ABSTRACT
With its emphasis on sacred spaces, devotional objects and holy bodies, the Counter-Reformation was driven by material culture. The increasing significance of material culture has been attributed to three factors. The first is the centuries-long religious and liturgical relevance that the Christian tradition – since its early times – had attributed to relics, devotional objects and shrines, as well as to sacred images. The second is the impact of the Reformation, and the need to respond to Protestant attacks on religious art, devotional objects and the cult of saints and relics. The third is the growth of the centralizing power of the Roman Church and Catholic states, which appealed to visual and material devices for propagandistic purposes, and recognized their crucial importance for indoctrination and propagating Catholicism. 1 Indeed, the relevance of spaces and objects in religion relied on their disciplinary potential, which made them very important instruments for carrying out religious reform and strengthening Catholic policies. A growing scholarly literature in this field has enriched our knowledge in this area, emphasizing the public as well as private functions of sacred spaces and objects, the meaning that people attributed to them, and the use they made of them. Furthermore, the focus on a wide geographical context and in particular on Catholic as well as Protestant countries, transconfessional areas and colonial territories, has allowed for a discussion of the ways in which spaces and objects served to define faith and religious divides, revealing at the same time their mutable identity, and pointing to the importance of the intersections between religion and culture for our understanding of the materiality of the Counter-Reformation. An important underlying interpretation that emerges from research in this field of inquiry – though sometimes only implicitly acknowledged – is that spaces and objects, depending on the function and meaning they had, can be considered as devotional tools for shaping people’s actions and behaviour and ultimately determining their experience of religion. The concept of agency, therefore, which has been discussed mostly by anthropologists and art historians with reference to the visual arts, can be usefully employed to study material culture in the context of the Counter-Reformation. 2
