Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria

Abstract

Mitchell B. Merback has produced a complex, fascinating and disturbing exploration of what he terms ‘cultic anti-Judaism’ and the ways in which accusation, violence and cult conjoined in the host-miracle pilgrimage shrines of Germany and Austria from 1300 to 1500. While primarily a work of art history, Merback’s book includes borrowings from other disciplines, such as the concept of ‘immanence’ from the sociology of religion, anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept of ‘social drama’, and historian Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on the blood of Christ, and these enrich an already highly developed theoretical framework. At once material and abstract, Merback’s study of the way the Paris host-sacrilege legend of 1290 made its way in the following centuries into Germany and Austria—seeping, like blood, or water from a well (both metaphors strongly delineated in Merback’s work)—explores how the creation of social memory was inscribed into the very stones erected by a pious Christian population upon the physical locus of a deadly falsehood. The tension between the Gnadenstätte , ‘the scene of miracle perceived as a locus of immanence’, and the Richtstätte , ‘the scene of punishment that stands as a locus of pollution’ (p. 290) is a tension that drives the creative and analytical framework of the entire book.