‘Helena on the Move: The Makings of a Medieval Saint’, in Writing Holiness Genre and Reception across Medieval Hagiography, edited by Jessica Barr and Barbara Zimbalist (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023), 35-64.
Authors: Ritsema van Eck Marianne Petra 
Published: December 2023

This essay investigates the role of narratives about relic mobility in the creation of medieval sainthood. It pays particular attention to relics’ connections with history and specific geographical locations, taking as its case-study Helena Augusta (c. 250–330), mother of Constantine the Great. Today Helena’s saintly status within Roman Catholicism is a widely accepted given; so much so, that assumptions about the universality of her saintly status are often erroneously projected back onto the late antique and medieval period. In reality Helena’s sainthood developed through a long and meandering process which gained speed only many centuries after her lifetime and lasted well into the seventeenth century. What little we know about the historical empress became interwoven with the legend(s) of the finding of the true cross soon after her death, but this did not immediately result in her sainthood in Western Christianity. Only from the ninth century onward did Helena become venerated as a saint at an increasing number of regional cults, most notably in the Rhineland. There are very few signs that Helena was venerated in Rome until the late fifteenth century, but once her cult caught on there during the course of the sixteenth century, the omphalic quality of the eternal city seems to have eventually ensured her status as one of the most important female saints of early modernity. The aim of this essay is to reconstruct Helena’s route to becoming a key figure in Catholicism — honoured with a chapel and a colossal statue at Bernini’s monumental crossing at St Peter’s in Rome in the 1630s — by analysing the medieval history of her route to sainthood. While the facts about her life, her role in the true cross legend, her cult in the Rhineland, and her legend in Britain have been studied, it remains unclear how and why Helena eventually became ever more universally venerated. The inventio crucis legend is often (somewhat vaguely) invoked as explaining her sainthood, but it does not provide clear answers. Hagiographical mobility and relic mobility are crucial for understanding the development of Helena’s cult in the West: the potential of her story and her relics to cross boundaries and to (re-)anchor at different locations. In order to reconstruct Helena’s trajectory to sainthood — from regional, to Roman, to universally revered Roman Catholic saint — I first examine the life of the historical empress, giving particular attention to the places which she visited and to how her travels were first construed as pious mobility. The following section then elucidates how the finding of the cross legend magnified both her (perceived) historicity and her piety (and pious mobility), without making her a saint. The third and fourth sections analyse how the core of Helena’s medieval cult was first created and was fundamentally characterized by narratives about relic mobility and border crossing. As it developed through a complex conversation between various locations, historical periods, literary forms, and (holy) objects, and by their transmission across Europe, her cult crossed numerous boundaries — both geographical and temporal. Helena’s relics acquired significance as they moved from place to place, and once she became known as a supplier of Holy Land relics, links with Rome and Jerusalem became increasingly important, too. By foregrounding the interplay between holy objects and hagiography, a versatile, transregional paradigm of sainthood emerges. Helena’s circuitous path to sainthood showcases the dynamism of hagiography as an expansive generic category which encompasses dialogues between various types of texts, including secular and sacred historiography. It also emphasizes the importance of the interactions between these texts and material culture (holy objects) as fundamental for the business of medieval saint making.