Leylim Erenel

‘Ter eere van den heilighen bloede’: The Relic of the Holy Blood in the Visual Culture of Late Medieval Bruges

Supervisor: Professor Susie Nash
Advisor: Professor Alixe Bovey

My research explores a variety of themes associated with the Holy Blood relic of Bruges, which is believed to have been brought from Constantinople in the early thirteenth century and has been housed in St Basil’s Chapel in the heart of the city since at least the 1250s. I am primarily focused on objects that have been produced in the town in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whose making is closely linked to – and in many cases, prompted by –  the presence of the relic in Bruges, as well as the social organisations and ritual practices that have developed in response to it.