Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe (review)

In writing a history of the Christian cult of relics, Charles Freeman does a valuable service for the educated and curious because—remarkably—such a thing did not previously exist in English. To his great credit, Freeman has read widely and voraciously. He has organized his findings in twenty-six loosely chronological chapters with brief notes and bibliography, charting the rise and fall of the cult. Although not deeply scholarly, the book fills a need with a lively narrative and a plenitude of specific and fascinating bits of information.

The strength of this book is its compelling sense of storytelling. The book organizes and delivers an overview of the rich work produced by scholars in the last twenty years. Celebrated scholars such as Peter Brown, Caroline Bynum, Eamon Duffy, Patrick Geary, Miri Rubin, André Vauchez, and many others are allowed to "speak" through the author. In chapters where the scholarship is particularly rich and focused—such as those on Byzantine relics and the Crusades, those on the rise of Gothic architecture, on the issues of the resurrected body, or the history of papal canonization (for some reason sensationally titled "Christ's recruits . . . fight back")—Freeman's ability to write exciting narrative sweeps one along. Generally there are big themes—politics, religion, conflict, and resolution—but there also are many telling anecdotes and a sense of the personal and the touchingly human.

The urge for storytelling also is the weakness of the book. In the effort to forge a narrative from frightfully disparate material, at times the textures of densely argued scholarly theses have been flattened and contexts have been distorted. To take one example, it cannot be doubted that there are some similarities between pagan practices and the new cult of Christian saints, but Peter Brown has very eloquently argued against Edward Gibbon's thesis of the mere continuation of polytheism. It is dismaying to see it revived here. Occasionally it is difficult to discover the source of quotes, despite the use of notes. Often legends are presented as if worthy of belief (especially in regards to very early dates), and at other moments the author's skepticism creeps in with a randomly inserted (sic). Although surely Freeman's work here is very much to be admired, perhaps inevitably in such an ambitious book, errors occur.

As mentioned above, Freeman's story has an arc. That is, in taking up a very English point of view (understandably, as Freeman is English), the story is "completed" in the formation of the English Church and the European Protestant Reformation. Admittedly, there is an attempt at a sort of coda about the Catholic church after the Reformation, but the penultimate paragraph seems to express the author's conclusion best: "An alternative approach, that the supernatural might be a figment of the imagination, was being formulated for the first time but its definition, notably in the Enlightenment, lies far beyond the scope of this book" (p. 269).

Encountering references throughout to "credulity," "mass hysteria," and generalizations about the "medieval mind," one realizes one is in the company of a very good popularizer who very much takes up the point of view of his more skeptical audience—one slightly appalled at all this "relicing" and its corollary superstitious behavior. Nonetheless, all is saved by a tasty storyline. This is a book that is well worth reading and one that, it is to be hoped, will lead the reader into the scholarship it so enthusiastically presents.