Jesus' Granny and Friend Jimmy Go AWOL

There are many hilarious tales of the plight of relics in the early Church, revealing that even in regards to holy things human beings can be just as grasping and venal as we are with regard to more traditional objects of avaricious desire. Thus one hears of  relics stolen by monks in their mouths while pretending to kiss them; heads of saints or Baptizers forever disappearing and re-appearing; bits of bones being snatched away from one monastery to draw pilgrim traffic and money to another. In more anal-retentive hands, these might be occasions of outrage or scandal, but I find these tales at once funny and re-assuring.

Some of those tales are coming in for recent scholarly scrutiny in two books, beginning with Eirini Panou, The Cult of St Anne in Byzantium, which is set for release in May from Routledge (250pp.).

About this book the publisher tells us:

This is the first undertaking in Byzantine scholarship to focus on St Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary. St Anna is a completely underexposed figure in Byzantine studies, and the examination of the formation, establishment, and promotion of her veneration offers a fresh insights to the way saints were manipulated in Byzantium. By studying various aspects of Byzantine culture such as topography, visual evidence and material culture, social history, theology and a variety of texts such as homilies, hagiography and histories, this work highlights the importance of examining and using different types of material for the study of the cult of Byzantine saints from the sixth century through to the fifteenth. The scholarship presented here enriches our knowledge of otherwise unknown aspects of the Byzantine culture. The variety of topics discussed makes the book an essential tool for literature and art historians, students of social, liturgical and theological studies, of early Christian and Byzantine topography, of homiletics, relics, early Christian texts and Medieval Christianity.

A second book, also from Routledge, traces one of the best-known pilgrimages in Western Europe and the saint associated with it: Translating the Relics of St James: From Jerusalem to Compostela, edited by Antón M. Pazos (2016, 252pp.).

About this collection the publisher tells us:

Analysing the narration of the translation of the body of Saint James from Palestine to Santiago de Compostela and its impact on the historical and biblical construction of Jacobean pilgrimages, this book presents an interdisciplinary approach to the two cities at the centre of the legend: Jerusalem and Compostela. Using a range of political, anthropological, historical and sociological approaches, the contributors consider archaeological research into Palestine in the early centuries and explore the traditions, iconography, and literary and social impact of the translatio on the current reality of pilgrimages to Compostela.

An Earthly Pilgrimage to the Tormented City of Peace

A staple of early Christian history, especially liturgical history, is that famous and fascinating diary kept by Egeria of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Both before her trip, and many times after, Christians and others have made the same trip for many of the same reasons.

Such pilgrimages are not just pious activities of a private few, but often have international political ramifications as well. In both Orlando Figes's fascinating and elegantly written The Crimean War: A History as well as the more recent study The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom: The Crisis over the Eastern Church in the Era of the Crimean War by Jack Fairey, we see the role that pilgrimages played in shaping English Anglican, German Lutheran, and Russian Orthodox (inter alia) imaginations not just of the places in question, but also of their geopolitical significance, and the need for each of those imperial powers, and others, to "protect" the holy places.

People travel, then, to Jerusalem and environs with a variety of motives and such trips can have a diversity of outcomes, some clearly favoured by capitalist and imperialist powers for their own mundane self-interest.

Many of those who do go to Jerusalem make it a point, as Egeria did, to write about the experience afterwards. Later this year we will see the publication of an anthology gathering together some of those writings: A Jerusalem Anthology: Travel Writing through the Centuries Hardcover, eds. T.J. Gorton and Andree Feghali Gorton (Oxford UP, 2017), 160pp.

About this book we are told:

Jerusalem has a special status as a city that is both terrestrial and celestial. The name includes a cognate for 'peace,' but the old stones of the city have witnessed epic bloodshed and destruction over the centuries. The three great monotheistic religions all regard it with especial fervor, and it has for at least two millennia attracted pilgrims intent on seeing it before they die. This rich and compelling anthology of travelers' writings attempts to convey something of the diverse experiences of visitors to this most complex and enigmatic of cities. A Jerusalem Anthology takes us on a journey through a city, not just of illusion and powerful accumulated religious emotion, but of colors, lights, smells, and sounds, an inhabited city as it was directly experienced and lived in through the ages. Memoirs of visitors such as as sixth-century AD pilgrim Saint Silvia of Bordeaux, medieval Jerusalemite al-Muqaddasi, Grand Tour voyagers Gustave Flaubert and Alexander Kinglake, the humorous Mark Twain, or the cynical T.E. Lawrence provide vivid and sometimes disturbing vignettes of the Holy City at very different times in its tumultuous history.

Russian Orthodox Pilgrimages

The blurb is replete with the sort of off-putting jargon that is popular in academia just now, but there is at least one chapter in this collection that will be of interest to Eastern Christians: Stella Rock's essay "Touching the Holy: Orthodox Christian Pilgrimage within Russia" in John Eade and Dionigi Albera, eds., International Perspectives on Pilgrimage Studies: Itineraries, Gaps and Obstacles (Routledge, 2015), 226pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Although research on contemporary pilgrimage has expanded considerably since the early 1990s, the conversation has largely been dominated by Anglophone researchers in anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and religious studies from the United Kingdom, the United States, France and Northern Europe. This volume challenges the hegemony of Anglophone scholarship by considering what can be learned from different national, linguistic, religious and disciplinary traditions, with the aim of fostering a global exchange of ideas. The chapters outline contributions made to the study of pilgrimage from a variety of international and methodological contexts and discuss what the ‘metropolis’ can learn from these diverse perspectives. While the Anglophone study of pilgrimage has largely been centred on and located within anthropological contexts, in many other linguistic and academic traditions, areas such as folk studies, ethnology and economics have been highly influential. Contributors show that in many traditions the study of ‘folk’ beliefs and practices (often marginalized within the Anglophone world) has been regarded as an important and central area which contributes widely to the understanding of religion in general, and pilgrimage, specifically. As several chapters in this book indicate, ‘folk’ based studies have played an important role in developing different methodological orientations in Poland, Germany, Japan, Hungary, Italy, Ireland and England. With a highly international focus, this interdisciplinary volume aims to introduce new approaches to the study of pilgrimage and to transcend the boundary between center and periphery in this emerging discipline.