David Hopkin’s upcoming online lecture on November 18, 5 p.m. (CET) is titled “The Singers of Saint Hubert: Pedlars and the Commercial Performance of Religiosity”. Please find the link to the Zoom meeting, the abstract, and the speaker’s short bio below.
Join the Zoom meeting here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88274863290?pwd=Krcz29GEwrc8J8imBndAalCtYFCA1G.1
Meeting ID: 882 7486 3290
Passcode: 956197
Abstract
We know that folk narrative draws on print as well as oral tradition, and that pedlars and street-singers were important in the diffusion of both. This talk will look at a specific sub-set of those involved in such commerce, the sellers and singers of religious material, and in particular the ‘carriers’ or ‘showers of Saint-Hubert’. These pedlars, mostly from a couple of villages in eastern France, but in theory licensed by the Abbey of Saint Hubert in the Ardennes, travelled throughout francophone Europe carrying a box shrine depicting Hubert – and often other religious figures – as well as religious knick-knacks including images, pendants, rings, keys, rosaries and scapulars. These items had supposedly been in contact with the saint’s shrine and imbued with his spiritual power to defend their owners against snakes, wolves and, above all, rabies. These pedlars retained the name ‘Saint Hubert’, regardless of which religious figure they exhibited, though there were also carriers of Saint Reine, Saint Solange and others. They created an entire performance around their box, singing, reciting, moving the figures, touching the images. In the process they spread particular narratives, prayers, charms and songs through the country, touting a religiosity which we can’t really call orthodox – because their claims to contact with religious institutions were usually spurious – nor folk, but a kind of commercial vernacular.
Short biography
David Hopkin is professor of European Social History at the University of Oxford, where his research mostly focuses on folk narrative of one kind or another – soldiers’ tales, sailors’ yarns, lacemakers’ legends and songs… From 2023 to 2026 he was President of the Folklore Society. He is author of Peasant and Soldier in French Popular Culture (2002) and Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (2012), and co-editor of Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth Century (2012) and Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture (2017).