The relics of the Magi who had visited the infant Jesus were enshrined at the cathedral at Cologne in the twelfth century, where they became an important focus of pilgrimage. The cult was widespread and diverse in form, and was especially focused on the season of Epiphany; devotional practices included formal liturgical rites, representative drama, and the invocation of the Magi in medical remedies. This chapter considers the relationship between such categories as devotional and liturgical in relation to examples of the cult in Insular sources. In particular, the presence of a votive Mass for Travellers of the Three Kings of Cologne, as found in a fifteenth-century manuscript belonging to priest Henry Wells, presents an opportunity to consider individuals for whom the cult held particular significance.

This chapter examines ‘the Stainton Missal’, a small folio in 8s, which survives in York Minster Library. It was printed in Paris in 1516 for use in York. The provenance covers a narrow geographical field, spanning the Reformation in emblematic form. In the exactly 500 years of its life, to this day, it has never moved outside of a small triangle in North Yorkshire, between York itself and the edges of the Dales and the Moors. However, the sensational aspect of the book is concealed by these details. At the opening of the Te igitur at the beginning of the Canon, the eye is confronted, we might say assaulted, by a vigorous slash, diagonally across the image of the Cross. Below, through the next dozens of leaves, is another, deeper gouge, in the opposite direction to the slashed crucifix, forming a reverse cross. The book is an astonishing example of iconoclasm. In this chapter, this macabre object is opened out to the fate more broadly of the fate of ritual books. How does the destruction of books relate to their consecration or preservation, and how does this relate to the history of memory before and after the Reformation?