The presence and power of Jesus in early Christian material culture are mediated through texts, visual depictions, and other objects, representing and re-presenting Jesus across various contexts. Focusing especially on the first five centuries ce, the analysis addresses Jesus in the materiality of text, liturgy, relic, and symbol, revealing early Christian theologies and practices that resonate in later historical periods and highlighting the complex dialectic of Jesus’s presence and absence in material forms.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

Many stories about river miracles and wonders were repeatedly told, retold, and transformed as part of the process of establishing and understanding discussions about moral values, sanctity, and socioeconomic behaviors. This chapter looks at some of these, following the stories over time and space. The section “Reversing the Rivers,” framed around a specific set of narratives involving the bodies of saints, tackles medieval ideas about what is “natural” and the ways that saints were understood as capable of both sustaining and reversing the natural. The chapter ends with an exploration of a series of stories that stretches into the 1100s and 1200s, encouraging readers to imagine themselves transported both backwards to the Edenic past and forward to a future salvation.

This chapter focuses on the idea of rivers as frontier or boundary, beginning with stories from Late Antiquity, and including a discussion of the ways that river frontiers are porous and permeable. A case study of the monastery of Prüm shows the complexity of these dynamics. The main focus of the chapter is on the impact of the Viking raids on medieval monastic writers, and how their stories about this moment created a new view of rivers as sites of danger and disruption. Then, the chapter explores ways that rivers were seen as sites of destruction and oblivion – an alternate to the idea of rivers and memory explored in the previous chapter. Finally, it looks at how monastic communities reinvented their histories in the wake of the Viking attacks, and how this helped them in turn to reimagine and restore their relationships with rivers.

Since late antiquity, bishops have been regarded as possessing the highest authority among Christians. But there was no linear path leading there. Rather, there were different bearers of authority among Christians: James, as the respected brother of Jesus, was a key figure at the beginning; intellectuals were able to gain importance as teachers, prophets also appeared after Jesus, among them many women; widows and virgins attained a special position; finally, the authority of ascetics increased. Basically, authority could be derived from an office within the church or from personal charisma, which was considered God given. Good bishops tried to combine both, but charismatics could always challenge them and would continue to do so throughout the history of Christianity.

Chapter 4 examines one of the most spectacular music-liturgical programs of the fourteenth century: the narrative office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition. A work of enormous rhetorical ingenuity and historical imagination, the Apparitio office, I argue, was a product of the state’s heightened attention to and generative engagement with the cult of relics. Found as a late addition to Basilica San Marco’s thirteenth-century antiphonal (VAM¹), the office celebrated the present-day virtue of the state’s most cherished possession: the body of its patron saint, the Evangelist Mark. Careful comparison between the Vespers office chants and the legend source from which the story derives reveals an inventive process of selection, omission, and invention of texts, and as well as a high degree of sensitivity in musical setting. The result was a compelling public ritual that represented the contract between the body of Mark and the Venetians who venerated him and, at the same time, made a self-reflexive bid for music and liturgy as the means for that contract’s renewal.

Chapter 5 shows how the text–music relationships in the Matins office for the feast of Saint Mark’s Apparition supported the construction of narrative history. Unlike the public-facing office of Vespers, the night office of Matins—an enormous and lengthy complex of readings, psalmody, and chant—offered a robust formal structure on which narrative history could be built up and elaborated. An analysis of the chants and readings from the Matins office reveals the composer’s careful curation of source material and inventive use of the conventional melodic features of mode and melody, showing just how much craft went into the representation of miraculous history in a liturgical format. The composer’s reliance on the technical and medium-specific tools of chant to make Mark “appear” within the office suggests that such formal devices served as viable substitutes for, or representations of, the miraculous. The office itself seems to argue that good storytelling, whether accomplished on the page or in plainchant, could produce miracles merely at the level of form and technique.

If one considers the Kantian cosmopolitan to be the result of political and cultural forces specific to Western European societies, then it is no more than a situated form of local knowledge. There were other forms of local globalism that were as situated as the Kantian cosmopolitan. The difference is that the forms of Catholic local globalism that I discuss here never became normative and universal. Moreover, the forms of local globalism explored in this essay never acquired the geopolitical epistemological authority to cast Kant as a parochial Prussian whose ideas were no more than one version of local globalism. In an unexpected turn, the Enlightenment notion of the cosmopolitan acquires the epistemological authority to cast the Black, nuns, and Indigenous intellectuals explored in this piece as parochial and local. This essay offers an alternative to early-modern forms of the local “cosmopolitan,” namely, individuals who often did travel physically more than Kant, with the exception of a few nuns who, like our Prussian, imagined the globe as a whole by firmly staying in one place.

Through an examination of scraps of clothing collected from the sites of lynching, this chapter theorizes the persistence of the reliquary object into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. The chapter focuses on the particularity of clothing as material objects capable of holding sensory and conceptual memories of the human body. This comes as part of a larger discussion of relics and reliquary cultures and builds on discourses on the Black male body from history, African American studies, and visual culture studies.

Milton’s Sonnet XVIII (‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’) propounds a familiar opposition between the ‘pure’ religion of Protestants and a corrupt Catholicism obsessed with material objects and images (‘stocks and stones’). Yet this ostensibly anti-Catholic poem veers brazenly and repeatedly into the language of relic veneration. Beginning with the poignant spectacle of the Waldensians’ bones scattered on the mountainsides, the sonnet goes on to weaponize human remains and grants them sacred force in the form of ‘martyred blood and ashes’ to be sprinkled over Italy. This chapter explores historical, confessional, and literary contexts for Sonnet XVIII’s surprising investment in human remains, both as objects arousing pity and as capable of a kind of material efficacy. Milton’s poem is situated within an extensive tradition of English Protestant poets and preachers, including Michael Drayton, John Donne, and Richard Crashaw, who had wrestled with the question of relics and the problem of scattered bones.

The festal homilies of the middle Byzantine period are covered in this chapter, following the introduction of major Marian feasts between the sixth and early eighth century. These works provide a combination of Christological teaching, which is often presented by means of typological rather than discursive methods, along with narrative – some of which comes from apocryphal rather than canonical biblical texts. Although the Virgin remained important as the guarantor of Christ’s humanity and divinity in this period, growing interest in her own legendary story and personal holiness is reflected in the festal homilies. The homiletic category called ‘occasional’ meanwhile provides narrative concerning Mary’s intervention in human catastrophes such as the siege of the Avars and Persians on Constantinople in 626 CE. The homiletic genre, as practised by preachers of the middle Byzantine period, thus encompassed a range of didactic and panegyrical purposes.

Chapter 19, “Pilgrimage to Constantinople,” examines the emergence of Constantinople as a sacred center of Christian pilgrimage. It outlines the city’s attractions and considers the motives that drove people to visit.

This is an account of the veneration of Insular saints as found in the kalendars of surviving Irish Sarum antiphonals and breviaries from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In accordance with a number of Dublin episcopal constitutions, these kalendars reflect the devotional practices of their users through the inclusion of Irish saints, ranging from those of national significance to a growing number of diocesan and more local figures. In addition, the presence of non-Sarum English saints reflects the regional practices of Anglo-Norman settlers from different parts of England, notably the West Country (Chester, Bristol), as well as connections with Canterbury, Winchester, London, and East Anglia. Comparison of these sources reveals how patterns of devotion could vary between English communities in Ireland and those that were more mixed or perhaps predominantly Irish, according to which saints were included in the kalendars, and how they were ranked.

The festal homilies of the middle Byzantine period are covered in this chapter, following the introduction of major Marian feasts between the sixth and early eighth century. These works provide a combination of Christological teaching, which is often presented by means of typological rather than discursive methods, along with narrative – some of which comes from apocryphal rather than canonical biblical texts. Although the Virgin remained important as the guarantor of Christ’s humanity and divinity in this period, growing interest in her own legendary story and personal holiness is reflected in the festal homilies. The homiletic category called ‘occasional’ meanwhile provides narrative concerning Mary’s intervention in human catastrophes such as the siege of the Avars and Persians on Constantinople in 626 CE. The homiletic genre, as practised by preachers of the middle Byzantine period, thus encompassed a range of didactic and panegyrical purposes.

The similarities in the way that the ubiquitous cult of saints was expressed in Wales, Cornwall and Brittany form a major body of evidence for contact among these regions. Overtly ecclesiastical place-names, containing such elements as *lann, are unusually common in all three regions. The implications of these for similarities and differences in church-organisation are discussed. The significance of the appearance of the same personal names compounded in ecclesiastical place-names in different British-speaking regions is explored. These seem likely in most cases to reflect movements of the devotees of particular saints between Wales, Cornwall and Brittany from the sixth to the ninth centuries and particularly the reliance of Bretons on the educational and spiritual resources of important Welsh churches. Contact between Brittany and Cornwall was more sustained and more intimate: a tenth-century list reveals a number of Breton saints established at permanent cult-sites in Cornwall by the tenth century and more were to follow by the central Middle Ages; Cornish and Breton authors also drew on each other’s work in composing saints’ Lives throughout the medieval period. By contrast the relative rarity of Irish saints’ cults in Brittany and the absence of Breton saints from Ireland implies a more distant relationship.

Focuses on the reliquary: an enclosing, revealing structure, which engages intensely with its contents. The apparently idolatrous worshipping of ‘Gods bodye in the box’ was a persistent complaint among reformers, and the murky box of the reliquary epitomised the falseness of the Roman Catholic faith. The chapter starts with sixteenth-century encounters with relics, beginning with Erasmus, whose attitude is characterised by ambiguities about the spiritual significance of material things. Comparing satirical and polemical responses to relics from both sides of the religious divide, the chapter considers how these boxes operated as contested sites. It then turns to the afterlife of the reliquary once it had been removed from the religious sphere, and locates its survival in the vocabulary of post-Reformation libraries as new kinds of shrine, and in seventeenth-century printed reliquiae, as safer kinds of receptacle. Even after the reliquary appeared to be emptied of its dangerous significance, the very idea of the relic and the possibilities offered by this controversial box endured as ways of thinking about the interweaving of physical and intellectual apprehension demanded by books.