Since Late Antiquity, relics have provided a privileged spiritual bond between life and death, between human beings and divinity. Royalty, nobility and clergy all tried to obtain the most prestigious remains of sacred bodies, since they granted influence and fame and allowed the cult around them to be used as a means of sacralization, power and propaganda. This volume traces the development of the veneration of relics in Europe and how these objects were often catalysts for the establishment of major pilgrimage sites that are still in use today. The book features an international panel of contributors taking a wide-ranging look at relic worship across Europe, from Late Antiquity until the present day. They begin with a focus on the role of relics in Jacobean pilgrimage, before looking at the link between relics and their shrines more generally. The book then focuses in on two major issues in the study of relics, the stealing of relics (Furta Sacra) and their modern-day scientific examination and authentication. These topics demonstrate not only symbolic importance of relics, but also their role as physical historical objects in material religious expression. This is a fascinating collection, featuring the latest scholarship on relics and pilgrimage across Europe. It will, therefore, be of great interested to academics working in Pilgrimage, Religious History, Material Religion and Religious Studies as well as Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Cultural Studies.

A sweeping, authoritative, and entertaining history of the Christian cult of the saints from its origin to the Reformation From its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. Robert Bartlett examines all of the most important aspects of the saints—including miracles, relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the saints' role in the calendar, literature, and art. The book explores the central role played by the bodies and body parts of saints, and the special treatment these relics received. From the routes, dangers, and rewards of pilgrimage, to the saints' impact on everyday life, Bartlett's account is an unmatched examination of an important and intriguing part of the religious life of the past—as well as the present.

Pilgrimage inspired and shaped the distinct experiences of commoners and nobles, men and women, clergy and laity for over a thousand years. Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader is a rich collection of primary sources for the history of Christian pilgrimage in Europe and the Mediterranean world from the fourth through the sixteenth centuries. The collection illustrates the far-reaching significance and consequences of pilgrimage for the culture, society, economics, politics, and spirituality of the Middle Ages. Brett Edward Whalen focuses on sites within Europe and beyond its borders, including the holy places of Jerusalem, and provides documents that shed light upon Eastern Christian, Jewish, and Islamic pilgrimages. The result is an innovative sourcebook that offers a window into broader trends, shifts, and transformations in the Middle Ages.

"Drawing on contemporary accounts and a wealth of illustration, Sacred Treks captures the atmosphere of pilgrimage through the ages. Divided into three sections - "Early Paths," "Medieval Roads," and "Modern Ways" - the book describes every aspect of pilgrimage past and present, from the practicalities of setting out, to the difficult conditions of travel, to the great sites such as Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, and Canterbury. The book looks at the pilgrims themselves, from St. Brendan, who is said to have cast himself adrift, letting God guide his search for a paradisal holy island, to the penitents, cure-seekers, and adventurers who in the Middle Ages set out for the unknown in their millions."

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The modern pilgrimage—to sites ranging from Graceland to the veterans’ annual ride to to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to Jim Morrison’s Paris grave—is intertwined with man’s existential uncertainties in the face of a rapidly changing world. In a climate that reproduces the religious quest in seemingly secular places, it’s no longer clear exactly what the term pilgrimage infers—and Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World critiques our notions of the secular and the sacred, while commenting on the modern media’s multiplication of images that renders the modern pilgrimage a quest without an object. Using new ethnographical and theoretical approaches, this volume offers a surprising new vision on the non-secularity of the “secular” pilgrimage. "This book will be sure to stoke our intellectual fire and heat up the discussion over the highly charged topic of secular pilgrimage.”—Simon Bronner, Penn State University

Relics were everywhere in medieval society. Saintly morsels such as bones, hair, teeth, blood, milk, and clothes, and items like the Crown of Thorns, coveted by Louis IX of France, were thought to bring the believer closer to the saint, who might intercede with God on his or her behalf. In the first comprehensive history in English of the rise of relic cults, Charles Freeman takes readers on a vivid, fast-paced journey from Constantinople to the northern Isles of Scotland over the course of a millennium.In "Holy Bones, Holy Dust," Freeman illustrates that the pervasiveness and variety of relics answered very specific needs of ordinary people across a darkened Europe under threat of political upheavals, disease, and hellfire. But relics were not only venerated--they were traded, collected, lost, stolen, duplicated, and destroyed. They were bargaining chips, good business and good propaganda, politically appropriated across Europe, and even used to wield military power. Freeman examines an expansive array of relics, showing how the mania for these objects deepens our understanding of the medieval world and why these relics continue to capture our imagination.