“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)
Related papers
This article explores the Counter-Reformation medievalization of Polish-Lithuanian St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk (1458-84)-whose canonization was only finalized in the seventeenth century-as a case study taking up questions of the reception of cults of medieval saints in post-medieval societies, or in this case the retroactive refashioning into a venerable medieval saint. The article investigates these questions across a transcultural Italo-Baltic context through the activities of principal agents of the saint's re-fashioning as a venerable saint during the late seventeenth century: the Pacowie from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Medici from the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, during a watershed period of Tuscan-Lithuanian bidirectional interest. During this period, the two dynasties were entangled not only by means of the shared division of Jagiellończyk's bodily remains through translatio-the ritual relocation of relics of saints and holy persons-but also self-representational strategies that furthered their religio-political agendas and retroactively constructed their houses' venerable medieval roots back through antiquity. Drawing on distinct genres of textual, visual, and material sources, the article analyzes the Tuscan-Lithuanian refashioning of Kazimierz against a series of precious reliquaries made to translate holy remains between Vilnius and Florence, to offer a contribution to the entangled histories of sanctity, art and material culture, and conceptual geography within the transtemporal and transcultural neocolonial context interconnecting the Middle Ages, Age of Reformations, and the Counter-Reformation between Italy and Baltic Europe.
The proposed paper takes up the issue of questions of 17th-century translatio—the physical transfer of the dead bodies of holy persons in whole or in part(s)—to attend to the movement of relics as inherently ambassadorial objects between Italy and the Habsburg Monarchy territories. It argues that ritual exchanges involving the importing and/or discovery, interchange and dispersion, and re-contextualization and spectacular display of numinous relic-bodies, not only participated vitally in socio-political processes including divisions of power, material and performative representations of hegemony, and reconfigurations of identity and allegiance, but also engendered new information and ideas between the North and the South, and notions of cultural coexistence in relation to the supernatural. The paper plots the perceived conservation crisis in the Catholic Habsburg sphere concerning supernatural resources in the form of relics against the confessional-political crisis manifest in military conflicts.
From the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, the Italian maritime republics of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice were almost constantly at war. In the context of crusade, they led military expeditions against foreign enemies in Spain, the Holy Land, and battled adversaries across the Mediterranean Sea. As crusading ventures lost their efficacy in the thirteenth century, these Italian cities engaged in warfare in the service of trade, fighting for commercial concessions and seizing strategic territories from rivals in order to maximize economic opportunities. In both of these scenarios, plunder played a central role, and though war spoils could take a number of different forms—money, people, merchandise—the warriors from these mercantile cities generally appropriated small-scale luxury objects, i.e. they took things. This paper will explore the reasons behind this emphasis on seizing concrete, tangible objects, arguing that it was the materiality and polyvalence of the spoils that made them so desirable. Their physical presence and beauty made them war trophies worthy of public display, their characterization as a fragment allowed for their incorporation into new, meaningful object collections, and their loss of functionality highlighted their materiality while simultaneously activating their symbolic resonance. Once collected and arranged in a triumphal display, these objects could forge relationships with humans and other objects, shifting in significance and accruing new meanings as war trophies from powerful enemies.
This essay takes up the Italo-Baltic translation of the relic of Polish-Lithuanian prince, St. Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, from Vilnius to Florence as a case study in the cross-cultural portrayal of entangled emotions during the Counter-Reformation. Focusing on Florentine religious culture under Grand Duke Cosimo III, I consider the transcultural reception and recontextualisation of Jagiellończyk's cult, corporeal remains, and the reliquary made to transport, safeguard, and encapsulate his relic. The essay draws on distinct genres of source material to frame the significance of St. Kazimierz as a spiritual martyr and also calls attention to the symbolic materiality of the reliquary made to cultivate shifting emotions as instruments of devotion.
Medieval Worlds. Comparative and interdisciplinary studies, 2021
Between the eighth and ninth centuries many kings, dukes and counts in Carolingian Europe promoted the collection of relics in cathedrals and/or urban foundations both to centralize their power and to increase their prestige. Their ventures were part of a wider framework in which the mobility of the saints’ bodies, which was strictly defined by the Carolingian authorities, put various political and social agents in a relationship, often competitive, with each other. This paper considers two cases of the translation of saints’ bodies at the peripheries of the Carolingian Empire: the furta sacra of St Mark (from Alexandria, Egypt to Venice, 828) and St Bartholomew (from the island of Lipari to Benevento, 838-839). Both the hagiographical traditions narrate the theft and transport of the relics from the Islamic world to the Italian peninsula by boat. These two cases are also both related to a conscious and ambitious plan to strengthen local public authorities. The paper examines the underlying political strategies that led to the mobility of two of the most important relics in the Mediterranean context and the circulation of cultural models from the Carolingian worlds, which relocated the saints’ bodies in order to redefine the political balance.
This preliminary chapter sets forth a prefatory case study on the censure of the early, precocious cult of Jesuit founder and would-be saint Ignatius of Loyola between Rome and Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century. This case serves as an introduction to themes that weave throughout studies in this volume, reflecting on the ways in which chapters take up questions of the making of early modern saints, aspirational saints, and holy persons of the long Catholic Counter-Reformation (c. 1550–800). In particular, this chapter describes the ways in which various authors, drawing on approaches from art, religious, social, and global history, with emphasis on materially and spatially inflected methods, unfold multiple meanings and resonances of the conceptual terms “global” and “material” in the book’s title.
This essay takes the eighteenth-century artistic patronage of the noble Plater family in Krāslava (Pol. Krasław), a private magnate town in Polish Livonia (present-day Latgale, Latvia), an administrative division within the historical territory of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, as a case study to explore multiple modes of artistic migration facilitated by human agents and the agentive properties of objects against the historical backdrop of the Age of Partition (c. 1750-1810). I examine how the Plater by means of migration by proxy and through performative engagement commissioning, collecting and displaying art and architecture constructed a network of monuments and artworks evoking the notion of the Plater as heirs to the glory of Rome, to re-form their dominion as the crossroads of Europe’s Roman Catholic frontier, where the long Counter-Reformation negotiated a complex web of intersecting yet potentially opposed religio-political prerogatives. I argue that these magnates undertook a multifaceted campaign of self-fashioning to realign their interests and re-legitimize their patrimonial hegemonic claims by undertaking the translatio reliquiae (transfer of relics), the ceremonial transfer of holy remains from the Roman catacombs according to venerable Roman Catholic tradition, and appealing to a broader cultural translatio imperii (transfer of rule or empire). Their campaign thematized the temporal passage between ancient and modern and the geographic distance between the Italian and Baltic sphere in a way that reanimated the grandeur of the past and deployed mediated forms of knowledge about its target (Rome) in honor of the illustrious patrons. It also took advantage of the fact that the beleaguered eighteenth-century Holy See sought to reaffirm the papal city as caput mundi, renovate its image as international arbiter of taste and reaffirm the illusion of integral Catholic empire.
This book brings together research drawing on methods from fields in in historical studies—including history of art and architecture, religious history, histoire croisée, transregional history, and object studies—with laboratory and conservation analyses, forensic archaeology, and museum studies, to offer the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary study of relics exchanges between Italy and the Baltic region in the early modern period. The monograph models a polyphonic methodological perspective mobilizing diverse and distinct genres of source materials, including archival documents, devotional literature, relics and reliquaries, works of art and architecture, analyzed across multiple geographic sites. It sheds light on little-known material cultural heritage, in some cases illustrated and published for the first time, and in other cases lost, preserved only in the archival records, but recovered through this publication. The book also underscores underknown or previously undiscovered connections between ostensibly far-flung areas of Europe, highlighting issues of transcultural exchanges in historical perspective.
Means of Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity: Objects, Bodies, and Rituals, K. Doležalová, I. Foletti, K. Kravčíková, P. Tichá (eds.) = Convivium Supplementum, 2022
The idea of displacing bodies or body-parts for the Christian cult of saints and relics represented a fundamental departure from the ancient relationship with bodies and bodily remains. Promoters of the cult in the fourth century, such as Ambrose of Milan, thus had to justify these new practices within a network of rhetorical and material realities, creating an ideological “frame” that mirrored the physical one – the reliquaries housing the relics themselves. Two centuries later, in the age of Gregory of Tours, these accepted practices were reframed in yet another geographical and cultural realm, paving the way for the medieval cult of relics. Against the backdrop of this classical narrative, this article aims to understand the tension between the intellectual and ideal setting of the cult of relics promoted by Ambrose and his circle and its actual material reality and transformations over the two centuries leading up to Gregory’s time. Specifically, the paper focuses on the new practices around martyrs’ relics put into place by the bishop of Milan, and how they spread via the contemporary networks of the ecclesiastic and intellectual elite. Secondly, based on the analysis of selected objects from the fourth-century Italian Peninsula such as the San Nazaro casket and the small capsella at Garlate, as well as on sources describing the performance of relics, the article examines the actual effectiveness of the cult’s material implementation as opposed to its rhetorical framing. Ultimately, it questions the efficacy and longevity of the initial networking promoted by Ambrose, especially when implemented in a place and time where Romanization and Christianization underwent a different set of parameters than in Milan.