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

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 wellintentioned iniative 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.1 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.2 The well-wisher’s belief in its effi cacy typifi es the tendency of her religious community to vest