"The Polar winds have driven me to the conquest of the treasure in the form of the much-desired relic." (Re)moving relics and performing gift exchange between Early Modern Tuscany and Lithuania

EN[...] The Vilnius chapter thus solicited an equally precious relic from the newly canonized Florentine Carmelite nun Caterina de’ Pazzi, known as Suor Maria Maddalena (1566–1607, canonized 1669). The Tuscan grand duke and his mother Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere actively promoted the cult of this Tuscan noblewoman and mystic at Santa Maria degli Angeli on the south side of the river Arno. The ceremonial trade of bodily remains of the pair of holy elites reified a strong node of entente interconnecting Italo-Baltic prerogatives during a watershed period of broader Counter-Reformation bidirectional interest. The Medici set their sights on Poland-Lithuania and the Pac courted Italian state and religious powers, even as both their houses and dominions began approaching a horizon of degeneration. I demonstrate that the natural substances used to fabricate the reliquaries charged with concretizing the translation of the Italo Baltic relics’ meanings between their respective contexts evoked notions of time, place and their shifting relation to history, as well as history’s own malleability. What follows explores how the respective Tuscan and Lithuanian relics could be leveraged from multiple viewpoints to manifold political, martial, spiritual and ideological ends, instantiating a hermeneutical borderlands wherein intercultural selfhood and cultural geographies might be negotiated. In these borderlands, I argue, could be found the juncture of Pac and Medici interests, converging on a pair of saints whose holiness was especially constituted through the incorrupt corporeal integrity of their bodies.This mutual exchange helped to reaffirm and realign their interests on the regional and trans-European stage, despite the reality that both elite families and their respective territories faced existential political and patrimonial threats, as if their apotropaic gifts might ward of the inevitable dissolution of their familial lines and state autonomy in the next century. Together they discursively forged an unbroken chain stretching backward along the axis of human chronology to re-embody Italy’s connection to the Baltic through the special potency of relics of vaunted integral saints like Jagiellończyk and Pazzi, famed for the miraculous incorruption of their bodies even after death. Lastly, I explore how a re-examination of their little-known gift exchange can contribute to a revisionist transregional history that reconsiders conventional understandings of cultural dynamics between ostensibly far flung regions of Europe specifically, and perceived centres and their purported peripheries more generally. [Extract, p. 105-106]