ABSTRACT

Thanks to the remarkably intensive investigation of Christian sainthood during these last two decades, it has never been more apparent than it is now that a saint’s cult is rarely what at first sight it might seem.2 In later medieval England in particular it has become increasingly obvious that the spiritual, social and psychological forces which underlay the adoration of saints were so varied, so fluctuating and so complex that the phenomenon defies not only precise analysis but full understanding too. Nothing, to state the very obvious, would have surprised fifteenth-century visitors to the shrines of St Cuthbert and of St Thomas Becket more than that what seemed to them to be a self-evident act of worship should appear to the twentieth-century historian as by no means self-evident at all.