Between the end of the thirteenth and the end of the fifteenth centuries, another fundamental change influenced the cult of the saints in the West: alongside relics, which retained a certain prestige, there was an increase in the power of holy images, in a mental world in which sight was beginning to play a more important role, together with touch. This belief implied recognition of both an active presence (a capacity to move and to be moved) and a passive presence (a capacity to suffer and to be offended) in certain images described as miraculous. The majority of these images, which attracted massive devotion in the fourteenth century, were sculptures, or more often paintings, that represented the Virgin Mary, whose cult assumed a quite new importance among the population in general. The criteria which caused certain images to be considered miraculous from a particular point in time remain largely unknown; any religious image, old or new, might, at a certain moment, be invested with a supernatural power which revealed itself in the full light of day in a vision, an activity - the Virgin who wept, bled or turned her head - or a miracle. The popular preference in Italy for 'exotic' images has been noted, in particular for 'aUa greca' madonnas, icons of eastern origin whose manufacture was attributed to St Luke. The sacrality of the image was due less to what it represented than to its origin, seen as miraculous - for example, the statues of the Virgin found in a tree by a shepherdess, or in the ground by a peasant digging - or as supernatural - like the image of Veronica (Vera icona) preserved in St Peter's in Rome, or the Holy Shroud that reproduced the suffering face of the dead Christ, which began to attract attention in the mid-fourteenth century and which was venerated in the chapel of the dukes of Savoy at Chambery and then Turin. It was this assumed divine origin that explained the supernatural power of the holy image and, in particular, its thaumaturgic capacities. The fundamental criterion for the popularity of these images was their effectiveness; the considerable success that some of them enjoyed - one thinks of the image of the Virgin Salus Populi Romani carried in procession every year by the confraternities through the streets of Rome - was linked, in the minds of the faithful or pilgrims, with the fact that the saints that were represented showed themselves receptive to the prayers of those who implored them; they, in their turn, thanked them for their intervention by offering them other images, the ex votos, which were both an act of gratitude and an advertisement for the sanctuary where they were displayed. The role of the place where the miracle occurred remained fundamental; in Italy the new devotions were usually to Mary. For the consumer, however, what mattered was not so much the person of the Virgin as the place where she had chosen to reveal her power. This is why these outpourings of devotion were often short-lived: in Florence, the first miraculous image seems to have been the Madonna of Orsanmichele, in 1292; however, it was soon supplanted, in the fourteenth century, by the Madonna of Impruneta, outside the city, which was itself eclipsed by the Madonna of the Annunziata, the church of the Servites, who were protected by the Medici, after the epidemics of plague. This is not to say that the original devotions disappeared; rather, after attracting, for a while, the whole population of the town, the sanctuaries which housed these miraculous images - sometimes specially constructed for the purpose - saw their influence shrink to a district or to a confraternity founded in their honour and which maintained the cult.
Historians still debate the reasons for the explosion of the Marian cult in the final centuries of the Middle Ages (in parallel with that of the eucharistic devotion). While it was particularly precocious and marked in the Mediterranean countries, it was found, with varying degrees of time-lag, all over the Christian West in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It was probably encouraged by the clergy, as they preferred the devotion of the faithful to be offered to the mother of God or the eucharist than to obscure saints or relics of unknown origin. However, the initiative seems mostly to have come from the laity, who were able, through the reference to the Virgin of Mercy propagated by the confraternities, to take the initiative in new cults, in town and country alike, without needing to seek authorisation from the bishop, as was the case with the translation of relics, or even, to begin with, the collaboration of the local clergy; a Marian apparition or the revelation of the miraculous nature of a holy image to a simple believer was sometimes enough to give rise to a cult, which the church usually eventually approved, if it lasted and was accompanied by the construction of a cultic building. Thus a new more immediate relationship to the supernatural emerged, illustrated by the large number of Marian sanctuaries, the most typical ofwhich was that ofLoreto, in central Italy. There had been a rural church dedicated to the Virgin here by the end of the twelfth century, which became a local sanctuary during the thirteenth century. The devotion grew in the fourteenth century, as shown by an indulgence granted by Pope John XXII to those who made the pilgrimage. In the fifteenth century people began to talk about the presence of the house of the Holy Family in Nazareth, or 'Santa Casa', whose miraculous origins were attested by the lack of foundations of the original church, which gave rise to the legend that it had been brought there by angels. The belief in the miraculous transfer may also have been connected with the transfer to Loreto, at the time of the Turkish advance in the Balkans, of an image of the Virgin from the sanctuary of Tersatto, in Croatia, which was hardly surprising given that there had been frequent exchanges of cult and religious objects between the two shores of the Adriatic throughout the Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century the sanctuary was famous throughout the whole of Christendom; the king of France, Louis XI, was particularly devout and generous towards Our Lady of Loreto, and replicas of this sanctuary were built in a number of places outside Italy.668
At the end of the Middle Ages, both the cult of the saints and pilgrimages were changing in important ways, but they remained generally flourishing and popular. Certain devotions had declined, but others replaced them and only intellectual malcontents like Wyclif or certain Florentine humanists indulged in a few criticisms against some excesses. Never, perhaps, had Christians travelled so much as at this period, and women seem to have been particularly involved: St Bridget of Sweden went to St James of Compostela with her husband; then, after being widowed and settling in Rome, she visited most of the Italian sanctuaries; finally, before her death, she went on a great pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she was blessed with visions, especially in Bethlehem. Another, less famous but perhaps more typical, woman, the English visionary Margery Kempe (d. 1439), also spent a large part of her time visiting sanctuaries:669 initially in England, where she went to every holy place of any significance, from Canterbury to Bridlington, where the body of St John of Bridlington (d. 1379), who had recently been canonised, was venerated; in 1414 she reached Rome, where, in the church of the Holy Apostles, she had the vision of her mystical marriage with Christ; in 1417 she went to St James of Compostela; after which she visited Wilsnack, in north Germany, where the Holy Blood of Christ was venerated after a eucharistic miracle, and Aachen, in 1433; finally, in 1434, she crossed the North Sea with her daughter-in-law to go to Danzig, where, a few years earlier, Dorothy of Montau (d. 1394), a lay woman mystic who, like Margery, had been a wife and mother, had died (she had heard about Dorothy from her son, a merchant who frequented the Baltic ports). These two examples confirm, if confirmation is needed, the importance of the role of pilgrimage in the religious life of the faithful, but also the artificial character - at least at this period - of the distinction between popular religion and the religion of the elites, since everybody made pilgrimages, from peasants to kings, and since they provided the greatest mystics of the age with essential nourishment for their spiritual progress.
World History
