This essay examines mass castration allegations within the North Indian guru movement Dera Sacha Sauda. Drawing on court records, public commentary, and prior fieldwork, it traces how surgical procedures served as a mechanism of enforced proximity an...
This article examines the Christological implications of Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. After exploring the biblical significance of the heart, it provides an overview of the development of Sacred Heart devotion in Catholic history....
Devotions in the Ancient Way of Offices was first published as a Catholic primer for worship between intimates, then reformed for individual Protestant worship, and then reformed again for Protestant worship between intimates. Each adaptation engages...
Continuing the long tradition of the allegorical interpretation of the Mass, the seventeenth- and eighteenth century ideal of proper mass attendance was devotion to the suffering Christ, inextricably linked to each step of the liturgy. In this articl...
This article will discuss domestic devotions by framing them in terms of devotions carried out in the home, defined by its opposition to ecclesiastical, consecrated space. It will examine how women, considered the laity par excellence through their i...
Early modern engravings of the tattooed arms of pilgrims such as Ratger Stubbe and Otto Friedrich von der Gröben preserve rare visual evidence of a devotional tradition whose origins lie in medieval pilgrimage to Jerusalem. While these tattoos h...
This paper interrogates familial devotion and its relationship with parts of the house other than the chapel. In detail, it aims to problematize the issue of the devotional/non-devotional use of paintings inside the house by moving the focus from thi...
Julian of Norwich’s performance within her longer Revelations of Divine Love involves layers of authorizing and devotional steps that frame it as a gift for her community. She presents herself not as an author, but as a revelator, in step with...
Scholars have identified Muslims’ religiosity and faith practices, often believed to be more intense than those of other religious groups, as a point of friction in liberal democracies. We use computer-assisted methods of lexical sentiment anal...
This paper critically explores Kṛṣṇanāṭṭam, a Sanskrit ritual dance-theater tradition from Kerala, as a product of socio-political and religious transformations in early modern South India. Conceived in the mid-17th...
This article argues that “compassion” in the worship of Guanyin in metropolitan Bangkok is not an unchanging category as one might assume, but a religious construction generated by the dialectic of devotion, images, and the urban religiou...
This article considers the major cycles of illumination in two Books of Hours belonging to Thomas Butler, seventh Earl of Ormond (c.1424–1515). The article concludes that the iconography of the two manuscripts reflects the personal and familial...
The central premise of this article is that narrative literature from premodern India can give us insights into the ways that sovereignty was conceptualized within broader cosmological structures, creating what has been called “political theology” in...
A late medieval paper amulet containing prayers to St. Dorothy and the Holy Cross was found in a demolished part of a medieval wooden stave church in Torpo, Norway. This article examines the content and the function of this textual amulet by placing...
From the early studies of Tancred Borenius (1885–1948) to the present, the iconography of the archbishop Thomas Becket has drawn attention among scholars. Numerous studies have been published on the representation of Becket’s martyrdom in...
In the early 1470s, Venetian artist Gentile Bellini painted Basilios Bessarion kneeling in front of the precious Byzantine reliquary that Bessarion donated to the Venetian Scuola di Santa Maria della Carità. This painting functioned as the cov...
Common sense tells us that feeling love involves loving another as another and is not merely an accident of self-love, while the Sanskrit theory of rasa aesthetics tells us that genuine love must be returned. God’s love for humanity would not r...
This article presents the Hungarian manifestations of a written devotional practice that emerged in the second half of the 20th century worldwide: the rite of writing prayers in guestbooks or visitors’ books and spontaneously leaving prayer slips in...
The purpose of this article is to study domestic devotion in Catalonia in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, based on the information provided by numerous post-mortem inventories and texts written by coetaneous spiritual authors such...
Despite is global popularity in recent decades, the Divine Mercy devotion has received scant scrutiny from scholars. This article examines its historical development and evolving appeal, with an eye toward how this nuances our understanding of Cathol...
Tracing the devotional beliefs and practices of everyday people during the late Middle Ages through documents is tricky, as most were written with other purposes in mind. To make up for this, it is necessary to examine the abundant material culture t...
This article concerns nōsatsu, also known in Japanese as senjafuda and generally known as “votive slips” in English. Nōsatsu emerged in the 18th century out of popular practices related to pilgrimage in the city of Edo. Nōs...
For a long time, historiography has considered the political thought of the dévot party, led by Mathieu de Morgues and Michel de Marillac, to be supportive of a traditional monarchy, Catholicism and the extermination of Protestants, while being oppos...
Performance has long been recognized to be a meaningful component in the worship of the Jina. This paper will focus on a particular aspect of devotional performance and historicize the phenomenon of ritual re-enactment of the Jina’s biography,...
I explore how devotion (mos gus) is re-interpreted as non-dual and non-conceptual through Mahāyoga tantric creation (skyed) and completion (rdzogs) stage practices as an expression of the ground (bzhi) for Longchenpa (klong chen rab ‘byams, 130...
The ferry from Havana to Regla, Cuba, transports visitors from today’s cruise ship docks across a brief stretch of water in about 20 min. Despite its brevity, this watery passage symbolically foregrounds the Marian devotion on the southern rim...
This study identified the relationship between preoccupation with devotional songs and spiritual well-being of religious individuals, and examined the mediating effect of intrinsic religiosity on preoccupation with devotional songs and spiritual well...
The body and blood of Christ are essential to Christian liturgy and passion devotion. In medieval devotional books, this came to the fore in an overtly material way. The skin of the pages, the red ink, the words, and the images constituted more than...
Sculpted representations of the Passion of Christ became widely used for popular religious devotion in Portuguese America. They comprise a variety of forms, since the Passion had so many episodes, and thus necessitated various bodily positions for Ch...
This paper studies complex narratives connecting the Hindu deity Krishna, his melodious flute, and the porous, sonic human body in the popular devotional sect, Bengal Vaishnavism. From the devotee–lover responding to Krishna’s flute call outside, env...
Focussing on the response to the Vatican Pietà and perversely using as a point of departure a 1549 remark on Michelangelo as an ‘inventor of filth,’ this article aims to present Michelangelo as an involuntary inventor of devotional...
Choirs in female monastic and convent communities are spaces whose complexity has been highlighted because of their multipurpose and multifunctional nature. Although they are within the community’s private sphere of prayer of the divine office,...
The article traces potential visual sources of Julian of Norwich’s (1343–after 1416) Revelations or Showings, suggesting that many of them come from familiar everyday devotional objects such as Psalters, Books of Hours, or rosary beads. I...
Devotional artworks represent a valuable form of art, as they are evidence of religious worship and the demo-ethno-anthropological, as well as historical-artistic, heritage of a community, which is why they definitely belong to the cultural identity...
In recent years, pre-modern beds have generated extensive scholarly interest. Their social, religious, and economic importance has been rightfully highlighted in the study of domestic piety. Yet, concern has primarily focused on beds in late medieval...
This paper draws from the author’s direct experience with material care, adaptation, renewal, and disposal made while working within Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist practitioner communities as a museum professional, conservator, and object-based...
This article examines the living images of the Virgin through the illustration of one of the most important collections of miracles of the 13th century, Les Miracles de Nostre Dame by Gautier de Coinci. In this case, I will focus my attention on manu...
This article presents the theological basis of Marian devotion on the medieval Camino de Santiago and its manifestation in the form of Marian advocacies (Virgen Peregrina, Virgen del Camino). The presence of the cult of the Virgin Mary on the pilgrim...
The Epitaph of Yuan Nanzi reveals the complex situation of aristocratic women in Northern Dynasties, caught between Buddhist devotion and familial obligations. Though burdened by secular hardships, Yuan Nanzi devoted herself to raising her children a...
In the world of sports today, young people have access to models of women athletes who seem to have it all, women whose actions push on gendered assumptions of love and the associated roles of women as sacrificial and subservient. And yet, young peop...
In the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, Parma Psalter, a luxury, small format North Italian Hebrew codex, the depiction accompanying Psalm 149 features a strikingly rare scene: a tightly consolidated Jewish choir led by a gesticulating ch...
This article tries to map the gender element in Bengali Vaiṣṇavism by focusing on the evolution of the image of Viṣnupriyā, Caitanya’s second wife, as it progressed from the pre-colonial hagiographic tradition to the novel theorization of Gaura...
Shrine-visitation (ziyāra) and devotion to Muḥammad (such as expressed in taṣliya, the uttering of invocations upon the Prophet), both expressed through a range of ritualized practices and material objects, were at the heart of everyday Islam for the...
Early Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theologians developed a unique path of Hindu devotion during the 16th century through which an aspirant cultivates a rapturous form of selfless love (premā) for Kṛṣṇa, who is recognized as the supreme and personal deity. In the...
Although traditionally associated with Eastern Christianity, the practice of venerating icons became deeply rooted in the Catholic societies of the broad Adriatic region from the Late Middle Ages onwards and was an indispensable part of everyday popu...
The present paper explores domestic devotional practices in Ragusa (modern day Dubrovnik) from the late-thirteenth through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Considering that important advancements in the understanding of domestic devotions in m...
The Gonzaga family promoted, in the early seventeenth century, a visual and devotional program aimed at positioning Blessed Luigi Gonzaga as both a spiritual standard-bearer and a political instrument of their dynasty. A comparative analysis of print...
This article examines the representation and significance of the Holy House of Mary as a metaphor for the domus Dei in the initial letters of a 13th-century Book of Hours (Brailes Hours BL MS Add. 49999) using hermeneutics, visual studies, and anthro...
This article examines the entangled relationship between hagiographic memory, liturgical space, and sacred landscape in the rock-cut monastic settlements of Cappadocia. Drawing on archeological, iconographic, and acoustic analyses, this article argue...
This paper is an analysis of the Santo Niño de Cebu, a statue of the child Jesus that is the object of widespread popular devotion among Roman Catholics in the Philippines. The central hypothesis is that a continuing challenge of Roman Catholicism in...
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