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This article offers a pedagogical approach to introducing undergraduate students to hagiology by comparing medieval sanctity to modern celebrity. The bodies of saints and celebrities are important loci for the transmission of sanctity or celebrity from a person to the public and for the continuity of identity. Examples include St. Faith, St. Cuthbert, Kim Kardashian, and Marilyn Monroe. Using a comparative method allows students who are non-religious to better apprehend the unfamiliar practices and beliefs around the cult of saints and relics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a pedagogical approach to introducing undergraduate students to hagiology by comparing medieval sanctity to modern celebrity. The bodies of saints and celebrities are important loci for the transmission of sanctity or celebrity from a person to the public and for the continuity of identity. Examples include St. Faith, St. Cuthbert, Kim Kardashian, and Marilyn Monroe. Using a comparative method allows students who are non-religious to better apprehend the unfamiliar practices and beliefs around the cult of saints and relics.

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attempt to capture a physical closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated explicitly in his unpublished writings.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]