ABSTRACT
Early modern efforts to reinvigorate the diverse plethora of Marian sculptures, paintings and votive shrines reflect the enduring position of the Virgin in both Catholic and Protestant forms of worship and spaces of sacred initiation. This paper explores a particular category of medieval votive Marian objects, ‘Shine Madonnas’, and their complex, enigmatic uses in mediating rituals of birth, procreation and incarnation as bodily ‘performance’ – enacting multiple, frequently controversial, thresholds of the sacred. Shrine Madonnas have their origins in medieval votive practices in women’s monasteries linked to Europe’s major pilgrimage routes, proliferating across France, Spain and the Mediterranean and German lands. Yet they also embody highly distinctive types of talismanic objects in which the sculpted body of the Virgin comprises a series of moving parts, opening to disclose an inner sacred architecture, a womb-like interior, often elaborate and complex in its staging of Incarnation and Christological Trinitarian iconology. Whilst aspects of the medieval provenance of these now rare objects have attracted scholarly attention, this paper aims to shed new light on their heightened sensory and ritual medieval contexts, and their afterlives in key nineteenth-century new ritual and cultural contexts. In particular, the discussion considers the significance of Shrine Madonnas within the re-imagined devotional practices and spaces, examining fascination with their liminal aspects as object-dramas in spaces of the sacred uncanny.
