Seminars

Abstract

This talk explores the relationship between the True Cross, its legendary history, and a category of miraculous carved crucifixes made from trees growing in the German countryside in the Middle Ages. It seeks to return the local objects to their context of spring rituals, through which they then re-sacrilized the earth. Arising out of miracles rooted in trees in the local landscape, the two crucifixes that form the heart of this talk were also instrumentalized to empower requests for renewed divine intervention within nature. Far from ordinary, as their surviving histories recount in words, the crucifixes transcended the ontological status as mere images precisely because the autochthonous trees from which they derived re-enacted many of the key tropes first exemplified by the True Cross. Imbued with the mystical qualities of the True Cross itself, the crucifixes furnished altars inside their churches but at pivotal moments in the agricultural and liturgical calendar they were ritually processed outside its walls to render the surrounding landscape and its vegetation with the potential for new divine intercession. For all the power these wooden artworks could claim over the lowly wood, though, their own wood was always carefully partitioned from that of the True Cross, laying bare the risks and challenges posed by reincarnations of the cross legends in local landscapes outside the sanctuary.