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## The Relic Trade and Its Discontents
The Beethoven hair story is one instance of a broader phenomenon: the long human history of preserving and venerating the biological material of the famous.
The practice has roots in religious tradition. Christian relics—the bones, hair, clothing, and associated objects of saints—were among the most significant objects of devotion in medieval Europe. Pilgrims traveled enormous distances to visit the shrine of a saint and to pray in proximity to the saint’s physical remains. Relics were bought and sold, stolen, forged, and disputed. The trade in relics generated both immense piety and considerable fraud.
The secular version of this practice, which flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, applied similar logic to the famous and talented rather than the holy. A lock of Napoleon’s hair, a fragment of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, a piece of Mozart’s clothing—these objects were sought and preserved by people who believed that proximity to greatness was itself meaningful, that something of the original person inhered in the physical object. The logic was not always explicitly articulated, but it operated consistently: famous people’s things were valuable not merely as historical artifacts but as tokens of some essential connection to their original owner.
For hair specifically, the practice was also deeply personal and emotional in a way that had nothing to do with fame. Nineteenth-century mourning customs included the cutting and preserving of hair from deceased loved ones—parents kept locks of their children’s hair, spouses kept locks of their partners’, and these keepsakes served as physical reminders of the absent. The line between the mourning lock and the celebrity lock was thin and was frequently crossed: musicians and artists who died young and were mourned by large publics had their hair cut by friends, family, and people who had known them only slightly, as much out of grief as out of the desire for a famous relic.