TWO: En route
Relics and their companions as travelers
As the company carrying the relics of St. Evermar approached the town of Herstal, the reliquary suddenly became too heavy to carry and fell to the ground, as if the saint had suddenly gotten tired. All the living members of the group—“those going ahead, those carrying [the reliquary], and those going behind”—were shocked by the sudden immobility of their saintly co-traveler (conviator).1 They rested alongside the reliquary for a while before trying to lift it again, but repeated and energetic attempts failed to make it budge. Realizing that force was ineffectual, they then attempted to reason with the saint, pointing out to him that he hadn’t refused to visit the other villages they had been to and that Herstal was both rich and populous. If he would only get up and go to Herstal, they pleaded, he would be well compensated—“not just with oblations, but with great riches!”—and they themselves would be able to enjoy a spacious guesthouse. This pleasant prospect was denied to them; Evermar remained literally unmoved until Herstal was dropped from the tour.2
This story, taken from the miracles of Evermar, was clearly dramatized to represent a dispute between the inhabitants of Herstal and the interests of the saint, though without offering the reader any clarity as to the nature of the disagreement. The hagiographer wrote that he did not want to guess at the motives for the saints’ actions, but added (with perhaps a hint of menace) that “the saint knows, what offense stands between him and that villa."3 Despite this ambiguity, the dynamics of this episode suggest some of the rewards and hardships of a journey as shared by a reliquary and its companions. The emphasis on physicality is hard to miss: the porters are overcome by the relics’ suddenly unnatural weight; the group heaves at it until they are forced to stop, panting from the effort; they argue in evocative language regarding the material comforts awaiting them in Herstal, with an urgent desire familiar to anyone who has hoped for a nice bed at the end of a long day of travel. The saint is depicted both as object and fellow traveler, simultaneously the most important and the most capricious of the party: an obstinate leader who might suddenly refuse to go a step further. The story invites us to envision Evermar and his entourage as a somewhat unimpressive sight: a box watched over by exhausted humans, sitting together in the dust by the side of the road.
For a modem traveler, tales of delays, discomforts, and missed connections are essential pieces of a travel narrative, but medieval hagiographical accounts often minimize or elide the actual process of traveling with relics. Their purpose was not to recount the journey for its own sake, but rather as a narrative frame for the miracles that took place en route. They are therefore not true “travelogues,” which center a journey as an entity in its own right. Travel and its hardships were often implied, but not often celebrated.4 On the one hand, details do emerge across accounts that give their readers a sense of the practical considerations involved for those traveling with relics. Using the reported dates of departure and estimated distances of the most informative relic journey accounts, Pierre-André Sigal calculated that these groups traveled on average 9—14 kilometers a day. The late spring and summer seem to have been, understandably, the preferred seasons for making longer journeys, especially since certain groups brought along tents in case no suitable lodging for the relics could be found.5 Reasonably, Sigal proposed that itineraries were planned and carried out according to the intersections of the goal of the journey, the monastery’s connections, and to some extent, ad hoc decisions made on the road.6
Yet these logistical realities do not fully encompass the implications of the journey for those who participated in it. As relics passed over the threshold into the secular world, they lost some part of the controlled religious atmosphere they normally inhabited. The relative invisibility of the realities of travel in relic journey accounts might be read as a retroactive fight against this uncomfortable state of liminality. While the act of movement meant that the saints could “express themselves” through immobilizing their relics, in doing so they also became more fully part of the physical world.7 Travel, for better or worse, emphasized the relics’ materiality as things. Evermar was a saint, but he was also (in the form of his relics) a heavy box. Similarly, those who carried and accompanied relics across that threshold found their fates even more tightly linked to the saint; their experiences as a companion of the saint could be onerous, dangerous, or simply annoying, but also offered the promise of spiritual and material benefit for their hardship. Their bodies (especially the bodies of those tasked with physically carrying the saint) became a connecting bridge which linked the tangible and portable to the divine, and thus were subject to intense scrutiny.8 From energetic leaders whose charisma and diplomacy propelled a journey forward to the more invisible members of the company, the custodians of a mobile relic themselves partially replaced the ritual frames which were lost in the process of displacement. Caught between the saint and the world, in a sense, these people also found themselves entangled in the liminality of being a traveler.
