CFP: Rethinking the holy materiality: bones and other ”stuff”, with and without reliquaries (the Middles Ages and Beyond), deadline March 1, 2025

A workshop

Rethinking the holy materiality: bones and other ”stuff”, with and without reliquaries (the Middles Ages and Beyond)

September 10–11, 2025

Venue: University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland

Call for Papers

While much has been published on relics, their understanding remains restricted and inflexible because of the prevalent definitions of the religious relic. Julia Smith has emphasized how our main concept and its different sub-categories are a creation of modern ways of thinking (by canon law and theology) to classify religious items, when medieval theology and thinking were in fact much more flexible. Encyclopedias, dictionaries but also single studies define the term “relic” primarily as bodily remains of saints and martyrs, and secondarily to objects that are directly associated with the life of Christ (the Cross, for instance) or of a saint, or again, objects which have touched the saint’s body. In other words, relics are seen to belong in two categories, “primary” and “secondary”, primary being “bodily relics” and secondary “contact relics”. Such terms of the categories explicitly and/or implicitly evaluate the items when for example early Christian authors such as Augustine did not differentiate in value objects and other materials in contact with living or dead saints, or their tombs from bodily relics. Thus, definitions in current scholarly use did not easily lend themselves to late medieval realities and ignored an important – even if hard to define – aspect of lay practices concerning relics. Consequently, reading late medieval sources and studying 14^th-15^th c. objects in the light of modern categorization and its restrictiveness at a practical level hinders or even prevents us from understanding what late medieval people regarded as relics.

Problems about the traditional categorizations of relics have also been acknowledged, but not much has been done yet. Especially objects which have been excluded from the established definitions, such as unofficial relics or objects which represent ‘the third or fourth generation’ of contact with the saint, are largely ignored in scholarship. An exception to the rule is a reliquary, acquiring the status of new-relic by contact with the relic it houses, the role of which was established in scholarship by Legner in 1995. In art history, other devotional objects that defy accepted conventions of classification, such as shrouds or imprints, have been taken into consideration only very recently. The current discussion of medieval materiality has already been augmented by the classic theory of agency by Gell in 1998, which has now been applied to the agency of the holy matter, especially by Bynum in 2011 and 2020. The ‘material turn’ has enriched research into medieval and early modern devotional objects, including emphasizing the role of texts in understanding the tangibility of the physical them, but the whole gamut of devotional materiality in late medieval contexts still awaits reconsideration, borrowing notions and methodologies used in the field of anthropology and religious sciences.

The workshop invites presentations exploring the relationship between bones and relics, as well as other material objects perceived to possess supernatural powers; how people engaged with (sacred) materiality in their everyday lives and what kind of significances they gave for these entities. We warmly encourage proposals from various academic fields to be able to offer a diverse and multidisciplinary program.

Please submit your proposal by March 1, 2025 to the organizers (see below). The proposal should include a provisional title, a 200–300-word abstract, 5 keywords, the presenter’s name (or names if there are several contributors), title, and affiliation. The organizers will notify participants about the acceptance of their proposals by the end of March. Kindly note that we intend to publish the presentations as peer-reviewed articles in a journal special issue or a similar publication. The details regarding publication will be discussed further with the participants during the workshop.

Key-note lecture:

The key-note presentation of the workshop will be given by Professor Vincent Debiais (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris: http://crh.ehess.fr/index.php?6059)

“See-trough. Relics, Materiality, and the Dynamics of Deception”

In the devotion to relics, seeing or not seeing defines the whole faithful’s attitude. Entering the sanctuary, standing in front of the reliquary, the sight and expectation are whether fulfilled or deceived. The devices – object or building – used for the presentation of relics dating from the end of the Middle Ages seem to have built on this tension between the need to look and touch the saints’ bodily remains and the impossibility to fully grasp on the subject of devotional actions, using transparency, concealment, or distraction as enhancers for the spiritual possession of relics. This lecture presents an overview of the material, sensorial, and theological questions raised by these objects, focusing primarily on reliquaries that used glass and writing to showcase the virtus of the saints.

Organizers:

Organizers, and more information: Docent Marika Räsänen (marika.rasanen@utu.fi) & Professor Päivi Salmesvuori (paivi.salmesvuori@abo.fi), Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies & Department of Church History, Åbo Akademi University

Sponsors: The project “Rethinking the Late Medieval Relic (c. 1200–1550), the Research Council of Finland, University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University, and The Polin Institute.

Image: Crown reliquary at the collection of Louvre, photographed by M. Räsänen.