Holy Bishops, Papal Canonisation and the Legitimisation of Power in Thirteenth-Century Norway and Poland: The Cases of Eystein Erlendsson of Nidaros and Stanislaus of Kraków

Abstract

This article explores two mid-thirteenth-century attempts to canonise holy bishops from the so-called peripheries of Latin Christendom. That two ecclesiastical centres – the metropolitan see of the Nidaros Church Province and the episcopal see of Kraków – both sought to attain papal acknowledgement of the veneration of a holy episcopal predecessor and did so in the same historical period, is understood to be a response to a general trend in the Latin Church. More specifically, we interpret these attempts in light of the paradigm of the holy episcopal champion fighting for the freedom of the Church, a recalibration of the idea of the holy bishop that emerged as a result of the canonisation of Thomas of Canterbury in 1173, and which was promoted throughout the Latin Church from that point onward. Due to the popularity of the new type of the holy bishop, the episcopal champion became a form of symbolic capital that conferred greater prestige onto the saints, their cult centres, and the guardians of those cult centres, i.e., the clergy. Through a comparative study of two unconnected cases, we see how peripheral agents could actively adopt central trends to strengthen their own legitimisation of power vis-à-vis both rulers and other ecclesiastical institutions.