Questions about the interface between the spiritual and the material have featured prominently in medieval studies over the past few decades. Attention to the status of materials and materiality — from precious stones reflecting ‘the stuff of heaven’, to building stones, wood, and the skins of manuscripts — has informed or transformed literary and historical scholarship. In this context, reliquaries have been seen as essential to the construction of the ‘cosmological and social significance’ of holy relics, which would otherwise be ‘naked and indeterminate’. Looking at relics and reliquaries in Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica, however, one finds only a very few mentions of caskets containing relics or ‘holy matter’. Bede does not describe them. The silver case for King Oswald’s arm and hand seems to be the only precious reliquary in the HE. Instead, Bede relies almost exclusively on ‘naked and indeterminate’ earth, bones, and water, which suggests that for him, the cosmological and social significance of sanctity need not be configured by human craftsmanship. It is, instead, elemental: in and of Creation, as he notes in his Commentary on Genesis.

This talk focuses on the elemental and the unadorned (the earth, water, air, fire and bone), in early Insular textual accounts of miracles, especially those in Bede’s Major Chronicle  and Ecclesiastical History, but also in Adomnán’s De locis sanctis, Æthelwulf’s De Abbatibus, the Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, and Stephen’s Life of Bishop Wilfrid. While most discussions of these miracles mention the elements, scholars tend to emphasize the healing virtus of the saint, or discuss questions of veracity and source, rather than the elemental materials. Given the recent scholarly emphasis on the ‘necessity’ of reliquaries, which tends to reach back beyond the ‘Age of Bede’ to Peter Brown’s work on the Late Antique cult of the saints, I believe that there’s much to learn from the study of the elemental and unadorned relics found in the narrative accounts from early England. This study challenges existing generalizations about the early medieval period, and sheds light on changing beliefs and practices in early medieval England.

Speakers: Sharon M. Rowley, Christopher Newport University

This event is open to all and free to attend, booking required via Eventbrite.

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