The focus of this chapter is monumental, freestanding altar Vasari built after his patronage rights shifted from the St. Mustiola chapel to the Pieve’s high chapel in 1560. Consecrated in 1564, the high altar was the first and largest of Vasari’s four chapels for the Pieve. This chapter considers its history and design and materiality and precedents, as well as its multiple functions as a high altar, a relic altar, a sacrament tabernacle, and, to a lesser extent, Vasari’s family funerary chapel.

The Epilogue reflects on the ways that nineteenth-century texts consistently acknowledge the post-lapsarian state of human existence. The literary works discussed in this book all, to some extent, either recreate the events of Milton’s epic in a world that is fallen or tell the story of what happens after the expulsion. Drawing on Christopher Ricks, the Epilogue identifies a single word – ‘error’ – as emblematic of Milton’s nineteenth-century legacy. ‘Error’ points to its post-lapsarian meanings even when used to describe Eden before the Fall. After opening with the 1790 disinterment of Milton’s corpse, the Epilogue turns to another disturbing anecdote to illustrate the complexity of Milton’s nineteenth-century reception: the history of a Victorian edition of Milton’s poetry, bound in tanned human skin. The skin in question belonged to George Cudmore, executed for murder in the 1830s. This instance of anthropodermic bibliopegy reveals that Milton’s works, while revered and respected by the Victorians – his body parts were treated as relics – were also open to disruption and reinterpretation.

Ambrose of Milan’s funerary oration for Valentinian II (392 ce) confronts violence, civil war, and imperial authority, ultimately redefining the emperor’s body as a collection of relics. The oration’s ambiguity regarding the circumstances of Valentinian II’s premature and violent death was not merely a matter of political expediency; it also served as a rhetorical strategy to support Ambrose’s innovative treatment of the emperor’s corpse. By weaving passages from the Song of Songs into his oration, Ambrose evoked imagery resonant with same-sex desire, while presenting himself as the emperor’s guarantor – but in his very own way: as a “womanly” father and a lover mourning his beloved. In portraying Valentinian II as a selfless soldier-martyr, Ambrose rehabilitated an emperor who may have died by suicide and without the sacrament of baptism, while also redefining key imperial virtues at a time when they – and the empire – faced mounting challenges from both internal and external forces.

Chapter 4 continues this examination of narrative truth, focusing on the new post-Tridentine pressure to accurately portray relics in depictions of sacred history. This chapter explores how two of Borromeo’s most cherished Passion relics, the Column of Flagellation in the Church of Santa Prassede in Rome and the relic of Christ’s burial shroud in Turin, began to appear in narrative art during the 1570s for the first time in the history of Christian art. Both relics were of doubtful authenticity: Borromeo’s Column of the Flagellation was short, rather than the expected long pillar, while the long dimensions of the Shroud of Turin failed to match with descriptions of Christ’s burial cloths in the Bible. Nevertheless, Borromeo and his fellow Catholic scholars attempted to fit these prized relics into sacred history – and artists joined in this endeavor. Artists’ visual skills in the making of the istoria, the dramatic narrative still so central to ambitious art-making, were instrumental in scholarly revisions of biblical events. Artists marshalled practices of figure drawing and composition to explain the possibilities of sacred history, producing istorie of historical value for reformers and antiquarians.

In the nave of Sant’Apollinare in Classe stands what, by the time it was constructed, had come to be called an altar (Figures 13 and 14). By the sixteenth century, not only the name but also the matter, the form, and the composition had come to provoke thousands of Christians, some to call for their replacement with wooden tables, some to singular physical violence, bringing sledgehammers to smash into rubble what had, for generations, stood in choirs, apses, and chapels and against columns. Even those who left them in place no longer accorded them the same role in the Mass. For Lutherans, they were the surface for the celebration of the Eucharist. For Catholics, they were more, but no longer what they had been. Even the great Jesuit scholar Joseph Braun, whose study of altars remains foundational, defined the altar as “that liturgical instrument [Gerät] on and at which the Eucharist was celebrated.” It was for him a thing. He accorded some six pages in a 756-page volume to the “symbolism” of the altar. For him, meaning was given to the altar by texts: commentators, liturgists including Durand, canon lawyers, popes, and theologians. The altar itself was mute.

The image in Plate 13 is now housed in the City Museum of Münster. The museum dates it to 1491. On the back, their website informs us, is the name of an otherwise unknown painter, Seewald. The museum lists it as “Faces without Eyes,” in which the eyes of all but Christ and two others have been “carefully removed such that one can often see the wood beneath.” The online description glosses the removal of the paint designating eyes as “destructions,” evoking “the immediate association” of “iconoclasts of the Reformation period.” As the Museum’s website suggests, there is a long tradition of using the word “iconoclasm” to name a part of what happened in the sixteenth century and a rich and dense body of scholarship on “the destruction of art.” But, as the painting materializes, the word has never fit as a name for what Evangelicals did.

Part II, ‘The Treasury’, begins in Westminster Abbey, where imported silks and jewels were highly visible, considering the difference between medieval practices of display and contemporary museum practice. Chapter 3 unravels the meanings of Arabic and Pseudo-Arabic textiles in medieval England, as devotional and resistant texts. The category of ‘Syriana’ is most clearly advertised in the case of these fabrics, with Italian weavers in Lucca explicitly recorded as the producers of ‘soriani’. By the fourteenth century, high quality Italian ‘Damasks’ were effectively indistinguishable from original Syrian wares. I consider the significance of the known inauthenticity of ‘Syrian’ textiles. Imported silks were ostentatiously used to construct sacred spaces in England, as seen in the instructions left by William Wey in his will for the reconstruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Wiltshire. Arabic-inscribed fabrics were venerated as Holy Land relics. The ownership of silks was regulated through sumptuary legislation, indicating – as with the legal regulation of sweet wines – an anxiety around the category. At the same time, imitative silks knowingly fabricated their origins, destabilising the relic discourse through which these items were venerated. Imported Arabic and Pseudo-Arabic textiles inscribe the role of mobility across borders in the creation of culture.

Chapter 3 focuses on the mechanisms through which certain special temple buildings were invested with an essential "prospective" role for empire and how in the face of crisis—especially the physical destruction of the buildings along with the challenge to the claims for continuity and security that came with them—those mechanisms were renewed or transformed.

Chapter 1 examines Agnolo Gaddi’s work between 1392 and 1395 in the chapel in Prato cathedral, which was built to house the Virgin’s Belt, the most important relic in the city. Primary sources allow reconstruction of the ceremony during which the precious relic of the Virgin’s Belt was displayed to the public. The monumental narratives of the origins of the Holy Belt and its journey to Prato celebrated Prato’s favored status as custodian of the relic. Detailed surviving payments, here published in full for the first time, reveal a narrative of the chapel’s construction and decoration and bring to light how the artist, Agnolo Gaddi, collaborated with Florentine and Pratese artisans in the enterprise. Agnolo’s  professional and personal connections with the Pratese Opera, and the social identities of its members, expose a rich network of relationships in which the commission unfolded.

The son of a praetorian prefect, well-educated and well-connected, Ambrose was governor of Aemilia and Liguria when, in 374, he was unexpectedly acclaimed bishop of Milan, though he was not yet even baptized. He was an able administrator, a benefactor of the poor and builder of churches, an innovative liturgist who composed hymns still sung today, and an eloquent preacher who dazzled congregants with allegorizing expositions of the Old Testament that drew on Philo, Origen, and other Greek writers. Ambrose used scriptural tapestries of his own creation to persuade his hearers into following a particular course of action, a competency on display in this letter. Ambrose’s voluminous writings were an important conduit of Greek thought to the Latin West. Major works include On the Sacraments and On the Duties of the Clergy. He also wrote texts dedicated to scriptural exegesis and to the promotion of celibacy and asceticism, especially among women. His theological treatises, more synthetic than groundbreaking, challenged Homoian views of the Holy Spirit and the Incarnation.

Chapter Three explores the elegiac quality of three further collections, and Heaney’s shifting engagement with Catholicism as these develop. I explore how the tactile piety of relics lie behind the poems of North, even if drafts of these poems show how much Heaney redacted Catholic iconography in the published versions. I argue that in 1975, when North was published, the worsening sectarian climate may have encouraged Heaney to avoid language which might suggest a theology of intercession. Field Work contains a number of elegies for those killed in the Troubles and for several poets and friends of Heaney. However, I argue that the collection might also be read as an elegy for Heaney’s Catholic childhood. The note of elegy in these collections is most personal in The Haw Lantern, the first collection of poems published since the death of Heaney’s mother in 1984. ‘Clearances’, the sequence of sonnets written in memory of his mother, inform the whole collection, and in paying close attention to their drafts, I argue that Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism is somehow bound up with his relationship with his mother.

The presence and power of Jesus in early Christian material culture are mediated through texts, visual depictions, and other objects, representing and re-presenting Jesus across various contexts. Focusing especially on the first five centuries ce, the analysis addresses Jesus in the materiality of text, liturgy, relic, and symbol, revealing early Christian theologies and practices that resonate in later historical periods and highlighting the complex dialectic of Jesus’s presence and absence in material forms.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

Many stories about river miracles and wonders were repeatedly told, retold, and transformed as part of the process of establishing and understanding discussions about moral values, sanctity, and socioeconomic behaviors. This chapter looks at some of these, following the stories over time and space. The section “Reversing the Rivers,” framed around a specific set of narratives involving the bodies of saints, tackles medieval ideas about what is “natural” and the ways that saints were understood as capable of both sustaining and reversing the natural. The chapter ends with an exploration of a series of stories that stretches into the 1100s and 1200s, encouraging readers to imagine themselves transported both backwards to the Edenic past and forward to a future salvation.

This chapter focuses on the idea of rivers as frontier or boundary, beginning with stories from Late Antiquity, and including a discussion of the ways that river frontiers are porous and permeable. A case study of the monastery of Prüm shows the complexity of these dynamics. The main focus of the chapter is on the impact of the Viking raids on medieval monastic writers, and how their stories about this moment created a new view of rivers as sites of danger and disruption. Then, the chapter explores ways that rivers were seen as sites of destruction and oblivion – an alternate to the idea of rivers and memory explored in the previous chapter. Finally, it looks at how monastic communities reinvented their histories in the wake of the Viking attacks, and how this helped them in turn to reimagine and restore their relationships with rivers.

Since late antiquity, bishops have been regarded as possessing the highest authority among Christians. But there was no linear path leading there. Rather, there were different bearers of authority among Christians: James, as the respected brother of Jesus, was a key figure at the beginning; intellectuals were able to gain importance as teachers, prophets also appeared after Jesus, among them many women; widows and virgins attained a special position; finally, the authority of ascetics increased. Basically, authority could be derived from an office within the church or from personal charisma, which was considered God given. Good bishops tried to combine both, but charismatics could always challenge them and would continue to do so throughout the history of Christianity.

Chapter 4 examines one of the most spectacular music-liturgical programs of the fourteenth century: the narrative office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition. A work of enormous rhetorical ingenuity and historical imagination, the Apparitio office, I argue, was a product of the state’s heightened attention to and generative engagement with the cult of relics. Found as a late addition to Basilica San Marco’s thirteenth-century antiphonal (VAM¹), the office celebrated the present-day virtue of the state’s most cherished possession: the body of its patron saint, the Evangelist Mark. Careful comparison between the Vespers office chants and the legend source from which the story derives reveals an inventive process of selection, omission, and invention of texts, and as well as a high degree of sensitivity in musical setting. The result was a compelling public ritual that represented the contract between the body of Mark and the Venetians who venerated him and, at the same time, made a self-reflexive bid for music and liturgy as the means for that contract’s renewal.