Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c.700–1200)

By Julia M.H. Smith

Proceedings of the British Academy, No. 181 (2012)

Introduction: A tale from twelfth-century Germany introduces this lecture. It concerns, a kindly woman and her neighbour whose son was very ill. In an effort to help save the child, she produced a pebble and recommended to the child’s mother that she make a revitalising drink by steeping it in water. There was nothing unusual about this sort of domestic remedy, yet her well intentioned initiative met with rebuff. This was because the mother who rejected something which might have saved her dying child was Jewish, while her well-wisher was a Christian who had produced a stone from Jesus’ grave in Jerusalem as a cure for the child’s ailments. How she had acquired it remains unknown: a pilgrim must have picked up a pebble from somewhere in the complex of buildings and courtyards that comprised the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or from the street right outside, but we have no idea whether that pilgrim was the woman herself, her husband, friend, parents, or more distant ancestor. The well-wisher’s belief in its efficacy typifies the tendency of her religious community to vest small material objects with importance as points of contact between the divine and the human. This Christian tradition is my subject.

The brief moment of neighbourly interaction is recorded because German rabbis preserved its details as a morality tale of steadfast maternal piety. From a rabbinical perspective, the stone had been defiled because it had been associated with a dead body. Rejection of non-Jewish healing practices was in any case praiseworthy, however tragic the consequences. But the Christian woman had every reason to believe that her little stone might cure a dying child. After all, it came from the tomb from which, according to one thousand years of tradition, backed by the testimony of scripture, the dead Jesus had risen. Its origin was the very site where the most fundamental transcendental event of the Christian story was believed to have occurred. This small piece of stone represented the essence of Christian teaching, and the woman to whom it belonged believed that it could cure a sick person—indeed ward off death from Christian and Jew alike.


This stone, and other objects like it, are the focus of this lecture. As the rabbinical tale implies, these little things were so readily portable that they could travel very long distances and cross political borders but, simultaneously, were also capable of delimiting cultural and religious boundaries. They are, then, good to think with in debates about religious and cultural identity. In addition, they encourage hard thinking about processes and representations of religious change and, in particular, about the reception and transformation of a religion which had originated on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean in the Roman era. They also challenge some of the central presumptions of the post-Enlightenment world, assumptions which, until fairly recently, have been hardwired into scholarship across the humanities. These stones and bones cannot be fitted into a world view which sunders materiality and belief, or enforces a rigid distinction between subject and object, or between object and thing. They cross political frontiers, but they also throw into sharp focus some of the conceptual boundaries which separate us from our medieval predecessors. Furthermore, they push medievalists beyond comfortable interdisciplinarity, and encourage fruitful dialogue with experts in profoundly different religious traditions about the interface between materiality and belief.

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