ONE OF THE things I enjoy most about studying anchorites is the opportunity to tramp around the English countryside tracking down remnants of cells, documenting the spaces inhabited by the bodies of the people whose religious lives have left literary traces. Similarly, when I introduce a class to the study of relics, I tend to start by telling them that relics are often “pieces of saints.” This is not to be flippant, but rather to drive home the fact that in medieval Christianity, relics, or at least first-class relics, are fragmented bodies—parts that come to represent the whole, just as the remains of anchorholds represent, at least to some extent, the whole vocation. It is important to feel close to the subject, to immerse myself in the “mat-ter” that makes up the normally intangible religious subjects I explore. As Alexandra Walsham notes, “the study of material objects offers an alternative perspective from which to analyze the societies that produced and consumed them.” Material objects almost have agency themselves, and they certainly invite responses from audiences with whom they physically interact. They can invoke memory, encourage participation, and reconstruct cultural moments. Relics, of course, which are simultaneously religious artifacts and secular objects offer these same opportunities.

Relics, broadly understood, offer two dimensions of analysis that must be considered at the same time: on the one hand as a body; on the other hand, as an object or perhaps more precisely, an artifact. I say “artifact” because they are crafted objects, bodies changed into things via human modification, with the qualities of artifacts—design concept, material selections, manufacturing standards, and distribution patterns. Concentrating on the materiality of relics, then, allows us to consider relics not only as religious objects, but also as social objects that express cultural beliefs.

Relics and reliquaries were core parts of medieval Christian piety, and the cult of saints was infused throughout Western society. Due to their centrality, relics offer glimpses at a range of material, social, and cultural phenomena related to medieval embodiment. As Julia M. H. Smith notes, “these stones and bones cannot be fitted into a world view which sunders materiality and belief, or enforces a rigid distinction between subject and object, or between object and thing.”