In the Footsteps of the Holy: Sacred Landscapes and the Cult of Saints in the Anglo-Norman World, 1066-1220

The study of sacred space and the cult of saints in the Anglo-Norman world has been primarily focused around the shrines and the great cathedrals and abbey churches that were built to contain them. Considerably less attention has been paid to the phenomenon of sacred places in the broader landscape as they relate to the promotion and veneration of a saint and his or her cult. This thesis argues that secondary cult sites and sacred landscapes were a crucial component of the cults of several major institutions, and that they can be identified and understood using a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach (including archaeology) that captures the full extent of the experience of the medieval pilgrim and the institutional agendas that shaped the sites he or she would visit.

This project employs a specialized methodology and draws a set of conceptual models from the better-surviving and studied examples of sacred landscapes in Ireland. Three case studies (St Davids, the cult of St Cuthbert, and Glastonbury) have been selected for Anglo-Norman England and Wales, primarily centered around the efforts of the host foundations to establish institutional and historical continuity between their present communities and the distant past of their patrons in a time of fundamental transition from pre-Conquest ‘native’ ecclesiastical communities to those governed by reformed orders originating from the continent. This period of institutional transition can be broadly located between the year of the Conquest in 1066 to the rise of the cult of Thomas Becket in the early thirteenth century. The goal of the project is to contribute to a richer understanding of how the cult of saints was experienced and promoted, primarily through the lens of the saints’ institutional guardians and their agendas, and to deepen our appreciation of how medieval people interacted with the divine in the mundane world.