Abstract
This article presents the Hungarian manifestations of a written devotional practice that emerged in the second half of the 20th century worldwide: the rite of writing prayers in guestbooks or visitors’ books and spontaneously leaving prayer slips in shrines. Guestbooks or visitors’ books, a practice well known in museums and exhibitions, have appeared in Hungarian shrines for pilgrims to record requests, prayers, and declarations of gratitude. This is an unusual use of guestbooks, as, unlike regular guestbook entries, they contain personal prayers, which are surprisingly honest and self-reflective. Another curiosity of the books and slips is that anybody can see and read them, because they are on display in the shrines, mostly close to the statue of Virgin Mary. They allow the researcher to observe a special communication situation, the written representation of an informal, non-formalised, personal prayer. Of course, this is not unknown in the practice of prayer; what is new here is that it takes place in the public realm of a shrine, in written form. This paper seeks answers to the question of what genre antecedents, what patterns of behaviour, and which religious practices have led to the development of this recent practice of devotion in the examined period in Hungarian Catholic shrines. In connection with this issue, this paper would like to draw attention to the combined effect of the following three factors: the continuity of traditions, the emergence of innovative elements and the role of the church as an institution. Their parallel interactions help us to understand the guestbooks of the shrines.
Highlights
While searching for precedents of a new type of written devotion custom that appeared in the world in the second half of the 20th century, it became clear that there is an overlap and transition among certain traditional forms of devotion
It can be said that at the levels of content, form and function, countless elements of the known traditional written forms of devotion could be identified in the guestbooks. They appear in the 20th-century modern manifestation of written devotion simultaneously (Eberhardt and Ponisch 2000, p. 24)
The order varied from one shrine to another: inscriptions on church walls replaced votive images; the book replaced inscriptions
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Kriss wrote about the increasingly intensive veneration of the saint and drew attention to the appearance of a form of devotion that differed from the traditional. It had become an increasingly frequent element of devotion that the faithful visiting the site wrote long letters to the saint, and in their supplications as part of the Mass, the members of the local religious community said prayers based on the contents of those letters. If we returned to Europe, to the chapel of a tiny village in western Hungary in the same year, we could have made similar observations Pilgrims to this site were able to write their personal requests and prayers of gratitude in a Guestbook placed there for that purpose (Frauhammer 2012). Parishes, was role theirinrole in giving instruction regarding practices these
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