To kneel or not to kneel? The dos, the don’ts, and the fear of Catholic contamination for Swedish 17th century travellers to Italy (original) (raw)
Related papers
static, 2024
I want to show how pilgrimage to the Holy Land helped mitigate Europeans’ fear of the Turks and the Ottoman world. Especially the accounts of the Holy Land produced between the 16th and 17th centuries are valuable testimonies that show us not only a real journey, but an inner journey as well. These accounts reveal how fragile the popular imaginary was, made up of the pilgrims’ own fears, highlighting the dynamics of cultural disconnections and reconnections, especially between Italian-Christian and Ottoman- Islamic popular culture. Starting with the European popular context, I will show the common imaginary of ‘the Turk’ and how pilgrimage, along with other factors, eased collective fears.
Annali on Line dell'Università di Ferrara. Sezione di Lettere, 2015
In the late middle ages, hundreds of pilgrims set sail from Venice to the Holy Land. Holy Places pilgrimages were for Jerusalem and the whole region (Jaffa, Bethlehem, the Jordan river) an important source of income. In Jaffa, pilgrims were controlled by officers with standard procedures, to collect due payments, prevent them from conducting espionage activity, or from getting out of the control of the mandatory guides, putting at risk their own safety. This paper deals with a little-known aspect of the medieval pilgrimage to the holy land: the disguise strategies adopted by pilgrims, in order not to be ripped off, or to pay high tolls.
Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol. 38, No. 2, 221–250., 2023
The Roman aristocrat Pietro Della Valle, who defined himself as a pilgrim and as a citizen of the world, can stand as a paradigmatic case of the emergence of the modern curious traveller out of a religious tradition of pilgrimage. Della Valle did indeed travel to the Holy Land as a pious Catholic, in the second decade of the seventeenth century. However, his pilgrimage was from the start conditioned by antiquarian and romantic concerns, and he eventually extended his journey beyond Ottoman lands towards Persia and India. This article will elucidate how the pilgrim fashioned and transformed himself around a multi-faceted idea of travel in his letters at different stages of his journey, and as a member of a learned academy upon his return to Italy. Looking back at his visit to the Holy Land as part of a project of aristocratic selffashioning, it will argue that the transformation of a religious pilgrimage into a complex experience involving religious and political schemes, antiquarian erudition and love did not open a chasm between piety and worldly learning, but instead widened the scope of curiosity in more exotic and cosmopolitan directions. The case exemplifies how early modern European Christian identities, in this respect often at odds with late antique and early medieval antecedents, were frequently built around the idea that religion and knowledge of the world were largely complementary, in a manner that facilitated new attitudes of cultural accommodation that placed increasing emphasis on the universality of learned civility over strictly religious experiences.
Vestiti a la morescha: Pilgrims in disguise in late Medieval Accounts
2016
In the late middle ages, hundreds of pilgrims set sail from Venice to the Holy Land. Holy Places pilgrimages were for Jerusalem and the whole region (Jaffa, Bethlehem, the Jordan river) an important source of income. In Jaffa, pilgrims were controlled by officers with standard procedures, to collect due payments, prevent them from conducting espionage activity, or from getting out of the control of the mandatory guides, putting at risk their own safety. This paper deals with a little-known aspect of the medieval pilgrimage to the holy land: the disguise strategies adopted by pilgrims, in order not to be ripped off, or to pay high tolls.
“Guarda che quel Christo, come è magro”: Migrations of the Holy in the Venetian Bay of Kotor
Migrations in Visual Art, Editors: Jelena Erdeljan, Martin Germ, Ivana Prijatelj Pavičić, Marina Vicelja Matijašić, 2018
In her highly influential article Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2014), Alexandra Walsham poses challenging questions regarding the ways in which historical development is conceptualized and explained. This provocative call implies awareness of constant tension between a decisive moment of change, such as the Reformation, and "ambiguities, anomalies and ironies" that followed it in practice. 2 The aim of this paper is to examine the ways in which transition between medieval and early modern attitudes towards the sacred body was experienced by the 17 th and 18 th centuries' believers in the Bay of Kotor. During this dynamic period of Venetian government most churches in the Bay were redecorated with new, Baroque artefacts, used together with the ones dating back from previous centuries. This change, although thoroughly explained from the angle of style and iconography, proved to be more complex seen through the eyes of contemporary citizens of the Bay.
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History, 2014
After decades of neglect, sacred space has become a popular field of research in the past few years. In the course of a spatial turn in the humanities, historians have started to study space, including the interior of churches, as constituted by action within it. 1 At the same time, the collaboration with art historians has brought the decoration of churches and their transformations during the early modern period to the attention of historians who, thanks to another turn, had only recently become receptive to images as objects of study. 2 As a result, traditional notions of a destruction of the sanctity of space during the Reformation on the one hand and the restoration or preservation of sacred space in the Counter-Reformation on the other have been called into question. 3 In particular, recent studies have uncovered the complexity of Lutheran conceptions of sacred space, encompassing processes of both secularization and sacralization, which manifested themselves in the preservation of medieval works of art, in the installation of new images in Lutheran * I wish to thank Renate Dürr, Fabian Fechner, Susanne Junk, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Herman Roodenburg, and the ARG's anonymous reader for their helpful comments and Laura Melkonian for her proofreading as a native speaker.
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.
POST-REFORMATION CHRISTIAN PILGRIMAGE AND THE GLOBALIZATION OF SENTIMENT
Theoforum, 2018
Changes to post-Reformation European pilgrimage as it was variously abandoned, revived, and transformed, are indicative of the wider changes that happened to western society. Pilgrimages are useful examples for understanding the relationship between the sixteenth-century Reformations , and, eventually, those forces which resulted in globalization. The decline of pilgrimage, especially in Protestant areas, helped lead to the emergence of tourism as a separate, identifiable, and eventually globalizing, phenomenon. Whether for contemporary bus pilgrims going to a healing shrine like at Lourdes, or long-distance walkers seeking experience and authenticity , this short study of pilgrimage proposes that the changes to pilgrimage highlight the effects of the Romantic era. RÉSUMÉ : Les changements que subit le pèlerinage chrétien en Europe après la Réforme, alors qu'il fut tantôt abandonné, tantôt rétabli, tantôt trans-formé, sont symptomatiques des changements plus vastes qui touchèrent la société occidentale. Les pèlerinages peuvent aider à comprendre le rapport entre les Réformes du seizième siècle et les forces qui aboutirent finalement à la globalisation. Le déclin du pèlerinage, particulièrement dans les régions protestantes, contribua à l'émergence du tourisme comme phénomène distinct , identifiable et éventuellement globalisant. Qu'il s'agisse des pèlerins d'aujourd'hui qui se rendent en autobus à un sanctuaire de guérison tel que Lourdes ou de grands marcheurs à la recherche d'expérience et d'authenti-cité, cette brève étude propose que les mutations du pèlerinage illustrent les effets de l'ère romantique.