As a follow-up to our 2025 saint’s-life generating Advent Calendar game, we hear an actual medieval saint’s life and discuss how we get some of our saintly terminology. You’ll also find out where you can get a downloadable version of the Advent Calendar game!
Today’s Texts:
“Life of St. Winefred.” Lives of the Cambro British Saints, of the Fifth and Immediate Succeeding Centuries, from Ancient Welsh & Latin MSS. in the British Museum and Elsewhere, with English Translations, an Explanatory Notes, edited and translated by W. J. Rees, Welsh MSS. Society, 1853, pp. 515-529. Google Books.
“The Miracles of St. Winifred’s Well.” The British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1762, 13 Oct. 1894, p. 829. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20230146
The Rule of St. Benedict. Translated by D. Oswald Hunter Blair, 2nd ed., Sands & Co,m 1907. Google Books.
References:
Dendle, Peter. “Lupines, Manganese, and Devil-Sickness: An Anglo-Saxon Medical Response to Epilepsy.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 75, no. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 91-101. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44445557
Head, Thomas. “Hagiography.” Reprinted from ORB: the On-line Reference Book for Medieval Studies, 1999. Hagiography Society, 2013, www.hagiographysociety.org/?page_id=678
Keune, Jon. “Comparative vs. Hagiology: Two Variant Approaches to the Field.” Religious Studies, vol. 10, no. 10, 14 Oct. 2019, p. 575. MDPI, doi.org/10.3390/rel10100575
Stumpe, Lynne Heidi. “Display and Veneration of Holy Relics at St Winefriede’s Well and Stonyhurst.” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 22, Dec. 2009, pp. 63-81. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41417138
In this prelude appendix to our episode on saint’s lives, we hear versions of the life of St. Valentine from three different medieval sources.
Today’s Texts:
First English edition of the Nuremberg chronicle: being the Liber chronicarum of Dr. Hartmann Schedel. Edited and translated by Kosta Hadavas, U of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, 2023, https://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/3SXNV3NHBQLFQ8J [used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.]
Jacobus de Voragine. “Life of S. Valentine.” In The Golden Legend, or Lives of the Saints. Translated by William Caxton, edited by F.S. Ellis, vol. 3, J.M. Dent, 1900, pp. 42-45. Google Books.
Bede. Martyrologium de Natalitiis Sanctorum. In Patrologia Latina, edited by J.-P. Migne, vol. 94, col. 840A-842B, 1862. Google Books.
As we enter the season of elves and Christmas spirits, we follow up on our fairy theme from last episode with a look at the famous 16th-century German hausgeist, Hinzelmann the Kobold — but don’t call him that to his face!
Today’s Texts:
Keightley, Thomas. The Fairy Mythology. E.G. Bohn, 1850. Google Books.
Der vielförmige Hintzelmann oder umbständliche und merckwürdige Erzehlung von einem Geist, so sich auf dem Hause Hudemühlen, und hernach zu Estrup im Lande Lüneburg unter vielfältigen Gestalten. Leipzig, 1704. Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen.
Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsche Sagen. Berlin, 1816. Google Books.
References:
Bullen, Barrie. “Before the Ouija board: William Rossetti’s Diary Gives an Insight into Victorian Séances.” The Conversation, 23 Dec. 2021.
Dorson, Richard M. “The First Group of British Folklorists.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 68, no. 267, 1955, pp. 1-8. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/537105
Music credit: Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101, composed in 1816 (same year as the publication of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen), performed by Paul Pitman (CC-PD). Musopen.
This year, Medieval Death Trip‘s annual Advent Calendar on Instagram is taking the form of a journaling game called Legendae Sacrae de Capitibus vel Caudis (Holy Legends of the Heads or the Tails), where you are invited to respond to daily prompts to construct your own mock medieval saint’s life.
What it is:
Legendae Sacrae de Capitibus vel Caudis (Holy Legends of the Heads or the Tails) is a non-competitive journaling game housed in an online Advent calendar, in which you respond to a series of prompts that will help you construct a written piece. In this game, that piece is a mock medieval saint’s life about a person born with an animal trait — namely, a body part.
What you’ll need:
Writing tools (digital or physical)
A means for randomly selecting between two options, “heads” or “tails” (e.g., a coin, odds or evens on a die, or your own intuition)
How to play:
To play, check in on the Advent calendar posts that appear on Instagram @medievaldeathtrip. Each post has a “door” cover image hiding the prompts. You can also find all the posts by searching Instagram for #MDTAdvent25.
Open the door (by advancing to the next image), and read the introduction to the day’s prompt. Then choose “heads” or “tails” using the method of your choice (flipping a coin, picking odds or evens by rolling a die or picking a word at random from a page and counting the number of letters, meditating on the question until a selection appears to you, etc.).
Once you’ve determined if you will be “heads” or “tails” for that day’s prompt, advance to the first image after the introduction for “heads” or to the second image after the introduction for “tails.”
Read the prompt and write a response with your choice of writing tool. Responses may range anywhere from a couple of sentences to a couple of paragraphs (or longer, if you’re feeling especially inspired).
If you would like to share your work publicly, you can post your response as a comment on the day’s prompt on Instagram.
You should begin the game with the set-up prompt for Dec. 1st and continue day-by-day in sequence until the conclusion on Dec. 25th.
Historical Context:
Hagiography, or writing about saints, was a major genre of medieval literature. Like popular genres today, it developed a common formula for organizing its narrative. The prompts of this journaling game will guide you through the conventional structure of a medieval saint’s life. This begins with establishing their origins, then narrates their birth and childhood, their education and spiritual guides, sketches out examples of their exceptional piety and notable events of their life (not necessarily in chronological order), and describes the circumstances of their death. The being alive part of a saint’s life is only half the story; their posthumous activities as a saint are typically given equal or greater attention. So next the life will discuss the disposition of their body or relics and their placement into a shrine or notable burial place, then present a catalogue of miracles attributed to the saint’s intercession with God.
As for saints with animal parts, this is not a common convention. Medieval depictions of the legendary figure of St. Christopher sometimes depicted him as having a dog’s head — not, in this case, as a prodigy or unusual birth, but as a member of a race of dog-headed people reported to dwell in far away in the East by classical authorities. The Queen of Sheba (not a saint, but a biblical figure) was sometimes depicted in medieval art as having either a goat’s or a goose’s foot. I am not aware of any saint’s born with a bestial tail, but such hybrids frequently adorn the margins of illuminated manuscripts and seem a natural addition to the choir of unusual saints.
A cynocephalus from British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A XV, fol. 100r.
No AI Commitment:
I will not be using generative AI to produce images or content for this game. I can’t promise an absolute elimination of AI, as it is integrated into many Photoshop tools that I will be using in simple image clean-up and preparation. But I will not be using AI for full generation of images or content. All the “doors” of this year’s Advent Calendar are from photos I took myself.
For our eleventh anniversary episode, we follow the fairy path of the redcap, from recent cinema through tabletop gaming, into Victorian folklorists and Romantic balladeers, and finally hunting up their ancestry in medieval manuscripts.
Henderson, William. Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders. W. Satchell, Peyton, & Co., 1879. Internet Archive.
Leyden, John. “Lord Soulis.” Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, vol. 2, edited by Walter Scott, James Ballantyne, 1803, pp. 353-388. Google Books.
Leland, Charles Godfrey. “Etrusco-Roman Remains in Modern Tuscan Tradition.” Congrès International des Traditions Populaires, Première Session, Paris 1889, Société d’Èditions Scientifiques, 1891. Google Books.
Gervase of Tilbury. Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor. Edited and translated by S.E. Banks and J.W. Binns. Clarendon Press, 2002.
Thomas of Walsingham. Historia Anglicana. Edited by Henry Thomas Riley, vol. 1, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1863. Google Books.
Croker, Thomas Crofton. Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. 2nd ed., John Murray, 1838. Google Books.
Hutton, Ronald. “The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition.” The Historical Journal, vol. 57, no. 4, 2014, pp. 1135-1156. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24531978
Sinclair, John. The Statistical Account of Scotland. Vol. 16, William Creech, 1791. Google Books.
Teverson, Andrew. 2025. “William Henderson: ‘A Folk-Lore Student before Folk-Lore Came into Vogue.'” Folklore, vol. 136, no. 3, pp. 447–65. Taylor and Francis.
This episode we continue further with Bede as he relates two more afterlife visions of a more infernal nature, and then we hear Gregory the Great answer some questions about the nature of Hell.
Today’s Texts:
Bede. Ecclesiastical History. In The Complete Works of Venerable Bede. Edited and translated by J.A. Giles, vols. II & III, Whittaker and Co., 1843. Google Books.
Rabin, Andrew. “Bede, Dryhthelm, and the Witness to the Other World: Testimony and Conversion in the Historia ecclesiastica.” Modern Philology, vol. 106, no. 3, Feb. 2009, pp. 375-398. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605070
Snyder, Susan. “The Left Hand of God: Despair in Medieval and Renaissance Tradition.” Studies in the Renaissance, vol. 12, 1965, pp. 18-59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2857068
Image: Detail of the torments of the damned from Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 134, fol. 99v.
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