“Landstriche” (Alps – Rome – Jerusalem, 11th–13th centuries)

Dr. Elisabeth Niederdöckl

Portable altars, chalices, patens, linen cloths, pyxes, reliquaries, crosses, vessels for wine, stands, and transport cases were required by the Church for the celebration of the Mass beyond consecrated ecclesiastical space. The project takes this ensemble as its point of departure and examines how images, inscriptions, materials, and their placement within and between artefacts related to ritual use. Read together with liturgical and theological sources, these elements help reconstruct how the ensemble was conceived, perceived, and used.
Particular attention is given to twelfth-century preparatory rites for celebrating Mass while travelling. Together with contemporary commentaries on the Mass, these sources show how priest and altar were prepared for the journey and how the ensemble was then handled, seen, and understood as it moved through the landscape.
The project contextualises these objects within Landstriche: stretches of landscape shaped by movement, encounter, and ritual, but persisting beyond the journeys that cross them. Focusing on Southern Italy and routes toward the Holy Land, the project studies little-known objects within the context of holy sites, rivers, ports, sea crossings, diplomatic encounters, changing political territories, and war, asking how objects and Landstriche became legible through one another: how the objects registered the landscapes through which they moved and how those landscapes, in turn, conditioned their perception, use, and meaning.