| Abstract | Paper -a:
This paper will examine an aspect of the perception of saints and their cults in post-Reformation Scania. The main focus of the discussion will be on narrative, much of it recorded or composed by members of the clergy, though oral narrative and earlier scholarly discourse will also be addressed. In these narratives, there is a strong tendency to associate saints, as living actors, with specific locales within the region. This tendency can be observed both for saints who lived in the larger Nordic region during their lifetimes (for example, St Olav) and for international saints whose vitæ locate their earthly lives in very different parts of the world (such as St Lawrence).
Paper -b:
In this paper I will address the some issues concerning the afterlife of saints' culture in Denmark after the Reformation, especially how the veneration of saints was perceived and transformed within a Lutheran realm. The specific pressing question is how shrines and popular points of pilgrimage fared after they officially had been abolished in 1536. A lot indicates that this abolishment was far from as thorough as the superintendents envisioned and indeed, that the act of pilgrimage found new 'protestant' guises.
Paper -c:
Ludus de sancto canuto duce is the title given in a manuscript preserved in the Royal Library in Copenhagen for a large saint's play honouring the Danish Duke Knud Lavard. Knud Lavard was a Danish prince (c. 1090-1131) murdered by a rival and canonised at Ringsted church in 1170 at the initiative of his son King Valdemar the Great (born a week after the murder of his father). The canonisation has been seen as the culmination of the establishment of the Danish Royalty as protectors of the Roman Church in Denmark. The play is only known from the mentioned manuscript which was copied in the last quarter of the 16th century. It is in Danish with Latin rubrics and has been considered a copy or redaction of an saint's play from before the Reformation since the play is dependent on the office for Saint Knud Lavard, preserved in a 13th-century manuscript recently edited and published by John Bergsagel.
In this paper I propose to discuss the ludus de sancto canuto duce, which so far has not been discussed internationally, in the context of European saints' plays. I shall focus on the question what interest such a play could have had after the Danish Reformation (1536) in a manuscript which seems to have been copied by a teacher at a school in the city of Ringsted, unlikely to have been a Catholic or to have been in a position to expose himself to accusations for covert Catholicism.
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