The Saint at the Gate: Giving Relics a “Royal Entry” in Eleventh- to Twelfth-Century France

Studies of royal entries in late medieval and early modern Europe have tracked the intertwining of power, celebration, and spectacle in these highly choreographed and public events.  Entries into cities, like other festive occasions, provided opportunities for veiled (or explicit) dialogues about the appropriate or desired relationships between the monarch being fêted and the citizens. These observations about the social and political roles of the ludic, partly inspired by the work of Victor Turner, can also be usefully applied to the “spectacles” of earlier periods.  In this paper, I examine a central medieval event closely associated with the adventus tradition, though less excessive: the entrance of a saint’s relics into a city during the course of a longer journey.  Relics, like kings and queens, were generally welcomed outside the city with a procession and escorted into the church where they would be displayed.  As with the royal entries, I argue, the process of entering and occupying a city’s space functioned as a conversation, defining the relationships of the visitors to the city’s inhabitants, both clerical and lay, but also illuminating group dynamics within the city itself. I analyze hagiographical descriptions of both the occursus procession and (when available) the relics’ subsequent movement within the city to explore the depictions of different groups, their approaches to the visiting relics, and the ritual role of urban topography.  In the end, recurring motifs of universal joy and spontaneous, broad-based lay involvement must be counterbalanced with the tight liturgical control exerted by the clergy.