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This chapter begins with a taxonomy of votive offerings that includes collages, photographs, documents, votive texts, milagritos, hair and braids, clothing, and a range of representative objects. A subsequent section addresses mandates for church orderliness and the ways in which these negatively affect material and textual offerings and contribute to the alteration or demise of current votive practice. The chapter then analyzes votive offerings as performative objects that give thanks, repay debts, close cycles, maintain relations, witness and commemorate, and publicize. The final section discusses retablos (votive paintings), including the interaction of text and image and the construction of miracles through representation.

The chapter begins with a discussion of votive exchange, including miracle petitions, the promises made when requesting miracles, and the offerings made in reciprocation. Also discussed are the purposes of votive offerings, including fulfilling promises, paying debts, bearing witness, and documenting miracles. In this context the use of petitionary texts and objects is analyzed. The chapter concludes with an overview of types of miracles. These range from medical miracles to silencing gossipers and include miracles concerning accidents, natural disasters, crime, incarceration, absence due to kidnapping and disappearance, migration, housing, employment, agriculture, self-improvement, education, family, childbirth and children, addictions, and war.

Pompeian citizens were surrounded by the sacred. Not only were there a lot of cult places in the town, there were also crowds of statues of divinities inside each sanctuary, usually set up as votive offerings. In a world of polytheism, the gods were never alone. Each divinity had multiple aspects and zones of competence, and the association with other gods in sanctuary spaces allows us to define their ‘personalities’ more sharply. This chapter studies the statues found in the sanctuaries of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and shows that the collocation of gods in a sanctuary and their association with the emperor or with local notables was a way of defining the religious interests of the cult in question. Most prominent here are the statues of ancestral divinities, embodiments of the city's religious and historical memory of the city.

This chapter explores jewellery in the Hebrew Bible in light of the material evidence from the ancient Levant. I consider the function of jewellery in biblical texts, focused upon how these objects modify and ritualize the body. The ability of jewellery to index personhood is utilized in order to explore and unpack the use of jewellery in votive offerings. Moving beyond these insights, I then turn to the recovery of amulets inscribed with biblical passages—the earliest written evidence for biblical literature. As amulets, these objects served an apotropaic, ritual function. In biblical texts, we see this in action in the production of the golden calf, which is made from the jewellery of the Israelites. Such items therefore provide access to dimensions of personal religion and religious worship carried out outside of the official sphere. But by making sure that jewellery was utilized in the furnishing of the Temple, the biblical writers circumscribe this personal piety, making it compliant to the larger dominant model of the official Temple cult.

A narrative analysis of devotion at the Señor de Chalma shrine in Mexico state, including the caves above the church and the nearby sacred tree in Ahuehuete. The discussion focuses on the ambience at different areas of the shrine, on the nearby commercial emporium, on votive offerings, on the ascetic hermits represented in the Cave of the Apparition, on some pilgrims, and on the author’s experiences during the fieldwork.