Reliquias minores and phylacteries
All four textual traditions demonstrate that the movement of relics was a recurring part of liturgical life at Cluny. Given the centrality of the central medieval cult of relics, this may seem unsurprising, but Cluny’s interest in relics has been relatively ignored in comparison to its other more innovative qualities. As Scott Bruce has shown, Cluny (unlike Gorze) did not place relics at the center of its identity in the first century of its existence; however, new relic acquisitions in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries meant that certain relics began to take on new significance for the Cluniacs.22 These special Cluniac relics are the subject of the following section, but it is worth noting first the extent to which relic transportation was woven into the fabric of monastic processional life. Much of the recurring relic movement at Cluny was not linked to the specific identities of the saints whose relics they were. Rather, objects referred to as reliquias minores were treated like pieces of liturgical apparatus (along with censers and evangeliaries), carried in the processions for festival masses and on other occasions but
Liturgical frameworks 57 not identified as associated with any particular saint.23 This treatment of some relics as objects forming just one element of a backdrop of sanctity is a reminder that hagiographical presentations of relics as avatars of the saints were not the only means of understanding relics. As hagiographers worked to present relics as subjects, the customaries generally treat reliquias minores as objects.
All four Cluniac customaries also offer a striking example of what the transportation of these “anonymous” relics could accomplish. Their descriptions of the use of relics during Rogations processions offer an alternative vision of relic movement, one that minimized the saints as individual actors and instead placed the monks and their personal sanctity at the heart of the spiritual performance. The celebration of Rogations was less clearly defined in the early Middle Ages than has been generally acknowledged. The assumption that the litaniae maiores referred to a procession held on April 25 and the litaniae minores referred to the procession(s) held three days prior to Ascension is not consistently born out across texts; as Joyce Hill has shown, the pre-Ascension Day processions were at times identified as the major litanies.24 The term “rogations” was also applied to processions held in times of crisis (such as drought), regardless of the liturgical time of year.25 Rogation days were often associated with relic-carrying, but the Cluniac variation took on a specific form that seems to have few hagiographical or narrative counterparts.26 In brief, each Cluniac monk, upon exiting the church during the Rogations procession, was issued a reliquary necklace called a phylactery, which they were to hang around their necks and so carry to the destination church. Once there, they placed their phylactery on the altar in a position that mirrored their own place in the choir, such that each monk could retrieve their own specific phylactery when exiting, as described in detail by Bernard:
Two of the secretaries, one on the right side of the choir, the other on the left, hold phylacteries in silver dishes, serving them to two others, who distribute them among the brothers. They should not be given to children, nor to those to whom something of this kind touched in the night. While all this is being done, everyone should be silent in the choir; then before they go out, all the bells should be rung... When they come to the church, each one as he enters should place his phylactery on the altar and once it is placed, ask forgiveness. The right choir [should place their phylacteries] on the right corner [of the altar], and similarly on the left, and those who distributed [the phylacteries] adjust them on the altar; and when after the end of the mass the brothers take them back, no one should take up any except his own, and at that time forgiveness is not asked...27
The fact that a small collection of phylacteries could be contained in a silver dish for distribution gives a sense of their modest size. The other customaries suggest that the forms of these objects varied—the Liber tramitis described them as “little golden capsules,” while Ulrich offered slightly more detail: “the relics of the saints enclosed in little crosses, boxes, and brooches.”28
The use of these phylacteries during Rogations seems to mirror the amuletic and apotropaic uses of wearable reliquaries known from other sources.29 As James Robinson notes, wearing a portable reliquary as a necklace was a deeply individual experience, “an intensely personal expression of medieval piety,” in part as a result of the close physical contact between the relics, their precious container, and the human body.30 The customaries do not elaborate on the special qualities of any individual phylactery worn at Cluny, and do not specify what saints’ relics they contained. They are treated as a category of object rather than unique items deriving meaning from the identity of the relics they contained or from any particular decoration (such as gems) they might have had, though their “identities” may have been known and acknowledged by the monks distributing and wearing them. Yet the ways in which they were distributed and used suggests a reflection of that intimate experience between relic and wearer. Those disqualified by age (children) and impurity (those who had been “touched in the night,” who had presumably had a wet dream) were ineligible for the honor. The identification of each phylactery with the holy character of the individual monk is suggested by their careful deposition on the altar in such a way that they would not be jumbled together, the use of the possessive in describing their placement, and the purification of the monks through the ritual (they asked forgiveness when placing their phylactery on the altar, but not when picking it back up). Though these phylacteries were not “owned” by the monks wearing them, the effect was still to place the emphasis on their individual spiritual health and merit.
Cluny originally based its reputation on the personal merit of its inhabitants, and only in the early eleventh century began to emphasize its relic collection.31 In the carrying of phylacteries during the Rogations procession, these two traditions seem to merge, linking the personal holiness of the monks with the spiritual prestige of portable relics. The collective of holy saints represented by the collection of phylacteries was temporarily projected onto the collective of monks, reflecting Cluny’s vision of itself as a house of aggregate sanctity. It was a model for relic transportation which did not rely on the hagiographical vision of saints/relics as persons, but on the representation of heavenly perfection in the monastic body. The use of phylacteries at Rogations thus encompasses a separate relic-moving tradition that paralleled the more conspicuous transportation of Cluny’s “named” relics.
