From the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries the Franciscans concentrated on the mere acquisition of the traditionally perceived holy sites, since the Muslim authorities were reluctant to permit the rebuilding of the ancient churches. Although in some isolated cases the Franciscans managed to repair the remains of Crusader churches, this seldom happened. Only the decline of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, and even more so the early years of the Western-Christian British Mandate in Palestine, enabled the Franciscan Custody to build new shrines in the holiest places to Christendom, many of which were in their possession. The opportunity to build new churches forced the Franciscans to choose between various interpretations and alternative sites and to fix the evangelical tradition to one specific place. Although many decisions were taken earlier, at the time when the Custody acquired the places, building a church on one specific site seemingly sealed the ongoing debate. As stated above, the visual impact of a built edifice is so powerful that it caused most of the alternative sites to lose their significance and potential, and they were soon forgotten, at least by the Catholic world. Franciscans were finally able to build the churches at a time when Palestine was opened up to modern scientific research which posed difficult questions regarding the authenticity of the holy places. The nineteenth century was marked by much scientific interest in the Holy Land. Renewed interest in its sacred geography and toponymy was already evident in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe as part of the Counter-Reformation effort and in reaction to the importance that Protestants attributed to the Holy Scriptures. However, it was not until the early nineteenth century, when several factors joined together, that widespread scientific research of the Holy Land was made possible. The invention of steam engines and the improvement of roads, transportation, security, and communication in the Ottoman Empire, together with the growing intervention of European nations in the Holy Land, made the area increasingly accessible to visitors, pilgrims, tourists and -- naturally -- scholars.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Gange, David;
Ledger-Lomas, Michael;
(2013)
Cities of God: The Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
(/isis/citation/CBB001422624/)
Article
Cohen, Susan;
(2014)
Mapping the Z-Axis: Early Archaeological Engagement with Time and Space in the Ancient Near East
(/isis/citation/CBB001450666/)
Article
Hugoniot, Christophe;
(2011)
Una bevanda di apostasia: il comos mongolico nell'Itinerarium di frate Guglielmo di Rubrouck
(/isis/citation/CBB001320885/)
Book
David Brown;
Jonathan Ben-Dov;
(2018)
The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science
(/isis/citation/CBB920028822/)
Article
Lincoln, Bruce;
(2009)
Anomaly, Science, and Religion: Treatment of the Planets in Medieval Zoroastrianism
(/isis/citation/CBB001030695/)
Chapter
Grasshoff, Gerd;
(2012)
Globalization of Ancient Knowledge: From Babylonian Observations to Scientific Regularities
(/isis/citation/CBB001422688/)
Article
Perry, Yaron;
Lev, Efraim;
(2006)
Ernest William Gurney Masterman, British Physician and Scholar in the Holy Land
(/isis/citation/CBB001020947/)
Book
Harrison, Mark;
Jones, Margaret;
Sweet, Helen M.;
(2009)
From Western Medicine to Global Medicine: The Hospital beyond the West
(/isis/citation/CBB001031588/)
Article
Ramsey, Jason D.;
(2004)
Petrie and the Intriguing Indosyncracies of Racism
(/isis/citation/CBB000931101/)
Book
Moulin, Anne Marie;
Ulman, Yesim Isil;
(2010)
Perilous Modernity: History of Medicine in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East from the 19th Century Onwards
(/isis/citation/CBB001200966/)
Article
Luigi Pepe;
(2016)
Tra matematica e fisica. François Jacquier in Italia e le sue "Institutiones philosophicae"
(/isis/citation/CBB559902160/)
Book
Dániel Bárth;
(2020)
The Exorcist of Sombor: The Mentality of an Eighteenth-Century Franciscan Friar
(/isis/citation/CBB487465382/)
Article
Luckhurst, Roger;
(2012)
Science versus Rumour: Artefaction and Counter-Narrative in the Egyptian Rooms of the British Museum
(/isis/citation/CBB001212977/)
Book
Pratik Chakrabarti;
(2020)
Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity
(/isis/citation/CBB228017644/)
Book
Gange, David;
(2013)
Dialogues with the Dead: Egyptology in British Culture and Religion, 1822--1922
(/isis/citation/CBB001450668/)
Book
Paolo Galiano;
(2022)
I codici alchemici di Frate Elia
(/isis/citation/CBB359695719/)
Article
Peter Murray Jones;
(2018)
The Survival of the Frater Medicus? English Friars and Alchemy, ca. 1370–ca. 1425
(/isis/citation/CBB784265899/)
Book
Jed Z. Buchwald;
Diane Greco Josefowicz;
(2020)
The Riddle of the Rosetta: How an English Polymath and a French Polyglot Discovered the Meaning of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
(/isis/citation/CBB801561972/)
Article
Meira Gold;
(2018)
Ancient Egypt and the Geological Antiquity of Man, 1847–1863
(/isis/citation/CBB995607914/)
Chapter
Christoph Geudens;
(2020)
Some notes on the Northern European reception of Frans Titelmans' De consideratione dialectica (1533)
(/isis/citation/CBB532695915/)
Be the first to comment!