Medieval history of sacred relics is surprisingly relevant amid current pandemic
That’s according to a new book about the Turin shroud by Gary Vikan, former director of Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum.
More than six-and-a-half centuries separate the years 1350 and 2020, but parallels emerge between the ways that European Catholics responded to the Black Death and the practices we are employing today during the coronavirus pandemic.
Medieval Christians held sweet-smelling posies—the era’s N95 masks—to their noses to counteract the plague’s “bad air,” and many priests on the front lines died from exposure to infected corpses when they delivered last rites “without PPP,” or personal protective equipment, according to Vikan.
The faithful held holy relics to heal via proto-“contact tracing.” A “contagious” jar of oil that had touched John the Baptist’s index finger could transmit its charisma to other objects endlessly, said Vikan, author of the new book “The Holy Shroud: A Brilliant Hoax in the Time of the Black Death” and former director of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.
My conversation with Vikan formed the basis of my recent (Aug. 11) Religion News Service article “How the Black Plague turned the Shroud of Turin into a beloved relic.”
Detail of Reliquary Monstrance with a Tooth of Saint John the Baptist (1433; container: 900/1200) at Art Institute of Chicago. My photo.
“From the very beginning, the idea was that the sanctity of a saint is contained in the smallest physical aspect of the saint and is infinitely divisible,” he said. “If a saint dies and you chop it into 10,000 pieces, each piece has no less potency than the thing still living.”
There’s even a parallel to Md. Gov. Larry Hogan’s announcement last April that National Guardsmen would protect coronavirus tests secured from South Korea, including from confiscation by the federal government.
In 1389, the Turin shroud’s custodians faced off against King Charles VI’s bailiff, who sought to impound the relic, which was initially seen as an artwork but was later shown deliberately and deceptively as Jesus’ actual burial cloth.
In a moment fit for operatic crescendo, church canons first pretended they lacked the key to the cabinet securing the shroud, but after the bailiff insisted the locks be clipped, they claimed the shroud was elsewhere. Their deception worked; the bailiff left empty handed.
The early story of the shroud is enmeshed irrefragably with the plague’s. In the 1350s, the knight who owned the shroud, Geoffroi de Charny, saw it as a painter’s “cunningly portrayed” artwork, and Pope Clement VII permitted its display as a “representation” of the true shroud, but not the original. After his father’s death, Geoffroi II showed the shroud for veneration, and the faithful came to see it as a true relic, per Vikan’s book.
Reliquaries on view at Vienna, Austria’s Dom Museum. My photo.
In 1350, Pope Clement VI declared a jubilee year half a century early, and more than 1 million pilgrims descended on Rome, then population 50,000, over two and a half months. Sojourners didn’t know whether the plague had ended but wanted to “be out of town and less susceptible to what they knew was a problem of being around too many people,” Vikan said.
He compared the pilgrims in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (1387-1400) fleeing pandemic to those who left Manhattan recently for the Adirondacks. At St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, pilgrims would have seen Veronica’s Veil, a relic also said to retain Jesus’ facial imprint.
Vikan cites the story of Saint Roch as indication of how seriously medieval Catholics took the plague. The saint is said to have fallen ill while administering to the sick in the 14th century. He self-isolated in the woods, where a dog licked his wounds and brought bread until he healed.
Reliquaries on view at the São Roque Museum in Lisbon. My photo.
Though the 14th-century plague was much deadlier than today’s—the Black Death killed between 30 to 90 percent of those who contracted it, depending upon strain—Vikan thinks people reach out to one another and crave physical objects in similar ways in stressful times. To read more about his view, and that of a priest who runs a chapel in Pittsburgh with 5,000 relics (the most outside the Vatican, by its count), you can see the Religion News Service story here.
Could there be a more timely release for this book? Given the strength of Vikan's profile, it's assumed this book was in the making for years and on S & S's publishing queue a year or years before COVID. Perhaps it's release was expedited, but the timing is indeed amazing. And, from initial comments here and by key voices (on the Amazon site) weighing in, looks like a book I'll be reading soon. Years ago I followed closely the STURP reports, and found the information on the Shroud engaging, even though the balance of passion and scientific inquiry seemed difficult for both the scientists and readers/viewers. It struck me early on that considerable funds were being spent (millions?) to determine via modern technology how this was made in antiquity. Instead, it seems they would want to look at what technology was available in the middle ages (when it first surfaced) for forgers to make it? We have plenty of evidence of ancient forgeries, long before the modern flow. A few years ago, a graduate student did just that--following Chesteron's "Father Brown" figure he looked at what was available for medieval artisans (and forgers). See the brilliant "Books & Culture" article on this by N. Wilson (now at St. Andrews?): "Father Brown Fakes the Shroud" (2005). He reproduced a very similar Shroud and image that also contains the "3-D" images in the linen--by painting on glass and allowing the sun's solstice to make an imprint. I think the 3-D result was quite unexpected, but seems to answer one the key questions. The article, according to the esteemed editor, John Wilson (no relation to N. W.), was one of the strongest in the venerated publication's history (produced by Christianity Today).