Session Abstract

Early modern Europeans perceived a world suffused with sacred meaning.  While the totality of creation was deemed a testament to God’s power, the landscape they inhabited was characterized by particular spaces, objects, and artifacts invested with holy importance.  Both the locations and the movements of such objects through space were viewed as inscribing on the terrestrial map evidence of providence’s operations.  Accordingly, early modern Europeans struggled to recognize and interpret such objects, motions and places, seeking both to grasp the illumination and the power that would derive from understanding and controlling profound evidence of divine will.   

The papers on this panel examine the processes by which early modern European men and women identified sacred places and objects, developed narratives imputing divine significance to them and their motions, and then used accounts of their movements to reshape or appropriate their significance for specific political, religious, or intellectual positions.    As these papers show, early modern Europeans inherited a wide variety of notions about sacred places and objects from an array of traditions.  While some were deemed holy for their purported connection to scriptural or salvific history, others earned the mantle of the divine for qualities credited by local testimony or hinted at by arcane authorities.    Man-made artifacts and preternatural naturalia alike could be sacralized, and their motions were viewed as revealing in providential, if sometimes inscrutable, evidence of divine significance. 

The invocation of these kinetic narratives ascribing divine significance to specific objects in early modern Europe, moreover, was rarely geared solely towards reinforcing piety or achieving pastoral aims.  Rather, such narratives were often used to intervene in broader debates concerning, for example, local jurisdiction, the secular authority of the church, the intellectual preeminence of theologians and laymen, the significance of modern travels, or the efficacy of modes of healing.  The histories undergirding the special status attributed to such places and objects themselves became terrains for debate, and even when individuals could not control the items or landscapes deemed holy, they sought to mobilize the substantiating narratives to their own specific ends.

The following papers investigate how specific spaces, objects, and motions in early modern Europe deployed the ascription of holy objects-in-motion to assert interpretive or political authority.  Margaret Meserve’s paper shows that the late fifteenth century papacy directed the astonishing mobility of the Virgin’s house to compel assent from recalcitrant subjects and build support for a new Crusade.  Nicholas Popper’s paper argues that sixteenth century explorers sacralized their enterprises by conceptualizing them as re-creating the postdiluvian population of the earth recounted in scripture.  Amanda Herbert’s paper demonstrates that seventeenth century British men and women reconfigured their notions of health and healing through their experiences of pilgrimages to spa towns characterized by intense piety.  Taken together, the papers demonstrate how early modern men and women engaged in a dynamic process of mobilizing the sacred by directing its manifestations to their own ends.