Caminoisation and Cathedrals: replication, the heritagisation of religion, and the spiritualisation of heritage

Religion in cathedrals: pilgrimage, heritage, adjacency, and the politics of replication in Northern Europe

“…At the same time, as Bowman and Sepp indicate, it cannot be entirely divorced from cathedral spaces for these were so much the foci of past pilgrimage endeavour and still function as tangible connections with, and experiences of, the past. Indeed, 'Caminoization' is shown to have its effects on the pilgrimage practices organized by cathedrals, and perhaps to resonate especially well with a Reformed focus on finding or rediscovering 'the self' (Bowman and Sepp 2018).…”

“…The popularity of such travel provides an important catalyst for both strategic and reflexive practice among clergy and cathedral staff more generally, who must reconcile liturgical with more secular, professional discourses in the planning, staging, and sometimes marketing, of pilgrimages. In Anglican contexts, there is of course the question of how and whether a post-Reformation institution should be encouraging such activity-and thus debates over pilgrimage reach into the question, raised earlier, of how far the Church of England can reappropriate medieval practices of piety (see especially papers by Bowman and Sepp 2018;Coleman 2018a;Mikaelsson 2018).…”

“…Replication may sometimes therefore refer to the extent to which a cathedral provides a feasible model, or emblem, for smaller constituencies of religious practice such as the diocese or parish; it may point to the ways in which cathedrals echo each other materially and ritually in processes of mutual borrowing or competition; it may refer to processes of acquiring relics from saints and other holy figures, which then become subject to a redistributive economy of sacred objects that diffuses sanctity across other religious spaces; it may pose the question as to whether the 'sacred space' of a cathedral is echoed by features of its 'common ground'; and, finally, it may refer to the ways in which both iconic places-such as Jerusalem-and more recently iconic pathways-such as the Camino-provide features that are copied by other shrines and sacralized landscapes. 11 Thus a theme running across some papers in this issue refers to how, in the past and present, a sacred place, a sacred figure, or a sacred route, may be copied by, or come to 'colonize', other spaces and places in processes of what we call 'Becketization' (Jenkins 2018) and 'Caminoization' (Bowman and Sepp 2018;Mikaelsson 2018). As in all forms of replication, there are questions as to whether the copy can ever reproduce fully the power and authenticity of the original, but also whether the existence of such copies also reinforces the legitimacy of such an originating source.…”

“…In the contemporary period, there is another process that seems increasingly significant in cathedrals and which also raises questions of replication and legitimacy: that of 'heritagization' (Bowman and Sepp 2018;Coleman 2018a;Mikaelsson 2018), where sacralized history is turned into more secular, commodifiable forms. One of the challenges of any scholarly approach to the latter, however, is to resist an easy hierarchy of value that automatically places original over reproduction, religion over the market.…”

Mute Sacrum. Faith and Its Relation to Heritage on Camino de Santiago

“…Thanks to this capacity, when seeing a monument from the past, the pilgrim is able to separate the essence from its cultural manifestations characteristic for the given period (Romanesque, Gothic, modern, etc.). The message expressed in stone or on canvas is purified and recovered for the next generation (Bowman and Sepp 2019). Accordingly, faith is the ability to see more in things than they themselves express, purifying cultural mixtures, on the principle of cleansing silver mixed with lead.…”