Souvenirs

Arguably as important as the actual journey to a place of pilgrimage is the pilgrim’s return and the memories of the voyage. Souvenirs formed a specific and tangible link to the site, especially if they combined objects from the site or relics as well as images (e. g. Hahn 1990). They could function both by visual mimesis (in replicating a particular icon or image) and by metonymy in bringing home a material fragment fi'om the place of worship. A striking example is the sixth-century box, from the treasury of the Sancta Sanctorum in the Lateran at Rome (moved to the Vatican Museums in the twentieth century), that contained images (effectively a cycle of little icons) of Christ’s life and Passion along with carefiiUy labelled bits of soil and stone from the places in Palestine where the events depicted had taken place (Morey 1926; Barber 2002:15-17). Although a relatively large souvenir, large enough to have served perhaps as a portable altar, this was not an expensive item, its materials being no more than wood, encaustic paint, and bits of earth. Yet its reliquary value, as a kind of metonymic summary of Palestine that made the Holy Land available elsewhere, led to its inclusion as a venerable relic in the grandest of all the relic collections of medieval Christendom (on the Sancta Sanctorum in the Middle Ages, see Kessler and Zacharias 2000:38-63). Similarly, the Monza and Bobbin ampullae, brought from Palestine in the late sixth century, although relatively cheap and mass-produced, were regarded as sufficiently illustrious relics to be donated as a collection to a royal church in the case of Monza, and to be buried in a casket with the holy body of St Columban in the case of the Bobbin group. Both collections of ampullae are interesting in that they gather a range of iconographies signalling not only the narrative pattern of Christ’s life from his birth to his death but also the geographic pattern of the sites where those narratives had taken place and which were evoked through the images. Thus each collection, in its new context as a memorial of Palestine in Italy, was an evocation of the totality of the Holy Land as scriptural narrative, topographic witness, and a liturgical pattern of feasts related to bdth the stories and the sites (Eisner 1997:118-23; Barber 2002:20-2).

Admittedly, the ampullae came to fulfil a rather complex fimction of evoking the distant Holy Land through a kind of reliquary mimesis. But other souvenirs were simpler in their offering of a direct link with a particular saint as a personal intercessor for the owner or wearer. We have very cheap terracotta tokens and flasks from popular shrines like those of Thekla and Menas near Alexandria in Egypt (Davis 2001:114-20), or fi'om the Holy Sepulchre and Qal’at Si’man in Palestine and Syria (Barber 2002:20-3), and we have extraordinarily wrought and expensive gold and enamel reliquaries (with hidden internal compartments) from the cult of St Demetrios in Thessalonike (e. g. Evans and Wixom 1997:167-8), or of the True Cross (e. g. Evans and Wixom 1997:169-74,302,331-2,461-3). Clearly these catered for pilgrims from radically different ends of the social spectrum, but arguably in function they provided for similar needs: a personal link to the original site through the tangibility of a token which contained some ‘stuff’, earth, water, oil, or bone, that was itself from the shrine.