A Walking Memory: State-Designed Processions as a Tool of Collective Remembering in Late Medieval and Early Modern Dubrovnik

Abstract

The state authorities of late medieval and early modern Dubrovnik used processions as a cultural tool to create a collective remembrance of traumatic historical experience, such as conspiracy, pestilence, or earthquake. Until the sixteenth century, the commemoration was amalgamated with the saint’s cult (“watermark” model), while in the last two centuries of the Republic the link to an underlying historical event became explicit. This shift may be accounted by the growing dominance of the secular over ecclesiastical authorities, and the increasing ambition of the state to manage its self-representation.