by Quan Gan and Harsha Gautam
On November 4th, 2022, the Department of Religious Studies organized a colloquium and invited Dr. Karin Vélez to discuss her recent monograph, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2018). Dr. Veléz is Associate Professor of pre-1800 Global History at Macalester College, Minnesota. She is interested in the study of spiritual encounters, comparative empire, global Catholicism, and indigenous female experience on the American frontier.
The two colloquia held each fall semester form an integral part of the department’s third-year graduate student seminar course. The event saw enthusiastic participation from both the faculty members and the students.
The discussion was initiated by third-year PhD students Drake Konow and Jordan Swanson. With the guidance of seminar instructor, Dr. Martha Newman, they prepared questions for Dr. Veléz based on a close reading of her monograph during class. First, they gave a brief recapitulation of the three terms Veléz uses to structure her book– journey, pairing, and experience — to show how religious history moves across time and space and religious actors. Then, they invited her to link her empirical evidence to ongoing scholarly concerns in the field of Religious Studies, namely the concept of “religion,” its relationship with power, and the problem of understanding miracles as religious experience.
Instead of providing a definition for “religion,” Dr. Veléz emphasized the accretional and additive process of identity-making explored in her book through the devotion to the House of Loreto. By drawing the readers’ attention to micro-historical complexity and dynamics, she explored the individual participatory dimension of the global spread of Catholicism, hoping to supplement the traditional top-down, institutional dissemination model. With regard to power, Dr. Veléz highlighted how it was “spontaneous mass participation, not institutions, political mandates, or impersonal forces [that] drove the globalization of Catholicism, as evidenced in the devotion to the house of Loreto.” Finally, drawing insights from paranormal studies and mytho-history, Dr. Veléz explored the potential of taking miracles and miraculous experiences as serious sources in historical reconstruction. She argued that because historical analysis focuses primarily on human actors, the miracle itself gets lost. Further, using the case of Loreto, she argued how its founding corpus was neither strict mythology nor standard history, but rather “a rolling record of individual realities.” Highlighting the lived experiences of Catholics seeking to reflect the ideal of Loreto in their own lives, she emphasized how the narratives and physical realities together assist in “enduring the charisma of the improbable.”
This discussion was followed by an enriching Q&A that witnessed a wide range of methodical and content-based questions. Dr. Veléz not only succinctly addressed these questions but also referred the audience to further readings based on their questions. For instance, when a specialist on pre-modern India expressed her interest in the use of mytho-history in interpreting early modern global Catholic miracles, Dr. Veléz guided them to Erin Benay’s new book, Italy by Way of India: Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World. After a wide-ranging discussion with faculty and students, Dr. Veléz engaged enthusiastically with the graduate students for over an hour. She generously offered her advice on writing, publishing, and professionalization in general, revisited her decade-long journey with her monograph, and shared her experiences of how she navigated through different spheres of academic life.
About the Speaker:
Karin Veléz is Associate Professor of pre-1800 Global History at Macalester College, Minnesota. She received her doctorate from the History Department at Princeton University in 2008. Her research interests include the history of the Atlantic World, early Modern Iberian and French empires, and popular religion.
About the Authors:
Quan Gan is a cultural historian of (post-)Carolingian Francia and (post-)Tang China, with a focus on the relationship between classical learning and royal authority. His PhD project examines how commemorative genres (genealogies, saints’ lives, and funerary texts) intersect with administrative genres (letters, diplomas, and institutional history) in tenth-century West Francia and China.
Harsha Gautam is a Ph.D. student in the Religions in History track in the Department of Religious Studies. She specializes in the study of premodern South Asia, early Buddhism, Sanskrit and Pāli literature, South Asian Art and Museum Studies. Her research interests also include religious identity formation, power relations, comparison and intellectual history.
