Hyperdulia americana: sacred history and devotional landscapes

TLDR: The Hyperdulia Americana: sacred history and devotional landscapes, special issue as mentioned in this paper, focuses on the history of the Virgin of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá in Spanish America.

Abstract: Nestled in the New Kingdom of Granada is the province of Tunja, home to an image of the Virgin Mary known as Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá. The creole Dominican Pedro de Tobar y Buendía (1649–1713) was the first to write a devotional history of this image and its shrine. In his prologue, the friar claims many would have ‘eloquently historicized’ the wonders of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá had they only had access to the juridical testimonies (informaciones jurídicas) that, for almost a century, had been locked up under ‘the keys of forgetfulness.’ Instead of allowing his discovery to remain ‘hidden in the archives,’ Tobar published his 1694 historical narrative of her prodigious self-renewal and other proclaimed miracles in Madrid (prólogo, n.p.). His desire to shed light on neglected or overlooked favors of the Virgin Mary was shared by hundreds of other churchmen across the early modern Spanish and Catholic worlds. Collectively they lamented that oral stories of the Queen of Heaven were lost within the ‘forgetfulness of time’ (Jesús María 1650, 29r) or ignored by ‘centuries of silence, carelessness, negligence, or the forgetfulness of writers from [past] eras’ (Florencia 1688, 44r). This special issue, Hyperdulia Americana: sacred history and devotional landscapes, wrestles with forgetfulness—misplaced papers, urban rubble, melted images, and oral testimonies—as much as it uses it as a source of inspiration to illuminate colonial silences, losses, and erasures in the Atlantic chapter of the global history of Marian devotion. The four essays published here approach these fragmentary pieces of evidence by concentrating on sacred histories (also known as church or ecclesiastical histories) and other related documents, all of which were crucial for the consolidation of local cults and their shrines. Devotional histories of holy images, cathedral inventories, juridical testimonies, and iconic compendiums—a sampling of some of the primary sources used in this special issue—offer a unique window onto the lived experiences of elites and everyday people across Spanish America. While creoles and European émigrés were the primary authors of these texts, they often based their work upon the oral histories of indigenous, casta, and black devotees who provided their testimonies to inquiring churchmen. Their published and manuscript accounts of Marian devotion offer a glimpse of the intersection between local politics and patronage, not to mention Spanish and indigenous concepts of urban space and divine protection. These documents also allow us to enter the history of emotions, specifically familial and romantic love, as well as ideas of beauty that informed the production of religious visual and material culture.