"Famous With Her Footsteps": Place, Proof, and the Holy House in England, Italy, and Scotland, 1450-1650

Abstract

The final collapse of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem effectively ended Christian control of the holy places of the Levant. Shortly after 1291, replicas of sacred buildings and spaces proliferated throughout Europe, making possible substitute pilgrimages for people unable to access the original sites. This dissertation explores how one such building, the Holy House of Nazareth, alleged to be the place where the Angel Gabriel visited the Virgin Mary, traveled to Europe. Walsingham, England, held a replica of the Holy House, while a sister cult in Loreto, Italy, claimed to have the original building, miraculously transported from the East. Scholars have argued that believing that the Holy House had relocated to Europe eased the sorrow of losing the holy places of the Levant; this study contends that those relocations engendered a new set of anxieties based around authenticating, protecting, and securing access to the fabric of the European sites. Walsingham, Loreto, and the Loreto daughter chapels of England and Scotland, this study argues, each had to be authenticated as replica or relic; however, those authentications were impermanent and needed to be repeated, changing over time and because of conflicts between religious orders and across confessional lines. To substantiate these claims, this study employs a variety of textural sources alongside material evidence, in particular the souvenirs produced by the Holy House cults. Such ephemera demonstrates that ordinary pilgrims desired to possess the fabric of the shrines, not only, as scholars of pilgrimage have contended, for the houses’ miracle-working power, but also because lay people understood and wanted to participate in the ongoing authenticating process. Moreover, even as the European Holy House cults flourished, pilgrimage to the original site at Nazareth continued. This study surveys pilgrimage narratives to argue that while identification of the Loreto house as a translated relic remained surprisingly ambiguous for many Catholics, Protestants used it to advance their reformist agendas. Further, Catholics used Loreto to defend pilgrimage from Protestant critiques by demonstrating the practice’s potential for quasi-scientific discovery. This dissertation thus argues that authentication in the late medieval and early modern period was a creative, evolving process, but one that, for the sites considered here, continued to require access to the Levant, both the idea of the Holy Land and its actual material fabric. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to scholarly understanding of how place and proof functioned in the mentalities and devotional practices of European Christians in the two centuries around the Reformation.