ABSTRACT
The grand duchesses’ publicly enacted visits and venerations dramatized their devoutness and linked them with local and distant sacred sites in visually evocative ways. These activities could be used to promote particular cults, or to exercise concern for certain favoured individuals and groups, and broadly to influence the devotional identity of the places visited. Their visits and journeys were not only performative but also acquisitive processes, in which the devotees collected sacred experiences. Publicly enacted, noted in letters and stored and treasured in the reliquary of the mind, the experiences they accrued could be indefinitely revisited in the realm of the imagination. Sometimes an exchange of gifts – to and from the shrine in question – memorialized their experience and made tangible the reciprocal processes the pilgrimage necessarily involved.2 I
1 ‘anderò vedendo i luoghi di devozione e le reliquie’, ASF, Mediceo del Principato 6071: Inserto 2, letter from Maria Maddalena d’Austria to Cosimo II, dated 13 October 1613.
