The Economics of Faith: Approaches to Monastic Saints' Cults in Medieval Scotland

Abstract

This paper will explore the sources and extant evidence relevant to the development and management of saints' cults by some of Scotland's major monastic houses (spread across a representative variety of localities and Orders). The difficulties of accessing fragmentary late-medieval and early-modern monastic cartulary manuscripts (in a country dominated by its post-Reformation (1560-) Protestant historiography) will be illustrated, along with the pitfalls of 19th century antiquarian published ‘editions' of such material often accepted by scholars as primary sources. A survey of a selection of monastic houses will then focus upon how the development of key monastic saints' cults elsewhere in the British Isles and Europe (e.g. Canterbury, Westminster, Durham, Rievaulx, St Denis, Cluny) influenced Scottish churchmen and cult centres; their evolving strategies - diplomatic, political, economic, architectural and liturgical - deployed over time to secure canonisation and/or to attract patronage and pilgrimage. An effort will also be made to measure the scale and changing nature of the local and national economies and infrastructure built around such cult development, as well as of pilgrimage within and into/out of Scotland; central to this survey will be evolving relations with the secular clergy, Crown, nobility and laity generally - not simply competition for resources and authority but, in particular, how the growing ‘secularisation of the liturgy' into the 12th century and beyond affected Scottish monastic cult centres. Lastly, the paper will also consider anything unique within the Scottish monastic experience: for example houses' socio-economic, political and liturgical strategies for dealing with pro-longed Anglo-Scottish conflict and late medieval economic distress; or the comparative fortunes of cults based around ‘native' or ‘Celtic' saints and their shrine reliquaries as opposed to sites associated with more universal, pan-Christian saints and feasts. In undertaking this survey, focus will be given to case-studies of the Order/house/cult of: Tironensians/Arbroath Abbey/St Thomas Becket; Benedictines/Dunfermline Abbey/St Margaret of Scotland; Premonstratensians/Whithorn Priory/St Ninian; Trinitarians/Peebles Crosskirk/the Holy Cross and (with recognition of the work of Dr Emilia Jamroziak) Cistercians/Melrose Abbey/St Waltheof.