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  • Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England by Robyn Malo
  • Cynthia Turner Camp
robyn malo, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 298. isbn: 978–1–4426–4563–9. $70.

Malo’s Relics and Writing opens up a new direction in the study of hagiography and religious texts, focusing on the rhetorical and ethical interrelations of signs, signifiers, and their interpreters. Having drawn her initial heuristic from the study of saints’ relics and reliquaries to argue for a disconnect between relics and their material and verbal representations, Malo demonstrates how this significatory disjunction manifests in a wide array of Middle English texts. In considering the incommensurability of any desired object and the available ways of depicting it, Relics and Writing will be of considerable interest not only to students of saints’ lives, but to all Middle English scholars.

Relics and Writing centers around ‘relic discourse,’ Malo’s phrase for ‘the technical terminology, together with the metaphors and commonplaces, that writers in the later Middle Ages drew upon to construct the meaning of relics’ (5). That meaning is neither as stable nor as self-evident as often assumed. Identifying a correspondence between reliquaries and writings about relics, Malo argues in her first two chapters that relic discourse became more elaborated in the later medieval period as shrines grew in size and relics became more distanced, spatially and visually, from pilgrims. Because bone fragments don’t self-evidently signify ‘saint,’ and because bejeweled boxes signal material wealth rather than holy contents, relic discourse—and its central voice, the relic custodian—was necessary for giving both relics and shrines their spiritual meaning, even while that discourse inevitably foregrounds the gap between relics and their representations.

The last three chapters consider how relic discourse operates widely across Middle English literature. Chapters Three and Four emphasize the ethical conundrums enmeshed in relic discourse, revealing the gap between the promise of access (penitents’ prayers are answered and/or they can encounter the saint directly) and the actual distance between the devotee and the relic (only relic custodians and/or the perfectly holy can view the relic). Chapter Three reads the Holy Grail in Malory, the Alliterative Joseph of Arimathea, and Henry Lovelich’s History of the Holy Grail as a blood relic. According to relic discourse’s conventions, Malo’s major argument runs, flawed Lancelot’s appropriately penitent actions in Malory should have allowed him sight of the Grail, but they do not. Lancelot’s example thereby reveals how relics are deliberately withheld from all but those who are already purified, like Galahad and the grail-keepers. Chapter Four discusses Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde alongside the ‘Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.’ Reading the Pardoner and Pandarus as ‘parodic [End Page 169] relic custodians’ (126), Malo identifies not only the constructedness of Criseyde and the Pardoner’s relics, but also the danger inherent in obfuscating the essential core with its rhetorically constructed representation. Troilus and the Canterbury pilgrims are doomed, not because their desired objects are flawed, but because the discourse that valorizes Criseyde and relics (whether true, like Thomas Becket’s, or false, like the Pardoner’s) focuses the devotee on external sheen rather than inherent value. The final chapter, on Wycliffite writings, valuably collapses the critical distance between heterodox and critical orthodox expression in the early fifteenth century. Wycliffite writers reject, Malo notes, not the relics themselves but the opulent packaging (material and verbal) common to the age. Malo’s nuanced reconsideration of Wycliffite approaches to saints thereby complements the revisionist work of scholars like Andrew Cole and Fiona Somerset.

Not all of Malo’s local readings will be revelatory or persuasive (Criseyde’s constructedness is not new, and this reader was unconvinced by the identification of the ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ gold with reliquaries). Moreover, her implicit argument about the progressive development of relic discourse may be overstated; in reading relic discourse back through shrine development, she sidelines those earlier texts (like the hagiography of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, writing either side of 1100) that exhibit precisely the style of relic discourse Malo attributes to the late medieval period. This concern notwithstanding, Malo’s...

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