“Grab ’em by the Relics”: The Elision of Consent and Selling Salvation with Female Virgin Martyrs Post-Sanctification

This article draws attention to the discursive ways in which the meaning of relics is made and remade in medieval texts by considering the issue of consent in the lives and afterlives of female martyrs as similarly narrative and subject to problematic mediation by the medieval Church. If relics and reliquaries signify primarily through written discourse, should we read a saint’s posthumous consent as similarly discursive, brought into being by the body’s very possession by the Church and the attribution of miracles through oral and written discourse? Does the process of sanctification assume consent a priori? Does the often fragmentary or diluted nature of a saint’s relics seemingly elide the necessity of consent? This article considers how the post-sanctification treatment of female saints’ relics reinforces the patriarchal structures of the medieval Church. Relying on an assumption that consent, once given, cannot be withdrawn, the Church’s rituals surrounding relics in the Middle Ages replay the torture and violation script after the virgin martyr’s death, ignoring the women’s resistance to those violations inflicted on them in life. These rituals also served to enrich the medieval Church at the expense of women’s consent.