Relics: Their Life & Afterlife

Nothing begins life as a relic. This day conference will explore the processes surrounding the creation of relics, their significance within history and antiquarianism and the various ways that they have been venerated, interpreted and preserved over centuries.

Central to this is the idea of sanctity itself and how it is expressed through material objects and places that have been in proximity to a sacred person, whether the bones of a martyr, a scrap of cloth, a jewel encrusted reliquary or the churches built to mark the spot where early saints were martyred.

Such objects and sites don’t remain in a static condition-they have a long ‘afterlife’. The sacred life becomes etched into landscapes and cultural memory through archives, records, legends and art– long after a sense of the historical person at the centre of the relics is out of reach and this is also part of their story.

There is growing interest in pilgrimage, sacred heritage and the cult of the saints. Recently, the recovery and dating of the relics of St Eanswythe; the reliquary of St Magnus; the lost relics of Thomas Becket and the conservation of Lucca’s ’Volto Sancto’ have all caught public imagination. This conference will be relevant to those involved in church-conservation, pilgrimage and anyone with an interest in archaeology, antiquarianism, curation, theology, art-history or object-biography.

Conference organisers

Revd Dr Lesley Hardy FSA (Canterbury Christ Church)

Dr Ellie Williams

Dr Andrew Richardson FSA

Speakers

Session 1 – Relics: Their Birth

Chair: Revd Dr Lesley Hardy (Diocese of Canterbury)

Professor Julia Smith (All Souls, University of Oxford) – What Makes a Relic?

Rt Revd Dr John Inge (Former Bishop of Worcester) – Dry Bones? The Power of Relics

Session 2 – Relics: Their Life

Chair: Dr Mike Bintley, University of Southampton

Dr Glenn Cahilly-Bretzin, (University of Liverpool) – Curating the Holy Past for a Pious Future: the use of saints and relics in the Middle Ages

Dr Emily Davenport Guerry (Christ Church, Oxford) – ‘Innumerable precious pieces’: What we learn from Rabban Sauma’s veneration of relics, from Beijing to Paris

Session 3 – Relics and Imagination 

Chair: Dr Heidi Stoner, Canterbury Christ Church

Professor Jane Hawkes (University of York), Visualising the Saintly in the Era before Cultic Images of Devotion in Early Medieval England

Professor Barbara Yorke (University of Winchester) – Anglo-Saxon Royal Relics; Moving the Bodies

Dr Heidi Dawson-Hobbis (University of Winchester) – Are Royal Remains Relics?

Session 4: Relics – Their Afterlife. Remembering and Forgetting

Chair: Dr Laura Moffat, Art and Christianity

Dr Jennie England (Research Coordinator, York Minster) – A Forgotten saint? The afterlife of St William of York

Dr Andrew Richardson (Kent Finds Liaison Officer) and Dr Ellie Williams (Canterbury Christ Church) – St Eanswythe: Reading the Relics Finding Eanswythe

Dr Lesley Hardy (Finding Eanswythe) – What Remains?