Mobile Shrine and Magical Bodies: Modern Afterlives of Medieval Shrine Madonnas

Early modern efforts to reinvigorate the diverse plethora of Marian sculptures, paintings and votive shrines reflect the enduring position of the Virgin in both Catholic and Protestant forms of worship and spaces of sacred initiation. This article sheds light on a particular category of medieval votive Marian objects, ‘Vierges Ouvrantes’ and ‘Shrine Madonnas’, and their complex, enigmatic meanings uses in mediating rituals of birth, procreation and incarnation as bodily ‘performance’ – enacting multiple, frequently controversial, thresholds of the sacred. Shrine Madonnas have their origins in medieval votive practices in women’s monasteries, linked to Europe’s major pilgrimage routes, proliferating across France, Spain and the German lands. Yet they also embody highly distinctive types of talismanic Marian objects. They range from tiny and portable to near life-size figures in which the sculpted body of the Virgin comprises a series of moving parts opening to disclose an inner sacred architecture, a womb-like interior, often elaborate and complex in its staging of Incarnation and Christological Trinitarian iconology. Whilst the medieval provenance of these now rare objects has attracted recent scholarly treatments, this article interrogates neglected contexts and afterlives of Shrine Madonnas and their cognates, ‘Vierges Ouvrantes’, in an expanded framework of Marian reception and response. This encompasses new insights into key pre-modern and nineteenth-century new ritual, sensory and cultural contexts. In particular, this article probes the significance, and to borrow from Aby Warburg, the ‘afterlives’ or Nachleben of Shrine Madonnas, within re-imagined embodied medieval practices and spaces, examining anew, fascination with their liminal aspects as object-dramas and threshold figures entwined with the sacred uncanny.