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medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture On Tuesday, June 19, 2007, at 10:38 am, Bob Kraft wrote: > I'm intrigued by this line from John Dillon's recent posting: > > > 2) Autbert of Avranches (d. 725) ... is further said to have > proceeded to obtain relics of > M(ichael the Archangel) from his sanctuary on the Gargano peninsula of > Apulia .... > > Are relics of an angelic beings frequent in these contexts? What is involved? Interesting questions. As far as frequency is concerned, though the number of medieval dedications to Michael is very high, most of these were in smallish places that have left no records of whatever relics they possessed. I would guess that most such places would have had at best a contact relic or two, with the contact having occurred at one of the few major sites (in the west, those on Monte Gargano in Apulia, at the Sacra di San Michele [a.k.a. San Michele della Chiusa] in Piedmont, and on Mont-St-Michel in Normandy). Of the latter three, the one on the Gargano was far and away the oldest. Its founding relics included a small red altar cloth (_palliolum_) that M. was said to have left there when he constructed the original altar. They still include (think of the Dome of the Rock) a depression in rock said to have been made by the archangel's footprints. The nineteenth-century historian of medieval Rome Ferdinand Gregorovius visited the site and left in his _Wanderjahre in Italien_ an account that is worth reading. There's a Web-based version of the German-language original here: http://tinyurl.com/2cosbt and here, with a couple of typing or translation errors corrected, is one of several extracts I posted to this list a few years ago from an English-language translation no longer available at the address where I found it: "The mass had ended and the grotto was emptying. We were watching this at leisure now. Near the altar a water basin is standing from which the pilgrims are drawing the water of the holy source. Nearby an ancient statue of the Archangel is set up. Here as well a footprint of his is shown in a stone, his only relic. But are the angels so heavy footed and so heavy walking as to be able to leave such footprints?" The Michaelic relics preserved at Mont-St-Michel that were said to have come from the site on the Gargano were a piece of that altar cloth and a piece of the stone (in BHL 5951 called _marmor_) on which M. had stood: "partem scilicet rubei pallioli, quod ipse memoratus Archangelus in monte Gargano supra altare, quod ipse manu sua construxerat, posuit, & partem scilicet marmoris, supra quod stetit, cujus ibidem usque nunc in eodem loco superextant vestigia,..." That's from the online Chadwyck-Healey version of the AA.SS. and the easiest way to find it is to do a BHL search for "5951". For those looking at one of the printed editions, it's at Sep. VIII, Dies 29, Sanctus Michael archangelus, et al., Commentarius Historicus. Following the AA.SS. and the entry on Autbert in the BBKL, in yesterday's post I called this text _Apparitio Michaelis in Monte Tumba_. But it's more correctly known as the _Reuelatio Ecclesiae Sancti Michaelis archangeli in Monte Tumba_. But wait, there's more! Remember that skull at Avranches of which I showed a couple of views yesterday? It too is a purported Michaelic relic. The oldest surviving inventory of the relics at Mont-St-Michel dates from 1396. According to the abbot who drew it up, Pierre Le Roy, A.'s head (thought to have been part of the remains discovered in the early eleventh century) had been placed in a separate reliquary in 1131 by an abbot Bernard who had had engraved thereon (the reliquary, obviously, not the head) a statement identifying it as the head of the founder, blessed Aubertus, and adding that a hole in the head was proof of the angelic revelation (_Foramen sis certus revelatione angelica rei bonae_). In the 1396 inventory itself _Foramen_ has become _vestigium_. The story (which I have not found in BHL 5951) is that M. placed his finger on A.'s head, creating the hole. The skull at Avranches is said to be A.'s and to have come from Mont-St-Michel (when?). Testing of so me sort has dated it to the Middle Ages (there had been suspicion that it was really considerably older than that). Bruno W. Häuptli, the author of the BBKL entry on Autbert http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/a/autbert_v_a.shtml says that the hole is the result of trepanning. The fundamental work on the relics of Mont-St-Michel is Jacques Dubois, "Le trésor des reliques de l’abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel", in _Millénaire monastique du Mont Saint-Michel_ (Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 501-93. Texts of the foundation stories of all three monasteries are printed at Pierre Bouet, Giorgio Otranto, and André Vauchez, eds., _Cultes et pèlerinages à Saint Michel en occident: les trois monts dédiés à l'archange_, Collection de l'Ecole française de Rome, no. 316 (Rome: Ecole française de Rome, 2003), pp. 1-41. At the Sacra di San Michele there was again said to have been an angelically constructed altar, this time flowing with balsam and with oil. The founding hermit is said to have wiped up the oil with a cloth and then to have used that cloth to cover the altar. Best again, John Dillon ********************************************************************** To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME to: [log in to unmask] To send a message to the list, address it to: [log in to unmask] To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion to: [log in to unmask] In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to: [log in to unmask] For further information, visit our web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html