Study of the spread of cults of saints in Finland

To understand medieval society, knowledge is needed about the ritual existence of the individuals of that time and the cult landscape that surrounded them. The project will study preserved artifacts from the period to increase the understanding of lived religion and of the cults of saints in the diocese of Turku, Finland.

“Lived religion” as a theoretical-conceptual tool has been developed for the study of lay religiosity and its manifestations in the daily lives of ordinary people. Lived religion focuses on individual attitudes, customs, and experiences.

In this project, lived religion is applied from an art historical point of view in an exploration of artifacts that served as tools for or expressions of worship, the veneration of saints. The material traces of the medieval cults of saints consist of, among other things, images, altars and relics, phenomena that were once an integral part of the medieval believer's daily life. Today, these traces are an important part of our cultural heritage.

In the project, the spread of cults of saints in the medieval diocese of Turku, the Finnish part of Uppsala Church Province, will be explored and analyzed with special focus on their material expression. Sources for the medieval cults of saints will be inventoried and registered.

The project is carried out in collaboration with the larger project Mapping Lived Religion. Medieval Cults of Saints in Sweden and Finland (2019–2023) which aims to establish a comprehensive online database of cults of saints in the medieval Swedish kingdom, including Finland. Data collected from the project will be integrated into the database. It will then be possible to both quantitatively and qualitatively process and analyze the sources to a completely different extant than previously. The database will make open-access data from several cultural heritage collections and archives, as well as results from previous research, openly available.

The project will result in an in-depth understanding of Uppsala's medieval church province as a whole and the role that the cult of the saints played in all parts of the medieval kingdom. The increased digital accessibility of the sources can also be expected to enhance awareness of and access to medieval sources and artifacts in Finnish collections, both in and outside Finland.