TIL of St. Waldetrudis, who died in 688. She, both of her parents, her husband, her sister, and her four children (one of whom died at the age of seven) are all venerated as Catholic saints. Were batch canonizations of whole extended families typical of the Church in that time period?

by spikebrennan
y_sengaku

While I can't say it was typical even in their contemporary period, some basic premises on the historical development of the cult of saints as well as canonization during the Middle Ages might be useful to take them into consideration.

The most important premise is: The Papacy had not regulated the canonization process in the first millennium, so many local saint cults had roots in the initiative of local churches and their leader, such as the bishop and the monastic community. The Papacy only gradually monopolized the acknowledgement of the canonization from the end of the 10th century (Ulrich of Augsburg) onward, culminated in the canon law collection, such as Liber Extra (1234) in the 13th century (Perron 2009: 27f.). Generally speaking, the pontificate of Pope Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) is regarded as a watershed of the more strict papal control of sanctity. Before that, the ritual of translation/ elevation and the commission of hagiographic literature had been often enough for the rise of local cult.

Another point to note is the relative abundance of local "royal" saints in early Medieval west, especially in newly Christianized area. "Dynastic" members of the local royal/ elite family, not strictly limited to the killed male member (who could be regarded/ fabricated as a martyr in later hagiography), were often respected as holy figures, in order to strengthen the authority of the family in question as well as the Christianity. Another or even the same "branch" of such royal family sometimes tries to transform their members into saints.

From this point of view, abbess born in the royal or local elite family often played an role of a commissioner of local holy cult, or even herself was as a patron of the newly founded monastic community. While northern France-Belgium was not technically the virgin soil of Christianity in the 7th century, the wave of Columbanan monasticism movement, named after St. Columbanus the Irish (d. 615), was popular in the fringe of northern France that led to the foundation of several new monasteries (Fouracre & Gerberding trans. 1996: 144f.). While I confess I haven't read the apparently latest monograph of this field of research, Yaniv Fox, Power and Religion in Merovingian Gaul: Columbanian Monasticism and the Frankish Elites, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014, I wonder whether venerated members of St. Waldetrudis belonged to this group of local saints' cult.

References:

  • Fouracre, Paul & Richard A. Gerberding (ed. & trans.). Late Merovingian France: History and Hagiography 640-720. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1996.
  • Geary, Patrick. Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages. Cornell, NJ: Cornell UP, 1994.
  • Perron, Anthony. "The Bishops of Rome, 1100-1300." In: The Cambridge History of Christianity, iv: Christianity in Western Europe, c. 1100-c. 1500, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, pp. 22-38. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.