My current research project focuses on holy objects -- relics and also sacred memorials of other sorts: first, replicas, consciously created as replicas of the original, like copies of icons; second, imaginatively conceived reconstructions of things and places never seen, ranging from Christ’s and the Virgin’s clothing, to furnishings and accoutrements associated with holy people, and also to holy monuments, like the sites of Christ’s Passion in the basilica di Santo Stefano in Bologna; and, finally, found objects or trouvailles that are assigned holy identities they did not and could not possess, like the shroud of Cadouin, which I will shortly discuss.
In the case of all these created and transformed objects, the goal of their creation or transformation may be (and may have been), variously, to commemorate, to inspire devotion, and also to deceive and mislead.
My interest in this broad topic stems from a single object, the focus of a treatise written by Eudes de Deuil, abbot of Saint-Denis (1110-1162, r. 1151-1162), whose edition and translation I am completing. The treatise features a holy garment of Christ whose ostension at Argenteuil in 1156 Eudes describes in his tract. The garment is now venerated and celebrated at Argenteuil as the Gospel of John’s tunica inconsutilis, for which the soldiers cast lots, whereas the treatise barely hints at this possibility. In the treatise Eudes cited John’s Gospel three times, and referred to the garment four times as tunica. Most often, however, he called it simply vestis and vestimentum, whereas an indulgence of Hugues of Amiens, archbishop of Rouen, which was included in the treatise, called it cappa pueri Ihesu. Eudes’s treatise did not succeed in generating enthusiasm for the garment. It failed its purpose, arguably because the nature of the garment was unclear and Eudes’s stories of its past were confused. Not until the sixteenth century did the cult of the garment as Christ’s seamless tunic gain momentum, in good part because of the imaginative elaboration by English historians, including Matthew Paris, of a notice the twelth-century Norman historian Robert of Torigni devoted to the cappa pueri Ihesu, which he described as inconsutilis and recorded was “found” at Argenteuil in 1156.
The enforced time for reflection produced by the pandemic has led me to ponder the similarities and differences between the Argenteuil garment and two other celebrated holy objects: the shroud of Lirey, better known as the shroud of Turin, and the shroud of Cadouin, a Cistercian house in Périgord. The shroud of Cadouin was celebrated as Christ’s true shroud during large stretches of time after 1214, especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but in 1934 it was revealed to be a trouvaille, a cloth produced in Fatimid Egypt around 1100, and a planned ostension was immediately canceled, with the cloth now undergoing restoration but destined for future exhibition in a museum at Cadouin. As to the shroud of Turin, it is still inspires passionate devotion even though carbon-14 technology has assigned the cloth a date in the fourteenth century, and even though there is compelling evidence that an artist created it as an imaginative reconstruction in the middle of the fourteenth century (probably in Burgundy or Champagne).
Investigating these three objects has led me to ponder the nature of holy objects in general, how the holiness of objects of markedly different sorts is explained, and how objects of different natures and origins come to be revered – and fall from favor. Studies of holy objects often focus on the material objects themselves. However, the mixed fortunes and careers of the three objects I am examining – and particularly their failures – have persuaded me of the impossibility of understanding holy objects apart from their complex and changing social and human contexts –the many people who, variously, have possessed, produced, promoted, viewed, venerated, debunked, denounced, sold, stolen, and destroyed them – and also attributed to them the power to speak, move, cry, and cure.
