CREATING ST. THOMAS: IMAGES, TEXTS AND PILGRIM SIGNS IN THE MAKING OF A MEDIEVAL SAINT

Abstract

At the time of Thomas Becket's murder over church power just after Christmas in 1170, many both inside and outside of the church considered him an unlikely candidate for sainthood. Nevertheless, his death instantly all but guaranteed he would become a saint; and from that point a textual and visual hagiography began to be produced that fit him to his new role. Thomas's popular. and then official, canonization occurred at a time when the saints' cults, with their shrines and pilgrimages, were in a period of expansion. Relics of older saints, such as Cuthbert at Durham, were being elevated into shrines, furnished with expanded and illuminated Lives, with cathedrals enlarged or refurbished to accommodate them. Thomas was, in a sense, in the right place at the right time to become the most important saint in medieval England, and the center of one of the three largest cults in Europe. His hagiography was derived from the long tradition of sainthood. With a martyrdom that was recent and witnessed, more or less, by several eminent clergy, and that had been preceded by a -Passion" involving his comparatively well-documented dispute with Henry II, his cult had a currency that those of the ancient martyr saints and the more recent confessor saints did not. We can observe in his textual hagiography, and in the illuminations that accompanied and interpreted it, the manner in which the "factual" aspects of his cult were embellished with and made to fit hagiographic narrative tropes, to transform him from ambiguous human to martyr saint. Thomas's cult, providing miracles—the vast majority healing—to pilgrims, was founded on earlier practices, but its Gothic chapel at Canterbury with his miracles portrayed in stained glass was a new experience for many of the visitors who came to it. The popularity of the cult resulted in an overwhelming number of miracles, and the stained glass windows picturing the textual miracle collections compiled by monks at Canterbury represented a relatively new hagiographic form to support his cult—representing, attracting, and admonishing pilgrims. Thomas's cult was also the first in England to employ pilgrim "signs"—ampullae and badges—bearing a new form of iconography suited to mass production and serving the functions of pilgrimage as both amulets and souvenirs. Although much has been written about the history of Thomas Becket and surveys of his art have been undertaken, little has been done to examine the interplay of text and image. This paper will examine both the textual and visual hagiography of St. Thomas and how these worked together to create a persona consistent with sainthood and to serve the different facets of his cult.