Lecture Three

‘Religious Real Estate: Properties of the Sacred’

[Wednesday 15 May, from 5:15 to 6:45 pm, Harris Lecture Theatre, Oriel College]

A persistent image of pilgrimage sites is that they act as ‘spiritual magnets,’ drawing others to them as a result of extraordinary events or miraculous properties of healing or revelation. This view occludes the significance of the multiple material infrastructures that facilitate access to and through a holy place, providing the bodily presences necessary to reinforce its image as locus of exceptional sacrality. In this lecture, I examine the affordances of resources that range from roads to real estate, and I highlight a category of person often ignored in studies of pilgrimage sites: those people—including but not just clergy—who regard sacred destination as ‘home’. I show how domesticity and the divine may become conjoined through miraculous narratives of acquiring and developing property. My focus on the materialities of both cathedrals and Walsingham as sacred places incorporates kitchens and cartographies, personal biographies as well as a wider biopolitics of religious encompassment. Drawing on anthropological work on hospitality and migration, I develop a model of the pilgrimage site as both generator and receiver of ‘vital signs’ of religious presence.