The darkened exhibition space of the former Reading Room at the British Museum is currently the sanctuary for an arresting display of ornate, glistening objects. The glorious Treasures of Heaven exhibition, which opened on 23 June, brings together sacred riches connected with the Christian devotion to saints from the Museum’s own collection as well as more than 40 other institutions worldwide, including the Vatican. The exhibition enables visitors to see at close hand a fascinating array of reliquaries – gorgeous containers embellished with precious metals and stones in which relics were displayed – as well as Roman burial plaques and bowls, medieval pilgrim badges, and many other artefacts associated with the culture of saints and holy remains.

The exhibition has made headlines already with rumours that curators are having to wipe kiss marks from the glass cases left by visitors for whom these artefacts are not art objects, but sacred things, still to be venerated. Professor Eamon Duffy’s detailed review of the exhibition, available here, beautifully evokes the power that these holy fragments of bone and other materials have had throughout two thousand years of Christianity, as ‘the seeds of transcendence, trophies and tokens of the imperishable glory in store for all whom Christ had redeemed’.

But what of material texts? One of the most remarkable objects in the exhibition is a twelfth-century German portable altar, made of porphyry and bound in gold, which contains relics of over forty saints. The names of the saints are written on the underside of the altar, and curators have opened it to reveal the contents: each tiny relic individually wrapped in a piece of silk or linen, and neatly labelled with the name of a saint. Another reliquary, a triptych from Rome commemorating the miraculous mass of St Gregory, opens to reveal a central icon surrounded by many tiny glass-covered compartments, each containing a relic wrapped in cloth accompanied by a fragment of paper again bearing the name of a saint.

The exhibition does not provide any further historical information about these tiny material texts, these faded labels purporting to certify which saints were enclosed within the reliquaries. Relics are traditionally touched and kissed by the faithful, but these labels, hidden or locked behind glass or metal, cannot easily be read, and the reliquaries have to be literally taken apart for them to be deciphered by curators. Ironically, while the relics themselves often seem  dehumanised, as unidentifiable dusty fragments enclosed within dramatically rich containers, these small scraps of handwriting are moving reminders of the human hands which have come into contact with these objects over many hundreds of years.

Treasures of Heaven is at the British Museum until 9 October 2011.