Storied Places

About this book

"The book's title, Storied Places, highlights the collaborative process of creating significant places by means of story--specifically the legends, myths, and histories told, retold, revised, and publicized about shrines, over time and across space. Shrines accrued their meanings through story, but they were also built of what nature offered--mountains, valleys, rivers, and springs. A glimpse of what nature and art together wrought can be seen in an early seventeenth-century drawing of Le Puy's Saint-Michel d'Aiguilhe (Figure Intro.1), a tenth-century chapel of Saint Michael built atop a volcanic plug or needle. Part I (Legendary Locations) of this book explores three places, each with its own legend, landscape, and past: Sainte-Reine in Burgundy, two Marian shrines in the central Pyrenees, and Notre-Dame du Puy in Languedoc. Part II (Text, Territory, and Truth) recounts how seventeenth-century chaplains of shrines authored books about their shrines, employing history, myth, and archives to prove that the shrines were authentic and the truths they exemplified were beyond dispute. Shrines absorbed this complex alchemy of nature, history, and legend. They promised spiritual favors, attracted pilgrims, and bravely tried to counter doubts in a world that no longer agreed on the foundation of divine truth"--