Holy Bones Holy Dust by Charles Freeman

Exclusive interview with author Charles Freeman and a review of his new book about how relics shaped the history of Medieval Europe **** 4 Stars

By Gabrielle Pantera

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 10/24/2011 –“I had become very interested in the fourth and fifth centuries AD and the fall of the Roman empire,” says Holy Bones Holy Dust author Charles Freeman. “It was just then that the relic cults began. What I found fascinating was the way these cults spread throughout the Mediterranean and then northwards into Britain and Germany as Christianity spread.”

Freeman delves deep into the subject of religious relics using original sources. Freeman’s book mixes history with elements of theology and anthropology. Most of the relics Freeman discusses are from the Middle Ages.

Holy Bones Holy Dust delves into practices across Europe, covering various religions. He also includes details about the Crusades, the Byzantine Empire, the confusing Italian city-states, and Protestantism. His narration is lively and you can tell he loves his subject. For anyone who loves history.

Christians whose martyrs remains had been hurriedly buried during the persecutions of the second and third centuries were reburied and shrines constructed. It was believed that as they were in heaven they could intervene directly with God and might also provide miracles of healing.

“When I started this book I thought it would be easy to write,” says Freeman. “There was just so much material that it was a matter of sorting it out in order and telling the story. Yet when I actually got down to it, it was very difficult to sort it all out. I had an enormous time span…from the 380s to 1600, as I wanted to bring in the Reformation. I wanted to include the eastern Mediterranean, notably the great city of Constantinople, which was crammed full of relics until it was sacked by the crusaders in 1204…as well France, Spain, Germany and Britain.”

Over the years Freeman had visited many shrines around Europe. “In Italy in particular they are still very lively places of worship,” says Freeman. “My wife and I visited many more for this book, notably wonderful buildings such as the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, built by Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns which he had actually bought from some Venetian bankers. Then there was Chartres cathedral, one of the finest Gothic buildings in the world, where they had the shift of the Virgin Mary. In Prato in Tuscany, they have the girdle that the Virgin Mary threw down to St. Thomas as she was assumed into heaven.”

“My oddest experience came in the Marche, in the eastern part of central Italy,” says Freeman. “I was in dark  church and there was an interesting looking painting in a corner so I went off to see if I could make out what it was. As I turned round, I was shocked to find that I was next to a dead body, just a few inches away. It turned out that it was a sixteenth century Franciscan monk whose body had been preserved, some would say miraculously. It was a real shock.”

Freeman grew up in rural Suffolk in the east of England and still lives there. “It is an area rich in medieval churches,” says Freeman. “There must be three or four hundred within thirty miles of where I write. Many are very beautiful and it is fun sorting out their history from the different architectural styles that developed between 1100 and 1500 when most of them were built. In their heyday they would have been full of statues, images and relics of saints.”

Not far away is Bury St. Edmunds, a great abbey church of the Benedictines in the medieval period, now in ruins following the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII at the Reformation of the 1530s. Pilgrims from all over Europe would visit the shrine of St. Edmund, an Anglo-Saxon king martyred by the invading Danes and believed to have been buried there.

“One of the problems writing this book is that there are an enormous number of stories about the relics and the miracles surrounding them,” says Freeman. “Many of the original documents have been translated. There was only one I had to read through the original Latin. That was The Travels of William Wey to Jerusalem, although the first English translation has now appeared. There was an early history of Venice that I needed, written by Martino da Canal between 1267 and 1275. It was written in medieval court French and the only translation I could find was in Italian.”

Freeman’s agent is Bill Hamilton of the London literary agency A.M.Heath. “He’s always looking out for new projects,” says Freeman. “But, he is very stern with me when I am developing a proposal. It is very tough getting a publisher to take on a new book. You have to have strong ideas to get noticed by the better publishers. I first thought of a book on the subject about ten years ago. My agent tried to sell it but at first there was no interest.” It was later that Yale University Press, who was publishing Freeman’s A New History of early Christianity, accepted what became Holy Bones, Holy Dust.

Freeman’s editors at Yale University Press are Heather McCallum and Rachael Lonsdale. “They were very tough on me, getting me into order and I wrote and rewrote, changed around chapters, took out some stories, added others and so on until we finally had a book we were all happy with,” says Freeman. “A stern editor is vital because writers love to go on and on and we live too close to the text,” says Freeman. “We all need an outside reader to tell us when we are getting boring or when a particular passage doesn’t make sense.”

“British authors are finding it much harder to get published in the US,” says Freeman. “It’s a changing market. I am lucky that through writing for Yale I get automatically published throughout the English-speaking world.  Even though my first book came out in 1978 and my second on Defence, an introduction for schools, won the Information Book of the Year Award from the Times’ Educational Supplement in 1983, I am still learning.”

Holy Bones will be released in Italian next year and other foreign language publishers are interested. Holy Bones hasn’t been optioned for film or television.

Freeman’s passion for history can be traced to when he was fifteen when he worked on an archaeological dig of a Roman villa not far from where Freeman now lives. He was lowered into an old hypocaust, where they built fires to heat water and air for the villa. Freeman realized he was touching ash that must have come from the last fires before the villa was abandoned, probably in the early fifth century as the Roman legions left Britain.

Freeman has lectures and study days coming up as a result of the book. He includes some of the shrines in his tours. “In October, we will be visiting the shrine of St. Nicholas, the original Father Christmas at Bari in southern Italy,” says Freeman. “He had been bishop of Myra in what is now southern Turkey. The Barians had stolen his body in the 1080s. As St. Nicholas is a patron saint of Russia, the shrine gets a lot of Russian visitors.”

One of my Freeman’s best selling books in the U.S. is Egypt, Greece and Rome, Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean. Freeman is currently writing the third edition for Oxford University Press. He’s also working on The Reopening of the Western Mind, that would be a companion to his book The Closing of the Western Mind. When not writing, Freeman says he’s busy organizing his autumn tours to Italy.

Freeman grew up in rural Suffolk in the east of England and still lives there. He doesn’t have a website.

Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe by
Charles Freeman
Hardcover, 306 pages, Publisher: Yale University Press (May 24, 2011) Language: English ISBN-13: 978-0300125719