Priests, Mountains, and "Sacred Space" in Early Modern Europe

Each new bishop had to come and confirm the valley's privileges "on knees, with head bowed, before representatives of valley clergy and laity, his right hand on the holy scriptures" (p. 89), then add his signalure to that of his predecessors on the original 1372 parchment These privileges, incremented by customary accretion, included valley retention of all tithes (half for the priests, half for the parish expenses), parish council presentation of curates, the figure of a local archdeacon with bishop-like judicial authority who could be appealed only to the archdiocese or the pope, and the limitation of episcopal visits (with no retinue) to once every seven years at most. The general pattern of reproduction of Jerusalem and the Holy Land within the church, churchyard, city, or village, often in some measured way, whether full-scale or reduced, was fed by pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in turn fed pilgrimage, not only to Jerusalem but also to Holy Land relics (the True Cross, shroud, tunic, and other clothes, Veronicas, the milk of Mary), European shrines of biblical saints, European replicas (Holy Sepulchres, Sacromonti), and relicreplicas (Loreto, on the jacket of SS).77 This tendency was emphasized in the Counter-Reformation in an attempt to demonstrate religious authenticity and pedigree, but it built on late medieval spiritual exercises like those at Wienhausen in which, as in the later ones of Ignatius Loyola and those described for pilgrims to Rome, believers imagined themselves in other places and times.