Material culture of religion

What is Protestant Art? offers a brief introduction to the field of Protestant visual cul- ture. It argues that the diversity of images and visual practices throughout Protestant history might better be described by the term ‘visual culture’ than the term ‘art.’ Examining images from the Reformation to the twentieth century, this review essay showcases the breadth of ways Protestants have put images to work in their religious practices. Containing dozens of illustrations, What is Protestant Art? provides the reader with an overview of current research on Protestant visual culture, as well as discussions of representative examples from five hundred years of Protestant imagery.

This chapter examines the interactions between of Bibles and comic books/graphic novels in America. It explains how the images of comic book Bibles reveal American Protestants' changing understandings of the religious work of images. It engages comic art from Basil Wolverton, Al Hartley, and E.J. Pace, among others. This chapter was published in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in America (Oxford 2017), a collection edited by Paul Gutjahr.

Visually Dividing the Word of Truth examines the role of vision and images in American Protestant fundamentalism. Paying particular attention to the work of dispensationalist chart maker Clarence Larkin, the chapter argues that fundamentalists apprehended biblical truth through the eyes. Seeing was the sense of certainty. Images facilitated direct and unmediated understanding of the Word of God. This chapter comes from my book project, "The Senses of Fundamentalism: Visual and Material Culture in the Rise of American Conservative Protestantism."

Since about the end of the first third of the Nineteenth Century, it became common in writings about Fiji to refer to the 3- and 4-pronged wooden forks some chiefs and priests used on occasion, as "cannibal forks". This extract from the book "Traditional Fijian Artefacts" rejects this name, and discusses why.

In the year 1176 a dispute erupted over possession of a sacred object known as the Holy Cross of Antioch. Two claimants, the abbey of St. Peter of Brogne and the family of the crusader Manasses of Hierges, argued that they were the rightful heirs of the object. The nature of their claims and the mode of their argumentation, as documented in a lengthy treatise composed in the year 1211, exposes the variety of interpretations of sacred material associated with the crusades. In claiming rightful possession of the object, the monks of Brogne insisted upon their monopoly over the legitimate interpretation of the Holy Cross as a reminder of the body and Passion of Jesus Christ. This article argues, however, that the dispute reveals traces of the family’s vernacular reading of the sacred material of the Holy Cross as a symbol of lordship and chivalric knighthood. This material vernacular was understood and perhaps even deployed by the monks in their subsequent campaign to emphasize the importance of the relic in the first decade of the thirteenth century.

The region of Navarra provides ample opportunities to explore interreligious aesthetics. Made internationally famous by Ernest Hemmingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, and more recently, as one of the most picturesque stages of the popular Camino de Santiago walking pilgrimage, Navarra is located between the French and Spanish provinces of the Basque Country, La Rioja and Aragon. Born during the Reconquista, Navarra was an independent kingdom up to 1512 when it was incorporated into the crown of Castile. Through the modern period it struggled to maintain its own cultural, religious and legal identity within the Spanish Monarchy. In this article we examine the representation and contestation of religions in the artistic and material culture of this province. We do this in order to consider how religious narratives may be expressed and contested by invoking the senses. We focus on examples of Navarran material culture that dispute or support historical narratives relevant to the ongoing identity politics of the regional government, nationalist groups, religious communities and the tourism industry. By considering these examples we make a wider contribution to the theory of interreligious aesthetics, arguing that religious difference is not only symbolically represented in architecture, images, art, and ritual, but can also be its raison d'être.

At a time when natural disasters, disease or even everyday events such as pregnancy could turn the devotee’s world upside down, religious objects were cherished not only for their sacred value but also for their healing and protective powers. This paper will investigate the portable devotional objects listed in Margherita of Austria’s 1586 post-mortem inventory from her home in Ortona, a small town in the Kingdom of Naples, and thus shed light on her relationship with such objects in the intimacy of her own home. Combining archival and material sources, it will explore what Margherita owned, how she engaged with it and also examine those who had given her such a wide variety of ‘things’. By doing so, this paper will show that, just as official religion was not the exclusive preserve of the élite, nor were superstitious beliefs reserved for uneducated men and women.

VI Seminario de Arte y Cultura en la Corte. Redes artísticas, circulación y exposición de reliquias en el Mundo Hispánico Dra. Emily C. Floyd University College London "Santos de papel y de hueso: Una aproximación hacia la lógica paralela de las reliquias y los grabados" En la geografía de la Sudamérica virreinal, las crónicas hagiográficas de santos y beatos locales relatan los milagros obrados por objetos de distintas naturalezas, como huesos o rosarios, elementos relacionados de alguna manera con el cuerpo o aspecto del personaje santificado. Diversas fuentes consultadas enfatizan el poder de dichos elementos, los cuales son denominados reliquias. El uso actual del término reliquia hace referencia a fragmentos corporales de la persona santificada, los cuales comprenden desde dedos hasta corazones, cabezas o cuerpos enteros. Sin embargo, en los documentos virreinales, no solo los pedazos del cuerpo tenían el poder de obrar milagros. Los trozos de tela del hábito del difunto, los rosarios tocados a su cadáver y sus imágenes, en particular los grabados que representan su "verdadero retrato", tenían la capacidad de transmitir el poder del santo. La relación entre el grabado y el fragmento corporal del santo y su mutua capacidad para comunicar el poder del difunto celestial a beneficio de sus devotos se extiende de esta manera no solo a su función, sino también a su naturaleza como objeto. Ambos implican la impresión de una matriz sobre un material que, como resultado, se entendía como un vestigio del santo. En el caso del grabado en cobre, las tallas en madera o las impresiones en papel, el poder espiritual del individuo traspasaba a las reliquias que funcionaban como vehículos de su poder. Esta ponencia analizará la función complementaria que existía entre reliquias y grabados en la Sudamérica virreinal teniendo como base diversos documentos coloniales y un estudio pormenorizado de los grabados de época.

Using the large collection of crusader coins at the Museum of the Order of St. John as a starting point, this paper explores some of the non-monetary roles that coins played in the crusading world. A significant number show evidence of secondary use, with some being pierced for suspension to be used as items of jewelry. Through this transformation such coins would have lost their monetary value but would have gained new values that were just as powerful. These coins were probably worn as amulets, their effectiveness and power being aided by the materiality, function, and iconography of the coins themselves. This paper argues that in being worn, held, and touched, these repurposed coins were used by individuals in their everyday experience and expression of belief within the changing sociopolitical landscape of the Latin East.

During the tumultuous Epiclassic period (AD 600-900), several smaller polities in Central Mexico and the Gulf Coast rose to prominence in the wake of the collapsed metropolis of Teotihuacan. Although this period is often characterized by rampant militarism, wide-ranging economic activities, and eclectic monumental art programs that incorporate foreign styles, few studies have considered the role that religious ideology played in these phenomena. Flower World imagery is prevalent in the monumental and portable artwork of Cacaxtla, Xochicalco, Teotenango, and other Epiclassic polities. While beliefs pertaining to a solar paradise inhabited by the souls of deceased warriors were inherited from Teotihuacan, Epiclassic elites adapted and modified aspects of the Flower World complex to suit new political and economic strategies. The Epiclassic Flower World complex valorized warfare and linked elites through shared ritual practice, identity, and exchange of exotic prestige goods.

Elizabethan churches were often fitted with clear glass windows, illuminating the sacred space to be illuminated and providing light to read the Bible by. During James I’s reign, new stained-glass windows began appearing in churches, chapels and cathedrals in spectacular colours, enabled both by advances in technology and by shifting views on the role of images in worship. In George Herbert’s “Love-Joy” the speaker meditates on the letters “JC” annealed on a bunch of grapes in a stained-glass window. Similarly, in John Donne’s “A Valediction on my name, in the Window” he references the early modern practice of scratching words and images in windows, often using a writing ring with a high point. I contend that these poems are more than whimsy. They are remnants of an important part of early modern writing culture, now often overlooked and veiled, in which buildings, objects, walls and windows were used as writing surfaces, carrying with them their own formal expectations and customs.
In both poems, the medium of glass is used as a means for exploring the relationship between bodies and names, words and memory. An image inscribed in a window is at once seen and seen through, whilst the window can act as both a mirror and an opening to the outside world. In this paper, I place these poems in the context of contemporary debates regarding images in the early modern church to examine how Hebert and Donne variously draw on this material reality to explore the place of the preacher and worshipper’s body in devotion.

Chapter from The Great Irish Famine: Visual and Material Cultures, edited by Marguérite Corporaal et. al., Liverpool University Press 2018. It examines the visual and material culture of Irish Catholicism in relation to system, affect and display through addressing liturgical objects, religious images and public ritual, mobilising the political theology of Giorgio Agamben.

The intellectual and theological bases for the hermeneutics of Augustine, Erasmus, and Luther have been well documented, but little attention has been given to the additional influence of the Bible as they knew it as a material entity with its own history. Interpretation begins with a definite idea of what it is that’s being interpreted, and this idea is affected by what I am calling the material condition of the text. By material condition, I mean whatever the interpreter has observed, experienced, and otherwise believes or assumes about the text as a physical entity that is subject to change over time. This includes the specific forms or media in which texts are made available. Other considerations about the provenance and reliability of the text that we now regard as text-critical issues are also important. Since a great deal is known about what Augustine, Erasmus, and Luther read and how they read, they are especially good examples of how interpretation is responsive to the material conditions of texts. Specifically, I want to suggest that their views of spiritual or allegorical exegesis have much to do with the ways in which they experienced and conceived of the Christian scriptures as a material entity.

Tibetan Buddhist practices include the engagement with Buddhist script in the form of tightly packed scrolls of paper that are placed in drums and spun in order to accumulate merit. On the scrolls are written or printed mantras (sacred or magic sounds in the form of a series of syllables) or dhāraṇīs (formula condensing lengthy texts or teachings). The receptacles containing such scrolls are the iconic prayer wheels, whose materiality enables and restricts particular modes of textual engagement. What kind of texts are these scrolls? How does one read texts that come in the form of tightly packed scrolls? They cannot be read by immersing oneself in the content of the text because its materiality restricts access to it. Instead it fits perfectly with the prayer wheel technology that allows circumambulatory recitation, the article argues.
The prayer wheel is not only an important object in recitation practices for Tibetan Buddhists, but has also become a key marker of Tibetan identity. Yet its history, culture and practice have received very little scholarly attention. This article attempts to eradicate this blind spot. It endeavors to show how the prayer wheel has earned itself its iconic status by explaining how the prayer wheel is a receptacle of sacred script and a devise for reciting sacred script. The article zooms in on (i) the cult of the book in the Tibetan culture sphere, (ii) the technology of prayer wheels; and (iii) the recurring tropes of the wheel, circumambulation, and rotation in Buddhism, as well as the merit connected with them. In view of this particular constellation of book cult, technology, and dominant trope, it makes sense that, first of all, Tibetan Buddhists have adopted and further developed a technology that optimizes interaction with sacred script; secondly, that rotation is considered an adequate way to interact with Buddha’s doctrine; and third, that this devise has become an icon for the Tibetan civilization. It is especially the sacred text within the wheel, the article argues, that endows the prayer wheel with high status in a hierarchy of Buddhist material objects. Finally, this raises questions about modernised prayer wheels – when technological progress has enabled further development of devises that can contain and spin Buddhist script such as optic discs, prayer wheel apps, and automised praying machines. How does their materiality impact textual engagement?
The article is based upon data produced through (i) ethnographic inquiry, such as interacting with the stakeholders who deal with Buddhist material culture for different reasons, eg. producers, marketers, ritual specialists, practitioners, and consumers, and (ii) textual sources that includes Tibetan and English-language scholarship, catalogues, user’s guides, and marketing material. This multi-modal method has produced knowledge about the prayer wheel as practice, i.e. what we can call popular religion, and as theory, i.e. according to how the prayer wheel is idealised in the writings of Buddhist masters.