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Just beyond the north transept, flanking the choir, the cathedral treasury is displayed in the Flamboyant Gothic Chapelle du Saint Sacrement de Miracle , named after a shameful anti-Semitic legend whose key components were repeated again and again across medieval Christendom. Dating back to the 1360s, this particular version begins with a Jew from a small Flemish town stealing the consecrated Host from his local church. Shortly afterwards, he is murdered in a brawl and his wife moves to Brussels, taking the Host with her. The woman then presents the Host at the synagogue on Good Friday and her fellow Jews stab it with daggers, whereupon it starts to bleed. Terrified, the Jews disperse and the woman tries to save her soul by giving the Host to the city's cathedral - hence this chapel which was built to display the retrieved Host in the 1530s. The four stained-glass windows of the chapel retell the tale, a strip cartoon that unfolds above representations of the aristocrats who paid for the windows. The workmanship is delightful - based on designs by van Orley and his one-time apprentice Michiel van Coxie (1499-1592) - but the effects of this unsavoury legend on the congregation are not hard to imagine. The treasury ( Le tresor ) itself holds a fairly predictable collection of monstrances and reliquaries, but there is a splendid Anglo-Saxon reliquary of the True Cross (Item 5) and a flowing altar painting, The Legend of Ste Gudule , by Michiel van Coxie (Item 3). Coxie spent much of his long life churning out religious paintings in the High Renaissance style he picked up when he visited Italy early in his career. Behind the chapel's high altar, which carries a routine nineteenth-century painting of the Adoration of the Sacrament , look out also for the more-than-usually ghoulish skull of St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231). In her short life, this Hungarian princess managed to squeeze in just about everything you need to get canonised. She was a faithful wife (whose husband died on a Crusade), a devoted mother, and a loyal servant of the church, renouncing the world to become a nun and devote herself to the care of the poor and sick.
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