Marking a rare achievement, Cecilia Gaposchkin, the Charles A. and Elfriede A. Collis Professor in History, has been awarded three prestigious national grants in a single year for her research on religious relics and medieval Christianity.
In January, her book project on the role of relics in shaping medieval Parisian society and politics won a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship—the only fellowship the NEH awarded in the Ivy League this year. Last April, her second project—a book on the evolution of the cross as a weapon of war—received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship. Gaposchkin was one of fewer than 200 recipients, selected from over 3,500 applications. The relics project also won a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where she is in residence for the 2025–26 academic year.
“To receive one of these fellowships is a tremendous honor,” says Associate Dean for the Social Sciences Benjamin Valentino. “To win three in a single year—from the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation—is truly exceptional, and a powerful affirmation of the importance of this kind of scholarship at a moment when support for the humanities has never mattered more. It speaks to both the significance of Professor Gaposchkin’s scholarship and her stature in the field of medieval history.”
From relics to power
Gaposchkin has been at Dartmouth since 2000, building over two decades a prolific body of scholarship that spans four books, dozens of peer-reviewed articles, and recognition from some of the field’s most prestigious institutions. A scholar of religious and cultural history, she focuses on how religious ideas and practices underwrote institutions and ideologies of power—work that has earned her election as a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, the organization’s highest honor.
“What I’m drawn to is the ways in which religious practices, praxis, ideology, rituals—basically the world views and the set of truth claims and values under religion—undergirded institutions of power, whether that was the monarchy or the church itself,” Gaposchkin says.
Growing up, Gaposchkin says her parents “dragged” her to churches across Europe, with a particular focus on those in France, as Gaposchkin’s mother was French. By the time she was in college, she had come to deeply appreciate the continent’s historic cathedrals as beautiful and moving, despite not being religious herself. She went on to major in medieval and Renaissance studies and art history, delving further into the role of the church in everyday life during this period and eventually earning her PhD in history from the University of California at Berkeley.
“I refer to myself as a cultural and religious historian of the Middle Ages—a kind of intellectual historian, interested in ideas,” Gaposchkin says.
Her NEH- and IAS-sponsored book project, tentatively titled Sacral Paris, asks what role relics—and the cults that cropped up around them—had in shaping Paris’ social, political, and cultural history. In the Middle Ages, Paris’ central institutions based their authority on their ownership of various relics, forever establishing these pieces of Christian history as key drivers of power, influence, and identity in the city.
In fact, when Paris’ famed Notre Dame cathedral caught fire in 2019, Gaposchkin points out, the city organized a rescue effort in real time to save the Crown of Thorns and other relics from the sacristy, highlighting the important role these relics still play in French history and identity.
“I want to bring to the fore how important these devotional commitments are to meaning and to identity and to people's understanding and place in the world,” Gaposchkin says.
The cross as weapon
For her Guggenheim-backed project, tentatively titled The Cross Invincible: A Long History of the Cross as a Weapon of War, Gaposchkin explores how the cross—an instrument of capital punishment in the Roman world and a symbol of submission, suffering, and self-sacrifice—became a weapon of war. The project grew in part out of her 2017 book, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology, which examined how ecclesiastical rituals underwrote an ideology of crusading. While working on a paper about relics in the Crusades, she came across a striking image of the 7th-century Byzantine emperor Heraclius literally wielding the cross as a lance against his enemies.
“It’s such a stunning image, such a breathtaking statement of the ideology of the cross,” she says.
The book, she says, “seeks to answer: how did the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, his passion, become a weapon of warfare? At first glance it seems to be a complete inversion. A paradox.”
“It struck me that there was a long story to tell about how this instrument of Christ’s passion could become part of belligerent practices like oppression, colonization, conquest,” she says.
As early as the second and third century, theologians were including the cross in their lexicon around waging spiritual warfare, with the cross coming to be understood as Christ’s weapon against the devil. By the time of the Crusades, from the late 11th century to the late 13th century, the cross had become a central symbol of the fight against evil, with Crusaders often carrying relics of the cross as they entered into battle.
“Once it’s a weapon, it’s a weapon. And once the devil is connected as the invisible enemy, an eschatological frame can be connected to the visible world. Your military enemy, particularly if they're non-Christian, becomes the devil’s servants. The ability to apply the spiritual within the temporal world is just too ideologically powerful,” Gaposchkin says.
Use of the cross as a symbol of militant supremacy continues today. “You can see it everywhere. It’s deeply implicated in Christian nationalism through history,” she says. Contemporary far-right groups have continued this tradition, erecting and carrying crosses at public demonstrations across the country as symbols of political and religious identity.
As if she weren’t busy enough, Gaposchkin is also working on a third book project about one of the most important movements in medieval Paris, known as the cult of St. Denis, which spun off from her Sacral Paris work.