A container where religious relics are stored or displayed (especially relics of saints)

Usage examples of reliquary.

Holy Orders than a boy of thirteen: a richly illuminated Book of Hours, a rosewood and silver crucifix worthy of a cathedral chapel, a relic of the martyred Saint Willim sealed in a crystal reliquary, and from Hubert, a starkly functional silver chalice and paten and a chasuble of creamy wool, surprisingly plain compared to the other gifts.

The reliquary caskets contained a variety of silver and gold, either in coinage or as unminted raw metal.

The feast of Saint Barnabas, the 11th of June, was chosen for the translation of the relics of Dionysius the Areopagite from the crypt where they had rested for so many years to the new reliquary tomb in the choir.

The torchlight flickered over the reliquaries on the altar, showing him the green-patinated bronze bowls intended to hold salt and sacred water, the old bronze knives of ritual, the rods of white ash, the stubs of Element candles, the incense burners, rune-stones, a small bell, and the dried remains of vines that had once wreathed the altar.

He sailed fleets of gold-crested vessels laden with cinnamon, cumin, hashish and nutmeg, and fought holy wars for the reliquaries of gods, and issued stern unpopular edicts, and cremated his chancellor for dropping tangerine peel on the steps of the royal harem, which was unfortunate for the innocent chancellor, who was allergic to tangerines and still alive to protest his innocence when the execution pyre was lit.

I sang the praises of the splendor of gold, a soft metal that can be transformed into the finest leaf, the hiss of the red-hot slivers when they are plunged into water to be tempered, and the unimaginable reliquaries to be seen in the treasures of the great abbeys, the high and pointed spires of our churches, the high and straight columns of the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the books the Jews read, scattered with signs that seem insects, and the sounds they produce when they read them, and how a great Christian king had received from a caliph an iron cock that sang alone at every sunrise, then what a sphere is that turns belching steam, and how the mirrors of Archimedes burn, how frightening it is to see a windmill at night, and I told him also of the Grasal, of the knights still searching for it in Brittany, about ourselves and how we would give it to his father as soon as we found the unspeakable Zosimos.

On the saint's day, the whole village processed, in the evening, up to the Chiesa Nuova carrying banners, candles, the saint's statue and her Holy Relic a fragment of her little finger in the Reliquary.

Ornate crucifixes were the most common, but there were banners and a reliquary borne by four women which, ifpure gold, must have cost as much as a starship.

He had reached the third step, he sank to his knees with only the gentlest of manipulations, holding by the fringes of the altar frontal, and the cloth of gold that was draped under the reliquary.

This was a day on which secular and monastic clergy united to do honor to their saint, and chapter was postponed until after High Mass, when the church was open to all the pilgrims who wished to bring their private petitions to her altar, to touch her silver reliquary and offer prayers and gifts in the hope of engaging her gentle attention and benevolence for their illnesses, burdens, and anxieties.

I remembered wandering casually into a side chapel of a Sienese church and looking into the face of St Catherine of Siena unexpectedly, her mummified head in its immaculate white wimple resting in a reliquary shaped like a church.

Hugh and Prior Robert had arrived at the priory late in the evening, paid their respects to the prior, attended Vespers to do reverence to the saints of the foundation, Saints Oswald and Wulstan, and taken Herluin and his attendants into their confidence about the loss, or at the very least the misplacement, of Saint Winifreds reliquary.