Sanctity and Identity: The Authentication of the Ursuline Relics and Legal Discourse in Elisabeth von Schönau’s Liber Revelationum

With her Liber Revelationum Elisabeth de Sacro Exercitu Virginum Coloniensium (Book of Revelations), Elisabeth von Schönau establishes the authenticity of the relics of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, which had been discovered some fifty years prior to the text’s composition. In this article, I demonstrate how Elisabeth’s text accomplishes this work of authentication: it weds divine revelation to emergent modes of legal proof in order to authenticate the Ursuline relics. Furthermore, its bipartite structure in which sets of halves are produced so as to be reunified is rhetorically analogous to the chirograph, a legal instrument for document authentication.