Introduction. Localization, imagination, social spaces

Abstract

The dossier presented in these pages invites us to study phenomena of production and reproduction of  both objects and places connected with the memory of the Passion in the Middle Ages and early Modern. These introductory words concentrate at first on the notion of localization then on that of collective imagination, underlining the fertile convergence of following two approaches: one emphasizing religious sensibility, the other scrutinizing the practices and the political meanings of the devotional processes in particular. We insist therefore on the distinction between the monumental complexes situated outside of cities and those connecting intramural and outer-urban spaces, resulting from the assimilation of both landscape and topography of the city with those of Jerusalem and of the drama of the Passion. The meanings and consequences of this difference of localization were as important in the practices of devotion as on the sociopolitical plane, from the “disciplining” to the construction of social space.