A series of seminars at the IRHT in Paris in 2021-2022 focused on sacred space at St.-Médard of Soissons during the Carolingian age, when the monks had to balance royal presence with their own (supposedly withdrawn) activities. From these seminars grew a conference held in Naples in 2022, to study more broadly the ways that monasteries had to shape their sacred spaces to accommodate pilgrims and other visitors, especially when the arrival of new relics resulted in a growth in visitors. This volume comes out of that conference, with sixteen articles by the various participants, plus an introduction and conclusion. It is divided into two broad sections, from relics to devotion, and from devotion to spatial organization.
The overall theme is the relationship between the acquisition and veneration of relics in a monastery and the need for designated spaces for the lay faithful who made pilgrimages there. Even though Benedictine monks were expected to be separate from the world, Daniele Ferraiuolo notes in the introduction, a monastery was dependent on the support of lay people, and thus relics, located in a suitable spot for pilgrims, helped drive decisions about the monastery’s spatial layout. Any rebuilding of an abbey church or the claustral buildings required decisions about where to put the relics for access both by the monks and by laypeople. Monks also needed to provide hospitality for pilgrims who came to revere their relics, even if only by providing a porch on which they could sleep. Poor planning could lead to the monks being overwhelmed.
The individual articles are written by a diverse international group of primarily younger scholars. Although the title of the volume and the introduction are in English, only five of the other articles are. Of the rest, five are in French, one is in Spanish, and six are in Italian, including the conclusion. The choice of topics is equally wide-ranging. The period covered extends from the time of the early Merovingian and Gothic kings in the late Roman Empire up to the end of Carolingian rule. The monasteries studied are found everywhere from northern Francia to Christian Spain, Lombardy, and Naples.
Each of the articles addresses a specific monastery or place and is fairly self-contained, with extensive illustrations and its own bibliography. Most of the articles rely heavily on archaeology as well as on written records. The secondary studies cited are almost entirely in the languages of the continent, with few citations to studies in English, even though at a minimum Barbara Rosenwein’s classic Negotiating Space (1999), on sacred space in Merovingian Gaul, would seem relevant.
Several general topics are repeated throughout the various articles, most notably that monasteries had to accommodate not only pilgrims who came to revere a house’s relics but also, in many cases, the royal or imperial court. St.-Médard, on which volume editor Daniele Ferraiuolo focuses in the book’s final article and with which this conference began, was considered a royal Carolingian monastery, expected to receive elite guests, for three centuries. Similarly, the basilicas of Ravenna, as discussed by Enrico Cirelli in the volume’s first article, had to interact with ruling Lombards and Goths as well as the emperors as they acquired their relics.
The most interesting article, at least to this reviewer, is the one by Christian Sapin on the crypt of St.-Germain of Auxerre, specifically how it was built and rebuilt from the fifth to the tenth century. It became the burial site for most of the bishops of Auxerre as well as an important locale for the Carolingian royal family, several of whose relatives became lay abbots of St.-Germain. Its origins were a fifth-century oratory where the body of Bishop Germanus (soon to be a saint) was buried. Auxerre is especially well provided with texts, from the nearly contemporary lives and miracles of its earliest saints up through the ninth-century Gesta of its bishops, and it also hosts an extensive excavation program, in which Sapin himself is a leader. The article traces how the oratory, transformed into monastery church, was rebuilt and enlarged in response both to kings, starting with the Merovingians, and to the pilgrims who wished to access the sacred relics within its crypt. Specifically, veneration of Saint Germanus took place by the ninth century both in the crypt, where his sarcophagus remained, and at the church’s high altar, where a golden reliquary with his bones was often set.
Other articles of note include a discussion of how the acquisition of relics in ninth-century Naples led to a reorganization of funerary space, as described in contemporary saints’ lives (Carlo Ebanista); an overview of the founding and economic growth of the monastery of Fulda (Thomas Kind); an effort to identify female monasticism in late antique Iberia, before the arrival of the Muslims (Jordina Sales-Carbonell and Marta Sancho i Planas); an analysis of the monastic complex in Pavia, especially an attempt to disentangle early medieval relics and saints’ stories from those introduced in the Ottoman era (Luigi Carlo Schiavi); and a report on the progress of the excavation of the old church of St.-André-le-Haut in Vienne, beginning with the study of the dilapidated remains of the church (which was turned into a military hospital two centuries ago and in recent years had been used as apartments), down to the funerary oratory that became a house of nuns in the sixth century (Anne Baud and Anne Flammin).
Given the wide range of topics, approach, and geographic and temporal limits, not to mention languages, this volume will mostly be consulted for the separate articles within it. As such, it would be a good addition to a library collection, for the overall level of scholarship is high, but few individuals are likely to read the entire book.