For our March Brownbag, Religious Studies is delighted to host Claire Kilgore, currently a PhD Candidate in Art History. Claire will present the talk “Advertising Ritual at Mariazell: Finding Lived Religion at an Early Sixteenth Century Austrian Pilgrimage Shrine.” This event is open to all interested students, faculty, staff, and members of the public! Please share widely with anyone who may be interested.
Abstract: Located in the Styrian Alps, the Austrian pilgrimage site of Mariazell is not easily accessible, even after the introduction of the railroad in the late nineteenth-century. Although Mariazell is renowned as a place of imperial devotion during the glory days of the Habsburg dynasty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, today’s talk focuses on Mariazell at the beginning of the sixteenth century and how the shrine’s material culture illuminates devotional practice. Looking at a series of woodblock prints produced by the unknown “Master of the Miracles of Mariazell” around 1520, I argue that the images not only functioned as advertisements promoting Mariazell’s efficacy amidst a crowded Marian pilgrimage landscape but also reveal useful details about ritual and lived religion in the early sixteenth-century, especially for the dysfunctional reproductive and maternal body.
Speaker: Claire Kilgore is a PhD Candidate in the Art History Graduate Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also works as a lecturer for the Religious Studies Program and completed the Religious Studies PhD Minor. Her work on Mariazell is part of her larger dissertation project “Sensing the Bodily Interior: Visualizing Pregnancy and Reproductive Anatomy in Central Europe, 1300–1550.”
Date & Time: Friday, March 27, 2026, 12 Noon – 1:00PMLocation: Room 202/204, Bradley Memorial Building (Street Address: 1225 Linden Dr. Madison, Wisconsin, 53706)