Sanctity as a Form of Capital

This paper uses Bourdieu’s model of the three forms of capital — economic capital, social capital and cultural capital — to explore the complex relationship between the spiritual and temporal spheres described in medieval hagiographical texts. It focuses on the vita of Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, composed in the early thirteenth century during a period of important procedural developments in the process of papal canonization. This paper argues that the two necessary prerequisites for canonization by the beginning of the thirteenth century, namely miracles and sanctity of life, can be analysed as forms of symbolic capital, which could be transformed into material goods through the mechanism of divine providence. Thus sanctity — in particular, a reputation for ascetic behaviour — was not merely a form of capital: it was also the mechanism through which one form of capital could be transformed into another.