The cult of St Thomas Becket, martyred in 1170, spread rapidly throughout Europe and, as legends of his sanctity grew so too did demand for his relics: pieces of his garments, vials of his blood (diluted with water), and more. And because many churches acquired these relics, the reliquaries made to celebrate them became a common sight. The cult was particularly popular in England and western France reflecting the unified English-French Plantagenet rule. This spurred artisans in Limoges, a center…

Writing in 1189, Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) wrote that the extraordinary success of Becket's cult had been foretold by an ancient Welsh seer, Merlin Celidonius or Silvestris, whose prophecies Gerald claimed to have translated and intended to publish as a Book of Prophecies ( Vaticinalis Liber): " Venient oratores ab oriente, et terrarum tam principes quam primates in occiduis oceani finibus novi vestigia martyris adorabunt " (Pilgrims from the East shall come, and on the western margins of the great sea, the princes and primates of the earth shall …

The magnificent sight of Canterbury Cathedral lingered in the memories of pilgrims such as Erasmus who wrote of "the majesty with which the church rises into the sky, so as to strike awe even at a distant approach; the vast towers, saluting from far the advancing traveler; the sound of bells, sounding far and wide through the surrounding country." Approaching the entrance, visitors saw a sculpture above the door of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket slain by four knights near an altar. Entering the nave, the pilgrims gathered as some went directly to see…

Unlike its rival cathedral town of Canterbury, with the shrine of the murdered Thomas Becket, or its northern neighbor Durham, home to the relics of the Anglo-Saxon St Cuthbert, York never attained the status of a major national pilgrimage site. However, the cult of St William of York, the city’s only native saint, maintained a steady local popularity. Like his contemporary Becket, William was thought to have been killed in his own cathedral in a most blasphemous manner, the poisoning of his com…

The exhumation of saints begins with the recovery of the bodies of martyrs and their burial in catacombs of in private cemeteries. As burial ad sanctos became popular, there grew up a demand for better access to relics. Ultimately, this demand became entangled with issues of control of the holy, securing bodies from plundering raiders and security against theft of relics for resale (see also Theft and Sale of Relics). Authorities began to move bodies, or at least bones, into churches, usually within c…

Textiles have long been an important component of church and shrine furnishings as liturgical objects, decorations and protective coverings. The justification for this practice comes from both the Bible (Exodus 26:1-37, 36: 8-37, 38:9-18) and Roman imperial ceremony. The wealth of textile donations listed in the Liber pontificalis shows abundant evidence of the primary importance that was placed on luxury textiles in the decoration of early Christian churches. In addition to being a principal component of altar furnishings, textiles in the f…

The integration of hagiography, local history, and theology into the iconography of reliquaries is chiefly a later medieval practice; few early reliquaries emphasize these themes. Enamel shrines made in Limoges in the 1100s and 1200s were perhaps the first substantial group to deploy scenes from saints’ lives, although fundamental were scenes of saints’ dramatic deaths, mainly to the exclusion of other events. Both Thomas Becket and Valeria were extremely popular saints for Limoges enamellers, with Becket caskets enjoyi…

Springs or sources of water were often found under medieval churches. Springs and wells are associated with pre-Christian water cults in regions like Bavaria in Germany, and they were integrated with those of martyrs and saints in the Christian Middle Ages. Many churches associated with holy figures, especially those with a central plan, were built over a well. Some of them continued to be popular centers of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages. Symbolic meaning attached to water and to sources of water is a universal element in many religions. In Europe’s folklori…

Activities and access within the cathedral building had a major impact on the emotional, sensual and physical responses of pilgrims, enhanced by the continuation of a journey to the spiritual focal point, the shrine of the saint (see Tilley, 'Interpreting': 10-17). The visual atmosphere established through architectural adaptations and spatial design created routes of orientation, allowing ritualization and regulation of access and behavior. Controlled space is a social construct that highlights a dichotomy between inhabitant and visitor areas of access. Cathedrals, like Ca…

The concept of exile as pilgrimage stands somewhere between the two most familiar understandings of pilgrimage: as a physical journey to the shrines of the saints, and as an expression of the soul's journey through life. As these two definitions developed, a third connected a less defined physical journey to more specific aspects of this spiritual journey, particularly penitence, asceticism and the monastic life. The act of leaving one's homeland, or wandering in foreign lands, could be seen as an expression of this journey to God, and a means of perfecting personal spiritual growth. The…

Before setting forth on their journey, some pilgrims took coins and bent them. When an inanimate object such as a coin was damaged or "killed" in this way, it was symbolic of the coin's transfer from a physical to a spiritual plane. By destroying its normal use, the bender rendered the coin functional only for supernatural purposes. Once bent, the coin was intended for the saintly personage to whom it was promised, and no one else. The presentation of that particular coin to the shrine fulfilled the pilgrim's vows. Vows of pilgrimage undertaken through or accompanying the bending of…

Deafness and muteness were some of the most commonly reported miracles at pilgrimage sites and shrines in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, after lameness, paralysis, and blindness. Such miraculous cures of disability are grounded in the Gospels, in which Jesus cured deaf, blind, and paralyzed individuals. In many medieval Latin miracles as well as in secular vernacular literature, non-congenital deafness was associated with sin, and in particular with promiscuity, gambling, or renunciation …

The Limousin region of south-central France with the capital city Limoges was famous for high quality champlevé-enameled, gilt copper objects created in urban workshops and used for sacred and lay purposes. The creation of Limoges enamels -- referred to as opus lemovicense -- flowered between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and gradually declined in the fourteenth. Objects created included altar retables and frontals, chrismatories, censers, crosses, pyxes, tabernacles, eucharistic doves, ciboria, tombs, storage boxes (often calle…

Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill is one of the seven major basilicas of Rome, and its premier shrine of Marian devotion. It is a location particularly associated with feast days of the Virgin, such as the Annunciation, Assumption, her Nativity, and Christmas. The foundation myth says that the Virgin herself selected the site at the "Miracle of the Snow" on August 5, 352. This event is depicted in detail in the mosaics by Filippo Rusuti (1292-97) on the original façade (now within the l…

According to canon law, all Christian pilgrims were poor: they were defined as miserabiles personae, and were thus entitled to the forms of charity that Christians were supposed to extend to widows, orphans and the indigent. Moreover, according to the ideal laid out in the early thirteenth century by Jacques de Vitry, all pilgrims were supposed to act as if they were poor: pilgrimage was a penitential endeavor, and thus all who took up the pilgrim's staff were expected to wear light clothing, leave behind wor…

Types of shrines Pilgrimage shrines and their consecrations can be divided into at least four distinct categories: the primary shrine (in the case of a saint, this is usually the burial site for a miracle or apparition, this would be the site of the miracle or apparition), reliquary shrines (housing significant relics of the devotional cult), image shrines (consisting of a painting or sculpture, but without relics), and popular shrines (which may or may not be in the domain of normative ecclesiasti…

English pilgrimage writing takes the form of the log, the guide (see also Guidebooks), and the narration. Although Canterbury was one of Christendom's major pilgrimage destinations, along with Jerusalem, Cologne Cathedral, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela, it produced no pilgrimage narratives, and only one pilgrim's log survives. With one exception, English pilgrims wrote exclusively about the Jerusalem pilgrimage. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (ca. 1395) cannot properly be labeled a pilgrimage narrative because it uses the Canterbury pilgrimage mer…

Many saints functioned as the patrons of medieval communities: guilds, monasteries, and cities among them. Some belonged to that community in life and were believed to watch over it after death; others were adopted or imported. In the cities of medieval Italy, which tried to eschew princely rule, patron saints played a distinctive political role as symbols of the divinely-sanctioned authority that their rulers claimed to exercise, although they were not crowned or anointed. Here a bishop-saint s…

Not all pilgrimage shrines were regarded as healing shrines, and not all saints as healers; none of the three great shrines (Rome, Santiago de Compostela and Jerusalem) are notable for cures. Furthermore, in collections of miracles before the twelfth century, healing miracles generally do not predominate.  Nonetheless, the power to heal was a salient aspect of the cult of the saints from its earliest manifestations. The classical practice of 'incubation' for cure at the shrines of certain gods m…

While the term ampulla refers generically to a flask, within the context of pilgrimage the term signifies a phial acquired by a pilgrim at a holy site and sanctified by contents that derived from that site. In the Middle Ages, ampullae were made using reusable molds specifically for sale to pilgrims, who valued them as souvenirs and as blessed objects. Pilgrims' ampullae first appeared in association with sites in the Holy Land and elsewhere around the eastern Mediterranean in the late Antique period. Extant examples from the early period are made of cla…