Can a skeptical scientist solve a mystery of faith? The remains of the most popular saint in history may provide an answer. (Excerpted from Rag and Bone: A journey among the world's holy dead.)
Ladies and gentlemen, Joan of Arc has left the building. The bits and pieces that may haveL once belonged to the Maid of Orleans, most popular saint the church ever killed, have been placed inside three glass jars, slid into cloth cozies, and arranged within a pale wooden case the size of a tool box. Setting off on another trip in what has already been a hectic year, she is taken from the bright lights of a lab at a hospital in Garche, out into early evening in the suburbs north of Paris. While the city did not treat her well in life, she can now be found on road signs and church doors and gleaming as a larger-than-life gold-plated statue in the Place de Pyramids, so she will perhaps feel right at home. First on the RER commuter train, then the metro, she rides up out of the darkness like a body exhumed, despite the unfortunate fact that she never had a grave to begin with.
Joan’s companion, Dr. Phillipe Charlier, keeps her close as he weaves through the crowd pushing up from the earth. A handsome young Frenchman with the slight beard of a man trying to look older, he has a doctor’s respect for the dead, no matter how long deceased, and so she’s tucked under his arm for safekeeping. Up the elevator to his elegant apartment, she is placed on a table in the shadow of Buddha statues, Tibetan prayer wheels, and other keepsakes from a well-traveled life, all displayed with carefully arranged track lighting shining dramatically down. The contents of the wooden relic case would make a nice addition to an already impressive collection, but she is not here to stay.
Dr. Charlier has made a name for himself, at twenty-nine years old, as the preeminent paleopathologist in France, perhaps the world. While pathology generally is interested in the study of disease, the paleo part of his chosen profession means that he is concerned primarily with death—the how, when, why of it—and what it can tell us about life both in history and today. The lead organizer of the International Colloquy of Paleopathy and author of Médecin des Morts, (Doctor of the Dead), he has also opened a lab devoted to the study of historic human remains.
“Once a month we will have an open door,” he tells me. “For anthropologists, forensic scientists, anyone who has human remains they want to understand. We will have them put their bones on the table, and we will do our best to tell them what we can.”
There is not yet a French version of Antiques Roadshow, but Dr. Charlier may be the man for the job. So long as the family heirlooms include actual pieces of the family, it will be right up his alley.
“A man brought to me a very old skull with a large hole from gunshot,” Dr. Charlier says. “After I told him all that could be known about it, he told me I should keep it. He did not want it near to him anymore.”
The good doctor places his latest patient on the polished wood of his dining room table. It’s just the two of us in the room—three if you count the one partially present between us—but nonetheless it has the feel of a surgical gallery. He lifts the lid on the carrying case and begins to extract its contents with a care that amounts to a moment of unintentional ceremony. First one jar, then the next, then the next, now catching light from the Buddha display on the wall behind us. Once the glass jars are aligned, we both stand, rising from our chairs as if pulled by strings, for reasons neither he nor I mentions. Now we are two men poised around a table which could not seem more like an altar.
Though there is something undoubtedly liturgical about this, I do not feel we are in the presence of the holy. The moment is more powerful than that. Looking down, seeing a curve of gray bone in the largest jar, we are undoubtedly in the presence of the human.
“I am sorry for my English,” Dr. Charlier says, and then gets down to the business of talking about the rib that may or may not belong to Saint Joan.
The history of investigation of relics is nearly as old as relics themselves. In every culture that has venerated them, it has been acknowledged that the remains of the dead are notoriously easy to fake.
Already by the time of Saint Augustine (born in 354), there was sufficient desire for remnants of the holy dead that less scrupulous clerics sought to find supplies to fill the demand. In his work “On the Labor of Monks,” Augustine complains that his era is afflicted by “hypocrites under the garb of monks, strolling about the provinces ... hawking the limbs of martyrs, if indeed of martyrs.” That there were limbs being hawked was a certainty; whose limbs they were was always the question.
Some time later, Guibert de Nogent’s twelfth-century “Treatise on Relics” told the story of a bishop called Odo who “eagerly desired the body of St Exuperius, his predecessor.” Odo asked the sacristan of the church where the saint was buried to dig up and hand over whatever was left of the body. According to de Nogent’s account, the sacristan dug up a peasant and sold him to the bishop for one hundred pounds.
As the story goes, the sacristan was savvy enough—and the practice of relic fakery was apparently established enough to seem like a good idea—that he planned ahead by digging up not just any peasant, but one who happened to share a name with the object of Odo’s devotion. When the bishop asked the sacristan for his oath that the body for sale was indeed Saint Exuperius, the crafty graverobber replied, “I swear that these are the bones of Exuperius. As to his sanctity I cannot swear, since many who earn the title of saint are far indeed from holiness.” Guibert de Nogent writes, “Thus the thief assuaged the Bishop’s suspicions and set his mind at rest.”
The “Treatise on Relics” goes on to describe ecclesiasts inserting misleading nametags into the nostrils of the anonymous dead; multiple claims of ownership of the head of John the Baptist; and bits of bread said to be the table scraps of Christ. It also describes a “common boy” who died in a village in Brittany on Good Friday. For no reason other than the day of his death—and the possibility of creating relics of his sad little bones—he was hailed as a saint by a local abbot, who “suffered the fabrication of false miracles” for the sake of the alms the dead boy brought in for his monastery.
Fake relics were not just a problem for Christendom. Marco Polo, the famous fourteenth-century Italian traveler, wrote of Kublai Khan’s attempts to procure teeth, hair, and a “magic bowl” from the king of Sri Lanka. As Polo writes of these efforts, the artifacts in question were relics of Adam, which down through the generations had migrated from the land east of Eden to the island off the southern tip of India. However, scholars generally assume now that the relics Kublai Khan sought to procure were said at the time to belong not to Adam but the Buddha. Writing in an era when the Catholic powers of Europe hoped that the emperor of China would prove sympathetic to Christianity, and hoping to convey something of the perceived worth of these objects, Polo apparently juggled the facts a bit to make the relics at stake not worthless old teeth—as the Buddha’s relics would have been seen—but something his audience could relate to and admire. The king of Sri Lanka meanwhile knew enough not to make the great Khan angry; he sent the Chinese contingent home with “two grinder teeth,” which were most certainly not Adam’s, not Buddha’s, maybe not even human.
At the time there was little that could be done to authenticate relics. Things have changed.
“First of all, the story of all these relics,” Dr. Charlier says as we stand over the bones. “You know that Joan of Arc was killed by the English in 1431, yes?”
In truth, I know this only vaguely at best, and so later on I look it up: Jeanne d’Arc, as the French call her, was just nineteen years old when an ecclesiastical court found her guilty of heresy and condemned her to death. Late in the Hundred Years’ War, she had been leading French forces in their fight against the English when she was captured outside Paris. Asked to explain her military victories and her practice of wearing men’s clothing—considered blasphemously irreligious at the time—she claimed she had been called by God to put on a soldier’s armor and drive England out of France, a claim which obviously made the English-financed church court uneasy. Trial documents—including transcripts and a cache of letters she dictated while awaiting judgment and execution—make Joan’s one of the best documented deaths in medieval history.
What the record shows is that the authorities of the church—led by an English-partisan French bishop—knew they were executing a symbol as much as a woman. They feared specifically that if anything at all remained of her, it would be found by her supporters and claimed as a relic of a martyred warrior saint.
And so they took precautions. On May 30, 1431, she was burned at the stake in the Old Market of the city of Rouen, seat of the occupying English government. As the flames still smoldered, what was left of Joan was laid out for the public to see, so that there would be no suggestion that she had escaped alive. The executioner then lit another fire and burned her again, and, if tradition is to be believed, a third time for good measure. After this final burning, Joan’s remains were shoveled into sacks. Pious legend has it that her heart—unburned, indomitable—was found whole among the ashes; it too was tossed into the bag. Brought to a bridge over the river Seine, the sackfuls of dust, bone, and muscle fragments that were Joan of Arc were released into the wind, cast into the water below.
Almost immediately a cult arose to venerate her memory, first among soldiers who had heard of her divinely inspired bravery, then among the general population. When the war ended in French victory four years later, her legend grew into an object of both nationalist pride and religious adoration. Those who considered her a saint had no physical remains, but they didn’t need them. Thanks to the trial transcripts and the dictated letters, they had her words. For four hundred years that’s all there was.
“These relics appeared in fact to the scientific and historic community only around the mid-nineteenth century,” Dr. Charlier continued. “Around 1865, they were discovered in a very old house close to the Republique station in Paris. They were found in the roof of the house of a chemist—” He paused at the word, smiling uncertainly, unsure it was the one he wanted. “No, no. Not a chemist; apothocaire, you know?”
“A pharmacist?”
“Yes, yes. So he had many, many bottles. These bottles,” he waved a hand over the specimens between us, “they were with many others like them, some dating back to the seventeenth century.”
Dr. Charlier, it should be noted, is not only a medical doctor but an archaeologist.
He does not suggest the age of objects lightly, because he knows that discovering when something came to be is the first step to understanding what it was for, who used it, why we should now care.
“My interest is strongly a forensic one. I try to develop forensic way of thinking with archaeological remains. Instead of cats or dogs or other animals I develop forensic analysis methods on older remains because all these cases are very well documented. The death of Joan of Arc is one of probably the most known of all medieval times. This approach will add nothing to what we know of her. Except: this is her remains or it is not. Which is quite unimportant for history. But for forensic analysis it is very important because it authorizes us to analyze strongly, confidently, completely, old remains. For me this case is an X case. She is variable. Whatever the solution is, that is the solution.”
“So it doesn’t particularly matter to you if it is Joan of Arc or not?”
“Absolutely, no.”
Like any good scientist, Dr. Charlier came to Joan through industrious deployment of the scientific method, and by accident. His first use of forensics in historical investigation involved the remains of Agnes Sorel, the mistress of King Charles VII, whose artifacts were kept at a museum in Chinon. A powerful woman of the French court, Sorel had no shortage of enemies, which made her death at twenty-nine, reportedly of dysentery, particularly suspicious. Through examination of preserved locks of her hair, Dr. Charlier was able to determine that the cause of her death had most likely been mercury poisoning.
The story of how her remains went public is an interesting relic tale all its own. At the time of the French Revolution, the rampaging sans-culottes wrecked churches and every sign of authority of king or religion. But they were still attached to such symbols.
“When the revolutionary people opened the sarcophagus of Agnes Sorel, they forgot she was the mistress of the king,” Dr. Charlier said. “They thought she was a saint. This is why they destroyed her tomb. This is also why many people took fragments of her body for medical reasons: Her teeth for dentures; her hair for wigs. And so a great deal of her hair was for a time in circulation.”
Some of it ended up at the museum in Chinon. As he neared the end of his work on Sorrel, he visited the museum once again. Looking at a nearby display case, he realized the king’s mistress was not the only woman of historical interest behind the glass. There he saw the apothecary jars, set above a small plaque labeling their contents as the possible remains of Joan of Arc. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on them.
As a physician Dr. Charlier treats all the human remains that come into his lab with the care one might give a patient. As an archaeologist, however, he digs through human remains, burrowing into their layers with scalpel, microscope, and an array of ever more complex tools: carbon-14 dating, DNA extraction, even odor analysis. All of which allows him to hypothesize the origins and uses of nearly any object once associated with human life. For him the ways of caring and of knowing seem very similar, and intertwined.
“The original bottle is this one,” he says as he holds up a dingy glass cylinder, about three inches wide at the mouth. It looks like an old mayonnaise jar you might find in a suburban garage, filled with rusty nails. Everything was inside this bottle, which is an eighteenth century bottle. On the top of it is written: ‘Remains discovered under the funeral pyre of Joan of Arc, maiden of Orleans.’
“So inside, what have we got?” He lifts two small curves of bone, each about three inches long. Holding them lightly, with two careful hands, he shows how they fit together, end to end.
“As you can see, we have broken this bone in two parts to try to extract the DNA.” He indicates the rough end of the rib pieces, where they had been joined.
I lean in across the table and stared down into the hollow core of the bone as if into a gun muzzle. It seems just as lifeless, and somehow as dangerous. It is as though whatever violence created this artifact is still in the room. Battle, torture, murder, burning ... what had this bone endured?
Dr. Charlier notices my ponderous expression. He seems to take it more for general anatomical ignorance, which is also true.
“It is a rib, a human rib,” the doctor said. “Absolutely a human one, that much we know. And it has been probably, ah, cooked. What you can see, you’ve got the surface of the rib, which as you see is very black.”
He turned the rib in the air between us, letting me see all its darkened sides. It was not just black but bumpy, as if coated in a mixture of sealant and wood chips.
“It looks this way probably—probably—because when you are on a funeral pyre, your body turns to liquid, then when the temperature goes down, the liquid solidifies, and it deposes on the surface of ribs, on bones, on stones, anywhere is there as a support. So this is what we can observe.”
The two probablies are part of Dr. Charlier’s method. Even when indulging in the creation of scenes of horrific drama—the saints’ skin melting and coating the stones at her feet—he tempers it with too-soon-to-tell skepticism.
He reaches into the wooden relic case and produces another jar. This one is clean and modern-looking compared to the apothecary’s artifact resting before us. Inside the new jar—more of a beaker with a stopper really; straight from the lab, nothing mayonnaisey about it—are two other bits of bone.
“I brought from the laboratory a modern case,” he says, as he lifts the stopper. “So sorry if it doesn’t smell good.”
Indeed it does not. From this tiny beaker the scent of fried roadkill fills the apartment. The old bone smelled like history—or perhaps that was just my imagination—this one smells of the nightly news.
“As I say, this is a modern case, from a woman that has been killed, and her body has been cooked exactly with the same mode as with Joan of Arc. As you can see on the surface of the ribs, you’ve got the same black deposit, which is muscles, skin and internal organs. This is quite fresh. Two weeks ago.”
He said killed, but I’m guessing this must be another oddly chosen English word.
“So this woman,” I ask, pointing my nose to the beaker, “she is someone who gave her body to science?”
Dr. Charlier shakes his head. “No, no, no. This is from forensic case.”
“A murder case?”
“Murder case, exactly. He killed her by bullets and afterward tried to make a false fire.”
He who? I wonder, but I do not ask, realizing it wouldn’t be a murder case if they knew that already. And of course any answer the doctor might give would come with so many probablies that I would still be left to wonder. I look down again upon the charred “fresh” bone, and the reality of not only her fate but Joan’s settles down upon me. Dr. Charlier is still working, however. This is no time to grieve.
He reaches again into the relic box and produces yet another bone, this one closer in color to gray dried wood.
“This is a case with aomething quite different, you see?”
It is another forensic case, only this one had no flesh when it was put into the fire. The difference between the two bones, he explains, is that one is what is left of a burned corpse, and the other is all that remains of a burned skeleton.
I look down at the two fresh cases and the one-not-so fresh before us. It occurs to me that other than nasty deaths, the one thing these fragments have in common is him. Only one man’s interest in telling the stories hidden within bones has brought them together.
“Do you work on all these currently?” I ask. “You are not too occupied with relics for the modern cases?”
“It is often busy, but there is time enough,” he says. “I do fresh autopsies in the morning and work on Joan of Arc in the afternoon.”
The problem of fake relics goes well beyond bones. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Church of Latter Day Saints was shaken by the exposure of forged documents related to its founding. The counterfeiter responsible for the fakes was a disgruntled Mormon missionary turned antiques dealer, Mark William Hoffman, who in 1980 began selling “discovered” artifacts for prices reaching tens of thousands of dollars each. When his works began to fill the church archives as well as the personal collections of high ranking LDS bishops, he moved on to other forgeries including letters he attributed to Emily Dickinson and Abraham Lincoln. Fooling his former church was his passion, however. He created and sold ever more titillating documents—including one that purported to show that LDS founder Joseph Smith practiced magic. In Hoffman’s most notorious forgery, he presents Smith as a man visited not by an angel but by a giant white salamander. It was these sorts of risks, rather than scientific analysis, that eventually brought him down. Fearing his own discovery, Hoffman killed two of his associates with explosives. He was caught only when a bomb he intended for a third victim blew up in his own car.
Since Hoffman’s time, the business of relic faking has expanded beyond specialized dealers and markets. The boom and the ease of buying religious items on eBay and elsewhere on the Web has led to a rebirth in the relic trade and also, it seems, to a renaissance of relic forgery. It’s not just the distribution and marketing that have improved since Bishop Odo’s time; it’s also easier than ever before to pull off a convincing fake. Just twenty years ago it took a talented schemer like Hoffman to create the documentation which relic collectors since medieval times have relied on to prove the provenance of a relic. Today these certificates of authenticity are easily scanned, manipulated, printed on yellowed paper stock, and sent through the wash to give them just the right wrinkle of age. Many of these forgeries are convincing to all but the most seasoned experts in the field, and even they have been fooled.
Because of these innovations, a number of Catholic ministries have cropped up hoping to police the trade and warn the faithful that they might be buying fakes. Among the most active is a Texas-based operation called For All the Saints, which publishes guidelines on how to buy a relic, even though relics are forbidden to be bought and sold:
1. Purchase your relic only from a reputable dealer who specializes in relics or church antiquities. (Even here one must be careful as professionals can be duped.)
2. Never purchase a relic that is not accompanied by an authentication document.
3. Examine the document and compare it with the relic. Is the impression on the wax seal on the back of the relic the same as that which appears on the document?
4. Investigate the name of the person appearing on the document. The Internet has made this quite easy.
5. If you still have doubts, do not purchase. It is better to be safe than sorry.
Not surprisingly, several of these ministries have decided the best way to keep fake relics out of the hands of the gullible is to acquire for themselves as many relics as possible—for testing and debunking if they are fake; for safekeeping if they are the real thing. Based in a small parish in El Paso, Texas, For All the Saints currently has a collection of over forty relics, ranging from the fourth century’s Saint Augustine to the twentieth’s Mother Cabrini, which they will gladly lend to your church or prayer group with appropriate ecclesiastical sanction, for a small donation.
Even traditions that historically don’t have relics are susceptible to fakes: A few years back officials at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem were disappointed to discover that an ivory pomegranate believed to have come from Solomon’s Temple was a forgery. Unlike the Mormon relics, the pomegranate was not too recent; it was too old.
Dr. Charlier continues his guided tour to the possible insides of a saint. “Everything here is accounted for by a seal of the archbishop in a little bottle, with a paper that says these are probably the remains of Joan of Arc,” he says. “But the paper is only thirty years old. It dates back from the last opening. You see?” He points a finger to the bottom of the note. 1979.
“So I have to say that we are absolutely not sure that everything belongs to her. Absolutely. This is very important.” He moves his hands over a few bits that to me looked very much like pieces of bone.
“These three fragments are fragments of wood,” the doctor explains. “The tradition of the chemist says that it is not necessarily the wood of the funeral pyre, but perhaps fragments of wood with which the pyre was started.”
He holds up another jar. Two small bones clink inside like dice as he moves it for me to see. The jar held directly between us, I can see through the glass that he wears an excited half-smile, clearly pleased with the puzzle he is about to present.
“This is the most amazing. Here, we’ve got part of a human vertebra,” he points to one bone, then another, “and here we have part of a cat’s bone. A cat’s femur. Which is very funny for some people because they think that these must not be the remains of Joan of Arc, but for other people they think this is absolutely normal, or logical, because if you go to Roeun to the place where she was killed you will see in a little museum an image of a black cat inside the wall, quite like this.”.
On this advice I visit Rouen the next day. It is a bit like Disney World, with Joan of Arc in the role of Minnie Mouse. One can stand below a replica of the tower in which Joan was imprisoned, one can buy three-dimensional molded plastic refrigerator magnets showing flames leaping around a small blond figure, one can visit the modern church built thirty years ago on the site of the execution: glass and concrete swooping up like a 1960s vision of the future in the middle of an otherwise medieval town center, one can imagine the citizens of Rouen wishing it would meet a fate similar to its namesake. Nonetheless Joan is big business there; the museum the doctor mentioned is actually a wax museum, complete with life-size tableaux depicting the life and death of Saint Joan. Whether or not the hundred or so figures depicted in the dozen rooms are actually wax is hard to say. They look like old department store mannequins, refitted with armor, sackcloth, or ecclesial robes to play the relevant roles. The official Musée Jeanne d’Arc, it is a sad and shabby place. One can indeed see a cat near the execution tableau: It is a little black puff of a thing with crossed plastic eyes and an overgrown pipe cleaner for a tail.
“It is said the cat was put inside the wall alive,” Dr. Charlier says. “Many cat skeletons like this have been found in the walls of castles going back to medieval times. So it would be quite logical to find a cat bone with Joan of Arc. For other reasons, too: To protect from the evil eye, which might come from watching an execution, black cats—particularly male—were often thrown inside the funeral pyre. This might explain the presence of a cat bone, and as you can see it also has been burned.
“So as with these fresh cases, we make some analysis on the surface of the rib, then we can know what we can find. The level of sulfur and oil on the rib is very high, for example. We also try to find fragments of insects, fragments of pollens.”
I look down at the bone. “Insects?”
He slides a glossy print across to me—black and white with a hint of blue. I see nothing but blurry lines. When he begins to describe what he sees, I feel as though I’m looking at an ultrasound—there is evidence of life hidden here; he traces it with a clinical finger.
“This is a fragment of insect,” he says. “Probably a flea. And here is another. When we look with an electronic microscope on the surface of the rib, we can see all these things. With such knowledge, we can approach the place where she was burned, and also the epoch, the year. We will not know exactly. But we will know if she was burned on the northern west side of France, as she would have been if she is Joan of Arc, or if she was burned on the south or east part of France, or somewhere else.”
“What tells you that?”
“The pollens,” he says and indicates another inscrutable shape on the page before us. “With the amount of pollens and the kind of pollens, we will know something about the place. We know Joan of Arc was burned at the end of May in Rouen, and so we know exactly during medieval times what kinds of plants, what kinds of trees we should find—if it is her.
“And also with microscopic analysis of tissue, we can approach other vegetation. Not just the trees nearby but the wood that was used to burn her. And also, look here, we can see cells. We can know the coloration of the skin and other informations. After microscopic evaluation, we begin with carbon dating. And then genetic analysis. We are waiting for the results.”
Today’s forensic scientists interested in relics for the most part don’t care who or what the relic really is. The point is that it was someone—long gone are the days when a pig’s knuckle can be passed off as a saint’s toe—and determining all that can be known about that someone, whoever it is, no matter how unholy, is a worthwhile endeavor.
Moreover they are not unaware of the macabre interest their subject holds for many. Dr. Charlier’s book, for example, concludes with a “Petit Guide Touristique du Paleopathologiste” which includes around one hundred grave sites of religious and historical interest—Martin Luther, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare—in many cases including the cause of death. The full list suggests that he is just as interested in secular saints as religious ones.
Dr. Charlier is not alone in this work. Other cases presented at the Colloquy of Paleopathology include the fifteenth-century nun Blessed Marguerite de Savoie. Known for her extreme bodily mortifications, she has been studied in death by a group of Italian anthropologists and, peculiarly, animal biologists, who have used her remains as a way of studying the effect of physical stress during life on posthumous tissue decay. The full corpse of the fourteenth-century nun Saint Roselinem, meanwhile, has been used as extreme case of a body in need of a mortician’s care. Restored with the use of metal bars and sculptor’s clay bonded to her skeleton in 1894, she has more recently been studied to learn more about the state of preservation technology at the end of the nineteenth century. Far from being interested only in debunking relics, these scientists are more often called upon to preserve and protect them. In the formal process of recognition of the bodies or remains of saints, physicians are regularly called in to disinfect, repair, or even rebuild tissues damaged by the elements, vandals, or simply the effects of time. Science needs the ancient bodies only religion can provide; religion in turn needs science to help keep the bodies around a few centuries more. This can range from a mere cleaning and removal of potentially destructive bacteria or molds to procedures that would be considered invasive by any patient, living or dead.
Each scientist has his or her own reasons for dabbling in the remains of saints; one can guess that as professionally motivated as some of these reasons seem, there is no doubt a personal element as well.
“This to me is not religious,” Dr. Charlier says. “The remains themselves belong to religious people, but what the owners told us is amazing. The archbishop of Tours said to me, ‘If it is not Joan of Arc, no problem. You do analysis, then it will go back to the museum.’ Because it is really important to know how a false relic is made. The history of false relics is probably more interesting than the history of true relics.
“I have to tell you I do not personally have any collection of relics. I think the place where a body has to be is in the tomb. Dead people don’t need to be a museum.
“I took her once to a church,” he tells me. “It was to the church of Joan of Arc, here in Paris. I thought, if it was her she would be happy, and if not, whoever it was maybe would not mind so much.”
The thought of him there makes me wonder if in fact he does care if it was Joan. If he wants it to be Joan as much as the church officials do.
A few months later, when the results of Dr. Charlier’s tests come though, I will only think of him sitting in the church with that sad little box of someone. His tests ultimately suggest that it is not Joan of Arc at all. The remains are much too old. The new possibility: “probably, probably” the bones belonged to an Egyptian mummy. In the nineteenth century, there was a fad of mummified materials ending up in various elixirs hocked by, yes, apothecaries. Ground-up mummies were used as tea, eaten by the spoonful, applied directly to wounds; so widespread was this practice that mummified remains could be purchased by the pound.
An accident of history saw this fad come to an end just as rising nationalist sensibilities in France made Joan a more popular saint than ever. The apothecary had the jar, he had the bones; one can almost hear the gears of his brain. Like some medieval bishop stuffing a slip of identification up a corpse’s nose, all he needed to do was give the rib a nametag.
Dr. Charlier does not work with relics in order to peel such nametags off. He works with them for the same reason he sat with the bones in the church. He cares more about who the relics were than what they are perceived to be. Those who believe in relics will rarely be persuaded they are anything other than what faith says they are; those who suppose all relics are frauds will likewise rarely be persuaded that there is any value in the belief they inspire. Yet for the vast majority of relics it is impossible, not to mention impractical, to learn much about their authenticy. The best way to view them, then, would seem to be with a skepticism that remains aware of the very real role they have played in both individual lives and our common history. And the best way to treat them is certainly with the care deserved by any body, no matter its religious significance.
Nevertheless I admit to Dr. Charlier that I find his recent trip to church with the relics a surprising act for a man of science. Taking anonymous bones to a sacred place? Isn’t that a little superstitious?
His face lights up at the thought.
“No, no! It was absolutely not superstitious!” he insists. “It was not religious to go there, it was respect.”
Just to be clear, he says it again, “I am everything but superstitious! When I am walking down the road and I see a ladder, I absolutely go under, each time.”
Peter Manseau is editor of Search.
