Capturing the Seen: Medieval Pilgrimage in Aachen

Capturing the Seen: Medieval Pilgrimage in Aachen

By Prof. Ann Marie Rasmussen, University of Waterloo

What might a pilgrim badge from fifteenth-century Aachen and a modern cell phone camera have in common? More than you might think!

In just a decade, cell phone cameras have become a ubiquitous presence at public and private events. They have accelerated consumers’ demand for images that they can make and store themselves. They have created new photographic rituals, notably the selfie. Consumers now consider cell phone cameras a necessary tool that co-sees alongside us, extending the seeing self and its experiences.

The invention of photography may be modern, but the idea of using a device to extend the seeing self is not. A similar device was invented five hundred years ago in Aachen, Germany as part of the elaborate rituals and practices surrounding the crowded events associated with pilgrimage to Aachen Cathedral.

Let’s start with the medieval device. It is a religious, pilgrim badge. These were small, cheap, mass-produced objects made out of lead-tin alloys that pilgrims would pin or sew onto their hats and cloaks. Each medieval pilgrim badge features an image that would normally have been familiar to and easily identifiable by medieval people and that was specifically associated with a specific holy site and the relics and/or saints venerated there.

By the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Aachen Cathedral, for example, which had been founded by Charlemagne in 814, contained a number of shrines and relics that attracted pilgrims from near and far: Charlemagne’s tomb; a shift or tunic purportedly belonging to the Blessed Virgin Mary; the swaddling clothes or diapers of the Infant Christ; the loincloth worn by Jesus on the cross; and the cloth on which the head of John the Baptist lay after his beheading.

Figure 1: Round pewter badge, seated Virgin Mary with Christ child and lily on the left flanked in left-hand niche by king holding a tower and in right-hand niche by a standing bishop with two figures in long garments displaying the holy tunic above, eyelets, Aachen, Germany, 1350–1399, found in Tholen, Netherlands, 85 x 61 mm. Langbroek, Netherlands, Family Van Beuningen Collection, inv. 3492 (Kunera 06476). Photograph courtesy of Family Van Beuningen Collection.

On the badge in figure 1, you can see Charlemagne on the left holding a building that represents the Aachen Cathedral; on the right, a bishop; in the middle, the Blessed Virgin Mary sitting with the Christ Child on her lap and at her side a lily in a vase – one of her attributes; and at the top, two figures in long robes, probably clerics, displaying a garment representing Mary’s tunic that is suspended from a stick. The venerated tunic and swaddling clothes are a special kind of holy objects known as contact relics because they were believed to have been in contact with the physical bodies of these holy figures. Pilgrims came to Aachen to see these relics and to venerate them. From the early 1200s onwards, while at Aachen they could purchase badges with recognizable Aachen images, which they then wore to broadcast their identity as pilgrims and devotees of Aachen’s saints and holy figures.

What does all this have to do with cell phone cameras? Look at the Aachen badge in figure 1 again. Made in the first decades of the 1300s, it originally had a number of embellishments that have disappeared over time. There would have been some kind of a backing attached on the back with little fold-down tabs, perhaps a brightly colored sheet of paper or parchment, against which the shiny pewter figures would stand out. But what about that round frame directly underneath the tunic? When the badge was new it contained a piece of glass that functioned like a mirror.

Badges with mirrors on them start showing up in Aachen around this time, and they rapidly came to dominate Aachen badge production. Sometimes there are figures but sometimes the badge is just a round, or square frame, which once held a mirror. These mirrors became arguably the identifying mark of an Aachen badge.

But why a mirror? It has to do with changes in the practices surrounding relic veneration at Aachen Cathedral. By 1400, it had become customary that Aachen’s fragile contact relics were removed from their shrines or from the treasury for public display only once every seven years. Pilgrims flocked to Aachen to view these auspicious objects at these times; there was doubtless pent-up demand. The clerical administrators of the Aachen relics then began cooperating with other pilgrimage sites in close geographical proximity to coordinate the timing of the public displays of each site’s relics so that pilgrims could visit a circuit of regional sites, including Aachen, within a short, prescribed time period, which was called a jubilee. These efforts meant throngs and throngs of pilgrims, and these masses produced an unexpected problem.

Medieval pilgrims did not merely seek to participate in a liturgy or to cast a glance at a tomb shrine, a reliquary, a wonder-working image, or a contact relic. The spiritual work of pilgrimage required physical contact with the holy object so that, from their perspective, the divine properties inherent in the holy object could be transferred to the pilgrim. Art historian Sarah Blick has written extensively on late medieval renovations and remodelings of holy tombs, which added hollows and niches and other features so that the pious might get as close to the saintly remains as possible. For a lowly pewter badge to work as an agent of holiness, its owner had to touch it to the saint’s tomb or to the relic shrine. Contact transferred holiness from the shrine into the badge, which only then became an agent of divinity. The contours of the problem are probably now clear: the dimensions of mass pilgrimage in Aachen sketched above made such touch impossible. There were simply too many people. It was not possible for each individual to spend even a few seconds with contact relics, such as the Virgin Mary’s tunic or shift, which in any case were too fragile to long withstand the hard use of so much touching, even if it took place only every seven years.

The solution to this dilemma came via a different sense: sight. Medieval understandings of the power of sight and medieval theories or hypotheses of how vision worked differed from modern western ones. In a nutshell, sight was understood to be a form of touch. Because seeing was a form of touching for medieval people, the mirror on an Aachen badge could perform the action of touch. It would be exposed to the shrine or object by being held up by a pilgrim standing in the throng of worshippers so that the mirror reflected the shown relic. The mirror badge had not only captured a reflection of the holy object; that act of “seeing” was understood as a form of touch. The mirror, and thus the badge, had touched the relic, just as powerfully as if it had been physically in contact with it. In this way, the mirror badge functioned as a kind of proto camera: it had seen the holy relic and retained, not an image of it, but rather the holiness and divinity inherent in the holy object. Such an Aachen mirror badge was far more than a pilgrimage souvenir; it had become a kind of relic-like object itself.

Learn more about the fascinating world of medieval badges in the author’s book: Ann Marie Rasmussen, Medieval Badges: Their Wearers and Their Worlds (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).

References and further reading
Biernoff, Suzannah, ‘Seeing and Feeling in the Middle Ages’, in Visual Sense: A Cultural Reader, ed. by Elizabeth Edwards and Kaushik Bhaumik (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 51–59.

Blick, Sarah, ‘Votives, Images, Interaction and Pilgrimage to the Tomb and Shrine of St. Thomas Becket, Canterbury Cathedral,’ in Push Me, Pull You: Art and Devotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. by Sarah Blick and Laura Gelfand (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 21–58.

Park, Katherine, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006), 73.

Rinn, Carolin, Zwischen Erinnerung und Heilsvermittlung: Visualität und Medialität der mittelalterlichen Pilgerzeichen aus Aachen und Canterbury (Berlin: Peter Lang Verlag, 2020).