ABSTRACT
In Bury St Edmunds, the ruins of a Benedictine abbey have long been subject to antiquarian interest and heritage legislation. Recently, a rumour that the bones of St Edmund might be buried in the abbey grounds generated considerable popular interest. Since 2016, a newly constituted Heritage Partnership has taken on the care of the remains of the Benedictine abbey. Generating affective temporalities of loss, longing and nostalgia, the process of heritagisation anticipates formal applications for project funding to enhance the interpretation and conservation of the ruins. This chapter analyses the process of heritagisation of religious remains as a composite of sacred and secular tempos. It demonstrates that the Heritage Partnership applies bureaucratic criteria of authentication to traces of the sacred. Drawing upon longings for the retrieval of the relics of St Edmund to create futures of bureaucratic heritagisation, this chapter suggests that heritagisation converts traces for the sacred into secular futures.
