Saint who? Questioning and defiance
“Who is this ‘Marculf’?” asked a group of young men, wrinkling their noses in derision, as his relics entered the church of St-Fursey at Peronne.62 The fact that the hagiographer refers to them as “sons of Belial” makes his sentiments regarding their skepticism clear, but lay questioning regarding the identity and validity of specific saints was not always discouraged or viewed in a negative light. Many saints’ cults were highly localized; only a very few saints could claim to be universally acknowledged and venerated.63 Moving a relic any significant distance created the problem that it might travel beyond the area within which the saint was known.
The theme of doubt overcome was a powerful one; hagiographers wanted to tell stories in which competitors or antagonists were exposed and any lingering doubts about the saint’s identity and power laid to rest. This meant that lay questioning of relics might be presented as legitimate, warranted, and necessary rather than reprehensible, when relics were at home as well as when they were traveling. This was the case for the laymen who appear in the account of the translation of St. Sigibert at St-Martin’s of Metz in 1063. Sigibert’s sanctity was a subject of some doubt within the monastery itself; his name had been erased from the book of litanies by a dubious brother named Hugo, who was punished by the saint until he reinscribed him into the holy list.64 After the translation, a young monk prone to making jokes was questioned by a group of laymen; they asked him which of the events of the translation he had seen and what miracles had been performed by the saint in the monastery since. He responded “not without derision, that that same holy man was lying in the grave as if dead, with open mouth and bared teeth, and that he himself was thoroughly unaware, if he had done anything of virtue.”65 He then went insane and had to be carried to the saint’s tomb to confess and be healed. The moral of the story was that the saint would not tolerate mockery (a point reinforced by the closing Biblical citation: “he who spurns you, spurns me”), but the text presents the laymen’s requests for some kind of confirmation of Sigibert’s merits as entirely natural and expected. Laypeople were entitled to ask and be told: just who was the saint and what were they capable of?
This indication that the onus was on a saint to prove their merit to a legitimately skeptical audience explains why lay doubt regarding relics on the road was not always condemned. The monks of St-Quentin of Beauvais, traveling with the relies of St. Romana after 1073, requested that a group of local fishermen near Argenteuil either give or sell them fish. Assistance, it turned out, was dependent on their relics’ identity and legitimacy, since “the fishermen first questioned from where, and of what merit that holy body might be, and by which name it was called, then at length responded that that they had no fish.”66 The scene implies that the monks of St-Quentin expected questions regarding their saint and that if they were not able to adequately establish Romana’s sanctity, no lay help could be expected. The account of Lewinna’s journey made this expectation explicit. When her reliquary reached the town of Leffinghe, “it was neither taken up nor honored by the inhabitants, because as they said, no one had heard of the name of this [saint] before in that place.”67 This embarrassing lack of an entry reception was blamed on the saint’s deficient reputation rather than the citizens’ unwillingness to honor her. After the relics had been placed in the church without the benefit of a welcome, one of the monks warned Lewinna that if she did not prove herself by performing miracles, she would be carried back to the monastery in dishonor. Though these stories were told in the service of narratives of redemption (eventually, Romana provided fish and Lewinna performed miracles), the laypeople involved were presented as justified in their skepticism—only powerful saints deserved honor and donations. At the same time, Ursmar’s hagiographer praised the people at Blaringhem who were respectful of his reliquary despite not yet knowing the saint’s identity: “they knew clearly enough who lay on the ground among them, even if they did not know him.”68 Respect for the saint could hopefully precede an exact identification.
Reliquaries provided a visual means for laypeople who recognized them to vouch for their identity and validity, as with the blind goldsmith of Arras who testified to the contents of the reliquary he had constructed, as discussed in Chapter 3.69 The expectation that laypeople would pay attention to the physical form and location of a reliquary as a means to equate it with a saint, and then use that knowledge to authenticate it to others, is perhaps clearest in an episode where that process failed. The monks of Bèze carried an icon of St. Peter along with numerous other reliquaries to a council at Besançon in 1124. While they were there, one of their reliquaries (a silver arm) was “recognized” by the laypeople who visited their tent as a reliquary of Prudentius, since they had seen it hanging in his church in Bèze. In reality, the monks had not brought any relics of Prudentius along, supposedly for fear they would be stolen. Despite this fact, they did not bother to inform the groups who came to view the reliquary of “Prudentius” of their mistake and had no qualms about both encouraging veneration of Prudentius and attributing the miracles performed to him.70 The woman who grabbed and kissed the arm reliquary, as described above, fully believed herself to be honoring Prudentius as the saint who had healed her. The cleric who attested to the veracity of her healing seems to have been more cautious, quite justifiably given the circumstances: he said that he could confirm that the woman was healed,
Lay responses to traveling relics 151 but cautioned that he did not know either the monks or their saint.71 The monks’ lack of candor aside, this case of mistaken identity suggests that laypeople actively viewed, identified, and authenticated relics and reliquaries for one another based on their own experiences and knowledge. One could not be too sure in “a world of trickery and scepticism” acknowledged by clergy and laity alike.72
These forms of lay inquiry about relics must be understood as a background to more dramatic hagiographical stories of mockery and defiance. Some members of the laity, given the same possibilities for access and public action as those who chose to engage in veneration, instead decided to express doubt or unwillingness to participate. Some attacked the validity of the relics themselves, claiming that they were not authentic or that the miracles they performed were false. Others chose to actively resist the economic and political power of the saint (and their representatives) by openly refusing them service or veneration, though without denying their identity or the authenticity of their relics. Although lay critique could and did exist when relics were stationary, the movement of a relic might prompt these public or private reactions.
Just as the acceptance and welcome of a visiting relic might be performed communally or individually, so too rejection might be presented as one person’s expressed opinion or a unified front. A man in Mâcon, chided by his neighbor for using candles to study at night that should have been given to Taurinus, cried out that the miracles done by the saint were not true miracles.73 An entire village (Lehenna) criticized Taurinus as unworthy of attention; when the monks arrived with their relics, the inhabitants ran them out of town on a rail:
The sons of Belial, having hearts hardened in evil, not only did not want to show due reverence to the saint of God, but expelled him ignominiously from their boundaries. They afflicted the brothers who were carrying him, filled with honesty, with every kind of insult. And threatening the brothers that they should not have entered their territory with impunity, and that they would justly pay the penalty, [the villagers] wanted to make good on their words by their actions.74
These stories were told, of course, as cautionary tales: the night-reader’s throat swelled up so much he was unable to drink consecrated wine and died; the inhabitants of Lehenna were punished with a hailstorm and begged the saint for forgiveness. But they illuminate the very real danger from the monks’ perspective that laypeople simply would not care about their relics or, even worse, openly mock and attack them. These were problems exacerbated by being on the road; like tourists caught with the wrong currency, if the saint’s name and validity were not accepted by the local inhabitants the situation could become difficult, as with the monks of Marchiennes who stripped the silver off Eusebia’s reliquary to pay for their passage home.75
The fear of those organizing a relic’s journey, who had invested time and effort into the event as a key moment for access and acclaim, was that lay reactions would instead be similar to that of one farmer. Encouraged by his wife to come see the procession of Vivianus’ relics to Figeac, he scoffed that it was a better idea to keep working than to go see the “the bones of some dead person, which have been collected together and which foolish opinion venerates.”76 If the assembly of a lay crowd consumed with desire to venerate the saint was the hoped-for outcome of a relic’s displacement, apathy and disdain were the responses most feared.
Perhaps the most telling moments of lay critique, however, are the situations like that faced by the tavern keeper’s daughter with which this chapter began. In these cases, the saint’s identity or power were not necessarily at issue; rather, it was the saint’s lordship and their economic as well as their spiritual prerogatives that came under fire. As a (living) lord might demand reverence, so too might the saints insist upon the obedience of their subordinates:
Another time that same body [of Marius] was carried by the same monks to a place of his possession called Glenat. It happened there that a certain rustic, ignorant of the reverence and fear of the saint that it is necessary to have, began to deride the transportation of the holy body, and to complain of the veneration that should be exhibited to it, with stupid and impudent words. But immediately he gouged out his own eye with his sickle, which he held in his hand, and too late he realized what reverence he ought to have for St. Marius, and that the veneration exhibited to that saint is not to be derided.77
Joy at a saint’s arrival was again presented as not optional, and the “fear” of the saint was perhaps not simply a synonym for devotion. It is significant that the unfortunate man seems to have questioned not only Marius’ veneration, but his transportation; it indicates that the relic’s movement was perceived as linked to a demand for devotion. The appearance of a saint’s relics in a village, often presented as a concession in response to lay desire, here takes on the character of an imposition and a veiled threat.
Given these undertones of authority and domination, what better moment could there be to publicly and dramatically denounce a saint than during the transportation of their relics? The same expansion of access and ritual possibilities that enabled creative lay activities in celebration of the saint, like the woman who threw her daughter in the path of Basolus’ relics, also opened the door to those with very different projects in mind. During the same procession of Basolus’ relics (though a different year), a man named Dominicus denied his subservience to the saint in spectacular fashion:
Between the groups preceding and following [the reliquary], those in the middle were speaking together about the virtues of the holy man, but Satan was present among them. For when certain people (a not
Lay responses to traveling relics 153 insignificant number) celebrated victory, because in that place they had remained from the beginning on the side of the great protector, a certain flag-bearer of insanity broke in among us, a Lotharingian, a lover of fickleness and pride, named Dominicus, but certainly diabolical in this case. When he had made himself higher than our men, he proclaimed that he did not want to ever serve or be subject to the saint...78
Dominicus’ declaration that he would not serve Basolus was not the kind of pronouncement that medieval saints or their representatives looked kindly on, and the text claims that he was suddenly stricken by a demonic attack and unable to move his hands or feet. Dominicus’ actions were different from those who questioned traveling relics’ identity or the validity of the saint’s miracles; he challenged the saint without denying his power. But in choosing a moment in which the relics were both outside their normal context and highly public to mount his act of resistance, Dominicus was acknowledging the vulnerability that accompanied such occasions. The same processes that exposed relics to spectacular demonstrations of veneration also exposed them to the spectacle of revolt against the saints’ authority.
Conclusion
Relics and their curators needed the validation and economic support that lay acknowledgment and devotion provided, a fact that could become more immediate when they were on the road. Those who came on pilgrimage to view relics “at home” were to some extent a self-selected audience; conversely, a traveling relic encountered those who might have had little or no prior interest in it. The hagiographical praise of the laymen and women who took advantage of a traveling saint’s vulnerability to express their loyalty (or at least, willingness to be convinced of their sanctity), and the vindictive abuse of those who did not, should be understood not as an indication of the absolute power of the cult of relics over the lay imagination but as an admission of its weaknesses. Relic movement invited increased lay attention to relics, but their authority as sacred objects did not always hold up under that scrutiny.
Surely many of the people who gathered to welcome and venerate traveling relics were motivated by religious sentiment and (for those seeking miracles) the hope of supernatural assistance. Yet devotion was not the only possible response, nor was apathy or resistance. The emotions and thoughts of those who publicly participated in the cult of relics were as complicated as the cult of relics itself, and we can see their ideas and impressions only imperfectly through the lens of texts that they did not produce. The movement of a relic, however, seems to have opened up different fields for lay action around a mobile reliquary and, given the potential for conflict, increased the likelihood that lay agency would be acknowledged and commemorated.
