As a contemporary “living saint” – a figure who was revered as saintly during her lifetime – Saint Birgitta of Sweden made a unique contribution to the medieval religious landscape around her. Her identities as a mother, pilgrim, monastic founder, and mystic were key to the development of her image and to her success in gaining religious and social authority, no easy feat for a medieval woman. Additionally, her identification with the Virgin Mary provided a model for Birgitta’s relationship with her own female devotees. In developing an image that reflected her religious achievements and engagement with issues of womanhood, Birgitta provided an inspiration for other medieval women, becoming a crucial figure in female pilgrimage and devotion.
While general notions of race in the modern era appear to be highly fixed, it was not always this way. Race has not always been something that could be determined at first glance. Medieval race as explored in this post, was a somewhat flexible thing.
Located about 50 miles outside of Paris, Chartres Cathedral is a site with a long history of destruction and reconstruction. The most famous example of this would be in September of 1194 when a large fire burned down most of the building. All that survived was the west facade, the two towers, the crypt, and, miraculously, the relic of the Sainte Chemise: the undergarment said to have been worn by the Virgin Mary when she gave birth to the Christ Child.
Pilgrim badges are wearable tokens of devotion that medieval people would pin to their clothes, like brooches, in order to signal to others that they were pilgrims who had partaken on or completed a journey.
In the small town of Villafranca del Bierzo there sits a Romanesque portal, a holy door, that grants pilgrims unable to continue their way to Compostela with the same indulgences as if they had reached their destination, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. Villafranca lies directly before the steepest and most treacherous part of the journey to Compostela, providing some possible hints at the significance of this portal. However, upon closer inspection, the meaning, significance, and purpose appear more complicated due to the perceived lack of information on the site. In order to understand the portal further it helps to look at it in context.
Among surviving Middle Byzantine reliquaries of Saint Demetrios, one of the most exceptional is a highly ornamented work of microarchitecture clad in gilt-silver repoussé, dating between 1059 and 1067.
