LoM · Landscape of Miracles: Communities, Women, and the Religious Experience of the Environment in the Early Modern Republic of Venice

Landscape of Miracles (LoM), investigates the sacralisation of natural spaces in rural communities of the Republic of Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines how visionary experiences transformed fields, woods, and water sources into sacred sites, focusing on the sensory dimensions, gendered dynamics, and ecclesiastical responses that shaped these devotional landscapes. Building on the historiographical “spatial turn” and drawing from cultural memory studies, gender history, and digital humanities, the project bridges disciplines to reassess how sacred environments were socially constructed.LoM pursues four objectives: (1) understanding how sensory and embodied encounters sacralised rural environments; (2) analysing women's roles as visionaries and agents of transformation; (3) tracing how ecclesiastical authorities either integrated or repressed apparition sites; and (4) creating an interactive, open-access digital map that integrates qualitative and spatial data from episcopal court records across six Venetian dioceses. Methodologically, the project combines archival research with qualitative coding, GIS-based spatial analysis, and digital storytelling, thereby generating new empirical and interpretive frameworks for the study of religion and environment.By engaging with underexplored Italian archival sources and employing innovative digital methods, LoM challenges narratives of post-Tridentine religious uniformity, revealing instead the contested, gendered, and sensory dimensions of early modern Catholicism. It also contributes to public history by collaborating with local associations to recover and disseminate intangible cultural heritage. Ultimately, the project enriches scholarly understanding of sacred space-making in early modern Europe while providing a transferable digital model for interdisciplinary research.