“Un mistico Armellino: Saint’s relics, animal fur, and slaves between the Lithuanian and Tuscan Grand Duchies,” in Counter-Reformation Sanctity in Global and Material Perspective, ed. R. S. Noyes. New York: Routledge, 2024, 40-64. (original) (raw)

This chapter argues for a more integrated material anthropology of sanctity and more inclusive cultural geography of Counter-Reformation Europe, re-evaluating conventional understandings of cultural dynamics between Italy and the Baltic region specifically, and perceived centers and their purported peripheries more broadly. This study also addresses questions of how hagiography studies after the material and spatial turns can contribute to ongoing discussions across fields which center around productively problematizing notions of canonicity, de-colonizing early modern histories (including those of Europe), and recovering previously marginalized or even silenced subjectivities. These methodological questions are framed by means of a case study in the seventeenth-century manufacture and exchange of relics, reliquaries, and other luxury objects between the noble Medici and Pacowie families, who represented the Grand Duchies of Tuscany and Lithuania, respectively. What follows explores ways in which period notions of sanctity associated with northeastern Europe were entangled with practices of enslavement and unfreedom that tethered the Baltic region to Italy for centuries.