Furta sacra

Furta sacra (Latin, "holy theft") refers to the medieval Christian practice of stealing saints' relics and moving them to a new shrine.^[1] Trade in and thefts of relics led to the creation of a new genre of hagiography that aimed to legitimize the actions that brought relics to their new homes; in these writings, the translation of the relics is often portrayed as morally necessary, or even requested directly by God.^[2] Sometimes, hagiographers would try to downplay the theft, but in general it was believed that a relic could not be stolen without the permission of the saint; a successful theft thus indicated saintly approval of the action.^[3] Saints Marcellinus and Peter are a famous example. Saint Faith is another. A monk from Conques brought her relics to the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy after spending ten years undercover as a secular priest in Agen, where her relics had previously been housed.^[4]

References

1. Geary, Patrick J. (2011). Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages - Revised Edition. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-2020-7.
2. Galdi, Amalia (2020). "Furta sacra in southern Italy in the Middle Ages". In Pazos, Antón M. (ed.). Relics, Shrines and Pilgrimages: Sanctity in Europe from Late Antiquity (1 ed.). Routledge. 146-163 at 147. doi:10.4324/9780429198908-11. ISBN 978-0-429-19890-8. S2CID 216219413.
3. Weakland, John E. (1994). "Furta Sacra". History of European Ideas. 18 (1): 107–109. doi:10.1016/0191-6599(94)90155-4. ISSN 0191-6599.
4. Ashley, Kathleen; Sheingorn, Pamela (1992). "An Unsentimental View of Ritual in the Middle Ages Or, Sainte Foy was no Snow White". Journal of Ritual Studies. 6 (1). pp. 63–85, at p. 69. ISSN 0890-1112. JSTOR 44398527.

Further reading

• Robson, James (2005). "A Tang dynasty Chan mummy [roushen] and a modern case of furta sacra?: investigating the contested bones of Shitou Xiqian". In Faure, Bernard (ed.). Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context. doi:10.4324/9780203987810. ISBN 9781134431175.
• Stirling-Harris, A. Katie (2020). "Stolen Saint: Relic Theft and Relic Identification in Seventeenth-Century Rome". The quest for certainty in early modern Europe from inquisition to inquiry, 1550-1700. Barbara Fuchs, Mercedes García-Arenal. Toronto. pp. 159–197. ISBN 978-1-4875-3550-6. OCLC 1123215752.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)