Towards the end of his narrative history of the First Crusade, the Provençal priest and chronicler Raymond of Aguilers made two important observations about the relationship between crusading and the possession and preservation of objects and spaces that he and his co-religionists held to be sacred. To begin with, Raymond celebrated the crusaders’ discovery on 5 August 1099 of a piece of wood that was identified as a fragment of the True Cross, stressing the significance of the fact that medieval Latins now had custody of both a place (the city of Jerusalem) and a thing (a relic of the Crucifixion) that enabled them to approach and engage more meaningfully with their absent god-man.

Although the contribution of the Italian city communes to the crusades in the East was never on the same scale as the collective efforts of transalpine Europe, the commitment of the population of northern Italy to the crusade was similar to the rest of the Christian West. Men from Lombardy and Tuscany took the cross, fought in the East, raised funds, supported and joined the crusading Military Orders, served as legates, wrote about the crusades and created numerous churches and shrines dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. After the Christians lost the Holy Land in 1291, north Italians were among the foremost planners of new crusade initiatives, and the ethos of crusading was kept vividly alive in the writing of some of the greatest literary figures of the Middle Ages and Renaissance such as Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75), and Torquato Tasso (1544–95).

We live in an age where gathering ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ via X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and other forms of simultaneously mass yet also individualised electronic communication have largely supplanted but occasionally still collaborate with the potentially unifying forces of network television, concerts, and charismatic speeches and sermons. It is therefore easy to forget that preaching was the closest equivalent the medieval period had to mass communication, and that the influence of that preaching depended not only on the rhetorical power of the message, but its context and its deliverer. The garrulous chronicler Salimbene of Parma ascribed one striking crusade appeal, delivered during the crusade against Ezzelino and Alberigo da Romano (c. 1258–60), to the papal legate Ottaviano degli Ubaldini. After hearing news of fresh brutalities committed by Alberigo da Romano, a local ally of the imperial cause, the legate sent a messenger throughout the city of Venice, summoning all the citizens, men and women, to assemble in the spiritual and political heart of their city: the square before San Marco.

Over the course of half a millennium and across a large area of western Eurasia and parts of northern Africa, the crusades affected every rank and order of human society, from modest farmers and pastoralists to the mightiest rulers. In Latin Christian Europe, where crusading expeditions and ideology originated, few individuals were not implicated in requests to aid them, whether that aid was military, logistical, financial or supplicatory. In the lands and communities targeted by crusading armies, violence was visited upon the city and the countryside, elites and common folk alike. Whether crusading is seen as a movement, practice, process or sequence of distinct military campaigns, however, no group was as deeply implicated in its continued prosecution as the European aristocracy.

This chapter explores the practices and economies of pilgrimage within the Byzantine cultural sphere. The development of Christian pilgrimage sites in the early Byzantine period contributed to the consolidation of Christianity by offering performative spaces for forming and asserting Christian identity. Attention in the first half is given to the origins of Christian pilgrimage, travel economies and the intersections between religious groups within the ritual spaces of pilgrimage sites, along with a brief survey of scholarly approaches to the phenomenon. The second half of the chapter offers two ‘multi-religious’ sites, the Oak of Mamre and the Baths of Ḥammat Gader, as case studies to further explore pilgrimage centres as locations that facilitated experimentation and readjustment in religious identification. Material and literary evidence suggest that pilgrimage activities at these two sites were not simply expressions of Byzantine piety but were instrumental in transforming and maintaining cultural identifications.

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.