Abstract
At every moment in the Middle Ages, the veneration of relics formed a ubiquitous and essential component of devotional practice. Medieval reliquaries were artifacts designed to contain these sacred bodily vestiges. Reliquaries ranged enormously in shape and nature, from caskets and portable disks (figures Intr.1 and Intr.2), to objects shaped like body parts held up in ceremonial processions (figure Intr.3), to large and elaborate altarpieces decorated with busts containing relics (figure Intr.4), to architecturally inspired artifacts constructed of metalwork and windows (figure Intr.5). Even entire architectural spaces were sometimes designed to convey the formal features of the reliquary, as was the case of the Sainte-Chapelle, which Louis IX conceived of as a grandly magnified reliquary shrine. This important structure wielded influence by continuing to serve as a model for royal building projects even in late-medieval England, the main focus of this study.l The device of building as reliquary also persisted into the late Middle Ages, as evidenced in this period’s various correspondences between architectural and metalwork ornamentation.2
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Notes
By the time of the Sainte-Chapelle’s construction France had developed for itself a national identity as the destined receptacle of the relics of the True Cross. See L. Levillain, “Essai sur les origines du Lendit,” Revue Historique 157 (1927): 254 [241–76]. See also Daniel H. Weiss, “Architectural Symbolism and the Decoration of the Sainte-Chapelle,” The Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 308 [308–20]. Weiss discusses the building’s purpose as housing the most important Passion relics. On English kings modeling building projects on the Sainte-Chapelle, see Ann R. Meyer, Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2003), p. 112.
Nicola Coldstream, “The Kingdom of Heaven: Its Architectural Setting,” in The Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England, 1200–1400, ed. Jonathan Alexander and Paul Binski (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1987), p. 93 [92–97].
Meyer discusses exchanges of form and feature among a variety of metalwork and stone memorial enclosures in Medieval Allegory, pp. 134, 156–61.
The negotiations between these two models, and their attendant theoretical constructs, will receive detailed examination throughout this study; however, one well-known point of reference for initiating thought about the conflict between inscriptionality and performance occurs in Walter Ong’s work. He acknowledges, for instance, his opposition to Derridean constructs of inscriptional self-reference and contrasts the “participatory” quality of oral utterance—its engagement with the world—with the “sequester[ing]” nature of the “mark on a surface.” Ong’s somewhat essentialist view of spoken language and mother tongues can be problematic; however, his articulation of an epistemological conflict between voiced and silent expression encapsulates a basic problem. See Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 10–22.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 21.
Henk van Os, The Way to Heaven: Relic Veneration in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam: de Prom, 2001), p. 122.
Herbert L. Kessler, “Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 413 [413–39].
van Os, The Way to Heaven, p. 122.
J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 67. This is one of Miller’s many characterizations of Derrida’s perspective on words and inscription.
van Os, The Way to Heaven, p. 40.
Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “The Medieval Work of Art: Wherein the ‘Work’? Wherein the ‘Art’?” in The Mind’s Eye, p. 376 [374–412].
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 152–53.
See, for instance, Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 13, on Rhabanus Maurus’s carmina figurata. See also Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 88. Jessica Brantley points out that medieval poetic texts found many ways to ask their readers to “attend to” the physicality and materiality of the text besides the shaped poem of the carmen figuratum tradition. Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 122.
On the performativity of language (in the Derridean sense) as a concept that occupies temporalized structures, see Catherine M. Soussloff’s point that “it is precisely because the communication is iterable that it must be able to refer to the past.” Soussloff, “Like a Performance: Performativity and the Historicized Body, from Bellori to Mapplethorpe,” in Acting on the Past: Historical Performance across the Disciplines, ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), p. 75 [69–98].
Jacques Derrida, Memoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 58.
Derrida, Memoires, p. 85.
Derrida, Memoires, p. 38: “But what defies the simple and ‘objective’ logic of sets, what disrupts the simple inclusion of a part within the whole,” is “the non-totalizable trace…interiorized in mourning as that which can no longer be interiorized, as impossible Erinnerung, in and beyond mournful memory—constituting it, traversing it, exceeding it.”
See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 211–12, 327, on the reliquary’s conflation of container and contained. This idea will receive further elaboration in chap. 4.
Cynthia Hahn, “The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries,” Gesta 36.1 (1997): 20, 27–28 [20–31].
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of theSaints:Hagiography,Typology, andRenaissanceLiterature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 64–65.
This conception of sacred enclosure as engendering permeable boundaries and conflations of inside and outside has incarnational aspects. The Augustinian understanding of the sacrament (Confessions 7.10), examined by Hugh of Saint Victor, involves the idea that “the Body of Christ is eaten in the sacrament in order that we might be incorporated into Him.” See Ann W. Astell, Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 38.
Sarah Stanbury uses a Bachelardian “dialectics of inside and outside” to read the enclosed spaces of the Middle English Patience; in her argument, Jonah himself orders the relationship between interior and exterior through the motif of vision. Stanbury’s reading of Patience, and of the Pearl-poet in general, elucidates the role of visuality in understanding relations among structures of enclosure in medieval texts. Stanbury, Seeing the Gawain-Poet: Description and the Act of Perception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 72.
This study refers throughout to various critical discourses, most frequently deconstruction, performance theory, and theories of performativity in language. I have tried to create a coherent framework from these references, rather than using them opportunistically and without consideration for the intellectual and cultural history that they themselves represent and participate in. I suggest that the specific move that poststructuralist theories of language and representation make toward ideas about performativity in language provide an important template for understanding the representational strategies of medieval poetic language. On medieval language philosophy’s resonance with the Heideggerian conception of relationality in language, see, for instance, R.A. Shoaf’s comment that the Middle Ages had the capacity to see “a text or a word [as] a node in a skein of relations constantly changing its contours as it, the text or word, assimilates to other texts or words,” in Shoaf, “Medieval Studies after Heidegger after Derrida,” in Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), pp. 12–13 [9–30].
Theresa Coletti, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 75.
Jacques Derrida, “Composing ‘Circumfession,”’ in Augustine andPostmodernism:Confessions andCircumfession, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 20–21 [19–27]: “I assumed for a long time, despite a number of reservations I had about Austin’s theory of constative and performative speech acts, that the performative speech act was a way of producing an event.
I now think that the performative is in fact a subtle way of neutralizing the event.”
Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 4, 153. Her analysis of systems of “pointing” suggests a self-referential system that bases itself on the mechanics of difference and relationality we have begun to discuss here (pp. 150–52).
Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 9–10. Glending Olson’s essay “Toward a Poetics of the Late Medieval Court Lyric” similarly turns to other cultural elements to find a language in which to articulate a lyric theory not entirely explicit in the medieval period itself. In Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. Lois Ebin (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1984), p. 228 [227–48].
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© 2008 Seeta Chaganti
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Chaganti, S. (2008). Introduction. In: The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615380_1
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