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Collecting vernacular religious material culture

Yesterday I unpacked my most recent purchase of vernacular religious material culture—a German ex-voto painting on wood of the blessings bestowed by the Virgin Mary on a man during a riding accident, and bearing a dedication date of 1517 (Figure 1; see Primiano 2016). I could not help but pause at this moment and, holding this cracked but stable panel, think of a rather worn cliché: if only this object could talk, what would we learn about the religious lives of this man, of his family who prayed for his recovery or thanked the Virgin Mary for his preservation, of the artist who created this image? What could be learned about the vernacular Catholicism which made this complex of tragedy, belief, intercession, pilgrimage, and artistry possible? What has been the journey of this artifact since its original placement in a European church or shrine, and now in my hands? As I sat there deciphering the Gothic German text, the clothing, regional Madonna, and so on, I grew excited at the thought of showing this object to other people and sharing the adventure of uncovering these mysteries with them during future research. That is for me one of the intense pleasures of collecting and studying material religion. My interest in collecting developed in graduate school as I learned more about the meanings of everyday objects—hand-made and mechanically reproduced—and the lives of their makers and users/consumers. Exposure to a faculty of folklorists meant that whenever there were social occasions in the professors’ homes, all of the students were exposed to their uniquely personal collections of books, art, and objects. Each object was connected to a story. Of course, their offices were also a marvel of things which could be reached for or brought down to illustrate a genre in conference, or carried into a classroom to demonstrate a point. I had appreciated books even as a child, first collecting weekly encyclopedias from supermarket giveaways, so seeing in the office of my advisor the late Don Yoder, the many volumes representing the history of scholarly work within the fields of American religion and folkloristics profoundly impressed me and, as I worked as his research assistant, they aided my professionalization as a scholar. Yoder, of course, did more than amass books. His office was a material religious marvel: a large room, his enormous book cases were marked on each shelf with objects: a framed Fraktur or a Mexican crucifix here, a statue of St. Christopher or a bottle of blessed Spiritist powder there. The diversity of traditions and objects was amazing, eclectic, appealing, and a testimony to his many years as a professor and researcher. It was here I began to learn to appreciate the dynamic local/ regional/national/international interconnectivity and intersubjectivity of such ephemeral and humble objects, and the significance of religious material culture and visual religious culture, which included every medium from paintings and paper ephemera to foodways and objectified text. These objects helped me to classify and contextualize and value items that I myself had presciently gathered years earlier. As a youth, I had indicated to my maternal grandmother an interest in religious objects and she gifted me with a large stack of old Roman Catholic holy cards, many in Polish—my grandmother spoke both German and Polish, but lived in a Philadelphia Polish ethnic parish. Somehow these cards survived my childhood and became the very sentimental center of a collection of Catholic paper ephemera (Figure 2). As a graduate student, I also began to come into contact with local collectors and with folk art dealers in Philadelphia, where one could drop in, ask questions, and learn. Again, the influence and example of Don Yoder was strong, because he had rather discreetly assembled one of the nation’s finest private collections of Pennsylvania German paper ephemera. On the modest salary of an assistant professor he began in the 1950s purchasing such items decades before their value increased, adding to his own family’s personal collection. Yoder amassed an enormous body of Protestant house blessings, letters from heaven, birth/baptismal/confirmation/marriage certifiLeonard Norman Primiano, PhD, is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies and Co-Director of the Honors Program at Cabrini University, Radnor, Pennsylvania, USA. He is series editor for the upcoming six-volume A Cultural History of Religion (Bloomsbury) and editor of Vernacular Catholicism: Folkloristic Studies of Catholic Culture. A Fellow of the American Folklore Society, he is Co-Chair of the Folklore and Religion Seminar, American Academy of Religion, and CoChair of the Folk Belief and Religious Folklife Section of the American Folklore Society. primiano@cabrini.edu