Furta Sacra

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

The subject of this study is not, as one might expect from the tide, relics, but rather people. As such, it will not attempt to discriminate between genuine and false relics, to provide a criticism of this peculiar manifestation of religious devotion, or even to trace the developing forms of reliquaries. The relics themselves, physical remains of saints, are essentially passive and neutral, and hence not of primary importance to historians. It is the individuals who came into contact with these objects, giving them value and assimilating them into their history, who are the proper subject of historical inquiry. As long as a scholar concentrates on the things rather than on the persons, he can do little more than add to the already considerable number of treatises, first appearing in the Middle Ages, which condemn the cult of relics to a greater or lesser extent as a barbarous superstition. Such studies, represented most recently by the work of Patrice Boussel, are at once valuable and entertaining, particularly since tracing the origins of such relics as the milk of the virgin, or counting the number of extant relics of the sacred foreskin lends itself today to humorous rather than polemical treatment. But because of these authors' focus, their works do not begin to explain the significance of saints' relics as a human phenomenon, an integral part of medieval civilization. Faced with these seemingly absurd and embarrassing vestiges of early Christian and medieval piety, historians until recently have tended to minimize their importance, to describe devotion to them as primarily typical of the less educated, and to relegate the entire subject to the level of antiquarian curiosities. When, however, the subject of investigation is not the relic itself but the people who honor it, invent it, buy or steal it, the fact emerges that contrary to the wishes of a more "enlightened" generation of historians, relics hold a fundamental place in the fabric of medieval life. While their significance differed from place to place and from person to person there was no class of individuals, be they theologians, kings, or peasants, for whom relics were not of great importance. From the church where they were a required equipment of altars, to the court of law where they were necessary for oath taking, to the battlefield where they helped bring victory in the hilt of Roland's sword, relics were an indispensable part of daily life, accepted as unquestioningly, in fact, as life itself.

In order to understand rather than to judge the relationship between people and relics, certain important concessions must be made to medieval ways of seeing the world. Historians, like anthropologists, must accept their subjects' system of viewing reality. Thus, for the purpose of this study, certain phenomena will be accepted without question: the relics discussed herein are all genuine until proven otherwise by contemporaries; these relics are miraculous, giving off pleasant odors when touched, healing the sick, and otherwise expressing the wills of the saints whose remains they are. Without the acceptance of these postulates, the entire phenomenon becomes incomprehensible and scholarly investigation remains at the level of antiquarian triviality or anachronistic skepticism.

On the other hand, sympathy for the contemporary view of these sacred objects must not be equated with accepting relic cults as pure manifestations of religious devotion devoid of all extraneous considerations. This view would be as naive as, say, considering the contemporary interest in collecting art objects as the spontaneous expression of aesthetic appreciation, completely divorced from any interest in sound financial investments. Unraveling the complexity of motivations which lead to investment in art today or resulted in relic thefts in the Middle Ages is always difficult. The medieval problem is perhaps the more problematic since people's attitudes towards relics were seldom clearly articulated or differentiated in categories of human perception immediately recognizable today. As a result, the successful completion of this investigation demands careful exploitation of available sources, keeping in mind their peculiar nature and employing a methodology that will allow them to yield satisfactory results.

Relics as Symbol

While the subject of this study is not relics themselves, we cannot get very far in our examination of the people who gave them such an honored place in their lives if we do not take into consideration the peculiar nature of these objects. Although symbolic objects, they are of the most arbitrary kind, passively reflecting only exactly so much meaning as they were given by a particular community.

It is tempting to approach the theft of relics from the comparative perspective of the stealing of other objects of cultural or religious significance, as for example the theft of manuscripts or sacred art. But in reality, the nature of relics is quite different from these other things, and the difference makes any examination of their function in medieval life extremely problematic. As a physical object, divorced from a specific milieu, a relic is entirely without significance. Unlike other objects, the bare relic—a bone or a bit of dust—carries no fixed code or sign of its meaning as it moves from one community to another or from one period to a subsequent one. By contrast, a manuscript will always have some potential significance to anyone capable of reading it, although the associations the reader may make when confronted with the text may vary depending on his cultural horizons. In an illiterate society a codex may mean nothing at all, or may be little more than a strange or even quasi-magical artifact from another world. But anyone who knows the language of the manuscript and can read the hand can appreciate the symbolic value of the text in a much more satisfactory way. This is not to say that the manuscript will have exactly the same symbolic function in the society in which it was written and in a much different society. Ovid's Ars amatoria, hardly a devotional work, could be interpreted in the Middle Ages as an allegorical prefiguration of Christ's love for his Church. Even so, there was some continuity of symbolic function, and later scholars could reinterpret it in a way that more closely approximated its original purpose.

Similarly, a representational work of visual art can carry an intrinsic code comprehensible within a relatively wide cultural tradition. A picture of a man or a woman, or even more specifically of a monk, priest, warrior, or bishop will be recognizable to anyone within a broad Christian tradition. This sort of code is completely lacking in relics. Bones may be the "pigges bones" of Chaucer's pardoner, those of an ordinary mortal, or the relics of a saint, according to the culturally induced perception of an individual. Moreover, unlike a book or illustration, a relic cannot itself transmit this perception from one community to another, even if these communities share identical cultural and religious values. In order to effect this transmission, something essentially extraneous to the relic itself must be provided: a reliquary with an inscription or iconographic representation of the saint, a document attesting to its authenticity, or a tradition, oral or written, which identified this particular object with a specific individual or at least with a specific type of individual (a saint).

In times of disaster or other temporary discontinuity, the extraneous signs identifying relics could be destroyed or become dissociated from their relics, thus erasing their symbolic meanings. Even without such crises, long neglect or changing cultural values could result in the loss or attenuation of the oral tradition which assigned a specific identity to a specific relic. In either case, in order for an object to be venerated as a relic, a new symbolic function had to be assigned—a function that had its origin in the fabric of the society in which it was to be venerated. Thus the symbolic value of a new or rediscovered relic was only a reflection of the values assigned by the society that honored it. Any change in the nature, force, or direction of its cult had to come entirely from the society itself and not from some dialectic between old signs contained in the relic and the new significance given to these signs.

The implications of the above discussion of relics as signs are most important for any examination of their place in medieval societies, but particularly in an investigation of their theft. Obviously the very act of theft often broke the cultural context that gave the relic its meaning. When a relic was stolen or sold, it was impossible to steal or sell its old function in its original location. Thus the theft could not result in the transferral of ideas or of religious or cultural values. In its new location it became an important symbol only if the society made it one, and this symbolism was necessarily a product of that society. Concretely, this means that translations from Spain, Egypt, or the Near East did not and could not in themselves result in the introduction of cultural or religious values from these places into the communities which received the relics. Venetians were able to bring the body of Saint Mark from Alexandria to the Rialto, but this translation did not result in the introduction of Greek or Coptic devotion to the saint in Venice. Nor could the translation of the remains of the martyrs of Córdoba to St. Denis result in the introduction of Mozarabic traditions in the Isle de France. In both cases, the translations could be effected only because of previously shared cultural values concerning saints in general and evangelists and martyrs in particular. Any new appreciation of these saints had to come from extraneous symbols introduced along with the relics. For Saint Mark, this was said to have been accomplished by the relocation in Venice of two monks from Alexandria who had been custodians of his body. The precise virtues of the Córdoban martyrs were told in the north in Aimoin's account of their translation.

Thefts of relics introduced a further difficulty since most were said to have taken place during some period of invasion, destruction, or other sort of cultural discontinuity. Hence the cultural symbolism of the relic, its identity, was usually lost or at least placed in doubt. This difficulty was recognized by contemporaries, and the very literature from which we learn of these thefts is largely an effort to overcome this loss of continuity. In these texts, a variety of means was used to preserve the identity and context of the relics. Since relics' authenticity rested ultimately on human testimony, characters who identify the remains of the saints regularly appear in accounts of thefts. Frequently, of course, the only person who could serve as link between the society from which the relic was stolen and its new society was the thief himself, obviously a biased source. Hence the texts often attempt to improve his credibility by extolling his virtues, sanctity, and devotion to the particular saint. Often, too, hagiographers introduced individuals outside both communities who could appear as knowledgeable but unbiased observers able to inform the thief of the relic's location and identity. In the Translatio Beati Vincentii, this individual was a Moor. In Einhard's Translatio SS Marcellini et Petri it is a Greek living in Rome. In any case, the translatio and the other hagiographic texts written about the saint are the means by which his identity is standardized and stabilized during this perilous move from an old to a new symbolic context.

The final implication of the symbolic nature of relics is that we must be quite dear that we understand just what we are examining when we say that we are studying relic thefts. We are not primarily trying to determine whether or not the theft actually took place in the way described in contemporary sources. Nor, with few exceptions, are we studying the motivations or justifications of the thieves. What we are really examining is the cultural and social context that gave the relic its symbolic function after the theft, and in particular we are examining the mentality within that context which accorded importance to the theft narrative as a "history" of the transition from old community to new.

By studying the perceptions and uses of stolen relics in various communities as they reconstructed new symbolic functions for them, we can approach differences in mentalities, religious values, and social needs within these relatively similar communities. The mentalities thus examined will necessarily be primarily those of hagiographers, a limitation to be sure, but not so great as one might expect. As we examine the nature of these hagiographic sources, particularly translationes, we realize that the propagandistic function of these texts and their public liturgical nature demanded that they reflect values and attitudes espoused by their audiences, if they were to be effective. As a result, the values of hagiography mirrored, as a reality or as an ideal, the consensus of the community in which and for which the text was written.

Between Hagiography and History

The sources for a study of relic thefts are not limited to any single type of document but include every possible shred of evidence, both written and monumental, that can be used to determine the role assigned to these thefts in medieval life. The most important body of documents is, of course, the vast literature of medieval hagiography edited for the most part in the Acta Sanctorum and in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The difficulties involved in using hagiographical materials for the reconstruction of history are notorious. This is particularly true of vitae which are fundamentally literary rather than historical or biographical in purpose; only rarely does their content approach what is today considered historical fact. A medieval hagiographer wrote the life of a saint, not to tell his readers anything about the subject's personality or individuality, but rather to demonstrate how the saint exhibited those universal characteristics of sanctity common to all saints of all times. Because this demonstration was much more important than a mere account of the particulars of the saint's life and death, examples and anecdotes demonstrating these characteristics need not necessarily come from the particular saint's own life. Instead of a view of the saint and his world, the vita provides a vision of the stereotypic world in which truth takes precedence over fact, a world which is composed of the topoi gleaned from other vitae. Hence, to the extent that the hagiographer was successful in his purpose, the historian is thwarted. When he did incorporate particular details and accurate descriptions, one might almost say that the author failed in his craft, because such details turn the reader's mind from the eternal ideal to the fleeting moment of this world. And as if this situation were not bad enough for the historian, it is usually impossible without independent checks to tell where the hagiographer has nodded and allowed something of the saeculum to enter his account. Such clues as vividness and freshness of narrative, detailed description, and accurate topography are no guarantees of the authenticity of the vita's historicity; the Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye was able to draw up a list of popular "heresies" committed by unwary historians bent upon wrenching "historical data" from these literary creations.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Furta Sacraby Patrick J. Geary Copyright © 1990 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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