Relics and Remains (Past and Present Supplement) - Softcover

Alexandra Walsham

9780199600588: Relics and Remains (Past and Present Supplement)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199600589 ISBN 13: 9780199600588

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2010

Edited by Alexandra Walsham, this wide-ranging collection of essays is the first to explore the relic as a religious and cultural phenomenon in a broad comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. It considers the ways in which human remains and material objects have become the focus of worship, celebrity, curiosity, and conflict in a range of eras and cultures stretching from antiquity to the twenty-first century, and from Western Europe to the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, the Indian subcontinent and China. The contributors assess when and why bodies and belongings are revered as sacred by the adherents of different faiths, alongside the dynastic, ideological and ethnic contests and rivalries they have served to stimulate in a range of past societies. They examine the politics and economics of the identification, creation and use of relics and remains and their significance and function in the spheres of memory, history, and heritage. Bringing together historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and scholars of religion, the volume seeks to stimulate further research on this neglected but intriguing theme.

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About the Author:

Alexandra Walsham completed a BA and MA at the University of Melbourne before winning a Commonwealth Scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where she completed her PhD under the supervision of Professor Patrick Collinson. She held a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College between 1993 and 1996 before being appointed as Lecturer in History at the University of Exeter in 1996. Promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2000 and to a personal chair in Reformation History in 2005, she served as Head of Department at Exeter between 2007 and 2010. She was appointed to the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge in 2010 and is also a Fellow of Trinity College.

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