4 - The Liturgical Vestments of Castel Sant’Elia: Their Historical Significance and Current Condition

Summary

Most liturgical garments surviving from the Middle Ages come down to us as ensembles recovered from burials or as single garments, the latter often preserved because of their association with a venerated cleric. These are often spectacularly beautiful and technically impressive, but they are hardly representative. The elite bias of preservation and recovery tends to be compounded by the interests of collectors and museums in garments made of rare silks or decorated with precious materials. What a medieval church may have owned in the way of vestments can be reconstructed with the help of inventories, but these valuable texts give only minimal descriptions of the material characteristics of the garments. The collection of liturgical garments from the monastery of Sant’Elia in Castel Sant’Elia, Italy however, offers us some view of what one medieval church owned. Consisting of twenty-six vestments, the collection includes two miters, three pairs of pontifical sandals, one tunicle, two dalmatics, six albs, and twelve chasubles. While some of these are beautifully crafted and made of precious materials, many are simply constructed and made of plain linen or cotton. Although certainly not complete, the Castel Sant’Elia collection offers a more diverse view of medieval liturgical garments than do most surviving specimens.

My aim in this article is to offer an introduction to the collection, some observations on its historical significance, and an overview of its current condition on the basis of the most recent publications and my own research in Castel Sant’Elia. Since my expertise is as a historian and not as a textile specialist, I append a working hand-list of the garments in the collection in the hope that it will aid those with appropriate skills to pursue research on these important liturgical vestments.

Study and Restoration of the Collection

First described in an inventory of the goods of the church of Sant’Elia drawn up in 1615, the collection came to the notice of the scholarly world when several pieces from it were featured in an exhibition of sacred art organized to accompany the 1896 Eucharistic Congress held in Orvieto. It was fortunate for textile specialists that Joseph Braun (1857–1947), the learned Jesuit historian of the liturgical arts, attended the congress. He subsequently went to Castel Sant’Elia to examine the entire collection, and he published a detailed appraisal of it in 1899.