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  • Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England by Robyn Malo
  • Barbara Zimbalist
Robyn Malo. Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 298. isbn: 9781442645639. US$70.00 (cloth).

Even in the twenty-first century, the relics of medieval religious culture continue to evoke strong responses that testify to their abiding power. Incidents such as the 2011 relic theft from a church in Long Beach, California, reveal the ongoing fascination inspired by religious objects; indeed, such incidents suggest that religious objects elicit a desire for interaction and contact indicative of a larger system of meaning and significance. In Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England, Robyn Malo offers an account of the emergence and function of this system of meaning—what she terms “relic discourse”—between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries in England. In her fascinating and timely study, Malo argues for a remapping of relic discourse as fundamentally and at times consciously constructed and deployed by material objects, the historical record, and literary texts. Her careful attention to this wide range of primary sources offers an implicit disciplinary argument for the benefits and even necessity of reading literary texts in tandem with both historicist and materialist discourses. As the title of her study suggests, understanding relics requires attention to the writing that produces and sustains their meaning. Each chapter meticulously shows how an interpretive approach encompassing multiple discursive praxes sheds light not only on the role of relics and writing within debates over religious images in England, but also on the function of signification, the difficulties of figurative language, and the production of meaning within late medieval religious culture.

Malo’s study consists of two parts, “Relic Discourse and the Cult of Saints” and “The Trouble with Relic Discourse.” Part 1 charts the emergence and function of relic discourse across a wide range of primary materials, from the material objects of relics, reliquaries, and shrines to the individuals and communities who interacted with and constructed them. The first chapter, “Representing Relics,” examines the representative function of relics [End Page 225] and their containers through close readings of architecture, relic lists, relic tracts, and hagiography, and argues for the emergence of a hierarchical relic discourse in England in which the increasingly elaborate enshrinement of relics (such as the feretory shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey) prompted their metaphorically complex textual construction. Malo shows how the discourse surrounding relics mediates their meaning, whether that discourse is the materiality of the shrine itself or the text that contains, reflects, and interprets it for contemporary and future audiences.

Malo’s treatment of diverse discursive materials is one of the most enjoyable aspects of her book, and the second chapter, “The Commonplaces of Relic Discourse: The Pilgrim at the Shrine,” maintains this focus in its discussion of English pilgrims and pilgrimage. The chapter reads translation narratives, canonization records, and hagiography to show how English relic discourse establishes a relic’s praesentia through the linguistic elision of shrines and relics and the accompanying elision of shrines and saints by relic custodians. As English shrines became increasingly elaborate and figural, with more relics being translated from tomb shrines to less accessible feretory shrines, believers came to rely more and more on their textual description and, eventually, to take these textual representations as the mediators through which they encountered not only the relic but the saint. For example, Jocelin of Brakelond’s account of Edmund of Bury’s translation minutely describes how the abbot and a few other monks see, touch, and venerate the body, thus allowing the text not only to stand in for the relic but to widen potential access to it, even as it describes translation into a more physically distant and obscured shrine. In this way, Malo concludes the first part of her study with a return to the basic problem of figurative language that lies at the heart of relic discourse. As she puts it, relics foreground “a fundamental problem with all types of representational language and objects, in that both metaphors and images have the potential to obscure what they signify” (83). Analysis of this problem offers a more nuanced...

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