Project

Brief overview of research project and major accomplishments expected:

TRANSLATIO has been developed with support from over 10 EU field research and language-learning grants, in addition to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Individual Research Fellowship. TRANSLATIO investigates the ritualized relic in the history of early modern Europe through the art, architecture and material attending translatio, the ceremonial transfer or removal of holy objects and corporal remains of saints and holy persons from one locality to another, according to a venerable tradition of Roman Catholicism. This investigation will be structured according to a cluster of microhistorical case studies on paradigmatic relics, reliquaries, art works, or architectural monuments.

It offers the first comparative history of the exchange of sacred relics of saints and holy persons between the Baltic-Nordic region and Italy circa 1550-1800, and into the modern era. The project investigates across art, architecture and ritual performance attending early modern relic translation within and between sites along the Italian peninsula (with special emphasis on Rome and Florence) and the Baltic-Nordic region, including the historical territories of the Kingdom of Denmark (present-day Denmark and Norway) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (comprising areas of today’s Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine). TRANSLATIO aims to incorporate strong historiographical traditions from scholarship in Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Belarus, and other areas of east-central Europe for an Anglophone readership to rewrite into premodern history not only relic cults and their transcultural migrations, but also Italo-Baltic religious and artistic exchange.

Firstly, the project investigates the central role of diverse forms of ritual not merely as a focus to highlight cultural changes, but as a prime generator of changes driving interreligious identity formation and coexistence between European communities, with an emphasis on cross-cultural exchanges between the Italy and the Nordic-Baltic region. It will explore how European borderlands identities were formed by the art, architecture and material memory culture of the ritual of relic translatio within and between Lutheran and Catholic communities along the Nordic-Baltic littoral and Italian peninsula, from the early modern period to the present.

Secondly, a broader objective with the project is to develop comparative methodological approaches to historical analysis that enable a way to take up the issue of the questions of the historical relation between religious ritual, memory and identity formation, and artistic-material culture. The overall accomplishment expected in conducting this research project is to reframe conventional dynamics of ‘center’ and ‘periphery,’ thereby contributing to encouraging directly more integrated conceptualizations of European cultural histories, and indirectly extra-European perspectives and to de-Westernizing the discourse and further connecting isolated regional histories.

TRANSLATIO’s research program has been divided in to four scientific work-packages (WP) structured according to the major phases of project development, namely – (WP1) Theoretical Training, (WP2) Field Research, (WP3) Drafting and Dissemination, and (WP4) Publication and Workshop.

WP1 (months 1-6): Cross-departmental training complemented by language training. Development of conceptual framework. Determination of project case studies. Presentation of initial research at international conferences. Publication of first findings. Organization of thematic conference panels. Launch of TRANSLATIO project website.

WP2 (months 7-8): Research travel for fieldwork to relevant sites. Write-up of field work reports and partial publication. Final selection of case studies.

WP3 (months 9-20): Further development of TRANSLATIO website. Drafting of monograph, including submission of MS abstract and sample chapter.

WP4 (months 21-24): Editing of monograph MS. Organization of international workshop.