Rebecca Pinner’s 2010 dissertation entitled “St: Edmund, King and Martyr: Constructing his Cult in Medieval East Anglia” is a helpful, though gentle, pushback against the predominant scholarship surrounding Edmund and medieval saints’ cults in general. Pinner is familiar with a vast array of scholarship on saints but finds particular inspiration from Virginia Blanton’s “horizontal” work on the cult of St. Æthelryth of Ely. Simply put, Pinner hopes that broader investigations into cults that focus less on trying to find the truest account of a particular saint’s life and more on examining the cult from all angles will yield more useful views into life in the middle ages and insight into the nature of cults. She uses Edmund as her case study, claiming that, “Edmund’s historical indeterminacy, which has so troubled historians, was in fact his greatest asset, enabling successive generations of devotees to redefine Edmund to suit their own proclivities and requirements and ensuring his enduring appeal.”[1] She critiques other scholar’s tendency towards oversimplification, both of general investigation into cults and particularly with St. Edmund.
Pinner’s twofold argument is intrinsically connected with her approach. Her investigation into Edmund, with its internal critiques, is simply an example as to how she thinks hagiographical inquiry ought to be done. Her principal argument is that one ought to use literature, art history, social history, and anthropology in the investigation into the cult of saints, rather than looking at the compartments of hagiography, miracle collections, and pilgrimage activity. Context is key, and she fears that even though focusing on one of the three traditional emphases might make sense for simplicity’s sake, such reductionistic methodology creates a narrow picture of the cult of saints that impairs the modern scholar from truly understanding religion and culture in the Middle Ages. She clearly explains each of her categories of inquiry, though admittedly most of her work comes from art history. The idea of the created thing that leaves the mark of a particular person in history is in full effect, and she does her job well in terms of trying to determine why particular images and texts were created, what they were used for, who would have used them, etc.
Her selection of Edmund, in particular, was to illuminate how the varying modes of inquiry might yield a plethora of insights, because Edmund was such a varied character. She toys with, and finally denounces, John Lydgate’s tripartite epithet ‘martir, maide, and king.’ Calling for nuance in each of the categories. She looks at Bury, his cult’s epicenter, as well as other areas in East Anglia, to piece together what life would have been like in the time Edmund died and past that. Of particular interest is the continual threat of Viking (Danish) invasion, and the psychosocial effect that would have had on East Anglians. Her insights into the significance of male virginity are profound when so much hagiographical scholarship on virginity focuses on females. She greatly illustrates the parallelism between Edmund’s constructed martyrdom and Christ’s sacrifice, showing that bit of the narrative to be as significant for clergy as Edmund’s head’s call of “hīc, hīc, hīc,” to his fellow East Anglians from between the legs of the wolf, which would have been significant to his people. Pinner leaves you thinking, “No wonder he had once been England’s patron saint.”
Although Pinner critiques other scholarship, what she is doing is critiquing a hyper fixation. Her work cannot exist without other scholars trying to investigate St. Edmund himself. Although she advocates what she believes to be a new methodology, it must be a broadening of an existing one; adding something new, while keeping what was already in place. In her attempt to say she is adding something distinctly new to the conversation, she sometimes dismisses good scholarship just because it seems too in the vein of a search for a historical person, such as Grant Loomis’ “The Growth of the Saint Edmund Legend”. There is the implication that these scholars waste their time doing guesswork that others have already tried their hand at and will never yield the full truth. What she hopes for seems to be a reorientation of spare resources. These resources (human, financial, historical, etc.), which currently in the majority focus on finding “the truth” on particular saints’ lives, should shift and instead focus on cultural interactions. To Pinner, trying to find the reality of Edmund’s life is nearly a lost cause, though such investigations do produce valuable information. Still, though Pinner’s art-historical preoccupation might yield good insight into the medieval mind, there are some concerns. If done well, art history can yield profound cultural insight. Done poorly, without enough research, it is a mess of conjecture. Pinner’s work for Edmund provides a lot of wonderful insight into the varying instances of Edward in East Anglia, but even then, one can only glean so much without dipping into guesswork that “sounds right”. Still, that criticism can be applied to much of hagiography due to its historically ambiguous nature. I do not want to discount this approach but qualify it.
Pinner’s argument in both the particulars and the broader scale is generally well-executed. There are broader veins of investigation that have been ignored thus far into the cult of saints that would yield a more holistic view of medieval Europe and England. Still, she would do well to use the humility topoi rather than claim her approach to be altogether new. Her critiques on the inability of certain veins of hagiographical scholarship to ever achieve truth are valid, and yet I find myself tempering support for her ideas because 1) her solution seems susceptible to the same pitfalls, and 2) there might be a different intention for their scholarship from her own. Considered on its own, some of Pinner’s claims seem harsh, but in the greater mix of scholarship on the cult of saints, they contain a valuable approach that other scholars would do well to implement.
[1] Rebecca Pinner, “St: Edmund, King and Martyr: Constructing his Cult in Medieval East Anglia,” PhD diss., (University of East Anglia, 2010), 375.
The Cult of Reagan 