Salvation Economics and Media. Constituting Social Spaces via early modern Pilgrimage in Lower Austria

The project works out the plurality of early modern pilgrimage in eastern Austria. Devotional imag-es, songbooks, and other works show how pilgrimages were framed by media as a religious practice. Those media were essential during as well as outside pilgrimages. The analysis deals with three par-adigmatic case studies, each of which embodies a specific early modern type of pilgrimage site in terms of its origin and medialization, and which provide optimal source materials: Sonntagberg (Lower Austria), Maria Hietzing (Vienna) and Pyhra (Lower Austria).
The condensed mediality typical of pilgrimages emerges in increased communication and in diversi-fied media. Essential is the twofold function of media, which consists (1) in their materiality, and (2) in the coding of their contents. Because media can only produce meaning through reception, media consumers play a crucial role. Given that condensed mediality is a central phenomenon of pilgrimage, the following research questions arise: How were social spaces constituted by pilgrimage media and the practices associated with them? Which narrative sequences of legends and reports were taken up and implemented in the media? How were pilgrimage sites medially integrated into the history of salvation and thus charged with the perspective of sacred presence? How did media products influence conceptions of pilgrimage sites and their reception? How can pilgrimage-related media spaces be described in terms of their economic, social, and cultural reach?
Because pilgrimages constituted new relationships between pilgrimage media and acts of active-performative reception, a bundle of methods is necessary that exceeds the instruments of source studies, iconography, and the history of media. To analyze the considerable media output and the associated socio-spatial networks of pilgrimage sites, inter alia the integration of Siegfried J. Schmidt’s wide-ranging media theory is suitable. It understands media offerings as interconnections of communication instruments (language/images), technical dispositifs, and social institutionaliza-tions (e.g. book trade). Through including intermedial phenomena, it is thus possible to consider images in the effect of different spatial and social settings.
Pilgrimage is distinguished from other forms of devotion by the amount of time and organization required. Tourism studies here provide new perspectives: Like modern tourists, pilgrims approach a destination with an expectation raised by media. The comparison of images experienced on site with expected images (tourist gaze) and their further medial reproduction is made usable for pre-modernity as pilgrim gaze. Pilgrimage media thus not only prescribe how to look, but also how to behave. This behavior is then imitated on site and can be reproduced medially, much like social media.
Primary researchers involved: Werner Telesko, Thomas Kühtreiber, Sabine Miesgang, Veronika Decker