Jane Garnett

Miraculous Images and the Sanctification of Urban Neighborhood in Post-Medieval Italy

In Liguria, in northern Italy, religious images (usually of the Virgin Mary) dating from the medieval and early modern period continue to be the focus of local cults that create a powerful spiritual sense of neighborhood through common visual references. Their histories are often complex, at certain times involving the defense of local interests against outsiders, sometimes serving as a focal point for the reconciliation of disputes. Some local cults have been coopted by wider groupings, yet they may continue to unite individual neighborhoods. They are able to create a shared identity that ties migrants and travelers to their place of origin. The histories of such local cults reveal the creation of neighborhood identity to be an ongoing and fluctuating process, one that local people deliberately cultivate, and yet one that may simultaneously serve different groups in different ways.

Shifting markers of identity in East London's diasporic religious spaces

ABSTRACT This article discusses the historical and geographical contexts of diasporic religious buildings in East London, revealing – contrary both to conventional narratives of immigrant integration, mobility, and succession and to identitarian understandings of belonging – that in such spaces and in the concrete devotional practices enacted in them, markers and boundaries of identity (ritual, spatial, and political) are contested, renegotiated, erased, and rewritten. It draws on a series of case-studies: Fieldgate Street Synagogue in its interrelationship with the East London Mosque; St Antonys Catholic Church in Forest Gate where Hindus and Christians worship together; and the intertwined histories of Methodism and Anglicanism in Bow Road. Exploration of the intersections between ethnicity, religiosity, and class illuminates the ambiguity and instability of identity-formation and expression within East Londons diasporic faith spaces.

Historicising diaspora spaces: performing faith, race, and place in London’s East End

From the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, there has been a prevailing tendency to orientalise the East End of London. The idioms have changed, but underlying distortions of perspective have remained, from ‘darkest London’ through myths of the Blitz to ‘the new East End’ (Dench et al., 2006; Gidley, 2000; Walkowitz, 1992). This orientalised east London has been framed through (and served as an icon for) two conventional narrative tropes in the history and social science of migration in Britain, one temporal and one spatial. Both narratives are embedded in often-unspoken assumptions about the exercise and practice of citizenship. In particular, east London histories privilege the trajectories of migrant minorities that arrive in London’s lower echelons and are rescued from the abyss through self-improvement and civic engagement. The stories of Huguenot refugees, the Jews of the East End, the Maltese, the Indians, and the Irish are all in some ways redemptively showcased as plot lines of model minority integration. This familiar chronological script is mapped onto an equally familiar cartography as migrants move up, move out of the ghetto and into the suburbs, and leave space for the next wave of settlement. In spatialised Chicago School geography, stories of invasion, succession, and neighbourhood change, as, in chronologies of ladder-climbing minorities, we tend to find cast lists that are relatively unblemished by the presence of traces of difference. The ethnic mosaic is the key metaphor here: it implies social worlds that pass each other by relatively untouched.

Canvassing the Faithful: Image, Agency and the Lived Religiosity of Devotion to the Divine Mercy

This chapter explores the controversial history and contemporary practice of an immensely popular devotion, sketching the charismatic role of its originator, Saint Faustina, and the various artistic representations of the Divine Mercy that have been created and circulated. It interrogates a highly influential contemporary form of Catholic spirituality as a socio-cultural as well as subjective, material and experiential form of belief and practice. Focused on an image arising out of a visionary experience by a simple girl, the framing narratives make explicit the association between this simplicity and the spirit of trust which lies at the heart of the devotion. The Divine Mercy images and prayers have achieved a striking global resonance through their scope for personal individuation and agency, whether clerical or lay. This very vitality has proved challenging and ultimately uncontainable. Keywords: Catholic spirituality; devotion; Divine Mercy images; Saint Faustina

Introduction: Cultures of Citizenship

This book draws on a wide range of disciplinary approaches, cultural vantage points, and geographical regions to address the interplay between religion in diaspora and cultures of citizenship. Its premise is that reflection on different religions, all of which in some sense have diaspora built into them and have conceived this foundational legacy theologically, and have also developed diasporically in particular historical circumstances, has intrinsic implications for understandings of citizenship. Debates about civil power, authority, and agency have historically been bound up with the relationship between the temporal and the transcendental, even where that distinction has been contested; historically situated conceptions of that relationship inevitably inform both sides of it.

Wounding and Healing: dealing with difference in Christian narratives of migrant women in East London since the 1980s

Setting oral histories conducted with a group of female Christian migrants to East London from various backgrounds and different stages in the life cycle alongside interviews with male migrants and non-migrant women, this article seeks to explore the relationship between gender, mainstream religious affiliation and the negotiation of the migratory experience. Informed by mimetic and feminist theory on religious subjectivities, the article focuses on the preoccupation with sacrifice and healing which emerges from these life stories and highlights the ways in which the emotional realities of pain, separation and suffering also give rise to powerfully reconceptualised, individual faith resources and creative strategies for claiming agency within familial, vocational and religious settings. Through a focus on domestic life, work and church leadership within ‘mainstream’ Christian churches, this article complicates assumptions about the nature and historical trajectory of ‘traditional’ religious organisations, and interweaves migrant womens experience closely with that of other members of their church communities. Through these ‘moving stories’, gender forms an integral part of these womens spiritual narratives and is constitutive of their articulation and negotiation of their faith, migration and inculturation.

The Virgin Mary and the People of Liguria: Image and Cult

We begin with an image, and a story. Explanation will emerge from what follows. Figure 1 depicts a huge wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, once the figurehead on the prow of a ship, but now on the high altar of the church of Saints Vittore and Carlo in Genoa, and venerated as Nostra Signora della Fortuna. On the night of 16-17 January 1636 a violent storm struck the port of Genoa. Many ships were wrecked. Among them was one called the Madonna della Pieta, which had the Virgin as its figurehead. A group of Genoese sailors bought this image as part of the salvage washed up from the sea. First setting it up under a votive painting of the Virgin in the harbour, they repaired it, had it repainted, and on the eve of Corpus Christi brought it to the church of San Vittore, close by the port. A famous blind song-writer was commissioned to write a song in honour of the image. Sailors and groups of young girls went through the streets of the city singing and collecting gifts. The statue became at once the focus of an extraordinary popular cult, thousands of people arriving day and night with candles, silver crowns, necklaces, and crosses in gratitude for the graces which had immediately begun to be granted. Volleys of mortars were let off in celebration. The affair was managed by the sailors who, in the face of mounting criticism and anxiety from local church leaders, directed devotions and even conducted exorcisms before the image. To stem the gathering tide of visitors and claims of miracles, and to try to establish control, the higher clergy first questioned the identity of the statue (some held it to represent, not the Virgin, but the Queen of England); then the statue was walled up; finally the church was closed altogether. Still, devotees climbed into the church, and large-scale demonstrations of protest were held. The archbishop instituted a process of investigation, in the course of which many eye-witnesses and people who claimed to have experienced miracles were interviewed (giving, in the surviving manuscript, rich detail of their responses to the image). Eventually the prohibition was lifted, and from 1637 until well into the twentieth century devotion to Nostra Signora della Fortuna remained strong, with frequent miracles or graces being recorded. So here we have a cult focused on an image of secular origin, transformed by the promotion of the sailors into a devotional object which roused the enthusiasm of thousands of lay people. It was a cult which, significantly, sprang up at a time of unrest in the city of Genoa, and which thus focused pressing issues of authority. The late 163os witnessed growing tension between factions of ‘old’ and ‘new’ nobility, the latter being marked by their hostility to the traditional Genoese Spanish alliance. Hostilities were played out both within the Senate and in clashes in the streets of the city. The cult of Nostra Signora della Fortuna grew up in this context, but survived and developed in subsequent centuries, attracting devotion from all over Italy.

Whose logic? Reflections on gender in the history of ideas

The paper challenges Bevirs failure to engage with issues of gender in his attempt to establish a logic of the history of ideas. It argues that this exclusion both compromises his claim to have articulated a comprehensive (and inclusive) logic, and suggests the limitations of his model as a way in which we might bring greater subtlety and texture to the understanding of history.