Search

The wanderings of an Elizabethan stonebow are traced from its discovery at Bosworth field in the eighteenth century and originally thought to be mediaeval relic of the famous battle. It passed through the museum of Richard Greene at Lichfield, and the Liverpool Museum of William Bullock and now lies at Browsholme Hall, Lancs. Acquired by Abraham Kirkmann, a lawyer, he bequeathed it to Richard Goulbourne Parker of Browsholme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including Apostles cabinet in Jane Eyre; precious archive of relics and popular exhibition of Charlotte's clothing.

This paper contributes to the existing scholarship on letters as material culture and relic culture in the nineteenth century and in Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853). In the novel, Lucy collects and preserves letters from absent loved ones to maintain a sense of connection to others in a life that she seems destined to live alone. In this article, I argue that her letters serve as relics of her past relationships and dead love as she desperately clings to tangible objects that bind her to other people. While scholars have concentrated on letters in Villette as material symbols of the corporeal body and romantic love, I argue that Lucy's letters form a collection that acts as a substitute for personal relationships. To borrow a term from Deborah Lutz (2017), I assert that Lucy's collection of letters function as a 'personal museum' of relics of dead love, which she carefully collects to preserve past relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the trope of the missing corpse in two contemporary Iraqi novels: Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) and Muhsin al-Ramli's Daughter of the Tigris (2019). Drawing mainly on critical work on the corpse and death studies as well as critical ideas on relics and hauntology the essay asks: What place does the missing corpse occupy in a body of contemporary literary outputs that have witnessed a significant engagement with the materiality of the dead body? How is the narrative of the absent corpse structured and framed? How is it experienced and accounted for? What forms and shapes replace the absent body? The essay argues that the missing corpse takes on an "absent presence" that haunts the narrative while the dead body's very disappearance is compensated for through relics, surrogates, replacements, and repetitions. In conclusion, the essay contends that this absent presence further signals a haunted futurity that is entangled in Iraq's history of violence but which, nonetheless, offers the potential for a radically new and democratic vision for the country's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits one of the texts associated with the fourteenth-century spread of Franciscan mission across Eurasia, the account of the travels of Odoric of Pordenone (d.1331). Odoric's text is often mined for what it might reveal about Latin Christian perceptions of East Asia. This article argues that the local rather than the global aspects of the text should be given prominence in our assessment of his work, and greater attention paid to the process of composition and likely audience. Odoric worked with a co-author and addressed a specifically Franciscan audience in the early fourteenth-century Veneto. The central priority of the text was to convey the 'reality' of a distant martyrdom, in Tana, India, in the absence of tangible relics to demonstrate the truth of that martyrdom. The account highlights some of the intellectual tensions produced as a narrative of universal mission – and martyrdom – became increasingly central to Franciscan identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Contested heritage' and 'cancel culture' have specific meanings and points of reference in our culture today, but these are by no means new phenomena in the life of cathedrals. At the time of the Reformation and the Civil War, all evidence of traditional Catholic culture was considered fair game for iconoclasts, who systematically destroyed saints' shrines and tombs with their relics. In recent years, in association with the revival of the practice of pilgrimage and in unstated rejection of Reformation tradition, shrines of saints in many cathedrals have been restored, some including relics. It is unsurprising that saints and their shrines can be controversial, since saints themselves are 'signs of contradiction', those whose lives lived according to the standards of the kingdom of heaven challenge the values of earthly kingdoms and cultures. Norwich Cathedral is unusual among the ancient cathedrals of England in never having had a great saint enshrined within it. This study will consider the cases of two figures locally revered as martyrs, William of Norwich and Edith Cavell, whose lives and witness have been causes of international controversy and yet who still merit commemoration by Christians today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines two shoe soles cut from a Torah scroll which British historian and collector of Judaica Cecil Roth collected in Greece in 1946. As Holocaust relics, the Torah scroll shoe soles are, in turn, sacred and sacrilegious, texts and objects, Greek Jewish and non-Jewish Greek artifacts. Roth's recovery of the shoe soles is compromised by occurring under the auspices of the British Army during the Greek Civil War and in the controversial climate of collecting Judaica displaced by the Holocaust. I discuss the ongoing story of the shoe soles: their separation, their use, and their best location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sources need categorisation to ensure that from an overabundance of material the most relevant sources are used. Commonly, the separation between tradition and relics, or between primary and secondary sources has been used for this and was taught in history courses as well as used in bibliographies of historiographies. The use of these categorizations, however, are at least since the cultural turn controversially discussed, and their significance is questioned. The need for categorizations for the ever-growing stock of sources available to historical researchers has, nonetheless, not diminished. This article discusses different approaches to source genres, how and why it matters if they are categorized as tradition, relic, primary or secondary source. Furthermore, suggestions are offered on how the cultural and social historian may preselect their sources, what it means to categorise sources for the research questions and the possible results, and what alternatives to approaching and selecting sources could look like. Based on a discussion of historiographical works on the later Stuart period, this article will show how source genres can be used to further historical research after the cultural turns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hariulf’s History of St Riquier is usually consulted for detail on liturgical, architectural and political history, but is rarely considered in its entirety. It was written in the changing and competitive world of the late eleventh century, when there were challenges for established communities, both in terms of innovative approaches to monasticism and the emergence of new political entities and potential patrons. In the past that Hariulf creates St Riquier had been the focal point of Ponthieu for generations and had stood the test of time as the conduit of royal patronage and liberality, symbolised by its great Carolingian church built by Abbot Angilbert. It remained, in Hariulf’s view, a centre of monastic excellence, whose abbots responded to and practised contemporary spirituality, and it had adopted strategies to strengthen its position, including care for its patrimony, securing new relics and memorialising its past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What sacred objects did the Lusignan kings of Cyprus treasure in their collection of holy items? Certainly, they had fragments of the Holy Cross and saints' skulls, but what about Passion relics such as the titulus placed above the crucified Christ, or the white rock to which the cross was affixed? This study explores overlooked fourteenth-century Franciscan apocryphal stories about the life of Christ and didactic narratives which, among other things, cite Passion relics and their respective proprietors. In the following essay, I will turn attention to relics which, according to these texts, were in the safe-keeping of the kings of Cyprus. In addition to evaluating the reliability of such evidence, I will discuss the nature of the relics, identify the mysterious relic-hoarder king, and seek to uncover a representation of such a relic in the 'Royal Chapel' at Pyrga, Larnaca. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heavy military attack and colonial domination during the successive Japanese invasion wars hit the Chinese traditional culture and people the hardest and wreaked havoc on cultural relics, causing a catastrophic and irremediable loss to society. The topic of restitution of looted Chinese cultural relics during these wars arose owing to the long-pending historical issues between China and Japan. However, this issue has never attracted significant attention from the international community. Applying empirical analysis and drawing on the case study, this paper primarily focuses on two typical representative cases of the recovery of looted Chinese cultural relics from Japan, which triggered three significant issues to be addressed: the legal analysis of two recovery cases through litigation and non-litigation relief; proving the legality concerning different ownership rights of the Chinese government and individuals seeking to recover state-owned and privately-owned cultural relics; exploring the legal grounds for recovering state-owned and privately-owned cultural relics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an important substrate of traditional Chinese cultural relics in museums, paper is the material with highly light sensitivity, which is susceptible to irreversible lighting damage. To provide high-quality viewing, it is vital to study the parameters of light sources in consideration of paper substrates' long-term conservation. As an important factor affecting both conservation and viewing, there are some issues concerning correlated color temperature (CCT) in the relevant standards, namely, the inconsistent recommended values. In this research, paper samples were subjected to accelerated irradiation experiments for 1440 h by 10 narrow-band lights in the visible range, and the infrared spectra were measured periodically. The calculated oxidation index was used to obtain the damage response function to different spectral wavelengths and exposures. Subsequently, using the method of exhaustion, 9477 spectra with a CCT range of 2650–4150 K that met the viewing requirements were screened, and lighting damage to paper substrates was calculated using this function. Based on that, the correlation between CCT and lighting damage to paper substrates and their standard deviations was obtained. Combining the previous research on recommended for CCT pigments, a preliminary recommended CCT of 3100–3200 K in selecting light sources for traditional Chinese paper relics was proposed. It is worth emphasizing that it is still necessary to use the spectral power distribution of light sources, as the underlying independent variable that leads to damage, to further calculate the lighting damage using the function mentioned above to achieve protective lighting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines three of the most iconic sites associated with Islamic mysticism, or Sufism, in Ottoman Hungary. These are three mausoleums located in Buda, Pécs, and Turbék, near Zigetvár. The first two are the final resting places of the Sufi mystics known as Gül Baba and Idris Baba. The third is Sultan Süleyman's mausoleum next to a Sufi dervish lodge, the foundations of which were uncovered during recent excavations. The research sheds light on the (embodied) material practices associated with these sites, as well as their sensory engagement and synaesthetic experiences. The bodies of the spiritual leaders, presented in the first two cases, serve as living sites of mystical experiences, both through self-destructive acts graphically represented on their bodies, and through bodily miracles such as hypercorporeality, multilocality, and dream visions. The third case concerns the body of a secular and a spiritual leader, the temporary burial of his disemboweled and embalmed body in the mausoleum at Turbék, and the tradition that his heart and entrails were kept in a reliquary-like vessel at the site, which interestingly paralleled contemporary Habsburg customs. Building on Thomas Csordas (1990) and Manuel Vásquez (2011), I explore the role of human and non-human "supernatural" actors interacting in these mystical networks, focusing on the role of their embodiment and materiality, their movement and their physically fragmented bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes to read Robert de Clari's account of Constantinople through the lenses of vibrant materiality, orientalism and the ethics and affects of colonial pursuit. Why was his account so different from Geoffroy de Villehardouin's? Why was he so focused on objects, on materials, and marvels? If we position his text, one of the first vernacular prose histories in French, in its relation to romance, to broader narratives of empire and the "Saracen" other, and in regard to the politics of colonial logic, we see that his version of events reflects broader logics and legacies of the Crusades and their attempts to colonize, rationalize, and interpret the "Other" through orientalist, racist, and marvelous lenses. Clari's account justifies the sacking of a sister empire—a Christian empire—due to the wealth of the relics conquered and the affective power therein, thus rationalizing the imagined end of Christendom at the borders of Byzantium. Clari thus uses the affective power of relics to imagine a united Christendom, united against a foreign, pagan/"Saracen" other, and to participate in the prophesy that, vaticinium ex eventu, Constantinople was always marked for conquest by the "French" and never for truce with the "Saracens." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stone relics in the Meili section of the ancient Tea Horse Road in Yunnan, China, are important for Sino-Tibetan cultural heritage. However, these relics were exposed to the risk of hydraulic erosion due to the construction of a hydroelectric power station, and thus protecting these relics is now imperative. Preliminary investigations and analyses of stone relics are crucial for their subsequent conservation and restoration. Thus, in this study, multi-analytical characterization including the microstructure, mineralogical characteristics, elements, and chemical compositions of the stone relics was conducted using optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy-energy dispersive spectrometry (SEM-EDS), polarized light microscopy, x-ray diffraction (XRD), and attenuated total reflection-Fourier transform-infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR). In addition, the contaminants and pigments on the surfaces of the stone relics were identified and analyzed by Raman spectroscopy. OM, SEM and Raman spectroscopy indicated that the surface contaminants mainly comprised of moss and soil dust, and some of the stone relics exhibited porosity and weathering. Polarized light microscopy revealed that the mineralogical morphology of stone samples mainly appeared as allotriomorphic, hypidiomorphic, and colloform structures. ATR-FTIR, and XRD confirmed that the stone relics mainly consisted of quartz, muscovite, illite, and chlorite. In addition, Raman spectroscopic analysis showed that the pigments on the relic surfaces included chalk, barium white, langite, green earth, amorphous carbon black, chrome red, and chrome yellow. The findings of this study may provide scientific support for the conservation of the stone relics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the visual responses (with political, spiritual and social connotations) to the visual statements about the role of Rome and the pope in Western Christendom made by Pope Urban V (1362–1370) at the time of his return to the Urbe from Avignon in 1367–9. It investigates the plurality of responses to these papal statements, the chain of further visual communications that these statements set in motion as well as their longue durée by engaging with the reception of the pontiff's powerful messages by different audiences, both secular and ecclesiastic, from Rome to the Italian peninsula more broadly, and southern France, in the following 50 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since China's inheritance, the history of the long river has left a brilliant cultural treasure. As a witness of history, they reflect the process of human activities. With today's rapid development, the protection of cultural relics is gradually deepening. Stone coated cultural relics are the most inheritance. However, the body material of stone carut articles is extremely fragile under the influence of time and environment. It is necessary to make it easy to continue to keep; it is necessary taking the necessary protection measures. But currently used protective materials have certain defects more or less. This paper is based on this, with the purpose of extending the life of the cultural relics; it proposed the use of nanomaterial Ti02 modified common protection materials WD-10. It performed comparison by adding different concentrations of Ti02, and the microsurrant rock obtained by the ground is used as a sample to detect its protection effect. And it has achieved appropriate ratios to enhance protection performance. The experimental results of this paper showed that the concentration of Ti02 was a modification result of the modification of the concentration, and the performance was most excellent. The value in the detection of the moist angle is 80% or more and excellent ultraviolet aging properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the walls of the Theban Tomb 123 (Luxor, Egypt) are the result and evidence of diverse histories developed over a span of 3400 years. They encapsulate, as overlapping layers, material and intangible transformations that reveal multiple uses, meanings, and ontologies which converged in the necropolis of Thebes. At this tomb, originally built for a scribe named Amenemhet, a detailed study of the stratigraphic matrix of one of the walls was undertaken. Forty-eight stratigraphic units have been documented and arranged in a Harris matrix through an exhaustive survey of the macroscopic evidence about the historical changes on the wall. The analysis performed reveals the complexity of these spaces and their multiple occupations across thousands of years and sheds light on the unambiguous visions of these places regarded as pristine relics of the pharaonic past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An African ploughing his fields in western Mpondoland in 1910 uncovered two elephant tusks at the site of what had once been King Faku's homestead. This obscure incident in the Transkeian Territories of South Africa provides an entry point to examining the consolidation of colonial bureaucratic control, and African responses to it, in the second decade of the 20th century by the Union of South Africa government. The unearthing of the tusks illuminated, on the one hand, Mpondo attempts to control the relics of Faku, and the memories associated with them, and to reassert traditional authority over the allocation of land; and on the other, efforts by the colonial administration of the Transkei to tighten control over land and strengthen 'native affairs' administration. In the process it explores how differing approaches to dealing with the government and contestations for power within Mpondo society impacted on their relations with the colonial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Israeli state-religious-education system (SRES) held an unfavorable view of Mizrahi religiosity in the 1980s. Text analyses of religious-education heads' writings indicate that they saw Mizrahi religiosity as a primitive relic of the past and as a "low-level religiosity" and regarded Mizrahi students as uncommitted and compromising. The large numbers of Mizrahi students in the SRES and the "melting pot" ideology prevalent at the time led to a systemic view of Mizrahi students as "religiously disadvantaged"—that is, children whose religion was flawed but rectifiable, with the task of rectifying it entrusted to the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edmund Kean played the role of Richard III for almost twenty years, in which time the most enduring images of his performance included his sword. Theatrical legend has it that this sword was passed down through generations of Shakespearean actors and found its resting place in Laurence Olivier's tomb. The significance of the sword as a theatrical relic can be located in the archival traces of Kean's performance style, particularly in James H. Hackett's 1826 annotated copy of Richard III. The sword's role in the performance takes on even more significance as Kean aged and became more physically debilitated. A performer known for his dynamic physicality, Kean was also recorded as struggling with physical impairments as a child. Moving from a mythical 'overcoming' of bodily challenges to simulating disability onstage as Richard to actual physical debility later in life, Kean continued to use his sword to 'prop' him up, literally and figuratively, on the stage. The sword becomes a prosthetic object, an addition to the body that shapes its movement and becomes an extension of the body itself. I argue that Kean's sword throughout his career showed off his prodigious physical skill and then became enmeshed in his bodily decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his book Le portrait du roi, Louis Marin seems to continue Ernst Kantorowicz's work on the Middle Ages, extending it to Early Modernity. Marin's book adds another body to the historical and juridical political bodies of Kantorowicz's King described in The Two King's Bodies, namely the portrait of the King. According to Marin, this body drives the interchange between the historical and juridical bodies; hence, the absolutist king has three bodies in one: the historical, the semiotic-sacramental, and the juridical. Following Kantorowicz and Marin's argumentative line, this paper addresses the ways in which absent or dead bodies can act politically, in particular, the shift in political legitimation that goes hand in hand with the transition from a politics of relics to a politics of images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year thousands of pilgrims, most on foot, travel to Santiago de Compostela, a medieval pilgrimage destination in northwestern Spain. Recent scholarship has mapped a historical shift of the focus in contemporary pilgrimage from the relics of St. James, ostensibly held in the crypt in Santiago's cathedral, to the journey itself as a primary site of meaning and transformation. However, this scholarship has not addressed the ways in which the meaning of pilgrimage is bound up with pilgrims' practices relating to their own and others' bodies. Pilgrims' feet, in particular, have become a fraught focus of contemporary pilgrimage. Pilgrims' practices of walking the pilgrimage, together with recorded images of their feet in social media videos, work to materialize two forms of nostalgia. The first involves the desire to return to a past time of imagined authentic pilgrimage. The second encompasses a melancholic recognition of the fragility of the present moment and longing for human connection. A detailed reading of two YouTube videos documenting the care of pilgrims' own and others' injured feet allows for an analysis of how recorded images of feet posted by pilgrims on social media reveal the complex relationship between bodies, social media, and nostalgia in pilgrimage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, this article historicizes poor urban settlements in Nairobi as ruins – the product of systemic ruination from the colonial period to the present. In so doing, it offers the provocation to think 'slum' dwellers as relics: remains of past/present conterminous ruins who are treated as subhuman hauntings of a foregone time and understood to be constituted by the decayed and unwanted material of city margins. In these embodiments they are perceived as ruining the city, even when they have been produced by longue durée political processes of ruination, captured by vernacular identities such as Matigari. Yet, as I show here, like unexpected relics, the inhabitants of poor urban settlements continue to insert vital bids for survival in city landscapes. And, in these layered movements, they act as mnemonic devices that bridge the oppressions of what are seen as separate times, while shedding light on often normalized colonial city and national governance processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on pectoral crosses, which functioned as relic containers and amulets and were characterized by a blend of figural imagery and inscriptions. Arguably produced between the late eighth and the early ninth centuries, the geographical origins of the crosses are still contested between Byzantium and Rome, while other alternatives have yet to be fully considered. Some of these pectoral crosses bear inscriptions in Greek which have been interpreted as 'incorrect', but may reflect the conventions of spoken language in an evolving hellenophone Mediterranean. It is possible that their owners read the text during private prayer and meditation while holding the pendant. In particular, this paper considers a now lost enkolpion, the inscriptions of which, in Latin and Greek, reveal that it was intended for an audience familiar with both languages, at least in religious practices. One of its inscriptions quotes a well-known liturgical hymn sung at Mass before the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus, there is scope for a wider investigation into the function as well as cultural origins of pectoral crosses. The combination of figural illustrations and inscriptions and the variety of precious materials and relics on such pectoral crosses may have been intended to elicit a sort of 'tactile prayer', suggesting the use of synesthetic ways to apprehend the Incarnate Logos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a previously unpublished collection of writings relating to the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, fought in Belgium on 18 June 1815.1 The author of these documents, Thomas Ker, was a Scottish merchant living in Brussels at the time of the battle, and this discussion places his observations on the battlefield in the days following the famous encounter between Napoleon and Wellington in the context of accounts by civilian visitors published soon after the event (mostly between 1816 and 1817). These include works by Sir Walter Scott, Robert Hills, James Simpson, and, importantly also, women, with Charlotte Eaton, Georgiana Capel, and Anne Laura Thorold among them. These writings are used here to provide insight into the transformation of Waterloo from a scene of carnage to a popular tourist attraction, with a particular focus on the role of relic collection in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Reliquaries were among the most highly valued items in the medieval churches, and cathedrals accumulated hundreds of them. Their shapes and materials, the relics contained within, and other essential details were registered in lists written by cathedral treasurers. In the Nordic countries, most medieval reliquaries as well as written documents concerning them have disappeared. However, a few inventories with relics and reliquaries from Nordic cathedrals are preserved. This essay examines how the material dimensions of reliquaries were put into words in those lists and what the chosen words reveal about the way these objects were perceived by their keepers and audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transposable elements (TEs) have been seen as selfish genetic elements that can propagate in a host genome. Their propagation success is however hindered by a combination of mechanisms such as mutations, selection, and their epigenetic silencing by the host genome. As a result, most copies of TEs in a given genome are dead relics: their sequence is too degenerated to allow any transposition. Nevertheless, these TE relics often, but not always, remain epigenetically silenced, and if not to prevent transposition anymore, one can wonder the reason for this phenomenon. The mere self-perpetuating loop inherent to epigenetic silencing could alone explain that even when inactive, TE copies remain silenced. Beyond this process, nevertheless, antagonistic selective forces are likely to act on TE relic silencing. Especially, without the benefit of preventing transposition, TE relic silencing may prove deleterious to the host fitness, suggesting that the maintenance of TE relic silencing is the result of a fine, and perhaps case-by-case, evolutionary trade-off between beneficial and deleterious effects. Ultimately, the release of TE relics silencing may provide a 'safe' ground for adaptive epimutations to arise. In this review, we provide an overview of these questions in both plants and animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bernardo de Toro (Seville 1570–Rome 1643) was a devotee of the Immaculate Conception and the last leader of a mystic group called the Brotherhood of La Granada. This article analyses what Toro did to create two shrines dedicated to the Brotherhood in the convents of La Concepción (Lebrija) and La Encarnación (Seville) of which neither has survived. This article reassembles their original components, which included the remains of the four leaders of the Brotherhood and investigates how Toro combined the relics of the four men, their portraits and the image of the Immaculate Conception in order to safeguard their spiritual legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collecting ancient furniture — or furniture thought to be ancient — for display in 'romantic interiors' proliferated in 18th-century Britain; such pieces became so popular that by the 1840s it was easy to purchase generic examples across the country. This essay explores the output of George Shaw (1810–76), a particularly industrious early Victorian antiquary, who, besides working as an architect, restorer and supplier of Gothic-style interiors, also peddled fake ancestral furniture made for specific victims. He claimed his modern forgeries were from the time of Henry VII or Henry VIII, and this essay demonstrates how they were indebted to his long-term antiquarian research into medieval architecture, heraldry and woodwork. Some of Shaw's forgeries, particularly those for the 4th duke of Northumberland, have been considered at length recently; however, this essay demonstrates that our understanding of his corpus is far from complete given the recent emergence of his until now forgotten work for the Mosleys of Rolleston Hall in Staffordshire. It also shows how the family's important collection of ancient furniture, some of it gifted by Elizabeth I, had a direct influence upon his work, and that we should consider him to be a more significant figure in the history of Victorian furniture and forgery than we currently understand him to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Key Cultural Relics Protection Sites in China (CKCRPS) are part of China's tangible cultural heritage with the highest level of protection. These sites constitute an important witness and remnant of Chinese civilization. Little research attention has been devoted to heritage conservation and tourism use of CKCRPS, however. Therefore, this article aims to promote the conservation planning and tourism revitalization utilization of CKCRPS by studying its spatial and temporal differentiation characteristics. This article uses geospatial analysis to explore the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of the 5,053 CKCRPS and their impact on tourism development in various provinces of mainland China. The results show that CKCRPS is mainly concentrated in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the sites have experienced the evolution process of concentration–dispersion–reconcentration–redispersion, and the program has a significant positive impact on tourism development, but the influence is smaller in central provinces and greater in peripheral provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mexico the dispatching of relics—body parts, skin, blood, or other personal objects with saintly residue—has become relatively commonplace. With a focus on the 2011 tour of the wax effigy and relics of Pope John Paul II, this essay draws on recent work at the intersection of religion, aesthetics, materiality, death, and violence to reveal the unique dimensions, coherence, and patterns of movement within contemporary Catholic Church evangelism that is necessarily both spiritual and political. In emphasizing the role of media, I develop two main lines of exploration: first, the dynamics of contemporary mediatic global Catholicism which has increased its reliance on images and objects such as relics; and second, the media-spectacle of narco-violence through which images of dead bodies circulate and saturate the Mexican social imaginary. I suggest that critical scholarly attention to Catholicism as a dynamic theopolitical infrastructure is critical for a broader and more dimensioned anthropology of Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If so, then Clonmore is typical of most Irish sites in that reliquary foci were kept separate from the principal church, thereby underscoring the distinction between veneration of relics and communal celebration of the Eucharist.[90] There are some exceptions to this, of course, which follow the continental practice of placing relics within the principal church (usually in or near the altar). Exploring "the Angels" Graveyard': Relics, Sculpture and Ecclesiastical Power at Clonmore Politics aside, the two churches were near enough to each other to have been in direct competition for pilgrimage revenue.[114] Though it remains unclear as to the degree to which the relic cults of Clonmore and Ferns competed against one another, it is certain that the rise of Uí Chennselaig power in Leinster, and with it that of Ferns, heralded a slow decline in Clonmore's ecclesiastical status. Though it is unclear whether this collection is the one later claimed to be housed at Clonmore, certainly by the 12th century, Onchú and his collection of saints' relics were explicitly associated with Clonmore. [Extracted from the article]

This article reassesses pilgrimage practices in eleventh- and twelfth-century England and questions the assumption that pilgrims had relatively unrestricted access to saints' shrines and relics in this period. Drawing on hagiographical evidence, and focusing on six case studies, the article finds that remarkably few pilgrims are depicted in close proximity to a saint's shrine in these narrative sources; they are instead shown venerating at alternative places of devotion such as holy wells, empty graves and extra-mural chapels. It proposes that policies of restricted access were operated by many English cult centres earlier than is often imagined, and in discussing why ecclesiastical institutions may have distanced the laity from their principal shrines the article sets its conclusions within the wider religious developments of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protection of cultural relics in a chariot pit in the ancient ruins has become an important issue. In order to study the spatial distribution, speciation of heavy metals in soil at a cemetery where an ancient chariot was buried and the influence heavy metals have had on the cultural relics. Heavy metals in soil samples surrounding the cultural relic were analyzed via atomic absorption spectrometry (AAS) using a wet digestion method combined with a three-step sequential extraction procedure. Results for seven heavy metals (Cu, Pb, Zn, Cr, Fe, Mn and Sn) and the speciation of six heavy metals (Cu, Pb, Zn, Cr, Fe and Mn) indicated that their contents exceeded local soil background values, indicating that the soil around the site had been contaminated to a certain degree. Analysis of their speciation showed that Mn mainly existed in the form of a reducible fraction in the soil, while the other elements were mainly in the form of a residual fraction. Correlation analysis showed that, except for the HOAc soluble fraction, a significant positive correlation existed between the content of the different forms and their total amounts. Heavy metals present in the soil surrounding the ancient relic predominantly influence the relic due to their related chemical reactions. In particular, copper and iron have a significant influence on corrosion of the cultural relics in this chariot pit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines how medieval Christian writers narrate a Cross relic's capture in battle by Muslims. It seeks to delineate the distinctive ways in which four texts from various genres craft a sense that this event should be perceived by Christians as a substantial collective loss that reshapes communities and individuals. It then concludes by assessing how these varied representations intersect with modern trauma theory in order to answer two questions: (1) Do Western medieval texts represent experiences of relic capture, which might be termed a form of devotional dispossession, in ways that communicate a sense of what is today labelled trauma?; and (2) If so, what might such representations mean for both medieval and trauma studies? Ultimately, the essay argues that these texts intersect with contemporary models of collective trauma and its narration and, in so doing, can contribute both to trauma studies' rethinking of what trauma narratives look like and to medievalists' understandings of the affective import of relic capture and the role of crusading texts in the construction of such affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nucleomorphs, relic endosymbiont nuclei, have been studied as a model to elucidate the evolutionary process of integrating a eukaryotic endosymbiont into a host cell organelle. Recently, we reported two new dinoflagellates possessing nucleomorphs, and proposed them as new models in this research field based on the following findings: genome integration processes are incomplete, and the origins of the endosymbiont lineages were pinpointed. Here, we focused on the nucleomorph genome features in the two green dinoflagellates and compared them with those of the known nucleomorph genomes of cryptophytes and chlorarachniophytes. All nucleomorph genomes showed similar trends suggesting convergent evolution. However, the number of nucleomorph genes that are unrelated to housekeeping machineries in the two green dinoflagellates are greater than the numbers in cryptophytes and chlorarachniophytes, providing additional evidence that their genome reduction has not progressed much compared with those of cryptophytes and chlorarachniophytes. Finally, potential future work is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To this day, the robed remains of mummified monks are venerated as 'living Buddhas' in northeastern Japan. Widely believed to have mummified themselves through strict adherence to ascetic regimen, temple patrons claim that these living Buddhas are capable of transmitting telepathic messages and curing disease, even of saving lives in the real time of disaster. In this article, I examine the ontological and symbolic basis of their purported immortality. Also, its politics, which emerge in contested historical narratives and assertions of authenticity about which mummified monks are real, true immortals and which are forgeries, curated corpses on display. As I demonstrate, such narratives are grounded in competing historicities of the automummification process. They are also situated in a competitive tourism industry. I argue that the bodies of these saintly figures are multi-temporal, semiotically charged, and political. Enduring faith in their posthumous vitality is not just a matter of theological exegesis. It is sustained by the interpretations of human suffering, history, and salvation that their anachronistic presence conjures for the living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Becket's relics are likely to have been owned by institutions and individuals throughout much of later medieval England, the reliable surviving evidence for them is limited. Without pretending to anything like completeness, the present essay assesses a range of sources in order to determine (or at least suggest) their usefulness for constructing a historically rooted understanding of the definition, distribution, appearance, and housing of Becket-relics. The approach taken arises partially from an ambition to cover as much ground as possible in the available space, and partially from misgivings about the value of documents whose original contexts cannot be satisfactorily reconstructed. The analysis is intended to contribute to scholarship on the cult of Becket generally in later medieval England: to this end, evidence has been sought widely and Canterbury receives less attention than the reader might expect, although the essay turns to the cathedral priory at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of social history within the domain of Tibetan Studies in recent years has been marked by a closer interest in the lives of people who would not usually be the subject of biographical studies. While there is also a Tibetan tradition of writing about the lives of sacred objects that has in turn attracted a certain amount of scholarly interest, the anthropological practice of documenting the histories of everyday artefacts remains relatively undeveloped. Following an examination of some of the dominant themes that emerge from the life stories of famous relics in the Christian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, this essay will take the case of two objects that have acquired some fame in their village setting to illustrate how the same themes—such as the importance of the objects as links to a sacred past, the existence of conflicting narratives, and the device of substitution—all feature equally prominently in the narratives associated with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the year 1000, judges from the ecclesiastical province of Narbonne (southern France and Catalonia) crafted judicial strategies that reinforced the region's Visigothic Code with the power of saints – conceived as gatekeepers to God's heavenly courtroom – to validate the oaths of witnesses. This practice merged liturgically grounded ideas about supernatural forces and space with a law code that prioritised secular authority. To forestall opposition to rulings, officials sometimes held proceedings in churches. This paper examines two unusual cases illustrating the challenges such strategies faced, given the perception that saints were not omnipresent. These disputes raise questions about the nature of saints, the degree of agency humans attributed to them and the utility of sacred spaces for legal ritual. In the province, saints were powerful, but constrained by their inability to act beyond the walls of consecrated sanctuaries housing their relics. This relegated saints to supplementary roles in law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this reflection, I consider my emotional experiences responding to a collection of objects left as offerings at St Brigid's holy well in Ireland. Drawing on my fieldwork at the site, I explore how emotion is a connective force by articulating the feelings and affective elements surrounding an encounter in this numinous space. The essay enables a fuller accounting of the abiding sentiments, presences, and enchantments that influenced me and my evolving appreciation of the place and all it entails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graduate students in a seminar on cultural heritage resources closely compared the experience of responding to museum artifacts in gallery settings with how those same artifacts might be experienced as digital surrogates. After learning to articulate precise differences between the "real" and the "represented," students applied their understanding of the relative strengths of Web technology to create online experiences for three area museums that were rooted in the fundamental principles of museum learning. The student sites thus transcend much current practice and point the way to exciting new possibilities for future museum Web sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 24 November 2017, less than two months after Maria, a category 4 hurricane devastated the island of Puerto Rico, performance artists Isil Sol Vil x Marina Barsy Janer enacted in the town of San Germán a communal piece in which debris from the storm was visited, gathered and regrouped as a nest on an empty urban lot. Performers and public breathed around the broken trees and sections of destroyed houses, they felt them. This instance serves as a springboard for an exploration of animism in relation to residues, ruins, and the discarded in the context of Puerto Rican economical precariousness and political disfranchisement, of the colony in ruins. Examples from my theatrical and installation practice in recent years, carried together with the Casa Cruz de la Luna group, as well as the description of performative exercises guide my discourse. Animism is posed as the materialization of rare, unforeseen, dissonant connections that disrupt given orders, often playing with our understanding of a diversity of disciplines -- the biological, the religious, the aesthetic, the typographical – in the performative encounter. The task of theatre makers is proposed as the design of, and incorporation of themselves into, live structures (stagings, actions/perceptions, installations) that allow us to question boundaries between selves' and others' insides and outsides. The actants encompass persons, but also other organisms, things, technologies, surroundings, language (in its material aspect). Integrating fragments of houses (ruins), memory-laden objects (relics), infinitely repeating phrases (mantras), humans, animals, plants (also relics) into these plays foregrounds the nature of residual materials and their coming together (clashes, hybridity) as sites of resistance to imperatives of progress carried by capitalism, imperialism and modernity. Points of connection in the discussion embrace: Tadeusz Kantor's notion of "reality of the lowest rank", Anne Bogart's Viewpoint Theory, and various philosophical and anthropological references. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heterogeneity of the ultramafic vegetation of the Central Balkans is rather great. Although this vegetation has been continuously investigated, some gaps are still to be filled. For example, the lack of available data on ultramafic vegetation of the Republic of Macedonia is evident. In that light, we have investigated different relic Stipa species-dominated dry grasslands over ultramafic bedrock. Twenty relevés were made and compared to the similar vegetation types (i.e. Potentilla visianii, Centaureo kosaninii-Bromion fibrosi, "Thymion jankae", Saturejo-Thymion and Alyssion heldreichii) by means of numerical analyses. We distinguished one new association and one informal community, providing them with diagnosis and lists of diagnostic, constant and dominant species. We also determined their syntaxonomic positions and relations to ultramafic syntaxa from the neighboring countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Occasionally, in Performance Art, after the event we are faced with some material leftovers, so-called 'performance relics'. This raises the question of how to handle such artefacts in accordance with the museum's core task of preservation. This article concentrates on the moment when the artistic process is completed and the transformation of its traces into relics begins. As leftovers of an ephemeral and fugitive action, relics have lost their original context and thus need to be redefined. In this article we will focus on a special kind of performance relic, ones that were transformed into new works of art. Two installations by the artist Joseph Beuys: Richtkräfte einer neuen Gesellschaft 1974–77 and Das Kapital Raum 1970–1977, 1980 are used as case studies to demonstrate how such performance-based art works need to be handled from a conservator's perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Westminster Abbey's relics, and objects functionally related to them, were kept in the shrine chapel of St Edward the Confessor, where the kings and queens of England were customarily buried. They constituted a discrete collection, curated by a dedicated monastic officer titled 'the keeper of St Edward's shrine and the relics of St Peter's church'. Inventories of the chapel, made when the office changed hands, survive from 1467, 1479 and 1520. These documents are analysed here for what they reveal of the contents of the collection, monastic interest in it, and the way the relics and related objects were cared for. As an important aspect of the chapel's spatial configuration, the problem of where precisely the relics were located is also investigated. By examining the routine management of a single, important collection, the article aims to contribute to a more holistic understanding of the cult of relics in the late Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most important buildings in the Forbidden City of Beijing, the Qin-An palace was initially built in 1535 of the Ming dynasty. The palace is mainly constructed with large wooden frame structure (L-22.25 m × W-19.68 m × H-16.67 m) with asymmetric double eaves and thick masonry infill wall in the north face. To better understand the seismic performance of the palace itself and related non-structural components and provide useful suggestions for relic protection from earthquake damages, a scaled 1:5 architectural model of the prototype structure and a kind of typical sample relics inside the room is designed and constructed for the earthquake simulation test on the 5 × 5 meter shaking table. The overall responses and the damage mechanism of the model structure as well as the seismic behavior and the local effects of the key elements such as the bucket arch system between the roof and the frame, the masonry infill walls, and the comparative sample relics with and without base-isolation measurements are observed and analyzed deliberately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early thirteenth century crusaders carried or sent dozens of textile relics from the treasuries of the Levant and Byzantium to the West. As these objects were integrated into the devotional life of western Europe, they collapsed the perceptions of temporal and spatial distance between medieval Europe and the world of the Apostles. Taking as a case study Pope Innocent III's renewed veneration of the sudarium, or Veil of Veronica, the article investigates the inherent and potent material qualities of cloth as a medium of holiness. The abundance of cloth relics coming into the West underlined the power of the divine presence. Whereas the intimacy promised by cloth—material made, touched, worn, soiled, and carried by the hands of others—brought the Holy Land and the physical realities of Christ's life and Passion into the heart of western Europe. Cloth evoked the bodies of its bearers and makers, referencing Christ, Mary, the Apostles, but also those who carried or sent such relics to the West, for example, crusaders who did not return to their kin. The intimacies of cloth, moreover, contributed to the generation of an abundance of other, new, and imitative relics over the course of the medieval period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]