The Legacy of Iconoclasm: religious war and the relic landscape of Tours, Blois and Vendôme, 1550-1750

Abstract

This study explores the process of physically rebuilding, renewing and reinventing the relic landscape in the regions around Tours, Blois and Vendôme following the widespread iconoclastic damage of the French religious wars. The author takes a long-term perspective exploring developments over two hundred years, from the mid-sixteenth through to the mid-eighteenth centuries. The book explores what the physical renewal of the landscape can tell us about evolving beliefs and practices concerning relics during the Catholic Reformation and what reconstruction activities reveal about the meaning and experience of relic veneration. It pays particular attention to how the relic landscape evolved through relic translations and how communities that oversaw relic shrines remembered the iconoclastic acts of the religious wars through liturgical and ritual commemorations, memorials, artistic renderings, oral traditions and written accounts.