Ali on Saints

“Both saints and lords were patrons in the sense of serving as the pater, the father, to those beneath them Indeed, our modern linguistic distinction between a "patron" and a "patron saint" is largely a product of the eighteenth century; before that time, the single word "patron" normally designated both categories.”

“[A]s James Simpson points out, Henry VIII moved against saints' cults as an adjunct to is move to centralize political power because the saints represented a social model based on intermediaries in which people gave their first allegiance to a local lord instead of to the king. In other words, the saints were not just theologically problematic. Because of their association with human lords, they were also politically and socially problematic for the Tudors, who were committed to a consolidation of power in the person of the monarch. Since, in Simpson's words, a saint's power was so often "felt along the networks of noble and gentry families," Henry tried to limit the power of the saints as a means to limit the independent power of these families.”

“Although fine studies have explored how medieval devotional traditions such as pilgrimage, Purgatory, and the Eucharist continued to ripple through the consciousness of early modern writers and to influence their works, the same attention has not been paid to the literally thousands of saintly men and women who constituted the late medieval canon (the virgin Mary is the signal exception here, one to which I return below. Ironically, the one major study of the impact of hagiography on early modern Protestant literature, Julia Lupton's Afterlives of the Saints, is premised on the idea that the saints themselves had largely disappeared, leaving behind only an empty genre, the legend, which the early modern period would then refill with new, secular contents. Lupton makes a compelling case for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century preoccupation with hagiography, but her thesis implies that early modern men and women had more or less forgotten about the individual saints themselves.”