In the summer of 1365, Emperor Charles IV (1346–78) had just begun his return journey from the papal court at Avignon when he stopped at the Abbey of Saint-Maurice d'Agaune along the Rhone. There, Charles sought to venerate Saint Sigismund, the sixth-century King of Burgundy buried at the abbey. To the apparent chagrin of the abbot, Charles IV also expected to acquire part of the saint's body. Several sources document this visit, attesting to the emperor's open expression of piety and devotion to the saint's cult. They also confirm that the emperor got his wish: he carried back with him to Prague a major relic of Saint Sigismund.
In this impressive book, Martin Bauch documents 605 relics accumulated by Charles IV, many of them from monasteries and churches across Europe. Repeatedly, the emperor's contemporaries commented upon his public displays of piety and humility; they especially noted his pronounced devotion to holy relics. As Bauch's study confirms, the scale of Charles IV's acquisitiveness was indeed unusual. Moreover, the effect on Prague and the other cities to which Charles IV redistributed the relics could be substantial. For instance, Saint Sigismund's chapel within Prague's new cathedral quickly became the center of a relic-producing cult; Sigismund himself, previously almost unknown in Central Europe, was soon adopted as a patron saint of Bohemia. How, Bauch asks, should historians understand all this? Bauch is hardly the first to ask this question. Many scholars have considered Charles IV's collection and uses of relics; several (including this reviewer) have even drawn attention the emperor's establishment in Prague of the cult of Saint Sigismund, which Bauch privileges as an illustrative case study. Bauch aims to “bring these observations out of the realm of anecdote,” and instead to integrate them into a coherent account of Charles IV's practice of sacral lordship.
To accomplish this, Bauch offers an introduction, seven heavily footnoted chapters of greatly varying lengths, a conclusion, and more than two hundred pages of bibliography and ancillary materials. The introduction explains the book's title, which draws from a shift in the standard language of Charles IV's charters that occurred after his imperial coronation in 1355—from gratia dei rex Romanorum (King of the Romans by the grace of God) to divina favente clemencia imperator Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans through the support of divine mercy). Whatever Charles IV's chancery staff may have intended by this shift, “divina favente clemencia” provides Bauch a convenient symbol of the more active supernatural support that, he argues, Charles IV claimed after the death of his rival Ludwig of Bavaria and his coronation in Rome as emperor.
The next three chapters—together amounting to fewer than sixty pages—establish the context for Bauch's study. One (chapter 2) surveys the previous scholarship on Charles IV's relic-centered piety and sacral kingship in the Middle Ages; another (chapter 4) explains the study's temporal and geographic limits plus surveys the relevant sources. Sandwiched between them in chapter 3 is Bauch's summary of two sociological approaches to religion and power—namely, Max Weber's sociology of religion and Pierre Bourdieu's development of Weber's ideas. Neither, Bauch quickly admits, offers a perfect model for characterizing Charles IV's religious acts. Yet, Bauch argues that Bourdieu's concepts in particular—of symbolic (and other types of) capital, habitus, and actions within a (religious) field—provide a way out of a dilemma that has stymied previous scholars: whether to consider Charles IV's public piety as instrumental (or even manipulative) or rather as an expression of genuine religious faith. Bourdieu's categories, according to Bauch, allow the historian to maintain both simultaneously.
The ideas of Weber and especially Bourdieu reappear briefly in the conclusion and at the end of each of the book's three much longer chapters, each of which fills between 100 and 150 pages. Chapter 5 considers Charles IV as a ruler who is a “sacral actor,” a theme it effectively explores through detailed accounts of the emperor's ceremonial arrival at eight different cities in different years. Chapter 6—which begins with part of the case study of Saint Sigismund—considers Charles IV's acquisitions of relics. Then the seventh chapter explores the emperor's careful use of the same relics, for example to establish Prague and other cities as centers of sacred rulership or to strengthen relations with particular places. Following these three central chapters, Bauch devotes another brief chapter to the reception of Charles IV's sacral rule; there is also a concluding chapter.
The strength of Bauch's book consists especially in the exhaustive details of its three central chapters. The author exhibits a rare mastery of a wide range of primary sources and relevant scholarship—some of it very recent—in several languages. Bauch's depth of research is commendable. His footnotes and appendices are stuffed with treasures for future specialists; these include his alphabetical listing of the hundreds of relics Charles acquired. Bauch also offers clarifying explanations of even the best-studied topics he considers, such as the contested significance of the relic collection at Karlstein castle. All this material is painstakingly subdivided into sections, sometimes three levels deep.
Many readers will want to start with Bauch's conclusion, where he articulates—in part using Bourdieu's terms—a strong case that Charles IV developed his own dynamic form of sacral rulership grounded in ostentatious piety and humility. From the 1350s especially, Charles IV used the cult of relics to establish a sacral power that extended beyond what normal lay people could claim—manifested, for example, in the quasi-clerical roles he played in relic-centered processions and other liturgical occasions. As Bauch notes, Charles IV's form of sacral lordship was grounded in harmony with the papacy rather than in opposition to the pope's rival claims to religious power. The contrast to the investiture controversy could hardly be greater. Such sacral rulership helped to legitimate Charles's own imperial rule but proved difficult for later rulers to imitate, not least because of the schism that began in 1378—the year of Charles's death.
