Bedazzled Saints: Catacomb Relics in Early Modern Bavaria, by Noria K. Litaker

Saints’ bodies today, whether reduced to mere bones or still ‘uncorrupted’, are reminders of the otherness of the past. In this remarkable book, Noria Litaker explores one fascinating iteration of Roman Catholicism’s cult of the holy dead: the mass of heilige Leiber, holy bodies, that were translated wholesale from the ancient catacombs of Rome to the parish churches and monasteries of Bavaria from the late sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries. The size of the phenomenon alone is astonishing. Litaker counts at least 384 new arrivals between 1648 and 1803, with a full body count given in two appendices.

Yet these heilige Leiber are also exceptional for other reasons. They go against the grain of Catholic tradition. As Litaker observes, inverting a famous insight by Caroline Walker Bynum, where medieval Christians were ‘materialized by being divided up and distributed, catacomb saints were materialized by being put together’. Fragmentary bodies were made whole and decorated and given names and identities. And where the cults of famous Counter-Reformation saints such as Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Avila went global, these new but ancient arrivals became an army of hyper-local patron saints, each protecting their own small village or convent.

Almost as a preliminary warming-up exercise, Litaker sweeps away some major historiographical pieties. The Counter-Reformation in Bavaria has often been presented as an exercise in religious state-building, led by the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty with assistance from the Jesuits. The fact that the first of the catacomb saints were translated by the ducal family in 1590, just over a decade after Rome’s catacombs were famously rediscovered, might add support for this hypothesis. Not so, shows Litaker. The initial translations were often private affairs; relics were no centrepiece of the ruling family’s Counter-Reformation propaganda. The lack of official involvement is shown by the fact that the dukes (later electors) did not even know how many catacomb saints had arrived in the country and were even forced to commission surveys to find out. Geographically and chronologically, the translations do not fit the pattern one might expect from a top-down imposition. The Upper Palatinate is not over-represented in the data, as one might suppose for a territory that was forcibly re-Catholicised during the Thirty Years War. Most strikingly, the phenomenon only really picked up after 1648 and thrived during the supposedly Enlightened eighteenth century. This campaign for catacomb saints, in other words, was a sustained grass-roots effort. Litaker emphasises the role of the laity and local fundraising. In the amusing example of the village of Dingolfing, the translation almost happened over the local parish priest’s own proverbial dead body.

Litaker explores both the practices of restoration and translation and what these signify. The richly illustrated book explores how early modern Bavarians reconstructed saints’ bodies, even creating wooden bones to add to those that had gone missing. The author here draws not only on archival records but also on the material remains themselves and the extensive experience of Uta Ludwig, a professional catacomb saint restorer. Once the bodies were completed, the arduous work—so-called Klosterarbeit—began of lavishly dressing and decorating them. The saints arrived in Bavaria with no more than a name (either deduced from their grave site or, more often, the result of a Roman baptism ceremony). Bavarians took on the hard work of fashioning a proper identity for their new saints. As early Christians, all were believed to have died for the faith and were presented with the typical attributes of martyrdom: notably, a palm leaf and an ampule of blood. The men were presented as typical Romans, that is, as legionary soldiers. Narratives were constructed ahead of public translation ceremonies with actors used to represent the saints involved. Older resident saints would greet new arrivals and adopt them into a holy household. For ceremonies such as these, the saints’ bodily completeness was essential; a scapula would never have sufficed.

As this last point shows, these catacomb saints were more than simply ‘matter’—they were people who dwelled in churches. They protected their local communities from plagues and fires. This explains both their hyper-local appeal but also the depth and extent of such local devotion. People were encouraged to form relationships with their saints and identify with them. In the early modern period, martyrdom became an increasingly spiritualised experience for the living. The catacomb saints, as supposed martyrs, inspired the faithful to bear their own cross (even, as Litaker observes, unhappy marriages). At the level of dogma too, these holy bodies had a contribution to make. As reminders of Christianity’s earliest beginnings, they exemplified the Counter-Reformation message that the church was semper eadem—ever the same. But Litaker also points to their highly visible position on altars to argue that they symbolise a key dividing line between Protestants and Catholics. These saints were really present in the churches in which they dwelled, in the same way as Christ was present in the Eucharist.

Bedazzled Saints is a dizzying must-read. It is highly readable, deeply learned and extremely compelling. One would be hard pressed to offer even a single point of critique. Every single chapter bristles with more insights than one finds in the average monograph and no short review can do it justice. This book will be required reading for scholars of early modern religion and should feature on student reading lists.