In 1693, quarrymen working near Caerleon, outside Newport in Wales, uncovered an alabaster sculpture of a figure they did not recognise. The man wore a suit of armour, which had once been covered in gold leaf. In one hand he held a sword, in the other a pair of scales. The scales themselves held a girl’s face and a globe of the Earth. The sculpture was donated to the Ashmolean, but experts there were baffled by it. Could it represent the goddess Astrea, one of them wondered.
In fact, it represented the Archangel Michael, one of the most significant figures in the medieval church. Among other things, it will be Michael who wields the scales on Judgment Day. How could so significant a figure have been forgotten – the cultural memory of more than 1,000 years erased – in such a short space of time? More importantly, what else did the Tudor Reformation rob us of?
Amy Jeffs’s Saints is intended to help answer that question. It comprises brief, tightly shaped, almost fragmentary, fictionalised narratives about 40 saints, organised by month according to their respective feast days. In a nod to medieval calendars, each month is also accompanied by notes about the labours traditionally undertaken at that time of year, together with the relevant sign of the zodiac, thought to influence human health and well-being.
The book therefore hints at the holistic, all-encompassing, God-steeped world – the universe-wide web of spiritual signs and meanings – of which saints were a potent part. Each story is paired with a thoughtful essay reflecting on its historical context. Cumulatively, these pieces offer a wider, if still skeletal narrative of faith and scepticism which charts the rise and fall of the cult of the saints and the culture of pilgrimage and relics, ending with the destructive madness of the Reformation.
It is a format that worked well for Jeffs in her previous books, Storyland and Wild, which explored the myths and histories of pagan and early medieval Britain. But are we, in our queasily post-Christian culture, comfortable embracing the divinely inspired miracle workers of medieval Catholicism in the same way?
It is interesting in this context to note the word ‘magic’ in the book’s subtitle – a more secular-friendly term, perhaps, than ‘miracles’. There is certainly enough unruly fantasy here for everyone: ships sail through the turf; birds are resurrected; trees bow to offer their fruits. There is the bawdy: an ill-tempered husband and wife find every inch of their bodies covered with, respectively, penises and vaginas. And there is horror: a man is tricked by the devil into castrating himself; the death of a boy spawns an anti-Semitic backlash.
But there are necessarily martyrdoms, too, and these point more clearly to the challenge Jeffs has set herself in trying to make medieval Christian mythologies attractive to a modern audience. After all, the question of what constituted a miracle was something theologians wrestled with at the time. Jeffs cites Albertus Magnus in the 13th century, who defined it as an event ‘raised above the order of nature’. Things conjured with magic – never mind the merely extraordinary – were explicitly excluded.
Saints challenges us to think about the distinction between the supernatural and the miraculous. Jeffs’s accounts are mostly drawn from the early church and all but one is pre-1200, when Vatican bureaucracy took control of the canonisation process. Her selection therefore prioritises exactly the sort of fantastic, folkloric and ahistorical accounts that the papacy wanted to sideline, if not suppress. But although her retellings are shaped by a modern sense of wonder, and in ways that would have been nonsensical to the medieval mind – her elliptical St Germanus narrative, for instance, ends before anything miraculous has occurred – they are sourced from traditional hagiographies. It’s a difficult balancing act, but it is skilfully done.
The agent of the miraculous was a person blessed with virtus, what Jeffs calls ‘the ineffable power of the saint’, the ability to channel the divine and charge everything about them with its grace, even after death. It is this that drew people in their tens of thousands to holy relics. A body’s sanctity was not diminished by dismemberment; each piece held the spiritual force of the whole. You might say the same about the shattered world of medieval Christianity. It is broken and dispersed, but its fragments carry the same indissoluble charge. ‘What should we do about the collective, royally imposed amnesia we have in relation to the survivals that are our birthright?’ Jeffs asks. One answer might be: read this book.
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