| My dissertation, "Saints' Relics in Medieval English Literature," examines how the occlusion, control of and access to saints' relics became the source of significant tensions in late medieval culture and literature. I argue that in England, conflicting ideas about papal control, institutional power and the role of the laity directly influenced the literary presentation of relics and their cults. Because saints' relics were thought to channel God's healing power and to work miracles, clerics highly regulated access to these body parts and objects. Literary scholars have seldom recognized this highly politicized regulation of relics. Instead, the assumption has been that relics are, as medieval theology would have it, an uncontroversial bridge between heaven and earth. I show that in fact, when they discussed relics, medieval authors were frequently using relics to explore lay experiences of hierarchical power.;Relics inspire interest and even repulsion in the contemporary scholar, but in the Middle Ages, they were a crucial focal point for lay devotion and, because of their miracle-working capabilities, institutional control. Situated as they were in the shrines and churches that became places of pilgrimage, relics inspired saints' cults and pilgrim communities, but also enabled a parish's or cathedral's assertions of institutional dominance. By examining the cultural history of relics, I argue that these objects functioned to consolidate Church authority and hierarchy. In this historical context, control over relics tended to be material and tactile: pilgrims were often literally kept from seeing or touching relics. In literature, however, writers tended to explore relics' management by presenting relics as rhetorically, as well as materially, occluded. This literary phenomenon is nevertheless based on the actual incorporation of the saint's body into the Church (in the form of a relic) and draws from the historical exclusion of lay bodies from full participation in and access to the power that the relic was thought to mediate. I show that the strict regulation of relics directly influenced literary presentations of local churches as more powerful than secular authority, as well as presentations of conflict between pilgrims and shrine-keepers.;To this end, I examine literature from widely diverse genres and time periods. Chapter 1 juxtaposes twelfth-century Latin liturgical and theological tracts on relics with fourteenth-century Lollard attacks on relic cults; Chapter 2 focuses on the Latin, Old English and Middle English renditions of the lives of Saints Erkenwald and Swithun; Chapter 3 features Thomas Cantilupe's fourteenth-century Latin canonization proceedings and Malory's fifteenth-century Morte d'arthur; and Chapter 4 engages with Chaucer's fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales. In these works, writers use relics as tools either to uphold or to criticize institutional control over access to divine grace and healing. By investigating some of these historical conflicts, my work challenges the idea that relics were uncomplicated objects of devotion and the idea that relics' appearance in literature was apolitical. In this way, my dissertation opens up new avenues for understanding lay and clerical roles in the religious culture of the English Middle Ages and the ways in which these roles impacted the vernacular literature of the period. |
