Materializing Histories: Producing Shrines at Oviedo, Conques, Compostela (1050-1150)

Kris Racaniello (Kress Foundation Fellow)

The face of the Majesty of Sainte Foy under different lighting conditions, in Conques, France. The face was made c. 300-400, reliquary made after 888 and remade c. 985 with later additions. Photo credit: Anna Kelblová. — The face of the *Majesty of Sainte Foy* under different lighting conditions, in Conques, France. The face was made c. 300-400, reliquary made after 888 and remade c. 985 with later additions. Photo credit: Anna Kelblová.

The face of the *Majesty of Sainte Foy* under different lighting conditions, in Conques, France. The face was made c. 300-400, reliquary made after 888 and remade c. 985 with later additions. Photo credit: Anna Kelblová.

This project centers the history-making that took place in Latin Christian shrines across the Pyrenees. As consciously constructed sites, object narratives were mobilized to (re)new cult centers by a group of special, competing shrine concepteurs. Objecthood, thingness, and materiality studies have all attempted to connect material “reality” with signified narratives; this project takes the opposite perspective, disarticulating “happenings” from object narratives by focusing on individual concepteurs’ inventive historical narratives. Imaginative elaborations on old and new cult figures in this period ran in tandem with history-making, authenticity, forgery, authority, and truth. New material methods developed in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries to advantageously reconstruct histories, shaped by the militant, expansionist ideology of the trans-Mediterranean expeditions we have come to know as ‘crusades.’
Each case study examines clashing object narratives and the impact of these materialized stories at three key sites across the Pyrenees: Conques, Oviedo, and Santiago de Compostela. These narratives were conveyed to audiences of varying literacy through epigraphic inscriptions, paleographic texts, iconographic imagery, and with materials and objects. Written testimonies, medieval ‘forgeries’, relics, cult materials, iconographies and ritual repertoires combined in a kaleidoscopic alteration of the texture of devotion at each site.