In 1226, the French cardinal Odo of Châteauroux gave a sermon in which he recounted an experience from his boyhood. He described how, when looking at a window, he could not identify the subject in the stained glass, only that it was some sort of ‘parable or story’. A young man nearby explained that it illustrated the Good Samaritan, and continued his commentary by saying that the story demonstrated that lay people and not priests were more likely to offer charity. Odo's sermon was no doubt rhetorically inflected for the sake of his audience, and perhaps the young man's comment was made with his tongue in his cheek, but the memory raises questions about medieval audiences’ engagement with visual and architectural material in their church buildings. The young man's novel interpretation subverts the institutional space for which the window was made, since we can assume that the local priest would not want his flock to think so little of him. The subversive reading works, and indeed is perhaps a little more humorous, because the interpretive act parallels contemporary intellectual systems used by clerics. The window has a plain meaning in so far that it shows a biblical story, but it has a deeper allegorical significance, one that our young man deliberately misreads. This type of material exegesis together with the systems put in place to institutionalise meanings and specifically to recall historical objects in the context of the medieval church are the subjects of this chapter. The Good Samaritan is a biblical character, part of a narrative about the past, but this chapter is concerned with how lost objects, the things of the past that can no longer be perceived, became present in the medieval church through material exegesis; that is, the act of engaging with the imperceptible significances embedded in architecture and church fittings.

At the beginning of the twelfth century, there was a surge in liturgical commentaries that outlined the many meanings given to the Mass, the liturgical vessels and the church building. The commentaries from this period explicitly spell out the significance of these objects and while they are interesting in their own right, this chapter is primarily concerned with how some medieval liturgical objects and spaces were substitutions for historical objects.