Introduction

Students of hagiography have been ambushed by a series of unlikely allies. Two prolific medievalists such as George G. Coulton (1858-1947), a former Anglican priest, and the Quaker, Henry C. Lea (1825-1909), for example, reflected both the repulsion and attraction evoked by medieval tales of the supernatural in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, motivated by a scarcely disguised agenda aimed at casting shame on the medieval church.2 Coulton even composed an essay in Latin on that most peculiar of medieval relics, the prepuce or foreskin of Christ, in order to avoid embarrassing the Victorian sensibilities of his readers. According to the legend, it had been presented by an angel to Charlemagne in Jerusalem and found its way first to Charroux; and then to the church of St John Lateran in Rome. It has been variously claimed by Coulombs, Calcata (near Viterbo), Le Puy, Metz, Antwerp, Hildesheim, Santiago de Compostela and Notre-Dame-en-Vaux in Châlons-sur-Marne. The highly

1 Peter Burke, ‘oblique Approaches to the History of Popular Culture’, in Approaches to Popular Culture, C.W.E. Bigsby (ed.) (London, 1976), 69-84 on the critical need to separate the views of the elite from those of the ‘popular’ classes and the use that can be made of art, ritual and artifacts for an understanding of changes in popular culture. on the problematic issues involved in exploring religious belief systems in the past, see Natalie Z. Davis, ‘Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion’, in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, Heiko oberman and Charles Trinkaus (eds) (Leiden, 1974), 307-336. on pre-Christian survivals in medieval religion see Nicole Belmont, ‘Superstition et religion populaire’, in La function symbolique. Essais d’anthropologie, Michel Izard and Pierre Smith (eds) (Paris, 1979), 53-70.