Faking Relics

It seems that the "relics" of Joan of Arc, supposedly taken from the pyre at which she was burned to death for heresy, are nothing of the kind:

The so-called "relics of Joan of Arc," overseen by the Archbishop of Tours in Chinon, France, do not contain the charred remains of the Catholic saint.

Rather, the artifacts consist of a mummified cat leg bone and human rib, both dating to the 6th-3rd century B.C., according to a new study.

I have long wondered about the mindset of people who fake relics. In this case it is hard to imagine that the first finder believed in what he was doing; how could somebody searching a pyre for bones somehow come up with museum pieces? Intentional fraud of some sort had to be involved. Was it a simple case of a con man tricking a gullible believer, who then passed the relics on as genuine? Or was the whole thing concocted by knowing churchmen who sincerely thought that having some relics for the common folk to venerate would help spread the true faith?

So far as I can determine, these "relics" first surfaced in the 1860s, when they were found in the attic of a Paris pharmacy with a scrap of paper written in a a 17th-century hand that identified them as "Remains found beneath the scaffold site of Jeanne d' Arc, Maid of Orleans." After a dispute, they were accepted by the church but housed in a museum at Chinon rather than in a cathedral, which suggests to me that somebody was unwilling to put the full weight of the church behind their authenticity.

This is a very interesting detail from the patholigical study of the remains:

Odour analysis is a new technique for palaeopathology, but Charlier says that he hit on the idea after being struck by the variety of odours of other historical corpses. Delacourte and Duriez sniffed the relics and nine other samples of bone and hair from Charlier's lab without being told what the samples were. They were also not allowed to confer. Both smelled hints of 'burnt plaster' and 'vanilla' in the samples from the relics.

The plaster smell was consistent with the fact that Joan of Arc was burnt on a plaster stake, not a wooden one, to make the whole macabre spectacle last longer. But vanilla is inconsistent with cremation. "Vanillin is produced during decomposition of a body," says Charlier. "You would find it in a mummy, but not in someone who was burnt."