Body-Part Reliquaries and Body Parts in the Middle AgesAuthor(s): Caroline Walker Bynum and Paula GersonSource: Gesta, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1997), pp. 3-7Published by: International Center of Medieval ArtStable 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 WALKER BYNUM Columbia University

PAULA GERSON Florida State University

Bodies and fragmentation of bodies have special reso- nance in society and art today. We are used to jewelry ads that show the isolated arm with bejeweled fingers, the iso- lated 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-part model."' Popular and

political culture makes images of body parts glitzy; it makes them gruesome, as well. Our nerves are scraped raw by nightly news saturated with clips of the dismemberment caused by land mines, airplane explosions and terrorist bombs; current discussions of organ transplants alert us to body parts and the ethical issues surrounding them.

Such images from popular culture have unquestionably heightened our awareness of fragmented bodies. Contempo- rary 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 Lou- ise Bourgeois, Hanne Wilke, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, and Annette Messager, whose imagery returns to these forms.3 There even are contemporary artists 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 fragmented body are different from ours of the late twen- tieth century, as Linda Nochlin makes clear in a recent es- say.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, performance and 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 mean- ingful ways. Our decision to focus a College Art Association session on body-part reliquaries grew from a desire not only to shed greater light on medieval cult and art but also to come, in the process, to a fuller understanding of modern represen- tation and response.

The systematic study of saints and their cults is one of the oldest areas of medieval history. Indeed, one might argue

that the work of the Bollandists on hagiography is one of the roots of modern "scientific history."5 Art historical study of reliquaries-containers for the holy bodies around which 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 dramatic new 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 ques- tions raised by such masters as Peter Brown and Hans Belt- ing, a new generation of historians of religion and of art, which includes, among others, Patrick Geary, Sharon Farmer, Thomas Head, Pamela Sheingorn, and Jeffrey Hamburger has 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 Christianity but rather to 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 horrors of mar- tyrdom to the early Christians was the fact that the resulting fragmentation of 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 thirteenth centuries, of procedures for canonization controlled by the papacy, it was the trans- lation 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 central Middle Ages bodies were divided and displayed as fragments. Relics and reliquar- ies 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. Monas- teries, monarchs and towns used saints, and hence relics, in order to establish both authority and boundaries.9 Relics and reliquaries were important in Byzantium as well as in the Latin West; historians have long emphasized that relics were prob- ably the most important treasure brought to the West from Constantinople as a result of the Fourth Crusade. Nonethe- less, it is clear that relics became the special locus of access to the divine in western Christianity-a role played increasingly in the East by holy images: icons. Understanding exactly how relics were housed and displayed-and why they were treated thus-is crucial to understanding the 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 thirteenth centuries.10 The emphasis of art historians on anal- ysis of the form of reliquaries has given this development special prominence ever since the pioneering work of Joseph Braun in the 1930s.11 The significance of this fact is far from clear, however. Indeed, we can see how puzzling the devel- opment has been to art historians when we note that all the

papers in the collection below raise in some form the problem of what to call these objects and why. Naming or classifying the containers implies an interpretation of their significance and of the response they evoke.

The traditional German term for them, "speaking reliquar- ies," implies, of course, that the shape expresses or "speaks" the body part beneath; yet we have much evidence that many body-part reliquaries did 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's Passion in 1204, the monks encased this treasure in the hand of a reliquary shaped like a human arm.12 Cynthia Hahn's formulation, "shaped reliquaries," is intended to rec-

ognize 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 (regard- less of which bones it contains) may be used to offer the bless- ing traditionally given by a living bishop in the liturgy. Its shape would depend, then, upon its function, not its contents. Neither the term "shaped reliquary" nor "speaking reliquary," however, indicates the full complexity of such containers as the sandal altar and the staff discussed below by Thomas Head. Although the staff may, indeed, have performed a liturgical function, it is not at all clear why the foot shape reposes on

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 containers that do not hold within what is represented without, 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 reliquaries that display the body bit behind crystal, making its nature clearly visible to the devout but not in any way "ex- pressing" 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 bare bones, with only a gold band on the ends, were sometimes displayed as proof that the relic actually ex- isted.13 Moreover, it should be noted that once a body part has lost its flesh, it loses its corporeal structure and acquires a new one as bones or dust. Despite the term "speaking reliquary" favored by German art historians, then, an arm or head rel- iquary 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 relation to 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 interpretative questions.

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 relationship of inside and outside in these objects and in reliquaries generally? If the container resembles or represents or reveals its contents, the relationship may be one of mimesis. But what then is the purpose of 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 sig- nificantly more sophisticated by the papers that follow, for they have complicated our understanding of 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-part reliquaries between contents and con- tainer relates to medieval notions of "likeness" and "repre- sentation" more generally. Historians such as Robert Javelet and Karl Morrison have informed us that exactly the period that saw the emergence of body-part reliquaries produced, as well, an intense exploration of the issue of likeness in spiri- tuality, predicated on the assumption that spiritual progress was possible because human beings were created in the "im- age" of God.14 Restoration of likeness could include extremely

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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 sal- vation, or of how a bishop might represent his diocese or a procurator his community at a meeting of the Estates. Since texts from this same period frequently explore the ways in which saints represent ordinary mortals 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 papers is the ques- tion of response. This has been of great interest to art his- torians recently: note how prominently reliquaries figure in David Freedberg's influential The Power of Images.'1 As the papers below 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 po- sitioned. A thirteenth-century Jew did not see a body-part reliquary or a representation of the stigmata as a thirteenth- century Christian did. But response to reliquaries is also mul- tiple 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's reliquary was an idol only by understanding that the saint could heal and kill; yet he also told quite casual and irreverent stories of Foy as a teasing, pre-pubescent girl.16 Exempla from the high Middle Ages re- count that both the devout and the thieving sometimes tried to carry away bits of relics in their mouths.17 Such a reac- tion 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 understood as awe- ful sources of great power.18 Indeed, had they not been, they would hardly have been stolen so frequently.

Today, as well, response is complicated and multi-layered. Guards in museums, and also the art historians who study reliquaries, report that viewers who approach reliquaries re- spond to more than simply the beauty and craftsmanship of the containers. At the recent exhibition of Limoges enamels at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, for example, view- ers displayed a different sort of fascination with the St. Fran- cis reliquary, because of what could be seen behind the crystal windows, than with diptychs and chasses. And body-part reliquaries, displaying what appear to 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 is- sues related to response to bodies. The most popular body-part reliquaries were those of heads and arms. As both Cynthia Hahn and Ellen Shortell point out, the act of separating a part from the whole focuses attention on that part. And the head and arms are the most expressive and communicative parts of our bodies. Consider the 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.19 Thus we must ask whether there is something universal in the response to body-part reliquaries, perhaps an element that is beyond what is specific to time or to geography or cultural tradition.

In the following essays, each author approaches body- part reliquaries from a different point of access.20 Barbara Boehm's essay presents the current state of the question and helps us understand how study of these objects has evolved and changed. Cynthia Hahn approaches the topic from the point of view of a specific class of body-part reliquaries, that is, arm reliquaries. Ellen Shortell explores the relationship of a particular group of reliquaries in the collegiate church of St.-Quentin to chapter and town. Scott Montgomery exam- ines one bust reliquary, that of St. Just, in relationship to the cult and liturgy of the saint. The last paper in the volume, that of Thomas Head, is written from a historian's point of view, complementing the art historical papers that it follows.

Barbara Boehm's essay provides an overview, concentrat- ing on the literature and historiography of body-part reliquar- ies. Because they are made of precious metals, they have been overlooked and undervalued as major objects of art historical concern; as might be expected, early studies were related to cult or to national patrimony. More recent studies have ex- plored issues of the relationship of these objects to the rebirth of monumental sculpture and to the appearance of portraits in western art. Boehm discusses, as well, the treatment of body- part 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's essay concentrates on the relationship of body-part reliquaries to cult, examining their function in re- lationship to content. Her discussion centers on arm reliquar- ies and points out that arm reliquaries, in particular, do not always contain relics of arms, hands or fingers. Thus, she finds a certain "slippage between the contained and the container." Hahn examines the importance of arms, hands and gestures in cult, emphasizing their metaphorical, rhetorical and referen- tial qualities, especially in making the sign of the cross. The portability of body-part reliquaries means that they can be used

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in processions where they not only gesture but also touch- as, for instance, in healing. Hahn considers the role of the arm reliquary as a transmitter, rather than only as a site of power, with ultimate power 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 approaches this issue from another direc- tion. She begins with a discussion of the construction of a new collegiate church dedicated to St. Quentin and the con- current dismemberment of the saint's relics, the placement of some of the separated relics into body-part reliquaries and their elevation to a more accessible position in the new che- vet. Focusing more on the issue of the fragmented body and the body-part reliquary, Shortell delineates the complex ways in which the new body-part reliquaries were integrated into the social fabric, ecclesiastic politics and spirituality of the town of St.-Quentin. Within this complex web of interrelating fac- tors she brings together the chapter's battle with the episcopal powers, its role in burials for the town of St.-Quentin, the new stained glass program for the rebuilt chevet featuring the "Apostles of Picardy," and processions through the town of St.-Quentin on feast days during which the body-part reli- quaries would be carried. The role of body-part reliquaries in processions is particularly important; the body of the saint re- mained 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 re- siding with the canons of St.-Quentin.

Scott Montgomery, in contrast to the other authors, has concentrated on a single body-part reliquary, that of St. Just. His study emphasizes aspects of narrative and performance in cult practices. Beginning with the extraordinary structure of the reliquary-St. Just with hands supporting his head and offering it for veneration--Montgomery turns to the Passion of the saint to understand the form. The image is seen to in- corporate the narrative of St. Just's martyrdom. After his be- heading, the saint presents his own head to his father so that it can be kissed by his mother. Thus the worshipper attending 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 narrative is an integral part of the form of the bust, rather than appearing in the more usual way as a series of scenes appended to the reliquary. Mont- gomery sees a conflation of relic and reliquary by the mid- fifteenth century, wherein the reliquary itself is identified as the relic. Both the narrative quality of the reliquary and the understanding of reliquary as 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-part relics and reliquaries, it examines in detail the way in which reliquaries, and the relics they con- tain, have been woven into the political fabric of the late tenth-century Ottonian kingdom. Thomas Head's discussion

centers around two mimetic reliquaries made for Archbishop Egbert in Trier in the late ninth century. Only one incorpo- rates 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 Trier by 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 against like claims by Mainz and Cologne. Head sees both rel- iquaries as visually dramatic and theatric objects, that, in use, confirmed close apostolic ties to both St. Peter and St. Andrew, the first patriarchs, respectively, of Rome and Constantinople. Of special importance to art historians is the relationship Head sees between object and text. Generally in medieval studies, iconography and ritual are considered to "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.

Taken together, these essays raise the insistent question: What finally are these objects? Are they containers that re- veal or represent their contents? Are they exteriors that hide or transmute what 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 trea- sures to be stored in cathedrals alongside narwhale horns and ostrich eggs; they were revered as the saint. Thus the con- junction of art, cult and devotion they represent raises a fun- damental methodological issue.

In the Catholic revival in France at the turn of the twen- tieth 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 Barbara Boehm points out, art histo- rians 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 can- not, however, be ignored. Such reliquaries belong in Belting's category of works "from before the era of art." But they are much more than Belting's "images" (Bilder). For they tran- scend the distinction he makes between representing and be- ing present, between image and sign.21 They are loci of power and, as Cynthia Hahn suggests, they are transmitters and in- dicators 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 representation of Christ and Christ, it is not Christ in the way the head of St. Just is St. Just. Yet St. Just was also before the throne of God. And those who crafted his wonderful head 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 empowered those who told them. Body- part reliquaries thus collapse any distinctions we might be

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tempted to make between object and sign, art and cult, poli- tics and religion, art history and history. If these essays con- cerning a specific type of reliquary raise questions not merely about reliquaries but also about the nature of art and art his-

tory, then-with our collection as with the objects it stud- ies-pars will stand pro toto. And the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

NOTES

* 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 thank him for clarifying and focusing the discussion. We also join the authors in expressing gratitude to Anne- marie Weyl Carr for careful editing and for detailed suggestions con-

cerning both interpretation and bibliography.

1. Nov. 15, 1996 interview on ABC-TV.

2. While artists from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century stud- ied and drew isolated limbs and parts of bodies, Gericault and Rodin seem to be among the first artists to include fragmented limbs in fin- ished works. Influences from Japanese prints and photography increased artists' interest in fragments of bodies, and more examples can be found with the development of Surrealism. Madeline H. Caviness has dis- cussed a number of issues concerning body fragmentation in a lecture given at New York University in Fall, 1995 entitled "The De-Eroticized

Body: Parts, Fragments, Relics." This will be the subject of a chapter in her forthcoming book.

3. There are, as well, many artists who include fragmented bodies in their work, but to a lesser extent, such as Robert Mapplethorp, Ed Kien- holtz, Magdelena Abakanowicz and Rona Pondick.

4. L. Nochlin, The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Mo- dernity, Walter Neurath Memorial 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.

5. D. Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises (London, 1963), 1-32. For a recent study of saints and relics, see A. Angenendt, Heilige und Reli- quien: Die Geschichte ihres Kultes vom friihen Christentum bis 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 acge d'apres les procks de canonisation et les documents hagiographiques, Bibliothbque des etudes franqaises d'Athenes et de Rome 241 (Rome, 1981).

6. S. Beissel, Die Verehrung der Heiligen und ihrer Reliquien in Deutsch- land im Mittelalter (Freiburg, 1890: reprint, Darmstadt: Wissen- schaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), and J. Braun, Die Reliquiare des christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung (Freiburg, 1940).

7. 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 (Chi- cago, 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

trenchantly by H. Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the

Image before the Era of Art, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago and Lon- don, 1994). Recent examples of work done by a younger generation of American historians under the 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, Commu- nities 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 chre- tienne aux premiers siecles: Les temoignages de Tertullien, Cyprien, et

Augustin at la lumiere de l'archeologie africaine (Paris, 1980), 240-44.

9. On relic cult generally, see N. Hermann-Mascard, Les Reliques des saints: Formation coutumiere d'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 trans- lation des reliques en 1265-1267, Subsidia hagiographica 57 (Brussels, 1975), 264-65.

13. I. Kalavrezou, "Imperial Ceremonies and the 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 Tradition of Reform in the West (Princeton, 1983), and idem, "I am You ": The Hermeneutics of Empathy in Western Literature, 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 Finu- cane, 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, "Pattern Vision in Newborn Infants," Science, CXXXX (1963) no. 3564, 296-97.

20. For another important study see J. Holladay, "Relics, Reliquaries, and Religious Women; Visualizing the Holy Virgins of Cologne," forth- coming in Studies in Iconography, XVIII (1996).

21. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 8-9, citing Erhart Kistner.

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