Intimacy and Abundance: Textile Relics, the Veronica, and Christian Devotion in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade

Abstract

During the early thirteenth century crusaders carried or sent dozens of textile relics from the treasuries of the Levant and Byzantium to the West. As these objects were integrated into the devotional life of western Europe, they collapsed the perceptions of temporal and spatial distance between medieval Europe and the world of the Apostles. Taking as a case study Pope Innocent III’s renewed veneration of the sudarium, or Veil of Veronica, the article investigates the inherent and potent material qualities of cloth as a medium of holiness. The abundance of cloth relics coming into the West underlined the power of the divine presence. Whereas the intimacy promised by cloth—material made, touched, worn, soiled, and carried by the hands of others—brought the Holy Land and the physical realities of Christ’s life and Passion into the heart of western Europe. Cloth evoked the bodies of its bearers and makers, referencing Christ, Mary, the Apostles, but also those who carried or sent such relics to the West, for example, crusaders who did not return to their kin. The intimacies of cloth, moreover, contributed to the generation of an abundance of other, new, and imitative relics over the course of the medieval period.

Keywords:

• relics
• the Veronica
• sudarium
• cloth
• abundance
• intimacy
• devotion
• crusades

notes and references

Notes

1 The Veronica as an art object and image has received a great deal of scholarly attention in past decades. See especially Belting (1994, 208–224, 541–544), Hamburger (1998a, 317–382), Wolf and Kessler (1998), Clark (2008), and Murphy (2017). For the image’s reception and veneration in the context of northern France see Gould (1978, 81–94), and Sand (2014: 27–83).

2 Petrus Mallius was a canon of St. Peter’s. See also de Waal (1893, 255–257), Belting (1994, 541), Kessler (2017, 18).

3 For the sermon Innocent III preached on the same date see PL 217, col. 345. Additional texts related to the hospital’s foundation and rule are in PL 217, cols. 1129–1155. See also Egger (1998), and Drossbach (2017).

4 Innocent often displays an interest in the transformation of material substances in many of his sermons and treatises. The meaning behind material objects is certainly an important theme animating his text De sacro altaris mysterio (PL 217, cols. 775–914). On this see the comments by Rist (2017, 120–121).

5 As Sand notes, over time it was the reproducibility of the image that made it like the Eucharist. In some later painted images of the Veronica, as for example in the Hours of Yolande of Soissons, as Sand states, “the material nature of the Veronica is fully elided with that of the Host: they are not incidentally similar to, but substantially like, one another” (Sand 2014, 55). For the reproducibility of the Eucharist in material and iconographical terms, see Kumler (2015, 2017).

6 On the genealogy of the prayers attributed to Innocent III, see Corbin (1947, 27–28); as they appear in Psalters and devotional books in the thirteenth century, see Sand (2014, 37–40).

7 On the role of intimacy and abundance in the Catholic tradition, see Orsi (2016); for the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204) context, see Lester (2014). Further discussion of these ideas can be found in my forthcoming book, Fragments of Devotion.

8 Robert of Clari, who took part as a knight on the Fourth Crusade, detailed what he saw in the palace in Constantinople and notes the presence of an object he referred to as the sudarium. Similar confusion persists concerning the objects sent to Louis IX between 1239 and 1241. See Sand (2014, 307 n. 57); and Corbin (1947, 8).

9 As Jeffrey Hamburger (1998b) has argued, many nuns understood the potential for reenacting this relationship.

10 Indeed, in the middle of the story, Joinville tells the reader that he had refused all the lavish gifts the Prince Bohemond VI of Antioch, count of Tripoli (r. Antioch 1252–1268; Tripoli, 1252–1275) had sent to him and his knights save “some of his relics, which [he] took to the king with the lengths of camelin [he] had purchased for him.” See Joinville (2000, para. 600), and Kleiman (2015, 61–74).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne E. Lester

Anne E. Lester is the John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Professor of Medieval History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Cornell University Press, 2011) and co-editor of five collections of essays and over 25 articles and chapters. Her research focuses on religion, gender, memory, materiality, connectivity, and premodern conceptions of empire and the state during the High Middle Ages. She has spent time as a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame (2004/5), a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (2012) and has held an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship (awarded 2011/held 2013), and a Derek Brewer Fellowship at Emmanuel College in Cambridge, UK (2015). She is completing a book entitled Fragments of Devotion: Relics and Remembrance in the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade.[email protected]