REPLICATING PALESTINE AND REVERSING THE REFORMATION: Pilgrimage and collecting at Bobbio, Monza and Walsingham

Abstract

This paper examines the display of collections of relics associated with Christian pilgrimage in the privileged context of a church building. Three collections are explored: the late-sixth-century Holy Land souvenirs buried with the body of St. Columban at Bobbio in the Appenines around 615; the seventh-century collections of Palestinian relics, Roman ampullae and Lombard treasures given to the basilica at Monza by Queen Theodolinda before her death in 626; and the stones culled from monasteries destroyed in the Reformation which were collected at the modern pilgrimage site of Walsingham in Norfolk in the 1920s and 1930s. While apparently far from the usual institutional contexts of collecting and display addressed by current museological theory, pilgrimage relics offer some interesting parallels with more secular collections. Genealogically they belong to the early ancestry of museums, but rhetorically they perform many of the same feats of cultural appropriation, classification and status enhancement found in later collecting.

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