Cult, Culture, Customs: Narrating religious otherness during times of migrations in Early Modern Europe. Presentation at the Migration(s) conference at University of Maryland, November 10-11 2017. (original) (raw)

What challenges and opportunities do migrations bring to the self-conception and the established narratives on the identity and religion of a society? Addressing the formulation in the call, this paper aims to highlight and discuss the shifting Early Modern narratives on religions and religious practices, objects, and identity, by exploring presentations adapted to foreigners in Catholic Europe, and in particular Rome and Venice. The heterogeneous visitors here are not part of a huge migration, and rarely members of an expat community manners, and networks. However, the need to explain and simplify not least the religious identity of a place, to make it comprehensible and non-offensive to the foreigner's beholding eye, appears to be the same regardless of the beholder's status. Religious identity (or identities) after mid 16 th and through 17 th century in Catholic Europe was communicated in part through collections, public feasts, displays, and a growing number of guidebooks directed to foreigners. The guidebooks, with Rome and Venice as examples, demonstrate a shift from a normative understanding of visitors as Catholic pilgrims, to one of a heterogeneous flow of people with various religions and backgrounds. Foreigners also caused disturbance: Lutherans eating meat on Fridays, Protestants at a church celebration preventing a miracle from taking place by their mere presence, or Catholics mocking Lutheran books displayed to a group of foreign visitors in the Vatican Library. The increasing diversity in religious beliefs, customs, and norms in Early Modern Europe appears to have created turbulence, but also creative ways to deal with difference. By presenting examples on new displays and narratives about otherness, for the imagined Other, I hope to bring forth glimpses of fear, curiosity, estrangement and encounters across boundaries which might give some perspectives also on our world today.