The Holy House and Its Wondrous Flight: The Papacy, the Loreto Cult, and the Press in the Roman Renaissance

The Virgin’s House took flight from Nazareth in the year 1291, carried by angels first to Croatia and then to the laurel groves of Loreto in northeastern Italy. Or so later tradition held. Though documents record a shrine to the Virgin at Loreto as early as the twelfth century, the first mention of the holy house and its miraculous flight did not appear till about the year 1470, when Pietro di Giorgio Tolomei composed a brief account of the house and its epic wanderings about the Adriatic littoral. Tolomei’s text became an early modern bestseller, appearing in nearly 25 editions (including Italian and German translations) over the next thirty years, while the cult of Loreto grew into an international phenomenon that quickly fell under papal control. This paper examines the wandering Holy House as a phenomenon both religious and political. Its cult illustrates a late medieval fascination with relics redeemed from Islamic captivity – refugee relics like the head of St. Andrew, the Holy Lance, and countless fragments of the True Cross. But interest in the house was neither entirely spontaneous nor entirely popular in its orientation. Successive popes from Sixtus IV to his nephew Julius II moved to appropriate and exploit the cult for their broader domestic and foreign agendas, aimed at maintaining control over the northern papal states and launching a new crusade against the Turks. The popes deployed the Holy House in these political campaigns through a variety of media including bulls, briefs, indulgences, orations, ecclesiastical foundations, liturgies, urban theater, and the new technology of the printing press. As the Holy House wandered through the air, over the sea, down to Rome, and into print, it served as a focal point for religious devotion and ethnic anxiety, papal grandiosity and authorial display.