Mobile Saints

Relic Circulation, Devotion, and Conflict in the Central Middle Ages

Kate Craig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378979
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Mobile Saints examines the central medieval (ca. 950–1150 CE) practice of removing saints' relics from rural monasteries in order to take them on out-and-back journeys, particularly within northern France and the Low Countries. Though the permanent displacements of relics—translations— have long been understood as politically and culturally significant activities, these temporary circulations have received relatively little attention. Yet the act of taking a medieval relic from its "home, " even for a short time, had the power to transform the object, the people it encountered, and the landscape it traveled through. Using hagiographical and liturgical texts, this study reveals both the opportunities and tensions associated with these movements: circulating relics extended the power of the saint into the wider world, but could also provoke public displays of competition, mockery, and resistance. By contextualizing these effects within the discourses and practices that surrounded traveling relics, Mobile Saints emphasizes the complexities of the central medieval cult of relics and its participants, while speaking to broader questions about the role of movement in negotiating the relationships between sacred objects, space, and people.

Part one
Departures

1 The effects of forced relic movement

In 827, a man named Ratleig stood in the crypt of the basilica of St-Tiburtius in Rome. Having failed to access the relics of the eponymous saint, he and his companions were now targeting the grave of two saints who had been martyred and entombed together: Marcellinus and Peter. They lifted the stone slab covering the tomb and found what they were looking for: the body of Marcellinus, in the upper part of the sarcophagus, with a marble tablet by his head identifying the saint. They wrapped the relics in linen, carefully replaced the lid to prevent discovery of the theft, and brought them back to the house of the professional relic procurer and deacon Deusdona.¹ At this point, Ratleig’s mission was complete: he had been sent to Rome by his employer, the Carolingian courtier Einhard, to bring back the relics of Roman saints. He now had the relics of Marcellinus—yet he hesitated. As he supposedly confided to Einhard later:

…it seemed to him not at all permissible to return home with only the body of blessed Marcellinus—as if it would be a sin that the body of the blessed martyr Peter, who had been his associate in his passion and for more than five hundred years had rested with him in the same sepulcher, should remain while he was leaving.²

As Ratleig’s reasoning went, the two saints were companions and friends, and it would be wrong to split them up by taking the relics of one but not the other. His resolution was to find a way to go back and get Peter’s relics too, so that the saints could embark on the journey to their new home north of the Alps together.

Ratleig (or rather Einhard) was not the only one of his contemporaries thinking through the problems and possibilities inherent in moving relics. By the ninth century, relic translation was a matter of course in the Carolingian world.³ The deposition of relics in altars as part of a church’s formal consecration had been common since the sixth century and required since the ninth.⁴ The capitularies pronounced at Mainz in 813 indicated that episcopal permission should be sought prior to a translation, but proscriptions like this did not mean translations were considered undesirable; rather, they reflected the will to place the cultural power of relic movement securely within the hands of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in service to the Carolingian state.⁵ In the relocation of relics over long distances, the Carolingians saw the opportunity to achieve a number of ends, especially to borrow spiritual prestige from Rome by obtaining its martyrs, as in the case of Marcellinus and Peter.⁶

Using relic translations to accomplish these goals relied on the perception that the saint’s supernatural presence, their praesentia, moved along with their relics.⁷ Translations insisted that a saint could leave one place and inhabit another by virtue of their relics’ movement. This was the issue at the heart of the problem with removing Marcellinus without taking Peter along. Theologically, neither saint was limited by their relics’ location: the saints could happily visit with one another in heaven regardless of their relics’ location on earth.⁸ Yet Einhard’s description of this moment implicitly argued that it did matter—that separating Marcellinus and Peter’s relics on earth would have affected the saints’ bond with one another. Though he was clearly making these claims to justify the choice to take both saints’ relics, his framing of the problem relied on the idea that the saints’ presence was connected to their relics. Translation narratives, like Einhard’s account, were thus stories of geographical abandonment and reconnection through relic movement.

It was exactly this association between relic, place, and presence that posed difficulties when the relics’ movement was instead undesirable, as happened during the “forced translations” of relics in response to the attacks of Vikings and other groups.⁹ These attacks have long been associated with a mass exodus of relics from the affected areas, in keeping with the descriptions of later authors such as Orderic Vitalis.¹⁰ The image of a wave of terrified monks fleeing with their relics from the 850s onward is evocative, believable, and as Felice Lifshitz has shown, at times suspiciously in sync with the political motives of the late Carolingian kings (at least in Neustria).¹¹ Despite these considerations, many relics were actually displaced temporarily or permanently, and the effects of these events on the discourses of relic movement are the subject of this chapter. Relic movement had implications for the saint and their people, even when it was presented as an unavoidable consequence of violence. These displacements especially posed challenges to the clean logic of saintly presence that a translation took for granted and in fact relied on. If a saint could “leave” a place and inhabit another via the movement of their relics, as translation accounts insisted, did the removal of relics mean the saint was fleeing rather than fighting?

There was no single model for how a Carolingian hagiographer might address these issues. The first half of this chapter explores how two ninth-century monastic authors grappled with the problem, by paying attention to the ways in which they represented the saint’s presence and absence as their relics were moved away from the danger. Even if the relics were expected to return, their movement severed the physical connection between the saint and their home; thus, the process of interpreting a relic’s forced removal had to go beyond explaining why it was necessary. An author needed to reframe the relationships between place, relics, and saint in ways which allowed the relics to depart while maintaining that the saint was powerful and an effective protector. The texts I discuss in this light are Ermentarius’ two books on the successive removals of the relics of Philibert from Noirmoutier and Aimoin’s descriptions of the departures and returns of the relics of Germanus to Paris. In their work, the two hagiographers each used different narrative strategies to treat the question of what relics’ movement meant for the places left behind. They had to choose whether to represent the saint’s departures in a positive or negative light, what relationships the saint should have to the places they passed through or rested at, and most troublingly, where the saint’s power was ultimately located. Their approaches, while always emphasizing the infallibility of their saint, reveal just how flexible the concept of saintly presence needed to be to accommodate both stability and movement. If the saint’s power was in fact tied entirely to the physical location of his relics, how could relic flight in the face of danger ever be justified? If, instead, the saint maintained a holy foothold in various places regardless of the presence of his relics, why did the relics themselves matter and why did they need to be saved? I do not claim that a consensus emerged around these questions, or even that these authors’ approaches were representative—only that these texts highlight the pressure that unwilling relic movement put on contemporary understandings of saintly presence in ways that were different from planned relic translations.

Yet the significance of these events for our understanding of relic movement did not end in the ninth century. In some cases, relics that were moved away from Vikings were later moved again for different reasons (as was the case for Philibert), suggesting that these forced translations dislodged relics in ways which led to the increased voluntary relic movement of the tenth and eleventh centuries. But the motif of ninth-century relic flight from Vikings also took on a life of its own, reflecting and shaping later discourses about relic mobility and stability. The second half of this chapter examines later hagiographical representations of forced translations as narrative strategies. Centuries later, authors were still reflecting on the meanings of these movements and how they differed from translations, as a fifteenth-century scribe surmised in his rubric for a text describing Remigius’ displacement in 882: “The relatio of the precious body of the most holy saint Remigius is done on the third kalends of January. It is not called a translation, because it came about on account of fear of the pagans.”¹² Accordingly, the “memories” of Viking-era relic flight were remembered and adapted over time, both to rationalize further relic movements and to support new arguments about saints and their geographical homes.

The refugee saint

Perhaps no saint is more closely associated with the relic flights of the ninth century than St. Philibert. Over the course of 40 years, the monks moved his relics at least five times: from their initial home on the island monastery of Noirmoutier (Hero) to Déas (836), Cunault (858), Messay (862), St-Pourçain (871), and finally Tournus (875).¹³ The firsthand description of the initial three stages, written by the monk Ermentarius, once made Philibert the classic example of saints displaced by Vikings in the ninth century and a touchstone for the continuing debates over the extent and effects of Viking assaults on a troubled Carolingian world. Ermentarius’ account, which emphasized widespread destruction and the need to move ever further east in search of safety, seemed to epitomize this period as a time of general chaos.¹⁴ This vision has been generally revised, and Ermentarius himself reevaluated as an ambitious author who “wanted as quickly as possible to escape the Atlantic backwater in which he was living.”¹⁵ In this view, his two books of miracles promoting Philibert as a “Viking-displaced” saint were written to endear him to Charles the Bald and the Carolingian ecclesiastical power brokers.

Yet a skeptical take on Ermentarius’ motives in promoting Philibert’s cult does not preclude the realities of the threats posed to Noirmoutier, or the concerns described by Ermentarius that led to Philibert’s repeated removals. Laying aside the tangled debates regarding the efficacy and political acumen of Charles the Bald, the realities of continuity or disruption by the Viking attacks, and the difficulties of reliance on monastic perspectives on either issue, Ermentarius’ text remains a peculiar and revealing meditation on the conception and effects of an iterative relic translation, extended over 40 years, that was not particularly desirable or glorious on the face of it. His history of Philibert’s movements offers us more than a series of five places and dates—it outlines a picture of a new flavor of translation, one that was forced to address with the geographical implications of unwanted relic movement. For Ermentarius, the relics’ portability and the saint’s ability to leave Noirmoutier was not an opportunity but a liability.

Ermentarius’ two books of miracles suggest evolving approaches to these questions; the first, recounting the initial movement to Déas (Saint-Philibert-en-Grandlieu), was composed after the arrival in Déas in 836 and likely before 840; the second was a product of the early 860s, after the moves to Cunault (858) and Messay (862).¹⁶ The first book reads like a translation account; Ermentarius carefully maps out the places where the saint stopped along the way as well as the length of time they were there, giving us a very clear picture of the itinerary followed by the monks. After receiving formal permission for the translation from Pippin of Aquitaine, as well as ecclesiastical authorities, the saint’s body was first put into a boat and floated down to the port of Furca. From ...