Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England by Robyn Malo

Abstract

Reviewed by: Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England by Robyn Malo Ellen K. Rentz Robyn Malo. Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. vii, 298. $70.00 cloth. In this fabulous new book, Robyn Malo challenges many of our most enduring assumptions about the meaning, function, and significance of relics in late medieval religious culture and literary history. In particular, she questions scholars’ conviction that “relics signified in a way that did not necessarily need explanation,” that a relic’s meaning is “always already there” (12). Malo warns us that, when it comes to relics, we have a tendency to “idealize” rather than “interrogate” (13). We haven’t thought deeply enough about relics, reliquaries, or the narratives that surrounded them, and Malo encourages us to question their seeming stability and straightforwardness. Malo asks how relics came to signify, and argues that narrative played a much more constructive and productive role in the enterprise than we’ve tended to give it credit for. Relics and reliquaries are anything but simple or easy to construe: they pose what Malo calls an “interpretive problem” (6), and an outpouring of relic-oriented narratives between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries bears witness to this. Relics and reliquaries needed narrative in order to be understood; their meaning inhered in—in some instances, only inhered in—language. Malo’s fascinating exploration of the rich and complex relationship between relic and narrative teaches us as much about the literary as it does about the material. Language could open up meaning, but it could also conceal it, and as Malo demonstrates, the same was true for material enshrinement: although we tend to associate reliquaries with display, they also trafficked in “occlusion.” Throughout, [End Page 346] Malo complicates our expectation that relics and reliquaries facilitate closeness and familiarity with the divine, that they render the divine familiar. The book studies saint cults in the broader context of late medieval devotional culture, offering new perspectives on lay piety, religious materiality, and the relationship between text and image. It also locates relic discourse in literary history, bringing religious practice to bear on a wide range of texts in new and unexpected ways, and raising important questions about genre, form, and the status of language and representation. A model of interdisciplinary study, Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England makes important contributions to a wide range of fields. The book’s five chapters are organized in two main parts. In the first (“Relic Discourse and the Cult of Saints”), Malo explores the development and commonplaces of “relic discourse,” while the second (“The Trouble with Relic Discourse”) concerns the deployment of relic discourse in a variety of literary contexts, including English Grail legends, Chaucerian poetry, and Wycliffite writings. Throughout, Malo’s thematic organization of the book makes for creative and productive new readings of a wide variety of texts and objects. Chapter 1 focuses on the conventions of relic discourse, particularly the function of specialized technical terminology and metaphor. Malo explores the essential role that language played in producing a relic’s meaning at a time when encounters with relics were increasingly characterized by deferral, distance, and occlusion: “Writing filled the gap,” Malo argues, because it assigned value and meaning not only to relics, but to the reliquaries that housed them (31). In doing so, it also drew attention to the potentially vexed relationship between the container and its contents. The chapter pairs readings of a wide variety of texts (relic lists, saints’ lives, pilgrimage texts) with fascinating discussion of late medieval developments in shrine base construction. Malo handles this impressive range of literary, historical, and material evidence with tremendous skill. In Chapter 2, she explores the “commonplaces” of relic discourse and the extent to which they gave meaning to a relic—establishing a saint’s praesentia, of course, but also complicating the relationship between relic and reliquary. The convention of nighttime exhumation and translation, for example, emphasizes “the parallels between translation, darkness, and relic discourse,” presenting the relic encounter as “an occluded, secret—even dark—affair,” and one that requires narrative: in a wide variety of saints’ lives, “language supplies meaning for what remains unseen...