The International Medieval Congress at Leeds, to convene for the eleventh time in July 2004, has become a fixture in the lives of academic medievalists of all stripes. Less well known is the publication of selected, thematically related papers from each conference in the irregular series known as International Medieval Research. Covering such topics as medieval frontiers, time and eternity, and love, marriage and family ties, the volumes of this series now number twelve; the latest, on the medieval household, appeared in 2003. The volume under review here initiated a new subseries devoted to art historical themes; its second volume, The White Mantle of Churches, edited by Nigel Hiscock, was published in 2003. Decorations for the Holy Dead, which includes some commissioned papers as well as those delivered at the congress, represents, like most conference sessions, a range-- in quality, adherence to the theme, and in approach as well as in the location and date of the monuments treated. The papers deal with monuments from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, which makes the decision to reprint Peter Brown's "Enjoying the Saints in Late Antiquity" (2000) as a prolegomenon a bit puzzling. The twelve largely monographic essays in the body of the book cover a vast geographic span--from England to Greece and from Hungary to Spain--with the latter unusually strongly represented by five of the essays. What is most surprising and what prevents the essays from hanging together as closely as one might expect is the wide interpretation of the subtitle. Only five of the articles deal primarily with tombs; the others interpret "shrines" more widely than I would have thought possible. Here we find discussions of a head reliquary, an altarpiece (with no claim that it held relics), two cloister capitals, one of which contains a relic "sepulchre," and a whole cloister. Thus the reader expecting to learn more about saints' shrines in the traditional sense--like the shrine of Charlemagne, St. Elizabeth, or St. Taurin-- will be disappointed. Only Stephen Lamia's paper treats such objects, albeit lost examples, and then only in passing.
The volume opens with a short introduction by the editors, providing the requisite bibliography on the topic and brief introduction to the individual essays. Brown's Prolegomenon follows. Its main theme, the degree to which saints were considered imitable and the desirability of imitating them, is addressed in the subsequent essays only in a most general way. Leslie Bussis Tait suggests a "vicarious interactivity" (156) in the capitals of the cloister of Saint-Pons-de-Thomieres in which the monks would have "identified with" (160) the struggle of the patron saint of their house. More typical is the way in which figures other than the saint him/herself portrayed in scenes on tombs echo or condition the viewer's behavior ( 32, 155). In fact, it is the "other forms of imaginative appropriation of [saints'] power"(14), an issue that interests Brown only peripherally, that provide the focus of most of the essays in the book.
The twelve new essays that comprise the body of the book are divided somewhat arbitrarily into three groups: Pilgrims, Piety, and Cultic Practice; Cloister--Holy Place for the Holy Dead; and Shifting the Saint, Moving the Faithful. The editors admit overlap (xxiv), and indeed some of these essays could have fitted as well in more than one section. Since the section on cloisters, with the exception of its first essay, by Eduardo Carrero Santamaría, is the tightest, I will examine it first. The essays by Leah Rutchik on Moissac, for me the high point of the book, and Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo on Silos work well together; both look in detail at a single capital and consider its iconography and placement in relation to other physical features of the cloister and activities that occurred therein. Both capitals are distinguished from the others of the cloister, that at Silos by its inscription and asymmetrical imagery, that at Moissac by its relic sepulcher. Valdez del Álamo relates the capital at the center of the north cloister walk to the nearby site of Santo Domingo's original burial and suggests how its inscription and imagery would have heightened its effectiveness as an "epitaph." Rutchik situates the capital with the relic depository in the creative process she calls ceremonial thinking, "a process akin to visual cognition that uses elements of ecclesiastical ceremony and ritual (gesture, procession, genuflection or prostration, speech, song, objects, aromas) to represent or create meaning in a performance context" (134). Linking chant, procession, the cult of relics at Moissac, and the location of the unusual capital, she argues that it was "a special focus of liturgical or paraliturgical ceremony to honour Peter on the anniversaries of his martyrdom, his liberation from prison and very likely on the anniversary of the church's dedication" (130-31). Indeed she proposes that the large cloister with its exceptional decoration may have been designed and built specifically to provide a more appropriate ceremonial space for such processions (142-43). Leslie Bussis Tait's essay, mentioned above, rounds out this section. Both Tait and Rutchik assume the major audience for the cloister capitals to have been the local monks. Recent work has shown that cloisters of churches with secular clergy were far from the hermetically sealed structures we have sometimes supposed; see, for example, the essays by Regine Abegg and Markus Stromer in Kunst + Architektur in der Schweiz 48/2 (1997). A family burial chapel at the original center of the Silos cloister and the likelihood of pilgrims visiting the miracle-working waters of the fountain in the northwest corner of the cloister at Moissac open up the possibility of a wider and more varied audience at these sites and elsewhere and might allow a productive expansion of some of the ideas proposed in these essays.
The essay by Rocío Sánchez Ameijeiras sets the tone for the section entitled "Pilgrims, Piety, and Cultic Practice." Concentrating on the cenotaph for San Millán at San Millán de la Cogolla and the tomb San Pedro at El Burgo de Osma, Sánchez examines a series of devices that enabled or reflected practices performed at these sites. Both tombs, for example, are set on columns, which allowed the faithful, especially those seeking cures, to creep under the tomb and thus enjoy greater physical proximity to the saint's healing powers. This type of "interactive sepulchre" (32), in which physical arrangement and the importance of touch heightened the viewer's experience, is also the theme of Stephen Lamia's article on the tombs of England's "premier saints," Thomas Becket and Edward the Confessor. These tombs afforded a similar access to the Spanish ones on columns by piercing the sides with holes large enough to crawl through. In this they provided pilgrims an experience akin to that of visitors to the tomb of Christ, which also had with holes in its sides. In addition to tracing the reconfigurations of Edward's tomb over time and the nature of the evidence for the tomb, Lamia returns to the idea of synaesthetic experience that he explored in his essay in the volume entitled Memory and the Medieval Tomb, edited by Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo and Carol Stamatis Pendergast in 2000. The subject of Daniel Rico Camps' essay, the stone shrine of San Vicente de Ávila, fits well with Sánchez's and Lamia's. Its form, an open arcaded structure, vaguely resembles the open, accessible tombs of the two previous essays and the narrative of the upper levels encourages, like the tomb of San Pedro at El Burgo de Osma and the inscription on the cloister capital at Silos, the viewer to circumambulation. The architectural form of the shrine likens it to metalwork shrines, a point that Rico does not discuss, but he does investigate the shrine as both a miniature of and a metaphor for the church in which it stands and for the city around it. Rico's dense layering of form, placement, and meaning make this a well developed, fulfilling treatment of a beautiful and important object.
The final two essays in the third section could just as well have been placed with these three from the first. Francesca Espanol sets physical remains and documents side by side to study the sepulcher of Saint Juliana at Santillana del Mar as it was remodeled in 1453, when the relics were moved to the altar. The large-scale effigy and the baldachin above it were intended, according to Espanol, to convince pilgrims that the saint's body still lay in the tomb (195) and to attract pilgrims with their financial offerings to make the detour off the pilgrimage road (191, 202-3). One has to wonder how much the pilgrimage to Santiago was still a going concern in the fifteenth century. Using late Romanesque reliefs still extant but dispersed throughout the church, Espanol reconstructs an earlier tomb, which she also sees as an attempt "to relaunch the cult of the local saint" (203). Not only the structural similarities of the later monument to that of San Vicente, but the reconstruction problem make this article particularly rewarding reading against that of Rico, who also reconstructs the tomb of Vicente's sisters.
The section ends with an essay by Ulrich Pfisterer on the tomb of San Donato installed in the cathedral at Arezzo after the rediscovery of the saint's relics in 1362. This monument participates in a genre of saint's tombs defined by Nicola Pisano in 1267 in the Arca de San Domenico in Bologna. In basic form this monument resembles others studied in this volume: set up on columns, it demanded circumambulation to read the narrative of Donatus's life. It differs from others of its type, however, in its opulence, combining as it does scenes of the saint's life with the structure of an altarpiece and scenes from the life of the Virgin more expected in that type of object. The second problem that interests Pfisterer is the "crisis" he sees after about 1380, when tombs of this type abruptly stop being made. He proposes that the attempt around 1400 to recover an ideal ecclesia primitiva, together with the economic and political situation and other factors, put an end to the competition for increasingly lavish tombs that had characterized the fourteenth century.
The remaining three essays seem to me to fit less easily with the rest. Scott Montgomery and Alice Bauer's lively discussion of the head reliquary of St. Ladislaus brings this important, but little known work to the attention of English-speaking art historians. Of particular interest is their association of the reliquary with the better known bust of Charlemagne at Aachen and the role that such a "copy"--and devotion to Ladislaus in general--might have had in legitimizing Louis the Great (1342-83), the second Angevin king of Hungary. Their redating to the period between 1357 and 1378 is convincing, although their attempts to discredit the charter that is the source of the more usual post-1406 date (84-85) seem forced to me. In any case, their warning (p. 90, n. 48) against our insistence on the primacy of texts is well taken.
The texts of Nadezhda Guerassimenko and Leanne Gilbertson, investigations of the decorative cycle in the Katholikon of the monastery of Hosios Loukas and the St. Margaret altarpiece in the style of Turino Vanni, respectively, depart from the others even more markedly, in that they deal with two-dimensional media. Guerassimenko is interested in the unusually full series of physician saints, their arrangement in the narthex and naos with respect to the functions of these spaces, and their role, like that of the tomb of St. Juliana at Santillana del Mar, in "consolidat[ing] the position of this nascent monastery as a pilgrimage site" (171). Although the panel Gilbertson discusses includes the representation of a well-placed man, probably the patron, she is interested in the ways in which a female audience would have perceived the arrangement and iconographies of the scenes from the life of this patron saint of childbirth and nurses. While some of her assumptions don't wash--the comparison of the Vanni altarpiece to the earlier example may well be an issue of date as much as audience, for instance, and the depiction of the saint's martyrdom on the panel need hardly suggest the proximity of her relics--the distinctions between the interests of gendered groups of viewers is a valid one.
A series of themes unites the essays of this wide-ranging volume. One is the variety of senses addressed. Looking at images in books and slides and talking continuously about "viewers," we often forget the element of touch that would have been so central to the medieval pilgrim; these essays bring back the cold of the stone and the dust in the tomb's interior. And Leah Rutchik reminds us of the chant that would have accompanied many of the ceremonies at these sites. Stephen Lamia would argue that we not forget smell and even taste (51). Another of the unifying themes is that of movement toward, around, and sometimes through these monuments. Penelope Davies has elucidated the role of circumambulation in the commemoration of the dead in ancient Rome and argued that imperial tombs were designed to accommodate and encourage this activity (Death and the Emperor: Roman Imperial Funerary Monuments, from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 83 and 124-28); is it possible that the act of circling these medieval monuments also somehow carried meaning in itself? Finally, several of the authors are interested in the fate of the empty tomb after the removal of the saint's remains to a reliquary. Sanchez, Lamia, Valdez del Álamo, and Espanol provide evidence that the original burial site acquired a kind of relic-like status itself, that miracles still occurred there, and that pilgrimage to it continued. It seems to me, however, that we should also consider the somewhat more cynical possibility: that the original, now empty tomb was all that was left to normal pilgrims and miracle-seekers once the relics had been removed for safe-keeping and placed in a valuable gold-sheathed, jewel-encrusted shrine. How these shrines were isolated from public traffic and lay use can be seen by the example of the mid-thirteenth-century shrine of St. Elizabeth, which was removed to the sacristy where it was surrounded, as early as 1326, by a metal grill, and covered, at least some of the time, by a great wooden shrine cover. Surely the installation of a new cenotaph or other monument should be seen not only as a marker of the erstwhile burial site of a saintly person, but also as a kind of booby prize, a cheaper, sturdier ersatz for the new container of the now holy remains.