Notes and Comments

Abstract

Notes and Comments Martin Menke and Kenneth Pennington Association News The Spring Meeting of the Association will be held at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania on April 17 and 18, 2020. The deadline for submission of proposals for individual papers, panels, and roundtables is February 3. They should be submitted via the ACHA website (achahistory.org). For further information, please contact Professor Robert Shaffern at robert.shaffern@scranton.edu. The 2021 Annual Meeting will be held in Seattle, Washington, on January 7 to 9, 2021. The ACHA solicits papers and panels on the following topics: Catholicism and missions, Pacific-rim Catholicism, Catholicism in the western United States, Catholicism and the environment, Catholicism and public scholarship, communities traditionally marginalized in the field of Catholic history, and premodern or early modern Catholicism. Proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, book discussions, and site visits should be submitted via the Association's website. For joint AHA-ACHA panels the deadline is February 15, for ACHA panels it is March 16, 2021. Joint panels with affiliated societies such as the American Society of Church History are encouraged. For further information, please contact Professor Anthony B. Smith at asmith1@udayton.edu. At its annual meeting in New York on January 4, 2020 the following awards were announced: 2019 John Gilmary Shea Prize The John Gilmary Shea Prize is given annually to the author of a book, published during a preceding twelve-month period, which is judged by a committee of experts to have made the most original and distinguished contribution to the knowledge of the history of the Catholic Church. Any author who is a citizen or permanent resident of the United States or Canada is eligible. The prize consists of $1500. The Shea Prize committee of the American Catholic Historical Association for 2019 was comprised of three members: Professor Una Cadegan (University of Dayton), Professor Stephen Schloesser, S.J. (Loyola University Chicago), and Professor A. Katie Stirling-Harris (University of California at Davis). Citation: The American Catholic Historical Association awards the 2019 John Gilmary Shea Prize to Karin Vélez for her book The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019; published December 2018). [End Page 158] This boldly conceived monograph examines the global spread of early modern Catholicism through the prism of a Marian devotion and by means of an innovative methodology. Vélez initially challenges readers by approaching her topic as mythohistory, a sympathetic position that takes "miracles and religion not as categories of belief but as historical records of reality" (26), a reality of believers' lived experience and memory. Turning away from conventional approaches that require scholars to peel away devotional layers accumulated over time, Vélez instead views religion as a continuous flow of motion, migration, accretion, and hybridization, and fortuitously lands on the Virgin of Loreto's flying house as the portable embodiment of Catholicism's expansion. As a result, Loreto's global Catholicism is "powerfully accretive: it is always in flux and reinvention, never frozen or static" (33). Drawing especially on reports sent to Jesuit authorities in Rome from Spanish colonies in the Americas as well as the published Jesuit Relations from New France, Vélez utilizes a variety of sources including mission accounts, travelogues, sermons, and cultic "histories." However, even while using such sources largely composed by clerics, Vélez expands the category of "author" by blurring boundaries between "authorized" missionaries and less authoritative (usually anonymous) missionized. This lets Vélez reimagine authorship as an organic, fluid process and a complex interweaving of migrants and indigenous: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Slav, Jesuit, Huron, Moxos, Monquí, Inka—and their invited guests. Avoiding both wholly top-down and bottom-up models of religious transmission and change, Vélez draws attention to multiple voices, haphazard and chance events, and a "jumbled" geography transcending customary center-periphery divisions. As a result, Vélez finds participation and contributions in places that more conventional methodologies might never have identified: "unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists, and unsolicited cataloguers" (7). In sum, this path-breaking study of the constructions, transformations, and expansions of a Marian devotion in early modern global Catholicism...