The traditio Lauretana, which states that the Holy House of Loreto, located inside the current Basilica della Santa Casa, is indeed the original house of the Virgin Mary, which was flown over by angels from Nazareth to the vicinity of Recanati in East-Central Italy, provides one of the most spectacular foundation stories of any Christian shrine or pilgrimage site. Although Mario Sensi has demonstrated that the motif of angels transporting a chapel from one location to another was not exclusive to Loreto when the legend of the translatio miraculosa was first recorded in writing around 1470 [1], other cases failed to achieve worldwide prominence.

The spectacular foundation story and the shrine's worldwide prominence contrast with its humble, rural beginnings in the late twelfth century. It is these humble beginnings, among other things, that make the widespread interpretation of the traditio Lauretana, which attempts to preserve the authenticity of the Holy House by sacrificing the idea of angelic transportation, unlikely. First proposed at the beginning of the twentieth century [2], this theory suggests that the angels are a distorted reference to the Angeli, a Greek-Italian aristocratic family closely related to the Komnenos dynasty, who supposedly carried the stones of the Nazareth house to the March of Ancona.

Bianca Lopez's book is meant to consider "the shrine's trajectory from local, to regional, to peninsular, to continental, all showing how the shrine both influenced and was impacted by political, religious, economic and cultural changes, as well as the plague. [...] Furthermore, this book considers devotion to Marian shrines drawn from archival sources of bequests created during plague, connecting religious and emotional reactions to epidemic disease with the Virgin Mary" (9). The author's main source material consists of a series of 785 testaments compiled by the Recanati notary Antonio di Gianni during his active years between 1379 and 1423.

Excluding the introduction and the conclusion, the book consists of seven chapters. The first chapter recounts the origins of the Loreto shrine and situates it in a broader pattern of initially rural Marian shrines in late medieval Italy, which at a certain point - after the Black Death, as Bianca Lopez emphasizes, without making entirely clear that also because of it, or because of it in the first place - began to attract urban audiences and undergo major transformations as a result.

It is in the second chapter that Bianca Lopez actually turns to the Recanati last wills drafted with the help of Antonio di Gianni during the period when Loreto rose from an isolated rural shrine to an object of devotion that sparked the interest of the papacy and others in the ruling elite of fifteenth-century Italy. The author attempts to demonstrate 1. that there was a clear increase in interest in Loreto during the period under review, and 2. that this increase was due to the plague. Although the diagrams included in the chapter are not analyzed systematically, they appear to show little clear change. The first year that Loreto was named as a beneficiary was 1383, with 45 out of 68 testaments including it (52 and fig. 6; the text on p. 55 modifies the total sum to 64 without explanation) equaling 66%. In the final year of the period, 1423, there were 12 testaments in total, if I read fig. 7 correctly, but only two of these mentioned Loreto (17%). Looking at some spiking years, the ratio was 34 to 51 (67%) in 1390, 35 to 83 (42%, with a conflicting sum total in note 58 on p. 56) in 1399, 10 to 32 (31%) in 1400, and 17 to 35 (49%) in 1411. Additionally, with a few exceptions, it remains unclear which years were plague years in Recanati, since the author does not systematically review the presence of the epidemic in, let alone its impact on, the town. (The book has an appendix entitled "Plague and Population Morbidity in Recanati, 1360-1410," but it is barely a page long and fails to provide any additional information beyond the estimated plague mortality in Recanati in 1348-1350, not covering either the period referenced in the appendix title or Antonio di Gianni's tenure as a notary.) Chapter two, just like the subsequent chapters based on the same source material, would be much more convincing if the author provided a detailed and thorough presentation and analysis of the quantitative aspects of her data and drew her conclusions about broader trends directly from it. In addition to this methodological issue, the argument is marred throughout by speculative references to and elaborations on the emotions of the testators, creating the impression that last wills, with their formulaic language, are a meaningful source for the history of emotions, even though this is not explicitly argued for.

Chapter three discusses the notary's contribution to the drafting of wills. While it largely provides a generic portrayal of Antonio di Gianni's work that could also apply to many of his colleagues in other towns, the author occasionally attributes a level of agency to the notary that is not supported by evidence. For example: "With the notary's influence, by the 1410s, Santa Maria di Loreto had become a site of public trust" (82), but it is unclear what this influence consisted of. Chapter four attempts to identify "household strategies for the afterlife" based on devotional practices described in the testaments, acknowledging that motivations or intentions are rarely given in the sources (see, e.g., 89 and 91). The devotional practices analyzed are, once again, rather generic. Chapter five examines the bequests made by widows to Loreto. The author emphasizes the importance of this demographic group, but the evidence remains fragmentary and inconclusive due to the lack of a systematic analysis of the data mentioned above. Chapter six turns to a further sub-group of testators, namely members of migrant communities in Recanati. The author links a notable aspect of the traditio Lauretana, which states that the Holy House was initially transported from Palestine to Dalmatia before being moved to its current location, to migration from the Eastern Mediterranean to Recanati, but the specifics of this connection remain unclear.

The final chapter is about how the papacy attempted to extend its control over Loreto following the Great Schism, and how the Italian aristocracy became interested in the shrine. However, it falls short of providing a convincing explanation for either of these processes, partly because it largely focuses on the activities of Angelo Correr, the former Pope Gregory XII, who became legate for the March of Ancona after resigning from the papal throne in 1415, but who lived for only two more years after this.

The main strength of this book is that, through the Recanati testaments, it portrays the devotion to the Loreto shrine as quite ordinary before its expansion in the fifteenth century, with no hint of the great fame it would achieve afterwards. While it makes clear that the shrine's origins are not the reason for its fame, it does not unequivocally indicate where the explanation can be found instead.

Notes:

[1] Mario Sensi: Loreto, una chiesa «miraculose fundata». Icona di Gerusalemme e di Nazaret, Firenze 2013, 125-135.

[2] Cf. Ulysse Chevalier: Notre-Dame de Lorette. Étude historique sur l'authenticité de la Santa Casa, Paris 1906, 488.

Ottó Gecser