British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
RALEIGH LECTURE ON HISTORY
Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700 –1200)
Professor Julia Smith
Monday 15 November 2010, 7.00pm
Royal Society of Edinburgh, 22-26 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2PQ
as part of the British Academy's 'Medieval Week'
Medieval Christians treasured tiny objects culled from biblical holy places and saints’ shrines. Using previously neglected evidence of the contents of medieval reliquaries and ecclesiastical treasure collections from western Christendom, the first part of this lecture will bring historical specificity to the generic terms ‘relics’ by exploring what they actually comprised and how they were conceptualised by those who garnered and collected them. This will open up for inspection the jewelled reliquaries, silk purses and ivory caskets in which relics were stored and will reveal relics’ material characteristics as minuscule objects of no intrinsic material value.
The second part of the lecture will then ask how these paltry items came to be highly valued for both social and religious reasons. By mapping the networks through which relics circulated, it will identify the multiplicity of contexts which gave relics social meaning and enabled them to be widely collected: as heirlooms, tokens of political affiliation, gifts, personal mementos, and much more. Juxtaposing these social meanings with their religious meanings, it will propose a new approach to the social practices of medieval Christianity in Western Europe.
About the speaker
Julia Smith holds the Edwards Chair of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow. She has wide-ranging research interests in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, c.400–1100 CE, and is especially interested in gender orders and the cultural history of religion in this period.