The Domestication of the Holy Man: A Comparative Study of Heroization, Estrangement, and Sacralization of St Adalbert in the High Middle Ages.

The aim of this sabbatical is to complete a monograph on the otherness of holy leaders in northeastern Europe after the region was Christianized around 1000CE.

Specifically, the book will comparatively study the ways sacral, heroic, and ethnic otherness was appropriated for political legitimation. The central case is the cult of Bishop St Adalbert of Prague (956-997) in medieval Poland.

In contrast to native holy bishops and kings from the 1000-1400 period, St Adalbert was an immigrant who became a holy patron of a foreign polity.

The way his veneration and political appropriations evolved is compared with carefully selected cases of holy leaders from Scandinavia and East Central Europe and from distant non-European cultures.

The book thus contributes with general insights about the ways otherness and exotic traits of elites – medieval and otherwise – could constitute an elementary form of their power, distinction, and ideology, which nonetheless needed to be culturally tamed to become operational.

To study this mutualistic relationship between non-human and human agents, i.e. between saints and their believers, the project develops a conceptual framework inspired by animal-human studies.

The book thus not only shows how elites and devotees “tamed” holy men and shaped their cults; it also explores how saints “domesticated” the wild traits of their newly converted societies and elites, by changing the latter’s behavior, beliefs, cultural self-expression, and even diet