Traite des reliques

John Calvin's Traite des reliques, published in 1543, is a primary polemical text. Its strength is that it is hostile testimony from a contemporary who catalogued specific relics venerated across Europe, useful as a record of what was actually being claimed and displayed, including his famous argument that the surviving fragments of the True Cross alone would fill a ship. Its limit is that Calvin wrote it as a Protestant attack on the practice, not as neutral documentation, so its polemical purpose has to be weighed alongside its evidentiary content.