ABSTRACT
In August 1670, some four decades from the start of the recatholicisation, Elector Ferdinand Maria asked his officials in Amberg to prepare a survey of the Upper Palatinate’s ‘miraculous or memorable pictures, altars, chapels and churches established in honour of the most blessed Queen of Heaven’ and known for their ‘wondrous signs and graces’, together with reports of miracles and details of their associated pilgrimages and processions (Kirchfahrten and Kreuzgängen).1 That the elector should have singled out Marian pilgrimage shrines is a reminder of the centrality both of the cult of the Madonna and of pilgrimage piety to baroque Catholic identity, as emphasised in modern historiography.2 In 1659 Wilhelm Gumppenberg SJ described the history of no less than a thousand shrines of Our Lady throughout the Catholic world in his Atlas Marianus, a work which also illustrated the distinctive iconography of each shrine image. In the Bavaria sancta, his confrere, Matthaeus Rader, further stressed an identification of sacrality and place, presenting Maximilian’s duchy as the real Holy Land defined by its saints: ‘the holy embraces so much of Bavarian soil that it would be tedious to go into details … the whole land seems to be nothing but religion: one collective, popular shrine’.3 As Philip Soergel has shown, the history, miracles, setting and associated rituals of Bavaria’s ancient pilgrimage shrines, above all perhaps that of the Black Madonna at Altötting, constituted a central theme of the duchy’s confessional
propaganda in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As baroque pilgrimage grew to surpass even medieval proportions by the eighteenth century, so the literature around it became more extensive and in particular the ‘modern’ vernacular miracle book, in which a universe of human suffering, fear, hope and joy, of the humdrum and the majestic, could be found, became a hugely popular Catholic genre.4 That the sacred should be conceived as capable of localisation, and that universal devotions, such as that to the Virgin, should be amenable to local inflection, had been challenged by Protestant reformers as part of their broader attack on the ‘superstition’ of intercession and therefore now required a theological defence as well. Preaching at the Lower-Bavarian shrine of Bettbrunn in 1596, Jacob Hornstein sought to save Catholic pilgrimage practice from the mockery of Protestant ‘pilgrimage-enemies’ and to admonish those who were tempted to pose the question: ‘isn’t God here as much as he is there? Are Mary and the other saints not as gracious here in our own church as they are elsewhere?’. Pilgrimage to holy places, he reminded his audience, was a venerable practice, undertaken not only by early Christian emperors but also by Christ Himself, who went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with his parents and honoured its Temple above other sacred sites.5 Pilgrimage figured too in the polemical and catechetical tracts disseminated in the Upper Palatinate 1620s, such as the 80-page Antidotum, an ‘Antidote to Heresies’, which extolled the moral value of pilgrimage as a reminder that we have no fixed place on earth.6 As with other aspects of the devotional and spiritual life of the Upper Palatinate, the revival of pilgrimage piety involved elements of old and new practice as well as selective memory and amnesia in relation to the Protestant period. The creation, or recreation, of a sacred landscape in the territory and the individual and communal voluntary devotion associated with it made pilgrimage perhaps the foremost emblem of the recatholicisation.
