Regardless of the Reformation’s attack on the allegedly superstitious practices of later medieval Catholicism, during the Counter Reformation the reverence of holy relics became ever more pronounced. This article looks at the theology behind relic making and the scientific processes by which body parts were preserved, making special reference to Luisa de Carvajal’s activities in Jacobean London. It places the traffic in relics in the anthropological context of gift-exchange, and especially recent discussions of “the free gift”.
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Alexandra Walsham, “Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics After the English Reformation,” pp. 121-143 at pp. 121-21, in the important collection of essays published in Relics and Remains, ed. A. Walsham (Past & Present Supplement no. 5, 2010). This article should be read in the light of two earlier articles by Walsham: “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England”, The Historical Journal, 2003, 46: 779-815, where she persuasively looked at the use of relics and the miraculous to highlight “the continuities between medieval and Counter Reformation piety” and how “Catholic reformers revived and mobilized rather than simply suppressed older devotional practices”; and “Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation”, in Historical Research, 2005, 78: 288-310. For the historiography of the Counter Reformation, also see below, note 4.
Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 30.
Canon 1237:2, http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P4K.HTM (accessed Dec. 2011).
For her life, see G. Redworth, The She-Apostle: the Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For an indispensable selection of her writings with critical commentary, see Elizabeth Rhodes, This Tight Embrace: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566-1604) (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000). Christine M. Cloud, “Embodied Authority in the Spiritual Autobiographies of Four Early Modern Women from Spain and Mexico” (Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State University, 2006) is also useful for its chapter on Luisa de Carvajal. The works of Anne J. Cruz on the subject of Luisa de Carvajal in many ways form the bedrock of modern scholarship on this subject.
Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 260.
James Laidlaw, “A Free Gift Makes No Friends,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2000, 6: 617-634, at p. 617.
Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in The Social Life of Things, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 169-191. For a more recent interpretation of the medieval circulation of relics, see Julia Smith, “Rulers and Relics c.750–c.950: Treasure on Earth, Treasure in Heaven¸” in Relics and Remains, ed. Walsham (cit. note 2), pp. 73-96.
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Regardless of the Reformation’s attack on the allegedly superstitious practices of later medieval Catholicism, during the Counter Reformation the reverence of holy relics became ever more pronounced. This article looks at the theology behind relic making and the scientific processes by which body parts were preserved, making special reference to Luisa de Carvajal’s activities in Jacobean London. It places the traffic in relics in the anthropological context of gift-exchange, and especially recent discussions of “the free gift”.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 595 | 72 | 11 |
Full Text Views | 130 | 2 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 79 | 4 | 1 |