Description
- Abstract:
- This thesis examines the rituals surrounding Christian relics and reliquaries of the Early and High Middle Ages. I argue that relic rituals engaged both the mind and the body in their facilitation of divine immediacy – moments of contact and conversation between devotee and divine. I primarily engage the work of three scholars: St. Augustine, Donovan Schaefer, and Robert Sharf. I argue that relics engaged the mind through their reliance on a lineage of belief and on a uniquely Christian visuality by placing their history in conversation with Augustinian theories of cognition that explained how venerators should engage with the material world. I then argue that relics also engaged the body through their affective presence by examining theories of Christian materiality and proposing that the material rhetoric utilized by reliquaries enacted affective, pre-cognitive flows of power through the bodies of venerators. Finally, I argue that these seemingly incompatible theories of belief and affect coalesced in the ritual lives of relics. The divine immediacy experienced in the presence of relics was made alive by ritual – moments in which the somatic and cerebral were conjoined. I rely on a diverse array of relics and rituals, ranging from the French reliquary bust of Ste. Foy de Conques to an English amuletic ring that once held a relic of the True Cross, to thematize the ways in which they simultaneously engaged the bodies of venerators and their belief-laden imaginational potentials.
- Notes:
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2023
- Concentration: Religious Studies
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Citation
Fischer, Sean,
"Calcified Sanctity: Belief and Affect in the Veneration of Early Medieval Relics"
(2023).
Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:9gnv37gd/
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Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Religious Studies department....