostages to fortune, given the wealth of evidence preserved in the royal wardrobe books, still unpublished and in this instance untapped. Here we find that on 8 December 1299 Edward gifted the shrine of St Oswine a gold ring priced at 6 marks (Liber quotidianus contrarotulatoris garderobae [London 1787], 333–4). Further royal gifts were deposited there, by proxy, on 20 June 1300 (BL, ms Add. 35291, fos 26v, 134r), including a gold brooch priced at £4, and again, by the king in person from 21 to 27 June 1301, when rumours reached Tynemouth of good news from Scotland (ms Add. 7966A, fos 25v, 144r, including another brooch valued at £4). A further 5 mark brooch was offered on 17 September 1304 (ms Add. 8835, fo. 121r, and cf. ms Add. 35293 fo. 75v), and in August 1306, a proxy was sent to Oswine’s shrine carrying not only alms but a taper ‘measured’ to the king’s height (ms Add. 37655, fo. 5v, ‘cum oblationibus et mensura regis’). Looking further afield, but likewise unnoticed by our essayists, these same wardrobe books record regular offerings to SS John of Beverley, William of York and Cuthbert, including at least one royal visit (on 3 July 1301) to Cuthbert’s shrine on Holy Island (ms Add. 35291, fos 23r–v, 26r–v, 134r; ms Add. 7966A, fos 25r –26r, 27r, 144r; ms Add. 8835, fos 5r–v, 121r). Oblations were made to Godric of Finchale, by proxy in December 1299, and again both in June 1300 and August 1306 (ms Add. 35291, fos 23r, 26v; 37655, fo. 5v). The king himself visited the Finchale shrine on 23 September 1304 (ms Add. 35293, fo.75v; cf. Calendar of patent rolls,1301-7, 259-60). St Wilfrid at Ripon was honoured, by proxy, in 1300 and again in October 1304 (ms Add. 7966A, fo. 144r; 8835, fo. 121r). In person, Edward i made offerings to St Oswald at both Pontefract and Nostell in June 1300 and August 1301 (ms Add. 35291, fo. 26v; 7966A, fo. 26r, and cf. ms Add. 37655, fo. 5v), and in November 1300 to the shrine of St Robert at Knaresborough (ms Add. 7966A, fo. 23r). Looking to more recent times, Claudia Di Sciacca traces the means by which Oswald’s cult was transmitted via Bavaria to Friuli, in the process transforming him from royal martyr into patron and protector of cattle, plague victims and eventually even of Italian state schooling. With somewhat less coherence, Catherine Sanok applies a verbal marinade, here exuded from the shrine of Norbert Elias, seeking to contrast ‘hermit time’ with ‘ordinary time’. More alarmingly still, Euan McCartney Robson enters a full-throttle Geertzian trance, informing his readers, amongst other things (p. 143), that Durham’s ‘hard and fast factuality, its sheer thereness, all strengthen the belief (indeed the hope) that meaning might wait patiently and protected, in a close examination of its stones’. Thank goodness, therefore (p. 133), that ‘a steady and increasing stream of medievalists interested in pilgrims and pilgrimage have annexed the generative promise of Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and place … into an impressively broad catalogue of inquiries, since it was first published’. Impressive indeed, but perhaps less so for those of us pedantically concerned with commas, italics, false quantities and the correct placement of subclauses. Pedantry, as this and other such collections reveal, is a failing by no means restricted to the grammarians. By the same token, whilst various ‘new directions’ arrive at interesting destinations, not all who seek necessarily find.