Saint-Making in the Later Middle Ages: Sanctity, Value, and Social Creativity

Ideology, Society and Medieval Religion seminar series

Please note this is a hybrid event. Upon registration you will be sent a Zoom link. If you are joining us in-person at the University of York, the seminar will begin at 6pm in H/G17, Heslington Hall.

In 1414, commissioners interviewed sixteen people in the city of Tours. They were interested in the life and miracles of a local noblewoman, Jeanne-Marie de Maille, who had recently died. These sixteen witnesses offered detailed narratives of Jeanne-Marie’s holy life, and her miraculous interventions. They each gave their time, and in many cases, considerable resources to telling the stories of their holy woman.
 
This paper sets out to consider why they did so: why did medieval people invest so many resources in the construction of deceased holy figures? Going further, why where there saints in medieval society? I offer an answer to this question through the anthropological theory of value offered by David Graeber, and argue that saints are ultimately a means of realising, negotiating, and manipulating value, and, through this, as a technology for the exercising of social creativity – for creating new social worlds. Approaching sainthood through this lens allows us to go beyond conventional studies of sainthood, which have generally either contented themselves with the conclusion that saints were ‘socially constructed’, or reduced the saint to a feature of wider discourses. In either case, the saint themselves, as a cultural and material object, has largely vanished from studies of late medieval religious practice. I suggest that saints are better understood as a total social phenomenon, a value-bearing object, and that those involved in the making of a saint - the devotees, pilgrims, hagiographers and commissioners made use of the miracles and virtues of the saint to hold debates over what value is, and thus, what society should be.

Ed van der Molen received his PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2025. His research focuses on late medieval religious culture, particularly the cult of saints, approached through the lens of anthropological theories of value. Please note: the seminar will take place over Zoom, and a link will be sent to you upon registration.