Did the Teutonic Order create a sacred landscape in thirteenth-century Prussia?

This article defines ‘sacred landscape’ as a combination of factors that the two authoritative chroniclers of the crusades in Prussia, Peter of Dusburg and Nicolaus of Jeroschin, present in their texts. These are the intersection of hierophanies (manifestations of the sacred), martyrdom, relic veneration and pilgrimage activities at specific locations over time: connecting them can account for the Teutonic Order’s role in the sacralisation of Prussia. To map the growth of this concept, the article uses Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in combination with textual analysis, providing a visual and spatial representation of the landscape propagated by the Order. The succeeding period of crusades in the Baltic, namely those against Lithuania in the fourteenth century, shows how the places founded during the thirteenth century functioned as pilgrimage centres for knights going toward the frontier. This article considers to what extent the Teutonic Order’s crusades to Prussia in the thirteenth century created a sacred landscape.     

Wanderers in the shadow of the sacred myth: pilgrims in the 21st century

Drawing on qualitative interviews with people journeying to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, this paper examines contemporary forms of pilgrimage. The journeys are found to encompass elements of both pilgrimage and tourism, blending the sacred and the profane. Contemporary pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is shown to be an expression of new forms of spirituality, as well as reflecting the global increase in tourism, rather than as a revival of a traditional religious practice. At one level, the sacred meaning of Santiago de Compostela is thus shifting. A sense of the historical sacredness of the Way persists, however, and this is as an important backdrop for the understanding and experience of the contemporary pilgrim.     

Modern and Medieval Approaches to Pilgrimage,Gender and Sacred Space

This article examines both modern ethnographical, and medieval hagiographical, constructs of sacred space in the context of female pilgrimage. Beginning with an overview of the ways in which anthropological theories of sacred space and gender have informed pilgrimage scholarship over the last fifty years, it focuses in particular on two conceptual models: that which argues that spatial practices employed by cult centres served to distance women from holy places, and that which contends that accommodation was reached between the devotional aspirations of female pilgrims on the one hand, and the institutional policies of the Church on the other. In turning to the Middle Ages, the second part of the article examines narrative representations of sacred space, and reveals that the spatial challenges posed by female pilgrimage in the medieval West were addressed and mediated in hagiography in surprisingly similar ways.     

Rockfort Temple at Tiruchirapalli,India: Conservation of a Sacred Landscape

Sacred sites in India are subject to many development pressures. Unlike heritage monuments, cultural and historic landscapes have not been the focus of institutional protection and preservation efforts. Using Rockfort Temple complex at Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu, as a case study, we propose that an integrated conservation approach be based upon restoring the natural and spatial archetypes that constitute the landscape vocabulary. A group of excavated and structural temples are located on a hill on the banks of the river Kaveri surrounded by a medieval fort that became the nucleus of urban growth over time. Overwhelming growth of commerce within the last half century has resulted in many problems such as traffic congestion, confusing circulation, and visual chaos, which in turn have led to the loss of sanctity. The structure of the pilgrim landscape constituted by circumambulatory paths, tanks and groves, shrines and temples can be clarified and made legible by minor design interventions such as restoring historic buildings, reviving the holy tanks, planting sacred trees, and building rest pavilions along the pilgrim path.     

On the path to oblivion: The pilgrims' declining role in the St. Christopher plays of early and early modern Spain

This article examines the representation of the pilgrim in the corpus of St. Christopher dramas of early and early modern Iberia. The importance of the character's supporting role varies according to the era in which each play is written. At first, in the medieval religious dramas of the Crown of Aragon, the pilgrim not only celebrates St. Christopher's piety and anticipates his meeting with Jesus Christ, but also embodies the sanctity and devotion necessitated of pilgrimage. The pilgrims undergo a transformation in the sixteenth century as they become comic and serve as foils to the protagonist's gravity. On the seventeenth-century secular stage, the representations diverge: they begin with a traditional representation of the pilgrim, but then the figure ultimately disappears as the comedias focus on the later period of St. Christopher's life, the result of a Tridentine directive that refocused the general worship of saints and hagiographical literature.     

Shiʻi Piety and Dynastic Legitimacy: Mashhad under the Early Safavid Shahs

Mashhad, the site in northeastern Iran of the shrine of the eighth Shi?i imam, is arguably one of the largest and wealthiest sacred shrines in the world. The gilded dome over the imam's mausoleum stands amidst an expansive complex of courts, monumental gateways, libraries, museums, guesthouses, and administrative offices that cater to thousands of pilgrims each year. This paper examines the period, under the aegis of the early Safavid shahs, when Mashhad was established as the preeminent Shi?i pilgrimage center in Iran. Appropriating the Timurid ecumenical vision for the shrine, the Safavid shahs refashioned the holy city into a site that celebrated the triumph of Twelver Shi?ism in the Safavid realm and reinforced Safavid claims of legitimacy. While highlighting Shah Tahmasb's personal devotion to Mashhad, and his privileging of the shrine within Safavid sacred topography, the paper focuses on Shah ?Abbas's urban reshaping of Mashhad and the architectural and institutional expansion of the shrine during his reign, thereby enhancing its status as the leading spiritual center in the Safavid empire.     

Remapping land and remaking culture: memory and landscape in 20th-century South Africa

This article considers landscape ideas in relation to culture, language and power. The discussion is placed in the context of current debates – both popular and theological – on the topic of prophets, poets, politics and cultural practice. I argue that over the course of the previous century in South Africa, ideas of landscape have shifted the ways in which language, culture and power found expression. My focus is on the role of key cultural players in remapping land and remaking culture in the region of KwaZulu-Natal. Specifically, I explore the landscape ideas of the prophet Isaiah Shembe, who founded the Nazarite church in 1910, and the romantic poet B.W. Vilakazi. Shembe evoked a sacred landscape marked by holy mountains and other sites of importance connected through the prophet's personal religious journey. This landscape transgressed the boundaries of colonial spatial divisions, and evoked meanings considered subversive by the state. Holy mountains were places of revelation for the prophet; his life and vision were commemorated through annual pilgrimages to the summits. The sacred landscape mapped through the texts and memorial practices of the church drew on biblical, romantic and traditional African ideas. This landscape imagery and the memories it evokes have allowed for the creation of religious community in the context of the hardships, contestations and dispossessions of apartheid rule, and more recently in the uncertainties of the post-apartheid era.     

Liminality Wanted. Liminal landscapes and literary spaces: The Way of St. James

Abstract

The term limen was introduced to anthropological studies following Van Gennep’s theories (1960) about liminality. Among them, Victor and Edith Turner (1978) defined pilgrimage as a liminal experience, as it implies being between two existential levels that, through rituality, favours reflection. In this sense, the case of The Way of St. James (Spain) is an interesting field or research as it is loaded with contemporary meanings. Its landscapes assume the nature of spiritual and therapeutic ones; here, the physical and built environment, social conditions and human perceptions produce an atmosphere favourable to spiritual healing. On the basis of these emotions, liminality is the essence of this pilgrimage experience, not only during the same, but especially afterwards. As a matter of fact, this spiritual journey involves the search for one’s self once back home, thus acting in the process of formation of the individual. Drawing on the need for improving researches on landscape perception approach in tourism studies, we pretend to singularise the pilgrimage landscape from a liminal perspective in order to point out the need for liminality before, during and after the pilgrimage. This is achieved by exploring perceptions and emotions expressed in a corpus of travel literary production. These narrative works are not limited to describe the pilgrimage experiences; rather they make liminality a literary theme to magnify their experiences. As a result, the concept of liminal literary landscape is used to refer to pilgrims’ desire to revive liminality through the pages of travel narratives, in order to continue enjoying these emotions and feelings. These travel narratives are producing new literary modes based on the geographical exploration of the landscapes of The Way in relation to human feelings.     

Pilgrimage,devotional practices and the consumption of sacred places in ancient Egypt and contemporary Syria

Pilgrimages are often messy affairs, not only leaving all sorts of material detritus behind, but also in many cases severely damaging or even destroying the sites that are visited as part of journeys to a sacred place. As such, this immensely popular religious tradition constitutes a social practice that is deeply tied to the landscapes and places that are considered to be holy and thus principally worthy of preservation (at least by many definitions of heritage), but which also in many cases ultimately consumes them over time, sometimes in very direct ways that immediately affect their physical state. This paper explores the contemporary and historical dimensions of this paradox, and considers the wider implications of seemingly destructive uses of sacred space by investigating the social and religious significance of so-called ‘pilgrims’ gouges’ observable at numerous pilgrimage sites in the Eastern Mediterranean. It, thereby, sheds light on the connections between the religious experience of pilgrimage and the material consumption of sacred places by juxtaposing cases from contemporary Islamic Syria and ancient Egypt, providing a long-term perspective on the use and consumption of sacred places. Lastly, it discusses the potential ramifications of the gouges for current approaches to heritage management and conservation.     

Mahishi's rage: Communitas and protest at Sabarimala,Kerala

In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India lifted the ban on females of menstrual age entering the sacred site to Lord Ayyappan at Sabarimala in the Indian state of Kerala. Violent protests, for and against, engulfed Kerala throughout the main festival and pilgrimage season of 2018–19. This article explores the major sociopolitical and cultural forces that underpinned the violent protests at one of India’s (and also the world’s) major centres of religious pilgrimage. The central argument extends Victor Turner’s thesis in The ritual process to show how the dynamics of liminality and communitas created an intense vortex of crisis of potentially sociocultural transformational effect.     

Catharine Macaulay on the Will

Catharine Macaulay's discussion of freedom of the will in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth has received little attention, and what discussion there is attributes a number of different, incompatible views to her. In this paper the account of the nature of freedom of the will that she develops is related to her political aspirations, and the metaphysical position that she adopts is compared to those of John Locke, Samuel Clarke, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, and others. It is argued that although Macaulay's position is ultimately ambiguous, she is most plausibly interpreted as following Locke's discussion of free will in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and of inheriting, from him, the ambiguity that we find in her account.     

The Queen and the City: Royal Female Intervention and Patronage in Hellenistic Civic Communities

In 196 bce , Queen Laodike III issued a decree (I.Iasos 4, I) to Iasos in Caria, Asia Minor, announcing that she was giving the Iasians a ten‐year supply of grain to alleviate their penury after her husband's conquest of their city, and she specified that the grain ought to be sold and the income used to provide dowries for the daughters of poor citizens. This and other donations were part of rebuilding efforts in the wake of military violence by Laodike's husband Antiochos III. For her beneficence, Laodike was honoured by cities with foundations of festivals, priestesses and sacred areas dedicated to preserving her cult. This reciprocity of goodwill was gendered, not only in the establishment of priestesses, but in the nature of the honours given; for example Iasos celebrated Laodike III's birthday with a procession of a maiden priestess and couples who were about to wed (I.Iasos 4, II), and the people of Teos dedicated a fountain in their city centre to Laodike and required that all brides should draw from it the water for their baths (SEG 41, 1003). Laodike's patronage and the cities’ responses to her bring to light the role of female citizens within the structures, perpetuation and ceremonial of the civic body. At the heart of honours given Laodike and her own self‐promotion was the identity of sister and mother, roles shaping her own queenship and the civic participation and power of the women she assisted.     

Pilgrim routes as contested spaces in Norway

Abstract

Many of today’s pilgrim routes are not only conceived of as religious thoroughfares. They are also seen as historical and cultural routes and are embraced by heritage polices and the tourism industry. It follows from this that contemporary pilgrim routes are endowed with many meanings and expectations, both in the public and private spheres. While much research has focused its attention on the diversity of motives, experiences and symbolic meaning processes among those who embark on journeys along pilgrim routes, less attention has been paid to the varieties of stakeholders involved. By exploring how different types of stakeholders engage with a recently reinvented pilgrim route in Norway, it is shown how this route represents a contested space. Among various stakeholders involved in the development and the management of the pilgrimage, as well as stakeholders who take an interest in the material and symbolic benefits one could possibly draw from it, there are disagreements on what kind of heritage pilgrimage should represent. The differing approaches are basically represented by those who want to promote religious motivations, traditionalist outdoor recreation interests and stakeholders who primarily want to develop and market the pilgrim route in a touristic context. While distinctions between categories such as pilgrims and tourists, or vacationers and religious travellers, are becoming more and more blurred, opposing and partly intersecting discourses among stakeholders tend in this case to result in the upholding of these kinds of distinctions. This implies that travellers along pilgrim route are not left to themselves with their experiences and practices. While some stakeholders take an interest in what pilgrims are doing, in the sense that they want to profit from it, others are concerned about questions of whom a pilgrim is and for whom a pilgrim route is for.     

Merchandising and sanctity: the invasive cult of Padre Pio

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the Blessed Padre Pio da Pietrelcina (1887-1968) became a 'saint' of global stature. It is most exceptional for the cult of a saint to acquire such dimensions in so short a time. Further, this is the story not of someone with a modern profile of sanctity,but someone who on the contrary answers to the traditional model of sanctity, and whose cult is moreover characterized by an instrumental devotional repertoire. Despite this 'classic' model, his person and cult are extremely ambiguous. This article describes and analyses the processes which have brought and continue to bring this about, and the recent development of the cult in Italy. By these processes a controversial cult, often associated with anti-ecclesiastical devotional activities and of limited scope, has become one of the most important and irreproachable in Italy. In part through the personal support of Pope John Paul II, in about a decade Padre Pio has grown from a friar in a controversial fundamentalist context to an almost invulnerable national saint, who is beginning to become a part of the Italian identity. The power of his cult is so strong - a devotional avalanche - that it has sidelined other cults, and to an increasingly large degree defines the Italian sacred landscape. The Pio cult encroaches on other devotions, and moreover is becoming its own competitor: to an increasing degree Pio's central pilgrimage site at San Giovanni Rotondo is losing pilgrims to the secondary pilgrimage site at Pietrelcina and to the hundreds of chapels and local shrines that have sprung up the length of Italy.     

Samuel Butler's Sheep

Alice Stopford Green, widow of proto-social and Teutonic nationalist historian J.R. Green, who went on to become an Irish nationalist historian and campaigner, complicates our view of fin-de-siècle women writers. Surprisingly for an amateur historian in an age of professionalization, she took a consciously separatist position, privileging the particular over the general, and defining her writing as both female and Irish.

This article focuses on Stopford Green's 1915 epilogue to her husband's Short History of the English People (1874), and her startlingly anguished periodical article of 1897 from Nineteenth Century, to demonstrate a separatism both bold and self-aware.‘Woman's Place in the World of Letters’ (1897) prefigures Cixous in its call for an écriture feminine. It views women as utterly alien to the established order of this world. Stopford Green at once acquiesces with female essentialisation – ‘woman’ comes in the singular – and undermines it by insisting that woman's true nature is almost never seen. In the ‘Epilogue’ (1915), which updates her husband's narrative to her war-torn present, Stopford Green voices jingoistic rhetoric, but employs unobtrusive asides to distance herself from these calls to imperialism. Through such surreptitious means, she uses her late-husband's popular textbook as the conduit of subversive ideas, both voicing and subverting his English nationalism.     

A Feminist Literary Cartography of the Canadian North: Women,writing and place in Aritha van Herk's Places Far From Ellesmere

This article examines the idea of North in Aritha van Herk's (1990) Places Far From Ellesmere, a feminist rereading of Anna Karenin that is also an exploration of place—Ellesmere Island—and of gender, identity and belonging. I situate my reading of Ellesmere firstly within feminist literary theory, focusing on the concept of intertextuality and on the implications of the concept, from the perspective of feminist theorists, for the acts of writing and reading. I further contextualise van Herk's work by outlining the growing sensitivity to the complexities of writing Canadian space in Canadian literary criticism. The focus then shifts to Ellesmere, beginning with an investigation of van Herk's representational practices and philosophies, which are organised around a critique of the relationship between writing, gender and power. I argue that van Herk's insistence upon the power of feminist textual rereadings, an insistence that results from her aversion to authority, critically shapes her geographical imaginary, and her understanding of North. By extending the text and thereby the practice of reading to geography, van Herk makes possible a feminist representation or rereading of the North that simultaneously contests the conventions of literature, of place and of gender. Ultimately, I argue that it is van Herk's commitment to investigate the processes of representation in which she is engaged that makes her representation of the North such a valuable text for feminist and literary geographers.     

El pulso de Centro América a través de la novela

This article offers a new reading of Miguel de Unamuno's San Manuel Bueno, mártir. Critics have traditionally focused on the question of the protagonist's supposed lack of faith and sought to relate San Manuel's doubts in the novel to Unamuno's own religious views. Although this novel is very much concerned with religion, eschatology, and social issues, it is also an extremely sophisticated literary narration wherein the use of irony and ambiguity remains perhaps unequalled in Spanish contemporary literature. By considering the principles of linguistic pragmatics, this article shows that in her account of San Manuel's life, the female narrator tells the dramatic story of the love she and San Manuel felt for each other. By means of a complex use of ambiguity, Unamuno writes a novel that can be read in two different ways: the religious novel and the love novel.