Body-Part Reliquaries and Body Parts in the Middle Ages Author(s): Caroline Walker Bynum and Paula Gerson

Source: Gesta, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1997), pp. 3-7 Published by: International Center of Medieval Art Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/767274 . Accessed: 21/10/2011 05:25
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Body-Part Reliquaries and Body Parts in the Middle Ages*

CAROLINE WALKERBYNUM ColumbiaUniversity PAULA GERSON Florida State University

Bodies and fragmentation of bodies have special resonance in society and art today. We are used to jewelry ads that show the isolated arm with bejeweled fingers, the isolated leg with the newest shoes or pantyhose, the male torso with T-shirt and jockey shorts. In fact, the actress Marylou Henner, in a recent interview with Tom Snyder, described her early work as that of a "body-partmodel."' Popular and political culture makes images of body parts glitzy; it makes them gruesome, as well. Ournerves are scrapedraw by nightly news saturatedwith clips of the dismembermentcaused by land mines, airplane explosions and terroristbombs; current discussions of organ transplantsalert us to body parts and the ethical issues surroundingthem. Such images from popular culture have unquestionably heightened our awareness of fragmented bodies. Contemporary artists have shown greater concern for the fragmented body in recent years than in any post-Renaissance period.2 One thinks immediately of the work of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Hanne Wilke, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, and Annette Messager, whose imagery returns to these forms.3 There even are contemporaryartists who, like Monica Bock, make body-part reliquaries. On museum tours of medieval treasuries both students and the general public often find body-part reliquaries the most compelling of the objects displayed. The reasons for the medieval concern with images of the fragmentedbody are differentfrom ours of the late twentieth century, as Linda Nochlin makes clear in a recent essay.4 Nonetheless, the visual culture of our own time seems to have created a sensitivity to similar forms from an earlier period. By the same token, the engagement of contemporary art historians and historians with response, performanceand ritual has opened new avenues of comparable exploration in our studies of the Middle Ages. Thus, although body-part reliquaries have been studied before, the sensibility of the 1990s makes these works available to us in new and meaningful ways. Our decision to focus a College Art Association session on body-partreliquaries grew from a desire not only to shed greaterlight on medieval cult and artbut also to come, in the process, to a fuller understandingof modern representation and response. The systematic study of saints and their cults is one of the oldest areas of medieval history. Indeed, one might argue
GESTAXXXVI/1 ? The InternationalCenter of Medieval Art 1997

that the work of the Bollandists on hagiographyis one of the roots of modern "scientific history."5Art historical study of reliquaries-containers for the holy bodies aroundwhich cult and pilgrimage developed-is also at least a hundred years old.6 From the perspective of today's medievalist, however, both the study of saints and the study of reliquaries have taken a dramaticnew turn in the past twenty years. The cult of relics has come to be seen as one of the most singular and characteristic aspects of western Christianity in the Middle Ages. Following the large historical and art historical questions raised by such masters as Peter Brown and Hans Belting, a new generation of historians of religion and of art, which includes, among others, PatrickGeary,SharonFarmer, Thomas Head, Pamela Sheingorn, and JeffreyHamburgerhas emerged. These scholars have made relic cult a site for the questions they asked about the Middle Ages: about the social construction of holiness, about response to images, about the significance of objects created before what Belting has called "the era of art,"and about the religious significance of bodies and of geographical place.7 Body-part reliquaries raise these new questions in an especially acute form. The cult of relics goes back not to the earliest days of Christianitybut ratherto the persecutions of the second and third centuries. The Roman world maintained strong taboos against moving the dead, dividing their bodies or burying them within city walls. And indeed one of the horrorsof martyrdom to the early Christians was the fact that the resulting fragmentationof bodies by execution or burning often made impossible the peaceful and respectful burial owed the dead. Nonetheless, by the late third to early fourth centuries the fragments of the martyrs had come to be revered as loci of power and of special access to the divine. We can see this shift during the lifetime of one of the greatest of the Fathers, Augustine of Hippo, who first opposed relic cult but came toward the end of his life to be convinced of the miraculous powers of the relics of St. Stephen and to proselytize for them in the final books of the enormously influential City of God.8 By the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, relics were required for the consecration of altars;and before the development, in the late twelfth and early thirteenthcenturies, of procedures for canonization controlled by the papacy, it was the translation of the holy person's remains into the altar, or into a reliquary that rested on the altar, that often constituted the
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making of a saint. Although the earliest reliquaries tended to keep the bones of the saint together, often in a casket shaped like a sarcophagus,by the centralMiddle Ages bodies were divided and displayed as fragments.Relics and reliquaries were traded, stolen and purchased; indeed, it has been argued that the need to accommodate relics was responsible for the development of the 'pilgrimage plan' church. Monasteries, monarchs and towns used saints, and hence relics, in order to establish both authorityand boundaries.9Relics and in reliquarieswere important Byzantiumas well as in the Latin West; historians have long emphasized that relics were probably the most important treasure brought to the West from Constantinople as a result of the Fourth Crusade. Nonetheless, it is clear thatrelics became the special locus of access to the divine in western Christianity-a role played increasingly in the East by holy images: icons. Understandingexactly how relics were housed and displayed-and why they were treated thus-is crucial to understandingthe political, social, artistic and religious history of the western Middle Ages. What we have called body-part reliquaries raise this question of the nature of the relic container in a particularly interesting way. Reliquaries shaped like parts of the human body are known as early as the late ninth century, but they emerge into prominence in the West only in the twelfth and The emphasis of art historians on analthirteenthcenturies.10 ysis of the form of reliquaries has given this development special prominenceever since the pioneering work of Joseph Braunin the 1930s.11The significance of this fact is far from clear, however. Indeed, we can see how puzzling the development has been to art historians when we note that all the papersin the collection below raise in some form the problem of what to call these objects and why. Naming or classifying the containers implies an interpretationof their significance and of the response they evoke. The traditional Germantermfor them, "speakingreliquarof course, that the shape expresses or "speaks" ies," implies, the body partbeneath; yet we have much evidence that many body-partreliquariesdid not in fact contain the bone or body part depicted. To give only one example: when King Louis VIII of France gave the monks of St. Maximin some relics of Christ'sPassion in 1204, the monks encased this treasurein the hand of a reliquary shaped like a human arm.12 Cynthia Hahn's formulation, "shaped reliquaries,"is intended to recognize this complexity and to underline the ritual-rather than imitative-significance of the shape taken by the object. Hahn points out that, for example, an arm reliquary (regardless of which bones it contains) may be used to offer the blessing traditionally given by a living bishop in the liturgy. Its shape would depend, then, upon its function, not its contents. Neither the term "shapedreliquary"nor "speakingreliquary," however, indicates the full complexity of such containers as the sandalaltarand the staff discussed below by ThomasHead. Although the staff may, indeed, have performed a liturgical function, it is not at all clear why the foot shape reposes on 4

the top of the portable altar or whether the shape expresses a religious function of the object inside. By the late Middle Ages in the West we find shaped containers that contain not body parts at all, but contact relics such as shoes or bits of cloth. We find shaped containersthat do not hold within what is representedwithout, and we also find body parts contained in non-shaped containers. True of the caskets of the early Middle Ages, this is all the more true of the new monstrance reliquariesthat display the body bit behind crystal, making its nature clearly visible to the devout but not in any way "expressing" or "speaking" its shape. A recent and fascinating paper by Ioli Kalavrezou, not included in this collection but relevant to its topic, suggests that in the East representation of the relic by the reliquary may have been avoided as too close to three-dimensional sculpture (which posed the threat of idolatry), yet barebones, with only a gold bandon the ends, were sometimes displayed as proof that the relic actually existed.13 Moreover, it should be noted that once a body parthas lost its flesh, it loses its corporealstructureand acquiresa new one as bones or dust. Despite the term "speaking reliquary" favored by German art historians, then, an arm or head reliquary is not so much an expression of what is within as a restoration-even a redemption-of the body part. Thus we have chosen to denominate the subject of these essays as "body-part reliquaries."This phrase situates the objects in relationto the wider group of reliquaries--reliquaries that are shaped and do not contain bodies, and those that do contain bodies and are not shaped-, and thereby it raises some large interpretativequestions. Two general questions are raised by these papers: the issue of likeness, and the issue of response. The question of likeness is, as we have indicated above, extremely complex. What is the relationshipof inside and outside in these objects and in reliquaries generally? If the container resembles or representsor reveals its contents, the relationshipmay be one of mimesis. But what then is the purposeof the mimesis? And is what we encounter indeed mimesis, or is it, in some cases at least, restoration or apotheosis of the fragments and dust within? It seems to us that this question has been made significantlymore sophisticatedby the papersthatfollow, for they have complicated our understandingof the relationship of inside and outside, and they have asked new questions about both the liturgical function and the political effectiveness of such objects. A question they have not asked but that might bear much fruit is the question of how the "likeness" that we find in some body-partreliquariesbetween contents and container relates to medieval notions of "likeness" and "representation"more generally. Historians such as Robert Javelet and Karl Morrison have informed us that exactly the period that saw the emergence of body-partreliquariesproduced,as well, an intense exploration of the issue of likeness in spirituality, predicated on the assumption that spiritual progress was possible because humanbeings were created in the "imRestorationof likeness could include extremely age" of God.14

literal imitation of Christ of the sort that culminated in the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi or it could be a far more inward, spiritual return.Moreover, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries also saw, in theology, in political theory and in canon law, sophisticated discussions of how one man could "represent"or "stand for" many, whether it was a matter of how Adam and Christ represent all humanity in sin and salvation, or of how a bishop might represent his diocese or a procuratorhis community at a meeting of the Estates. Since texts from this same period frequently explore the ways in which saints representordinarymortals before God's throne, or how the parts of a saint represent or "are" the whole, it seems probable that consideration of issues of "likeness" in texts on the one hand and in objects on the other will prove mutually illuminating. The second large issue raised by these papersis the question of response. This has been of great interest to art historians recently: note how prominently reliquaries figure in David Freedberg'sinfluential The Power of Images.'1 As the papersbelow suggest, there will never be simply one response to an object, certainly not an object as complex as a reliquary. This is so because all knowing and responding is, as we have recently come to say, perspectival; people see according to where they are socially and politically and religiously positioned. A thirteenth-centuryJew did not see a body-part reliquary or a representationof the stigmata as a thirteenthcentury Christiandid. But response to reliquariesis also multiple because the object itself is multi-layered, because-to return to our first point-it is both container and contents. Medieval texts give us evidence of a wide range of response to relics and body-part reliquaries, from fear to familiarity. The early chronicler of the miracles of St. Foy at Conques was cured of fear that the saint'sreliquarywas an idol only by understandingthat the saint could heal and kill; yet he also told quite casual and irreverent stories of Foy as a teasing, pre-pubescentgirl.16 Exempla from the high Middle Ages recount that both the devout and the thieving sometimes tried to carry away bits of relics in their mouths.17 Such a reaction may suggest to modern readers not only familiarity but even contempt;yet no one who has read the miracle stories of the same period can doubt that relics were understoodas aweful sources of great power.18Indeed, had they not been, they would hardly have been stolen so frequently. Today,as well, responseis complicatedandmulti-layered. Guards in museums, and also the art historians who study reliquaries, report that viewers who approachreliquaries respond to more than simply the beauty and craftsmanshipof the containers. At the recent exhibition of Limoges enamels at the MetropolitanMuseum in New York,for example, viewers displayed a different sort of fascination with the St. Francis reliquary,because of what could be seen behind the crystal windows, than with diptychs and chasses. And body-part reliquaries,displaying what appearto be severed pieces of the human body, seem to evoke in many present-day museum-

goers a response to the fact of partition that has elements of response to death itself. Response to body-part reliquaries brings up special issues relatedto response to bodies. The most popularbody-part reliquaries were those of heads and arms. As both Cynthia Hahn and Ellen Shortell point out, the act of separatinga part from the whole focuses attention on that part. And the head and arms are the most expressive and communicative parts of our bodies. Considerthe role of eyes in making contact,the importance of mouths for speech, of arms for gesture. These are the body parts that resonate most deeply in our own bodies. We know, in fact, that infants prefer faces to look at more than anything else.19Thus we must ask whether there is something universal in the response to body-partreliquaries, perhaps an element that is beyond what is specific to time or to geography or cultural tradition. In the following essays, each author approaches bodypart reliquaries from a different point of access.20 Barbara Boehm's essay presents the currentstate of the question and helps us understandhow study of these objects has evolved and changed. Cynthia Hahn approaches the topic from the point of view of a specific class of body-partreliquaries,that is, arm reliquaries.Ellen Shortell explores the relationshipof a particulargroup of reliquaries in the collegiate church of St.-Quentin to chapter and town. Scott Montgomery examines one bust reliquary,that of St. Just, in relationship to the cult and liturgy of the saint. The last paperin the volume, that of Thomas Head, is written from a historian'spoint of view, complementing the art historical papers that it follows. BarbaraBoehm'sessay providesan overview, concentrating on the literatureand historiographyof body-partreliquaries. Because they are made of precious metals, they have been overlooked and undervaluedas major objects of arthistorical concern; as might be expected, early studies were related to cult or to national patrimony.More recent studies have explored issues of the relationshipof these objects to the rebirth of monumentalsculptureand to the appearanceof portraitsin western art. Boehm discusses, as well, the treatmentof bodypart reliquaries in a museum environment, pointing out the limits of a purely archaeological approach.She argues for a complex study of body-part reliquaries that considers their association with cult and history, with style, patronage and quality, and she calls for more focused studies of individual reliquaries. Cynthia Hahn'sessay concentrateson the relationshipof body-part reliquaries to cult, examining their function in relationship to content. Her discussion centers on armreliquaries and points out that arm reliquaries, in particular,do not always containrelics of arms,handsor fingers.Thus, she finds a certain "slippage between the contained and the container." Hahn examines the importanceof arms, hands and gestures in cult, emphasizing their metaphorical,rhetorical and referential qualities, especially in making the sign of the cross. The portabilityof body-partreliquariesmeans thatthey can be used
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in processions where they not only gesture but also touchas, for instance, in healing. Hahnconsiders the role of the arm reliquaryas a transmitter,ratherthan only as a site of power, with ultimatepower residing in heaven. By focusing vision on a fragment of the body, the viewer is led to a whole beyond the individual saint whose relics may inhabit the reliquary. Ellen Shortell approachesthis issue from anotherdirection. She begins with a discussion of the construction of a new collegiate church dedicated to St. Quentin and the concurrentdismembermentof the saint'srelics, the placement of some of the separated relics into body-part reliquaries and their elevation to a more accessible position in the new chevet. Focusing more on the issue of the fragmentedbody and the body-partreliquary,Shortell delineates the complex ways in which the new body-partreliquarieswere integratedinto the social fabric, ecclesiastic politics and spiritualityof the town of St.-Quentin. Within this complex web of interrelatingfactors she brings together the chapter'sbattle with the episcopal powers, its role in burials for the town of St.-Quentin, the new stained glass programfor the rebuilt chevet featuringthe "Apostles of Picardy,"and processions through the town of St.-Quentin on feast days during which the body-part reliquaries would be carried.The role of body-partreliquariesin processions is particularlyimportant;the body of the saint remained in the church while the body parts in their reliquaries processed outside the church, bringing together the religious and secular communities of the town, with power clearly residing with the canons of St.-Quentin. Scott Montgomery, in contrast to the other authors, has concentratedon a single body-partreliquary,that of St. Just. His study emphasizes aspects of narrativeand performance in cult practices. Beginning with the extraordinarystructure of the reliquary-St. Just with hands supportinghis head and offering it for veneration--Montgomery turns to the Passion of the saint to understandthe form. The image is seen to incorporatethe narrativeof St. Just'smartyrdom.After his beheading, the saint presents his own head to his father so that it can be kissed by his mother.Thus the worshipperattending the service on the Feast Day of St. Just is reenacting the role of St. Just's mother, and is necessary for the completion of the passion of the saint. The narrativeis an integral part of the form of the bust, ratherthan appearingin the more usual way as a series of scenes appended to the reliquary.Montgomery sees a conflation of relic and reliquary by the midfifteenth century, wherein the reliquaryitself is identified as the relic. Both the narrativequality of the reliquary and the understandingof reliquaryas relic heighten and intensify the experience of the liturgical ritual. The concluding paper in this volume is written from the point of view of a historian. While it does not deal with the specific issues of body-partrelics and reliquaries,it examines in detail the way in which reliquaries,and the relics they contain, have been woven into the political fabric of the late tenth-century Ottonian kingdom. Thomas Head's discussion 6

centers aroundtwo mimetic reliquariesmade for Archbishop Egbert in Trier in the late ninth century. Only one incorporates a body part, the portable altar containing St. Andrew's sandal with a sandal-shod foot on top. The second reliquary Head discusses is an episcopal staff said to contain the staff given to the first bishop of Trierby Saint Peter. Head shows how both reliquaries were used, with other works of art, in Archbishop Egbert's campaign to gain primacy for his See againstlike claims by Mainz and Cologne. Head sees both reliquaries as visually dramaticand theatricobjects, that, in use, confirmedclose apostolic ties to both St. Peterand St. Andrew, the firstpatriarchs,respectively, of Rome and Constantinople. Of special importanceto arthistoriansis the relationshipHead sees between object and text. Generally in medieval studies, iconographyand ritualareconsideredto "encode"pre-existing texts. In this instance, Head argues that the prior existence of the objects laid the basis for texts later used in claims for the primacy of Trier. Takentogether, these essays raise the insistent question: What finally are these objects? Are they containers that reveal or representtheir contents? Are they exteriors that hide or transmutewhat is inside? Or-to pose the more audacious question--perhaps they are not containers at all? For, as we have seen, they were also liturgical props; they were treasures to be stored in cathedralsalongside narwhalehorns and ostrich eggs; they were revered as the saint. Thus the conjunction of art, cult and devotion they representraises a fundamental methodological issue. In the Catholic revival in France at the turn of the twentieth century, Emile Male and his contemporaries took the religious significance of medieval art seriously. In the middle of our century, a reaction against their work de-emphasized religious experience. As BarbaraBoehm points out, art historians could disassociate statue columns from the liturgy they framed;historians could study the miracles allegedly worked at shrines without asserting their spiritual significance. The religious context and content of body-part reliquaries cannot, however, be ignored. Such reliquariesbelong in Belting's category of works "from before the era of art."But they are much more than Belting's "images" (Bilder). For they transcend the distinction he makes between representingand being present,between image and sign.21They are loci of power and, as Cynthia Hahn suggests, they are transmittersand indicators of power (and these are not the same thing). Parallel to icons, they are different from icons. No matter how close the Veronica comes to collapsing the difference between a representationof Christ and Christ,it is not Christin the way the head of St. Just is St. Just. Yet St. Just was also before the throne of God. And those who craftedhis wonderfulhead not only made a glorious object; they also, as Scott Montgomery shows us, told a story in an artful and fully self-conscious way. As Ellen Shortell and Thomas Head convince us, the telling of such stories empoweredthose who told them. Bodypart reliquaries thus collapse any distinctions we might be

tempted to make between object and sign, art and cult, politics and religion, art history and history. If these essays concerning a specific type of reliquaryraise questions not merely about reliquaries but also about the nature of art and art history, then-with our collection as with the objects it studies-pars will standpro toto. And the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

NOTES
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trenchantly by H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago and London, 1994). Recent examples of work done by a younger generationof American historiansunderthe influence of Brown and Belting includes P. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1978); T. Head, Hagiography and the Cult of Saints: The Diocese of Orleans, 800-1200 (Cambridge, 1990); S. Farmer,Communities of Saint Martin: Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours (Ithaca, 1991); P. Sheingorn, "The Image of Saint Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,"Gesta, XXXII, 1 (1993), 73-85; and J. Hamburger,"The Visual and the Visionary: The Image in Late Medieval Monastic Devotions," Viator, XX (1989), 161-82. 8. See P. Courcelle, Recherches sur les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1968), 139-53; D.-P. De Vooght, "Les miracles dans la vie de saint Augustin," Revue de theologie ancienne et medievale XI (1939), 5-16; and V. Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques en Afrique chretienne aux premiers siecles: Les temoignages de Tertullien,Cyprien,et Augustin atla lumiere de l'archeologie africaine (Paris, 1980), 240-44. 9. On relic cult generally, see N. Hermann-Mascard,Les Reliques des saints: Formation coutumiered'un droit (Paris, 1975), and Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien. 10. The earliest known from France is the head of St. Maurice, dating from 879-887. 11. Braun, Die Reliquiare. 12. V. Saxer, Le dossier vizelien de Marie Madeleine: Invention et translation des reliques en 1265-1267, Subsidia hagiographica57 (Brussels, 1975), 264-65. 13. I. Kalavrezou,"ImperialCeremoniesandthe Cult of Relics at the Court," in Byzantine Court Culture (Washington, D.C., 1997), forthcoming. 14. R. Javelet, Image et ressemblance au douzieme siecle de saint Anselme at Alain de Lille, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967); K. E Morrison, The Mimetic Traditionof Reform in the West (Princeton, 1983), and idem, "I am You": The Hermeneutics of Empathy in WesternLiterature, Theology and Art (Princeton, 1988). 15. D. Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989). 16. See The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. with an introduction and notes by P. Sheingorn (Philadelphia, 1995). 17. See, for example, Adam of Eynsham, The Life of Hugh of Lincoln, ed. and trans. D. L. Douie and H. Farmer,2 vols. (London, 1961), vol. 2, bk. 5, chap. 14, p. 170. And see R. C. Finucane,Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (Totowa, 1977), 28. 18. Among much recent work on miracles performed by relics, see Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims; B. Ward,Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory,Record and Event, 100-1215 (Philadelphia, 1982); P.-A. Sigal, L'homme et le miracle dans la France mdie'vale (XIe-XIIe siecle) (Paris, 1985); and M. Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: A Private Grief and a Public Salvation (Chicago, 1995). 19. R. L. Fantz, "PatternVision in Newborn Infants," Science, CXXXX (1963) no. 3564, 296-97. 20. For another importantstudy see J. Holladay, "Relics, Reliquaries, and Religious Women; Visualizing the Holy Virgins of Cologne," forthcoming in Studies in Iconography, XVIII (1996). 21. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 8-9, citing ErhartKistner.

At the 1995 College Art Association Conference in San Antonio, Texas, where most of these papers were first given, Harvey Stahl contributed an insightful commentary;we thankhim for clarifying and focusing the discussion. We also join the authors in expressing gratitude to Annemarie Weyl Carr for careful editing and for detailed suggestions concerning both interpretationand bibliography. Nov. 15, 1996 interview on ABC-TV. While artistsfrom the Renaissance throughthe nineteenthcentury studied and drew isolated limbs and parts of bodies, Gericault and Rodin seem to be among the first artists to include fragmented limbs in finished works. Influencesfrom Japaneseprintsand photographyincreased artists'interestin fragmentsof bodies, and more examples can be found with the development of Surrealism. Madeline H. Caviness has discussed a number of issues concerning body fragmentationin a lecture given at New YorkUniversity in Fall, 1995 entitled "The De-Eroticized Body: Parts, Fragments, Relics." This will be the subject of a chapter in her forthcoming book. There are, as well, many artists who include fragmentedbodies in their work, but to a lesser extent, such as Robert Mapplethorp, Ed Kienholtz, Magdelena Abakanowicz and Rona Pondick. L. Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity,WalterNeurathMemorial Lecture 26 (London, 1994). Nochlin insists on the fragment as discrete and ungeneralizable and says that if she were to give a theory of the body part it would be as a model of difference. She thus suggests that depictions of fragments since the French Revolution have none of the medieval sense of pars pro toto. D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises (London, 1963), 1-32. For a recent study of saints and relics, see A. Angenendt, Heilige und Reliquien: Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom friihen Christentumbis zum Gegenwart (Munich, 1994). The best among the plethora of recent books on hagiography is probably A. Vauchez, La Sainete en Occident aux derniers siecles di moyen acged'apres les procks de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, Bibliothbque des etudes franqaises d'Athenes et de Rome 241 (Rome, 1981). der S. Beissel, Die Verehrung Heiligen und ihrer Reliquien in Deutschland im Mittelalter (Freiburg, 1890: reprint, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), and J. Braun, Die Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung (Freiburg, 1940). In American scholarship, new attention was focused on the cult of the saints by P. Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,"Journal of Roman Studies, LXI (1971), 80-101, and The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981). The issue of the place in art history of objects such as reliquaries that are not "art"in the modern sense was posed especially

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