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What remains: women, relics and
remembrance in the aftermath of the
Fourth Crusade
Anne E. Lest er
a
a
Depart ment of Hist ory, Universit y of Colorado at Boulder, 234
UCB, Boulder, Colorado 80309–0234, Unit ed St at es of America
Published online: 30 May 2014.
To cite this article: Anne E. Lest er (2014) What remains: women, relics and remembrance
in t he aft ermat h of t he Fourt h Crusade, Journal of Medieval Hist ory, 40:3, 311-328, DOI:
10.1080/ 03044181.2014.917834
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Vol. 40, No. 3, 311–328, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2014.917834
What remains: women, relics and remembrance in the aftermath of the
Fourth Crusade
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Anne E. Lester*
Department of History, University of Colorado at Boulder, 234 UCB, Boulder, Colorado 80309–0234,
United States of America
(Received 31 December 2013; final version received 9 March 2014)
After the fall of Constantinople to the Latin Crusaders in 1204 hundreds of relics were carried
into the West as diplomatic gifts, memorabilia and tokens of victory. Yet many relics were also
sent privately between male crusaders and their spouses and female kin. As recipients of relics
women were often called upon to initiate new relic cults and practices of commemoration in
honour of the men who sent these objects and who often never returned from the East. By
considering the material quality of Fourth Crusade relics, this article argues that they were
objects that exercised a profound effect on the lives of those receiving them, influencing
their perceptions and actions, focusing practices of commemoration and ultimately shaping
the memory of the crusade. Relics formed the scaffolding that recursively evoked a
venerated martyr, a kinsman dead in the East, a family’s crusading lineage, and broader
ideas of religious sacrifice.
Keywords: relics; materiality; women; Fourth Crusade; liturgy; devotion; gifts
We speak of friends and their fortunes,
And of what they did and said,
Till the dead alone seem living,
And the living alone seem dead.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Meeting1
Memory thus had a retrospective and, curious as it sounds, a prospective character. Its object was not
only what had happened but what was promised.
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence2
In the early spring of 1205 – less than a year after contingents of French, Flemish and Venetian
crusaders captured the city of Constantinople and established a new Latin empire in the East –
the same men began to send relics from the Byzantine capital to churches, chapels and
individuals in the West. It was during that spring that Count Louis of Blois, one of the
*Email: anne.lester@colorado.edu
1
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems and Other Writings (New York: Penguin, 2000), 616.
2
Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: a History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10.
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
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312
A.E. Lester
leaders of the Fourth Crusade, sent his wife Catherine of Clermont, countess of Blois and
Chartres, several prize relics, including the head of St Anne and relics of Sts Peter and
Andrew, wrapped in silks.3 He must have set these objects in motion during the months he
resided in Constantinople and before he departed for Adrianople, where he died in the
company of the newly elected Emperor Baldwin I, on 14 April 1205.4 Unlike other relics
that travelled publicly or surreptitiously out of the imperial city in the years following its
conquest, Louis sent these relics first to his wife, who ruled his lands as regent during his
absence. It was Catherine who presented them to the cathedrals of Chartres and Beauvais and
who initiated the commemoration of the objects, the crusade and her husband’s deeds in
Greece.5
The events of the Fourth Crusade have been, and remain, a topic of great contention
and little historical consensus.6 Because this expedition ‘deviated’ to Constantinople
scholars have alternately characterised the crusade – much as some contemporaries did –
as either a perversion of the original crusade ideals and ambitions, or as a
misunderstood manifestation of the changing nature of crusading by the turn of the
thirteenth century.7 Conceiving of the crusade in religious terms has been complicated by
its decidedly material outcome: in terms of the movement of objects and the accumulation
of wealth, the Fourth Crusade was perhaps the most materially focused of all the
campaigns to the East.8
While plunder, silks and coin, among much else, accrued to the successful knights, nobles
and merchants who won the empire, the main objects to travel westward after 1204 were relics.9
Comte Paul Riant, the nineteenth-century gentleman-scholar whose compilation of sources
3
See Comte Paul Riant, Exuviae sacrae Constantinopolitanae. 2 vols (Geneva: s.n., 1877–8), 2: 73, no. 22;
184–5, no. 4 (necrology entry from Chartres); and 183, no. 3 (obituary entry from Beauvais). For the
commemoration at Chartres, see E. de Lépinois and Lucien Merlet, eds., Cartulaire de Notre-Dame de
Chartres. 3 vols. (Chartres: Garnier, 1861–5), [hereafter Cart. Chartres], 3: 89 and 178; and Jan van der
Meulen, ‘Recent Literature on the Chronology of Chartres Cathedral’, Art Bulletin 49 (1967): 152–72.
4
On the role of the count of Blois on the Fourth Crusade, see Thierry Crépin-Leblond, ‘Louis, comte de
Blois et de Chartres: de Blois à Andrinople’, in 1204 la quatrième croisade: de Blois à Constantinople et
éclats d’empires, ed. Inès Villela-Petit, special issue of Revue Française d’Héraldique et de
Sigillographie 73–5 (2003–5): 17–20; also Jean Longnon, Les compagnons de Villehardouin: recherches
sur les croisés de la quatrième croisade (Geneva: Droz, 1978), 79–85.
5
See below.
6
See for example, Michael Angold, The Fourth Crusade: Event and Context (London: Longman, 2003);
Donald E. Queller and Thomas F. Madden, The Fourth Crusade: the Conquest of Constantinople. 2nd
edn. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Thomas F. Madden, ed., The Fourth
Crusade: Event, Aftermath and Perceptions (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
7
For an early characterisation of the latter perspective, see Paul Alphandéry and Alphonse Dupront, La
chrétienté et l’idée de croisade. 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1954–9); most recently, Thomas
F. Madden, ‘The Venetian Version of the Fourth Crusade: Memory and the Conquest of Constantinople
in Medieval Venice’, Speculum 87 (2012): 311–44.
8
See Jean Longnon, ‘Sur les croisés de la quatrième croisade’, Journal des Savants 2 (1977): 119–27; and
Savvas Neocleous, ‘Financial, Chivalric or Religious? The Motives of the Fourth Crusaders Reconsidered’,
Journal of Medieval History 38 (2012): 183–206.
9
See Jannic Durand, ‘La quatrième croisade, les reliques et les reliquaries de Constantinople’, in 1204 la
quatrième croisade, ed. Villela-Petit, 55–78; Holger Klein, ‘Eastern Objects and Western Desires: Relics
and Reliquaries between Byzantium and the West’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 283–314; and
Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 223–44. See also Henry Maguire and
Robert S. Nelson, eds., San Marco, Byzantium and the Myths of Venice (Washington, DC: Dumbarton
Oaks, 2010); and David Perry, Sacred Plunder, Venice, and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming).
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Journal of Medieval History
313
relating to the crusade still remains the most complete record of items sent to the West,
calculated that over 300 objects arrived in Europe between 1205 and 1215.10 These relics he
divided into three parts: ‘The first two he designated official and private [thefts, gifts, etc.],
which together produced a total of 317 items, of which 217 were sent between 1204 and
1213’.11 He also described another category of ‘objects of Byzantine provenance’, for which
the dating and attribution was not clearly established, but which he related to the Fourth
Crusade. These objects account for an additional ‘94 items of which 76 appear to have been
sent between 1204 and 1213’.12 All such totals are illusory because in many instances relics
were collected and sent together in boxes and packets, containing many diverse fragments from
an array of saints, martyrs, confessors and virgins. When it is possible to relate relics to
liturgical texts, Riant identified 46 new commemorative feasts – usually celebrated on the day
of the reception of a new relic – that were created for relics that came into Europe between
1205 and 1213.13
The material gains of the Fourth Crusade have ironically obscured an investigation of the
memory of the crusade and the expedition’s place in the longer history of crusade devotion.
This is surprising in that most of the objects that came into the West were objects freighted
with spiritual meaning and familial association. In the aftermath of 1204, far more often than
scholars have noted, crusaders sent relics and reliquaries from the great imperial collections
of Constantinople specifically to their spouses or female kin. As a result women became the
initial arbiters of new cults created to honour both the Greek objects in the West and the
crusaders who sent the relics and who often never returned home. Women also kept personal
collections of relics that they used for a time for their own private devotions and then later
bequeathed to monastic communities or to their heirs as objects of devotion and as a
material instantiation of their lineage. In both cases, through these objects women shaped the
public and private – collective and familial – memories of the Fourth Crusade and its
perceived success in the West. They did so by linking the collective memory of the
crusade to what remained in the crusader’s absence: relics from Greece that recalled in
multiple registers of meaning the expedition of 1204, Christ’s sacrifice, and the people and
places associated with the apostolic past. By privileging a history of material objects, this
article addresses how the relics that arrived in the West, and principally in France, after
1204 informed and enriched the ways that men and women in Europe understood the
crusades, interpreted the deaths of their spouses and male relatives in the East, and
constructed patterns of devotion and commemoration in the decades that followed. In this
context relics possessed not only a social life, which could be traced in their
movement from East to West within a network of aristocratic and mercantile connections,
but also a ‘cognitive life’ tied to devotion, ritual and narrative, capable of suggesting the
contexts, ideas and concepts men and women used to remember the crusades and their
crusader kin.
10
Comte Paul Riant, ‘Des dépouilles religieuses enlevés à Constantinople au XIIIe siècle et des documents
historiques nés de leur transport en occident’, Mémoires de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France,
4th series, 6 (1875): 2–214 (177–203), where he discusses these totals.
11
Malcolm Barber, ‘The Impact of the Fourth Crusade in the West: the Distribution of Relics after 1204’, in
Urbs capta: the Fourth Crusade and its Consequences, ed. A. Laiou (Paris: Lethielleux, 2005), 325–34
(327).
12
Barber, ‘Impact of the Fourth Crusade in the West’, 328.
13
Riant, Exuviae, 2: 290–304.
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A.E. Lester
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Relics, memory and materiality
Relics are unique and complex things.14 In the broadest sense, relics were physical objects and
materials that held the virtue [virtus] or power of a saint or holy place.15 As Peter Brown
described, relics contained the praesentia of the saint in a way that made the holy person or
place literally present in the material object.16 Relics existed in many forms, as bones or parts
of the body in their most potent, but also as substances – like oil, cloth, milk, tears, stone or
wood – made holy through contact with a holy person. Other materials, known as brandea,
that had touched a relic, received the transferred power of the original and thus became holy.
Still other remeins– dust, sand, wood, water and oil – from sites in the Holy Land were
collected and venerated as eulogiae or ‘blessings’ and were especially popular as souvenirrelics during the crusade period. As material objects their value did not adhere to the quality or
‘worth’ of the fragment – bits of bone or dust – but rather to the social and religious meaning
it was given. And for this reason a relic’s value was often announced by its container, its
history and its movement, as well as by the social context in which it was enshrined. As
Cynthia Hahn has argued, reliquaries were created and embellished to direct and inform the
viewer’s understanding of the power and significance of what they contained. Valuable in their
own right, reliquaries ‘teach the viewer what a relic is and how to interact with it’.17
Although relics could function as commodities in some settings, their commodification was
not simple and their meaning was not fixed.18 Indeed, perhaps most powerfully, relics had the
ability, in the words of Annabel Wharton, to ‘collapse time’. As such, ‘[a relic] evokes a lost
fullness. It is the part that allows the embrace of an absent whole. … it is an intensely material
sign entangled in a spiritual significance.’19 And as Julia Smith has characterised it, ‘a relic
was a materialisation of complex abstractions, an inert fragment equally suggestive of
cosmological entirety and historical circumstance.’20 It was the possibility of abstraction that
made relics especially meaningful and potent.
Part of this abstraction stemmed from their role as translated objects that consented to move
across time (from the apostolic to the present) and space (from Jerusalem to Constantinople to
France) and thereby sanctify their new location. After 1204 when the numbers of relics
translated into Europe grew exponentially, displaying a relic’s provenance from Byzantine
treasuries and chapels became especially important. All of the relics considered here bore
markers – whether Greek inscriptions or the personal stories of the crusaders associated with
them – that announced their Eastern association and broadcast their authenticity. As they were
14
See the dedicated issue of Past and Present, Supplement 5 (2010), ed. Alexandra Walsham, on relics, and
Julia M.H. Smith, ‘Rulers and Relics c.750–950: Treasure on Earth, Treasure in Heaven’, Past and Present,
Supplement 5 (2010): 73–96, especially, 74–7. Relics were also the focus of a dedicated issue of the journal
Numen 57 (2010). Kevin Trainor discusses the material aspects of relics in his introduction ‘Pars pro toto:
On Comparing Relic Practices’, Numen 57 (2010): 267–83. See also Cynthia Hahn, ‘What Do Reliquaries
Do for Relics?’, Numen 57 (2010): 284–316.
15
Hahn, Strange Beauty, 8.
16
Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), 86–105.
17
Hahn, Strange Beauty, 8. Also Seeta Chaganti, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement,
Inscription, Performance (New York: Palgrave, 2008).
18
See Patrick Geary, ‘Sacred Commodities: the Circulation of Medieval Relics’, in The Social Life of
Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 169–91.
19
See Annabel Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006), 9–10; and Belting, Likeness and Presence, 297–310.
20
Smith, ‘Rulers and Relics’, 75.
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Journal of Medieval History
315
added to collections, inserted into new cases and set on display they were transformed and
objectified.21 By means of this process of appropriation these objects referenced far more
abstract ideas fundamental for understanding the outcome of Fourth Crusade: the appropriation
of Greek spiritual authority through its objects; continuity with an imperial and apostolic past;
and divine sanction of the Latin crusaders’ actions in Byzantium and the Levant. Translated
relics communicated their consent to the crusaders’ ambitions through their willing re-location.
They gave material endorsement to the actions of those men who sent them westward as
tokens of victory and objects of remembrance.
Relic translations had long been linked with memory in the crusade context. Many of the
participants on the First Crusade returned in the early years of the twelfth century with relics
from Jerusalem and the Holy Land and installed them in local churches and monastic
houses.22 But in this earlier period, relics travelled with many other materials – palm fronds,
silks, tapestries and even (as Nicholas Paul has suggested) animals – all preserved as symbols
of victory in the East. In these and other contexts relics could also function as crusade
memorabilia, evocative of the experience of a crusader’s time in the East.23 Yet in all such
examples, items that functioned as memorabilia were carried with the men who had the
associated experiences and personal memories tied to the object. This was not the case for the
relics that crusaders sent to their spouses from Constantinople, for these were objects that
came from the imperial chapels, especially from the Buceleon palace in Constantinople. They
included a distinctive litany of materials and fragments associated with Christ’s birth,
childhood and Passion (also known as the arma Christi), as well as relics of the early apostles
and objects associated with Mary. Nearly all of them evoked ideas of martyrdom, the imitation
of Christ and a proximity to the Holy Land that relics from the West – like the bones of
Martin of Tours or Geneviève of Paris – could not. Such relics were particularly significant to
crusaders and their kin because they signalled the kinds of suffering and ideas of martyrdom
that crusaders had come to understand as part of their vows.24 In turn, the Fourth Crusade
relics sent to spouses and female kin also evoked a memory of the loved one in their absence.
They were more than memorabilia and were meaningful without long personal narratives or
martial associations.
Recent work on material culture and cognitive behaviour offers additional insights as to how
and why relics functioned as powerful tools around which to structure and support memories,
both communal and personal. Objects and spaces inform the process of remembering, and
trigger memories and associations in the past. Funeral monuments and personal items like
clothes and jewellery kept as heirlooms, were created or preserved to offer access to the past
and to memorialise those dead or absent.25 Elisabeth van Houts has argued for a gendered
dimension to the process of remembering through the use of objects. Building a series of case
21
Concerning ‘an impulse to collect’ relics, see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Wonder’, The American
Historical Review 102 (1997): 1–26 (18); and Pierre Alain Mariaux, ‘Collecting (and Display)’, in A
Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2006), 213–32 (215).
22
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
30–2 (for those returning with relics before 1095), 144–68.
23
Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: the Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle
Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 90–133.
24
See below, n. 67.
25
See especially, Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford and
New York: Berg, 2001).
316
A.E. Lester
studies from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, van Houts showed that women preserved family
memories by
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informing monks and nuns [in monastic institutions] about their menfolk’s public lives, [and in turn]
contributed to in the public role of mourner and fund-raiser to finance the family’s memorial tradition.
On the other hand, they maintained a private memorial tradition by handing down objects … and with
those objects, private stories to their daughters and granddaughters.26
In addition to functioning in van Houts’ words as ‘memory pegs’, objects also shaped memories
and narratives through their interactions, that is, by means of the engagement they demanded or
received. Lambrois Malafouris and Colin Renfrew have recently posited that objects have a
‘cognitive life’, through which ‘things are constantly implicated in networks, or
… “meshworks” of material engagement’.27 Analysing these networks leads to a ‘more
detailed understanding and classification of the possible affective links between cognition and
material culture’. Working in the context of archaeology and cognitive science they have
begun to trace the ‘cognitive efficacy and the dynamics of past and present material culture’,
asking ‘what do things do for the mind? [And] how is human thought built into and executed
through things’?28 Malafouris and Renfrew argue that ‘things become what the human mind
and language makes of them, e.g. images, percepts, concepts or mental tokens.’ Objects in this
sense function as ‘cognitive amplifiers’ or ‘cognitive scaffolding’ buttressing and enhancing
the ideas and experiences associated with them.29 Applying these ideas to the translation,
objectification, collection and devotion to relics demonstrates how an object – a fragment of
bone, cloth, wood – can hold multiple layers of cognitive meaning and create memories that
‘are able to condense different times through their aesthetic, sensual or material properties’.30
Relics were especially adept at linking multiple past events: the apostolic past, crusader past
and death of male kin. In this way, relics were a kind of memory.31
Gifts and collections
The role of relics sent to female relatives has not been the focus of sustained scholarly attention. In
part this is due to the fact that many of these objects cannot be tied to written texts like chronicles,
letters or charters that describe their translations in detail. Even in the case of Louis of Blois and
26
Elisabeth van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1999), 93–120 (119).
27
Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, ‘The Cognitive Life of Things: Archaeology, Material
Engagement and the Extended Mind’, in The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the
Mind, eds. Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological
Research, 2010), 4.
28
Malafouris and Renfrew, ‘Cognitive Life of Things’, 2. Many of these ideas build on the work of Alfred
Gell, Art and Agency: a New Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also
Janet Hoskins, ‘Agency, Biography and Objects’, in Handbook of Material Culture, eds. Christopher
Tilley and others (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 74–84.
29
Malafouris and Renfrew, ‘Cognitive Life of Things’, 3; for the term ‘cognitive scaffolding’, see the
excellent essay by John Sutton, ‘Material Agency, Skills and History: Distributed Cognition and the
Archaeology of Memory’, in Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach, ed. Carl
Knappett and Lambros Malafouris (New York: Springer, 2008), 37–55 (37), citing Andy Clark, ‘Toward
a Science of the Bio-Technological Mind’, International Journal of Cognition and Technology 1 (2002):
21–33.
30
Hallam and Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, 51.
31
Here I draw upon Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of
Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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Journal of Medieval History
317
the head relic of St Anne, the relic arrived, as Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Mary B. Shepard note,
‘by means of a private, undocumented envoy, and its arrival or translation, was apparently not
commemorated in a special translation celebration’.32 We must speculate about when the relics
arrived in the West and when precisely they were installed in Chartres cathedral, for the
written evidence is unconcerned with these details.33 Gifts to female kin have also been
overlooked because they were of a more routine and personal nature. They were neither overly
diplomatic statements of authority and victory – as were the relics the newly elected Emperor
Baldwin I sent to Philip Augustus and Pope Innocent III as an expression of his new
authority.34 Nor were they associated with thrilling tales of holy thefts – of abbots filling their
robes with bits of bone and silver reliquaries – used to aggrandise the relic collections of
cathedrals and monasteries like those at Halberstadt and Pairis.35 The relics sent to female kin
had a simpler history of movement: they were transferred from one spouse to another or from
brother to sister for the purpose of commemoration, personal devotion and public veneration.
Public gifts
In most cases, when a crusader sent a relic to the West arrangements had to be made for its
transportation as well as its formal reception and integration into the rhythms of the local
liturgy. In doing so, the public reception and veneration of a relic was closely linked to a
crusader’s commemoration. This occurred both through the physical placement of the relics in
a new communal setting in a local church, cathedral or chapel and through the creation of a
narrative cycle within liturgical texts that detailed the relic’s translation. These narratives, often
part of lectionary readings, retold in clipped form the events of a particular crusade expedition
and a crusader’s role in obtaining the relic. An object’s biography often included the story of
its migration and incorporated a crusading dimension that would have had nothing to do with
its earlier past or previous apostolic associations or those of the Holy Land. Although the
32
Elizabeth Carson Pastan and Mary B. Shepard, ‘The Torture of Saint George Medallion from Chartres
Cathedral in Princeton’, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 56 (1997): 26. A liturgy for
St Anne, however, was developed at Chartres and probably in place by the mid-thirteenth century.
33
Art historians have speculated about the precise date of the arrival of the relics of St Anne at Chartres and
attempted to link the relics with the history of the cathedral’s rebuilding during the thirteenth century. The
northern portal sculpture featuring St Anne was probably completed in phases between c.1220 and 1240.
There is a vast literature on the building and glazing of Chartres, which is beyond the scope of this
article. Most recently, see Anne McGee Morganstern, High Gothic Sculpture at Chartres Cathedral, the
Tomb of the Count of Joigny, and the Master of the Warrior Saints (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2011), 73–103.
34
Riant, Exuviae, 2: 56–7, no. 2, and 62, no. 8.
35
See ‘The Deeds of the Bishop of Halberstadt’, in Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade, ed.
Alfred J. Andrea with Brett E. Whalen. Rev. edn. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 237–64; and Alfred J. Andrea,
‘The Anonymous Chronicler of Halberstadt’s Account of the Fourth Crusade: Popular Religiosity in the
Early Thirteenth Century’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 22 (1996): 447–77. Gunther of
Pairis’ Hystoria Constantinopolitana relates the furtum sacrum – or holy theft – of his community’s
abbot, Martin of Pairis in the days following the siege of the city. See Alfred J. Andrea, ed. and trans.,
The Capture of Constantinople: the ‘Hystoria Constantinoplitana’ of Gunther of Pairis (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); and Francis R. Swietek, ‘Gunther of Pairis and the Historia
Constantinopolitana’, Speculum 53 (1978): 49–79. For other narratives that address the theft of relics
after 1204, see Alfred J. Andrea, ‘The Devastatio Constantinopolitana, a Special Perspective on the
Fourth Crusade: an Analysis, New Edition, and Translation’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
19 (1993): 107–149; idem, with Paul I. Rachlin, ‘Holy War, Holy Relics, Holy Theft: the Anonymous of
Soissons’s De terra Iherosolimitana. An Analysis, Edition, and Translation’, Historical Reflections/
Réflexions Historiques 18 (1992): 147–75.
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A.E. Lester
creation of such narratives was very much the provenance of male clerics, women played a
significant role in establishing the public ceremonies and informing liturgies that
commemorated the relic and its crusade history. It was women who in several cases mediated
access to the objects that became the focus of a community’s devotion and it was the letters
and charters sent to female kin that provided both the authentics for some relics as well as the
main narratives of their translation.
Chartres cathedral and the relics amassed there after 1204 offer one of the more robust
examples of this phenomenon.36 Catherine of Blois (d. 1218) must have received the relic of
St Anne as well as those of Sts Peter and Andrew by 1206, at the same time she learned of her
husband’s death following the battle of Adrianople.37 The cathedral’s necrology explains that it
was Catherine who presented the relic of St Anne to the church and noted that she ‘worked
peacefully together with the clergy to institute the celebration’ of a series of venerations
commemorating Count Louis and the holy head (sanctum caput) on the anniversary of his
death.38 The necrology distinguished between the roles of each spouse: Count Louis had
‘acquired the relic in Constantinople’ and sent it to the cathedral ‘with a precious cloth
(pallio)’ where it was received with great joy by the people of Chartres for ‘the head of the
mother (St Anne) was joined to the house of the daughter (Mary)’, whose ‘chemise’ or tunic
was already the focus of the major twelfth-century cult at Chartres.39 Countess Catherine
presented (presentavit) the relic to the community and then amplified the veneration (amplior
veneratio) of Louis’ anniversary by augmenting the rents and gifts the count had first set in
place before his departure in 1202.40 Her role in the process was reiterated 10 years later when
36
The material evidence at Chartres is particularly important because most of the manuscripts in the
Bibliothèque Municipale were destroyed by Allied bombing in 1944. See Margot E. Fassler, The Virgin
of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010),
especially the appendices which reconstruct several of the manuscripts; and Craig Wright, ‘The Palm
Sunday Procession in Medieval Chartres’, in The Divine Office in the Middle Ages: Methodology and
Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography: Written in Honor of Professor Ruth Steiner, eds.
Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 344–71, especially
365–6, n. 16.
37
Far less is known about the reception of the relics of Peter and Andrew at Beauvais. It is possible that more
details of these gifts and the commemorations due to Louis of Blois and Catherine of Clermont were
recorded in the necrology of Beauvais. That text, however, was part of six volumes known as the
‘Archive of Beauvais’ which was sold at auction through Sotheby’s London sale of Western manuscripts,
2 July 2013, lot 51 (see http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2013/western-manuscriptsminiatures-l13240/lot.51.html). I have not been able to view the text.
38
‘Clerus hujus ecclesie et comitissa Katremoerina, que ex parte predicti comitis viri sui caput presentavit, in
id concorditer convenerunt, pro intuitu statuendo, ut singulis annis de oblationibus factis predicto sancto
capiti centum solidi in augmentum et ampliorem venerationem anniversarii ejusdem comitis adderentur’:
Cart. Chartres, 3: 89. Catherine had ruled the county of Blois and Chartres as well as her own lands of
Clermont from the time of her husband’s departure in 1202 until her death in 1218. During much of this
time the countess and the canons were in conflict regarding certain liberties of the cloister. See Cart.
Chartres, 2: 36–7, no. 77 (1207), and 56–62, no. 203 (1210–11). See the brief discussion in Jane Welch
Williams, Bread, Wine & Money: the Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993), 22–4.
39
‘Caput sancte Anne, matris beate Virginis genitricis Dei, apud Constantinopolim acquisivit et huic sancte
ecclesie cum pallio precioso transmisit. Unde ex tali presentatione thesauri et susceptione materni capitis in
domo filie, facta leticia magna in populo’: Cart. Chartres, 3: 89 (15 April). On the veneration of the Virgin’s
chemise, see Fassler, Virgin of Chartres; and E. Jane Burns, ‘Saracen Silk and the Virgin’s Chemise: Cultural
Crossings in Cloth’, Speculum 81 (2006): 365–97.
40
‘Et comitissa Katerina, que ex parte predicti comitis viri sui caput presentavit, … in augmentum et
ampliorem venerationem anniversarii ejusdem comitis adderentur’: Cart. Chartres, 3: 89–90. For Louis’
original gifts in 1202, Cart. Chartres, 2: 17, no. 153 (4 May 1202).
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Journal of Medieval History
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her own entry was added to the necrology at the time of her death (20 September 1218), where she
is listed again as Louis’ wife, who presented the relic to the church and gave three additional
pieces of precious cloth (tria alia pallia preciosa), most likely silk of Byzantine origin, to the
cathedral.41 In the cathedral’s rounds of remembrance, Catherine and Louis were linked to the
relic of St Anne twice a year, their gifts and connection to Constantinople resounding in the
happy reception of the relic. The sources are silent about how long Catherine possessed the
relic before passing it to the canons. The reference to her presentation of the relics, however,
suggests that some sort of translation ceremony took place and, as Margot Fassler has noted a
liturgy for St Anne, was in place by the middle of the thirteenth century.42
The Chartrain was the centre of a network of crusader families whose male kin joined Count
Louis of Blois on the Fourth Crusade, travelling to Constantinople and in some cases dying at the
count’s side in Adrianople.43 As Claudine Lautier has shown, several relics came to Chartres in
the wake of 1204 in addition to that of St Anne.44 Gervais de Châteauneuf and his son Hervé
accompanied Louis to the East and sent relics of the head of St Matthew to Chartres, as well
as that of St Christopher to the abbey of Saint-Vincent-aux-Bois nearby.45 The treasury
inventory for the cathedral, drawn up in 1322, lists several other objects including a reliquary
containing the True Cross with a double transverse cross in the centre surrounded by
Christological relics and materials designated by Greek inscriptions and a second reliquary
also inscribed in Greek containing a relic of the belt of the Virgin, both of which came from
Constantinople.46 The ‘grande châsse’ that contained the major relics of the Virgin at Chartres
was also embellished with the addition of smaller fragments relating to the Virgin’s life,
including pieces of the True Cross, the Sepulchre, and fragments of Sts Paul, Cosmas and
Damien.47 And Lautier suggests that other relics of Eastern provenance, likely originating in
the chapels and churches of Constantinople, arrived in Chartres with returning crusaders after
1205.48
Just as Countess Catherine received the relic of St Anne from Louis of Blois, so too other
female relatives were involved in the commemoration of relics and their crusader lineages.
After Gervais of Châteauneuf sent the relics of St Matthew to Notre-Dame de Chartres in
1205, Amicie of Beaumont, countess of Leicester, the wife of Simon III of Montfort and
mother of Simon IV, donated a precious vas or container made of silver and gems to serve as
41
‘Que caput beate Anne, matris beatissime Virginis Dei genitricis Marie, a viro suo, illustri comite
Ludovico, apud Constantinopolim acquisitum et huic missum ecclesie, cum precioso pallio presentavit et
tria alia pallia preciosa eidem ecclesie dedit’: Cart. Chartres, 3: 178 (20 September).
42
Fassler, Virgin of Chartres, 109, 344–6, 393–4, 426.
43
See Geoffrey of Villehardouin, The Conquest of Constantinople, in Chronicles of the Crusades, trans.
Caroline Smith (New York: Penguin, 2008), paragraphs 357–63; and Longnon, Les compagnons de
Villehardouin, 79–111.
44
Claudine Lautier, ‘Les vitraux de la cathédrale de Chartres: reliques et images’, Bulletin Monumental 161
(2003): 3–97 (24–8, 54–65).
45
‘Obiit vir nobilis, bone memorie, Gervasius de Castro-Novo, qui caput beati Mathei apostoli et
evangeliste, apud urbem Constantinopolim acquisitum et inde allatum, huic sancte ecclesie presentavit et
dedit. Nobis quoque XL solidos annui redditus ad suum anniversarium celebrandum donavit’: Cart.
Chartres, 3: 53 (28 February). For his donations before his departure, see Cart. Chartres, 2: 19–20, nos.
156 and 157; Riant, Exuviae, 2: 184; and Lautier, ‘Les vitraux’, 57, 59–60.
46
Lautier, ‘Les vitraux’, 24–5 and 75, citing the inventory of 1322. See also L. Merlet, ed., Catalogue des
reliques et joyaux de Notre-Dame de Chartres (Chartres: Garnier, 1885), 90.
47
Lautier, ‘Les vitraux’, 25 and 62.
48
Lautier, ‘Les vitraux’, 60–4, including relics of St Thomas, St Blaise and several other fragments of the
True Cross and material related to Mary and Christ.
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A.E. Lester
its reliquary.49 Indeed, the necrology of Chartres offers numerous examples of mothers and wives
providing for the anniversaries of their deceased sons and husbands. Certain events resound in the
necrology as well suggesting the toll of crusading on the local families of the region. April 15, 17,
18 and 19 marked the anniversaries of Louis of Blois, Stephen of Perche, Renard of Montmirail
and John of Friaize, all of whom died with a large part of the French army fighting the Cumans
near Adrianople and all of whose remains never returned to the West.50 In this case, the presence
of relics tied to accompanying anniversary masses served as a way to commemorate crusaders. It
also further collapsed the Christian deaths of the martyrs with that of the sacrificed crusaders in
the East.
At Chartres this connection was further reinforced through an elaborate iconographic
programme – in both glass and sculpture – that underlined the connections between crusader
families and the relics from the East they donated. As Lautier notes, when the relics of
St Anne arrived in Chartres, they altered the liturgical life of the cathedral, which now had
another set of major feasts that deepened the familial dimension of the life the Virgin and the
holy family and thus contributed to a sense of female familial commemoration.51 St Anne was
added as the focus of the redesign of the north portal, creating a parallel set of images and
associations to balance that of the south portal, the so-called martyrs’ portal, which depicted
martyrs some of whom bore a striking resemblance to contemporary crusaders.52 Likewise, the
49
In 1206, Amicie (d. 1215) created an endowment for the building works of the cathedral (‘expendendos in
opus ipsius fabrice’) that funded an anniversary mass following her death. ‘Preterae donavit eidem ecclesie
vas preciosum, argenteum deauratum, quod largo sumptu de proprio fecit studiose componi et miro opera
atque gemmis eleganter formari, ad reponendum caput beati Mathei apostoli et evangeliste.’ See Cart.
Chartres, 2: 35–6, no. 186 (1206), and 3: 173 for the necrology. Simon of Montfort (whom the editors
suggest is Simon II, d. 1104) is also listed in the necrology, 25 September, Cart. Chartres, 3: 185.
Simon IV of Montfort (d. 1218) was also one of the leaders of the Albigensian Crusade from 1208 until
his death outside the walls of Toulouse. He was part of the contingent of the Fourth Crusade that
continued on to Syria rather than to Constantinople after the fall of Zara in 1203. See Villehardouin,
Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Smith, paragraphs 4, 38 and 109; also Longnon, Les compagnons de
Villehardouin, 113–14; and Donald E. Queller, ‘The Fourth Crusade: the Neglected Majority’, Speculum
49 (1974): 441–65. For the connection with Chartres, see Yves Delaporte, Les vitraux de la cathédrale de
Chartres. 4 vols. (Chartres: É. Houvet, 1926), 3: 458–60; and Françoise Perrot, ‘Le vitrail, la croisade et
la Champagne: réflexion sur les fenêtres hautes du choeur à la cathédrale de Chartres’, in Les champenois
et la croisade: actes des quatrièmes journées rémoises 27–28 novembre 1987, eds. Yvonne Bellenger and
Danielle Quéruel (Paris: Aux amateurs des livres, 1989), 109–30 (122–3).
50
Villehardouin records ‘Emperor Baldwin, never willing to flee, remained on the field with Count Louis
[who had been wounded in two places]. The emperor was captured still alive, while Count Louis was
killed. Among those lost there were Bishop Peter of Bethlehem, Stephen of Perche, who was Count
Geoffrey’s brother, Renard of Montmirail, who was the count of Nevers’ brother, Matthew of Walincout,
Robert of Ronsoy, John of Friaize, Walter of Neuilly, Frederick of Yerres and his brother John, Eustace
of Heumont and his brother John, Baldwin of Neuville, and many others this book will not mention
here’: Villehardouin, Conquest of Constantinople, trans. Smith, paragraphs 360–1. Many of these men
appear in the cartulary and necrology of Chartres: Cart. Chartres: 2: 14, 17, 21–2, 43–4 (where in 1209
Hervé of Nevers gave detailed instructions about the commemoration of his brother, Renaut of
Montmirail); 3: 89–93 (for the necrology entries).
51
The feast of St Anne, celebrated on 26 July, was a duplex feast. In Lautier’s words, ‘il apparait donc
clairement que la présence de la relique a provoqué un changement spectaculaire dans la liturgie.’
Lautier, ‘Les vitraux’, 62–3.
52
Lautier, ‘Les vitraux’, 63. For the redesign of the portal and the resemblance of contemporary crusaders,
see Morganstern, High Gothic Sculpture at Chartres Cathedral; James Bugslag, ‘Ideology and Iconography
in Chartres Cathedral: Jean Clément and the Oriflamme’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 61 (1998): 491–
508; and idem, ‘St Eustace and St George: Crusading Saints in the Sculpture and Stained Glass of
Chartres Cathedral’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 66 (2003): 441–64.
Journal of Medieval History
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glazing programme inside the nave and transepts reflected the close ties between saints, the Virgin
and the crusading families active in the Chartrain.53 This is most vividly exemplified in the
stained-glass panels featuring St Eustace, though it is notable in other panels involving Mary
as well as those depicting Charlemagne, Constantine and the translation of relics from
Constantinople to France.54 James Bugslag argued that these images, and especially that of
St Eustace in window 115, ‘conflate donor and devotional focus into a single composition’.55
As Bugslag explains:
For anyone familiar with this standard recension, the identity of the donor here [a knight of the
Beaumont family] perceptibly merges with that of the saint. By manipulating the semantic
elements of the narrative in these ways, knightly devotion here is manifested not simply through a
donor image being combined with a pious donation, as is usual, but more directly through a
conflation of identities between donor and saint.56
He notes as well that a similar conflation occurs in the right lancet window where the lady of
Beaumont occupies a place in the bottom scene below scenes of the Annunciation, Nativity
and Adoration of the Magi.57 By entwining scenes of familial devotion – knights and ladies
kneeling in prayer before cross-adorned altars – within the stained-glass panels that depict or
narrate the lives of saints, many of whom were from the East, crusader piety and remembrance
at Chartres came to be conflated with devotion to the saints and their relics contained in the
altars below the glass.
Although never as spectacular as at Chartres Cathedral, the association between relics and
remembrance among spouses and female kin can be found elsewhere throughout northern
France. Indeed, in the same year that the relics of St Anne arrived in the Chartrain, Aléaume
de Fontaine, a knight from Fontaine-sur-Somme (in the Beauvaisie), 12 kilometres south-east
of Abbeville, sent a cache of relics from Constantinople to his wife Laurette, the daughter of
the lord of Saint-Valéry. Before his departure on crusade in 1199 the couple had founded a
small collegiate church at Longpré. Aléaume sent these relics wrapped in precious silks shortly
before he died in 1205 accompanied by letters patent to explain their origin and authenticity.58
His chaplain, Wibert, carried them through Venice and on to the Beauvaisie and gave them to
Laurette, who, like Countess Catherine, in turn gave them to Longpré. Laurette may have also
helped to compose the long lectionary entry that formed the basis for the history of the relics
and Aléaume’s deeds on crusade.59 Surprisingly, the contents of the relic collection were never
detailed. A drawing from the 1840s of a now lost reliquary box suggests that Wibert
53
See Delaporte, Les vitraux; Perrot, ‘Le vitrail, la croisade’.
See Clark Maines, ‘The Charlemagne Window at Chartres Cathedral: New Considerations on Text and
Image’, Speculum 52 (1977): 801–23. I would also like to thank Christopher Timm for sharing his
unpublished paper, ‘Constantine and Charlemagne: an Apologia for the Fourth Crusade in the Windows
at Chartres Cathedral’, presented at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, July 2013.
55
Bugslag, ‘St Eustace and St George’, 454.
56
Bugslag, ‘St Eustace and St George’, 455.
57
Bugslag, ‘St Eustace and St George’, 454, n. 48.
58
Riant, Exuviae, 2: 69–70, nos. 19–20. On Aléaume and Laurette, see Longnon, Les compagnons de
Villehardouin, 179–80; and Susan B. Edgington, ‘A Female Physician on the Fourth Crusade? Laurette
de Saint-Valéry’, in Knighthoods of Christ: Essays on the History of the Crusades and the Knights
Templar, Presented to Malcolm Barber, ed. Norman Housley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 77–85.
59
The collegial church Longpré-les-Corps-Saints (dép. Somme). For the lections, see Riant, Exuviae, 2: 10–
22. The history of this text is very complicated. Riant traces the 1437 lections to an earlier document, known
as the Rotulus de Longpré, which survives as a copy in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection
Baluze, vol. 38, f. 213. See also Catalogue des manuscrits de la Société des antiquaires de Picardie,
54
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A.E. Lester
transported a staurotheke – a reliquary box in the Greek form – that displayed a relic of the True
Cross at the centre surrounded by several other relic fragments.60 The Longpré readings used to
celebrate an office for the relics also commemorated both Aléaume and Laurette as a couple who
together acquired and bestowed the relics on the community and who would be remembered as
part of the history of the holy object itself. Moreover, the anonymity of the relics – simply referred
to as Corps-Saints – meant that Aléaume and Laurette as named individuals personalised the holy
bones with which they were associated. The bones Aléaume sent may have also stood in for his
own missing bones, which never returned to the West. The material of the relics recalled the
bodies of the crusading dead and associated them with those of the martyrs and the saints.
The conjoined celebration of Greek relics and the remembrance of crusaders was not solely
the province of spouses. Siblings also took up the duties of commemoration and remembrance.
In the years after 1204, Henry of Ulmen sent his sister, a canoness at the Augustinian house of
Saint-Nicholas in Stuben, a beautiful staurotheke reliquary now in the cathedral treasury of
Limburg-an-de-Lahn, which he had taken for himself after the fall of the city. When he gave it
to the canonesses in 1208, he also established an anniversary for himself, his mother and his
wife, Ermengard, joining the celebration of the relic’s provenance with his crusading deeds
and associating both with his sister and wife.61 Similarly, in 1205, Nivelon de Quierzy
(d. 1207), bishop of Soissons, one of the religious leaders of the Fourth Crusade, sent a long
list of relics to his sister, Helvide, the abbess of Notre-Dame de Soissons and the nuns of her
community, including relics of the belt of the Virgin and a silver tabula or tablet, probably
also a staurotheke reliquary containing numerous relics.62 He too asked the nuns to remember
him and his deeds in the East when they prayed before these objects. As was common,
Helvide added to these bequests for his anniversary and founded an additional prebend for a
nun to serve charitably in the hospital of the abbey in remembrance of her brother.63 In the
cases where relics were incorporated into the devotional calendars of monastic or cathedral
communities, the commemoration of objects came to be tied ritually to the remembrance of
the crusaders who sent them to the West. Women played a powerful role as arbiters of holy
objects, and as those who both oversaw the installation of relics in their new devotional
contexts and whose prayers were considered especially important. In these examples, objects
were anchored to texts – charters, letters, necrologies and lections – that affirmed the
connection between relics and crusaders and that inscribed and informed their continued
collective memory.
Mémoires de la Société des antiquaires de Picardie 57 (Amiens: Société des Antiquaires de Picardie, 2002),
45, no. 98.
60
M. Duthoit made a series of drawings recording the reliquaries of the abbey of the Paraclet and Longpréles-Corps-Saints. See M. Dusevel, ‘Notes sur divers objets provenant de l’ancienne abbaye de Paraclet, près
Amiens, et de l’église de Longpré-les-Corps-Saints’, Bulletin du Comité Historique et Arts et Monuments 4
(1853): 82–5. For a discussion of the reliquary in relation to similar objects, see Jannic Durand, ‘Le reliquaire
byzantine de la vraie croix du Mont Saint-Michel’, in ‘Tout le temps du veneour est sans oyseuseté’:
mélanges offerts à Yves Christe pour son 65ème anniversaire par ses amis, ses collègues, ses élèves, ed.
Christie Hediger (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 335–48.
61
See Riant, Exuviae, 2: 82, no. 31; Heinrich Beyer, Leopold Eltester and Adam Goerz, eds., Urkundenbuch
zur Geschichte der jetzt die Preussischen Regierungsbezirke Coblenz und Trier bildenden mittelrheinischen
Territorien. 3 vols. (Coblenz: Hölscher, 1860–74), 2: 275, no. 235; and Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps,
112.
62
See Riant, Exuviae, 2: 67–8, no. 16; and Longnon, Les compagnons de Villehardouin, 115–16. In addition
to his gifts to the nuns of Notre-Dame de Soissons, he gave relics to the cathedral of Soissons, the abbeys of
Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, Longpont, Saint-Étienne of Châlons and Saint-Aubins of Namur.
63
Riant, Exuviae, 1: 7 and 2: 190.
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Private collections
Relics were used in other ways to remember those lost on crusade and to reinforce
commemorative strategies within families. As Nicholas Paul has recently noted, women played
a central role in ‘the commemorative structures that operated within the family and household,
structures that we only rarely glimpse’.64 References to relics kept in personal collections
suggest how families remembered crusader kin in the absence of a returned body or other
personal mementos and in the private sphere of their own chapels or spaces of prayer.65 The
use of relics in the context of domestic devotions also underscores the ways that personal
memory and ideas about suffering – whether on crusade or in imitation of Christ – were linked
to the growing materiality of Christian piety.66 Moreover, private devotion to relics that had
connections to crusaders served to emphasise the expanding associations between crusading
and martyrdom, whereby death on crusade was understood as a holy sacrifice, an idea that,
although never officially defined, was increasingly popular by the thirteenth century.67 Thus, in
the years after 1204 some relics remained for a time in private collections where they served
as personal reminders of a family’s crusade lineage and memorials for absent kin. Unlike those
objects that were integrated into larger institutional collections and became part of public
rituals discussed above, objects kept in personal collections rarely have formal histories or
lectionary readings attached to them. They appear in the material record alone, as objects seen
or noted in inventories, testaments or later descriptive catalogues.68 Yet they do fit plausibly
within the pattern of movement and commemoration discussed above and thus expand the
count of relics sent from the East after the Fourth Crusade.
Although there is no diplomatic correspondence describing gifts sent from Emperor Baldwin I
to his daughters, Jeanne (r. 1206–44) and Marguerite (r. 1244–78), who ruled the county of
Flanders in his absence and after his death, both women had personal collections of relics
whose contents strongly suggest that some of the objects originated as gifts sent from
Constantinople.69 In 1208 Emperor Henry (who came to the imperial throne after Baldwin’s
64
Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps, 164–5.
On practices of domestic devotion, see Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, ‘Medieval Domestic Devotion’, History
Compass 11 (2013): 65–76; Beth Williamson, ‘Altarpieces, Liturgy, and Devotion’, Speculum 79 (2004):
341–406 (380); and Henk van Os, ed., The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300–
1500 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
66
See Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: an Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe
(Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2011). As Bynum argues, the shape, material and iconography of many
relics and reliquaries spoke to ‘seeing an unseen that is, although hidden, really there – in other words, it
seems to be about demonstrating the doctrine of the real presence of Christ … and about affirming the
phenomenon of visionary experience’ (66). See also Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary:
Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
67
For this development, see Caroline Smith, ‘Martyrdom and Crusading in the Thirteenth Century:
Remembering the Dead of Louis IX’s Crusades’, Al-Masaq 15 (2003): 189–96; and Anne E. Lester,
‘Confessor King, Martyr Saint: Praying to Saint Maurice at Senlis’, in Center and Periphery: Studies on
Power in the Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, eds. Katherine L. Jansen, G. Geltner
and Anne E. Lester (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 195–210.
68
For an example of using the material record alone to reconstruct historical events and movements, see
Robin Fleming, ‘Recycling in Britain After the Fall of Rome’s Metal Economy’, Past and Present 217
(2012): 3–45; similarly Michael McCormick, The Origins of the European Economy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); and more broadly, Leora Auslander, ‘Beyond Words’, American
Historical Review 110 (2005): 1015–45.
69
While it is possible Baldwin I sent relics to his young daughters, Jeanne and Marguerite, it is, I think, more
likely that their uncle, Emperor Henry I (r. 1206–16) could have sent them to his nieces. Between 1206 and
1208 Henry sent a flurry of imperial gifts to houses in Flanders and Hainaut. On the countesses and their rule,
65
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death in April 1205) sent his brother, Philip, count of Namur, a beautiful and ornately fashioned
gold vas or container, holding part of the True Cross as well as many other relics from the imperial
palace.70 It is possible that similar objects were sent to Baldwin’s daughters, Emperor Henry’s
nieces, as well. Both women became powerful patrons of the Cistercian Order and shortly
before their retirement they each offered gifts from their personal relic collections to the
Cistercian nunneries where they chose to be buried.71 In 1238, Jeanne and her husband
Thomas of Savoy founded an altar with an attached prebend at the nunnery of Salzinnes near
Namur and gave a great many relics to the community, including several pieces of the True
Cross, a piece of the column to which Jesus was bound during the flagellation, a piece of the
Holy Lance, a fragment of the stone of the Sepulchre, several morsels of the holy bread from
Cana, a part of the basin in which Christ washed the feet of the Apostles, a fragment of the
purple garment Christ wore before the crucifixion, as well as hairs from the Virgin, a part of
her belt, and a tooth from John the Baptist, among many other fragments.72 As Thomas
Coomans noted, the striking number of relics of Christ suggest that they came from the Holy
Land and Constantinople.73 Philippe Georges also noted the heightened interest in amassing
relics related to Christ’s Passion among the Cistercian nuns and mulieres religiosae of the
diocese of Liège.74
Gifts of relics that had originated in the East and especially in Constantinople become
increasingly common by the middle of the thirteenth century. In 1278, two years before her
see Erin Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave, 2006),
and Nicolas Dessaux, ed., Jeanne de Constantinople, comtesse de Flandre et de Hainaut, (Paris: Somogy,
2009), especially 257–71, which details several of the reliquaries associated with Jeanne.
70
‘Vobis mitto, per magistrum Danielem de Scausin, clericum nostrum, vas aureum pulchrum et pretiosum,
in quo continetur maxima pars de Ligno Domini, in modum crucis, auro circumligata et ornata. Mitto etiam
vobis de sacrosanctis reliquiis imperialis palatii Bucceleonis, videlicet: de spinis corone Domini, de veste
purpurea Ihesu Christi, de panis infantie Salvatoris, de linteo quo precinxit se in cena, de zona beate
Marie virginis, de capite sancti Pauli et Sancti Jacobi minoris’: Riant, Exuviae, 2: 74, no. 23. These were
accompanied by other objects including ‘tres samitos et duos annulos, unum smaragdum et alium
rubinum’. For related relics and prebends involving the count of Namur, see Riant, Exuviae, 2: 79–80,
nos. 28–9. See Filip Van Tricht, The Latin Renovatio of Byzantium: the Empire of Constantinople (1204–
1228) (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 145–50, 251–349, which touches in the notes on related gifts of relics.
71
On the patronage activities of the countesses, see Jordan, Women, Power, and Religious Patronage;
E. Jordan, ‘The Success of the Order of Saint Victor: a Comparative Study of the Patronage of Canonical
Foundations in Thirteenth-Century Flanders’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 96 (2001): 5–33. Also
Geneviève de Cant and Régine Pernoud, Jeanne et Marguerite de Constantinople: comtesses de Flandres
et de Hainaut au XIIIe siècle (Brussels: Racine, 1995); Robert Didier, ‘Reliquaires offerts par Marguerite
de Constantinople aux collégiales Sainte Waudru à Mons et Saint-Vincent à Soignies’, Bulletin de la
Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France (1997): 252–9. See also Robert Didier and Jacques
Toussaint, eds., Autour de Hugo d’Oignies (Namur: Société archeologique de Namur, 2003); and
Christine Descatoire, Marc Gil and Marie-Lys Marguerite, Une renaissance: l’art entre Flandre et
Champagne, 1150–1250 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2013).
72
See Thomas Coomans, ‘Moniales cisterciennes et mémoire dynastique: églises funéraires princières et
abbayes cisterciennes dans les anciens Pays-Bas médiévaux’, Cîteaux 56 (2005): 87–146 (132, especially
n. 149). For the donation, see Jacques Toussaint, Les cisterciens en Namurois, XIIIe–XXe siècle.
Monographies du Musée des Arts anciens du Namurois 15 (Namur: Société archéologique de Namur,
1998), 171. The list of relics was included in an inventory of the abbey’s treasury, printed in PierreLambert de Saumery, Les délices du Païs de Liége. 5 vols. (Liège: E. Kints, 1738–44), 2: 299–301 (300).
A version of the inventory has also been presented in Philippe Georges, ‘Le trésor des reliques de
l’abbaye du Val Saint-Georges à Salzinnes: les cisterciennes et le culte des reliques en pays mosan’,
Annales de la Société Archéologique de Namur 74 (2000): 77–114 (103–7).
73
Coomans, ‘Moniales cisterciennes et mémoire dynastique’, 132.
74
Georges, ‘Le trésor des reliques de l’abbaye du Val Saint-Georges à Salzinnes’, 92–4.
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death, Countess Marguerite offered her personal collection of relics to the Cistercian nunnery of
Flines, her favoured house and where she chose to be buried. Among the most precious of these
objects – kept in cases set with precious stones – was a drop of the Holy Blood, several pieces of
the True Cross and a thorn from the Crown of Thorns that Louis IX had given Marguerite, as well
as teeth from Sts Peter and Paul, and ribs from St Nicholas and St Elisabeth among other
fragments.75 Flines would become the familial necropolis of the counts of Flanders and
Dampierre and thus a special place for crusader commemoration, which in this case was
enhanced by the countess’ personal relic collection.76
Although not as well documented, Blanche of Navarre, regent countess of Champagne from
1201–24, gave her personal collection of relics to the Cistercian nunnery of Argensolles, which
she had founded in 1224 and where she retired shortly before her death in 1229. According to
Martène and Durand, who visited the nunnery during their travels in the first quarter of the
eighteenth century, Argensolles possessed ‘many relics with Greek inscriptions … among these
is a small altar which had belonged to Countess Blanche.’77 Similar objects surface among
other communities – often Cistercian nunneries. The Cistercian nunnery of Le Paraclet (not to
be mistaken for the similarly named nunnery that Abelard founded for Heloise) near Amiens is
associated with a very fine cross containing relics of the True Cross as well as a delicate
crown reliquary holding fragments of the Crown of Thorns.78 Although the reliquaries have
been dated to the 1220s or 1230s, the relics themselves suggest an earlier and Eastern
provenance. Enguerrand de Boves founded Le Paraclet in 1219 for his two daughters, who
later became the first abbess and prioress of the community.79 He had taken part on the Fourth
Crusade but chose to leave the army at Zara in 1202 and to travel on to Jerusalem to fulfil his
vow. He and his brothers, Robert de Boves and Hugh de Boves, however, remained close to
the rulers of Constantinople and engaged in the affairs of the Latin empire during the 1220s.80
It is possible that Enguerrand or his brothers, or an aristocratic crusading patron with ties to
the de Boves family or Le Paraclet, sent relics to the community or their female kin in the
decade after the nunnery’s foundation.
75
Coomans, ‘Moniales cisterciennes et mémoire dynastique’, 135–6; and Édouard Hautcoeur, Cartulaire de
l’abbaye de Flines. 2 vols. (Lille: Quarré, 1873), 1: 222, no. 201 (May 1278).
76
The Cistercian abbey of Clairvaux also served as a familial necropolis for the counts of Flanders and other
crusader patrons close to the abbey. There a similar, albeit larger, collection of relics from Constantinople
was also amassed. See Charles Lalore, Le trésor de Clairvaux de XIIe au XVIIIe siècle (Troyes:
J. Brunard, 1875). On the role of Cistercian nunneries in the burial and commemoration of crusaders, see
Anne E. Lester, ‘A Shared Imitation: Cistercian Convents and Crusader Families in Thirteenth-Century
Champagne’, Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009): 353–70.
77
‘On voit derriere le choeur des religieuses cette princesse [Blanche of Navarre] representée, quoiqu’elle
n’y soit point enterrée. Mais elle leur donna beaucoup de reliques, qui sont dans le trésor avec des
inscriptions grecques. On y voit entr’autres un petit oratoire, qui étoit apparemment celui de cette
princesse’: Edmond Martène and Ursin Durand, Voyage litteraire de deux religieux benedictins de la
Congrégation de Saint Maur. 2 vols. (Paris: F. Delaulne, 1717–24), 1, part 2: 76.
78
See Descatoire, Gil and Marguerite, Une renaissance, 173, for a description of the cross and its
inscriptions; and Didier and Toussaint, eds., Autour de Hugo d’Oignies, 356.
79
See Anne E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: the Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in
Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 106–7, 155 and 161.
80
Longnon, Les compagnons de Villehardouin, 123–5; and Van Tricht, Latin Renovatio of Byzantium, 147.
For the de Boves family’s interactions with the counts of Saint-Pol, who also took part on the Fourth Crusade
and likewise founded and endowed Cistercian communities, see Jean-François Nieus, ed., Les chartes de
comtes de Saint-Paul (XIe–XIIIe siècles), ARTEM 11 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), especially nos. 160,
201–2 and 206.
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On the basis of its materiality alone, the Jaucourt cross, now in the Louvre, suggests a
tantalisingly similar provenance and connection between crusaders and their female kin. Jannic
Durand has identified the reliquary as one of the finest examples of a Byzantine staurotheke in
the West.81 The Greek box dates to the eleventh or twelfth century and may have made its way
to northern France – as a gift or through pious theft – in the decades after 1204. In the 1340s it
was set into a new golden statuary mount. As was the fashion at the time, the staurotheke was
affixed to an ornate silver gilt base with two angels, who clasped the Greek case in their hands,
holding it aloft, appearing to offer the piece up to the viewer and to God Himself.82 Along the
bottom of the new addition runs a short inscription: ‘This sanctuary (reliquary) which holds the
True Cross was offered by the noble Dame Marguerite D’Arc Dame de Jaucourt (d. 1380).
Pray to the Lord for them that they may have a good life and a good end. Amen (‘+ cest
saintuaire ou il a de la vrai crois fist ainsi à estofer noble dame madame Marguerite Darc dame
de Jaucourt; Pries nostre segnieur pour li qui li doint bone vie et bone fin amen +’). Marguerite
was part of a long lineage of crusaders who were also the founders of the Cistercian nunnery
of Val-des-Vignes, which served as the family’s necropolis, not far from the castle of
Jaucourt.83 It is possible that after Marguerite’s death the reliquary came to rest with the nuns
in a chapel dedicated to the family’s crusader kin. The Jaucourt cross also appears to have been
part of a personal collection of relics, similar to other such collections kept by the wives and
female relatives of crusaders. Marguerite’s prayers and those of the nuns of Val-des-Vignes
may have stretched back generations to benefit those of their lineage who had died in the East
and who sent the material object that was the focus of their devotions.
By the fourteenth century, as the personal accoutrements of prayer began to expand, private
collections of relics like those described here were often used with books of hours and specially
designed psalters as aids to devotion.84 Relics that had crusader associations and origins in the
East complemented prayer books embellished with family heraldry and markers of a family’s
lineage meant to aid the women in remembering her kin over generations.85 By the
mid-fourteenth century, women’s detailed testaments begin to enumerate gifts of books and
81
Durand, ‘La quatrième croisade’, 57–8. For comparable objects, see Jannic Durand, ‘La relique impériale
de la vraie croix d’après le Typicon de Sainte-Sophie et la relique de la vraie croix du trésor de Notre-Dame
de Paris’, in Byzance et les reliques de Christ, eds. J. Durand and B. Flusin (Paris: Association des Amis de
Centre d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 2004), 91–105. See also Sandrine Lerou, ‘L’usage des reliques
du Christ par les empereurs aux XIe et XIIe siècles: le saint bois et les saintes pierres’, in Byzance et les
reliques de Christ, eds. Durand and Flusin, 159–82.
82
In form, this resetting of the original eleventh-century staurotheke was quite brilliant for it kept the
Byzantine object and form intact and through this presentation effected an instruction for the viewer,
conveying how the reliquary was to be venerated by modelling this in the form of the kneeling angels.
On this construction, see the comments by Alexander Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’, in
Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe, eds. Martina Bagnoli and others
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 211–22 (212), where Nagel comments that ‘the Greek
[Jaucourt] reliquary is handled like a relic in its own right; it has become fused with the relic and
partakes in its venerability.’ On the form, see K.M. Holbert, ‘Relics and Reliquaries of the True Cross’,
in Art and Architecture of Late Medieval Pilgrimage in Northern Europe and the British Isles,
eds. S. Blick and R. Tekippe. 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1: 337–64 (360).
83
For Val-des-Vignes and the Jaucourt, see Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns, 160–1, 189–91.
84
See the comments in Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three
Women and Their Books of Hours (London: British Library, 2003), 82–95 and 255–6.
85
See, for example, Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion, 95–119; Richard A. Leson, ‘Heraldry and Identity in
the Psalter-Hours of Jeanne of Flanders (Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Lat. 117)’, Studies in
Iconography 32 (2011): 155–98; and Adelaide Bennet, ‘Commemoration of Saints in Suffrages: From
Public Liturgy To Private Devotion’, in Objects, Images, and the Word: Art in the Service of the Liturgy,
ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton University Press and Index of Christian Art, 2003), 54–78.
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relics bestowed to the next generation and through which women were often able to recount the
historical genealogies of their relic collections.86 As Queen Blanche of Navarre noted in her
testament, drawn up in 1396, ‘the reliquary that contained a fragment of the sponge from the
Passion and a piece of the head of John the Baptist came from her aunt Jeanne d’Evreux’.87
Marie of Saint-Pol (b. 1317, testament from 1377) also enumerated the previous owners of her
books and relics in a similar fashion, linking them to her crusader kin. She possessed ‘a
fragment of the True Cross set in gold, with pearls and stones, standing on a little foot of
silver, and she had preserved from her husband’s collection a cross of gold and emeralds
which William de Valence (her father-in-law) had brought from the Holy Land’.88 By the
fourteenth century, it was common to find objects that had once originated in the thirteenthcentury crusade context newly embedded in settings – whether as small statues, altars or
pieces of jewellery – that facilitated memory on multiple levels: memories of close kin, known
in present time, memories of crusaders of previous generations and the associated recollections
of Christ or his saints whose presence was evoked through the material of the relic itself.89
In each of these instances relics from the treasuries of Byzantium and the Holy Land became
part of women’s personal collections – sometimes for decades – before they were given to
communities for more public veneration and commemoration. They would have been used in
personal chapels and with portable altars and they would have held their attention and the
focus of their gaze as they prayed the hours, commemorated the dead and cultivated a memory
of their crusading kin whose stories adhered to the material objects from the East. We cannot
know precisely what kinds of ‘memory work’ such objects performed, especially in the
absence of accompanying texts. And yet, as James Fentress and Chris Wickham point out,
many people, and women especially, cultivated methods of remembering that lay outside the
(often hegemonic) confines of texts.90 Objects could encode memories and stories and could
do so in ways that made powerful arguments about the conjoined nature of Christ’s suffering
(emphasised in relics of his Blood, the Crown of Thorns, the True Cross) and a crusader’s
86
One of the most detailed testaments was that of Blanche of Navarre, widow of Philip VI of France, edited
by Léopold Delisle, ‘Testament de Blanche de Navarre, reine de France’, Mémoires de la Société de
l’Histoire de Paris et l’Île de France 12 (1885): 1–64. See also, Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, ‘Lost and
Found: Visualizing a Medieval Queen’s Destroyed Objects and Collection’, in Queenship in the
Mediterranean: Negotiating the Role of the Queen in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras, ed. Elena
Woodacre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 73–96; and Mariah Proctor-Tiffany, ‘Portrait of a
Medieval Patron: the Inventory and Gift Giving of Clémence of Hungary’ (PhD diss., Brown University,
2007).
87
See Brigitte Beuttner, ‘Le système des objets dans le testament de Blanche de Navarre’, Clio. Femmes,
Genre, Histoire 19 (2004), online at http://clio.revues.org/644, at para. 22 (Accessed 9 February 2014).
See also eadem, ‘Women and the Circulation of Books’, Journal of the Early Book Society 4 (2001): 9–
31; and Marguerite Keane, ‘Most Beautiful and Next Best: Value in the Collection of a Medieval Queen’,
Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 360–73.
88
Hilary Jenkinson, ‘Mary de Sancto Paulo, Foundress of Pembroke College, Cambridge’, Archaeologia 66
(1914–15): 401–46 (426, and edition of testament, 433). See also Richard Rouse and Mary Rouse, ‘French
Literature and the Counts of Saint-Pol ca. 1187–1377’, Viator 41 (2010): 101–40; and Sean L. Field, ‘Marie
of Saint-Pol and Her Books’, English Historical Review 125 (2010): 255–78. This is the same Saint-Pol
family that took part on the Fourth Crusade and subsequent crusade expeditions to the East.
89
For examples of such portable reliquaries, particularly reliquaries worn as jewellery, see James Robinson,
‘From Altar to Amulet: Relics, Portability, and Devotion’, in Treasures of Heaven, eds. Bagnoli and others,
111–16, and the catalogue entries, 55–76. On these themes more broadly, see Julia M.H. Smith, ‘Portable
Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200)’, Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012):
143–67.
90
See James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1988), 137–43.
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sacrifice in the East. These were complex sentiments to marshal in writing, but which could be
beautifully and readily presented in material form.91
In both contexts – in the public realm of community commemoration and in the private world of
domestic devotion – relics from the East, and initially in the early thirteenth century especially those
from Constantinople sent to female kin, served as ‘cognitive amplifiers’, parts of a larger whole.
They were bones and fragments that recalled and in some cases mnemonically replaced the
bodies of male kin that never returned. The relics especially – more so than silks and cloths,
rings and shields – offered evocative, visceral reminders of women’s spouses and crusader kin.
They were a material manifestation of the very spirituality of sacrifice that underlay and
legitimated the crusading endeavour. To pray before the relics of Christ’s Passion, fragments of
his purple robe, his Crown of Thorns, the girdle of the Virgin, or relics of Christ’s divine lineage
including St Anne, was to recognise and reaffirm the kind of sacrifice crusaders themselves took
on, especially when they did not return from the East. This kind of deliberate slippage – of bone
for bones, holy material for worldly remains – was given further sanction by theologians like
William Durand (d. 1296). Writing in the later thirteenth century Durand explained that the
contents of treasuries should be displayed on solemn feast days ‘in memory of their being
offered to the church, namely, in memory of those that offered them to that church’.92 The
conflation of relic and the memory of those who offered them was perhaps even more in
evidence with those objects encased in small cross reliquaries or staurotheke; the weighty thing
that could be held in one’s hand as a reminder ‘of the corporality God was said to have taken on
in Jesus’. But such objects in miniature were also an invocation of the corporality of a husband,
brother, father or son, ‘a corporality that bound Christ to human experience’.93
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented in a session on ‘Women and Objects’ at the 128th Annual
Meeting of the American Historical Association, New Orleans, LA, January 2013. I thank the participants
at that session for their helpful comments and encouragement, especially Julia M.H. Smith, whose work
on this topic has been invaluable. I would also like to thank Scott G. Bruce, M. Cecilia Gaposchkin,
Nicholas Paul and William Chester Jordan who generously read earlier drafts.
Anne E. Lester is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is the author
of Creating Cistercian Nuns: the Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century
Champagne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), and has co-edited Cities, Texts, and Social
Networks, 400–1500: Experiences and Perceptions of Medieval Urban Space, with Caroline Goodson
and Carol Symes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010) and Center and Periphery: Studies on Power in the
Medieval World in Honor of William Chester Jordan, with Guy Geltner and Katherine L. Jansen (Leiden:
Brill, 2013). She is currently at work on a book entitled Fragments of Devotion: Relics and
Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.
91
A similar process was at work in the creation and use of books of hours. See Smith, Art, Identity and
Devotion, 58. For the role of images and objects in relation to practices of memory, see also Belting,
Likeness and Presence, 9–12.
92
Timothy M. Thibodeau, trans., The ‘Rationale Divinorum Officiorum’ of William Durand of Mende
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 45; and Paul, To Follow in their Footsteps, 112.
93
Nina Rowe, ‘Pocket Crucifixions: Jesus, Jews, and Ownership in Fourteenth-Century Ivories’, Studies in
Iconography 32 (2011): 81–120 (107). The interplay of objects and devotion is a subject still in need of
further research, specifically as we expand ideas of perception and cognition in relation to material
objects. On this, see Beth Williamson, ‘Sensory Experience in Medieval Devotion: Sound and Vision,
Invisibility and Silence’, Speculum 88 (2013): 1–43.