Monastic Life Link 1

Saints' Lives, Martyrdom, and the Body

This link requires that you consult the New Catholic Encyclopedia and the Dictionary of the Middle Ages in order to learn about the history and development of martyrdom. Anyone who dies for a cause is a martyr, and in the early centuries of the Church there were thousands of martyrs, whose grisly deaths became plot materials for their recorded lives.

• What is the correlation that you find between martyrdom and the spread of religious ideals? Those who die in holy wars today are often hailed as "martyrs of the faith," a designation that seems to have more purposes than honoring the dead. What were the uses of martyrdom in the early days of Christianity?
• What happened to martyrdom in the Middle Ages? You will find, in this period, that there were not many martyrs, although there were a few. One, from the eighth century, was Boniface (he is mentioned in the Life of Leofgyth (see TEXTS); another, two centuries later, was Oswald, an Anglo-Saxon king. Oswald's death is recounted in Bede's History, Book 3, Chs. 1-13. The story was retold by the abbot AElfric in the early eleventh century in Lives of Saints.
• What are the importance and value of Oswald's death according to Bede?

1/98