The Morthouse

Reliquary from Spain, 1624. From the V&A Museum:

This reliquary once held a fragment of St Scholastica’s right arm, visible through the crystal window. A Latin inscription asks the saint to pray for us. Another inscription, as well as the dove perched on her fingers, alludes to Scholastica’s death. The holy legend states that her brother St Benedict saw her soul ascending to heaven in the form of a dove.

Reliquary from Spain, ca. 1525. V&A Museum, London:

This empty reliquary portrays a young girl in a brocaded dress with a fashionable square-cut bodice. Her identity is unknown, but she probably represents a virgin martyr, perhaps St Ursula who, according to legend, was martyred with 11,000 virgins. The reliquary may originally have held a relic of her head.

Find another Ursula virgin reliquary here.

“The Becket Casket.” V&A Museum, London. From Limoges, France, ca. 1180-1190.

From the V&A:

The murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December, 1170 by four knights in the service of King Henry II, is one of the few episodes of British medieval history that is still widely familiar. It provoked outrage throughout Europe, and Becket’s tomb became a place of pilgrimage within days of his death. He was canonised in 1173 and his shrine was one of the most famous in the Christian world, until its total destruction in 1538 on the orders of king Henry VIII.

Relics of Becket were much in demand and were often housed in elaborate caskets. Numbers of these survive today, scattered worldwide, most made of Limoges enamel, like this example. The V&A chasse is the most elaborate, the largest, and possibly the earliest in date. It is a magnificent example of Romanesque art, probably made for an important religious house.

The casket, or ‘chasse’, shows the murder of Becket, his burial, and the raising of his soul to heaven. […] Scenes of Becket’s martyrdom were made familiar in Canterbury by their depiction in the stained glass windows of the Trinity Chapel, near the shrine itself. The shrine was made in 1220, when Becket’s relics, newly enclosed in a shrine of gold and silver encrusted with gems, were placed behind the Archbishop’s throne.

Reliquary Box with Scenes from the Life of John the Baptist. Byzantine, 14th century.

Source: The Cleveland Museum of Art, via Treasures of Heaven:

The Christian cult of John the Baptist emerged early as a result of his prominence in the account of the Gospels, which credit him as the first to recognize Christ as the promised Savior. After his execution at the fortress of Machaerus, his remains were allegedly moved to Sebaste. Despite reports that John’s coffin “was opened, his bones burned, and his ashes scattered” during the reign of Julian the Apostate (Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History 3.3), Christian pilgrims such as Egeria in the 380s continued to visit his tomb. His head, however, was taken to the capital, where it was solemnly deposited on 18 February 391 in a church, richly endowed by Emperor Theodosius I. Over the centuries, at least thirty-six churches were dedicated to St. John the Baptist in Constantinople alone, attesting to his exceptional status among the saints and martyrs venerated in the Byzantine Empire.

The painted wood box likely served as a container for one of the saint’s relics. Several such relics—two fragments of his skull, his right arm, and locks of his blood-clotted hair—were kept and venerated in churches and monasteries at Constantinople into the late Byzantine period.

The Shrine of St. Amandus; The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. Flemish, early 13th century with significant later additions. From Kathryn B. Gerry’s article on the Treasures of Heaven exhibit:

Amandus was the bishop of Maastricht and the founder and abbot of the Monastery of Elnon, near Tournai, where he was buried after his death (ca. 679). Before the end of the seventh century, he was considered a saint, and a pilgrimage cult developed at Elnon, eventually requiring that his bones be housed in a reliquary that could be shown to the faithful. In addition to being visited by pilgrims and carried in procession on feast days, the relics of St. Amandus were taken on a tour of the region around Elnon at least twice: once in 1066 to raise funds to rebuild the monastery after it was destroyed by fire, and again in 1107 to remind ambitious nobles of the monastery’s power and privileges. At least one earlier reliquary for St. Amandus must have existed, but it was destroyed or lost prior to the thirteenth century, perhaps in the fire of 1066. The figure at one of the gable-shaped ends is presumably Amandus; the other end, now empty, probably originally contained a figure of Christ. Although many such reliquaries were destroyed or sold to collectors during periods of religious reformation and political revolution, some continued to be used into the modern period: a reliquary similar to that of St. Amandus is still owned by the religious brotherhood of St. Symphorian in Belgium, and carried in public procession on several occasions during the year. Over the centuries, reliquaries such as this were likely to suffer some wear. Extensive scientific testing has shown that this reliquary was made in the early thirteenth century, but that it has been repaired and modified throughout the centuries as it continued to be used in the service of the cult of St. Amandus. The most recent modifications, however, were made by a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century art dealer hoping to “improve” the piece and make it more marketable.

I’m an Amanda, so this appeals to me greatly. However, if I were a saint, I would have preferred the tour of Flanders before dying.

Reliquary of the Tooth of Mary Magdalene. Tuscan, 14th century (goldsmith’s work: 15th century). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

Source: Treasures of Heaven online exhibit.

Ostensorium with “Paten of St. Bernward.” German (Lower Saxony [Hildesheim?]), ca. 1180-90 (paten); ca. 1350-1400 (monstrance). The Cleveland Museum of Art.

From the Treasures of Heaven exhibit:

This unusual ostensorium (from the Latin ostendere: to show) was made to facilitate the display and veneration of ten relics, most prominent among them an elaborate liturgical paten—a shallow plate for the elevation of the Eucharist during Mass—associated with St. Bernward of Hildesheim (d. 1022), and a relic of the True Cross.

On the back, eight more relics are visible:

They’re wrapped in silk and are identified—by an inscription on parchment accompanying the piece—as the remains of Saints Godehard, Nicholas, Auctor, Silvester, Servatius, John Chrysostom, Alexis, and Lawrence.

There’s a nice little video about this piece—showing a curator/smart person opening it up and revealing the (sadly, empty) compartments inside—on the website for the exhibit Treasures of Heaven.

The reliquary is believed to have held bits of skull and breastbone purported to belong to one of the 11,000 slaughtered maiden-followers of Saint Ursula.*

Image: Unknown female saint. Source: britishmuseum on Flickr.

Reliquary bust of an unknown female saint, probably a companion of St Ursula.
South Netherlandish, c. 1520 – 1530.
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

*Allegedly.

Rhenish crystal reliquary, ca. 1200, featured in the (totally awesome!) Treasures of Heaven online exhibit. From Martina Bagnoli’s article on the site:

This barrel-shaped reliquary consists of a large, cylindrical piece of crystal bored down the middle to create a narrow compartment for a relic. According to medieval lapidaries, rock crystal was a symbol of spiritual purity. Hence the mineral was frequently used to adorn saints’ reliquaries from the early Middle Ages onward. In the Walters’ reliquary, however, rock crystal is not merely decorative but is used as a chamber. In this way, the relic is revealed for veneration rather than hidden from view as in earlier reliquaries. The rock crystal chamber magnified the relics contained inside, establishing the real presence of the saint. The emergence of this new type of transparent reliquary is to be linked with a renewed interest in visibility during the early Gothic period. Transparent reliquaries satisfied the believers’ desire to see the relics without having to handle them.

Portable altar of Countess Gertrude (Germany, ca. 1045) and its contents. From Holger A. Klein’s article in the Treasures of Heaven online exhibit:

According to the prescriptions of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea of 787, every consecrated altar was to contain sacred relics. The portable altar of Countess Gertrude was no exception. Of the various relics listed in the inventory of 1482, those of Sts. Hermes, Bartholomew, Vincent, Adelheid, Gertrude, Marcian, and others are still preserved today. They were wrapped in textiles, stuffed into a richly decorated silk pouch and inserted into the altar through a trap door on the altar’s underside. This oblong reliquary pouch was sewn together with a few irregular stitches from a single piece of light-green silk. Its woven figural decoration, which consists of pairs of opposing lions arranged in several narrow registers, is reminiscent of Near Eastern designs and Islamic textiles produced by Mudejar artists in thirteenth-century Spain. An accompanying cedula, or parchment strip with an identifying inscription, suggests that the bag used to contain relics of the arm of one of the Twelve Apostles, namely that of St. Bartholomew. Together with other precious relics, some of which were likewise wrapped in silk and linen textiles, the apostle’s remains (multiple fragments of soft tissue rather than bone) were found inside the portable altar of Countess Gertrude of Braunschweig in 1985, when the trap door on the reliquary’s underside was opened for the first time since the late nineteenth century. According to early Christian tradition, St. Bartholomew was flayed alive and beheaded, which may explain the presence of soft tissue (rather than bone) and its identification as the “arm” (brachium) of the apostle.

I wish I could find more information about each of the pieces in this picture, and what they might be, but no dice.

Source: The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Arm Reliquary of the Apostles, Cleveland Museum of Art. From Germany (Lower Saxony), ca. 1190.

This image comes from Treasures from Heaven, a wonderful online exhibition about saints and relics in medieval Europe. From Holger A. Klein’s article about this piece:

This reliquary belongs to a class of objects often referred to as body-part, shaped, or “speaking” reliquaries. Imitating the form of a clothed lower arm with an outstretched right hand, it gives visual expression to the very body part it contains, namely, the ulna bone—part of the lower arm—of an unidentified saint. Correspondences between the shape of a reliquary and its contents, however, are not the rule. Some arm reliquaries contain the remains of not just one, but several saints. Others hold relics from different parts of a saint’s body, or contact relics. The popularity of arm reliquaries from the twelfth century onward must be considered a result of their usefulness as liturgical props, which allowed clerics to animate a saint’s body during liturgical celebrations and processions. In this way, the saint could literally bless, touch, and heal the faithful with his own hand.

Here’s an X-ray of this piece, showing the arm bone that’s in there: