“New Monuments of the Old Miracle”: Authenticity and Devotion at the Santa Casa of Loreto

In 1294, a small stone building miraculously appeared in Loreto, a hitherto obscure Italian town. This building was hailed as the original Holy House of Nazareth, the structure within which Mary received the Annunciation. However, despite Loreto’s popularity as a pilgrimage site and papal bulls declaring its legitimacy, the shrine’s earliest histories, dating from the mid-fifteenth century, raised doubts about its date of arrival on European soil and its authenticity as a holy relic.

This paper uses the arguments surrounding the Santa Casa of Loreto to examine the changing nature of authenticity and proof in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. It looks at two bodies of work, humanist histories of Loreto and pilgrimage guides to the house’s original site in Nazareth. The paper asks how humanist scholars, developing new ways of relating to the past, attempted to prove the House’s antiquity. It then turns to contemporary descriptions of Nazareth, some of which look to Loreto as the appropriate site for commemorating the Annunciation, and some of which are critical of the Italian shrine.

The Santa Casa venerated in Loreto was a domestic building transformed into a pilgrimage destination; it became a site around which premodern people negotiated changing conceptions of authenticity and proof. This search for “new monuments of the old miracle”, in the words of one sixteenth-century historian, reveals how premodern people understood the history of the Annunciation and of this building, and how those understandings affected their ideas about their own place in history.