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This chapter describes how some Catholic pilgrims tried to reconcile the Jesuit official advice of mental self-discipline with their first intense encounters with the Madonna of Loreto. The pilgrims' stories involve both contemplative quests for spiritual improvement and transformative run-ins with the material manifestations of Catholicism. Yet they flip the order recommended by Richeòme of contemplation first and real world next. The first pilgrims considered are the Jesuits who loom large behind the good-pilgrimage rubrics of this time period. Then, the Jesuit template for pilgrimage is tested against the reported experiences of two non-Jesuit travelers to Loreto, Nicolà Albani and Pierre Chaumonot.

This introductory chapter begins with the story of a small, well-traveled house that fell from the sky into the middle of a road leading to the town of Recanati, in Italy's Marche region, 2 December 1295. The house came to be known as “Loreto” for the owner of the land, Laureta. The chapter then sets out the book's purpose, which is to show the myriad human hands behind the Holy House's emergence on the Italian and global scene. Movers ranged beyond French, Spanish, Portuguese, and central European Jesuits to include Monquí pilgrims from Baja California, Moxos house builders in Bolivia, Huron female mission leaders in Canada, Inka procession organizers in Peru, Slavic migrants in the Adriatic basin, and German atlas makers, among others. The experiences of these individuals who got bundled into the history of Loreto turn Loreto's founding parable on its head.

Since the miraculous flying house first surfaced, people have applied historical methods to better understand it. But these attempts have fallen short at explaining three hallmarks of the Loreto devotion: its movement (journeys), its grafting onto new venerated objects (pairings), and its lasting appeal (due in part to people's continued real, lived experiences). This chapter presents a basic background and descriptions of key features of Loreto's devotion. It focuses on questions such as: What are the possible avenues that have been explored by those keen to crack past mysteries like Loreto's flying house? How do particular choices of focus constrain understanding? How do the ways that people describe an event contribute to that event's staying power? These questions are broached and answered in the surveys of both deconstructive methods and reconstructive counterapproaches.

This chapter reexamines Loreto's historical “brand” by looking at some of the first authors of Loreto's origin story. It opens with the architects of Loreto's shrine seal, Cardinal Antonio Maria Gallo and Cardinal Rutilio Benzoni. Moving down the ranks and back in time, there are two earlier sixteenth-century chroniclers who laid the groundwork for the high clergy's selective mythohistory: a shrine governor, Pietro di Giorgio Tolomei, and a local secretary, Girolamo Angelitta. Like Virgin and house, and seal and medal, these men are first introduced in pairs and then grouped in larger company because, sometimes unbeknownst to each other, they worked in tandem to reconstruct Loreto's past. Their overlaps and contradictions illuminate the often inadvertently collaborative project of building official shrine history.

This chapter first considers Bishop Casal's failed attempt to take a stone from the Holy House and its repercussions. It then surveys multiple iterations of the Holy House of Loreto that were built from blueprints distributed at the Loreto shrine in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It closes by honing in on the replicas of the Jesuits, especially a diverse string of Holy Houses left by one Jesuit, Juan Maria Salvatierra, across Mexico. Individually and as a group, holy house builders in Europe and on the American frontiers wavered between creating accurate, rooted copies that were thoughtfully integrated into their new surroundings, and making imperfect, drifting copies that were unmodified and intrusive to their new settings. This variety suggests that what mattered most in spreading the Loreto devotion was felt intent (mood) rather than following instructions (mind).

This chapter begins by examining how two peripheral artworks of the Virgin of Loreto, the eighteenth-century wooden statue from the Moxos missions and the seventeenth-century Roman painting by Caravaggio, each tapped into outside streams of Marian art. The same impetus for transformation is observed for the original icon of the Madonna of Loreto at the Italian shrine. Updates to this icon were spurred by an awareness of the world outside Loreto. The chapter concludes with a return to the frontier, to Canada, to consider some significantly named but lesser known Huron women converts who contributed to Mary's global public image. Overall, these case studies of modifications to the Virgin of Loreto reflect what mattered to people on both sides of the Atlantic about Mary at this time: she was alien, yet she was accessible; she moved, and she could also be moved.

Agostinho de Santa Maria (1642–1728), a Descalced Augustinian friar from Portugal, spent the last three decades of his life taking inventory of sites dedicated to Mary. Jesuits such as Wilhelm Gumppenberg, Francisco de Florencia, and António Cordeiro also produced encyclopedic compilations of Marian sanctuaries across the world. Their projects suggest that mission names counted in the early modern period because they were actually counted. This chapter begins with counters including the Santa Maria, Gumppenberg, de Florencia, and Cordeiro. This assortment of atlas makers, inventory compilers, and biographers shows the diversity and quantity of individuals engaged in the counting project of the seventeenth century. It was these counters who fixed and publicized the notion that the spread of Loreto was collective and intentional. The chapter then turns to some of the namers featured by the above writers. Finally, it examines Jesuit records that point to the Inka of Cuzco and the Monquí of California, whose processions in honor of Loreto brought the name currency and freshness.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. It begins by recapitulating the three entry points for analysis that have been tested in this book: beginning with anchoring ideals, looking for actual patterns, and finding late expressions. These strategies have been applied here to historically examine miraculous data to determine what happened in the remote past. Now they will be brought to bear to reconstruct Loreto's origins. Taken seriously as historical proof, the prototype miracle of Loreto illuminates how Catholicism moved and continues to move. The chapter concludes by comparing the construction of Loreto's mythohistory and today's Wikipedia entries, which is illuminating both for the similarities and differences that rise to the fore.

The Roman Catholic female teaching order of Loreto established very different networks of interaction that were not always coterminous with empire. They resulted in different outcomes for Indian girls, taking some out of destitution and eventually offering a select few a university education of a kind that was equivalent to that received by Indian males and away from European, middle-class accomplishments education. Catholicism in India was mistrusted by the raj. Loreto was a teaching order from Ireland, with strong links to Belgium and German Jesuits in India. Some Loreto women religious (nuns) were sympathetic to the Irish national struggle and saw the Indian nationalist struggle in similar terms. Different predications were at the core of Loreto’s femininity and there were different forms of female oppression within its order. Loreto’s outreach to Indian communities was also inspired by different mentalities from those underlying Indian social service that was based on ‘living traditions’ such as sannyas (creativity and alertness) and brahmacharya (control of the senses). Yet Loreto’s outreach, that intuitively melded education and medicine for females, and funded in part by cross-subsidy from its wealthier boarding schools for Eurasians, created possibilities for recognition by Bengal’s bhadralok (Indian middle-classes) in post-Partition India.

Most of this book focuses on the biogeography and ecology of plants and various animal taxa on islands in the Sea of Cortés. These chapters highlight the historical and biogeographical factors that contributed to the patterns of species distribution and co-occurrence among islands. However, these patterns also reflect the action of ecological processes because the species present interact, directly or indirectly, within the food web that occurs on any given island. Island food webs may also be unique from other communities in the degree to which their structure and dynamics are also strongly influenced by the surrounding ocean. We believe that a deeper appreciation of the trophic connections between the sea and the land, and the resulting effects on the structure and dynamics of island food webs, is key to understanding the biogeography of species on islands. Many factors that operate through the food web can enhance or depress populations in a way that affects their local distribution and persistence, and, as a consequence, affects patterns of diversity on a biogeographical scale. Of these, we recognize three as being particularly important: the availability and quality of resources, competition, and consumption (i.e., by herbivores, predators, parasites). Bottom-up factors (nutrients, primary productivity, and food availability to consumers) set limits on island productivity and hence on the potential abundance of a particular group. Within a given community, secondary productivity and population density are subsequently constrained by top-down (i.e., consumption) and competitive effects. One of our goals in this chapter is to show how processes that influence productivity of gulf islands determine patterns of abundance of organisms on islands and affect interactions among species and trophic levels in these systems. Our second goal is to demonstrate the importance of spatial and temporal variability in productivity in determining the structure and dynamics of island food webs. Using our long-term studies of plants and consumers on islands in the northern gulf, we show that productivity varies greatly, both among years and islands, as a result of both local conditions and global climatic factors. Such variable productivity markedly affects food web dynamics and ultimately the abundance of species on the islands in the Sea of Cortés.

In 1973, George Lindsay, one of Baja California’s most eminent botanists, visited the islands of the Sea of Cortés together with Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Kenneth Bechtel. Lindbergh, one of the most celebrated popular heroes of the twentieth century, had become by that time a committed conservationist, interested in the preservation of whales and in the conservation of nature at large. Joseph Wood Krutch, a naturalist, had written The Forgotten Peninsula, one of the first natural history descriptions of Baja California. George Lindsay had helped organize a series of scientific explorations into the Sea of Cortés and the peninsula of Baja California, first from the San Diego Natural History Museum, and later from the California Academy of Sciences (Banks 1962a,b; Lindsay 1962, 1964, 1966, 1970; Wiggins 1962). Kenneth Bechtel, a philanthropist from San Francisco, had given financial support to the Audubon Society in the 1950s and 1960s to study the sea bird rookery at Isla Rasa, which had been decreed a protected area by the Mexican government in 1962. Bechtel was interested in showing the Sea of Cortés to people who might be aroused by its astounding natural beauty and who might help to protect it. For this purpose, he organized the trip and invited Lindbergh to visit the region. The group flew a chartered Catalina flying-boat that allowed them to get to small and remote islands. They landed in the water and then piloted up to the beach so they could have shade under the wing. They visited many of the islands, starting from Consag north of Bahía de los Ángeles, and ending up in Espíritu Santo, east of the Bay of La Paz. It was a wonderful and memorable trip. Two or three months later, both Lindbergh and Lindsay traveled to Mexico City to watch the Mexican premiere of a documentary film on the Sea of Cortés by the California Academy of Sciences that Kenneth Bechtel had sponsored (see chap. 1). Taking advantage of the opportunity, and also of his immense popularity, Charles Lindbergh requested to see the president of Mexico, Luis Echeverría.

This chapter explores the transmission of religious objects, ideas, and practices between the household and the wider community. Occupying a central place in the discussion is the Holy House of Loreto, the Virgin’s own home, which was supposedly transported by angels in the thirteenth century from the Holy Land to the Papal States. Despite Counter-Reformation attempts to impose boundaries between sacred and profane space, the Italian Renaissance casa was not a bounded, sealed space but was infinitely receptive to outside influences. In attending to thresholds, this final chapter insists on a fluid conception of the home: a locale with a special place in the divine cosmos, protected by Christ, the Virgin, and saints and open to the presence of the supernatural.

This chapter considers educational provision for Irish girls and the origins of Catholic female religious teaching orders in Ireland. The purpose and content of female education was based on a construction of the Irish girl as a vain and excitable creature. Her education was intended to curb the supposedly innate character flaws of girlhood. This chapter considers a selection of Loreto, Ursuline, and Dominican boarding schools to examine how institutions implemented the ideal of Catholic girlhood in practice. From academic curricula, disciplinary measures, daily schedules, and uniforms, the boarding school experience contained a variety of mechanisms for forming the behaviour of girls. Debates over female education and the convent boarding school offer an excellent example of how ideas of class, femininity, and religion interacted with evolving views of childhood.