Peter CostelloHoly Bones and Holy Dust: How Relics Shape the History of Medieval Europe
Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs
These are two very remarkable, but very readable books. From very earliest times we know that humanity, almost instinctively, respected the remains of the dead, perhaps from the awe in which death was held. More so with the remains of heroes and holy people: they have often been more than honoured, they have become the object of veneration.
Rewarding
This veneration is an understandable, and in itself rewarding, for it leads the individual into a sense not only of reverence, but also (through contemplation) an apprehension of what holiness in all its manifestations means.
Charles Freeman is a specialist in the early middle ages and the rise of Christian Europe. In this entertaining and lively book he surveys the rise of Christian relics from the days of the catacombs though the high middle ages and the baroque down to the Reformation.
During the middle ages many pious legends were woven around what were claimed to be the relics of the saints. There was brisk trade in such things, just as there was in more mundane articles like wonderful birds and animals from the fabled East.
With the reformation a reaction set in: shrines were demolished, relics destroyed all in the name of a purer faith. Yet as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs suggests, Protestants too were fascinated by any contact with those they admired for their faith and courage.
This book ends at the time of the Catholic Revival after Trent. This led to a reassertion of the efficacy of relics and the miracles they promoted. This remains a part of Catholic life today, but the climate of faith has changed. Such medieval extravagance has given way to a quite, though no less intense, reverence.
The richly illustrated pages of Paul Koudounaris’s book describe the discovery in 1578 of previously unknown burials in the Roman catacombs of thousands of bodies. These were identified as the catacomb saints, and their remains were soon translated throughout Europe to replace those relics from earlier times which had been lost in the Reformation.
Especially in Germany these sacred bones were housed in gold shrines and display cases, and were encrusted with precious metal and stones. Many of these were extraordinary works of baroque art. However a certain sense of embarrassment, as the author expresses it, began to emerge even among Catholics over this excess. Many of these relics were (like the Shroud of Turin) hidden away.
Great splendour
Yet he closes his book with an account of how the relics of Primus and Felicianus, banished to a remote Austrian church in 1803 from the city Rottenbuch, where they had once been enshrined in great splendour. In the summer of 1977, after large sums of money were raised to buy them, the relics were retranslated to Rottenbuch.
“Enthroned anew, the re-gilded Baroque shrines of Primus and Felicianus reveal more than just the skeletons of two supposed martyrs. To look at these glorious relics on the high altar at Rottenbuch is to peer through a window into a largely forgotten past, opened through a measure of devotion that was once accorded to countless other heavenly Bodies, and that in one community refused to be extinguished.”