Dividing Relics

Abstract It is commonly believed that the practice of dividing corporeal relics had begun as early as the fourth century and that it was initiated in the eastern Mediterranean, to appear in the West at a much later date. This chapter challenges both these views. It demonstrates that there is no early description of dismembering a saint’s physical remains, and the evidence of the veneration of specific body parts is extremely scarce. Testimonies to the deposition of the same saint’s relics in several places can be better explained by transfers of relics, their independent discoveries, or the production of contact relics than by the actual division of relics. If this practice really existed in Late Antiquity, it was probably extremely rare in either part of the empire before the sixth century.