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，被法国人制服，并两次被废黜，他作为囚犯死在了铁塔中。然而，尽管他作为统治者的糟糕记录，他一度成为中世纪晚期英格兰最受欢迎的圣人；人们记忆中对这位最糟糕的国王的如此崇拜既令人惊讶又反常。大量印有他形象的朝圣者徽章是唯一一个接近圣托马斯·贝克特的收藏。当代的奇迹故事集(Miracula)记录了166个关于人们援引已故国王的名字来帮助他们解决问题的账户。这个项目将研究对亨利六世的崇拜，以及为什么他在1471年去世后在社会各阶层中的受欢迎程度如此显著地上升的原因。在这样做的过程中，它试图审视中世纪晚期宗教信仰的性质及其与王权观念的关系。关于他专注于宗教的生活和他作为国王的糟糕记录，有大量的学术研究，但相比之下，关于亨利的邪教的著作很少。此外，那些写过这一主题的学者已经狭隘地从亨利·都铎1485年上台的赞助角度对其进行了解释。亨利邪教的兴起是一个比人们所承认的更耐人寻味和分层的现象。

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.