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.’

The later medieval Scottish poet Maol-Domhnaigh mac Mhághnais Mhuileadhaigh (Maol-Domhnaigh son of Magnus of Mull), in his poem Ná léig mo mhealladh, a Mhuire (Do not allow me to be deceived, O Mary), addresses the Blessed Virgin Mary in the hope that she will intervene with God on Judgement Day to save his soul:

This chapter seeks to introduce some of the material which can be used to gain an understanding of devotion to the Virgin in the later medieval Gàidhealtachd. The Virgin is crucial to any study of christian piety and devotion in the later middle ages. How then was she conceptualised by the Gaels of Scotland during that period? We will begin with an introductory survey of some of the available material, before concentrating on Gaelic poetry which focuses on the Virgin and miracles performed by her for her devotees. Miracle tales including the Virgin are often seen as ‘excessive’ and scholarly reaction to medieval Marian miracles is very mixed. It will also be shown how this debate is relevant to the Gaelic material.

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.

In the past few decades there has been a great deal of interest expressed in the history of the family in medieval Europe, particularly the emotional bonds between parents and children. Analysing royal families is one place to start exploring familial bonds. Lois Huneycutt has begun the process for Scottish history by studying St Margaret of Scotland (ob. 1093) and her children. Investigating the portrayal of the relationship between the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus is another route to understanding affective familial relations. Scots were children of Mary and siblings of Jesus, believing that a fuller understanding of Mary and Jesus's relationship brought them closer to salvation. They were taught that Mary and Jesus shared a close emotional bond forged through a lifetime of interaction. Jesus began life as a nursing infant clinging to His mother's arms, and ended it as a voluntary sacrifice for human sin. His ascension into heaven, and Mary's later assumption, did not break this tie. Mother and son remained close, working to rescue humanity from sin. Lay people were taught about the Trinity, but tended to distinguish between Jesus and God; Mary was believed to have allied herself with the Son rather than the Father. This mother-son alliance gave humanity hope for salvation, for Mary's determination to help people at Judgement was matched by her influence over Jesus. Whether as human son or resurrected king, Jesus appeared willing to forgive sinners at His mother's request.

This volume arises from a conference held in Edinburgh in September 2007 to mark the conclusion of an AHRC-funded project, The Survey of Dedications to Saints in Medieval Scotland. The publication includes chapters based on papers delivered at that conference, supplemented by a number of invited contributions. This is the second edited volume arising from the ‘Dedications to Saints' project, the first, Saints' Cults in the Celtic World, having been published by Boydell and Brewer in 2009. The database compiled by the project team can be consulted at http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/Research/saints/. The main aim of the project is to stimulate and facilitate research into the cult of saints and the associated themes of piety and religious enthusiasm in medieval Scotland.

The present volume contributes to this endeavour in two discrete, but interlinked, ways. First, the contributions of Clancy and Ditchburn have been designed as wide-ranging reviews, providing general comment on, and challenges to, the paradigms governing the scholarly study of saints and their cults in the early and late middle ages. Clancy's article concentrates on the various ways in which place-name evidence has been used to trace or analyse the development of saints' cults in early medieval Celtic societies. Clancy suggests that the investigation of place-names, church dedications, and hagiographical material relating to saints has too often been moulded to fit established scholarly paradigms, particularly through the tendency of earlier historians to treat these sources as useful guides to the ‘real’ lives and achievements of early medieval missionary saints in northern Britain or by the privileging, in both the surviving evidence and modern scholarship based on it, of those cults adopted and propagated by powerful ecclesiastical figures or institutions.

What follows is an attempt to contextualise the fragmentary and dispersed evidence on local and insular saints in the kingdom of the Scots in the central middle ages, and to understand better the ramifications of Europeanisation and other well known, sweeping changes on their cults. These changes, which included the restructuring of the church establishment under greater papal control, the massive growth of the Cistercians and other reformist monastic orders, and the expansion of power by the Norman and Angevin kings of England across Britain and Ireland, amounted to tectonic shifts in the religious life of a kingdom. How the familiae of saints like Columba, Cuthbert, Kentigern and lesser-known others maintained relationships with the kings, aristocracy and their newfound reformist brethren is the subject of this paper.

Saints' cults in the kingdom of the Scots

It is well known that familiae devoted to various saints were commonplace throughout northern Britain in the early and central middle ages. Charters, notitiae of donations and foundation accounts make clear that gifts to communities at places like Durham, St Andrews, Abernethy, Loch Leven and Deer were often seen as donations made directly to the saint himself (or herself), rather than to institutions. Such gifts comprised an important element in the network of relationships which made these saints and their familiae central to medieval Scottish society.