Papers by Mary Laven
Past & Present, 2016
If you take the train from Naples around the northern rim of Mount Vesuvius, you will arrive at M... more If you take the train from Naples around the northern rim of Mount Vesuvius, you will arrive at Madonna dell'Arco, on the edge of the town of Sant'Anastasia. The station takes its name from the large and rather grandiose whitewashed sanctuary that dominates the neighbourhood. With its generic belfry and copper-green cupola, the church building, begun in 1593 and much extended in the twentieth century, is nothing to write home about architecturally. But its bulky presence is a good starting point for thinking about the concrete means by which communities seek to record miraculous events. According to tradition, on Easter Monday 1450 a local lad was playing the ball game pall-mall with his friends when-in a fit of irritation-he threw the ball at a painting of the Madonna that had been placed within an arch (hence 'Madonna dell'Arco'). This act of sacrilege ignited a trio of miracles: firstly, the Virgin's face bled and secondly, the boy found himself rooted to the ground and unable to flee. The third miracle related to the punishment of the boy. When news reached the Count of Sarno, who held judicial authority over the region, he reacted quickly by condemning the accused to be hanged from the lime tree next to the Madonna. Two hours later, following the death of the intemperate youth, the tree dramatically withered-an event that was perceived as lending sacred force to the secular justice of the hanging. These were the first of thousands of miracles that subsequently occurred thanks to the intervention of the Madonna dell'Arco and which, to this day, are documented in a variety of media at the church and adjacent study centre. 1 ? This essay draws on research conducted for the project funded by the European Research Council and hosted by the University of Cambridge, Domestic Devotions: The Place of Piety in the Renaissance Italian Home, 1400-1600, directed by Abigail Brundin, Deborah Howard and Mary Laven. Many thanks to Jason Scott-Warren for help and advice and to Warren Boutcher, Filippo de Vivo and Rebecca Flemming for invaluable bibliographical leads. 1 For the early history of Madonna dell' Arco, see Antonio Ermanno Giardino and Michele Rak (eds.), Per Grazia Ricevuta: Le tavolette dipinte ex-voto per la Madonna dell'Arco
European History Quarterly, 2020
Finally, in Chapter 6, Kulchytsky analyses the Ukrainian famine of 1933 and suggests differentiat... more Finally, in Chapter 6, Kulchytsky analyses the Ukrainian famine of 1933 and suggests differentiating it from the all-Union famine of 1932, referring to Ukrainian demographers' data on the mortality rates. He claims that depriving people of food was a brutal form of murder and terrorism, and concludes that the Holodomor in Ukraine was a terror by famine, calling for the recognition of the Holodomor as a particular type of genocide 'directed exclusively against the Ukrainian people' (144) and peasantry (148). Although this is a well-written and contextualized volume, it presents, however, the Ukrainian peasants as a homogenous class, as the only famine victims, without considering the experiences of national minorities, urban dwellers, or other social groups. Readers will find helpful, however, the accompanying illustrations, the map of rural direct losses, and Alexander Wienerberger's album. This English-language publication contributes to increasing scholarly interest in the Holodomor. Prospective directions for future research include the already growing number of studies related to migration and resettlement, perpetrators, gender, childhood, the elderly, famine foods and consumption, health, trauma, and memory. Overall, this book represents the fruits of long-term research, which presents the achievements of Ukrainian historiography regarding the emergence and recognition of the famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine. This study will be valuable to specialists in Soviet and Ukrainian history, as well as in famine and genocide studies.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 396 pp.; 80 color ills.; 178 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780... more New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. 396 pp.; 80 color ills.; 178 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (9780300176605) Mary Laven By 1600, there were over fifty miraculous images in Florence: weeping Madonnas, bleeding Christs, paintings and sculptures—often veiled and only occasionally exposed to direct view, surrounded by heaps of votive offerings left by the faithful in gratitude for miracles experienced. Their proliferation during the previous three hundred years in churches, oratories, and street tabernacles throughout the city had occurred simultaneously with the founding of many more cults across Florence's hinterland, or contado. Indeed, as the commune extended its territorial domain, so the new subject-cities spawned miraculous images—a process of sacralization strongly supported by the Florentine regime. With painstaking scholarship, Megan Holmes's The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence reconstructs the chronology of this devotional phenomenon. She identifies four main phases of development. The period from 1292 to 1398 witnessed the origins of the earliest cults, mostly centered on images of the Madonna and Child. The start of the second phase, which lasted from 1399 to 1493, coincided with the rise of the Bianchi—a popular religious movement, renowned for its barefoot processions in which crucifixes were carried. Given the high profile of the Bianchi in Tuscany, it is no surprise that this period should have resulted in new cults featuring crucifixes, some of which had started life as processional crosses. From the late fifteenth century, the pendulum swung back in favor of Marian cults. A crop of miraculous images of the Virgin arose during a period of political instability between 1494 and 1530, and in particular following the execution of Girolamo Savonarola in 1498. The return of the Medici to power in Florence in 1531 in their new role as hereditary rulers of the Florentine dukedom prompted a final phase of growth in the number of miraculous images venerated in the city that lasted until the end of the sixteenth century. During this period, the proliferation of cults sponsored by the Medici fused with the Counter Reformation impulse to promote both Marian and Christocentric devotions, albeit under more controlled conditions. Many of the new image cults were located within nunneries. While Holmes's work in tracing the complex histories of image cults in Florence and the contado is in itself to be commended, her engagement with chronology goes beyond establishing dates and trends. In fact, the book is an ambitious attempt to unsettle and reconfigure understandings of the Renaissance—as both concept and period—by viewing a key facet of cultural productivity in Florence through the lens of devotion. This is, needless to say, an anti-Burckhardtian Renaissance that banishes the idea of the era as harbinger of modernity and secularization and eschews the art-historical canon. While, in older accounts, miracle-working images tended to be dismissed as " archaic in style, imitative in form, poor in quality, compromised by repainting, and consequently of little art historical interest, " Holmes here boldly argues that " image cults were among the most vital and dynamic sites of cultural activity in Renaissance Italy " (5–6). True enough, the explosion of image cults coincided neatly with the period generally associated with the Tuscan Renaissance: from the second half of the thirteenth century, the age of Dante and Giotto, to the 1500s—the century of Michelangelo and Machiavelli, Vasari and Galileo. But Holmes is talking about more than coincidence. The novelty which we attribute to the Florentine greats was—she argues—also evident at the shrines of miraculous images: " The material and visual culture of Renaissance Florentine image cults did not simply involve the recrudescence of earlier artistic and religious genres.. .. New categories of visual representation and innovative variations on traditional forms emerged " (10). Among these innovations, she includes the emergence of life-size votive portrait statues, small painted wooden panels representing miracles, elaborate all'antica tabernacles enshrining critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies published by the College Art Association Donate to caa.reviews The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence
Parto. Making use of an extensive array of sources (archival records of the employment and paymen... more Parto. Making use of an extensive array of sources (archival records of the employment and payment of singers and organists, published music, contemporary diaries, etc.) Getz charts the evolution of polyphony in services attended by the laity. Her distinctive contribution is to connect compositional trends to contemporary images and texts in order to understand how music was heard and processed by the devout. The techniques of rhetoric taught in the boys' schools of Renaissance Italy are key to Getz's argument. Take Simon Boyleau's Modulationes in Magnificat ad omnes tropos, written for five voices (1566). In order to appreciate how that rich vocal mix was experienced by the laity, we need to consider how, in Boyleau's setting, the Magnificat was broken down into smaller phrases which were gradually recombined. In this manner, the pace of delivery of the momentous text was slowed, as the congregants were encouraged to hear, visualize, and internalize the Annunciation, and to identify powerfully with the Virgin. In her analysis of devotional music, Getz claims for the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola a particular influence. As a meditational program designed by a Jesuit for Jesuits, the broader impact of the Exercises on the laity is sometimes questioned. However, Getz argues that Ignatian meditational techniques were popularized via Jesuit preaching and that the Exercises were moreover foundational to the churchmen in Milan who reshaped popular piety after Trent. Imagination, visualization, segmentation, and repetition were key to the teaching of doctrine and to the sounds of devotion in the late sixteenth-century city. To music and meditation, the central interests of the book, one might add one further " M " : miracles. Several of the Marian shrines examined by Getz owed their origins to late fifteenth-century cults that emerged in response to miraculous healings and apparitions. One of the strengths of this study is that
Publications by Mary Laven
Catalogue of the Exhibition, Fitzwilliam Museum, 7th March-4th June 2017
Download for free here: https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/230/suppl_11
This Supplement builds ... more Download for free here: https://academic.oup.com/past/issue/230/suppl_11
This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of significant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. The essays that comprise it focus attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800 and place the process by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes and analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, alongside the role of textual, pictorial, material and financial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical definitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the quotidian circumstances and politics of everyday life. They also illuminate some of the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to permanent oblivion.
Seminars by Mary Laven
The Venetian Seminar is a peripatetic one-day workshop with a long tradition of participation by ... more The Venetian Seminar is a peripatetic one-day workshop with a long tradition of participation by scholars of history, art history, literature and linguistics who study Venice and Italy. It is convened on a yearly basis by Alex Bamji (Leeds), Filippo de Vivo (Oxford), and Mary Laven (Cambridge). Warm thanks to Filippo de Vivo for hosting this year's seminar. A light lunch will be provided thanks to the generosity of St Edmund Hall. There is no registration fee, but space is limited and registration is required.
Published by Amsterdam UP by Mary Laven
Volume editors: Suzanna Ivanic, Mary Laven & Andrew Morrall
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press... more Volume editors: Suzanna Ivanic, Mary Laven & Andrew Morrall
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.
For more info, visit: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462984653/religious-materiality-in-the-early-modern-world
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Papers by Mary Laven
Publications by Mary Laven
This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of significant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. The essays that comprise it focus attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800 and place the process by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes and analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, alongside the role of textual, pictorial, material and financial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical definitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the quotidian circumstances and politics of everyday life. They also illuminate some of the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to permanent oblivion.
Seminars by Mary Laven
Published by Amsterdam UP by Mary Laven
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.
For more info, visit: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462984653/religious-materiality-in-the-early-modern-world
This Supplement builds on a burgeoning body of research that approaches the archive not merely as the object, but as the subject of enquiry. It explores the phenomenon of record keeping in the early modern period in the context of significant ecclesiastical, political, intellectual and cultural developments that served as a stimulus to it: state formation, religious reformation, and economic transformation; the advent of the mechanical press, the spread of educational opportunity, and the expansion of literacy; changing epistemological conventions, shifting attitudes towards history and memory, and new modes of self-representation. The essays that comprise it focus attention on the impulses behind the surge in public and private documentation in Europe between 1500 and 1800 and place the process by which individual, collective and institutional records were created, compiled, authorised, and used under the microscope. They examine the activities of curators and scribes and analyse the issues of credibility and authenticity to which their endeavours gave rise, alongside the role of textual, pictorial, material and financial records in managing knowledge and giving expression to senses of identity. Stretching traditional, technical definitions of the record and archive, they investigate how writing and document-making of various kinds was shaped by dynamic interactions between ordinary people and by the quotidian circumstances and politics of everyday life. They also illuminate some of the multiple ways in which archives mediate and construct the past, preserving some traces of it for posterity while consigning others to permanent oblivion.
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.
For more info, visit: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789462984653/religious-materiality-in-the-early-modern-world