In France after the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, Catholics flocked to pilgrimage shrines to seek divine healing and restore their faith's presence in a sacred landscape. As Virginia Reinburg shows in Storied Places, the church promoted shrines to defend Catholic doctrines against Protestant criticisms of saints and miracles. Reinburg is a historian of religion in early modern France, well known for French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, 1400–1600 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). In her new book she looks at those places where “nature, divinity, and humanity met,” marking them as sacred (233). The shrines were often located in dramatic natural locations—on mountaintops, by cascading streams, and adjacent to mineral springs—sites where pilgrims could easily imagine God working wonders. The sick were cured, Huguenots abjured, and the faith was preserved. These shrines were “storied” in the sense of being famous but also because their stories made them central to the Catholic revival.
The book's first section looks at four shrines as examples of the intersection of natural location, divine intervention, and polemical purpose. The shrine of Sainte-Reine in Burgundy was devoted to an early Christian martyr whose beheading generated a miracle-working spring. The shrine achieved a national reputation when Cordeliers took over its management in the 1640s. They marketed the healing waters, and the shrine prospered in tandem with increasingly popular thermal spas. Its renown attracted pilgrims of all ranks, including migrant workers traveling through the area, but also Anne of Austria who visited in 1665.
Healing waters also helped ensure the success of the Pyrenean shrine, Notre-Dame de Garaison (in Bigorre). A miracle-working image and a Calvary did the same for nearby Notre-Dame de Betharram (in Béarn). In these locations, pilgrims encountered nature at its most dramatic—extreme weather, tall mountains, and dangerous streams. Divine power was manifested in the landscape. However, the shrines’ wider fame came from encounters with the Virgin Mary that led to their establishment. Foundation legends claimed that either Mary appeared to a shepherdess (Garaison) or a peasant discovered a hidden image of her (Betharram). The shrines’ visions and images of Mary and their location in or near the formerly Huguenot principality of Béarn imbued them with great anti-Protestant polemical power, which shrine chaplains advertised in publications about the sites.
The fourth shrine, Notre-Dame du Puy, combined a wonder-working image and a long tradition as a pilgrimage with a dramatic location on a mountaintop in the volcanic landscape of Velay. A church had stood on the spot since the fifth century. Early modern writers describing the shrine claimed even greater antiquity for its black Madonna image. As Reinburg points out, the black color was understood not as a marker of race but as one of antiquity and Middle Eastern origin. One legend claimed that the prophet Jeremiah had made it, and crusaders brought it to France. Prior to the Reformation, jubilees and plenary indulgences drew pilgrims to Le Puy. Huguenot attacks and iconoclasm threatened the town's economy and self-image. However, the city's Catholics also split amongst themselves when Henry IV ascended to the throne: the town's elite joined the king while artisans and merchants followed the Catholic League. Thus, in the wake of the wars, Catholics had to reunify themselves as well as counter the Huguenots, and reviving the shrine was the way to do it.
In the book's second section, Reinburg examines the numerous shrine books that the sanctuaries’ chaplains and local promoters composed to advertise shrines. They reworked the shrine's foundation legends to fit the circumstances of the postwar period. They also borrowed the techniques of contemporary history writing by using the archives of legal depositions and eyewitness testimony that substantiated the original apparitions and subsequent healing miracles. The writers’ purpose was to authenticate the shrines, attract the support of ecclesiastical authorities and noble patrons, and combat Protestantism. The shrine books thereby turned a “faith in archives” into “archives of faith” (176).
Catholic polemics against Protestantism asserted that the true church had existed in a long, unbroken tradition, and shrine book authors echoed the claim in insisting on their sanctuaries’ antiquity. Writers on Notre-Dame du Puy pointed to their image's legendary ancient origin and their church's early medieval foundation. For newer shrines, the matter was more difficult. Pierre de Marca, whose Notre-Dame de Betharram shrine was only a few decades old when he wrote in 1648, had to claim that it was located in a region of ancient devotion to Mary and that Betharram derived from the Book of Joshua's Beth-Aram (13:27). At least the shrine had an aura of antiquity, even if it was not very old.
The books about shrines devoted to Mary charted a pattern followed in the foundation of Marian shrines to this day. First, Mary appeared to a person of low social standing, a shepherdess or peasant, giving instructions to build a shrine in that location. Local people flocked there seeking cures, but authorities resisted Mary's command. Mary insisted through further apparitions, and eventually the authorities realized their error and built the shrine. While for us the repetition of such tropes might suggest a lack of authenticity, for early modern observers it signaled instead that God acted in consistent ways. As shrines attracted crowds of pilgrims, authorities ensured they operated under clerical supervision.
It is perhaps more implicit than explicit in Reinburg's argument that the campaigns to promote shrines also were an effort to channel popular religious enthusiasm in ecclesiastically controlled directions, but she notes that the shrine books provide “an explicitly doctrinal framework for local beliefs and practices” (228). Ultimately, as this fine book demonstrates, successful shrines required the collaboration of individuals seeking miracles and the church re-establishing itself. Together they created “a new map for a post-Reformation Catholic world” (231).
