WikiTree > Articles > Year 1000 > The Saints
Personal portraits did not really exist in the early Middle Ages. Even kings were only depicted as symbolic and idealised figures on their coins. But when it came to the lives of the saints, you had a chance to analyse their personalities, pondering the peculiarities of a character like Simeon Stylites, the fifth-century hermit who spent much of his life living naked on top of increasingly high pillars, or learning from the life of Mary of Egypt, the patron saint of fallen women. Mary was an Egyptian who left home at the age of twelve and went to live in fifth-century Alexandria, where she became a prostitute for seventeen years. Through curiosity she joined a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, paying for her passage by offering herself to the sailors. But on arriving at the holy city with her fellow pilgrims, she found it impossible to enter the church. She felt herself held back by an invisible force, and when she lifted her eyes to an image of the Virgin Mary, she heard a voice telling her to cross the river Jordan, where she would find rest. So,according to legend, she bought three loaves and went to live in the desert, spending the rest of her life there living on dates and berries. When her clothes wore out, her hair grew long enough to cover her modesty, and she dedicated the rest of her life to prayer and contemplation. Mary featured frequently in medieval chronicles and church statues, identified by her long hair and by the three loaves that became her emblem.10
People identified with the personalities and quirks of saints, as today they feel they know soap opera stars. The hagiographies that recounted their stories were bland and stereotyped eulogies, usually written by loyal followers and friends. But human clues lurked in the details, and every saint's day of the month offered its own drama. In the monasteries, morning prayers were said to that day's holy figures. Prayer was a way of asking a saint to pay attention to your own particular worries. Singing was a beautiful way of saying, "Please listen." The God of the Middle Ages was a God who intervened actively in daily life. That was the message of the miracles executed by Jesus and continued by his saints. So one function of worship was to secure divine intervention on your own behalf.
After prime, the first service of the day after sunrise, the monks would repair to their chapterhouse — the monastery meeting room — where the lives of that day's saints would be read out, and one of the sermons preached in chapel might well take an incident from the life of that particular day's saint as the jumping-off point for some practical teaching.11 January 5 offered the feast day of Simeon Stylites, the pillar-dwelling hermit, while other days featured Isidorus of Seville, who had proclaimed that there should be a cathedral school in every diocese; St. Genevieve, who saved Paris from Attila the Hun, and whose candle was blown out by the devil when she went to pray at night; St. Lucien, who was imprisoned for his faith by the emperor Diocletian; St. Timothy, a companion of St. Paul who was stoned to death by the heathens; St. Secundinus, who wrote the earliest known Latin hymn in Ireland; and the hermit St. Paul of Thebes, who was said to have survived more than a hundred years of piety and austerity in the desert.
Each hero or heroine had their own lesson to teach. It could carry you through the day, a psychic talisman of encouragement, and the geography of the saints' adventures — from Antioch to Seville, then north to Paris and Ireland — provided a lesson in itself about the varied shape and character of a world which extended further than we might imagine. The Anglo-Saxons knew of three continents — Europe, Africa, and Asia — and they also knew about India. Late in the ninth century King Alfred sent money to help the Christian missionaries there.
Copyright © 1998 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium: An Englishman's World" at Amazon.com.
