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Full-Text Articles in History

Objectifying Love: Ladies And Their Tokens, Saints And Their Relics In Chrétien De Troyes, Lydia Hayes Nov 2020

Objectifying Love: Ladies And Their Tokens, Saints And Their Relics In Chrétien De Troyes, Lydia Hayes

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Relics are powerful signifiers of the relationship between humanity and the divine because they allow humans to physically touch a part of a saint’s body or an extension of the saint’s body. This type of symbolism may also be found in the relationship between ladies and knights in Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romances, when a part of the lady’s body (her hair, for example) or an object that once belonged to the lady is touched by the knight. The objects that represent these ladies provide their knights with some form of power at crucial stages in the romances, usually encouraging …


Bartered Bodies: Medieval Pilgrims And The Tissue Of Faith, George D. Greenia Mar 2019

Bartered Bodies: Medieval Pilgrims And The Tissue Of Faith, George D. Greenia

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

In ‘The Bartered Body,’ George Greenia disentangles the complex desires and experiences of religious travellers of the High Middle Ages who knew the spiritual usefulness of their vulnerable flesh. The bodily remains of the saints housed in pilgrim shrines were not just remnants of a redeemed past, but open portals for spiritual exchange with the living body of the visiting pilgrim.