Abstract
Abstract Adorned with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary and other Christian emblems and text, the miraculous medal has been an important object of Catholic intercessory prayer since the mid-nineteenth century. The religious and social history of the medal in Europe is relatively well known. However, few scholars have connected the medal’s emergence with the spread of the European mission in the wake of nineteenth-century colonial expansion. This article uses the medal to shed new light on the material, corporeal, and gendered aspects of the Catholic Christianization of present-day Buganda, where it fulfilled a variety of functions for missionaries and Baganda alike. For missionaries it served as a key item for proselytizing and propaganda. For some Baganda, meanwhile, it played pivotal roles in a newly emerging form of local religious identity politics. Object analysis of an extant version from Buganda also reveals the medal’s material diversity and offers important insight into local agency in the reception and reshaping of Catholic objects. Thus when viewed in non-European contexts, miraculous medals were far more dynamic and multifaceted than has previously been understood.
Highlights
The study of ‘material religion’ or ‘religious things’ has advanced significantly over the past three decades.1 As Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer note, materiality and material culture have become ‘key terms in the study of religion, generating new empirical questions about how religions shape the world in a concrete manner’ (2012, 6)
The image of the Blessed Virgin Mary crushing the snake took on new gendered and racialised meanings for missionaries. In his discussion of precolonial African religions, John Mbiti explains that the snake was an important symbol for a number of African communities and did not always embody the type of sinister connotations rendered by Christian missionaries (Mbiti 1969)
The owner of this particular object responded to this change by positioning it alongside indigenous materials that had strong symbolic value prior to the arrival of European Catholicism
Summary
The study of ‘material religion’ or ‘religious things’ has advanced significantly over the past three decades. As Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer note, materiality and material culture have become ‘key terms in the study of religion, generating new empirical questions about how religions shape the world in a concrete manner’ (2012, 6). This quote demonstrates that creating a ‘spectacle’ of the maternalism of white female missionaries (and in turn the Blessed Virgin Mary) was perceived as crucial to Catholic success and the salvation of women in the region. How can we understand these choices? Other studies of Ugandan history, ethnography, and archaeology allow us to root some of the individual material and aesthetic elements in local historical, social, and cultural contexts, and to offer some tentative explanations
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