RELIGION : BOOK REVIEW : An Eccentric Odyssey to See Relics of Faith : MAGNIFICENT CORPSES: Searching Through Europe for St. Peter’s Head, St. Chiara’s Heart, St. Stephen’s Hand and Other Saints’ Relics; By Anneli Rufus; Marlowe & Company; $13.95, 246 pp.
The world’s first tourists were pilgrims, and what drew them to pilgrimage sites around Europe were the bits and pieces of saints and martyrs on display in churches and cathedrals that were the Disneylands of their day. Anneli Rufus burned with curiosity to see these sights, and so she embarked on a kind of secular pilgrimage that is charmingly described in “Magnificent Corpses.”
Rufus is Jewish, a fact that she discloses at the outset of her book precisely because it affects how she sees and responds to the “magnificent corpses.” “The practice of venerating relics contradicts everything I was taught as a Jewish child,” she concedes. “The first relic I ever saw, a vial of desiccated blood that I encountered in Spain as a 10-year-old on vacation, aroused me in the same way Halloween did, and ‘The Twilight Zone.’ ”
Rufus approaches her subject with both a playful spirit and a savvy insight into the business of relics. Putting a relic on display was good for business, she points out, and not just the tourist trade. “Cologne might be just a sleepy hamlet today if not for its tomb of the Three Kings,” writes Rufus. Rival pilgrimage sites engaged in lively competition for pilgrims: “France and Constantinople both claimed they had John the Baptist’s head.” And, not surprisingly, some relics are demonstrably phony: “Relics long hailed as those of Palermo’s St. Rosalia, credited with banishing epidemics, have been positively identified as the bones of a goat.”
“Magnificent Corpses” describes 27 pilgrimage sites that can still be seen in Central and Western Europe, ranging from the mass grave of St. Ursula and 11,000 other virgins in Cologne to Westminster Cathedral in London, where the remains of a 17th century martyr named St. John Southworth are on display. Along the way, Rufus shares her own experiences as a postmodern pilgrim. A ghost may or may not have haunted her hotel room in Cologne; the clerk at a rental agency in Prague speaks with the same Cockney accent as his English tutor; on a wall in an Italian train station, she spots a bit of graffiti: “Kurt Kobain Rest in Pis.”
Each stop on the grand tour is the occasion for storytelling about the men and women whose body parts are so reverently preserved and displayed, and that is one of the glories of “Magnificent Corpses.” Some of the stories are familiar: The Three Kings, whose remains are the glory preserved in the cathedral of Cologne, for example, are the Magi who honored the newborn Jesus. But many more of them are so exotic and so harrowing that they read like fairy tales or horror stories or, more often than not, both at the same time.
One favorite, for example, is the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, whose remains are in a Vienna convent that bears her name. “Almost Juliet” is how Rufus sums up her life. She was betrothed at the age of 4 to the son of a German count who had heard her praises sung by a troubadour, and she went to live in a mountaintop castle to await the day of her marriage. The little girl grew up to be a model of piety, tithing away her husband’s wealth, feeding the hungry and washing the wounds of the afflicted, turning over her bed to lepers and using the sheets as shrouds for corpses.
When her husband joined the Fifth Crusade and never came back, Elizabeth was reduced to begging and living in a pigsty. Even after she found refuge in a monastery, the inquisitor who became her mentor spied on her and beat her for her imagined transgressions. At last, she fell ill and died--and we are shocked to learn that all of these sufferings were endured in a life that lasted barely 23 years.
“Elizabeth is now the patron saint of hospitals, as well as of nurses, bakers, beggars, brides and countesses,” explains Rufus with a characteristically sly flourish. “She is the patron too of dying children, exiles, hobos, homeless people, lace makers and widows.”
“Magnificent Corpses” is a uniquely exotic “armchair adventure” that invites the reader to visit unheard-of places and see remarkable sights through the eyes of a hip and hardy writer with an edgy but engaging sense of humor. At the same time, it is a latter-day “Lives of the Saints” that resurrects the long-dead men and women whose dry bones once inspired thousands of proto-tourists to hit the roads of medieval Europe. Both as a travel book and as a meditation on what prompts us to regard a life and the relics of a life as holy, “Magnificent Corpses” is a magnificent if eccentric success.
Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “Moses: A Life” (Ballantine).