The thesis aims to recover relics - i.e. the bodily remains of the saints in the Roman-Catholic tradition - as a neglected object category within the study of material religion. In doing so, it seeks to widen the understanding of the materiality of religious practice, complementing more traditional approaches that have focused on religion as primarily a phenomenon of belief, ritual or written discourse. To achieve this aim the thesis examines the continuing conditions of the production, authentification, circulation and function of relics at the intersection of institutional and private contexts. Special emphasis is laid on the modes of abduction and appropriation that mediate between these contexts, in particular their more controversial aspects involving the use of modern electronic media such as commercial websites like eBay, the Internet auction house The first section of the thesis charts how relics are produced within the institutional setting of ecclesiastical authorities and how they derive potency, authority, in short: significance, from the inscription within these settings, localized at Rome and the Vatican as both, objective and imaginary spaces and how, often against the resistance of Church authorities, relics are alienated from these settings through more or less legitimate channels such as street markets, the trade in antiques and especially eBay, the Internet auction site, which appears as an arena on constructing and contesting religious significance through sacred objects. The second section then looks in more detail at the specific meanings that individual faithful invest in relics, especially when seen before a backdrop of larger controversies about popular and official piety, Catholic tradition(alism) and innovation following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), a discussion that, within the social sciences, also involves debates on the understanding of religion and modernity, on memory, value and values, materiality and spirituality.

This thesis seeks to trace the unique journey of Cater in a da Siena (1347- 1380) from a venerator of saints to a venerated saint. In doing so, the thesis presents a detailed case study of the importance of the cult of saints in medieval Europe. In order to do this, the thesis looks first at Caterina's relationship with the cult of saints through her veneration of Paul, Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary. This allows for a close case study of Caterina as a venerator through an examination of her own testimony in the Letters, Dialogo and her Prayers. The second section focuses on the creation of her own cult by Raimondo da Capua (1330-1399) and Tommaso Caffarini (1350- 1434). This section examines particular events and qualities such as Caterina's mystical death and her reception of the stigmata. These events were included by Raimondo and Caffarini in their hagiographies of the saint: Legenda Jvfaior, the Leggenda Minore and the Libellus. The final section explores Caterina's role as a venerated saint by examining the lives ofChiara Gambacorta (1362-1420), Giovanni Dominici (1356-1419) and Lucia Brocadelli da Narni (1476- 1544). Each life reveals a particular connection that led these venerators to Saint Caterina

Hagiographies and canonisation processes from the thirteenth century are frequently saturated with descriptions of tears. The tears of holy men and women were both the means to, and apex of, spiritual perfection. Using hagiographical sources from the new Mendicant Orders emerging in Italy, France and the Low Countries, but drawing on other important examples when appropriate, this thesis demonstrates the complexity and importance of tears in thirteenth-century religious life. It makes significant contributions to understanding the construction of sainthood and the history of emotions during this critical period. Case studies of the beguine Marie d'Oignies (d.1213), and the founder of the preaching friars Dominic of Caleruega (d.1221), developed in chapters one and two allow for the meaning of tears to be explored fully and contextualised within the broader themes of devotional piety, gender, medicine and physiology, and the cult of saints. The hypotheses raised in these case studies are tested in chapter three using an extensive sample of vitae to demonstrate the importance of tears. In order to navigate the sea of tears, the study offers a bipartite conceptual framework that takes into account both a charismatic experience of tears (often known as gratia lacrymarum) and a progressive,transformative journey through tears. Building on Piroska Nagy's seminal work Le Don des Larmes, this thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of tears in thirteenth-century hagiographies. It argues that they were not devalued in light of other forms of bodily piety nor did they become mere virtues in light of their proliferation; on the contrary, tears were highly valued and saturated religious life, traversing boundaries of what was to be imitated and admired.

Many philosophers throughout Christianity’s history have asserted the existence of intermediary beings or, in more familiar terms, angels and demons. According to Christianity, God, angels, demons, and human souls are all thought to share a common nature, namely ‘spirit.’ This ‘spirit’ is thought to signify immateriality. Yet each is said to interact with the physical world. God, who is conceived of as omnipotent, can interact with the world simply at will. Human souls are paired with bodies which provides them the equipment to interact with the world. Angels receive special assistance from God by which they interact with the world. But demons, unlike angels, are not likely to benefit from any special assistance from God (unlike angels), nor are they themselves omnipotent (unlike God), nor are they paired with bodies (unlike humans). However, demons are believed to interact occasionally with this physical world. But how can an immaterial demon interact with a material world? Any appeals to the same explanations for how other immaterial beings (viz. humans, angels, or God) interact with the physical world will not do. I propose a solution that is consonant with their being purely immaterial creatures and yet does not rely on such an ad hoc manoeuvre. I argue that they actually never do interact with the physical world apart from their exploitation of human beings as proxies. I propose to explain their interaction in terms of their basic ability to cognitively interact with embodied souls. I call this sustaining affirmation of their immateriality along with this particular relationship they have with the world through human beings psychodynamic immaterialism.

Much of the extant literature from the kte Second Temple and early Christian periods (200BCE 100CE) contains material about angels. This dissertation is an investigation into the understanding during this period of the relationship between angels and humans. It serves two purposes: (1) it contributes to our understanding of ideas about angels in this period by surveying all of the available evidence and considering evidence that has not previously been studied in detail, and (2) it concludes, contrary to recent studies by Fletcher- Louis and Gieschen, that a clear distinction was maintained between angels and humans, despite occasions when this gap is bridged and humans do become angels. The first chapter introduces the subject, surveys previous research showing the need for the present study and sets out the historical context of the literature to be examined. After these preliminary considerations, the evidence for the distinction between angels and humans is examined in two parts: Part one consists of two chapters that investigate the issue of the similarity of appearance between humans and angels. Chapter two examines the evidence for the portrayal of angels as human beings; conversely, chapter three examines the evidence for the portrayal of humans being as angels. Part two consists of three chapters that investigate the portrayal of close contact between humans and angels. Chapter four examines texts that describe humans and angels living together in communities. Chapter five considers texts that portray angels as recipients of human hospitality, including the issue of whether or not angels ate food. Chapter six considers the human-angel hybrid offspring of Genesis 6 and its interpretations. The final chapter summarises the conclusions that are drawn from the evidence and outlines their implications for current scholarship.

This study aims to interpret Lives of Christian saints as examples of religious literature. Hagiography is commonly studied as an historical artefact indicative of the politics or linguistics of the time in which a text was composed, but few theorists have attempted to interpret its religious content. As these texts were composed within monastic environments I argue that the religious content may be illumined by a methodology which identifies an implicit theology of sanctity within the narrative. The biblical hermeneutic method proposed by Paul Ricoeur in the mid-twentieth century is applied to the earliest Lives of Samson, Cuthbert, and Brigit. These three date from the mid- to late-seventh century, a time of secular and ecclesiastical change, in some cases profound turmoil. Historical context for the composition of each text is presented; texts are analysed for biblical allusions and literary sources, and submitted to structural analysis. Motifs of religious and archetypal significance are derived from the work of theorists in folklore, anthropology, Bible, and the History of Religions. Each text is examined for motifs and patterns that disclose the structural framework used to organize the work. The structural analysis is then used to highlight central themes in the text. This interpretive process imagines a dynamic encounter between text and reader which combines historical inquiry with biblical hermeneutic, fulfilling Ricoeur’s expectation that the encounter would expand the reader’s horizon of meaning. Samson’s encounters with serpents and sorceress function as an initiatory pattern drawing monastics into a dynamic of spiritual growth. Cuthbert’s time on Farne Island includes echoes of the Desert Saints as well as the crucifixion of Christ and results in a brief but powerfully kenotic episcopal ministry. Brigit’s Kildare becomes the locus of the New Jerusalem, City of Refuge and Peaceable Kingdom.

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The cult of St Patrick in the medieval period has been largely neglected in modern scholarship, which has predominantly tended to favour analysis of the saint’s own fifth-century writings; the troublesome area of fixing exact dates for his fifth-century career and context; the seventh-century Patrician vitae in the context of political rivalries between Armagh, Kildare and Iona; and Patrick’s status as an icon of modern Irish identity. My thesis represents the first full-length study of Patrick’s relic cult between the seventh and the late twelfth centuries by primarily concentrating on the evidence from his various Latin and Irish Lives belonging to this period. Each of the Lives of Patrick provide us a lens through which we can observe a vibrant and diverse array of Patrician relics during our period, many of which survive only in these texts; however, these Lives also act like mirrors of the historical realities in which they were conceived. By studying the Lives over a broad chronological period we gain invaluable information on several key aspects: why authors have chosen or not to retain or omit certain stories featuring relics; whether the numerous and various miracles and functions that these relics perform in the narratives indicate the type of role they had in and their value to wider society; if there is a growth in the number of Patrician relics in the texts at any given point in our period. By placing these aspects in their historical contexts, this thesis musters a better understanding of the broader ecclesiastical and secular political fortunes in Ireland and elsewhere that helped shape the development of Patrick’s cult as we know of it today.

This thesis reassesses the evidence for the English woman of spirit, Christina of Markyate, as a case-study for transitions in sanctity and spirituality during the twelfth century. It highlights the lack of appropriate vocabulary and models available in the 1130s and 1140s to make sense of the new manifestations of holiness that Christina embodies. By using three distinct but overlapping discourses to structure the study – social networks in religious life, sanctity and spirituality – it reflects on how the stakeholders in Christina’s texts negotiated their positions in relation to these discourses and throws light on a context of rapid discourse shift. The first section, ‘The Lady Christina: Texts and Contexts’, locates Christina, her texts, and her religious foundation at Markyate in their immediate and extended social networks. It shows that she had regional fame during her lifetime but that this was not sustained after her death. Her story is intimately tied up with the Abbey of St Albans, whose interest in their own domestic saints caused its revival in the later middle ages. Although charismatic in her own right, Christina was principally a successful institution builder and prioress, whose main concerns were domestic, rather than carving out a new kind of role for religious women in England. The second section, ‘Saint Christina: Sanctity and Learning’ addresses whether it is possible to consider Christina a saint, and what sanctity might involve when the traditional trappings of cult are missing. Christina fell between older and newer ideas about holiness, which resulted in the disrupted use of models to shape her story. Her saintly credentials were her virginity and visions, and in seeking to have these recorded Christina strategically performed and recast her external behaviour within recognisable modes of holiness. It is also possible to identify ways that Christina moved beyond existing constructions of identity and found a feminine voice in the performances of her ‘sartorial body’. The third section, ‘Ancilla Christi: Visions and Community’ looks in detail at Christina’s spirituality, using her visions to critique the separation of elite and popular modes of numinous encounter by taking her out of her primary social networks and identifying a comparative framework in contemporary trends in Western visionary culture. Visions flourish within particular domestic contexts and disciplines, and Christina enables us to glimpse a sub-culture of visionary experience in twelfth-century England, which rarely shows up in sources and is given little authority in the dominant narratives. The question of what ‘success’ might mean in these three discourses, forms a background theme to the investigation. It is used as a route into what was valued, what was normative, and what was recognisable, in the contemporary fields where Christina enjoyed networks and status, rather than as an objective measurement tool. A variety of sources and theoretical approaches are used to contextualise the fourteenth-century redactions of her vita in order to yield twelfth-century meanings. The main redaction, found in John of Tynemouth’s legendary of British saints, is a disrupted text full of hagiographic elements that can be opened up to multiple readings because of its historical situation and competing agendas. Overall this thesis concludes that Christina and many of the people with whom she came into contact recognised her visions as a mark of divine favour, and that in a climate where the primary category for receiving such distinction was sainthood, Christina was cast, not especially successfully, as a saint.