For sale: the two skulls of St John the Baptist

In the Middle Ages status-conscious kings bought a dazzling array of relics, says David V Barrett. But they were often duped by unscrupulous forgers The Jesus Relics by Joe Nickell, The History Press £20 The recent disinterment of Cardinal Newman shows that relics still have an important place in Catholic sensibilities. Unfortunately Newman's body had completely disintegrated, and there wasn't even the desired finger bone or two to place in reliquaries. However, the Birmingham Oratory already had a lock of the cardinal's hair; failing any other "first-class" relics parts of the prospective saint's body they will have to make do with "second-class" relics, objects which the cardinal wore or touched.
Joe Nickell 's book sets out the different categories of relic; thirdand fourth-class relics are objects deliberately touched by first or second-class relics respectively with the intention of creating a relic. Nickell explores the origins and significance of relics and, of course. their massive proliferation in the Middle Ages.
If your faith is easily offended, don't read this book; it treats relics as objects of history, not of piety, ' and in places the author is clearly exasperated and amused by the credulousness of (especially medieval) believers. My favourite joke about relics, which he includes, is about the pilgrim seeing a second skull of John the Baptist, asking how this could be so, and being told: "The other one was from when he was a boy." Old Testament relics have included pieces of the tablets of the Ten Commandments, the slippers of the patriarch Enoch, the hem of Joseph's coat of many colours, and a sprig of the burning bush.
Obviously relics (of any class) of Jesus himself outweigh any number of saints' relics, and these are the main subject of Nickell 's book.
Today it's easy enough to be sceptical about the genuineness of the thousands of pieces of the True Cross or the many lances of Longinus, but 1,000 or more years ago pious believers took these seriously and relic-makers made a killing out of their credulity.
At one time as many as 30 nails from the Cross are known to have been in circulation; other relics we might not treat completely seriously today include the tear that Jesus shed at Lazarus's tomb, the basin in which his mother washed him as a baby, the basin in which he washed his disciples' feet and the tail of the ass on which he rode into Jerusalem.
In the Ilth century the emperor's palace in Constantinople had, says Nickell, "almost a complete set of relics of the Passion. In addition to a cross, nails, and lance, there was a sponge and hyssop reed, together with burial linens and a pair of Jesus's sandals".
He describes the crown of thorns that still appeared green in the sixth century, its freshness, according to no less an authority than St Gregory of Tours, being "miraculously renewed each day".
Kings were just as credulous. The French King Louis IX (later St Louis) built the beautiful SainteChapelle in Paris in 1246-48 to house the Crown of Thorns he had bought for a large fortune from the emperor in Constantinople, regarding it as "superior in authenticity" to the two other Crowns of Thorns already in Paris.
Jesus's everyday clothing was also important. Nickell quotes a legend from the Catholic Encyclopaedia about a garment that the Virgin Mary wove for her child, "that miraculously grew as he grew and was therefore worn by him his entire life". A cathedral in Aachen has not only the swaddling cloth of the baby Jesus, but the loincloth he wore on the cross, and for good measure the shroud of the Virgin Mary. As for Jesus's own burial shroud, he says: "Over the centuries there have been some 43 'True Shrouds' of Christ in medieval Europe alone."
He only devotes a paragraph to one of the more bizarre relics: the foreskin of Jesus, or the Holy Prepuce. There may have been as many as 18 of these scattered around Europe over the centuries, II of them in France and the most famous one in the Italian village of Calcata. Other unlikely "first-class" relics of Jesus include his baby hair and his milk teeth. A sense of humour is a prerequisite for reading this book. Writing about the scientific tests on supposed bloodstains on various shrouds and the Oviedo cloth, a sudarium or napkin believed to have covered the face of Jesus in the tomb, Nickell jokes about "type AB tempura paint".
More seriously, he writes that the true mystery of both the Shroud of Turin and the sudarium "is why people persist in attempting to convert medieval forgeries into sacred relics". He offers an answer from "a devout shroud believer who told me that I was missing the point". She told him that the shroud's genuineness was not important; "what was important, she said, was that if people believed it to be genuine, it could help lead them to the true religion". Whether this is a valid point or mere sophistry must be for the individual reader to decide.
The Jesus Relics is a fascinating read from beginning to end, but I have one major criticism of the British publishers, the History Press. Sometimes you wonder whether publishers actually think about what they do to books. The American edition of this book had all the photos on the text pages. This new British edition gathers them all together in one section though as they are still not on gloss paper, and in many cases are reduced in size, and so are not improved in any way, I can't see any advantage in removing them from their relevant places in the text.
But worse: taking the photos off the text pages inevitably affects the pagination, which affects the index.
Instead of having a junior editor spend a few hours renumbering the existing index not a skilled job the British edition throws the 15page index away completely, thus rendering the book utterly useless if you actually want to find a specific relic, place or person.
How stupid can publishers get? If you have the opportunity, buy the American edition (entitled Relics of the Christ, University Press of Kentucky) instead.