This chapter questions how prostration was informed by its material setting and how carrying this out on the bare earth and on different floor coverings could enrich and complicate the significance of the act and the encounter with the ground. The chapter investigates the setting of prostration as this was carried out within the humiliation of relics, coronation, and the last rites. It also identifies a particular environment in which rituals were performed, such as the abbey of Farfa, Westminster Abbey, and the infirmary chapel of the abbey of Marmoutier in Tours. The chapter develops the arguments on the role of the ground in identity-shaping rites, and the relationship between body, material, and image. It draws connections with the treatment of the ground in other context.
In 1508, Pope Julius II gave Florian and Barbara von Waldenstein a twofold gift. He not only granted the burial chapel they had founded in Hall in Austria privileges equivalent to those of the Campo Santo Teutonico in Rome, but also gave the couple the right "to strew its surface with the dust or holy earth of the cemetery of the Campo Santo." 1 In its turn, the Campo Santo Teutonico had a material connection with the Holy Land, as it was understood to contain earth from the burial ground of Akeldama in Jerusalem. This chapter explores these and other contexts in which Christian burial places were equated through the movement of earth in the later Middle Ages, allowing people buried in one location to enjoy * This chapter presents initial results of a research project on "Earth and the Portability of Place." An earlier version was delivered at a workshop in the AHRC Network "Remembered Places and Invented Traditions: Thinking about the Holy Land in the Late-Medieval West." I would like to thank the AHRC and Professor Anthony Bale for the opportunity to participate in the network, and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on a draft of the chapter. I am also grateful to Professor Stefan Heid and Marjan Rebernik of the Görres-Gesellschaft in Rome for their kind assistance. 1 "eandem capellam sacram auctoritate apostolica in Campum Sanctum et ad instar capelle cemiterii Campi Sancti de Urbe erigi, creari et institui et illud ex pulveribus seu terra sancta cimiterii ipsius Campi Sancti de Urbe accipiendis vel accipienda et ad illud deferendos seu deferendam in superficiem eius aspergi facere": Cartularium
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