Description
Evidence of the spread of the cults of English saints in medieval Scandinavia is revealed by detailed detective work in fragmentary manuscripts. The process of Christianising the Scandinavian countries in the tenth to the thirteenth centuries was spearheaded in the earliest phases by missionaries from Anglo-Saxon England. It is likely that such missionaries took with themthe books that would have been essential for church services - Bibles, Gospel-books, Psalters, Breviaries - along with saints' relics, thus introducing the cults of the saints venerated at the time in England. A remarkable quantity of mainly fragmentary manuscripts have survived from this activity and from Scandinavia manuscripts produced in imitation of the imports. Almost all of them were gathered together at the Reformation as redundant and used mainlyto provide covers and bindings for provincial accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; they are preserved largely in the National Archives in Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo and Stockholm. Materials for some seventy-fourEnglish saints are recorded in this volume, giving an idea of the extent of their presence in the liturgies of medieval Scandinavia. They include all occurrences of the saints in surviving liturgical calendars, martyrologies, missals, breviaries, etc; where the texts are not otherwise attested, they are reproduced in full. It will be an essential point of reference for all scholars working on the English saints and on the spread of Christianity in the middle ages.
