An Infinity of Relics Erasmus and The Copious Rhetoric of John Calvins Traite Des Reliques

An Infinity of Relics: Erasmus and the Copious
Rhetoric of John Calvin’s Traité des reliques

SPENCER J . WEINREICH , P ri n c e t o n U n i v e r s i t y
John Calvin’s “Traité des reliques” (1543) inventories early modern Europe’s fraudulent relics. Yet,
theologically speaking, authenticity is irrelevant: all relics are idols to the evangelical Protestant, while
for Catholics prayer’s intention, not its conduit, was paramount. This article locates a solution in
Calvin’s humanist formation: chiefly, his debt to Desiderius Erasmus—not to Erasmus’s satirical
or devotional works, but to his rhetorical theory of copia. The “Traité” amasses a copia, an
abundance, of fakes, burying the cult of relics in its own contradictions. Fusing rhetoric and
proof, this mass juxtaposition subjects sacred presence to noncontradiction, patrolling vital
confessional borders in Reformation theology.
INTRODUCTION
THE G REATEST RELIC collection in all of early modern Europe was assem-
bled in Geneva, in 1543, by the Protestant Reformer John Calvin (1509–64).
The collection existed only on paper, in the 327 relics cataloged in Calvin’s
Traité des reliques (Treatise on relics). Of course, the Reformer assembled
these objects not to revere them but to debase and debunk them as frauds.
“In order to vilify,” writes Joseph Koerner, “it is also necessary to exhibit.”1
This essay explores why this was so for Calvin, investigating the rhetorical
and forensic work the catalogue form did for him—indeed, arguing that
rhetoric and proof are, in the Traité, one and the same.2
The Traité was Calvin’s best seller, seeing twelve French editions before 1600,
as well as translations into English, Dutch, German, and Latin—and, surely most
This article is dedicated to the memory of Louise Grafton, an artist of the genuine illusion. I am
profoundly grateful for the suggestions and encouragement of audiences in Princeton, New
Brunswick, and New York; the anonymous reviewers; Jeffrey Castle, Colin Macdonald,
Jessica Wolfe, Max Engammare, Michael Gordin, Angela Creager, Carlos Eire, Jake Purcell,
Jan Machielsen, Wesley Viner, James Delbourgo, and, most of all, Anthony Grafton.
1
Koerner, 2002, 164.
2
I am indebted here to Carlo Ginzburg’s Menahem Stern Lectures: see Ginzburg.
Renaissance Quarterly 74 (2021): 137–80 © The Author(s) 2021. Published by the Renaissance
Society of America.
doi: 10.1017/rqx.2020.316
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 27 Mar 2021 at 13:23:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use.
138 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY VOLUME LXXIV, NO. 1
satisfying to its author, two outraged Catholic rebuttals.3 The pamphlet’s mordant
wit and rhetorical showmanship, however, have misdirected attention from the
puzzle at its heart: why does Calvin hang his treatise on the fake relic, a problem
both evangelical critics and Catholic devotees could wave away as secondary to the
real theological issues of idolatry or the distinction between latria and dulia?
Answering this question requires an appreciation of the humanist bona fides
of the Traité, usually taken for a mere “curiosity” or a display of polemical fire-
works, and rarely as a serious piece of intellectual work.4 Building on the metic-
ulous efforts of Pierre Antoine Fabre and Mickaël Wilmart, I reconstruct
Calvin’s textual practices as he marshals print culture and erudite historiography
to assemble and debunk an unparalleled catalogue of relics. Calvin’s curious
emphases are clarified by reference to Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1466–1536)—
not to his satires on popular piety, as has been the custom, but to his rhetorical
theory. Read as a weaponization of copia, Erasmus’s prescriptions for an abun-
dant literary style, the Traité’s catalogue drowns the cult of relics in its own
overabundance, transforming the meaning of individual objects through a mas-
sive act of juxtaposing competing claims to authenticity. The catalogue form
permits Calvin to divorce the relic from layers of material, cultic, and local
meaning, at once undermining the cult, inculcating a Reformed way of seeing,
and reconfiguring the experience of sacred presence. The Traité thus limns key
theological boundaries—not only between Protestant and Catholic, but also
between different camps of Protestants, reinforcing a distinct Reformed sensi-
bility predicated on noncontradiction. Calvin knew what E. M. Cioran knew
long afterward: “It is not easy to destroy an idol: it takes as much time as is
required to promote and to worship one. For it is not enough to annihilate
its material symbol, which is easy; but its roots in the soul.”5
TOWARD A HISTORY OF RELICS

I begin where Calvin begins, with Augustine of Hippo’s (354–430) De opere
monachorum (On the work of monks, 401), in which the saint, “complaining
about certain peddlers who, even in his time, plied a sordid and dishonest trade,
carrying hither and thither relics of the martyrs, adds, ‘if indeed they are
martyrs’ relics.’6 By this expression he indicates that even then this abuse and
3
Calvin, 1970, 36; Calvin, 1995, 187.
4
“Curiosité”: Calvin, 1921, 39. See also Calvin, 1970, 13–15. All translations are my own
unless otherwise noted.
5
Cioran, 16.
6
Augustine, 585 (De opere monachorum 28). See also Calvin, 1560, 572 (Institutes 4.13.15).
Where possible, I cite the 1541 French edition of the Institutes, as the recension closest in time
to the Traité; for later additions I rely on the final, 1560 French edition.
ERASMUS AND THE RHETORIC OF CALVIN 139
trickery was practiced in bringing the simple folk to believe that the bones
gathered here and there were the bones of saints.”7 Augustine functions here as
a historical, rather than a theological, witness, attesting not to the relic as idol but
to the existence of fraudulent relics “even then.” Conveniently absent is
Augustine’s enthusiasm for genuine relics—an omission seized upon by
Calvin’s Catholic critics.8 The Reformer goes on to explain that his project in
the Traité as a whole is not theological, though the pamphlet does open and
close with the doctrinal argument: “If idolatry is nothing but the transfer of
the honor due to God elsewhere, can we deny that this is idolatry?”9 The empha-
sis, however, is on a more contingent, factual claim: “the greater part [la plus part]
of the relics shown in every place are false [faulses].”10 The Middle French word
faux, or fauls, is richly polysemic: false, counterfeit, forged, artificial, deceitful,
unfaithful, treacherous, hypocritical, wrong. All of these meanings concatenate
in the relentless denunciation of “fausses reliques,” as error slides into deception,
ignorance into wickedness. Calvin exploits the word foy, “faith,” in a similar fash-
ion, with repeated taunts about “if one can place faith [foy] in things so absurd.”
Foy here means confidence, but the word equally connotes religious faith and the
trustworthiness of an individual or thing.11 Accordingly, though Calvin princi-
pally contends with relics not as theological but as “strictly material objects,”
the moral weight of his findings is never absent.12
So the Reformer’s thoughts turn to an inventory. “It would be something to
be desired,” he muses, “to be certain of all the trifles that are taken here and
there for relics, or even, at least, to have a register and reckoning [denombre-
ment].”13 He then dedicates the rest of the pamphlet’s 110 pages to something
7
“Se complaignant d’aucuns porteurs de rogatons qui, desia de son temps exerceoyent foyre
villaine & deshonneste, portans çà & là des reliques de Martyrs, adiouste: Voyre si ce sont
reliques de Martyrs. Par lequel mot, il signifie que dez lors il se commettoit de l’abuz et tromp-
erie, en faisant à croire au simple peuple, que des os recueilliz çà & là, estoyent os de saintz”:
Calvin, 1543, 3. For modern French editions of the Traité, see Calvin, 1995; Calvin, 2000.
8
Cochlaeus, sigs. B1v–B6v; Blanckaert, sig. A3r–v.
9
“Si l’idolatrie n’est sinon transferer l’honneur de Dieu ailleurs: nyerons nous que ce la ne
soit idolatrie?”: Calvin, 1543, 7–8. Interestingly, several German editions supplement the
Traité with polemical paratexts that delve into doctrinal issues, including idolatry, justification,
and the Eucharist: see Calvin, 1557; Calvin, 1584.
10
“La plus part des reliques qu’on monstre par tout sont faulses”: Calvin, 1543, 11.
11
“Si on doit adiouster foy à des choses tant absurdes”: Calvin, 1543, 92. Cf. Reinburg,
176–77.
12
“Des objets strictement matériels”: Barral-Baron, 365.
13
“Ce seroit donc vne chose à desirer, que d’auoir certitude de toutes les fariboles, qu’on
tient çà & là pour reliques: ou bien, au moins, d’en auoir vn registre & denombrement, pour
monstrer combien il y en a de faulses”: Calvin, 1543, 15.
that looks awfully like a “register and reckoning,” proceeding from Jesus Christ
to various other biblical figures, to the martyrs of the early church, and, finally,
to a few later “common” (“vulgaire”) saints.14 Fabre and Wilmart tabulate some
327 objects, unevenly dispersed throughout Western Europe.15
The first relics the Traité names are not those of Christ but an arm of
Anthony of Padua (1195–1231) and the brain of Peter the apostle, both for-
merly housed in Geneva. These, Calvin crows, were revealed as the “membre”
(less delicate authors clarified that it was the “membre viril”) and a pumice
stone, respectively, when the altars of the city’s cathedral were stripped in
1535.16 The events in Geneva were but one of the many sixteenth-century out-
breaks of iconoclasm, some led from above and some from below, some riotous
and some orderly, some accompanied by wholesale transformation and some
ultimately reversed. Most shared a common dramaturgy: the exposure of
Catholic fraud and the disabusing of the deceived.17
Not every relic turned out to be so picturesque a fraud, but the Traité is a
systematic textual replication of that iconoclastic gesture. A passage on the
Titulus—the inscription the Gospels record as displayed at the Crucifixion,
mocking Christ as King of the Jews—is representative.18 When, where, and
how was it found?
Someone will say to me that the church historian Socrates [Scholasticus (ca.
380–ca. 439)] records it.19 I confess it. But he says nothing at all of what
became of it. So this testimony is not worth much. Furthermore, this was
something written in haste and on the spot, after Jesus Christ was crucified.
Therefore, to display a tablet elaborately crafted, as though to be kept for dis-
play, has no purpose. Thus, even were there only one, we could regard it as a
fake and a fiction. But when the city of Toulouse boasts of having it, and the
people of Rome contradict them, displaying it in the church of Santa Croce,
each refutes the other. Let them battle it out as much as they like. In the
end, both parties will be convicted of lying as soon as one chooses to examine
the thing itself.20
14
Calvin, 1543, 99.
15
Fabre and Wilmart, 35–36.
16
Calvin, 1543, 13–14 (quotation on 13); Eire, 1986, 150–51 (quotation on 150).
17
Marshall.
18
Matt. 27:37; Mark 15:26; Luke 23:38; John 19:19–20.
19
Socrates Scholasticus, 177 (Historia ecclesiastica 1.17).
20
“Quelcun me dira, que Socratés historien de l’eglise en faict memoire. Ie le confesse. Mais
il ne dit point qu’il est deuenu. Ainsi ce tesmoignage n’est pas de grand valeur. D’auantage, ce
fut vne escriture faicte à la haste, & sur le champ, apres que IESVS Christ fut crucifié. Pourtant,
de monstrer vn tableau curieusement faict, comme pour tenir en monstre, il n’y a nul propos.
As in the citation of De opere monachorum, the analysis is historical and mate-

rialist: Calvin is concerned with the Titulus as object, not idol. Within this pas-
sage, and the Traité as a whole, three overlapping canons for examining relics
can be identified: these I have termed the critique from provenance, the critique
from historicity, and the critique from multiplicity. All three are rooted in the
relic as “strictly material object” and in the established tools of humanist
historiography.
According to Fabre and Wilmart, provenance constitutes the “central issue”
of the Traité, developed along spatial (transportation) and temporal (conserva-
tion) axes.21 How did the relic survive as long as it has, and how did it get from
its point of origin to its point of display? Or, more simply, is it credible that the
relic exists when and where it does? Would Pontius Pilate have allowed some-
one to make off with the costly robe in which Christ was clothed? Who was so
obliging as to give the Christians the sword with which John the Baptist was
decapitated?22
Calvin thus inverts the usual privileging of antiquity; age becomes a liability:
the older the relic, the less credible.23 Where a church might take pride in pos-
sessing a relic from distant lands, in the Traité such a provenance is inherently
suspect.24 How indeed had the tablecloth from the Last Supper wound up in
Italy and/or Germany?25 The Traité forces each object to bear the full weight of
late antique and medieval history: how could the true cross have been
discovered by Saint Helena (ca. 255–ca. 330) when Jerusalem was sacked
and razed to the ground fifty years after Christ’s death?26 Natural, as well as
historical, processes—principally, the decay of organic matter—also threaten
provenance: the relic of a fish from Christ’s post-resurrection meal at the Sea
of Tiberias (John 21) must have been exceedingly well seasoned to have lasted
Ainsi, quand il n’y en auroit qu’vn seul, on le pourroit tenir pour vne faulseté & fiction. Mais
quand la ville de Thoulouse se vante de l’auoir, & ceux de Rome y contredisent, le monstrant en
l’eglise de sainte croix: Ilz dementent l’vn l’autre. Qu’ilz se combatent donc tant qu’ilz vou-
dront. En la fin toutes les deux parties seront conuaincues de mensonge, quand on voudra
examiner ce qui en est”: Calvin, 1543, 31–32.
21
“Problème central”: Fabre and Wilmart, 56.
22
Calvin, 1543, 36, 76.
23
Fabre and Wilmart, 58–59; Holmes, 159–60.
24
Karin Vélez elucidates how the color of Marian images was adjusted “to preserve the gap
between the human and the divine . . . to accentuate that she was other, former, foreign to the
land”: Vélez, 177.
25
Calvin, 1543, 26.
26
Calvin, 1543, 25, 27.
so long.27 Of course, Calvin was being deliberately obtuse, as the miracle

consisted precisely in the fish’s survival, but the effect is to call into question
the great dance of objects, the centuries-old system of exchanges, discoveries,
gifts, and thefts, that constituted the cult of relics and that had been accelerating
as late medieval Catholics amassed ever-larger collections.28 As every cataloguer
knows, provenance is built on the back of attestation, and Calvin’s “constant
refrain” is the lack of scriptural, patristic, and historical warrants.29 Though
Exodus 16 states that the Israelites preserved a jar of manna in commemoration
of the miracle, “of the leftovers remaining from the five loaves, the Gospel says
nothing about them being kept for such a purpose, and there is no ancient
history that speaks of them, nor any Doctor of the Church.”30
The historical record was still more central to the critique from historicity,
whose target is the anachronistic relic, the object that does not match the time
and place whence it claims to come. In the words of Carlo Ginzburg, “the
knowledgeable use of context causes the anachronism, written in invisible
ink, to emerge.”31 Calvin debunks the robes of Christ displayed at Argenteuil
and Trier because they are “in the fashion of a folded chasuble,” rather than the
Greek chiton that would have been worn in first-century Jerusalem.32 Equally
problematic is the chasuble of Saint Peter at Rome: “the custom had not yet
come to playing dress-up, for they mounted no such farces in the Church as
we have now.”33 The critique recoils on the accumulation of relics itself, for
“it was not the custom to gather up breeches and slippers in this fashion in
order to make relics.”34 Neither the Gospels nor the best texts of Eusebius of
Caesarea (ca. 260–ca. 340) attest to such behavior. If the early Christians col-
lected the bones of the martyrs, Calvin explains, it was to save the remains from
desecration and to give them an honorable burial.35 Providing a terminus post
quem for the cult of relics shattered any aura of timelessness, whether in the
27
Calvin, 1543, 53.
28
See Geary; Hahn, 295–96.
29
Gordon, 2009, 189.
30
“Des reliefz qui demeurerent des cinq pains, l’Euangile ne dit point qu’il en fut rien
reserué à telle fin, & n’y a nulle histoire ancienne qui en parle, ne aucun docteur de l’eglise”:
Calvin, 1543, 27.
31
Ginzburg, 23.
32
“Comme vne chasuble pliée”: Calvin, 1543, 38.
33
“La façon n’estoit point encores venue de se desguiser: Car on ne iouoyt point des farces
en l’eglise, comme on faict apresent”: Calvin, 1543, 79.
34
“Ce n’a pas esté la façon des fideles, de ramasser ainsi chausses & soulliers, pour faire des
reliques”: Calvin, 1543, 64.
35
Calvin, 1543, 107; Eire, 1990, 54.
saint’s ability to intervene posthumously or in the access their remains might

offer to the history of the church.36
Finally, Calvin’s third and favorite avenue of attack is the critique from mul-
tiplicity, the juxtaposition of multiple churches’ competing claims to possess a
single item. Calvin counts some fourteen nails supposedly from the Crucifixion.
The head of John the Baptist can be seen, in whole or in part, at Amiens,
Saint-Jean d’Angély, Malta, Nogent-le-Rotrou, Saint-Jean-de-Mauriene,
Besançon, Rome, Paris, Saint-Flour, Oviedo, Noyon, and Rome, once more
for good measure.37 However cunning a polemicist Calvin was, as historical
criticism this is all thoroughly traditional. Medieval churchmen had noted
with dismay the proliferation of the Baptist’s heads, while the oddities of the
cult of relics had been fodder for generations of satirists.38 Methodologically,
there is nothing in the Traité ’s historical critiques that cannot be found in
Polydore Virgil (ca. 1470–1555) or Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72).39 But
that is precisely the point: Calvin is thinking about relics like a good
Renaissance humanist.
HUMANIST COLLECTING
A good humanist Calvin certainly was, as at least a century of scholarship has
established (though not without dissent).40 Educated at Paris, Orléans, and
Bourges, he studied under luminaries of sixteenth-century letters like
Mathurin Cordier (ca. 1479–1564) and Andrea Alciati (1492–1550).41 He
made his print debut with a commentary on Seneca the Younger’s (ca. 4
BCE–65 CE) De clementia (On mercy, ca. 55 CE)—unimpeachably humanist
fare—and his last major institutional achievement was the 1559 foundation of
the Genevan Academy, whose curriculum reflected the cutting edge of
sixteenth-century pedagogy.42 In between, he penned the Traité, only recently
accorded the status of a “work of erudition,” but thoroughly humanist in its
genesis, its content, and its methods.43
The sine qua non for composing the Traité was an adequate store of relics,
the assembling of which Fabre and Wilmart have compellingly reconstructed.
In a sweeping survey of early modern sources of information on relics, they posit
36
Geary, 176; Fabre and Wilmart, 64–65.
37
Calvin, 1543, 32–34, 70–72.
38
Bartlett, 241–42; Eire, 1986, 96–97; Barral-Baron, 364–65.
39
Cf. Bouwsma, 83–84, 117.
40
See, inter alia, McNeill, 212–13; Breen; Bouwsma, 113; Gordon, 2009; Burger.
41
Bouwsma, 12; Gordon, 2009, 20–21.
42
Gordon, 2009, 22–30; Bouwsma, 14.
43
“Oeuvre d’érudition”: Fabre and Wilmart, 34.
that Calvin relied upon a mix of print and manuscript texts, as well as his own
experiences, those of his entourage, and general knowledge.44 This is confirmed
by a comment of Nicolas des Gallars (ca. 1520–81), Calvin’s amanuensis, that
the Traité was not “the labor of a single man. . . . Truly, our Calvin could not
find out everything. He recorded as many as he was able to see, and those he
knew of from trustworthy evidence.”45
The textual sources would have included inventories of collections, “the
general catalogue[s] of the relics of a city and of the indulgences appointed
for its churches,” “the letters of indulgences for a specific church,” and tips
gathered from correspondents.46 It is difficult to be more exact, but Calvin’s
awareness of obscure Roman churches and yet-obscurer Roman relics indicates
the use of at least one of the dozens of pilgrim’s guides to the Eternal City; the
same can almost certainly be said of a printed letter of indulgence for
the Cathedral of San Salvador, in Oviedo. On the other hand, various
errors, Calvin’s usual working methods, and the sale of his library in the
early 1540s imply considerable reliance on memory.47
As for experience, Fabre and Wilmart try to match the pattern of the
relics mentioned to the known itineraries of Calvin and his associates. The
most suggestive result concerns Poitiers, where Calvin lived for some time in
the 1530s: “The schema looks like a by-the-book [en règle] tour of the city’s
institutions . . . of the ten Poitevin relics cited, only three are not precisely
located. The other seven are found in seven different churches.” As there is
no trace of an available guide to Poitiers’s relics, Fabre and Wilmart conclude
that “therefore we ought to see this catalogue as the product of lived experience,
as a direct witness by Calvin to what he had been able to see in Poitiers.”48
Of course, it is conceivable that such a guide simply has not survived, but it
is not hard to imagine the young Calvin wandering the city, observing
Catholic piety with morbid fascination.49
44
45
“Vnius hominis est labor. . . . Caluinus enim noster omnes rescire non potuit. Tantùm
eas descripsit, quas ipsi tum videre licuit, tum certis testimoniis accipere”: Calvin, 1548, sig.
A2v.
46
“L’inventaire général des reliques d’une ville et des indulgences proposées par ses églises”;
“les lettres d’indulgences d’une église particulière”: Fabre and Wilmart, 36.
47
48
“Le schéma paraît ressembler à une visite en règle des établissements de la ville . . . sur les
dix reliques poitevines citées, seules trois ne sont pas localisées précisément. Les sept autres se
trouvent dans sept églises distinctes. . . . On doit donc voir cette énumération comme le résultat
d’une expérience vécue, comme un témoignage direct de Calvin sur ce qu’il a pu voir à
Poitiers”: Fabre and Wilmart, 50.
49
On Calvin as an observer of Catholicism, see Eire, 2008, 146–47, 163.
Calvin does not hide the personal experiences that undergird the Traité, and
the text includes two explicitly autobiographical moments (quite rare in the
Reformer’s corpus). He recalls festivals in the Noyon of his boyhood, including
the pious ladies who lit candles in front of the image of Saint Stephen as well as
the images of his persecutors, for Saint Michael as well as for the devil falling
before his sword.50 More startlingly, Calvin confesses his own idolatrous past:
enumerating the relics of Saint Anne, he reveals, “I kissed a piece [of her relics]
in the abbey of Ourscamp near Noyon.”51 Fabre and Wilmart conclude that,
“more than the reflection of notes taken while reading, the Traité des reliques
appears to be the fruit of a collective experience: that of a universal [catholique]
culture of relics.”52
I have only admiration for this bibliographic detective work, but I would
question whether “notes taken while reading” necessarily stand in opposition
to “collective experience.” To the contrary, note-taking, commonplacing, and
other textual strategies were fundamental to the “collective experience” of early
modern European thinkers, not least with regard to their travels and their con-
versations, and to the texts they produced, especially sacred histories.53 The acts
of hearing of a relic from a friend’s recollections, learning of it from a childhood
journey, and reading about it in a printed pamphlet were not obviously distinct.
Here, as in the larger picture of an intellectually omnivorous Calvin, is a man
absolutely typical of the learned culture of his time—the most materially
inclined antiquarians not excepted.54
To take a single, well-studied example, Calvin’s Zurich contemporary
Conrad Gessner (1516–65) worked by cannibalizing “all kinds of sources:
books already in print, manuscripts never printed before, his own observations,
letters from correspondents far and near, people he knew well, and scholars
whom he never met,” in addition to paratexts like tables of contents and book-
sellers’ catalogues.55 Crucially, “there is apparently little distinction to be made
between Gessner the author and Gessner the reader. For both, scissors ever at
the ready, books were annotated, indexed, summarized, copied, cut up, and
re-arranged.” Calvin, too, “was at once author and reader,” constantly revising
50
Calvin, 1543, 109.
51
“I’en ay baisé vne partie en l’Abbaye d’Orcamps prés Noyon”: Calvin, 1543, 85.
52
“Plus que le reflet de notes prises au cours de lectures, le Traité des reliques semble être le
fruit d’une expérience collective: celle d’une culture catholique des reliques”: Fabre and
Wilmart, 46.
53
E.g., Blair, 1992; Grafton, 2016, 25–26; Bolgar, 272; Reinburg, 164–65.
54
E.g., Muecke; Fane-Saunders.
55
Blair, 2017, 12–14 (quotation on 14). See also Nelles, 156.
the Institutes of the Christian Religion (first ed. 1536) in light of his studies, his
critics, and the issues of the day.56
Both Calvin the reader and Calvin the author were fascinated by history. All
his life, he devoured the writings of historians ancient and modern, attaining a
sophisticated knowledge of the past that informed his theological work. His
biblical commentaries, for example, play out within a richly contoured vision
of the Holy Land and strive mightily to resolve contradictions among historical
and scriptural witnesses.57 Even the Institutes makes frequent detours through
historical argument, as when Calvin adduces the example of Nectarios of
Constantinople (d. 397) against auricular confession, or quibbles over the litur-
gical evolution of confirmation.58 As Kirk Essary has shown, Calvin was “an
able and discerning critic” of history, and if he subordinated scholarly rigor
to doctrinal considerations, he never did so blindly or uncritically. He “never
reverted to the argument that the biblical authority simply trumps the non-
biblical one,” at least with authors of some weight; quite the reverse: extrabibl-
ical sources could push him toward more convoluted interpretations of scrip-
ture.59 It should come as no surprise, then, that Calvin’s handling of his relic
collection reflected the best practices of humanist historiography.
To prosecute a critique of relics as material objects in history, Calvin
immersed himself in ancient texts, “so as to give his demonstration a solid foun-
dation according to humanist standards.”60 He could thus weigh the relics’
claims against the combined witnesses of the Bible and an array of church
fathers and ecclesiastical historians (fig. 1). Here Calvin rides the impetus of
what has been called the “patristic Renaissance” of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, an avalanche of new editions of early Christian literature, including
each of the texts cited in the Traité.61
These erudite editions shared bookshelves with a far larger universe of com-
pilations, abridgements, printed commonplace books, and other reference
works that attempted to manage early modern “information overload.”62
Calvin was no less willing to make use of secondhand erudition (or to disguise
that expedient) than his contemporaries. In citing Eusebius of Caesarea’s
Historia ecclesiastica (Ecclesiastical history, 324–35), for example, he made
56
Nelles, 165, 150. On Calvin’s revisions, see Gordon, 2016, 30.
57
Gordon, 2009, 25, 106, 286; Essary, 671, 684; Bouwsma, 119, 121, 169.
58
Calvin, 1541, 316–17, 677 (Institutes 3.4.7, 4.19.10).
59
Essary, 671. See also Backus, 432–33, 435, 437.
60
“Afin de donner à sa démonstration une assise solide selon les critères humanistes”: Fabre
and Wilmart, 46.
61
On the patristic Renaissance, see, inter alia, Rice, 1985; Grane et al.; Pabel; Naquin,
esp. 319–61.
62
Blair, 2010, 11.
Figure 1. Handlist of patristic and historical sources for the Traité. Works marked with an aster-
isk are conjectures by Backus, Millet, and the author, respectively. Image created by the author.
use of Rufinus of Aquileia’s (ca. 345–411) Latin translation, Haymo of

Halberstadt’s (d. 853) Epitome, and Jerome’s (ca. 345–420) adaptation of the
Chronicon (Chronicle, ca. 325), yet his citations still read “Eusebius.”63 Two
such slippages occur in the Traité: once when Calvin is actually using
Rufinus and again when he attributes to Eusebius the story of the
Mandylion—the portrait of himself that Christ legendarily sent to King
Abgar of Edessa—though this episode was already well established as a later
addition (or perhaps a mistake).64 More forthrightly, when he cites
Theodoret of Cyrus (ca. 393–ca. 460), a marginal annotation directs readers
to the Historiae ecclesiasticae tripartitae epitome (Epitome of the tripartite eccle-
siastical history, ca. 510), an abridged Latin collation of Theodoret, Socrates
Scholasticus, and Sozomen (ca. 400–ca. 450).65 The twin phenomena of
new, deluxe scholarly editions and textual shortcuts were constitutive of early
modern learned culture and of the Traité’s historical panorama.
That panorama was stocked with tangible objects: bones and brains, chairs
and chasubles. These Calvin scrutinizes for their material credibility, for their
“archaeological” verisimilitude, as Marie Barral-Baron incisively terms it.66 In
early modern parlance, Calvin adopts the methods of the antiquarian here.
The antiquarians were rewriting the rules of historiography: “They wrote
63
Backus, 419.
64
Calvin, 1543, 56, 70.
65
Calvin, 2000, 34n11.
66
“Archéologique”: Barral-Baron, 365.
from material as well as textual evidence. They abandoned the narration of bat-
tles and treaties for the reconstruction of rituals and customs.”67 One of the
pioneers of this trend had been the Italian polymath Lorenzo Valla (ca.
1406–57), whose De Falso Credita et Ementita Constantini Donatione
Declamatio (On the donation of Constantine, 1439–40) also exposed some
of the material absurdities fêted in Renaissance Rome. For instance, Valla sub-
jects the manuscript vaunted at San Paolo fuori le Mura—“like the remains of
saints”—as Jerome’s autograph copy of the Vulgate Bible to a critique strikingly
like the one Calvin applies to the Titulus. For one thing, “there is considerable
painted cloth and gold, as Virgil says68—something which would rather suggest
that it was not written by the hand of Jerome.” More damningly, Valla had
inspected the document and found the scribe’s signature: “it had been written
by order of a king, Robert, I think, in the handwriting of an inexperienced
person.”69
Along with attending to the physical stuff of history, antiquarians innovated
by reconstructing customs and forms of life of earlier eras. Calvin, for instance,
explicates marriage and burial practices “in the manner of the Jews” to expose
the error in giving the Virgin Mary a wedding ring (“because now it is the
custom”) or Jesus a full-body shroud.70 Indeed, the Traité redeployed
long-standing points of dispute within antiquarian discourse. To ridicule the
supposed table from the Last Supper at St. John Lateran on the grounds that
“the form of tables was then quite different from what it is now . . . they
reclined, rather than sitting, at meals,” was to join a debate that had been
running among scholars, artists, and clergymen for nearly a century.71
Calvin owed much to Valla, whom he elsewhere calls “a learned and keen-
witted man,” and the Reformer’s formative years coincided with the rediscovery
of the Italian’s declamatio after its 1518 reprinting by Ulrich von Hutten
(1488–1523).72 When Calvin demands to know why the evangelists never
mentioned Veronica, or how to reconcile relics of John the Baptist with histo-
rians who maintained that his body was burned,73 he was following Valla’s lead.
The declamatio catalogues such awkward gaps both in the existing record (“Livy,
an earlier and more serious author, knows neither of these stories”) and in the
67
Grafton, 2018, 18.
68
Virgil, 307 (Aeneid 9.26).
69
Valla, 119–21 (italics in original).
70
“À la façon des Iuifs”; “pource que maintenant la coustume est”: Calvin, 1543, 45–46, 65.
71
“La forme des tables estoit lors toute autre qu’elle n’est maintenant. . . . Car on estoit
couché au repas, & non pas assis”: Calvin, 1543, 25. See Grafton, 2016, 36; Grafton, 2010.
72
“Vn homme docte & d’esprit aigu”: Calvin, 1560, 550 (Institutes 4.11.12). See Valla, ix–x;
Antonazzi, 189–90.
73
Calvin, 1543, 42, 70.
record that ought to exist (“I should have expected you to show gold seals,
marble inscriptions, a thousand authors”).74 When Calvin savages those who
retrojected the garb of early modern deacons onto Saint Laurence (d. 258),75
he is borrowing from Valla’s merciless examination of the Donation. Imperial
diadems, the Italian sniffs, were made of cloth or silk. But “this forger of ours
cannot conceive that what kings now normally supplement with a gold band
and gems was made of anything other than gold.”76 And when Calvin builds
the Traité around the scrutiny of physical objects, he reprises Valla’s careful
attention to material evidence: coins, manuscripts, buildings, inscriptions,
tools.
Above all, the two men share a certain rationalism, an insistence that “the
nature of things [rerum natura]” is governed by logical rules. Constantine
(r. 306–37) cannot refer to Constantinople before he has founded the city;77
Mary Magdalene cannot have more than one body.78 Just as Calvin demands
a world in which fish rots with time, so Valla demands one where leprosy devel-
ops as medical knowledge says it should. The relic must exist within time, and it
must follow time’s rules.
To show that Calvin went about collecting fake relics in a thoroughly
humanist fashion does not explain why he did so in the first place. That this
should need explaining is perhaps not immediately obvious, but a brief theolog-
ical excursus reveals why this is problematic.
CRITIQUES A T CROSS-PURPOSES
Theologically speaking, Calvin’s thesis—“the better part of the relics displayed
in every place are false”—is neither especially useful to the Protestant nor espe-
cially threatening to the Catholic. If, as Fabre and Wilmart claim, the “question
centrale” of the Traité is Calvin’s demand of each relic, “Whence come you?,”
the inquiry will remain theologically impotent.79 For the Reformed Protestant,
authenticity is irrelevant: even a relic of flawless provenance, uncontested sin-
gularity, and unexceptionable historical consistency remains a material object.
To revere such a thing is to divert to the created the honor due to the Creator—
in short, idolatry: “Honor cannot be rendered unto the creature in worship
[religionis causa] without unworthily and sacrilegiously appropriating it from
74
Valla, 59, 127.
75
Calvin, 1543, 94.
76
Valla, 87.
77
Valla, 75. Cf. Rice, 1950, 403.
78
Calvin, 1543, 87.
79
“D’où venez-vous?”: Fabre and Wilmart, 67.
God.”80 At one point, Calvin comments, “it would have been enough to abuse
a body through idolatry without making one devil into two or three.”81 Why go
further? The standard Protestant position was simply to cleave doggedly to the
scriptural prohibitions on idols.82 To ask the relic, “Whence come you?” is to
allow that the answer matters—and to leave open the possibility of a correct
answer (the genuine article).
On the other hand, the iconoclast’s gleeful exposé of the idol’s made-ness
is considerably less impressive to the idolater. The problem of fake relics was,
as Calvin suggests, as old as the cult itself, and was lamentable but hardly
calamitous. To acknowledge the abuses was not to indict reverence for the
saints or their relics.83 In his reply to the Traité, the Belgian Carmelite
Nikolaas Blanckaert (d. 1555) frankly admits, “Some fraudulent and cun-
ning merchants are accustomed to adulterate their wares, offering the false
for the true, the contrived for the pure, and the spurious for the genuine;
that the shameless hierophants of our age do this is too obvious to be denied.”
But, he continues, should “the relics of the saints be neglected on that
account, their graves disrespected, their memories consigned to oblivion,
their veneration halted, all to deal with this evil?”84 Another Catholic critic,
Johann Cochlaeus (1479–1552), actually cites Martin Luther (1483–1546)
against Calvin, to the effect that “the abuse does not impugn [tollit] the sub-
stance.”85 And since true devotion “is directed toward Christ through the
relic, and not toward the saint,” “the question of the authenticity of the relics
does not arise.”86 The involuntary, unwitting sin of revering a false relic,
80
“Creaturae enim dari honor, religionis causa, non potest quin a Deo indigne et per
sacrilegium transferatur”: Calvin, 1863–1900, 49:28 (Comm. Rom. 1.25).
81
“Il suffisoit d’abuser d’vn corps en idolatrie, sans faire d’vn diable deux ou troys”: Calvin,
1543, 88.
82
Eire, 1990, 54.
83
Parish, 11–12; Marshall, 46; Lazure, 60; Erasmus, 1997, 365n38, 659n74.
84
“Quodque solent fraudulenti & dolosi facere mercatores, merces suas adulterantes, ut
falsa pro ueris, fucata pro simplicibus, & notha pro germanis supponant: hoc nostri seculi
impudentissimos Hierophantas facere, tam est manifestum, quam ut negari possit. . . . Ideo
ne erunt negligendæ sanctorum reliquiæ, tumuli contemnendi, memoriæ obliuioni tradendæ,
ueneratio intermittenda, quo malo huic prospiciatur?”: Blanckaert, sigs. A2v–A3r.
85
“Abusus non tollit substantiam”: Cochlaeus, sig. B2r. Luther uses this dictum repeatedly,
but Cochlaeus cites his anti-Anabaptist writings: see Luther, 30.1:219.
86
“La question de l’authenticité des reliques ne se pose pas”; “dirigée vers le Christ à travers
la relique et non vers le saint”: Fabre and Wilmart, 31; Lazure, 60. See also Erasmus, 1997,
365n38; Cochlaeus, sigs. B8v, C1v; Koerner, 2008, 97.
Cochlaeus reasons, would not really be a sin at all. “Truly, God regards the
heart, and judges the intention.”87
Doubts over the identity of this or that relic were endemic, with few ever
enjoying “unbroken veneration from the time of the saint’s death.”88
Authenticity could be settled with admirable straightforwardness: “If the relics
worked—that is, if they were channels for supernatural intervention—then
they were genuine. If they did not, they were not authentic, regardless of the
strength of external evidence.”89 Cochlaeus, for one, was untroubled by the
enigma of how Saint James’s remains ended up in Compostela, since “the divine
majesty has proven and shown by miracles and benefits, better than any books
or pages, that his body is truly there.”90
Moreover, Calvin has undersold the sophistication of his opponents’ faith.
He dismisses the careful Catholic distinction between latria, worship due only
to God, and dulia, reverence due to the saints.91 There were cogent Catholic
responses to his assaults on individual relics. Duplicate relics were miracles:
“God multiplied these objects as He wished, for the benefit of humankind.”92
So was their survival, each vicissitude only further confirming the power of
providence. The critique from historicity was answered by the invocation of
church tradition or ecclesiastical history. Catholic authorities had long held
that the chasubles Calvin so mocked, for instance, were derived from the vest-
ments of ancient Israelite priests.93 Anachronisms could also be attributed to
repairs, modifications, or adornments—while the relic was original, the reli-
quary or other external trappings did not need to make such a claim.94 The
work of remaking and restoring disrupted linear chronologies: Paulinus of
Nola describes such reliquaries as “at once ancient and new, yet neither new
nor ancient, / at once different and the same,” a paradox cherished by the
devout.95
Calvin’s outrage that “les simples”—a phrase connoting purity, sincerity,
honesty, straightforwardness, and virtue, as well as a lack of learning—had
87
“Deus enim cor intuetur, & intentionem iudicat”: Cochlaeus, sigs. D4r–D4v. Cf. Lenain,
74–75; Parish, 12.
88
Geary, 176–77 (quotation on 177). Cf. Marshall, 46.
89
Geary, 178.
90
“Corpus eius ibi ueraciter esse, Diuina Maiestas miraculis & beneficijs potius, quam
literis & folijs comprobat & ostendit”: Cochlaeus, sig. A8r.
91
Calvin, 1560, 37–38 (Institutes 1.12.2); Koerner, 2008, 85, 96–99; Cochlaeus, sig. C3v.
92
Eire, 1986, 16. See also Erasmus, 1969–, 1.3:478; Cochlaeus, sig. D3v.
93
Grafton, 2016, 27–28.
94
Hahn, 291.
95
“Simul uetera et noua, nec noua nec uetera aeque, / Non eadem simul atque eadem”:
Paulinus of Nola, 416 (Natalicium 10.218). Cf. Vélez, 180; Reinburg, 2, 4, 168.
been deceived by the papists deliberately mischaracterizes Catholic worship.96

He leaves no room for what Robert A. Orsi calls “devotional double-mindedness”
vis-à-vis holy matter. Pilgrims come to New York City’s Our Lady of Lourdes
Grotto believing that “in some way these waters are the waters of Lourdes,” even
as they know perfectly well that “these waters come through the pipes of the
city’s reservoir”: “the water is both ordinary and extraordinary; it is identical
and not to the water at Lourdes.”97 The same dynamics inflect early modern
devotional causes célèbres like the Rood of Grace. In 1538, Henrician officials
tasked with the dissolution of the Kentish monastery Boxley Abbey claimed
to have discovered that the Cistercian house’s celebrated crucifix, famous for
its moving eyes, contained “certen Ingynes & old wyer wyth olde Roton stykkes
in the backe . . . that dyd cause the eyes of the same to move & stere in the head
therof lyke unto a lyvelye thyng.” The Protestants brandished the Rood as evi-
dence of “the false, crafty & suttel handelyng” of the papists and the gullibility
of their addled flocks.98 Yet Leanne Groeneveld shows that the credulity of the
pious was a polemical construction: the devout “would have been well aware
that the Rood of Boxley’s movements were effected by internal devices and
an external operator.”99 That awareness in no way precluded real devotion;
the automaton could be at once machine and miracle.
Such paradoxes, in the language of Catholic spirituality, are mysteries. Not
only is a mystery impossible to explain in rational terms, but an insistence on
doing becomes impious, or at least wrongheaded.100 And while some Catholics
were troubled by the inconsistencies in the cult of relics, iconophile theology
was more than equal to the challenge.101 The debunking of 327 individual
relics—or three thousand, for that matter—left the underlying theological
edifice unscathed. The key word, however, is individual. Thus the strenuous
efforts of Protestants, with varying degrees of success, “to conflate specific
instances of fraud with a more general critique of traditional religion.”102
Calvin’s madcap enumeration becomes comprehensible—and effective—
when the level of analysis shifts from particular relics to the collective.
Reckoning with the Traité as a cumulative rhetorical effect demands rethinking
the influence of Calvin’s most immediate model: Erasmus.
96
Calvin, 1543, 31.
97
Orsi, 52–54.
98
Quoted in Marshall, 54.
99
Groeneveld, 11, 13, 40 (quotation on 13).
100
Vélez, 19; Koerner, 2008, 99; Blanckaert, sig. B7r.
101
Fabre and Wilmart, 34; Reinburg, 209.
102
Marshall, 62.
CONTESTING THE ERASMIAN INHERITANCE

“All his life,” avers William Bouwsma, “Calvin inhabited the Erasmian world of
thought and breathed its spiritual atmosphere.”103 This debt manifested vari-
ously in Calvin’s scholarly methods, pedagogical principles, critical insights,
philosophical concepts, and stylistic flourishes.104 In 1543, Erasmus was
unquestionably Europe’s foremost critic of the cult of relics.105 His Colloquia
(Colloquies, 1518), notably “Naufragium” and “Peregrinatio religionis ergo,”
lampooned the grossness of popular piety: letters dictated by the Virgin, suppli-
ants who forgot about Christ in their frantic pleas to the saints, used handker-
chiefs revered as relics. On a loftier plane, the Enchiridion Militis Christiani
(Handbook of a Christian knight, 1503) warned that materiality was eclipsing
true pietas, an Erasmian keyword that fused sound doctrine, communal and
personal devotion, and lived morality:106 “You revere the saints; your joy is
in touching their relics. But you spurn the best of what they left behind, the
perfect example of a pure life. . . . You gaze in astonishment at the tunic or
sweat-cloth they would have be Christ’s, and you read Christ’s revelations
drowsily. You think it the greatest of all things to possess some fragment of
the cross in your house. Yet this is nothing compared to carrying the mystery
of the cross in your heart.”107
The traditional genealogy from the Traité to Erasmus has understandably
run through the Colloquia, the Enchiridion, and the Modus Orandi Deum
(On praying to God, 1524); these texts not only mock the excesses of popular
piety, but they share with the Traité a tone Barral-Baron aptly calls
“the ironic smile.”108 There are also direct borrowings from Erasmus in the
Traité—notably, several jokes lifted from the Colloquia. Of fragments of the
true cross, the Reformer quips, “If one were to gather up all of them that
could be found, it would be the freight for a mighty big boat.”109 Here is
Erasmus, three decades earlier: “They allege the same of the Lord’s cross,
103
Bouwsma, 13.
104
Brashler, 154–55; Barral-Baron, 354; Bouwsma, 17.
105
Fabre and Wilmart, 31; Barral-Baron, 359, 367–69.
106
Erasmus, 1988, xi.
107
“Veneraris diuos, gaudes eorum reliquias contingere. Sed contemnis, quod illi reliquer-
unt optimum, puta vitae purae exempla. . . . Attonitus spectas tunicam aut sudarium, quod
fertur Christi, et somniculosus legis oracula Christi? Maximo maius esse credis, quod crucis
portiunculam domi possides. At istud nihil est prae illo, si mysterium crucis in pectore condi-
tum gestes”: Erasmus, 1969–, 5.8:194, 196–98.
108
Barral-Baron, 371.
109
“Si on vouloit ramasser tout ce que ses trouué, il y en auroit la charge d’vn bon grand
bateau”: Calvin, 1543, 29–30.
which is displayed in so many places, privately and publicly, that if all the frag-
ments were gathered up they’d seem the full freight for a ship.”110 Quite rightly,
then, the Traité has become a key case study for the “filiation between the
humanist and the Reformer.”111
Quite rightly, but not so straightforwardly. Despite the sense among some
Catholics that Erasmus had betrayed them, compared to Calvin his critiques are
a prescription for considered reform, rather than a call to full-throated
Reformation.112 For one thing, there is the obvious but essential fact that the
Traité is in French. Where Erasmus “always communicates for a cultured,
select, and Latinate elite,” Calvin addresses himself “to the largest possible pub-
lic,” here anyone who can understand French.113 Francophone territories were
the focus of Calvin’s polemical efforts in this period (when first mooting an
inventory of relics, he suggests “ten or twelve cities, such as Paris, Toulouse,
Rheims, and Poitiers”).114 In light of Erasmus’s paralyzing fear of popular
unrest, so much of which had marked the early Reformation, the linguistic dif-
ference is not insignificant.115 Calvin’s Catholic interlocutors, for their part,
viewed the choice of French as a stratagem to “more easily infect the souls of
the unlearned, simple, and foolish with his poison.”116
As for the critique itself, in assessing Erasmus’s agenda it is worth keeping in
mind Cochlaeus’s and Blanckaert’s distinction between substance and abuse.
Erasmian pietas had a reformist bent, as the humanist marshaled his learning
to evaluate the state of the church and to imagine a better alternative.117 He
regarded the cult of relics as a lightning rod for superstition, exploitation,
and greed. Far too many pagan practices had survived under the fig leaf of a
saint; far too many absurdities were embraced in the name of devotion. It
appalled Erasmus to see Christian pilgrims genuflect before a saint’s filthy
linens, or to hear them haggling with divine patrons (this many votive candles
110
“Idem causantur de cruce Domini, quae priuatim ac publice tot locis ostenditur, vt, si frag-
menta conferantur in vnum, nauis onerariae iustum onus videri possint”: Erasmus, 1969–,
1.3:478. For further parallels, see Calvin, 1543, 63, 99–100; Erasmus, 1969–, 1.3:474, 477–78.
111
“Filiation entre l’humaniste et le réformateur”: Barral-Baron, 350. See also Eire, 1986,
228–29.
112
Eire, 1986, 1–2; Rice, 1950, 388, 399.
113
“S’exprime toujours pour une élite culturelle, choisie, et familière du latin”; “au plus
large public possible”: Barral-Baron, 362.
114
“Dix ou douze villes, comme de Paris, Tholouse, Reins, & Poytiers”: Calvin, 1543, 15.
See Gordon, 2009, 187.
115
Erasmus, 1969–, 5.1:154.
116
“Facilius . . . indocti, simplicis, & imprudentis uulgi animis uirus suum insinuaret”:
Blanckaert, sig. B4v.
117
Erasmus, 1988, xvi–xviii.
for so much assistance).118 Still worse is the mercenary behavior of those who
maintain the cult: at every shrine, the protagonist of “Peregrinatio” is hounded
by custodians and guides, each expecting a show of pious generosity. After
spending a small fortune in this fashion, he expresses his gratitude at having
eluded certain notorious bandits; readers duller than Calvin would have gotten
the joke.119
All of which is to say that Erasmus’s target is abuse rather than substance, the
exception rather than the rule: the obscene accumulation of wealth, the brazen
exploitation, the patent superstition.120 But he refused to extrapolate from the
abolition of scandals, however egregious or pervasive, to the abolition of popular
piety itself. When it came to images, for instance, he acknowledges that their
use and abuse had become “infinite [immensum]”: “Yet this is not a reason for
casting all images out of the churches, but for teaching the people how they may
rightly be used.”121 As for the saints, Erasmus believed that a well-regulated cult
could offer a spur to virtue: “if you delight in rendering worship to Christ
through the saints, strive to imitate Christ through the saints, and in honor
of each one endeavor to improve a particular vice or to embrace a particular
virtue.” So long as outward displays were matched by interior devotion,
Erasmus had no complaint.122 The wealth the shrines had accrued over the
years could, perhaps, be given to the poor.123
Calvin flatly denied that the physics of worship, as it were, permitted the
upward movement from image or relic to God. Worship channeled through
even the noblest matter will inevitably be corrupted through idolatry, which
tends ever downward toward more and more debased objects.124 The error
intrinsic to relic piety could only end in worshippers revering “the bones of
some bandit or thief, or even of an ass, or a dog, or a horse” as the remains
of a martyr, or “the trinkets of some whore” as the jewelry of the Virgin.125
Here Calvin differed from Luther, for whom the problem was also abuse; a
good Lutheran, looking at a good Lutheran image, could “see through the
118
Erasmus, 1969–, 1.3:328–29, 491; 5.1:154.
119
Erasmus, 1969–, 1.3:491–92.
120
Hexter, 64.
121
“Nec tamen ideo profligandae sunt imagines omnes e templis, sed docendus est populus,
quamadmodum his conueniat vti”: Erasmus, 1969–, 5.1:156. See also Barral-Baron, 354.
122
“Si Christi cultus in sanctis eius te impendio delectat, Christum facito in sanctis imiteris
et ad singulorum honorem singula vicia mutare aut singulas virtutes amplecti stude”: Erasmus,
1969–, 5.8:196.
123
Erasmus, 1969–, 1.3:471, 489–90; Eire, 1986, 44.
124
Calvin, 1921, 28–29; Calvin, 1541, 131 (Institutes 1.11.9); Eire, 1986, 225.
125
“Les os de quelque Brigand ou Larron, ou bien d’vn asne, ou d’vn chien, ou d’vn che-
ual”; “les bagues de quelque paillarde”: Calvin, 1543, 109.
image to its didactic charge.”126 Calvin, by contrast, spoke of worshipers as

“stunned” by matter, unable to transcend “looking at the bare sign.”127
In comparison to the Colloquia, the Traité ranges far wider, gathering famous
and obscure relics alike. Furthermore, Calvin all but ignores the excesses and
enormities, the elaborate ecclesiastical settings, the liturgical apparatus sur-
rounding the relics. What abounds is not gold or silver, indulgences or services,
but the relics themselves—for all its attention to fraud, the Traité attacks the
cult, not its abuses.128 This Erasmus never did, though he had all the same his-
torical and philological tools. Despite the enthusiasm of contemporary
Reformers and radicals, scholarship has reaffirmed the steadfastly orthodox, tra-
ditionalist character of his religious thought.129 On the subject of relics, as
Erasmus grew more and more uneasy at what Luther had set into motion, he
emphatically endorsed the cult, at the cost of contradicting his younger self.130
In this light, I want to complicate the accepted line of descent from Erasmus
to the Traité, suggesting that the influence of the Colloquia and the spiritual
writings is mediated through the humanist’s rhetorical theory, an influence
measured in style rather than content. For it was in his attention to and reliance
upon rhetoric that Calvin showed himself most thoroughly as a child of the
Renaissance and of Erasmus.131
I am thinking specifically of copia. No better description of copia can be
offered than the one penned by Erasmus himself, opening his 1512 treatise
De Duplici Copia Verborum ac Rerum Commentarii Duo (Two commentaries
on the double abundance of words and things): “There is nothing more admi-
rable or more magnificent than oratory overflowing like a river of gold with a
rich abundance of arguments and of words.”132 Famously, De Copia offers a
virtuoso practical demonstration, as Erasmus lists 147 ways to say, “Your letter
delighted me immensely [Tuae me literae magnopere delectarunt]” followed by
two hundred ways to say, “As long as I live, I shall always remember you
[Semper dum vivam, tui meminero].”133 With his own language flowing in
such extravagant torrents, Erasmus advises his readers on how to speak and
write copiously: how to assemble a sufficient store of words, examples, argu-
ments, and references; how to organize them to good effect; how to vary
126
Koerner, 2008, 28, 32 (quotation on 32). See Eire, 1990, 55, 61.
127
Quoted in Koerner, 2008, 138.
128
Marshall, 49.
129
Erasmus, 1988, xiv–xvi.
130
Barral-Baron, 367; Bouwsma, 14, 46.
131
Breen, 8, 18; Bouwsma, 14.
132
“Vt non est aliud vel admirabilius vel magnificentius quam oratio, diuite quadam sen-
tentiarum verborumque copia aurei fluminis instar exuberans”: Erasmus, 1969–, 1.6:26.
133
Erasmus, 1969–, 1.6:78–90; Eden.
one’s language so as to delight, move, and persuade. Copia of subject matter—

relics, perhaps—was to be assembled by amassing exempla, under which
heading Erasmus grouped “stories, fables, proverbs, opinions, parallels or
comparisons, similitudes, analogies, and anything else of the same sort.”134
De Copia was an international best seller and a standard textbook of human-
ist pedagogy.135 R. R. Bolgar went so far as to call it “a clue to the whole of
Humanism.”136 Though the defining trait of Calvin’s prose style was clarity,
even simplicity, he could be abundant whenever rhetorical or homiletic exigen-
cies demanded.137 It should be noted that copiousness is not the same as pro-
lixity: copia could be, though in practice rarely was, concise.138 Critics like
Cochlaeus savaged Calvin’s verbosity: the Catholic controversialist sniped, “It
is written in Proverbs [10:19], ‘In a multitude of words, sin is not lacking.’ And
none of the heretics of our time more abounds in verbiage than John Calvin, a
fugitive and exile from France, as proven by his books, which he floods with a
ceaseless deluge of words, and scatters through the world with impious
loquacity.”139
The Traité, an enormous catalogue of words describing an overabundance of
things, is a set-piece display of Erasmian copia. It is the function of such copia
“to conceptually and materially conflate words and things”: here it re-creates the
infinitude of the cult of relics.140 As Calvin rattles off the relics of the apostles,
for instance, the reader is crowded by names, places, and bodies all at once:
“Everyone knows that the city of Toulouse thinks it has six of them—namely,
Saint James the Greater, Saint Andrew, Saint James the Less, Saint Philip, Saint
Simon, and Saint Jude. At Padua is the body of Saint Matthias, at Salerno the
body of Saint Matthew. At Ortona that of Saint Thomas. In the Kingdom of
Naples that of Saint Bartholomew. Now let us note those who have two bodies,
or three. Saint Andrew has a second body at Amalfi; Saint Philip and Saint
James the Less each [have] another at Rome, at Santi Apostoli. Saint Simon
and Saint Jude also at Rome, in the church of Saint Peter. Saint
134
“Fabulam, et apologum, prouerbium, iudicia, parabolam seu collationem, imaginem, et
analogiam. Praterea si qua sunt similia”: Erasmus, 1969–, 1.6:232, 258 (quotation on 232).
135
Erasmus, 1978, 283.
136
Bolgar, 274; Johnson, 2010, 74.
137
Gordon, 2009, 148; Bouwsma, 93, 125–26; Breen, 16; Millet, 735.
138
Millet, 710, 744.
139
“Scriptum sit in prouerbijs. In multiloquio non deesse peccatum. Nullus autem
hæreticorum hoc tempore magis abundet multiloquio, quám Ioannes Caluinus, profugus et
exul Gallorum: Quemadmodum indicant libri eius, quos incessabili uerborum profluuio inun-
dat, & impia loquacitate in orbem dispergit”: Cochlaeus, sig. A2v.
140
Johnson, 2012, 1104, 1110 (quotation on 1104). See also Johnson, 2010, 49.
Bartholomew at Rome in his church.”141 And these are only the whole bodies—a
further litany of smaller pieces follows. Note the gradual increase in asyndeton
and the fragments instead of sentences, as the bodies shift from textual repre-
sentations to brute things that intrude upon language.
In particular, Calvin embraces Erasmus’s method of amplificatio, which
“proceeds by a certain number of steps ‘not only to the extreme, but sometimes
beyond the extreme in a fashion.’”142 The Traité ’s amplificatio climaxes with the
heads of John the Baptist:
Those of Amiens glory in having the face, and in the mask that they display
there is the mark of a blow from a knife, which they say Herodias gave him.
But those at Saint-Jean-d’Angély contradict them, and show the same frag-
ment. As for the rest of the head, the top, from the front to the back, was at
Rhodes and is now at Malta, I believe. At least the Commanders claimed that
the Turk yielded it to them. The rear part is at Saint-Jean[-Baptiste] de
Nemours. The brain is at Nogent-le-Rotrou. Despite this, those at Saint-
Jean-de-Maurienne do not lack a portion of the head; his jaw has not failed
to be at Besançon at Saint-Jean-le-Grand. There is another piece at Saint-
Jean de Latran in Paris and a bit of his ear at Saint-Flour in Auvergne. At
San Salvador in Spain the brow and his hair. There is also a piece at Noyon,
where it is displayed most authoritatively. There is likewise a piece at Lucca; I
know not in what corner. And is all this the end of it? Fly over to Rome, and at
the monastery of San Silvestro, you shall hear it said, “Behold the head of Saint
John the Baptist.”143
141
“Chascun sait, que la ville de Toulouse en pense auoir six, assauoir sainct Iaques le
maieur, sainct Andre, sainct Iaques le mineur, sainct Philippe, sainct Simon, & sainct Iude.
A Padoue est le corps S. sainct Mathias: à Salerne le corps sainct Matthieu. à Orthonne
celuy de sainct Thomas. au Royaume de Naples celuy de sainct Barthelamy. Aduisons main-
tenant lesquelz ont deux corps, ou troys. S. Andre a vn second corps à Melphe, sainct Philippe
& sainct Iaques le mineur chascun aussi vn autre à Rome, ad sanctos Apostolos. S. Simon &
sainct Iude aussi bien à Rome à l’egli[se] sainct Pierre. Sainct Barthelemy à Rome en son eglise”:
Calvin, 1543, 81–82.
142
“Quoties gradibus aliquot peruenitur, non modo ad summum, sed interim quodammodo
supra summum”: Erasmus, 1969–, 1.6:218. Erasmus here quotes Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria
(8.4.4): see Quintilian, 2:450.
143
“Ceux d’Amiens se glorifient d’auoir le visage: & en la masque qu’ilz monstrent il y a la
marque d’vn coup de cousteau sur l’oeil, qu’ilz disent que Herodias luy donna. Mais ceux de
sainct Iehan d’Angely contredisent, & monstrent la mesme partie. Quant au reste de la teste, le
dessus depuis le front iusques au derriere estoit à Rhodes: & est maintenant à maltes, comme ie
pense. Au moins les Commandeurs ont faict à croire que le Turc leur auoit rendu. Le derriere
est à S. Iehan de Nemours: La ceruelle est à Noyan le Rantroux. Nonobstant cela, ceux de sainct
Iehan de Morienne ne laissent point d’auoir vne partie de la teste: sa machoire ne laisse point à
De Copia further recommends many of the tools Calvin deployed for the
Traité, among them commonplacing and an attention to “what in spoken
usage changes with the times” (read custom), properly set in a historical con-
text.144 Calvin also seems to have deliberately subverted some of Erasmus’s pre-
cepts, notably those concerning decorum. De Copia cautioned against the use of
expressions that were “sordidus” (“those which will seem too low for the dignity
of the matter”) or “obscoena,” which “ought to be utterly alien to the speech of
Christians.”145 To speak of a “swarm [fourmillere]” of holy relics, to describe
saints’ bodies as “filth [ordure],” if not outright indecent, was to debase “the
dignity of the matter.”146
Still more abundant than the relics of the Traité are the arguments against
them; Erasmus insisted on nothing so much as variety, and Calvin rarely con-
tented himself with one argument when many would do. Thus he piles up
problems of survival, anachronism, and attestation pell-mell to debunk the
table from the Last Supper: “Note that Jesus Christ had the Last Supper in a
hired room. On leaving it, he left the table behind: we nowhere read that it was
ever recovered by the apostles. Some time later, Jerusalem was destroyed, as we
have said. How plausible is it that it should be found seven or eight hundred
years later? What is more, the form of tables was then quite different from what
it is now. For they reclined, rather than sitting, at meals, as the Gospel expressly
states.”147
Besides reaffirming the humanist character of the Traité, recognizing the text
as a piece of copia addresses the theological impotence of debunking, because it
positions the entire ensemble, not individual items, at the core of the critique.
estre à Besanson à sainct Iehan le grand. Il y en a vne autre partie à sainct Iehan de Latran à
Paris, & à sainct Flour en Auuergne vn bout de l’aureille. A sainct Saluador en Hespaigne le
front & des cheueux. Il y en a aussi bien quelque lopin à Noyon, qui s’y monstre fort autenti-
quement. Il y en a semblablement vne partie à Lucques, ie ne say de quel endroict. Tout cela est
il faict? Qu’on aille à Rome & au Monastere de sainct Siluestre, on oyra dire, Voicy la teste de
sainct Iehan Baptiste”: Calvin, 1543, 70–72.
144
“Quid in vsurpandis vocibus aetas variarit”: Erasmus, 1969–, 1.6:44–46, 52 (quotation
on 52); Cave, 27.
145
“Quae humiliora videbuntur quam pro rei dignitate”; “oportet ab omni christianorum
sermone procul abesse”: Erasmus, 1969–, 1.6:40, 48. Cf. Johnson, 2010, 77, 343.
146
Cf. Walsham, 125; Hamilton, 142.
147
“Notés, que Iesus CHRIST estoit en vn lieu emprunté quand il feit sa Cene. En partant
delà, il laissa la table, nous ne lisons point que iamais elle ayt esté retirée par les Apostres.
Ierusalem, quelque temps apres fut destruite: comme nous auons dict. Quelle epparence y à
il, d’auoir trouué cette table sept ou huit cens ans apres? D’auantage, la forme des tables estoit
lors toute autre qu’elle n’est maintenant. Car on estoit couché au repas, & non pas assis, ce qui
est expressement dit en l’Éuangile”: Calvin, 1543, 24–25.
Copia dwells not in the particular examples but in their collective action, in the
production of a rhetorical and forensic effect.148 As Erasmus puts it, copia
“makes it so that the entire oration is densely and closely packed and secured
by arguments on every side. Even if you do not marshal them and lead them
out, as it were, in battle array, they shall fight for themselves and shall aid the
cause in no small degree.”149 Umberto Eco writes of the Litanies of the Blessed
Virgin, enumerations of Mary’s myriad “properties, attributes and titles,” “They
must have been recited like a mantra . . . it does not matter so much whether the
virgo is potens or clemens . . . what matters is being seized by the dizzying sound
of the lists.”150 The sensory experience of reading or listening to the Traité may
have accomplished not a little of Calvin’s work, affectively conveying the sheer
vastness of the cult of relics and the corresponding magnitude of its fraudulence.
Listen to the drumbeat of additions in Calvin’s list of the forefingers of John the
Baptist: “At Besançon in the church of Saint-Jean le Grand there is one of them.
At Toulouse another. At Lyon another. At Bourges another. At Florence
another. At Saint-Jean-des-Aventures near Mâcon another.”151
Moreover, the Traité ’s cumulative effect as copia changes the status of the
individual relics mentioned, as the technique transforms its constituent parts.
Analyzing a passage from Cicero (106–43 BCE),152 Erasmus explains that
each word and each sentence is strengthened by what came before: “Here
each word grows stronger in turn. . . . If one were to divide up and linger on
individual stages, it would certainly augment the copia of the oratory, but it
would amplify less effectively.”153 Each of the Baptist’s heads and fingers
gains heft by juxtaposition with all the others. Compilation generates new har-
monies and dissonances among its constituent parts; scale itself is transforma-
tive, for a word, a thought, a fact comes to mean something different when it is
placed into juxtaposition with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of others, a phe-
nomenon Calvin discussed in his biblical exegesis.154
148
Johnson, 2010, 52.
149
“Facit enim vt tota oratio densis ac crebris argumentis vndique differta sit et communita.
Quae tametsi non explices quasique in aciem educas, tamen pugnant per sese causamque non
mediocriter adiuuant”: Erasmus, 1969–, 1.6:218.
150
Eco, 118. Cf. Belknap, xiv; Johnson, 2012, 1108.
151
“A Besanson en l’eglise sainct Iehan le grand il y en a vn. A Thoulouse vn autre. à Lyon
vn autre. à Bourges vn autre. à Flourence vn autre. à sainct Iehan des aduentures, pres Mascon,
vn autre”: Calvin, 1543, 73.
152
The passage in question is Philippics 2.63: see Cicero, 133–34.
153
“Hic singulae voces incrementum habent. . . . Haec si quis diuidat ac circa singulos gra-
dus immoretur, augebit orationis copiam, tamen minus efficaciter amplificabit”: Erasmus,
1969–, 1.6:218.
154
Blair, 2010, 176; Calvin, 1541, 615 (Institutes 4.16.23).
Here, perhaps, Calvin understood copia better than Erasmus. The irenic
Dutchman chose the material for his demonstration of copia deliberately: his
variations on “Your letter delighted me immensely” and “As long as I live, I
shall always remember you” sought to impress upon his readers “the central
importance of friendship among scholars.” Now, so long as they were parceled
out into different missives to different correspondents, his lists were indeed “the
tools to maintain such relationships at long distance.”155 But what Calvin real-
ized was that if the variations are all brought together, each is hollowed out into
a cheap formula. Here the elegantly varied copia of the Colloquia gives way to
the brute accumulation of Calvin’s contemporary and fellow (rebellious)
Erasmian François Rabelais (d. 1553). By the end of the catalogue of the
Library of Saint Victor in Gargantua and Pantagruel 2.7—“Jumblings of
Scotus. The Winged-Rat of the Cardinals. On the Holding Back of Spurs, in
Eleven Decades, by Master Alberic of Rosata. By the same, On the
Fortification of Hairs, in Three Books. Nine Enneads on the Success of
Exhausting Things by Bishop Boudarin, with Papal Privilege for Three Years
and Afterwards not”—the very notion of a book, any book, has become
laughable.156 As Christopher D. Johnson notes, “hyperbolic amplification
proves a means of exhausting or mocking received ideas.”157 Bringing together
327 relics strips each one of its singularity; “profusion itself vilifies images by
brutely exposing them as so many things.”158
A L IST OF BA RE B ONE S
Framing the Traité as an inventory is Calvin’s foremost rhetorical coup, for it
permits the disavowal of the use of rhetoric itself: “No form of writing appears
more matter-of-fact, unrhetorical, and innocent than the list.”159
Ostentatiously confining himself to the relics “les plus certaines” and “les
plus authentiques,”160 Calvin positions his critiques as truths not made but rec-
ognized, “discovered rather than invented.”161 It is the relics themselves that
demand their own rejection, by the pure force of truth. The Traité ’s eminently
155
Grafton, 2008, 23. See Eden.
156
“Barbouillamenta Scoti. La Ratepenade des Cardinaux. De calcaribus removendis
decades undecim, per m. Albericum de Rosata. Eiusdem, de castrametandis crinibus lib.
tres. Boudarini episcopi, de emulgentiarum profectibus eneades novem cum privilegio papali
ad triennum, et postea non”: Rabelais, 339 (Gargantua and Pantagruel 2.7).
157
Johnson, 2010, 12.
158
Koerner, 2008, 47 (italics in original). Cf. Barral-Baron, 365.
159
Delbourgo and Müller-Wille, 711. Cf. Belknap, ix–x; Shapin, 495.
160
Calvin, 1543, 16, 87–88.
161
Shapin, 496, 507–08. Cf. Barral-Baron, 365; Fabre and Wilmart, 35.
rhetorical assemblage, then, masquerades as what Eco calls a “practical list,” one
with “a purely referential function.” Such lists “refer to objects in the outside
world and have the purely practical purpose of naming and listing them.”162
Calvin thus eschews the overt preposterousness of a Rabelais, or even a
Luther. Compare the matter-of-factness of the Traité with Luther’s brief
salvo against relics, Neue Zeitung vom Rhein (Fresh news from the Rhine,
1542). The German Reformer listed the treasures Albert of Brandenburg
(1490–1545), archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg, had recently acquired:
1.A fair piece of the left horn of Moses.
2.Three flames from Moses’s bush on Mount Sinai.
3.Two feathers and an egg of the Holy Spirit.
4.The whole tip of the flag with which Christ harried Hell.
5.Also a great lock from Beelzebub’s beard, which was stuck to the same flag.
6.Half a wing from Saint Gabriel the Archangel.
7.A whole pound of the wind that blew for Elias in the cave on Mount Horeb.
8.Two ells of the sound of the trumpets on Mount Sinai.
9.Thirty beats from the drum of Miriam, the sister of Moses, heard at the Red
Sea.
10. A great heavy piece of the cry of the children of Israel, with which they
brought down the walls of Jericho.
11. Five fine bright strings from David’s harp.
12. Three fine locks of Absalom’s hair, by which he was left hanging from the
oak tree.163
This is all very amusing, but easily dismissed as parody, unrepresentative of the
cult of relics as actually practiced. Incredible though some of the claims
Catholics did make on the behalf of relics were, they rarely reached such levels
of absurdity. By dealing with actually existing relics and with the claims
Catholics themselves made about them, the Traité ’s blows are much harder
to parry.
162
Eco, 113.
163
“I. Ein schoen stueck vom lincken Horn Mosi. II. Drey flammen vom Pusch Mosi, auff
dem berge Sinai. III. Zwo Feddern und ein Ey, vom heiligen Geist. IIII. Ein gantzer zipffel von
der Fanen, da Christus die Helle mit auff sties. V. Auch ein grosser Lock, vom Bart Beelzebub,
der an der selben Fanen bekleben bleib. VI. Ein halber Fluegel von Sanct Gabriel dem
ErtzEngel. VII. Ein gantz pfund, von dem Winde, der fur Elia uber rausschet, in der huele
am berge Oreb. VIII. Zwo Ellen von dem Dohn der Posaunen, auff dem berge Sinai. IX.
Dreissig Bombart von der Paucken Mir Jam der schwester Mosi, am Roten Meer
gehoeret. X. Ein gros schwer stueck vom geschrey der kinder Jsrael, da mit sie die Mauren
Jericho nidder worffen. XI. Fuenff schoener heller Seiten von der Harffen Dauid. XII. Drey
schoener Lock har des Absaloms, damit er an der Eichen hangend bleib”: Luther, 53:404–05.
Then again, not every practical—in Eco’s terms—list of holy remains will be
“the means by which the relic is consummated and annihilated through an ulti-
mate displacement that makes it a topos.”164 The closest cousins to the Traité,
formally speaking, are Heiltumsbücher, illustrated catalogues of relic collec-
tions.165 The contents of a Heiltumsbuch could far outnumber those of the
Traité, but they do not have the same deconstructive effect. To the contrary,
they are enthusiastic expressions of relic piety: their organization tends to reflect
the order in which the collection was ritually displayed in a ceremony known as
a Heiltumsweisung; their copious illustrations permitted readers to relive the
ceremony “and immerse themselves in the contemplation of the vessels and
statuettes with their sacred contents.”166 Enumeration could vest each object
with deep meaning of its own, and description could stimulate the imagination
and invite emotional identification.167
It is not, then, as Fabre and Wilmart would have it, the catalogue form per se
that “destroys the value” of each relic.168 The Heiltumsbuch is analytic and com-
memorative, confined to and drawing its meaning from local contexts and col-
lections (which almost never gathered their contents into one metanarrative);169
Calvin’s inventory is synthetic and destructive, forcing each item to stand side
by side with hundreds of its fellows (or competitors). Alongside this difference
in geographic remit, Calvin dispenses with the illustrations with which the
Heiltumsbuch celebrates the unique visuality of the relic—and, specifically, of
its reliquary, as in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s (ca. 1472–1553) exquisite wood-
cuts of the Wittenberg collection (fig. 2).170 Indeed, perhaps the most crucial
feature of Calvin’s list is the omission of reliquaries, the masterpieces of design
that mediated virtually every early modern experience of relics. Some collec-
tions, Heiltumsweisungen, and Heiltumsbücher were organized according to
type of reliquary (crosses with crosses, busts with busts, and so on)—yet even
artists without Cranach’s skill managed to highlight each item’s particularity
(fig. 3).171 The rich detail and “artistic exactitude” of the deluxe
164
“Le moyen par lequel s’accomplit et s’anéantit la relique dans un ultime déplacement par
lequel elle devient lieu de discours”: Fabre and Wilmart, 58.
165
See Cárdenas, 2002 and 2013.
166
“Und sich in die Anschauung der Gefäße und Statuetten mit ihren heiligen Inhalten
vertiefen”: Cárdenas, 2002, 28, 45, 117 (quotation on 117); Rublack, 148.
167
Vélez, 137, 193.
168
“Anéantit . . . la valeur”: Calvin, 1995, 18.
169
Cárdenas, 2002, 30–31; Vélez, 31.
170
Curiously, the first German edition of the Traité does include images, including depic-
tions of reliquaries. See, e.g., Calvin, 1557, sig. E7r.
171
Cárdenas, 2002, 28.
Heiltumsbuch made it a kind of “picture-catalogue” of the relic collection, as

much an inventory of art objects as of holy remains.172 The Traité ’s aniconic
character undercuts the emphatically visual nature of relic piety, a move conso-
nant with Calvin’s deprecation of sight vis-à-vis hearing as the medium of true
knowledge and true faith.173
But the reliquary was more than a work of art. As Cynthia Hahn has shown,
reliquaries were instrumental in shaping the worshipper’s encounter with the
holy object, presenting “the relic as powerful, holy and sacred, part of the larger
institution of the Church.”174 Reliquaries and Heiltumsbücher recorded the gifts
of donors, reenacted salient moments in the object’s history, and proclaimed
local allegiances.175 They propagated “a complex instruction of the body and
the senses, the teaching of reverentia,” the awed respect due to the holy.176
Integral to this process was the reliquary’s character as a functional, liturgical
object, “a dynamic part of the chorus of saints . . . an object to be carried
and manipulated, displayed and presented.”177 The Vienna Heiltumsbuch
(1502), for example, specifies the songs to be sung at each stage of the
Heiltumsweisung.178 It was also one of several Heiltumsbücher to include images
of worship in action (fig. 4), exalting the act of reverence and reenacting it with
every turn of the page. For the worshipper, relic piety involved a complex
choreography of kneeling, praying, touching, kissing, bowing, and singing.179
In reducing the relic to the bare bone (pun intended), Calvin strips away the
patina of liturgy and local tradition that gave these objects precise meanings,
and often guaranteed their authenticity.180 Excluded from the frame too was
the double movement that powered the cult: the movement of relics among
shrines and collections and the movement of pilgrims to and from holy
sites.181 Relics, “inherently restless,”182 seem to “burn the hands of those
who possess them” and to multiply as they move.183 This pas de deux ground
172
“Zeichnerische Detailgenauigkeit”; “Bildinventares”: Cárdenas, 2002, 74, 119–20
(quotation on 74).
173
Hahn, 301–02; Bouwsma, 158.
174
Hahn, 289.
175
Cárdenas, 2002, 26–27.
176
Hahn, 291, 301 (quotation on 301).
177
Hahn, 290. See also Reinburg, 130–31.
178
Cárdenas, 2002, 31.
179
See Munday, 28–55.
180
Lenain, 76. Cf. Groeneveld, 43–44.
181
Geary; Vélez, 5, 77. On the movement of pilgrims, see Julia; Reinburg.
182
Vélez, 31.
183
“Brûlent les mains de ceux qui les détiennent”: Fabre and Wilmart, 62. See also Vélez, 151.
Figure 2. Lucas Cranach, woodcut of a reliquary of Saint Margaret in the Wittenberg

Heiltumsbuch. Dye Zaigung des hochlobwirdigen Hailigthumbs der Stifft Kirchen aller Hailigen
zu Wittenburg (Wittenberg, 1509), sig. B3r. Image courtesy of the Bayerische
Staatsbibliothek, Munich.
to a halt as the Traité fixed relics in place and neutralized their propensity to
“self-propel” among Christian communities.184 Keen observer of Catholicism
that he was, Calvin recognized that “it was practice not theology that
184
Vélez, 31.
Figure 3. Arm and other reliquaries from the Vienna Heiltumsbuch. Matthaeus Heuperger, Jn
Disem Puechlein ist Verzaichent das Hochwirdig Heyligtu[m]b so man Jn der Loblichen stat Wienn
Jn Osterreich alle iar an Suntag nach dem Ostertag zezaigen pfligt (Vienna, 1502), sig. B3r. Image
courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
determined the shape of the cult of relics” and that once the object was severed
from practice, half the battle was already won.185
It must be remembered that sixteenth-century Catholicism was a mosaic of
local rites and traditions, “engineered to celebrate the particular rather than the
185
Hahn, 294. Cf. Holmes, 211.
Figure 4. Mattheus Heuperger, “Die Form vnd gestaldt des heyltumbstuels,” from the Vienna
Heiltumsbuch, sig. A3v. Image courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
universal,” in which saints and relics played a vital part.186 And cult objects in
their turn were closely associated with the spaces—nation, region, town, even
neighborhood or church—that housed them, as well as with the specific con-
tours of the landscape.187 Protestants, Koerner notes, “abhorred such localism,”
186
Koerner, 2008, 346. See also Lazure, 67, 70; Ditchfield.
187
Holmes, 3; Rublack, 146; Reinburg, 2.
which seemed continually to verge upon polytheism.188 Calvin’s pamphlet on

the Lord’s Supper includes among “the abuses that are so vile as to be unmen-
tionable” that of “attributing to each saint their own mass, and transferring
what is said of the Lord’s Supper to Saint William and Saint Walter.”189 In
the Institutes he reasons that prayer to the saints is foolish, since the true saint’s
will is nothing but the fulfillment of the will of God—which, in any case, their
intervention could hardly alter.190 Calvin also savages monastic orders for hav-
ing “broken the tie of unity” in Christ’s church through their distinct rites and
private observances.191
Contrast Calvin’s detached relics with those listed by the Elizabethan wit
Anthony Munday (ca. 1560–1633) in his exposé of the English Catholic
expatriate community in sixteenth-century Rome. The English Romayne Lyfe
(1582) lingers over the “meruailous reuerence” and “great deuotion” paid to
each relic, especially the physical practices of the worshipper and the details
of the reliquaries.192 This attention to worship places each object within a
system of meaning and within the space of particular churches: “From thence
we goe into an old roome, wherein is an old Wall standing along in the midst of
this roome, and in this Wall is three old doores.”193 Practically a textual pilgrim-
age through Rome, Munday’s critique struggles to transcend its localism—and
to avoid taking the Roman sacred landscape as a given.
The Traité disrupted Catholic localism not only in bringing together relics
from across Europe but also in subjecting them to a single rubric of critique. It
was here that the Protestant Reformation most dramatically set the agenda for
the Catholic Counter-Reformation: the Council of Trent would strive to
impose uniform standards on the cult of the saints, and on worship tout
court, precisely to preserve the particular while warding off challenges from
the likes of Calvin.194 The proliferation of unofficial cults and spurious relics
continued to worry Roman authorities throughout the early modern period.
Trent did not mark, or even seek, the end of Catholic localism, but the validity
of the Protestant attack had been granted.195
188
Koerner, 2008, 348. See also Davis, 60; Benedict, 137.
189
“Des abuz qui sont si lourdz, que ilz ne sont pas dignes qu’on en face mention”;
“d’attribuer à chacun sainct sa Messe, & transferer ce qui est dict de la Cene du Seigneur,
à sainct Guillaume & sainct Gautier”: Calvin, 1545, 45.
190
Calvin, 1560, 391 (Institutes 3.20.22).
191
“Rompu le lien d’vnité”: Calvin, 1560, 571 (Institutes 4.13.14).
192
Munday, 31–32, 34–38 (quotation on 31).
193
Munday, 30, 33–36 (quotation on 33).
194
Reinburg, 158, 216.
195
Bouley, 13, 15; Ditchfield, esp. 1–13; Lenain, 71–72, 76; Vélez, 126–27.
The systematic juxtaposition of relics, the collision of local geographies of the

sacred, causes the cult as a whole to short-circuit. Recall what Calvin said of the
dueling claims to the Titulus: “Each refutes the other. Let them battle it out as
much as they like. In the end, both parties will be convicted of lying as soon as
one chooses to examine the thing itself.” If, in Orsi’s felicitous phrase, late
medieval Europe was constituted as “a map of bones,” Calvin wrenched his
readers from meditating upon their own private corner and forced them to con-
front the unwieldy whole.196 The Traité undertakes that most dialectical of
exercises: heightening the contradictions.197
TO INFINITY
Propelled by the copiousness of his relic collection, Calvin leaps from a contin-
gent, historical, partial critique of the false relic to an absolute, ontological, uni-
versal critique of all relics as false. This is not because the Traité is actually all
encompassing, “permit[ting] everyone to find a relic they know, that they have
been able to venerate, or of whose benefits they have heard, and to comprehend
its falsity.”198 As Calvin himself acknowledged, the catalogue is riddled with
lacunae: there are only thirty relics in all of modern-day Germany, seventeen
in Spain, three from the Swiss cantons, one in the Low Countries
(Maastricht), and none at all from the British Isles, Portugal, Scandinavia, or
Eastern Europe. Even in the francophone territories where the Reformer’s net-
works were strongest and his readers the most numerous, he ignores all of
Romandy (save Geneva), all of what is now Belgium, and such major regions
of France as Aquitaine, Normandy, and Brittany.199
Instead, the universalization of the Traité ’s critique is accomplished by the
rhetorical framing of the list itself. Developing an aesthetics of the list, Eco dis-
tinguishes between representations of bounded completeness and those created
“when we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, when we do
196
Orsi, 21. Rabelais suggests that the jurisprudence of Tribonian (ca. 485–542) attempted
a similar trick. The Roman supplied “those bits and pieces of the laws that they use now, sup-
pressing and destroying the remainder of what made up the whole law, fearing that if the law
remained complete and the books of the ancient jurists read . . . his knavery would be exposed
to the world” (“ces petitz boutz et eschantillons des loix qu’ilz ont en usaige: la reste supprimant
et abolissant qui faisoit pour la loy totale, de paour que, la loy entiere restante et les livres des
antiques jurisconsultes veuz . . . feust du monde apertement sa meschanceté congneue”):
Rabelais, 823 (Gargantua and Pantagruel 3.44).
197
Cf. Grafton, 2018, 23, 42.
198
“Permettre à chacun d’y trouver une relique qu’il connaît, qu’il a pu vénérer ou dont il a
pu entendre les bienfaits, et comprendre leur fausseté”: Fabre and Wilmart, 35.
199
Calvin, 1543, 102; Fabre and Wilmart, 35–36, 36n25.
not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to
be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large . . . an actual infinity, made
up of objects that can perhaps be numbered but that we cannot number—and
we fear that their numeration (and enumeration) may never stop.”200 These
lists are made “because we cannot manage to enumerate something that eludes
our capacity for control and denomination,” much as the excesses of the cult of
relics disrupted the order of the Reformed church.201
By casting the Traité as a prolegomena to, rather than an attempt at, the
inventory of relics, Calvin builds in this sense of potential infinity, leaving it
to the reader’s imagination how many more frauds would be revealed if the
effort were continued. After listing more than a dozen shrines claiming to pos-
sess fragments of the Crown of Thorns, he insists, “Were a diligent inquisition
to be made, more than four as many of these could be named. There must nec-
essarily be fraud here. What faith can one have in either the one or the
other?”202 Still more trenchant is his warning at the outset: “when we have
found so much deceit in what I shall name of relic worship [reliquiaire],
which is hardly the thousandth part of what is displayed, what are we to
think of the rest?”203 Here the Traité epitomizes what Terence Cave calls the
“cornucopian text,” an Erasmian concept of dynamic open-endedness that con-
tains within itself the generative possibilities of endless extension.204 A tableau
built around the last relic mentioned in the Traité drives the point home:
“While this booklet was being printed, I was informed of a third prepuce of
Our Lord, displayed at Hildesheim, of which I had made no mention. There
are infinitely more like this. In the end, the investigation [visitation] would
discover a hundred times as many as can be named.”205 The Latin translation
of the Traité had the express purpose of encouraging others elsewhere in
Christendom to begin their own inventories, a prospect that appalled
200
Eco, 15 (italics in original).
201
Eco, 117.
202
“Quand on auroit faict diligente inquisition, on en pourroit nommer plus de quatre foys
autant. Necessairement on qu’il y a de la faulseté. Quelle fiance donc peut on auoir ne des vnes
ne des autres?”: Calvin, 1543, 35–36.
203
“Quand on aura trouué tant de mensonge en ce que ie nommeray de reliquiaire, qui
n’est pas à peu pres la millesiesme partie de ce qui sen monstre: que pourra-on estimer du
reste?”: Calvin, 1543, 16. Cf. Eco, 17.
204
Cave, ix–xi, 11.
205
“Ce pendant qu’on imprimoit ce liuret, on m’a aduerty d’vn troysiesme Prepuce de
nostre Seigneur, qui se monstre à Hyldesheym, dont ie n’auoye faict nulle mention. Il y en
a vne infinité de semblables. Finalement, la visitation descouuriroit encores cent fois plus,
que tout ce qui sen peut dire”: Calvin, 1543, 108.
Calvin’s Catholic opponents.206 Nor was the infinitely extendable inventory,

continually supplied with new tidbits, mere bravado: Calvin contemplated
returning to the Traité, as he did so frequently to the Institutes.207 The
Reformer’s biographer Nicolas Colladon (ca. 1530–86) reports that “his inten-
tion was to enlarge the said book if he might be informed of other, similar
things in those lands, as there were countless others besides those he had
mentioned.”208
Thus, a relic does not need to be mentioned in the Traité to become a target
of its critique. At the end of the inventory, Calvin practically taunts his reader,
“Now, among so many lies, as obvious as I have shown them, where can a true
relic be found, of which you can be certain?”209 Any relic must now be seen
alongside its thousands of fellows scattered across Europe. Not even the best-
attested object was safe from doubt, from the niggling fear that somewhere, just
over the horizon, there was another one just like it. As Alain Besançon vividly
puts it, “In the pure, cold light of the Reformation, everything the church holds
takes on a hideous and obscene shape.”210
What Calvin undermined, then, is not only the authenticity of the particular
items he named but the way of seeing and the sense of space that underlay the
entire cult of relics.211 The Reformation, in Virginia Reinburg’s perceptive
words, had shattered “a commonly shared agreement about religious
truth.”212 What made a shard of bone or a drop of blood into a relic was belief:
belief in saints, in this particular saint, and in the authenticity of this particular
relic. Remove the belief (and the concomitant practice), and bone and blood
were once more only bone and blood.213 Worship required sound knowledge
of God. For this reason, medieval and early modern churchmen exerted
206
Calvin, 1548, sig. A2v; Cochlaeus, sig. A7r. Cf. Calvin, 1557, sig. A7v; Calvin, 1584, sig.
r–v
C7 .
207
Gordon, 2016, 30.
208
“Son intention estoit d’augmenter ledit livre, si des-dits pays il eust peu estre adverti
d’autres semblables pieces, comme il y en a infinies outre celles dont il fait mention”:
Calvin, 1863–1900, 21:68.
209
“Car entre tant de mensonges, si patents comme ie les ay produictz, ou est-ce qu’on
choisira vne vraye relique, de laquelle on se puisse tenir certain?”: Calvin, 1543, 108.
210
Besançon, 189. On Calvin’s encounters with “the terrors of doubt,” see Bouwsma, 184–85
(quotation on 184).
211
Cf. Groeneveld, 36.
212
Reinburg, 1. See Eire, 1990, 53.
213
Lenain, 68; Geary, 174–75. Cf. Koerner, 2008, 85; Hahn, 286, 291, 310; Parish, 12–13,
82; Reinburg, 176.
themselves “to teach congregations how to approach, venerate, and even, how to
see relics.”214
If Calvin is a different kind of historical materialist, “heightening the
contradictions” nevertheless neatly characterizes the effect of juxtaposing twelve
heads of John the Baptist. He forces the believer to confront the logical fallacies
in their “devotional double-mindedness.” The appeal, ultimately, is to common
sense, to a “nature of things” ruled by the law of non-contradiction.215 Carlos
M. N. Eire emphasizes that for Calvin, “material reality cannot be usurped by
spiritual reality. . . . Calvin did not want a religion in which reason had at times
to be denied or suspended. Faith was reasonable, it had to make sense.”216
Duplicated bodies were frauds, not miracles. If Calvin has his way, it will no
longer do to explain—or, rather, to refuse to explain—the conflicts of faith
and the senses as mysteries.217 Cochlaeus perceived this rationalizing impera-
tive, and provocatively asked whether God can do “nothing that Calvin does
not understand?”218 Like Gessner’s Bibliotheca Universalis (Universal library,
1545–49), then, the Traité can be read as “claiming to order knowledge as a
propaedeutic to judgment,” an order predicated on the rationality of
Creation.219
The consequences of subjecting miraculous presence to the law of noncon-
tradiction cannot be overstated. Paradoxes of presence defined what was, per-
haps, the doctrinal flashpoint of the Reformation—the meaning of the
Eucharist.220 What did it mean to say, as virtually every sixteenth-century
Christian would have, that Christ was present in the sacrament? For
Catholics, Christ was physically present, the elements transubstantiated into
the fleshly body and blood of the Savior. For Lutherans, too, he was really
present, his body with and within the bread and wine, “both everywhere and
nowhere.”221 For Calvin and his Reformed fellow travelers, both positions were
nonsensical. Christ’s body—human flesh like anyone else’s—was in heaven,
and so could only be in heaven; Christ could only be spiritually present on
the altar.222 To claim otherwise implied “either that the body of Christ is
214
Hahn, 306 (italics in original). See also Eire, 1990, 60.
215
Bouwsma, 102; Calvin, 1543, 35–36; Higman, 22, 44; Gordon, 2009, 188.
216
Eire, 1986, 230, 312. Cf. Bouwsma, 100, 107–08, 192–93.
217
Koerner, 2008, 99; Shapin, 500; Parish, 12.
218
“Nihil . . . quod nesciat Caluinus?”: Cochlaeus, sig. C6r.
219
Nelles, 150–51, 159 (quotation on 159).
220
Koerner, 2008, 310.
221
Jorgenson, 363. Cf. Calvin, 1545, 64.
222
Calvin, 1541, 625–28 (Institutes 4.17.1–4, 14), 633 (Institutes 4.17.5), 637 (Institutes
4.17.12); Calvin, 1560, 628–29, 631–32 (Institutes 4.17.28, 30); Calvin, 1545, 16–20. See
also Tylenda, esp. 70–71, 73; McDonnell, 42–43.
without measure, or that it can be in multiple places [at once],” with unaccept-
able implications for the nature of Christ’s humanity.223 God was of course
omnipotent, but the ubiquitarian demand that his omnipotence “make flesh
be flesh and not-flesh at once” was a logical absurdity, “perverting the order
of the wisdom of God.”224 Such a stipulation permitted the possibility of a mir-
acle while drastically redefining the nature of the miraculous.225 Nor could
Calvin countenance the paradox of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or
sacramental union: the bread and wine looked, felt, and tasted like bread and
wine because they were (only) bread and wine.226 To claim that they were
simultaneously or instead Christ’s flesh and blood was simply repugnant to
sense.
Calvin’s insistence in the Traité that matter, however holy, had to behave
logically—and that to claim otherwise was not piety but delusion—contains
no exception for the consecrated Host:227 “It functions as it is supposed to func-
tion, as created, as material, as finite. Material reality cannot be usurped by spir-
itual reality.”228 Cochlaeus conceded that the argument from noncontradiction
was “more substantial and evident” than the others in the Traité and, spotting
the threat to transubstantiation, included a defense of the real presence in his
refutation.229 It is worth mentioning that two years after the Traité, Calvin pub-
lished a treatise on the Lord’s Supper whose vocabulary bears some resemblance
to his pamphlet on relics.230
Yet the theological consequences for the Eucharist are only an outworking,
albeit a crucial one, of a more profound shift in ontology. The rationalization of
presence, divine presence not excepted, entailed a redefinition of the relation-
ship between “divine and human,” and, thus, “between spirit and matter,
between the past and the present, between representation and reality, between
223
“Ou que le corps de CHRIST est sans mesure, ou qu’il peut estre en diuers lieux”:
Calvin, 1545, 48–49 (quotation on 48). Cf. Calvin, 1541, 637–39 (Institutes 4.17.12, 16–
17); Calvin, 1560, 629–31 (Institutes 4.17.29); McDonnell, 63–64. Indeed, Luther could
wax lyrical about the miracle—“above flesh, above spirit, above all that one can say, hear, or
think” (“uber leib, uber geist, uber alles was man sagen, hoeren und dencken kan”)—of ubiq-
uitous presence: see Luther, 23:137.
224
“Face que vn corps soit ensemblement corps & non corps”; “peruertir l’ordre de la sapi-
ence de Dieu”: Calvin, 1541, 641 (Institutes 4.17.24). See also Eire, 1990, 61.
225
See Sluhovsky.
226
Calvin, 1545, 45–46; Calvin, 1541, 628–30 (Institutes 4.17.14–16); Calvin, 1560,
625–26 (Institutes 4.17.23); Marshall, 66.
227
Benedict, 8, 44; Eire, 1990, 56.
228
Eire, 1990, 61, 63 (quotation on 61).
229
“Plus habet momenti & apparentiæ”: Cochlaeus, sigs C2v, D3r (quotation on D3r).
230
E.g., Calvin, 1545, 57.
one person and another, and between political leaders and those over whom
they exercised different forms of authority.”231 Orsi writes, with not-unjustified
hyperbole, that “divergent conceptions of presence became a point of absolute
division between Catholics and Protestants, and then it evolved into one of the
normative categories of modernity.”232 In seeking to subject sacred presence to
the dictates of common sense, the Traité mounts “a violent rejection of the
assumptions about the immanence of the holy that underpinned traditional
Catholic devotion.”233
At the same time, presence is as much a dividing line within Protestantism as
it is between Protestants and Catholics.234 As far as the divine presence is con-
cerned, Lutheran ubiquitarianism is far closer to Catholic transubstantiation
than to Reformed sacramentarianism. Indeed, it was disagreement over the
Eucharist in the 1520s that first split the Reformed from the Lutherans, a divi-
sion that defined intra-Protestant relations and Reformed identity throughout
the early modern period.235 When, in the 1570s, the Reformed churches
attempted to hammer out a creedal statement to which all could subscribe,
the one unifying principle was a rejection of ubiquitarianism.236 The
Reformed Protestant cosmos obeyed a different, far stricter set of rules, funda-
mentally incompatible with the more capacious forms of presence that suffused
the worlds of rival confessions. Out of this incommensurability flowed the out-
raged incomprehension voiced in the Traité, that anyone could accept what
“reason shows us” to be “nothing but lies.”237 The journey between paradigms
was possible, as Calvin’s own trajectory proved, but the difficulty of making
such a shift must not be underestimated. Calvin, who had once kissed a
piece of God’s maternal grandmother (though with how much reverence one
cannot say), had to strive relentlessly to uproot any traces of Catholic mentality
within himself—and never quite succeeded. Sowing the seeds of doubt, as the
Traité sought to do, was a painful business.238
A critique of fraudulent relics thus doubled as a Trojan horse for Reformed
sacramental theology, but even more for a Reformed vision of the world—and a
Reformed way of being in the world. The Traité was part of Calvin’s lifelong
campaign for “spiritual worship,” “worship devoid of trust in material props or
231
Orsi, 3. See also Roper, 290; Eire, 1990, 67.
232
Orsi, 9.
233
Walsham, 121. Cf. Fabre and Wilmart, 66.
234
Eire, 1990, 53, 61.
235
Benedict, xxiii–xxiv.
236
Benedict, 289.
237
“La raison nous monstre,” “n’est que mensonge”: Calvin, 1543, 50.
238
Eire, 2008, 146.
humanly devised ceremonies; and worship that has been commanded by

God.”239 It was, crucially, a campaign directed no less at what was done with
objects than at the objects themselves.240 The endless quest for absolutely pure
worship defines the history of the Reformed tradition. Calvin wrote the Traité
just as the francophone Reformation was coalescing into a distinct confession.
The rejection of relics became at once one of its rallying cries and one of its
shibboleths.241
It is ironic, then, that of the many things Calvin himself worried about, not
the least was iconoclasm, particularly when the impetus to smash things came
from below. Yet his rhetoric, by charging the knowledge of relics with sensory,
intellectual, and theological revulsion, helped foment popular iconoclasm.
Loath though he would be to admit it, Calvin was standing upon the shoulders
of the iconoclasts who had come before, and he was inspiring their successors.
Protestant communal violence was marked by precisely the feelings of liberation
from deceit, outrage at fraud and the dominion of the clergy, and incomprehen-
sion at the unenlightened that animate the Traité.242
Calvin mobilized the rhetorical lessons of Erasmus to do what Erasmus
always feared: disturb the universe. By crafting an overwhelming exercise in
copia, by making doubt in relics contagious and imposing noncontradiction,
Calvin destabilized the religious and intellectual foundations of Roman
Catholic piety, causing a tremor whose aftershocks were only amplified by
the Council of Trent. The list, as Eco writes, “becomes a way of reshuffling
the world,” while affirming the principles by which it is really ordered.243
239
Eire, 1990, 57.
240
Eire, 1990, 52.
241
Benedict, 354; Calvin, 1921, 15–16; Walsham, 131; Eire, 1986, 3; Davis.
242
Davis, 51–52, 56, 67, 76–77; Marshall, 39; Eire, 1990, 59, 65.
243
Eco, 327, 353 (quotation on 327). Cf. Johnson, 2012, 1104, 1112; Johnson, 2010, 13.
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An Infinity of Relics Erasmus and The Copious Rhetoric of John Calvins Traite Des Reliques

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An Inﬁnity of Relics: Erasmus and the Copious

Rhetoric of John Calvin’s Traité des reliques

TOWARD A HISTORY OF RELICS

As in the citation of De opere monachorum, the analysis is historical and mate-

so long.27 Of course, Calvin was being deliberately obtuse, as the miracle

saint’s ability to intervene posthumously or in the access their remains might

use of Ruﬁnus of Aquileia’s (ca. 345–411) Latin translation, Haymo of

been deceived by the papists deliberately mischaracterizes Catholic worship.96

CONTESTING THE ERASMIAN INHERITANCE

image to its didactic charge.”126 Calvin, by contrast, spoke of worshipers as

one’s language so as to delight, move, and persuade. Copia of subject matter—

Heiltumsbuch made it a kind of “picture-catalogue” of the relic collection, as

Figure 2. Lucas Cranach, woodcut of a reliquary of Saint Margaret in the Wittenberg

which seemed continually to verge upon polytheism.188 Calvin’s pamphlet on

The systematic juxtaposition of relics, the collision of local geographies of the

Calvin’s Catholic opponents.206 Nor was the inﬁnitely extendable inventory,

humanly devised ceremonies; and worship that has been commanded by

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