Description: Saints and Sacred Matter explores the embodied aspects of the divine--physical remains of holy men and women and objects associated with them. Contributors explore how relics linked the past and present with an imagined future in essays that discuss Christian and other religious traditions from the ancient world such as Judaism and Islam.
Brief description: Holger A. Klein is a Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.
Review Quotes: At their best, the yearly symposia of the Dumbarton Oaks center for Byzantine studies delineate the high-water mark of scholarship in the particular field to which they are devoted. The collection Saints and Sacred Matter (which emerged from the symposium of 2011) lives up magnificently to this expectation. Most notably, Cynthia Hahn and Holger Klein have gone well beyond Byzantium. They have included remarkable new studies of the cult of relics in medieval Western Europe, and also in Islam and Judaism. This generous outreach enables us, at last, to compare the function of relics in two major Christian regions--Byzantium and the Catholic West--as well as in the Jewish and Islamic worlds.--Peter Brown "New York Review of Books" (7/14/2016 12:00:00 AM)