Book contents
- Boxes and Books in Early Modern England
- Boxes and Books in Early Modern England
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Texts
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England
- Chapter 2 The Renaissance of the Box
- Chapter 3 The Word in a Box
- Chapter 4 How to Read a Reliquary
- Chapter 5 ‘Because this box we know’
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- Index
Chapter 4 - How to Read a Reliquary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2021
- Boxes and Books in Early Modern England
- Boxes and Books in Early Modern England
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Texts
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Chests of the Mind in Early Modern England
- Chapter 2 The Renaissance of the Box
- Chapter 3 The Word in a Box
- Chapter 4 How to Read a Reliquary
- Chapter 5 ‘Because this box we know’
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Primary Sources
- Secondary Sources
- Index
Summary
Focuses on the reliquary: an enclosing, revealing structure, which engages intensely with its contents. The apparently idolatrous worshipping of ‘Gods bodye in the box’ was a persistent complaint among reformers, and the murky box of the reliquary epitomised the falseness of the Roman Catholic faith. The chapter starts with sixteenth-century encounters with relics, beginning with Erasmus, whose attitude is characterised by ambiguities about the spiritual significance of material things. Comparing satirical and polemical responses to relics from both sides of the religious divide, the chapter considers how these boxes operated as contested sites. It then turns to the afterlife of the reliquary once it had been removed from the religious sphere, and locates its survival in the vocabulary of post-Reformation libraries as new kinds of shrine, and in seventeenth-century printed reliquiae, as safer kinds of receptacle. Even after the reliquary appeared to be emptied of its dangerous significance, the very idea of the relic and the possibilities offered by this controversial box endured as ways of thinking about the interweaving of physical and intellectual apprehension demanded by books.
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- Information
- Boxes and Books in Early Modern EnglandMateriality, Metaphor, Containment, pp. 148 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021