Indispensable immigrants by Lester Little

Author:Lester Little [Little, Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Italy, Social History, Religion, Christianity, Saints & Sainthood
ISBN: 9780719095221
Google: XQbeyAEACAAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:37:33+00:00

Figure 18 This sandstone tablet shows Alberto, as in Figure 9, dressed as a pilgrim receiving the viaticum, and specifically identified (although the inscription at the top is barely legible) as S[anctus] Albertus. The tablet is one of a pair (each 41 × 23.5 cm) found in the Museo Civico Ala Ponzone of Cremona. The inscription on the other one bears the date 1357.

Canonisations do not occur spontaneously. Some would-be saints expend great effort on preparing the way for their own canonisations, but although we expect generals and political figures to spend fortunes and years polishing their respective images for posterity, campaigning for one’s own sainthood is really rather unseemly. Much of what is relevant in these matters is or can be very personal and thus well out of public view, and therefore the role of a confidant such as a parish priest or, especially, a confessor, can be crucial in determining whether the memory of a very holy, but also very humble, person simply slips into oblivion or gets widely enough talked or written about to come to the attention of an entire community. In one way or another somebody has to gather up information about the deceased holy person in order that it not be lost and then do something to pass it along to others. Practically always this meant that the information would get written down because even in a society made up mainly of illiterates, literate clerics had the responsibility (and power) to preserve the communal memory in written form.

In totally illiterate communities oral tradition had of necessity to serve this function. In the 1240s in a rural backwater north of Lyons a Dominican inquisitor came across the cult of a saint named Guinefort, who was, strange to tell, a greyhound. Poor Guinefort, the inquisitor found out, had been killed by his master, the local lord, who mistakenly assumed that once when he and his lady were briefly absent from their chateau this aristocratic pet had killed their infant son, when in fact Guinefort had saved the child’s life from the attack of a large serpent. The repentant master buried his faithful pet with all the honours due a martyr – a martyr to babysitting – and the local people, mothers especially, took their sick children to Guinefort’s grave to be cured. The good friar, needless to say, did all he could to extirpate this outlandishly irregular cult, and probably left the scene satisfied with the results of his effort, and yet six hundred years later folklorists found that the cult had lasted into the middle of the nineteenth century. 34 In settings that were the very antitheses of rural backwaters, namely the northern Italian communes of the thirteenth century, not only did matters of importance need to be put in writing but the writing itself was best put into the hands of persons who enjoyed public faith, i.e. notaries. 35 Someone must have called upon notaries to take down the record of Alberto’s miracles, but

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