Margaret Cormack

Professor Emerita

E-mail: cormackm@cofc.edu


Margaret Cormack taught courses on World Religions, Christianity, and Scandinavia. The topics of her upper level seminars included Medieval Christianity, Magic and the Cult of Saints.

In her own words

My research focuses on two subjects: the cult of saints in Christianity and other religions, and the religious (and magical) history of northern Europe, especially during the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Recently I have been comparing medieval myths and hagiography with 19th-century Scandinavian folklore.

I organized several conferences:  "Muslims and Others in Sacred Space" at the College of Charleston in 2007; “Saints and Geography” at Holar, Iceland, in 2006, and "Saints and Pilgrimage around the Atlantic," at the College of Charleston in 2004. Before coming to Charleston, I organized a series of lectures on martyrdom at Smith College. Papers from these meetings have been published as: Muslims and Others in Sacred Space, Perigrinations (vol. 3 issue 2), Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World, and Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion. A session on “Childbirth in the Middle Ages” became a special issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality (vol. 21 nr. 2). 

I published The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400, Subsidia H (Brussels, Société des Bollandistes: 1994) and am working on a database of the early religious, agricultural, and environmental history of Iceland  which is a continuation of that project.

Education

Ph.D., Medieval Studies, Yale University

B.A., Linguistics and Germanic Languages, Harvard University

Research Interests

  • Cult of Saints

  • Northern Europe in the Middle Ages

Links

Courses Taught

  • RELS 105 Intro to World Religions
  • RELS 230 The Christian Tradition
  • RELS 375 History of Religions
  • RELS 450 Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion
  • HONS 381 Vikings and Valkyries
  • HONS 391 Pagans, Priests, and Poets; Religion in the North

Publications

Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World, ed. Margaret Cormack. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

"Fact and Fiction in the Icelandic Sagas" History Compass 5 (1) 2006.

Sacrificing the Self: Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion, ed. Margaret Cormack. Oxford University Press, 2002.

The Saints in Iceland: Their Veneration from the Conversion to 1400, Subsidia Hagiogaphica 78, Société des Bollandistes, Brussels, 1994.

"Poetry, Paganism, and the Sagas of Icelandic Bishops" in Til Heidurs og Hugbotar ed. by Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir and Anna Guðmundsdóttir (Reykholt: Snorrastofa, 2003).