Christ’s crown or his mother Mary’s milk, or the more macabre bones, teeth and indeed whole limbs of saints, they brought comfort and cures to pilgrims and wealth to whoever owned them. Relics, says Charles Freeman, represented “a polytheism that endured long after the traditional pagan gods of the Mediterranean had been expelled”, because of the Medieval mind’s obsession with the supernatural. When it comes to the ancient and Medieval worlds, Freeman is one of the most accessible academic writers around, and he does not disappoint in this book. But the reader has to wait until near the end for him to answer what is, for me, the most pressing question: were relics really responsible for restoring the sick to health and, if so, how?
There are many persuasive contemporary claims that they were able to do so. It required two volumes to record the miracles performed at the shrine of Thomas Beckett in Canterbury Cathedral where “the paralysed are cured, the blind see, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the crippled walk, the fevered are relieved, the possessed are freed from the devil, and the sick are cured from diverse illnesses”. No wonder it quickly became the wealthiest shrine in England, bringing in two-thirds of the cathedral’s income.
Freeman tells us not to underestimate the power of the imagination, so it would matter little whether the bones being prayed over were those of a saint or a dog. “This is what would now be called the placebo effect”, he adds. “The simple belief that a cure will be effected is enough to bring it about.”
Christians in the Middle Ages followed the teachings of the theologian Augustine; that original sin, passed down through the generations from Adam, meant everyone faced the wrath of God and eternal punishment. Sickness and disability in this life were the results of earthly wrongdoing. But a small number of souls in heaven who had already been saved – the saints and martyrs – might be prevailed on to save or heal others through their relics. And the pleasing fragrance that dead bits of a saint gave off were proof of their authenticity, even though some saints would have needed more limbs than an octopus if all the arms and legs on display across the continent of Europe were genuine, and there were enough pieces of the True Cross to fill the hold of a cargo ship.
To prosper, the major shrines went for impact, because that brought in the punters and, noted the 12th century historian William of Malmesbury, ambitious abbots and bishops constructed ever-more elaborate churches to house their prized exhibits “to entice the dullest minds to prayer and to bend the most stubborn to supplication”. Pilgrims heading for the Holy Land would assemble in Venice where travel agents touted their package tours. The city authorities kept this transit process going for as long as possible to boost the local economy.
But popular enthusiasm for relics was being questioned long before the Reformation began to do away with them. A Lollard tract of 1394 suggests the pilgrim should ask why, if the lance and nails used to wound Jesus are to be venerated, the lips of Judas should not be similarly honoured? So there is a temptation to dismiss the whole business of relics as one Almighty confidence trick, feeding off the superstitions of the gullible to line the pockets of the powerful.
Freeman should have the last word here. “A modern mind can become irritated with the belief in so many stories of resurrections, healings and rescuings for which there can be no ‘scientific’ explanation. Yet if the supernatural is treated as a ‘real’ world, on a different level, its events, or lack of them, can be accepted as easily as they were in the natural world we can see or touch. Fantasy perhaps, but it is an imagined world that balances the harshness of the material one.”
