Visions, Reliquaries, and the Image of “Becket’s Shrine” in the Miracle Windows of Canterbury Cathedral

Abstract

This essay argues that early thirteenth-century stained-glass panels in the chapel ambulatory of Canterbury Cathedral, long read as picturing the shrine of Thomas Becket that stood in the chapel from 1220 to 1538, actually depict scenes from stories in the miracle collection that Benedict of Peterborough wrote about 1171–73. One of the panels shows a fictive shrine seen in the vision of a clerk of Alnwick, while two others display a personal reliquary owned by the wife of the earl of Hertford that held relics of Becket’s clothing and was stored in a local church. These new readings of the shrine panels are supported and contextualized by comparison to other panels in the Trinity Chapel glass, reliquaries and pilgrims’ ampullae from the period, and images of shrines and reliquaries in contemporary stained glass, book illumination, and wall painting. The last section of the article examines overlooked references to clothing relics and personally owned reliquaries in the Becket miracle collections. Such relics and reliquaries seem to have been widely disseminated and stored in local churches in the late twelfth century. Overall, this study of the shrine panels suggests that the Canterbury glaziers worked carefully to create images recognizable to medieval viewers and that Becket’s early cult was more decentralized than we usually assume.

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