The Cult of Henry VI: Medieval Memory, Sainthood and Kingship

同时代的人普遍认为亨利六世的统治是一场灾难。由于精神衰弱，被法国人征服，两次被废黜，他死于伦敦塔的囚犯。然而，尽管他作为统治者的悲惨记录，他一度成为中世纪晚期英国最受欢迎的圣人；在人们的记忆中，对最糟糕的国王的如此崇敬既令人惊讶又反常。大量印有他头像的朝圣者徽章是唯一能与圣托马斯·贝克特媲美的收藏品。一本同时代的奇迹故事集（miracle）记录了166个故事，讲述了人们祈求已故国王的名字来帮助解决他们的问题。这个项目将研究对亨利六世的崇拜，以及他在1471年去世后在社会各阶层中受欢迎程度急剧上升的原因。在此过程中，本书试图考察中世纪晚期宗教信仰的本质及其与王权观念的关系。关于他专注于宗教的一生和他作为国王的糟糕记录有大量的学术研究，但相对而言，很少有研究致力于对亨利的崇拜。此外，那些写过这方面文章的学者将其狭义地解释为1485年亨利·都铎掌权后的庇护。亨利崇拜的兴起是一个比人们所认识的更有趣、更有层次的现象。

Contemporaries widely regarded the reign of Henry VI as a disaster. Subject to mental debilitation, overpowered by the French, and twice deposed, he died a prisoner in the Tower. Yet despite his woeful record as a ruler, for a time he became the most popular saint in late medieval England; such veneration of the worst king in living memory is both greatly surprising and anomalous. The large number of pilgrim badges bearing his image is the only collection to come close to that of St Thomas Becket. A contemporary collection of miracle stories (miracula) records 166 accounts of people invoking the name of the dead king to help with their problems. This project will examine the cult of Henry VI and the reasons why his popularity rose so dramatically amongst all strata of society after his death in 1471. In doing so it seeks to examine both the nature of late medieval religiosity and its relationship with notions of kingship. There is ample scholarship on his religiously focused life and his abjectly poor record as king yet, comparatively, very little work has been devoted to Henry's cult. Moreover, those scholars who have written on the subject have explained it narrowly in terms of the patronage of Henry Tudor came to power in 1485. The rise of Henry's cult is a much more intriguing and layered phenomenon than has been acknowledged.