Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation

Abstract

Devotion to relics, declared the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin in an unusually scurrilous tract translated into English in 1561, was a most ‘execrable sacrilege’, a ‘filthy polution the which ought in no wise to be suffered in the church’. He spared not an ounce of withering contempt and acerbic wit in cataloguing the vast reservoir of counterfeit bones, blood, shirts, caps, and assorted other ‘baggage’ and ‘geare’ that filled the churches of Europe and was cunningly manipulated by the devil and the papists to pervert the simple. Among ‘the seae full of lyes’ he sought to expose was the brain of St Peter, which was actually a pumice stone, and the improbable proliferation of relics of Christ’s Cross and Mary’s milk: if a man gathered together all the splinters of the former that were said to exist ‘there would be inough to fraighte a great ship’, while the quantity of the latter could scarcely have been produced ‘if the holye virgyne had bene a cowe’ or a wet nurse throughout her life. Had it not been for her assumption into heaven, ‘they woulde have made the world beleve, that she had a body sufficient to fell a great poudryng fatte’. As for the morsel of broiled fish presented to Jesus by one of his disciples after his resurrection from the dead, Calvin commented cuttingly, this must have been ‘wel spiced’ or ‘merveylously well soussed’ to have been preserved for such a long time. The ease with which the populace had been deceived by these tricks was itself a just punishment from God for its gullibility and natural addiction to ‘this most perverse kinde of superstition’ and to a carnal religion that revolved around visible, physical things. 1