The religious imagery of Benedetto il Moro in the interactive archive of the Social Networks. A dialogue with the hagiographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Abstract

The study of the cult of Benedetto il Moro has revealed the wide penetration and diffusion of devotion on Social Networks, where the heterogeneity of visual and audiovisual sources indicates the existence of a polysemic and multifunctional model of holiness and devotion.
However, what is the relationship between devotional expression captured on the Web and that observed in a church, square or private home? Certainly, for scholars of worship in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century primary sources or for those seeking more recent local interpretations of devotion in Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily, the question arises of how to approach the incursion of devotion on Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube: is it a devotional continuity or the emergence of a new worship practice?
Furthermore, we questioned the content of the representations in terms of their active or passive relationship to historiographical data: convergence or discrepancy? At the same time, the problem of method emerged and the implications of the coding of the Web as a platform to produce history and, consequently, as an archive for historical research were assessed. The article therefore investigates the relationship between visual and audiovisual data collected on the World Wide Web and 17th and 18th century hagiographies and focuses both on the impact of virtual devotion on the history of worship and the implications of doing historical research in an interactive archive.