Curators at London's British Museum have discovered the relics of 39 saints, including St Benedict, packed in bundles of cloth inside a 12th century portable German altar. The Irish Times reports that the new medieval gallery at the British Museum in London is full of beautiful images of saints in ivory, stone, gold and wood also holds the bones of 39 real saints, whose discovery came as a shock to their curator.
The relics, packed in tiny bundles of cloth, including one scrap of fabric more than 1,000 years old, were found when a 12th-century German portable altar was opened for the first time since it came into the British Museum collection in 1902.
To the amazement of James Robinson, curator of medieval antiquities, when it was opened a linen cloth was revealed, and inside it dozens of tiny bundles of cloth, each neatly labelled on little pieces of vellum.
The most precious was the relic of St Benedict, father of the western monastic tradition. The relic was wrapped in cloth which was itself an extraordinary object, a piece of silk from 8th- or 9th-century Byzantium.
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(Source: CTHUS)