The gendered nature of relics, reliquaries and devotional objects in late medieval Europe.

Upon initial examination, the reliquary of the tooth of St. Mary Magdalene does not have any explicitly gendered iconography. The tooth is held in a glass egg (which might subtly hint at femininity) at the center of an ornate golden structure. How did medieval viewers know that this tooth belonged to a female saint, and would this have mattered for its veneration? Material culture played an integral part in medieval religious practice from the 4th century on. Christians believed that relics, which are pieces of a holy person's body or an object which a holy person touched during their life, contained that holy person's virtus (or virtue, holiness) and venerated these objects. Relics were displayed or concealed in ornate containers called reliquaries. Previous scholars have focused on either devotional and material culture or gender and religion. My thesis brings these two fields of inquiry together and examines the relationship between changing discourses on gender and religious material culture, focusing on relics and reliquaries in Western medieval Europe. At the core of my thesis is the question of how reliquaries and relics communicate gender, and reflect or dispute learned and political discourses on gender. I have conducted in-depth visual analysis on a selection of reliquaries, including reliquary boxes from 5th-century Byzantium (chapter 1), an arm reliquary of St. George from the 13th century (chapter 2), a 14th/15th-century reliquary of St. Mary Magdalene's tooth (chapter 3), and 16th-century reliquary busts of St. Ursula (chapter 4). I visually analysed these reliquaries alongside the contemporary textual sources about gender and holiness. I argue that discussions of whose body can and cannot be resurrected can be seen to be negotiated in the specific shapes of reliquaries, the containers of relics that mediate the perception of the relic's holiness. This has significant implications for our understanding of religious experience and gender in the European Middle Ages and beyond. My focus on the role of medieval gender in religious objects (reliquaries) has the power to reveal to specialist and non-specialist audiences that the human body, in my example bones of saints, have always and will continue to elide binary classification.