Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Italian and Italian Studies
Bryn Mawr College

“Anachronism, the Late Medieval Patrona Statue of Lucera, and a Modern Angevin Cult”

This talk examines the so-called Santa Maria Patrona statue of Lucera, a late medieval wooden Throne of Wisdom venerated as an eighth-century statue for a southern Italian civic cult that dates to the eighteenth century. This talk examines the tensions that have formed between the Patrona statue as a work of art—or more precisely a product of a late thirteenth-, early fourteenth-century Angevin cultural milieu—and the statue as an important cult object and the center of a southern Italian city’s foundation legends. Second, it examines the tension between local legends that trace current devotional practices to the year 1300, and the reality that those practices were institutionalized only after a period of civic medievalism at the turn of the eighteenth century.