Talkative Head Reliquaries in the Nordic and Livonian Middle Ages

Abstract

Reliquaries shaped as heads or hands were called “speaking reliquaries” for several decades since the term – in German, redende Reliquiare – was coined by Joseph Braun in his book Die Reliquiare des Christlichen Kultes und ihre Entwicklung (1940). Their shape was assumed to have an explicitly informative function: to reflect the relics they contained. This was challenged by Cynthia Hahn in her article The Voices of the Saints: Speaking Reliquaries (1997. Hahn has since shown in her many articles and books that the relation between the shapes and contents of reliquaries is not straightforward, and that reliquaries of various shapes can indeed “speak”.
This article examines the “talkativity” of head reliquaries with examples from the Baltic and Nordic countries. It discusses their different forms of expression and their thematics, ranging from concrete aspects such as the saints represented by the reliquary and the relics within to the identity of their commissioners, and more abstract themes like sainthood, seeing, belief, and blessing.