Royal saints and early medieval kingship

Abstract

The problem I want briefly to focus on concerns the significance of the saint-king in early medieval cosmology: what is his relationship to the sacral king of so many pre-industrial societies? A commonly-accepted view has been that the sacral king was, quite simply, the immediate ancestor of the saint-king. To quote the recent but in some respects old-fashioned work of W. A. Chaney on Anglo-Saxon kingship: ‘The sacral nature of kingship.... would lead the folk to expect God to honour the stirps regia. The recognised form of this in the new religion was sainthood.’ Christianity, so Chaney implies, simply makes a saint out of the sacral king: in essentials, nothing is changed.

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