Replicas of the Santa Casa: Networks of Geographic Translation
In February 2020, Erin Giffin launched her ongoing digital humanities project mapping replicas of the Santa Casa di Loreto. A companion to the monograph Translating Space: Replicas of the Holy House of Loreto (in progress), this tool provides an interactive resource to better visualize the spread of Loreto devotion, and the relationships between replicas.
Emerging from the SACRIMA Project, this digital humanities initiative maps Holy House replicas constructed globally based on extant structures and surviving documentation. This project takes a multidisciplinary approach to explore the impetus behind structural recreations and their enduring cult value, and also seeks to identify probable sources of structural and iconographic information. By comparing textual and visual print culture, local histories, and eyewitness accounts in addition to surviving structural replicas, this project reveals how trends enter new communities, and the ways in which each new group reinterprets the devotional prototype to serve regional priorities.
