Final Report Summary - COS (The Cult of Saints: a christendom-wide study of its origins, spread and development) The ‘Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity’ project researched a central development in early Christianity: the emergence and evolution of the belief that saints in their graves could help one in the present; and the many distinctive practices that developed with this belief (such as the celebration of the saints’ feast-days, the building of churches dedicated to them, and the collection and generation of relics, whether corporeal remains or objects that had been in contact with the saints). For the first time, thanks to the support of the ERC, it was possible to investigate this important phenomenon which initially united Christendom (though later it was to divide it), across all the languages of early Christianity (Armenian, Coptic, Georgian, Greek, Latin and Syriac), and across all the many types of evidence: secular and ecclesiastical histories, the written saints’ lives and martyrdom accounts, inscriptions, images in fresco and mosaic, law-codes, sermons, letters, private documents, amulets, curse-tablets, etc.. The project has collected all the available evidence for the cult of saints, dating from before around 700 CE, inputting it into a freely available database, both in its original languages and in English translation (in many cases the first such translations to be made), accompanied by contextual commentary. This resource (http://csla.history.ox.ac.uk/) has been available to the public since November 2017; it lies at the centre of the project-team’s own research, but is also already proving invaluable to others interested in the early history of the saints. Some 7500 individual pieces of evidence for the early cult of saints, many of them substantial passages of text, are available through the database, and tagged so that they are fully searchable in multiple ways, including ways that are not central to the project, but could be useful to others. The nature of this evidence is very varied: from passing references to individual saints’ shrines and tiny pilgrim tokens, to complete martyrdom accounts (which are presented in summary, but with key passages in full, both in the original language and in translation).Several features of the emergence and early development of the cult of saints have emerged, which will be presented and discussed in the print volume, currently in preparation: the explosion, across the entire Christian world, of saintly cult in the later fourth century; the ubiquity of very minor local saints (sometimes even without a name); the dominant role of a few major figures, some biblical but others (like St George and Sts Cosmas and Damian) not; a broad uniformity of practice, but also some diversity (for instance, in the Armenian treatment of bones, or the Greek East’s fondness for sleeping at saints’ shrines); the very slow emergence of cult for saints who were not martyrs, even the Virgin Mary who later became the saint par excellence of Christianity; the importance of texts for establishing durable cult (but not for the emergence of more ephemeral saints); and much else besides.The project, in collaboration with local institutions, held three conferences across Europe: in Paris in 2015, at the Collège de France, on the theme of ‘Cult and Hagiography: Agreement and Disagreement’; in Bari in 2017, at the Università degli Studi ‘Aldo Moro’, on ‘Cultic Graffiti across the Mediterranean and Beyond’; and a final conferences in 2018, focused more generally on the cult of the saints, at the University of Warsaw. Without the support of the ERC, a project of this scale and complexity would have been quite impossible.
