The project ‘RECOGNISING SAINTS in the High Middle Ages: Local and Papal Formalisation of Cults Reconsidered’ focuses on the phenomenon of formalisation of the cult of saints in the Latin Christendom in the period between late 10th and late 13th c.

Since late antiquity, the Church tried to control the veneration of men and women regarded by the faithful as saints. It did so primarily by reserving for itself the right to recognize saints, that is, to formally declare that a deceased person may be publicly venerated in the liturgy, that their relics may be used for the consecration of altars, and that their feast day may be included in the calendar. While in later periods, and also today, in the Catholic Church this right to proclaim saints belongs solely to the papacy, in the Middle Ages this idea was only just emerging and becoming widespread. As a result, during the period of our interest, the recognition of saints was carried out by various institutions within the still relatively decentralized Church — bishops, metropolitans, synods, and monastic communities —which increasingly turned to Rome on this matter.

The aim of the ‘RECOGNISING SAINTS’ project is to present the whole of this complex picture, in which the recognition of sainthood took place in various ways and was the result of the actions of various performers (people, institutions, groups).  As opposed to the previous scholarship, the project does not focus only on the papacy and on the case studies of Roman involvement in the formalisation of new saintly cults, but rather stresses the key role of local ecclesiastical institutions played in the recognition of sainthood, including in the emergence of a new, centralised model. To this end, the researchers involved in the project analyse written sources, mainly hagiography, to which comparative and quantitative methods are applied. Moreover, they set out to building a complete digital catalogue of all cases of the recognition of sainthood in the High Middle Ages: the Sainthood Recognition Catalogue.