Book Review: Revolutionary Europe: Politics, Community and Culture in Transnational Context, 1775–1992 by Gavin Murray-Miller

Abstract

figure in the woodcuts. Meserve demonstrates the volatility of the significations attached to the Holy House. The emphasis tended to be on the long-venerated and supposedly thaumaturgic Byzantine image of the Virgin which it contained rather than on the account, only crystallizing in the 1460s, of its transportation by angels from Nazareth to Italy via Dalmatia, an account which bolstered calls for crusades. Here is but one example of how this ambitious study is based on meticulous textual scholarship and the inter-relation of texts and imagery in the investigation both of the development of a Papal documentary style and of the mutations of legend.