"The veneration and staging of saints could take on very different forms at different times and in different places: Sometimes the inviolable sacrosanct tomb took centre stage, sometimes only parts of the body formed the core of a place of veneration with relics, sometimes other, initially seemingly absurd media, such as icons, were used to visualise saints and make them tangible.
These different strategies for veneration and staging were determined to a large extent by the availability of the saints, in addition to other reasons, such as region-specific ones. In Rome, for example, where the number of martyrs and their graves was barely manageable, the conditions were fundamentally different from those in the newly founded capital Constantinople, where people had to make do entirely without their own local saints."
A new article "Reliquien als Ressource: Knappheit und Abhängigkeit Relics as Resource: Dependency from Holy Remains" has been publisched in "Control, Coercion, and Constraint: The Role of Religion in Overcoming and Creating Structures of Dependency" on one of our projects in the BCDSS Cluster of Excellence!
Click here to go to the Bonn Centre for Depenency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) website.
And here is our own page: Relics as a resource: scarcity and dependence.