Salvation Economics and Media (SALVEMED)

The research of the SALVEMED project places the practice of early modern pilgrimage on a new footing through in-depth studies of Lower Austria. The focus thereby lies on those text and image media that significantly determined the religious experience: devotional pictures, miracle and song books, pilgrim signs and medals as well as the rich decorative programmes of pilgrim churches. Essential to SALVEMED is the idea that pilgrimages established new relationships between the individual media, i.e. the pictorial and textual evidence on the one hand, and the perception by people on the other. Pilgrimages differed from other forms of devotional practice, such as attending mass or praying, in that they required a great deal of time and organisation, as pilgrimages to a specific destination often involved considerable risk. Like todays tourists, pilgrims once approached their destinations, i.e. the places of pilgrimage, with expectations that were fed primarily by the media. The comparison between the impressions experienced on site with the expected images and their further media reproductions can be described as the pilgrims gaze. SALVEMED also examines the complexity of pilgrimage in eastern Austria in the early modern period in a European context. The corresponding pictorial and textual sources were of great relevance for pilgrimage, but were often produced abroad. The project itself is based on three exemplary case studies each of which is both historically significant of a particular type of early modern pilgrimage site: Sonntagberg (Lower Austria), Maria Hietzing (Vienna) and Pyhra (Lower Austria). The starting point for the SALVEMED project is the concept of condensed mediality, which is both characteristic of early modern pilgrimages and intends to describe the intensive relations between the media. However, research on the media involved in pilgrimages should also always take into account the aspect of reception, which assigns a decisive role to the respective consumers, i.e. the pilgrims or the viewers of the media. With the approach described above, the SALVEMED project largely breaks new scholarly ground. Methods that go beyond the established and proven instruments of source studies, iconography and media history will be used in the realisation of this project. On this basis, the following research questions take centre stage: How were social spaces created through pilgrimage media and the practices associated with them? What stories are actually told in the pilgrimage media? In what ways were the places of pilgrimage linked to the Christian salvation stories? Did the media products influence the ideas about the places of pilgrimage?