Remaking and Remembering the Monymusk Reliquary

The object known today as the Monymusk reliquary (Fig. 6.1) is undoubtedly one of the most important pieces of early medieval metalwork in the collections of National Museums Scotland.1 It belongs to a larger corpus of Insular objects, typically identified as ‘house-shaped shrines’. The nomenclature is somewhat misleading, however, as the steeply pitched ‘roofs’ and rectangular structures more closely resemble Irish churches and Insular representations of churches such as seen on f. 202v of the Book of Kells (Fig. 5.6) and on several high crosses.2 As explored in Cormac Bourke’s chapter, the house-shaped shrines’ decoration points to their close association with founder saints’ shrines and shrine-chapels. Indeed, it seems very likely that these portable containers deliberately blurred evocations of holy sepulchre, church, tomb and reliquary together. To complicate matters further, while these objects are most frequently identified as reliquaries, there is also evidence to suggest that they might have functioned as chrismals.3