Votive World: Wax Testicles, Clay Wombs, and Kidney Stones in European Churches
Early modern churches were not only places of worship — they were also sites of exchange with the divine. People promised a gift in return for healing, survival, or luck, and then paid their debt in objects: money, wax, metal, cloth, chains, crutches, bullets, teeth, bladder stones — and, strikingly often, anatomical models. You still could walk into a major pilgrimage shrine and find it lined with wax eyes and legs, silver hearts, tiny bodies, infants, breasts, hands, or explicitly intimate offerings made for urinary problems, hernias, infertility, and childbirth.
This lecture reconstructs the ex-voto tradition as a material history of fear, pain, and recovery. We will follow how a vow could become an action — pilgrimage, penance, public testimony — and how miracles were recorded not only in written “miracle books”, but also in things themselves: bandages, extracted objects, swallowed items returned by the body, or a stone displayed beside the votive image as physical proof. Why was wax so powerful — and in rural economies, sometimes as good as cash? Why did some shrines begin to resemble anatomical theatres or proto-museums, accumulating not only devotional gifts but also “wonders of nature”: crocodiles under vaults, whale bones, meteorites, “unicorn horns”, and other mirabilia that made the church feel like a cabinet of curiosities. And finally — why did reformers, inspectors, and state authorities repeatedly try to clean these spaces up, even when the objects were clearly doing the work of belief? We will go together on an illustrated tour through Europe’s most visceral archive of devotion.
Speaker Bio:
Sergei Zotov is a historian of science and visual culture specialising in alchemy, magic, and iconography in medieval and early modern Europe (c. 1400–1800). He received his doctorate from the University of Warwick and is currently an Associate Fellow at the Warburg Institute (University of London). His research has been supported by major international fellowships held in Baltimore, Glasgow, Berlin, Gotha, Wolfenbüttel, and Überlingen, and has involved extensive archival work across more than 100 collections worldwide. Sergei has published in leading journals, including Nuncius and the British Journal for the History of Science, and is the author of five books on early modern iconography, two of which have received prestigious prizes and others shortlisted for major awards.
Curated & Hosted by:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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