Objects of Devotion

Historians of the late medieval and early modern period have created an antithesis between spiritual (inward) and physical (outward) devotion, branding the latter as superficial, ritualistic and mechanistic. More generally, from the first Protestant historians to Max Weber and his followers, the Reformation has come to be represented as the classic watershed between material, magical devotion and spiritual, rational belief. In a similar vein, art historians have opposed the notion of the medieval cult image, material and functional, to the early modern work of art, subject to aesthetic regard. Yet, does it make sense to distinguish between late medieval and early modern religious culture, given the fact that the definitions and boundaries of these periods are notoriously problematic and considerably overlap?

This volume shows how in early modern Europe religious ideas and practice were realized through interaction with objects that were both functional and aesthetic and how the presence of sculptures, paintings, books, and church furniture—their visibility, tactility, and materiality—helped form attitudes toward devotion, sacred history, and salvation.

Introduction
Ethan Matt Kavaler & Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

Part 1: Touching Things

Touching Rosary Manuscripts: How Patterns of Wear Reveal Devotional Handling Practices in Two Late Medieval Manuscripts
Kathryn M. Rudy

Along the Lines: Folds and Pleats as Evidence of Devotional Use of an Amulet Sheet (Princeton MS 235)
Marie Hartmann

Devotion Made Miniature: Small-Scale Religious Sculpture in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries
Elizabeth Rice Mattison

Part 2: Living Sculpture

In the Beginning Was the Wood: The Altarpiece to the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin in Kalkar
Ethan Matt Kavaler

Lamentations over the Dead Christ: Emotional Expression, Affective Piety, and the Flagellants
Isabelle Frank

Misbehaving with Italian Renaissance Devotional Sculpture: Pygmalion’s Legacy
Una Roman D’Elia

Part 3: Framing the Sacred

Civic Identity Machines: The Relic Houses of Dortmund, Werl, and Unna
Achim Timmermann

Presence and Proximity: The Candelabrum of the Order of the Golden Fleece
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene

Part 4: Reformations

The Arma Christi in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic: A Calvinist Afterlife
Herman Roodenburg

The ‘Ornamentalisation’ of the Ornamenta Sacra in the Early Modern Low Countries
Ralph Dekoninck and Caroline Heering

The Afterlife of Medieval Tabernacle Shrines in Scandinavia
Justin Kroesen