Hemming of Turku

Hemming, known in Latin sources as Hemmingus and commonly called Hemming of Turku or Hemming of Åbo, was a fourteenth-century bishop of Turku in Finland, at that time the eastern part of the Kingdom of Sweden. He was born in Sweden, most likely during the 1290s, but neither a precise year of birth nor a securely identified birthplace is recorded in the surviving medieval documents. He received an advanced education at the University of Paris, where he became a Master of Arts and studied canon law, training that distinguished him among the clergy of the Nordic kingdoms of his age.

He subsequently joined the cathedral chapter of Turku and served as a canon. In 1338 he was elected bishop of the diocese. As bishop he was an active administrator who sought to strengthen the economic foundations of the see, to improve and furnish Turku Cathedral, and to support clerical education through the cathedral school. He took part in provincial synods and in the collection of papal revenues such as Peter’s Pence, and he figured in the ecclesiastical politics of the Swedish realm during the middle decades of the fourteenth century.

Hemming was a friend and collaborator of Saint Bridget of Sweden. In the 1340s he travelled to the papal court at Avignon together with other Swedish churchmen, carrying Bridget’s revelations to Pope Clement VI. The mission urged the pope to leave Avignon for Rome and sought to encourage peace between England and France during the Hundred Years’ War. The journey illustrates both Hemming’s personal standing and the links that bound the remote Diocese of Turku to the wider Latin Church.

Hemming died in Turku on 21 May 1366 and was buried in Turku Cathedral. He was soon remembered as a holy bishop; miracles were reported in connection with his tomb, and in 1514 his relics were solemnly translated, confirming a local cult that had grown up in the later Middle Ages. Although the Reformation in Sweden and Finland ended most public Catholic veneration, he continued to be commemorated in Catholic tradition, with a feast observed on 22 May. Many particulars of his early life and of any formal Roman process of beatification or canonization remain imperfectly documented, yet he occupies a secure place in the medieval history of the Finnish church.