Giuseppe Ripamonti, De peste quae fuit anno MDCXXX libri V (Milano, 1640), 93–5. Manzoni could only have read the Latin version, as the book was not to be translated into Italian until 1841, by Francesco Cusani. For a general history of the untori accusations during the 1630 Plague of Milan, see Romano Canoso, Tempo di peste: magistrati ed untori nel 1630 a Milatio (Rome: Angelo Ruggieri, 1985); Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “Plague Spreaders,” in Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 127–160.
Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi (Milan: Mondadori, 1990), 525. The original text reads, “Come per accertarsi ch’era marmo, stesero essi la mano a toccare. Bastò.” English translation by Bruce Penman.
Again, Ripamonti was his principal source. For a discussion on Manzoni’s Storia as a notable historical addendum to the fictional I promessi sposi, see Hal Gladfelder, “Seeing Black: Alessandro Manzoni between Fiction and History,” MLN 108, no. 1, Italian issue (January 1993): 59–86. See also Claudio Povolo, The Novelist and the Archivist: Fiction and History in Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, trans. Peter Mazur (New York: Springer, 2014); Marco Codebò, “Records, Fiction, and Power in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi and Storia della Colonna infame,” MLN 121, no. 1 (2006): 187–206.
Ripamonti, De peste, 94. The English translation is mine; I am grateful to Dong Hao and Zhang Xiaoxi of Princeton University for their help with the Latin language.
Manzoni’s purification and abstraction from delibare to toccare was not unique: in Francesco Cusani’s 1841 Italian translation of Ripamonti’s book, which postdated Manzoni’s novel by only a few years, the translator similarly reduced, if not utterly converted, the same Latin word to tasteggiare, or “to gently touch.” Giuseppe Ripamonti, La peste di Milano del 1630 libri V, trans. Francesco Cusani (Milano, 1841), 85. Cusani translated this sentence as “…e li vide tasteggiare quanto a loro sguardi sembrava pregevole in que’marmi.”
According to the definition of “architecture”—as opposed to mere “buildings”—of seventeenth-century Europe, the design of churches and other religious spaces assumed the most prominence. Hence religion’s supreme pertinence to the discipline of architecture at that time.
On blame, hatred, and persecution incurred by past epidemics, see Cohn, Jr., Epidemics, 2018. It may also be mentioned that there is a profound and exceedingly old connection between touching and epidemics. In Akkadian (the earliest attested Semitic language), the word for plague literally means “the touch or the blow of god.” In the Hebrew Bible, plagues are repeatedly referred to as “the touch,” not to mention the Greek and Latin origins of the English word itself, meaning “to strike, to beat.”
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957). See also Douglas A. Marshall, “Temptation, Tradition, and Taboo: a Theory of Sacralization,” Sociological Theory 28, no. 1 (2010): 64–90; Giorgio Agamben, “The Ambivalence of the Sacred,” in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 75–81.
Carl Abel, Über den Gegensinn der Urworte (Leipzig: W. Friedrich, 1884); Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words, 1910,” in Standard Edition 11 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 153–161, first published in 1910 as Sigmund Freud, “Über den Gegensinn der Urworte,” in Gesammelte Werke 8 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1910), 213–221.
See Gabriel Josipovici, Touch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 58–61.
John 20: 25, New Revised Standard Version.
See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), 88. Brown’s book is one of Josipovici’s major references.
Josipovici, Touch, 61.
Ibid., 62–4. A very famous study on the royal touch is Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). The healing touch is incorporated into spiritual rituals in multiple religious traditions. Touching consecrated objects in Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, etc. or drinking (the Amrita, for instance) as healing rituals was ancient; in the Gospels one finds numerous accounts of Jesus touching the affected parts of the blind, the lame, or the leprous; the Islamic prophet Muhammad was reported to have performed healing miracles by touching the sick; consuming the Taoist talismanic water (符水 fu shui, ashes from burnt talismans dissolved in water) was believed to cure diseases (I am grateful to Du Yalin of Princeton University for this reference); one could continue.
See Jacob Magid, “To Kiss or Not to Kiss: The Question for Old City Pilgrims amid Virus Outbreak,” The Times of Israel, March 12, 2020.
See Celia Jean, “Western Wall Notes Removed for Passover, Stones Sanitized for Coronavirus,” The Jerusalem Post, March 31, 2020.
See Jon Nazca and Silvio Castellanos, “Another Victim of Coronavirus: Spain’s Religious Statue-kissing,” Reuters, March 6, 2020; Rozina Sini and Armen Shahbazian, “Coronavirus: Iran holy-shrine-lickers face prison,” BBC, March 3, 2020; Vivian Yee, “In a Pandemic, Religion Can Be a Balm and a Risk,” New York Times, March 22, 2020.
See Kathryn M. Rudy, “Kissing Images, Unfurling Rolls, Measuring Wounds, Sewing Badges and Carrying Talismans: Considering Some Harley Manuscripts Through the Physical Rituals They Reveal,” Electronic British Library Journal (2011); Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 150.
See Sheila Barker, “Art, Architecture, and the Roman Plague of 1656,” in La Peste a Roma (1656–1657), ed. Irene Fosi (Rome: Università degli Studi Roma Tre—CROMA, 2006), 243–262; Roberto Battaglia, “Crocifissi del Bernini in S. Pietro,” Quaderni di studi romani XI (1942): 3–21; Ursula Schlegel, “I crocifissi degli altari in San Pietro in Vaticano,” Antichità viva XX (1981): vi, 37–42.
I took the expression “anti-relic” from Constance Classen’s discussion on the fear of touching the bodies of plague victims. See Classen, The Deepest Sense, 150. For the medieval Venetian Christians’ fear and isolation of Jews, see Richard Sennet, “Fear of Touching,” in Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 212–254.
On the “clean power” in association with holy sites and sacred artifacts, see Brown, The Cult of the Saints.
See Henry Donald Maurice Spence-Jones, The Church of England: A History for the People, vol. II: The Medieval Church (London: Cassell, 1897), 424–427.
On the decline of the sacred touch in relation to the Reformation, see Craig Koslofsky, “The Kiss of Peace in the German Reformation,” in The Kiss in History, ed. Karen Harvey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 18–35.
See Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 122. François du Moulin called the skull into doubt because he believed that the evangelists never wrote Jesus touched her forehead.
Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12.
I am inspired by Alexander Nagel’s discussion on the topographical instability of medieval churches (his cases are Giotto’s Arena chapel and the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem). See Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 97–115.
On the idea of vital/vibrant artifacts, which would not only (as in our context) challenge a traditionally anthropocentric architectural/art-historical discourse, but also problematize certain notions of materiality at large, see Jane Bennett’s influential book: Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
My claim here on the two temporal modes of the sacred artifact is indebted to Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s perceptive theoretical construction in their co-authored Anachronic Renaissance. See Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “Plural Temporality of the Work of Art,” in Anachronic Renaissance (Princeton: Zone Books, 2010), 7–20.