Marian Cult-sites along the Venetian sea-routes to Holy Land in the Late Middle Ages (original) (raw)
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“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.
MEDIEVAL PILGRIMS FROM EAST ADRIATIC COAST TO TERRA SANCTA AND JERUSALEM
Medieval inhabitants of the East Adriatic cities and towns actively participated in medieval Christian pilgrimages to Terra sancta and Jerusalem. As testified in the sources, in the mid-medieval period pilgrimages to Holy Land were the privilege of highest and most powerful members of East Adriatic societies. Only the wealthiest of the spiritual and lay pilgrims were in position to go on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the most sacred Christian shrine. Yet the early thirteenth century saw the start of a process of democratization, in the sense that, as documented in extant sources, believers from all strata of Eastern Adriatic societies appear as palmarii to Holy Land. In the thirteenth century most pilgrims to Terra sancta were still male and from higher social classes, often participating in crusades as peregrini cruce signati. After the end of the thirteenth century, when the last Christian forts in Palestine fell into the hands of the Saracens, the idea of peregrinatio in subsidium Terre sancte significantly declined, at least among the lay population. During the fourteenth and fifteenth century a new group of pilgrims to the Holy Land appeared more often in sources – women. Until then mobility was almost exclusively associated to men, either clerics or lay figures such as diplomats, soldiers, intellectuals, merchants, artists or artisans. However, from the fourteenth century onwards the number of female pilgrims to the Holy Land significantly increased and, at least as far as the East Adriatic is concerned, female pilgrims to Jerusalem became as numerous as their male contemporaries. A very important factor in the general growth of palmerii from the Eastern Adriatic coast to the Holy Land was convenient geographic position of this region on the main naval routes from Venice to Palestine. There is much written evidence (in diaries, chronicles, traveling accounts) describing ecclesiastical, cultural, intellectual, economic and artistic contacts between European pilgrims and the peoples of the Eastern Adriatic. Such contacts, most often expressed through peaceful communication and through the exchange of constructive ideas, influenced the growth Eastern Adriatic pilgrims to Jerusalem as locus sanctissimus among all Christian shrines.
In this article the authors examine creation and development of the cults of saints in the medieval and early modern communes situated on the East Adriatic shore particularly focusing on influence of Marian cult on pious life of inhabitants of East Adriatic urban settlements. Based on the data from unpublished and published written and visual sources the authors also analyses the creation and increase in popularity of Marian cult from the Early Middle Ages to Renaissance paying particular attention to historical reasons which influenced the flourishing of Marian cult in Istrian and Dalmatian communes in the late medieval Renaissance period. For this purpose the authors examined notary records, chronicles, pilgrim diaries as well as votive images from various Istrian and Dalmatian communes.
The Adriatic Catholic Marian Pilgrimage in Nin near Zadar as a Maritime Pilgrimage
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Following the general approach to pilgrimage as established by anthropologists and other scientists, the paper analyses the pilgrimage in Nin to Our Lady of Zečevo. More specifically, this pilgrimage will be observed as a maritime pilgrimage, following relevant recent research. Based on the oral story about the apparition of Virgin Mary to a widow, the statue of Mary is transported from Nin in a boat procession via sea to a mediaeval church on the nearby uninhabited island of Zečevo. Pilgrimage practices include many sensorial and symbolic practices, so it will be analysed from several points of view and more than one theoretical approach, including the relational approach and mobility turn, applied also to maritime pilgrimage with a reflection on influence of tourism on pilgrimage activities, especially in the Mediterranean. The paper relies on the field research from 2020–2023 in Nin near Zadar in Croatia which has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under th...
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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.
Pictorial Narratives of the Holy Land and the Myth of Venice in the Atrium of San Marco
The Atrium of San Marco in Venice. The Genesis and Medieval Reality of the Genesis Mosaics, edited by Martin Buchsel, Herbert L. Kessler and Rebecca Muller (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2014), 2014
The narrative mosaics of the atrium of San Marco constitute the single most significant addition to the narrative program of the church in the thirteenth century -an Old Testament prelude to the New Testament and hagiographic narratives of the interior. Although considerable research has been devoted to their iconography and the relationship with the late antique Cotton Genesis manuscript, usually attributed to Alexandria or Antinoë, relatively little attention has been given to the broader programme of the atrium. 1 In this paper I explore how the pictorial narratives of the biblical chosen people in the Holy Land contributed to the renewal of the myth of Venice at a time in which the territory of the Middle East and its inhabitants, the Jewish and Muslim peoples descended from the common ancestor Abraham, were a focus of considerable religious and economic interest. 2 The myth of Venice, as elaborated in the eleventh-century Chronicle of John the Deacon, is of a prosperous, harmonious and beautiful city rising out of the chaotic waters of the sea, a city whose success and longevity as a state are ascribed to religious piety and divine protection, and to a stable government, headed by an elected patrician, the Doge, who guaranteed justice and the defense of the republic. 3 It is also a myth of origins, providing a history for a city with a relatively recent past: the islands of the Venetian lagoon were first thought to have been settled by Roman Christians fleeing invading Huns and Lombards in the fifth and sixth centuries; but by the thirteenth century, Venice traced its origins much earlier to the Trojans from the East. The foundation of its Church on the terra firma at Roman Aquileia -Venetia vetuswas traced to Saint Mark the Evangelist, whose relics were translated from Alexandria in Egypt to the New
Shrines and holy Places in Tuscany between Pilgrimage and religious Tourism: the difficult Relationship between Knowledge and Valorisation, Almatourism, “Journal of Tourism, Culture and Territorial Development”, Università di Bologna, (2018), pp. 79-101, 2018
After an introduction to the correct classification of the relationship between knowledge and valorisation as a strategic subject in territorial development policies, the article moves on to talk about the Via Francigena through historical and territorial Italian culture. In the accumulation of successful initiatives not everything has been estimated and minimised, but many occasions have been wasted, beginning with that of a systematic survey of historical testament. The Francigena, the most ancient and important European pilgrim route has frequently facilitated the biggest and most important historical-cultural subject of medieval viability which, for example could include the numerous vie romee. Selections made have eliminated the financial support to the basic research on cultural heritage from which knowledge inexorably derives a non-substitutable foundation for the divulgation and dispersal of knowledge. In the matter of the Tuscany, it would have been possible to highlight, not only the important historical moments of historiography, by to also make the large documentary, literary, artistic and architectural depositories available from the presence of ecclesiastical institutes on a local level. The article develops, deepening the theme of the cult of the Mother of God in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance with relation to narrative tradition, thus recomposing the framework of Marian exaltation to be brought to light and valorised spiritually as well as culturally.