Introduction

There is a range of ways of approaching the meaning of ‘conversion’ both broadly, and within the context of Late Antiquity. These might include baptismal figures (if we had them), attendance figures at the principal ecclesiastical events, or, less directly but perhaps more accessibly, the spread of church organisation and related buildings. Equally, there is a number of approaches through which analysis of the processes of conversion can be undertaken: through imperial, papal and royal policy; through episcopal history as Humphries (1999) has done for northern Italy; through the sociology of health care and exponential growth as Stark has shown (1994); through analysis of trade and contact patterns; and through the study of the transmission of estates. But one of the most interesting and fruitful, because it offers some chance of accounting for the phenomena of conversion rather than recounting its progress, is to view religious experience as a field of social practice in which identities are constructed and cultural meanings signalled.

Here, I wish to investigate three particular components of the mechanisms of conversion: firstly, the ways in which human bodies were used, with their associated graves, containers and related objects, which together constitute a very special class of material culture; secondly, the creation of focal loci in time and space; and thirdly, the character of the networks which bound together crucial actors in the story. I shall do this by looking in detail at a limited area in northern Gaul, comprising the late imperial provinces of Belgica Secunda, Lugdunensis Senonia, Lugdunensis Tertia and Lugdunensis Secunda (although I shall largely leave aside the area which became Brittany), during the period from roughly 350, when the movement towards a general Christian society began to take shape, to c.550 when it is clear from the works of Gregory of Tours that such a society had come into being. The success of the Christian enterprise in this area during these two centuries or so should not blind us to the struggle for hearts and minds which conversion involved; during the early period, particularly, things might perhaps have taken several different turns.

The Manipulation of Body Parts: Holy Remains