English Saints in the Medieval Liturgies of the Scandinavian Churches

The slow steady process of Christianising the Scandinavian countries (medieval Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and also at that period, Finland) in the tenth to the thirteenth centuries was spear-headed in the earliest phases by missionaries from Anglo-Saxon England. There is a fair certainty that such missionaries took with them the books that would have been essential for church services - Bibles, Gospel-books, Psalters, but also Breviaries for the daily Office - along with saints' relics, thus introducing the cults of the saints venerated at the time in England. A remarkable quantity of mainly (though not exclusively) fragmentary manuscripts have survived from this activity and from new manuscripts that must have been produced in Scandinavia in imitation of the imports. Almost all of them were gathered together at the Reformation as redundant but valuable material and used mainly to 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 as well as to a lesser extent in various libraries in Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. This book meticulously records all the occurrences of English saints in the liturgical manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts that have survived in Scandinavia. Materials for some seventy-four English saints are recorded in this volume, giving an idea of the extent of their presence in the liturgies of medieval Scandinavian cathedrals, monasteries and parish churches, in the middle ages. They include all occurrences of the saints in surviving liturgical calendars, martyrologies and then in missals and breviaries and other more specialised kinds of liturgical book; where the texts (prayers, hymns and so on) 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.