Saints and pilgrimages: new and old

Abstract

The Middle Ages played an important role in the religious life of the faithful, through the cult rendered to the martyrs and the confessors. In parallel with changes in conceptions of sainthood, there was a significant shift both in the development of the idea of sanctuary and in the geographical distribution of sanctuaries. Until the Carolingian period, there seem to have been relatively few places that were considered holy by the Christians of the West and that attracted large numbers of pilgrims. Increased control over the cult of saints by the hierarchy was accompanied by a process of verification, and hence definition, by the papacy on behalf of the Roman Church. The modernisation of the Roman sanctoral was one of the principal manifestations of this new attitude to the cult of saints on the part of the church. Historians still debate the reasons for the explosion of the Marian cult in the final centuries of the Middle Ages.

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