medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Wednesday, October 14, 2009, at 4:41 am, Jon Cannon wrote:
> One of the more remarkable is at St Albans, where the shrine of St
> Alban has been put back together (for the second time) using Lottery
> money and has become quite a place of pilgrimage. Local people of no
> clear faith resort to it as a 'quiet healing space'; the vergers tell
> me they get through tens of thousands a candles. I sat for an hour and
> watched a steady flow of people come in an linger and pray: all ages,
> all types. Yet this is nothing but a shrine base; the relics
> themselves are of course long gone.
>
>
>
> Except that the Chapter have also done much to revivfy the cult in a
> more official way; there is now an annual and rather theatrical
> diocesian pilgrimage, and the reconstructed shrine does I understand
> now include a small fragment of the saint, leant by a church in
> Cologne.
The church in Cologne (Köln) is St. Pantaleon. Accounts at the time (2002) characterized the transfer as a gift.
The bone in question (a shoulder blade) is of course only a _possible_ relic of the English martyr. Christopher Lewis, then Dean of St Albans, put the matter very well in a statement quoted in a BBC report of 29. June 2002 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/2074492.stm>:
"Whether these relics are the bones of Saint Alban can never be known for certain but there is a distinct possibility that they are."
The relics of St. Alban in Köln have been at the former abbey church of St. Pantaleon since the later tenth century. There is a story that St. Germanus of Auxerre, who did visit A.'s shrine at Verulamium, sent some of A.'s relics back to Rome, where in 972 they were presented to Theophanu at the time of her marriage to Otto II. Theophanu, who patronized St. Pantaleon (she is buried there), is said to have deposited the relics in its church.
Father Réginald Grégoire, _Theofano. Una bizantina sul trono del sacro romano impero_ (Milano: Jaca Book, 2000), pp. 133-35, advances the view that these relics at Köln were brought from Mainz, in which case they will have been attributed initially to St. Alban of Mainz. But as the cult of A. of Mainz (who shares with A. of England a _dies natalis_ of 21. June) is not attested before 758 (well after that of A. of England had spread to Francia), it is quite possible that he is in origin A. of England outfitted with a new localizing identity. So, even if we accept Grégoire's view, the relics in question _could_ be those of the English martyr. Whether these, and _a fortiori_ the bone at St Albans, really are fragments of that saint is of course another matter.
Best,
John Dillon
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