Bodies and fragmentation of bodies have special resonance in society and art today. We are used to jewelry ads that show the isolated arm with bejeweled fingers, the isolated leg with the newest shoes or pantyhose, the male torso with T-shirt and jockey shorts. In fact, the actress Marylou Henner, in a recent interview with Tom Snyder, described her early work as that of a "body-part model."' Popular and political culture makes images of body parts glitzy; it makes them gruesome, as well. Our nerves are scraped raw by nightly news saturated with clips of the dismemberment caused by land mines, airplane explosions and terrorist bombs; current discussions of organ transplants alert us to body parts and the ethical issues surrounding them. Such images from popular culture have unquestionably heightened our awareness of fragmented bodies. Contemporary artists have shown greater concern for the fragmented body in recent years than in any post-Renaissance period.2 One thinks immediately of the work of artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Hanne Wilke, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, and Annette Messager, whose imagery returns to these forms.3 There even are contemporary artists who, like Monica Bock, make body-part reliquaries. On museum tours of medieval treasuries both students and the general public often find body-part reliquaries the most compelling of the objects displayed. The reasons for the medieval concern with images of the fragmented body are different from ours of the late twentieth century, as Linda Nochlin makes clear in a recent essay.4 Nonetheless, the visual culture of our own time seems to have created a sensitivity to similar forms from an earlier period. By the same token, the engagement of contemporary art historians and historians with response, performance and ritual has opened new avenues of comparable exploration in our studies of the Middle Ages. Thus, although body-part reliquaries have been studied before, the sensibility of the 1990s makes these works available to us in new and mean-