Crown of thorns

Since posting about a book by Neil MacGregor at reference 1, I have been dipping in the earlier book at reference 2. Today I came across an entry for an elaborate reliquary for a thorn from the crown of thorns, worn by our Lord during his Crucifixion. In the course of the three and a bit pages devoted to the reliquary, we also learn about the crown of thorns itself, which made its way via Constantinople and a Venetian pawnbroker to Louis IX of France, aka Saint Louis.

What we do not learn from MacGregor is that this crown of thorns, while a very important relic, no longer contains any thorns at all, the sixty or seventy thorns which came with it, perhaps under separate cover, having been given away by Saint Louis and his successors. The relic now consists of ancient rushes, originally used to hold the crown together, encased in the elaborate reliquary illustrated left, made in 1896. Until recently held in Notre Dame in Paris.

I felt that MacGregor had been a bit lazy, or a bit careless, and his (or his research assistants') gloss on the true crown might have come a bit closer to the its true substance. Despite the shortage of space.

Fuller stories are to be found at references 3 and 4. And if one visited Paris, perhaps one could turn up the sort of antiquarian zeal prompted by the far less important Barbarossaleuchter of Aachen, for which see reference 5.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/history-by-enumeration.html.

Reference 2: A History of the World in 100 Objects - Neil MacGregor - 2010.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_of_thorns.

Reference 4: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/Crown_of_Thorns.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/courtauld-second-campaign.html.