ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the transformation of the Catholic culture of relics and pilgrimages in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in England. Focusing particularly on the cults of the medieval archbishop Thomas Becket and the 17th-century Jesuit Edmund Arrowsmith, it traces the process by which relics were domesticated and shows how private homes were thereby sacralized and turned into sites of political resistance. Persecution did not prevent the circulation of relics or thwart the practice of pilgrimage; on the contrary, it enhanced the mobility of holy things and fostered creative adaptations of traditional ritual that were emblematic of tendencies within early modern Catholic Christianity more generally.
