1st Edition
Thefts of Relics in Italy From Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, 300–1150
By Marco Papasidero
Copyright 2025
296 Pages
by
Routledge
With the birth of the cult of the saints, their relics became valuables whose possession would guarantee prestige, protection, and spiritual benefits to a town, church, or monastery. For this reason—at first with the aim of preserving the bodies of newly-executed martyrs from destruction and later of increasing the power of a particular faction or community—, the relics began to be stolen, with... Read more
Abbreviations, Acknowledgements, List of figures, Introduction, 1. Relics and Thefts: A Preliminary Approach, 2. Thefts of relics in Late Antiquity (300-600), 3. Thefts of relics in the Early Middle Ages (600-950), 4. Thefts of relics in the Central Middle Ages (950-1150), 5. The accounts of translation: historical, literary, and visual representations, 6. Anthropology of the thefts of relics, 7. Dreams, Rituals, and Spaces, Conclusions. Thefts of relics: a never-ending story, Appendix, Map of the thefts of relics, Bibliography, Primary sources, Secoundary sources.
Biography
Marco Papasidero is Assistant Professor in History of Christianity and Churches at the University of Palermo, Italy. From 2019 to 2023, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Turin, as part of the ERC StG project NeMoSanctI. He has also been Research Fellow at the Edward Worth Library in Dublin and at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, as well as Visiting Professor at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.
