> "....In times of trouble, when they thought that their patron had
> deserted them, monastic communities sometimes performed a ritual humiliation
> of that saint's relics, in which they were taken out of their shrine,
> scattered on the floor of the church, and cursed as a means of forcing the
> saint to reverse the sagging fortunes of the community."
> Are suchlike practices documented in more than one place, I'm wondering?
Christopher,
As I suspect you know, this happened at Chartres Cathedral, but I
really can't remember any details, other than that, usually, the
practice was not quite so messy, involving simply the relocation of a
reliquary from an altar to the floor just in front of it. The
"humiliation" of relics, once again, on analogy with Chartres,
sometimes accompanied interdiction. Another instance in which this
happened was at the nunnery of St Gertrude at Nivelles in Belgium,
where her relics were humiliated twice through the 13th century, in
relation to troubles between the nunnery and the counts of Brabant.
Cheers,
Jim Bugslag
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