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Stories involving lost items, sick or missing birds and animals, and the strange behaviour of objects such as coins, candles and relic containers are frequently encountered in high medieval miracle collections, with the 'jokes' of St Foy of Conques being a well-known example. Such miracles, in which saints were thought to incongruously exercise their powers on 'minor' or 'trifling' matters, provoked a range of reactions, from laughing delight to unease and outright dismissal. This essay argues that the 'trifling' miracle would be a useful addition to typologies of medieval miracles, and contrasts the ways in which two late twelfth-century monks at Canterbury, Benedict of Peterborough and William of Canterbury, worked to integrate and explain stories like these in their collections of the miracles of Thomas Becket. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collecting relics from notable public events has long been practiced. We name numerous public museums and private collections that store, curate, and engage these relics. This article provides a theory for how mundane items are imbued with public memory, and how to understand that value once imbued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Éveline Lot-Falck (1918-1974) graduated from the School of Oriental Languages in 1940 and joined the Musée de l'Homme as a volunteer. Ultimately, in 1952, she took control of the museum's Asian, Eastern European, and Arctic departments. Claude Levi-Strauss proposed the creation of a Chair of Religions of Northern Eurasia and the Arctic for her at L'École Pratique des Hautes Études, which was entrusted to Éveline in 1963. Publishing a number of books and articles on myth systems of Northeast Asia, she became the foremost French specialist on shamanism. In the 1870s Alphonse Louis Pinart went to the Alaskan Northwest Coast and Aleutian Islands and collected masks as an unofficial representative of France. At that time artifacts of the Native cultures were acquired primarily for museum collections. It was many years later that Lot-Falck analyzed and published the results of Pinart's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laurence Hutton (1834–1904) was an American author, critic, and editor who later became a lecturer in English literature at Princeton. Today he is best remembered for leaving the University a remarkable collection of life and death masks that he spent many years accumulating and researching. This body of casts reveals a vital element of Hutton's collecting praxis: his belief that death was a critical (perhaps even the critical) component of enduring celebrity. Death masks – a wax or plaster cast taken posthumously from a person's face – were executed for a number of reasons: scientific, artistic, or intensely personal. In all cases, though, there was a desire to preserve a hypothetically objective likeness of an important person, marking a shift between the perceived binary of life and death. While the death mask facilitated a sense of proximity to the celebrity body, Hutton was driven to flesh these faces out with an array of ephemera, including portraits, autographs, photographs of graves, strands of hair, and even casts of their hands. For Hutton, this triangulation figured as an attempt to capture a physical closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated explicitly in his unpublished writings. This article offers a new lens through which to consider celebrity mementoes – as relics in which the 'imprint' of the individual is sought and as icons through which we attempt to materialise celebrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1599 Valencia celebrated the arrival of an ancient Christian martyr whose remains were the latest addition to the collection of the city's archbishop, Juan de Ribera (1532-1611). Through an examination of some of Archbishop Ribera's relic acquisitions, I explore the inner workings of the early modern sacred economy of relics. Ribera's collection strategies blended distinct modes of exchange and linked him to a clandestine economy of relic theft. These transactions reflected the relic's own uncertain ontological status as both person and object. This ambivalence became a factor that fostered an atmosphere of anxiety around the early modern relic economy, as did Protestant reformers' critiques and their upending of the traditional Christian symbolic order. The reaffirmations of the cult of relics by the Tridentine Church stabilized the value of the sacred commodities. The economy of relics illustrates how the sacred constitutes a heretofore underexamined area of inquiry for commodity studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses one of four surviving Glastonbury lists which provide an account of the contents of Glastonbury Abbey's relic collection in the thirteenth century. Referred to as Relics Trinity, the list is found in Cambridge, Trinity College. Historian William of Malmesbury acknowledges the Abbey's reputed vast collection of saints' relics, which supposedly includes St. Patrick and St. Dunstan. The four relic lists attest to the size and content of Glastonbury's collection but the relics' authenticity was said to be difficult to establish.