1. When St Agatha’s breasts were ripped off with pincers, her devotees kept them as relics.
So, here we come to the final item on our list, and one of the most bizarre. Another very early Christian martyr, Agatha was a virgin who died at Catania, Sicily. Like many Christians of the first few centuries AD, she was executed for her faith. But her mode of death, according to later legend, was especially macabre. When the Roman consul Quintinian failed to seduce her, he roasted Agatha over a hot fire and then ripped her breasts off with red-hot pincers for good measure. They miraculously grew back, but she died of her injuries nonetheless.
Like Oliver Plunkett’s head, Agatha’s dismembered breasts were a ready-made relic. They were swiped away when the torturers weren’t watching, and instantly venerated. The saint’s mammaries are now lost, but it’s easy to understand how so many pairs were knocking about in the Middle Ages. All you had to do was hack a pair off a dead body and sell them to foolish (or enterprising) churchmen as Agatha’s. Though her alleged-breasts are long-gone, Sicilians commemorate Agatha by baking mine di Sant’ Agata [literally, ‘St Agatha’s breasts’], sweet cakes in the shape of breasts with a glacé cherry as a nipple.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Bagnoli, Martina. Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe. London: British Museum Press, 2010.
Borrini, Matteo, and Luigi Garlaschelli. “A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin.” Journal of Forensic Sciences 64, no. 1 (January 2019): 137-43.
Butler, Alban. Lives of the Saints. London: Studio Editions, 1990.
Caviness, Madeline Harrison. Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Freeman, Charles. Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Friedman, David M. A Mind of its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. London: Robert Hale, 2009.
Robinson, James. Finer than Gold: Saints and Relics in the Middle Ages. London: British Museum Press, 2011.
Vogt, Andrea. “Stolen Brain of St John Bosco Found in Kettle’. The Daily Telegraph, June 16, 2017.
de Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend, trans. by William Caxton. London: Dent, 1993.
