Was there such a thing as lay sanctity in the central Middle Ages before, it seems, the twelfth century produced a new kind of urban lay saint?Footnote 1 Could the secular lay person be venerated without the necessity of coming from royal stock or suffering martyrdom? Historians have generally followed the lead of André Vauchez, who thought not.Footnote 2 This survey, however, will bring together eight lay saints of western Europe who collectively imply that sainthood was a more irregular phenomenon than has been supposed. They died or their cults were initially promoted in the century and a half between about 970 and about 1120 (the ‘long’ eleventh century), an era that includes the Peace of God movement, the Gregorian reform and the First Crusade.
Any discussion of this subject should, by necessity, begin with Gerald of Aurillac, the secular lord and arms-bearer whose recorded miracles and piety found him worthy of veneration. He is usually thought to have died around 909 and his long Life written in about 930 by Odo of Cluny, but a convincing case has been made for dating this text later (up to c. 1030) and for an alternative authorship.Footnote 3 But Vitae aside, his cult was launched properly in 972 when a church in the Auvergne in southern France was dedicated to him.Footnote 4 The reason for so much interest in him, apart from the unusually rich and detailed long Life, is that he never joined a religious community, making him a lay saint. Furthermore, he was not of royal blood nor did he die a martyr. This absence of criteria which might justify sainthood makes him a true lay saint of a new kind.Footnote 5
When precisely lay sanctity developed was of particular interest to Vauchez. He saw Gerald of Aurillac as an anomaly and emphasised instead:
the appearance in the twelfth century of a new phenomenon in the religious history of the West: the fact that simple laypersons were able to become officially recognised saints and enjoy the honours of a cult … this was the case in some Mediterranean countries, where the evolution of religious mentalities took place earlier than elsewhere because of the importance of urbanisation beginning in the early 1100s, and because of the peculiarities of their political and social structures.Footnote 6
Vauchez is perhaps best known for his masterwork, Sainthood in the later Middle Ages, which traces developments in canonisation including the high-point of lay sanctity itself: the papal recognition of a simple Italian merchant, Homobonus of Cremona (d. 1197).Footnote 7 Before this came locally recognised examples of laity such as Gualfardo of Verona (d. 1127), Allucio of Campigliano (d. 1134), Teobaldo of Alba (d. 1150) and Ranieri of Pisa (d. 1160).Footnote 8 These people were recognised for the piety that they practised in everyday life. They emerged in a period of growing ‘contentiousness’ among certain laymen who wished to live according to the Gospel but, at the same time, continue in their work and marriages.Footnote 9 Their concerns were often for helping the poor and travellers, while Vauchez also realised the primacy of pilgrimage in these saints’ careers.Footnote 10 They were part of the same desires and developments among the laity that would coalesce in the shape of the Arnoldists after 1155, the Waldensians from 1170 and the early Humiliati, Beguines and other communities of laymen and women in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Many of them were suspicious of the wealth and temporal power of the clergy, from the Patarenes of the Gregorian era to the Cathars, and finally Pope Innocent iii found himself needing to face up to, or make concessions to, popular religious enthusiasm. The prompt canonisation of Homobonus was one such ‘significant gesture’; reaching an agreeable accommodation with that more famous merchant, St Francis of Assisi, was another.Footnote 11
According to this view, therefore, a shift in twelfth-century urban Mediterranean society allowed the ordinary layperson to achieve religious self-discovery, acceptance within a changing Church and ultimately sainthood.Footnote 12 Apart from Gerald ‘the only saints outside of the ecclesiastical world, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, were almost all selected – except for a few hermits – from among the holders of power, such as Emperor Henry ii, Empresses Mathilda, Adelaide and Cunegund, and Queen Margaret of Scotland’.Footnote 13
The saints discussed below challenge this view. It is worth stressing how unlikely lay sanctity was before the period studied here. Cults of laypeople were marginalised by a Western ecclesiastical tradition that appears to stretch as far back as Sulpicius Severus’ Life of St Martin, bishop of Tours, written in 396. This was reinforced by Gregory the Great and Gregory of Tours in the late sixth century, both of whom, like Sulpicius, sought to legitimise new types of sanctity beyond martyrdom, but in their influential works of hagiography gave saints an almost exclusively clerical role.Footnote 14
Studies of both Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian sanctity affirm this view. John Edward Damon has argued that lay sanctity was emerging as a potential ethos in Anglo-Saxon society until the Norman Conquest put an end to it. Pious ealdormen never quite achieved sainthood because there was no recognised way of staying in the secular world while also moving into the spiritual one. There is ‘no instance of a secular leader who was neither a king nor a prince who came to be regarded as a saint without first abandoning his secular role in favour of the religious life’.Footnote 15 Following the Norman Conquest (and the martyrdom of the rebel earl Waltheof of Northumbria, the one Anglo-Saxon layman who merited hagiography by virtue of his beheading in 1075), Damon argues that the call to crusade provided a new and welcome purpose to those caught in the middle.Footnote 16 Likewise, in the Carolingian world, the nobility were frequently exhorted to live a pious life but, as the many treatises addressing the subject show, they were never advised to enter the Church or cloister because their role was active, worldly and concerned with ‘the hurly-burly realm of daily realities’.Footnote 17 Liutberga of Windenhausen, a girl plucked from a monastery to serve a ninth-century Saxon family, is an interesting case of female sanctity expressed in part through worldly activity, yet she felt compelled to return to the religious life and enter a cell.Footnote 18 Before Odo of Cluny's brave biography of Gerald of Aurillac, roles were too defined to allow misfits a proper place, and modern attempts to find lay sanctity expressed in hagiography have come up short.Footnote 19
What of the ‘few hermits’ to whom Vauchez refers? While we do not know whom he means, in an age when the vocabulary of religious life was often nebulous and contradictory, the grey area of hermits is one to be aware of. The hermits who sought a solitary life, inside or outside a religious community, are easy to identify and cannot be considered strictly laypeople, that is, laici or saeculares, let alone conjugati (married). But those who mixed with society, for example as wandering preachers, can be less easy to classify. Giles Constable, surveying the diversity of such characters, concluded that by the twelfth century ‘it is almost impossible to say exactly what it meant to be a hermit’.Footnote 20 However, most hermits who were socially engaged seem to have been ordained or to have taken religious vows, such as Wulfric of Haselbury (a priest) or Gerald of Corbie (a monk who founded La Sauve-Majeure). Contemporaries considered them part of the monastic order.Footnote 21 The lay saints discussed here are different. They had neither clerical nor monastic roles, nor were they called hermits by their biographers using words such as ‘heremita’, ‘solitarius’, ‘anchoreta’, ‘religiosus’, ‘inclusus’ or ‘reclusus’.
The saints are separated into two groups, both for convenience and to signify the major themes that emerge from their cults. These represent first, attempts to idealise the role of the lay aristocracy, and second, a new appreciation of the laity's outward spirituality, especially in the form of pilgrimage, at a time when voluntary exile was an increasingly popular way to express one's devotion.Footnote 22
The good lord and lady
This is not the place for yet another investigation into the cult of Gerald of Aurillac so this discussion is limited to some salient points, though it is worth pointing out that Andrew Romig's recent rereading of the saint as a monastic rather than lay exemplar, combined with Mathew Kuefler's discovery of textual shenanigans, make him a controversial and interesting figure once again.Footnote 23 Kuefler's claim, contrary to previous belief, that the short Life was written first by Odo of Cluny, and that Odo's authorship of the long Life is fraudulent, is supported by a long list of convincing arguments and has since influenced Romig. The new paradigm presents the long Life as a result of further writing and rewriting after Odo's time to suit the demands of a growing cult. This provides a solution to the complex way in which the different parts of the long Life circulated until completion, as well as accounting for its errors and anachronisms.Footnote 24 The frequent mentions of Limoges and the cult of St Martial that were inserted tell us that this rewriting most likely happened at the monastery of Saint-Martial, Limoges, itself, which is supported by the manuscripts.Footnote 25 Finally one long work, with a new preface, was made consistent in its model of a powerful but pious layman who wished to spread peace, justice and proper religious practice through Aquitaine in the face of violent and rapacious lay upstarts and lackadaisical monks, and whose miracle-working attested to his special status as a saint.
This Life, therefore, came on the heels of the cult's first public manifestation at Aurillac in 972 and subsequent spread to Limoges, and was composed against the backdrop of the Peace of God movement of Aquitaine, when bishop-led councils attended by the laity sought to limit violence through the swearing of oaths in the presence of saints’ relics. Christian Lauranson-Rosaz has described the dedication of 972 as a form of early Peace council. The accounts of miracles occurring, the innumerable numbers of clergy and people gathering, and the local relevance of ‘the first non-royal layman ever to become a saint’ made it highly pertinent to the themes of later, more recognised, Peace councils. ‘How appropriate to launch a peace movement by exalting the abbey of that saint of peace par excellence.’Footnote 26
There is evidence that in the early, short Life, Odo felt that he was doing something new and perhaps risky. ‘At first I put it off’, he writes in the preface, ‘partly because the matter seemed uncertain to me because of its novelty … In truth, doubt about this especially arises because the same man [Gerald] was powerful in the world’.Footnote 27 He presses on with his enquiries – there have been ‘gatherings of peasants’ and, he implies, an unofficial cult needed to be made official – and his doubts are overcome, though there is discussion over Gerald's divine purpose, and Odo does not bring himself to make a positive acclamation of sanctity.Footnote 28 In the later, long Life, Gerald is unequivocally ‘an example to the mighty’ and placed firmly ‘in the company of the saints’.Footnote 29
This millennial interest in promoting lay heroes had further consequences at Saint-Martial, where the Life of its titular saint was being rewritten under fraudulent authorship at around the time of the extensive revisions to Gerald's Life. The long versions of the Life of St Martial, of which there are three, were developed from a ninth-century version to suit the needs of the Peace of God movement in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, in a parallel to Gerald's development.Footnote 30 The intensity of the peace council at Limoges in 994 made Martial, in the words of H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘the patron par excellence of peace in all its aspects’.Footnote 31 One of the most interesting features of the new Lives is the development of the character of ‘Duke Stephen’. This person, who was the anonymous murderer of his fiancée in the old Life, becomes the second most important figure in the new, longer Lives after Martial himself.Footnote 32 Remaining a layman, he worked tirelessly for the Church and the pursuit of justice throughout Gaul as a ‘father of Christians and most fierce persecutor of pagans’ while also ‘staying chaste in mind and body’.Footnote 33 He is modelled along the same lines as Gerald of Aurillac: Gerald's humility, chastity, sobriety, love of justice, devotion to prayer, almsgiving, endowments, regular abstinence from meat and pilgrimages to Rome are all matched in Stephen's deeds. Stephen may not have been venerated as a saint but his model appears to have served the same purpose of promoting just, pious and effective lords.
An unconnected cult in northern France shows a similar concern for pacifying the laity. Burchard the Venerable (probably d. 1005) is alone among our lay saints for having been an important political personality attested in other sources.Footnote 34 He was a close advisor to Hugh Capet and was the count of Vendôme, Corbeil, Melun and Paris. His Life was written in 1058 by Odo of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, near Paris, where he had been laid to rest.Footnote 35 Odo's aim seems fairly clear: at the time of writing, his monastery was under siege from rapacious and predatory lay lordship. There had been ongoing problems concerning the depredation of Saint-Maur, most recently by Count William of Corbeil, to the extent that Henry i had had to step in to set limits on a lay protector's permissible behaviour, even citing Count Burchard's good example of stewardship in a charter of 1058, the same year as the Life’s composition.Footnote 36 Odo's sanctification of an exemplary steward or advocatus of this royal monastery, complete with detailed (and exaggerated) evidence of Burchard's munificence, is designed to showcase the ideal lay lord.Footnote 37 Odo has little to say about Burchard's piety beyond some formulaic remarks; overall it is a curious Life, frequently overlapping with the genres of monastic chronicle and cartulary. None the less he exhorts his congregation to continue to celebrate the feast days of both Burchard and his wife Elisabeth.
The third cult in this section concerns a feminine model of sainthood. The Life of Ida, countess of Boulogne (d. 13 April 1113), was written between 1130 and 1135 by an anonymous monk of Saint-Vaast in Arras.Footnote 38 It begins with her upbringing as the daughter of Godfrey the Bearded, duke of Lorraine, her marriage to Eustace ii, count of Boulogne, and the birth of three sons: Eustace, Godfrey and Baldwin. Their arrival is announced to Ida by a dream in which the sun descends into her lap, signalling her impending motherhood. The first son succeeded as count of Boulogne; the second, Godfrey of Bouillon, became the first Christian ruler of Jerusalem; and finally Baldwin became its second, this time as king.
According to her Life, Ida was pious, humble and generous with alms, compassionate towards the sick and lowly, and an exemplary wife and mother. Her spiritual advisors included Abbot Hugh of Cluny, though her close friendship with St Anselm of Canterbury, with whom she exchanged letters, is not mentioned. She also healed the sick: at one of her foundations, the monastery of La Capelle, which was dedicated to the Virgin, the set-piece miracle occurs, in which she thrice heals the same deaf and dumb girl, repeating the healing each time the girl falls back into carnal sin.Footnote 39 Ida was buried at Saint-Vaast, which she had refounded under the Cluniacs. Posthumous miracles include the cure from fever of Countess Matilda of Boulogne, Ida's granddaughter by her eldest son Eustace.
Almost everything in the Life is geared towards celebrating Ida's virtue of motherhood.Footnote 40 In her role as mother of Godfrey of Bouillon, this virtue would be enhanced in the Old French Crusade cycle, in the Enfances Godefroi, in the later twelfth century.Footnote 41 Ida heralds an age of increasing devotion to the Virgin Mary and more positive clerical perceptions of marriage and motherhood.Footnote 42 In the original Latin Vita, however, the tone of embarrassment that Georges Duby detected in the prologue, which tries its best to celebrate procreation, is no doubt reflected in a most tentative cult: Ida appears late in martyrologies and calendars, liturgical items seem lacking, and the single manuscript of the Life is a fourteenth-century copy made as part of a compilation.Footnote 43
Ida's granddaughter Matilda provides the key to the origins of the cult. By this time she had married Stephen of Blois, future king of England; besides Ida, her other grandmother was St Margaret of Scotland, whose cult had already been promoted by Margaret's daughter, Queen Matilda, wife of Henry i of England. As well as taking part in a wider family tradition of remembrance through saints’ Lives and chronicles that have been explored by Elisabeth van Houts, Countess Matilda was directly following the example of Queen Matilda, her aunt, by promoting Ida as a saint.Footnote 44
Pilgrim saints
The remaining five lay saints experienced pilgrimage as a decisive and transformational aspect of their spiritual careers. In other respects they vary. We begin with Bovo of Voghera who, according to his Life, was born into high nobility at Noyers (Noyers-sur-Jabron, near Sisteron in the foothills of the Provençal Alps).Footnote 45 He was a scourge of the Saracens who came from Spain, and much of the story is taken up with his victory over their stronghold at Fraxinetum, which is usually connected to La Garde-Freinet and the area around the Gulf of St Tropez; the historical expulsion of the Saracens from Fraxinetum occurred in 972 or soon after.Footnote 46 The text does not shy away from bloodshed: Bovo and his men gained entrance and ‘entering joyfully, they chopped the necks of those opposing them. With each [Saracen] running away in different directions, he slaughtered whomever he could’.Footnote 47 Bovo set out for Rome after these adventures, feeding and assisting the blind, lame and poor along the way. He stopped at Voghera, just across the Po in Lombardy, where he died, performed posthumous miracles and is venerated to this day. He is almost always pictured with an ox, in an echo of his name. He is the model of the penitent warrior whose pilgrimage makes an appropriate conclusion to his glorious deeds against the Saracens, and as such seems to fit well into crusade-era ideology. The date of the text is unclear, however, and the earlier rather than later part of the eleventh century has been proposed, but however the story was written down, the first reference to a concrete cult concerns Bovo's own church at Voghera in a charter of 1119.Footnote 48
Davino of Lucca is a pilgrim saint through and through, unlike Bovo claiming neither a glorious background story nor any other deeds of note. Travelling from Armenia, Davino took inspiration from Christ's commands to set out on an epic pilgrimage that took him to Jerusalem and Rome.Footnote 49 The Life is relatively short and, posthumous miracles aside, free of additional evidence of sanctity that might be expected in the case of such a layman, such as live miracles, ecclesiastical foundations or examples of outstanding piety or asceticism. Instead we are vaguely told that Davino wore down his body with vigils, fasts and prayers on his pilgrimage. After Rome, he intended to travel to Santiago de Compostela, but only made it as far as Lucca, fell ill, and a local noblewoman laid him to rest at San Michele in Foro, traditionally in 1050 or 1051.Footnote 50 A Lucchese liturgical calendar written before 1070 lists Davino under 3 June.Footnote 51
The key fact about the origin of the Life of Davino is that it emerged from a community of regular canons. San Michele had been home to a community of such canons since before 1023.Footnote 52 The earliest manuscript, which is from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, appears to come from nearby San Pantaleone.Footnote 53 (Other possibilities are the houses of San Frediano or Santa Reparata.Footnote 54) All these Lucchese communities followed the canonical rule, which was the city's primary expression of reform in this period. Indeed, in the eleventh century, eight such houses appeared in the city, and another eighteen in the diocese, thanks to a series of reforming bishops.Footnote 55 In addition, hospitals sprang up in association with these houses to look after travellers, and Lucca, strategically situated on the Via Francigena, became a spiritual hub that was especially outward-looking and whose hagiology includes several foreign saints.Footnote 56 Historians have shown that, compared with Benedictine monks, regular canons had a special interest in serving the world despite their adherence to a common life.Footnote 57 Their promotion of the cult of a layperson seems likely to have been a consequence of this.
While quite a lot can be said about Bovo and Davino, Gerard of Gallinaro is an almost complete mystery. His Life is so short – comprising a modest paragraph of the Acta sanctorum – that he barely warrants a mention.Footnote 58 The author sketched the Life essentially as a preface to a collection of posthumous miracles which, we are told, began twenty-five years after Gerard's death, and which tell of the construction of a church over his place of burial. Born in the Auvergne, Gerard was a pilgrim who landed on the Italian coast, fell ill and died at Gallinaro (in Lazio). The date is given as ‘the third year after every spiritual power, inspired by the spirit of God, had taken up arms for the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre’, so at the time of the First Crusade.Footnote 59 Twenty-five years later, it reports, a sick pilgrim returning from Jerusalem triggered the miracles.
By the modern period the legend had become a complete distortion of the original, and Gerard was transformed into an Englishman who in the seventh century travelled to Jerusalem and elsewhere, spent time living as a hermit, and died at Gallinaro where his cult has endured.Footnote 60 But it seems that the original twelfth-century cult was constructed around the tomb of a more or less unknown individual. The one sure fact is that his identity was understood to be that of a pilgrim and a stranger who had come from afar.
Two further lay pilgrim saints made a much more significant impact on western Europe, though their origins are Byzantine. First, the ancient story of St Alexius (or Alexis) exploded in popularity in the period around 1000. The outlines of the story may be traced back to a fifth-century legend from Edessa; in terms of its development in the West, versions of the Latin Life began to appear in the late tenth century after the cult and relics were brought to Rome. A Latin version was written in the last quarter of the tenth century at the monastery of Santi Bonifacio e Alessio on the Aventine, which added Alexius’ patronage in about 987 and would later become called simply Sant'Alessio. This Life became extremely popular and was transmitted in more than a hundred manuscripts throughout Europe, of which about twenty are dateable to the eleventh century. Vernacular, poetic versions emerge from as early as the mid-eleventh century or c.1100.Footnote 61
The principal features of the story resonate strongly with the growing eremitic and evangelical movement that took root in the West around the turn of the millennium and whose beginnings are often represented by St Romuald of Ravenna. Alexius, however, never joined a religious community nor followed a rule, instead remaining an urban pauper; nor was he a martyr. The reformer Peter Damian, Romuald's biographer, therefore called Alexius ‘a new and unusual type of martyr’ who triumphed with ‘a new and nearly unheard of victory’ and whose ‘virtue is more pleasing to the Church because of its unaccustomed novelty’.Footnote 62
Alexius was born to a late-imperial, pious noble family of Rome. Once wed, rather than consummate his marriage, he departed on a ship for the eastern Mediterranean. At Edessa, Alexius gave away all his riches, dressed in simple clothing and lived among the poor for seventeen years. As his holy renown spread, he left and boarded a ship for Tarsus but instead was blown off course all the way to Rome. Confident that he would not be recognised, he found his father in the streets of the city and begged mercy in the name of the son who was lost (i.e. himself):
Servant of God, look at me and have mercy on me, because I am poor and a pilgrim, and order me to be received in your home, and I will be fed from the scraps that fall from your table, so that God will bless your years and have mercy on the one whom you believe to be travelling abroad.Footnote 63
Alexius self-identified as a peregrinus, the one his father believed to be travelling abroad or on pilgrimage (in peregrinatione). He ended up living in his family home for the next seventeen years (either in the entrance way or under the stairs, depending on the version) and was bullied by the servants.Footnote 64 Before his death, he wrote his story down, recounting ‘how he was converted in peregrinatione’.Footnote 65
Nicholas the Pilgrim in many ways takes after Alexius. Nicholas, who came from the Greek province of Boeotia, was also a product of Eastern Christianity but his sanctity manifested at Trani, the east-facing port of southern Italy, where he died in 1094. Recently Byzantine, but technically part of Norman Italy by this time, the town was in effect independent.Footnote 66 The cult was quickly recognised, resulting in canonisation.Footnote 67 Although Nicholas is a saint based in Eastern tradition, his impact was felt at Rome and above all at Trani, where the Latin rite had been followed since long before the Norman conquest. Latin was the written language, and the population, including clergy, was overwhelmingly Lombard, despite the presence of some Greeks with Greek names.Footnote 68
Like Alexius, Nicholas moved between East and West, embracing the life of the destitute wanderer, and in this sense he was a realistic manifestation of the Alexius legend, with one major difference: he was considered insane. His first Life narrates his impoverished, rural upbringing and apparently mad behaviour which involved crying Kyrie eleison (‘Lord have mercy’) continuously from the age of eight.Footnote 69 He was ejected from his house by his mother at the age of twelve. Amid his adventures, Nicholas was mistreated by the monks of Hosios Loukas, who tried different means to lock him up or expel him, but he always evaded imprisonment and returned. Finally they tried to drown him in the sea but he was rescued by a dolphin. He then saved the monks themselves from drowning by advising them to shout Kyrie eleison. Nicholas attracted a following and crossed over to southern Italy, where his life was a combination of continued abuse and increasing recognition, including many miracles.
As for Nicholas's religious status, the Life gives no indication that his time at the monastery was as anything other than a temporary guest. The end of the Life addresses the issue in a little epilogue, where we are told that Nicholas was dressed in a habit by the monks of Hosios Loukas as if for a joke (‘quasi per ludum’).Footnote 70 The ‘second’ contemporary Life by Adelferius, as if to answer the question, makes clear that Nicholas was a peregrinus; indeed that is already considered his surname, the author tells us.Footnote 71 He was neither a hermit nor a monk, simply a pilgrim. If Latin writers were slightly uncertain how to categorise him, it is because he stemmed from a genre of sanctity that was alien to the West. The salos – ‘holy fool’ or ‘fool for Christ's sake’ – first appeared in Egypt in the fifth century before spreading to the cities of the Byzantine Empire.Footnote 72 By consciously simulating madness and folly, the holy fool revealed a deeper wisdom while avoiding the vanity of worldly praise. Nicholas and Alexius reflect a less hierarchical genre of sanctity in which the social orders might be freely inverted, or subverted. In the Western tradition saintly rebels are far harder to locate and sanctity in this period generally mirrors the make-up of the ecclesiastical elite.Footnote 73
Eight lay saints – Gerald, Burchard, Ida, Bovo, Davino, Gerard, Alexius and Nicholas – became recognised in the West in the long eleventh century. There was also the creation of Duke Stephen, another model for the laity, in the Life of St Martial. No definitive register of saints exists for this period so there are likely to be further examples that have been missed.Footnote 74 There are some possibilities among later legends that place their subjects in this period but whose cults are hard to trace back to it, such as Walstan of Bawburgh (d. 30 May 1016), who was an agricultural labourer. He had been the object of local veneration and pilgrimage activity in Norfolk since the late medieval period, but unfortunately we know little of his importance in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.Footnote 75 Meanwhile, certain stories emerge from Germany that have proved hard to trace back to the central Middle Ages.Footnote 76 None the less, the principal themes that emerge from the Lives surveyed above concern first, the role of the good lord and lady, and second, pilgrimage as a motor of lay spirituality. It is no coincidence that the Peace (and subsequently Truce) of God emerged in this period to counter bad lordship, that attitudes to motherhood and the Virgin Mary were evolving, and that the great pilgrimage to the Holy Land – later known as the First Crusade – represented ‘a new way of earning salvation’ for the laity, as one contemporary famously wrote.Footnote 77
With these saints, the boundaries between the laity and the clergy at a time of Gregorian reform – a time which included clerical attacks on the laity – became porous.Footnote 78 Vauchez thought that the atmosphere of the Gregorian era ruled out lay sanctity, but historians should not be so surprised by its possibility.Footnote 79 One of the features of the age that scholars now recognise is the extent to which clergy and laity in fact worked together.Footnote 80 A prime example is Countess Matilda of Tuscany (or Canossa, 1046–1115), the powerful ally of Gregory vii who nourished reforming institutions and was remembered in the almost-saintly biography known as the Vita Mathildis.Footnote 81 The concept of reform has been sufficiently deconstructed for us to realise that any single-minded idea of what it means is bound to hinder explanation.Footnote 82 In sum, these cults may help to encourage wariness among historians of sainthood when making rules or announcing trends, and a willingness to see the phenomenon in all its complexity, using ‘exceptions’ and ‘anomalies’ as evidence of a curious variety that makes up the rich whole.
