Furta sacra

Taking the body of Saint Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria and hiding it into a basket. 11th-century mosaic in St. Mark's Cathedral, Venice.

The translation of the relics of Saint Nicholas from Myra to Bari. By Radul (1673–74), Patriarchate of Peć, Serbia.

Furta sacra (Latin, "holy thefts") refers to the medieval Christian practice of stealing saints' relics and moving them to a new shrine. ^{[1] [2]} 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. ^[3] 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. ^[4] 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. ^[5]

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. Papasidero, Marco (2025). Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in Italy: From Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages, 300–1150 (PDF). Amsterdam.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.