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Liturgy was the perfect and unparalleled medium for public relations in the Middle Ages, and when it came to relics, it could transform any stone, bone, or a piece of wood into an object worthy of devotion. This article revolves around the activating force of the relics of Mary Magdalene in medieval France. It examines two liturgies—from Vézelay and from Saint-Maximin in Provence—honouring the saint, representing two distinct responses whose character reflects the priorities of the communities that produced them and the agendas that set them in motion. Liturgy was accorded a special role in bolstering the claims of Provence over the corporeal presence of Mary Magdalene in its midst, with liturgists adopting a more audacious and unreserved vocabulary to validate these claims over those of Vézelay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]

Copyright of Codex Aquilarensis is the property of Fundacion Santa Maria la Real del Patrimonio Historico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores how one object—the alleged papal throne of St Peter in the Vatican—became a battleground for Protestant and Catholic readings of the early history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. For many progressive Protestants, archaeology provided the long-sought-after scientific and material vindication of the authority of scripture. But critical analysis of scripture and historical texts could either authenticate or discredit sacred things. As tangible traces of Catholic apostolic authority, the material remains of early Roman Christianity provoked much religious, moral, and political debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article discusses how these debates were mediated in popular print and visual culture in Britain and Ireland by examining a widely publicized pamphlet debate between the English Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and the Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Although this was a debate about the theological authority exerted by the material remains of the past, the battle over Peter’s chair was conducted exclusively in the realm of word and image through exegesis and illustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the relics and cult of Saint Merolilanus, a martyr in eighth century Rheims, France of Scottish or Irish (scotigena) heritage. It examines the account of Saint Merolilanus as outlined in the "Historia Remensis Ecclesiae" by Flodoard of Rheims. The author comments on the translation of Saint Merolilanus' relics to the church of Saint Symphorien in Rheims and later to the Scots College in Rome, Italy. Other topics explored include Scottish identity and aspects of Scottish Catholicism.

Abstract: In the early 840s, Archbishop Amolo of Lyons wrote to one of his suffragan bishops about extraordinary miracles reportedly taking place at Dijon in the wake of the arrival of mysterious new relics. Re-examining the complex interaction of these relics with pre-existing social and political processes in the region and locally, this article also explores other aspects of Amolo’s letter which have been less discussed, notably its manuscript transmission and the insights it offers into structures of religious organisation. Finally, it argues that the way issues treated together in the letter tend to be separated or even opposed in the historiography points to the need for renewed, critically reflexive attention to the specificities of the Carolingian church reforms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Vézelay, Saint-Maximin-la –Sainte-Baume, and Magdala Nunayya are by no means the only alleged burial sites of Mary Magdalene. However, they are the most prominent, and each provides insight into the ways that preservation, religious observance, commercial interest, and historical research may co-exist, even as they pursue their own programmes. In each case the ecology of various interests has permitted cultural sites to be preserved, and offers prospects for the practice of a more balanced, progressive ecology in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the results of an ethnologist field study along the Indre River in France. Descriptions are given of the ways family memories and intimate artifacts were preserved in house storage an discovered through the field study. Further comments are given concerning the ways familial souvenirs can help maintain a link between the living and their deceased loved ones.

This article pursues the relation of heads to faces in medieval art through a relic of a head that was at the same time a face: the relic of John the Baptist. The Baptist's severed head assumed an iconic role in twelfth-century Byzantium, as illustrated by an icon at Sinai that initiated a composition repeated for centuries. John's head, portrayed through its face as an icon for veneration, is presented here on a paten as a metaphor for the Eucharist. Later compositions iterate both the iconic role of the relic portrayed through its face and the Eucharistic metaphor, eventually eliminating the figure of the Baptist himself and showing just the gigantic face on its paten on an altar. The image of the face on a paten, preserved in icons, must have had a counterpart in precious metal, for a relic of the "face of the Baptist" on a charger was found in 1206 in Constantinople and given in 1217 to the cathedral of Amiens, where it remains a famous relic. Its form as a face on a charger aligned it with the Western Johannesschüsseln, with which it is generally associated. The Amiens relic, however, always remained something distinct, a relic that was also a personal presence, a face. Akin in its mysterious assertion of real presence, it joined the Veronica as an image of the Corpus Christi, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharistic Host. No less than the Veronica, the St. John's Head emerged from a distinctively Byzantine invention--the relic of a face--but like it found a particularly intense vitality in the late medieval West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of imaginary anthropological structures elaborated by Gilbert Durand enables us to identify a symbolic language of ideograms from Mont Bego (circa 2500-1800 BC). There are three main types of figures: figures associated with the Bull- God and with the God of Storms, which come under the first function “heroic”; figures depicting harnessing and reticulates which evoke ploughed fields ands make reference to the feminine and maternal function known as “mystic nocturne”; figures linked to initiation, to the relationship between the first and the second function, which come under the function known as “synthetic nocturne”. These figures are located particularlyon the slab known as the “witch”. A comparative study of the later symbolic figures, presented in worship practises in archaic and then classic Greece and in the Greek-Roman imaginary, helps us to understand that Mediterranean mankind portrays a coherent image of the cosmos. This image is stable from the proto-Ligurian figures of Mont Bego until the forms elaborated by the Greek-Roman religious imaginary, in particular through mysterious rituals. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article examines the use of Anglo-Saxon Christian tradition of text as authority for interpreting how the nuns of St. Pierre and the lay brothers of St. Nizier in the 13th century prove their possession of the relics of St. Aunemund. Information on St. Nicetius hagiography; Relationship between secular and spiritual authority in Lyon, France; Rebellion against cathedral clergy.

This article uses a little-known sermon by Victricius, bishop of Rouen, as an approach to the fourth-century debate on the translation of relics. In the last third of the fourth century, the cult of martyrs and their relics was promoted by Damasus of Rome, Paulinus of Nola and Ambrose of Milan, but remained controversial in the western churches. Roman law forbade the disturbance of dead bodies, especially where magic was suspected. Christians as well as non-Christians were repelled by the veneration of bone, bloodstains and dust, and by the extreme asceticism that was often associated with relic-cult. The sermon Victricius preached, welcoming to Rouen a gift of relics from Ambrose, is here interpreted as an attempt at cultural translation. Victricius deploys a late-antique education in rhetoric and philosophy to make relic-cult and asceticism acceptable. Like many others, he uses the adventus, the ceremonial reception of a visiting emperor or his deputy by local aristocracy and officials, as an analogy for the reception of relics by ascetics and clergy. Exceptionally, he equates corporeal relics with the presence of God; but his unique theology of relics was lost to view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focused on the example of Amiens Cathedral (ca. 1489-1532), this study questions the relations among choir screen, liturgy, and the cult of relics. It will explain that the image cycle of the choir screen prepared the laity for the visit to and worship of the cathedral's relics and supported the staging of relics, especially during the feast days of the saints. This was possible through the arrangement of the saints' cycles, the choice of scenes, their pictorial rhetoric, and finally by the orientation of the reading direction in relation to the liturgy and cult-topography of the cathedral. The close interaction between image and liturgy could even extend to synesthetic effects. The choir screen therefore appears not only in its primary function of separating the laity and clergy but also in its pictorial decoration as a type of furniture essentially defined by liturgy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the role of saints' relics in the western controversy over the use of religious images in Italy and France in the later eighth and ninth centuries and examines the place of holy relics in relation to religious art in the thought of four of the leading western participants in the controversy: Theodulf of Orléans, Claudius of Turin, Dungal, and Jonas of Orléans. Theodulf believed that relics are consecrated objects because of their intimate link with the saints and martyrs, unlike images. His understanding of the association between holy relics and religious images reflects the official doctrine and mainstream practice of the early medieval western church.

Information on the town of Autun in Burgundy, France from Chapter 13 of the book "Frommer's France" is presented. Autun is one of the oldest towns in the country. Some relics still stand, including the remains of the largest theater in Gaul, the Théâtre Romain. On the highest point in Autun, Cathédrale Saint-Lazare was built in 1120 to house the relics of Saint Lazarus.