Episode 22: “Encounters with Local Saints and Their Cults”

August 20, 2025 in Announcements, Event Registration, Manuscript Studies, Research Group Episodes for The Research Group Speaks, Research Group Speaks (The Series)

“The Research Group Speaks”
Episode 22

“Encounters
with Local Saints and Their Cults:
Traces in Prose, Poetry, and Relics”

Saturday 13 December 2025
1:00–2:30 pm EST (GMT-5) by Zoom

[Posted on 20 August 2025, with updates]

For the series wherein “The Research Group Speaks,” we respond to suggestions and requests as the series unfolds. For information, please see:

Next we turn to a report by several scholars working in different areas and language-groups upon a similar subject of perennial interest in religious, historical, and devotional identities.

This Episode considers the characteristics of veneration of local saints, as manifested in the surviving evidence, especially in manuscripts. Among the materials are vitae, hymns and liturgical practices for saints’ feast days.

Speakers and Respondents include:

Outline

London, British Library, MS Royal 14 B VI, detail. King Edward Martyr, Image Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons via https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e3/Edward_the_Martyr_-_MS_Royal_14_B_VI.jpg.

This episode aims to consider the challenges and opportunities when encountering and studying local saints, those whose renown and veneration might not have reached a wide audience or enjoyed a persistent duration. Nonetheless, their stories and the individuals or communities who both followed and cultivated their appeal can reach across time and place to show how the habits of pious practices and the methodologies for discovering materials and contexts in modern study might be shared in widely different cultures, languages, and periods.

Looking at case studies from complete vitae, where the saint’s biography is given in full but only circulated locally, and progressing to hymns and paracontent, where only names and scattered biographic hints survive, the speakers and respondents will reflect on the methodological challenges posed in each instance and strategies for engaging with them.

Among the subjects will be Ethiopic vitae and hymns and Western Medieval liturgical Kalendars (such as in Books of Hours in Latin and/or vernaculars).

We welcome your observations.

Registration

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