Organizer and presider

Sacred Scents: Byzantine Reliquaries and Olfactory Activation

The veneration of relics in Byzantium was a physical act. Reliquaries were routinely opened and sacred matter exposed in order to make the “stuff” of sanctity available for the faithful to see, touch, and kiss. In this paper, I explore the ways in which the sense of smell was also a part of the Byzantine experience of relics. I show how epigrams inscribed on reliquaries and the mechanical features of these objects were designed to activate and stimulate one’s olfactory perception of the divine.

Medieval Depictions of Sacred Space in Our Lady of Saidnaya Monastery

Our Lady of Saidnaya, an ancient Byzantine Orthodox monastery about thirty kilometers north of Damascus, was renowned for its miraculous icon: the Chaghoura, or “the illustrious,” which provided pilgrims and worshippers with healing oil. Yet the icon’s image was mostly obscured and placed behind an iron grate, as well as being partially subsumed by the apse wall it was set into; this required viewers to rely on faith, rather than sight, to affirm the icon’s miraculous power. The Chaghoura was also likely placed behind the altar inside a large basilica in a place of prime spiritual importance, reaffirming its hidden power. According to high and late medieval sources, the icon attracted an eclectic crowd of worshippers, which ranged from local Syrians to European travelers, to possibly Muslims and Jews. This diverse crowd, all gathered to receive the icon’s holy oil, added to the monastery’s sacred space by building a pilgrim community within its walls. Our Lady of Saidnaya’s gardens also provided an external reflection of the monastery’s internal holiness. This icon and its monastery were informed by principles of logos and topos: logos hinted at the unseen spiritual power in a space, and topos ensured that physical spaces reflected these hidden spiritual principles. This paper will demonstrate that the Chaghoura’s topos exemplified its sacral logos; its placement within the monastery, the surrounding buildings and gardens, and the eclectic crowd of worshippers that came to visit it served to emphasize and reinforce its sacrality as physical reflections of spiritual power.

Thecla's Beasts: Vision as Veneration and Violence

The author of Thecla’s fifth-century Life remarks that “beautiful bodies always attract the eyes of beasts,” referring both to the animals of the arena and the spectators who look with lecherous eyes. If, in the words of Tertullian, “every public exposure of a virgin is (to her) a suffering of rape,” why would a limestone roundel from Oxyrhynchus depict Thecla between the lions as beautiful, bound, and in near nudity? This paper will consider the provocative challenge the relief mounts to its viewers—whose gaze risks victimizing the virgin martyr in physical terms and metamorphosing the viewer into a ‘beast’—to explore the transformative encounter of looking at Late Antique martyrdoms. In these spaces, the onlooker’s gaze and the object seen had powerful effects upon one another, with the potential to reshape both.

Marian Pregnancy Representations in Castile and León: A Multisensory Perspective

This paper focuses on Marian pregnancy representations with special emphasis on Castile and León in a timeframe that spans from the twelfth-thirteenth to the seventeenth century. More precisely, it discusses statues, frescos, and panel paintings from Salamanca, Ávila, Medina del Campo, and, alternatively, Zamora, La Hiniesta, and Toro as these places host some of the earliest pregnancy representations in the Iberian Peninsula. As previous studies on Marian pregnancy representations are quite rare, particularly in connection to sensory studies, the present investigation scrutinizes the construction of Marian art in relation to the senses with emphasis on the incorporation of other forms of religious and/or secular representations in Marian material. These representations emphasize a certain episode(s) of the vita Mariae, namely that of the Annunciation which particularly stands out in relation to the bodily (sight and touch)/spiritual senses as facilitators of unification with the divine.