The Veneration of Relics at Glastonbury Abbey in the Middle Ages

I recently found a forgotten relic in a drawer at home. It is a minute piece of straw, from a mattress belonging to St. Theresa of Lisieux (1873–1897), acquired during a family pilgrimage to Normandy in the late 1950s. It is in a small leather folder, with a short prayer on the cover, and a photograph inside. This item seems to belong in an earlier era of religious pilgrim- age, described by historians such as Webb (1999, 2000) and by cultural anthropologists like Turner and Turner (1978). In part, though, the trans- formation of a piece of straw from mundane to sacred, and its subsequent consumption as a retail artefact, can perhaps be better understood through the work of later anthropological studies on the phenomenon in religion, travel, ¹ and shopping (O’Guinn and Belk, 1989).