Reliques modernes: Cultes et usages chrétiens des corps saints des Réformes aux révolutions (review)

As the title suggests, this book engages with two, normally quite discrete areas of inquiry. It is a brilliant engagement with the question of “modernity” and the abiding close association between it and “secularization,” as Max Weber most influentially defined it. It engages obliquely with that thesis through an extraordinary collection of articles, taking up relics; offering a close, richly documented study; and suggesting the complexity—devotional, cultural, political, ecclesiastical, and colonial—of the bones of holy persons.

Piece by piece, these articles reveal a multilayered relationship between matter and spirit, bones and devotional identity. The two volumes are divided into six parts: I.“Lieux et corps saints: le temps des polémiques,” II.“Le pouvoir et le sacré,” III.“Le sacré dans la guerre,” IV.“Inventaires et inventions de lieux,” V. “Un espace en expansion,” and VI. “Reliques et reliquaires: une archéologie du sacré.” Some interrogate a single text, as in the case of the first article, “Le Traité des reliques de Jean Calvin (1543): Texte et contextes” (Pierre Antoine Fabre and Mickaël Wilmart). A number offer a layered study of a single site, such as Fabre’s “Le grande reliquaire de la chapelle du Crucifix: Recherches sur le culte des reliques dans l’eglise San Ignazio, XVI^e–XIX^e siècles.” Most situate specific relics within communities that the articles carefully delineate.

The titles of the six parts suggest something of the conceptual and geographic breadth of the volume. The first section takes up both critiques and apologies—Calvin’s Treatise on Relics, the Council of Trent’s decrees on relics (Dominique Julia), the restoration of relics in nineteenth-century France (Philippe Boutry), documentation of a relic (Alain Cantillon), and Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire critique des reliques (Nicole Courtine)—placing them within complexly conceptualized “contexts.” These contexts include the textual tradition of inventories that framed relics in certain terms and provoked polemics by those who abhorred the reification, not the relic itself; or the individual histories of authors and the dialectic between text and experience, devotion and polemic. The second section takes up “power” in precisely articulated specific instantiations: the girdle of the Virgin in Prato (Mario Rosa); the translation of relics from Roman catacombs to sites in France in the seventeenth century (Françoise le Hénand); King Philip II’s complex relationship to relics he gathered in the Escorial (Guy Lazure); and the hand of St. Stephen, king of Hungary, and its life within Hungarian national history (Andràs Zempléni). The third section takes up relics in three discrete historical instances of violence: the “temps des troubles de Religion” (Denis Crouzet), the French Revolution (Stéphane Baciocchi and Dominique Julia), and the Soviet Revolution (Bernard Marchadier). These articles document not the wholesale exhumation and expulsion of relics, but far more complex pictures of absences and remains. The next two sections take up the issue of space. The fourth part focuses on the places of relics—in addition to Fabre’s study of San Ignazio, Pierre Cordoba’s situating of relics and Catherine Maire’s excellent explication (with graphs and maps) of Adrien Baillet’s Topographie des saints. The fifth part focuses on vignettes of relics in worlds new to Europe, including Ines G. Županov’s history of São Tomé de Meliapor, as relic, site, and locus of encounter; Leandro Karnal’s complex consideration of relics and their multiple roles in the efforts to translate Christianity to Portuguese America; and Charlotte de Castelnau-L’Estoile’s delineation of the dialectic between Jesuits and the Tupinamba in “Le partage...