Bedazzled Saints: Catacomb Relics Early Modern Bavaria

By examining these ornamented skeletons—painstakingly enhanced with jewels and fine clothing and still on display atop church altars to this day—Noria Litaker elucidates the interplay between local religious practice and universal church doctrine, shedding new light on the negotiated nature of sanctity in early modern Catholicism. In so doing, she challenges the dominant narrative of the Bavarian Catholic Reformation as a top-down process and provides new insights into the role relics and their innovative presentation played in the development of Catholic identity in early modern German lands.