Vélez - The miraculous flying house of Loreto: spreading Catholicism in the early modern world

THE MIRACULOUS FLYING HOUSE OF LORETO

The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto

SPREADING CATHOLICISM IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

Karin Vlez

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

LCCN 2018940059

ISBN 09780691174006

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel and Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Debbie Tegarden

Jacket/Cover Design: Amanda Weiss

Jacket Credit: Engraving of the flying house of Loreto, from Bartoli, Historische Beschreibung des Heil. Hauses zu Loreto, 1725. Courtesy of SLUB Dresden / Digital Collections / 3.A. 6718

Production: Jacquie Poirier

Publicity: Tayler Lord

Copyeditor: Kathleen Kageff

This book has been composed in Miller

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS & TABLES

Illustrations

Table

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THERE IS A DANGER for writers overly immersed in decades-long endeavors to see their topics writ large in all current events. In autumn 2017, as I was finishing this manuscript, Hurricane Maria blasted through the Atlantic causing much death and destruction. Responding to the disaster in his familys home island of Puerto Rico, popular composer Lin-Manuel Miranda released a fundraising song he called Almost Like Praying. His chart-topping hit is based on Maria, a number from the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story. I was drawn to Mirandas Maria remake because it reminded me of my own drawn-out encounter with the star of this book, Mary of Loreto.

On the surface, Mirandas new lyrics have little to do with Maria/Mary: he makes a love song out of the names of all seventy-eight towns in Puerto Rico. But the effect is more than simply gathering the many villages that contributed to his formation. Chanted together, the words assume the power of a living prayer: the names are intoned variously in appreciation, entreaty, and even awe. The names in the following acknowledgments have likewise functioned Almost Like Praying for me. As was the case for Miranda, Mary is what indirectly precipitated the occasion to summon and to publicly recognize these particular people and places. I group their names below to loosely parallel the roles featured in my book chapters, to honor the diverse ways in which they have contributed to this work whose completion is its own small miracle.

The First Authors of this project are my teachers, founts of wisdom but also models of the kind of scholar I hope to become. Though some of them are not listed in the copious notes of this book, their questions and approaches have been foundational to my thinking. Most recently these mentors have included Jeanne Kilde, Jaine Strauss, and Jim Laine. In graduate school, where this took its first shape as a doctoral dissertation, I was fortunate to benefit from the sharp insights of Anthony Grafton, Kenneth Mills, William Chester Jordan, and Robert Darnton. William B. Taylor and Simon Ditchfield have also been kind and interested readers providing inspiration from graduate school forward. Before that, in the murky prehistory of my intellectual formation, Shanti Singham and Harry Payne planted seeds of French rebellion that have found their way from their undergraduate classrooms onto these pages. Still earlier, I was boosted on the shoulders of my grandparents who posthumously remain giants in my life. Henry Agostini, Ana Lydia Espada, Reverend Samuel Jos Vlez, and Gladys Vega encouraged all my writing and schooling endeavors. Their brave choices, fighting spirits, steadfast faith, and ambition also inspired their shy, overly curious granddaughter to dream big.

I have been fortunate to share the road with Accidental Pilgrims who have accompanied me through rough stages of the journey, offering encouragement and purpose in distant places and often continuing to provide this support when our paths diverged. This project would not exist in its current form had I not crossed paths with Shen Liu, Susan Hoang, Sang Mi Pak, Christina Esposito, Alicia Muoz, Sushmita Hodges, Andrea Moerer, Aaron Bohr, S. J., and Lynn Hudson in Minnesota; Kimberly Juanita Brown and Ethan Hawkley in Boston; Danielle Kane and Christine Beaule in North Carolina; Katrina Olds, Caroline Sherman, Elizabeth Foster, and Sindhu Revuluri in New Jersey; Tami Miyashiro Visco, Heidi Natkin, Tanya Landsman, and Tara Snchez in Williamstown; and Meena Kaur in New Hampshire and Tanzania.

Many Holy House Builders have aided this endeavor by sharing templates, suggesting structural modifications, providing space and time for layout, and constructing alongside me. I have run across them in groups first: at Macalester College, the Department of Religious Studies, the Humanities Faculty Colloquium, and several cohorts of intrepid senior undergraduate history majors; at the University of Minnesota, the University Honors Program 201617, the Institute for Advanced Study 201415 Fellows, the Atlantic History Working Group, the Missionaries and the Early Modern World workshop, the Center for Early Modern History, the Resilience and Sustainability Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar, the Mediterranean Collaborative, the Religious Studies Program 2012 summer workshop, and the Theorizing Early Modern Studies Reading Groups; in Boston, the Urban Cultural History Workshop at the University of Massachusetts and the Boston Area French History group; in Seattle in 2014, the International Symposium on Jesuits in World History; in Galway, Ireland, in 2013, the International Symposium on Missions and Frontiers; and in Liverpool in 2010, the Rethinking the Iberian Atlantic conference. In Minnesota, two individuals stood out from this crowd of architects as groups onto themselves: I owe special thanks to Rivi Handler-Spitz and Katharine Gerbner for their solidarity, tireless reading of drafts, and dependably excellent feedback.

There are a number of scholars who generously offered their thoughts on the manuscript and its earlier incarnations without expecting any sort of public credit for it. Some of their suggestions resulted in major alterations and upgrades. These Anonymous Renovators of Icons have included my dynamite editorial team of Fred Appel, Thalia Leaf, Debbie Tegarden, and Kathleen Kageff, plus Princeton University Presss two anonymous reviewers; Luke Clossey, Andrew Redden, and the bold thinkers of the Institut fr die Spte Altzeit; J. Michelle Molina, at North-westerns 2009 roundtable on Jesuit research and beyond; and the regulars of the Forum for European Expansion and Global Identities conferences, who twice gave platform and redirection to chapters in progress. I am also grateful for the input and positive energy generated around this undertaking by my local colleagues Kirsten Fischer, Beth Severy-Hoven, Linda Sturtz, Chris Wells, Jennifer Gunn, Howard Louthan, J. B. Shank, Giancarlo Casale, Victoria Morse, Jeanne Grant, and Susie Steinbach. Distance notwithstanding, during this project I have benefitted from the acumen and humor of Kittiya Lee, Karen Melvin, Molly Greene, Kristen Block, Jane Murphy, Elizabeth McCahill, Daniela Bleichmar, Emily Michelson, Karoline Cook, Alexandra and Noble David Cook, Tania Munz, Mitra Sharafi, Ishita Pande, Liliana Leopardi, Katherine Wheeler, Carla Keyvanian, Javier Vlez, and closer at hand, Herta Pitman. Additionally, conversations with these generous scholars provided turning points for this work: Natalie Davis, Allan Greer, Laura Smoller, Alexandra Walsham, Robert Kendrick, Bernard Bailyn, Patrick Geary, Liam Brockey, Brandon Bayne, Virginia Reinburg, Thomas Tweed, Thomas Taylor, Jorge Caizares-Esguerra, and Diana Walsh Pasulka.