In this chapter, the focus is primarily on the problems that beset investigating saints' cults in the early medieval period, something approached also in Rachel Butter's incisive case-study of St Munnu. The Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland is one of the most welcome developments in such investigations. First, it will help us understand the dynamism and evolution of saints' cults during the later medieval period, a period for which there remains a great deal of work to do, and much headway to be gained in refining and opening out our understanding of medieval Scottish piety and the nexus between society and religion. Second, and more importantly for this contribution, it will help to clarify for us what we do and do not know about the later medieval position of the cult of those saints already present in the Scottish landscape in the period before the twelfth century. It has become increasingly apparent in recent studies that no real progress can be made in our understanding of early medieval saints' cults without a firm grasp of the nature of the later medieval evidence for those cults. This is especially so, given the paucity of clear documentation cited for the likes of church dedications or fair days by key secondary sources like Mackinlay's Ancient Church Dedications and Watson's Celtic Place-Names of Scotland. This chapter primarily addresses the evidence provided by one source which has had to remain largely outwith the remit of the Survey: place-name evidence.

In 1968 The Innes Review published an article by David McRoberts which was (to use a word often overused in recent years) seminal. Its influence is visible in much, indeed in almost everything, that has been written since 1968 about the Church and about religion in later medieval Scotland. The thesis which it presented was relatively straightforward. McRoberts argued that the fifteenth century witnessed a new and what he called ‘nationalist’ trend in Scottish religious observation. There were several dimensions to this development – but it was especially apparent, McRoberts argued, in the veneration of saints. Before the fifteenth century the Church had neglected Scotland's early saints; thereafter leading clergymen began to look anew at these forgotten worthies. In the earlier part of the century Prior James Haldenstone of St Andrews had coordinated a campaign to have St Duthac officially canonised. Elsewhere there were efforts to relocate the relics and to promote the cults of St Kentigern (at Glasgow and Culross), St Ninian (at Whithorn) and St Triduana (at Restalrig). We find the chronicler Walter Bower lauding St Columba and Archbishop Schevez of St Andrews mounting a search for the relics of St Palladius. This ‘devotional nationalism’ reached its culmination, according to McRoberts, in the early sixteenth century with the work of Bishop William Elphinstone and a team of collaborators in Old Aberdeen, who produced a new martyrology and a new breviary.

Munnu, or Fintan Munnu, as he is sometimes called in Scotland, is an apparently straightforward saint, with an eighth-century vita, an obit in the Annals of Ulster, an appearance in Adomnán's Vita Columbae, and a name – Mun or Mund – which appears in a distinctive form in place-names in Scotland: four Kilmuns in Argyll, and an Eilean Munde near Ballachulish in Lochaber. He is intriguing too in the survival of traces of his cult in fifteenth-century references to a keeper of his crozier, and in the surname Mac Gille Mund, evident in Argyll at least into the seventeenth century.

This cheerful opening may sound like a prelude to the cruel news that in fact Munnu is not straightforward at all – that his obit is unreliable, that the person in Vita Columbae is someone else altogether, and that Kilmun may commemorate another saint. I will indeed flag up some potential problems towards the end of this chapter but for now I am going to treat Munnu as if he were a nice simple saint, uncontaminated by overlap or confusion with other saints. And I treat his strange double name – Fintan Munnu – as a helpful aid in our attempts to track his cult. This name derives from the common name Fintan, of which there were many bearers,5 followed by an affectionate form of the same name, arrived at thus: Fintan > *Mo Finn (‘my Finn’ where the f is lenited and therefore silent) > Mun > Munnu.

A recent study of Marian iconography in relation to The Lord of the Rings pithily notes that Mary, ‘in many respects is the central figure of the Middle Ages’. There is a vast body of surviving texts, statues, pictures, rosaries, misericords, icons, etc., relating to Mary, and even in their vastness they are but a small portion of what existed during the middle ages. This fact underpins this exploration of Marian devotion, which aims to see what sense can be made of the varied but fragmentary evidence for that practice in medieval Perth. It assesses how that evidence fits the broad pattern of such devotion in medieval Europe and whether we can see any kind of gender dimension to that devotional practice. Mary is a figure both human and quasi-divine, both a virgin and a mother, the Church's feminine ideal. As Marina Warner observed, women are equal in God's eyes but not in men's, and ‘Whether we regard the Virgin Mary as the most sublime and beautiful image in man's struggle towards the good and the pure or the most pitiable production of ignorance and superstition, she represents a central theme in the history of western attitudes to women.’

In mid-1206, a group of six inquisitive lay brothers at the Cistercian house of Melrose made an exciting discovery. The brethren had been preparing a tomb for the recently deceased Abbot William II, who was to be buried alongside the tomb of his saintly predecessor, Abbot Waltheof. Waltheof's most famous attribute was the miraculous preservation of his body, a state that had last been witnessed over thirty years previously in 1171. Overcome by the desire to witness this miracle for themselves, the brothers urged the abbey's mason, Brother Robert, to raise the marble cover of St Waltheof's tomb and peer in.

This second discovery of Waltheof's incorruption was an event that must have both re-awakened interest in the saint's cult and re-opened older questions surrounding its promotion. The immediate response of the house appears to have been to commission the well known Cistercian hagiographer, Jocelin of Furness, to write an official account of Waltheof's life and deeds, a work that was begun during the brief abbacy of William's successor, Abbot Patrick (ob. 1207). The Vita's main intention was to raise the profile of Waltheof's cult. The possession of an incorrupt corpse was, as the Vita makes clear, no common claim. Waltheof joined a select group of only six English saints, the shrines of whom were major sites of pilgrimage in the religious landscape of Britain: Canterbury, Bury St Edmunds, Durham, Ely, and London.