Chapter 13 Skulls: The Travels of St. Ursula’s Companions in the New World

Rose Marie San Juan

Few European religious objects crisscrossed the world with as much confi- dence as the of the virgin companions of St. Ursula. Even before any of these relics had been taken to the ‘New World’ in the late sixteenth century, the virgins had already infiltrated territories previously unknown to Europeans. was only the first to name a grouping of unknown coastal islands after the eleven thousand virgins that according to legend ac- companied St. Ursula on a pilgrimage to Rome and were killed on their return to . In the ‘New World’ they traversed even greater distances, passing one coastline after another, and giving their imprecise name, in some cases only briefly, to the Virgin Islands in Antilles, the southern point of the conti- nent later to be known as Cabo de Hornos, and the northern coastal islands eventually renamed -Pierre and Michelon.1 For Columbus it may have been the large number of islands and their proximity to each other that sug- gested the name, while for Ferdinand Magellen it was probably the recognition of the danger of the coastline at the southern tip of the unknown continent, but all shared one idea, the uncertainty of number, kind, and identity, in ef- fect the idea of being not just unknown but unknowable.2 The companions of St. Ursula were well known for being unknown, for being impossible to count and impossible to tell apart.3 It is all the more intriguing that when the Jesuit missionaries started to circulate relics across the world, they actively promoted the relics of the virgins, and when directing these to the missions in Brazil, they delimited the choice from a wide range of available bone relics to the skull

1 Columbus named the Virgin Islands in 1493 on his second voyage; in 1520 Magellan named Cape Horn ‘Cabo de las 11,000 Virgines’, and Joao Alvares Fagundes named the group of is- lands off the south coast of Newfoundland ‘Las Onze mil Virgines’. See Johnson D., Phantom Islands of the Atlantic (New York, NY: 1994) 199, n. 2; Montgomery S.B., St Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins of Cologne: Relics, Reliquaries and the Visual Culture of Group Sanctity in Late Medieval Europe (Bern: 2010) 40–41. 2 Montgomery, St Ursula 99–115. 3 Ibidem 117–136.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004354500_015 Virgin Skulls: The Travels of St. Ursula’s Companions 407 . In this essay, I propose to consider how the reconstitution of the relics of St. Ursula’s companions in the ‘New World’ altered the possibilities of what relics could produce. In particular I will consider attempts by missionaries to deploy skull relics to communicate with indigenous people in Brazil, especially those that maintained rituals focused on human bone. Instead of the imposi- tion of one form of ritual on the other or the resistance of one people to the other, I will explore the extent to which each adapted to the other and assimi- lated something new to their established practices. Written accounts of these rituals are scant but I hope to make a case for what the relics themselves have to say, mindful that this is a voice forged within distant and disorienting travel, gaps in cultural exchanges, and the silence and indecipherability of bone. A remarkable journey with remarkable effects was long ensconced within the legend of Ursula and her companions.4 According to Jacopo Voragine, whose early thirteenth century account is fully developed from separate earlier sources, Ursula, the daughter of the King of Britannia, demanded three-years of travel in order to be free of earthly concerns before she agreed to marry a neighbouring prince.5 The princess requested eleven ships in which to carry herself and her designated female companions, 11,000 in total, all of whom she consecrated to celibacy within the first day of the three years. With time to spare, she concentrated on the journey and ‘thanks to a favourable wind, they reached a port in Gaul called Tiel and from there travelled to Cologne’ where an angel appeared to Ursula in her sleep.6 The angel instructed her to under- take a pilgrimage to Rome, giving directions to the city of Basel where Ursula was to leave the ships and continue by land. More people joined the virgins during their journey, to the point that members of the Roman militia, seeing the great accumulation of followers, feared the spread of Christianity. They arranged for soldiers to meet the travellers in Cologne and attack them like ‘wolves that pounce on sheep’.7 When the legend appeared in late fifteenth century narrative painting, the long journey by ship and the proliferation of people that joined the pilgrimage came to the foreground. The well-known 1456 fifteen-panel narrative produced in Cologne for the church of St. Ursula represents the navigation of the Rhine

4 On the legend and cult of St. Ursula and her companions, see Montgomery, St Ursula 11–17; Kauffmann C.M., The Legend of Saint Ursula (London: 1964) 9–11; Zehnder F.G., Sankt Ursula: Legende Verehrung Bilderwelt (Cologne: 1985) 13–41. 5 Varazze I. da, Legenda aurea (Florence: 2007) vol. 2, 1206–1211. 6 Ibidem 1208–1209: ‘grazie al vento propizio, giunsero a un porto della Gallia che viene detto Tiel e da li arrivano a Colonia’. 7 Ibidem 1210–1211: ‘lupi che infieriscono sulle pecore’; Voragine dates the account to 238.