This interesting and well-illustrated study, based on the author's doctoral thesis, is a fruit of the University of Fribourg's project to investigate the creation, staging, and perception of holy sites along the sea routes to Palestine between 1300 and 1550. Zoitou has studied over three hundred pilgrim accounts with a focus on pilgrims’ expectations and perceptions of the sites, the response of the Hospitallers to those expectations, and how sites and artifacts were linked with the Holy Land. The approach chosen is primarily art historical. The survey is largely limited to sites that pilgrims are known to have visited.
Having summarized the Hospital's establishment on Rhodes, its relations with the Greek church, and the significance of Rhodes town as a stopover for Holy Land pilgrims, Zoitou turns to the Hospital's main religious institutions: the conventual church of St. John; the chapels within the master's palace; the order's successive Hospitals; the chapel of St. Catherine's Hospice; the churches of St. Anthony; St. John the Baptist de Fonte and Our Lady of Victories in or just outside Rhodes town; and the church of Our Lady of Phileremos to the southwest. Drawing on the relevant literature, she describes the architectural history and layout of the buildings in detail, and their interior decoration where recoverable. In the context of each building in turn, she then, where possible, traces the histories of the relics displayed there, their associated miracles, how they were acquired, where they were kept, how they were ornamented and presented, how they functioned in liturgical and cultic settings, how pilgrims responded to them, and what happened to them after 1522.
Pilgrim descriptions of relics and icons were usually laconic and sometimes contradictory, not least because the objects were periodically rehoused or re-presented, but the author teases out what can be gleaned about what could be seen and when. Some of the fuller narratives also provide an idea of how some sites, particularly the conventual church of St. John, appeared to visitors. Zoitou's recourse to Maltese sources, most notably an illustrated eighteenth-century inventory in the Mdina cathedral archives, enables her to tie pilgrim and archival descriptions to illustrations of some items which survived in their Rhodian, or earlier, manifestations, although many other items were set in new reliquaries in Malta.
Zoitou establishes that in keeping with the order's origins, continued care for Jerusalem pilgrims, and Hospitaller functions, many of the relics it displayed were associated with Christ, the Virgin, the Baptist, and saints martyred in the Holy Land or associated with healing. She suggests that this reflected a deliberate policy of accumulation. Pilgrims were encouraged to visit relics, icons, and churches benefiting from papal indulgences while they were in Rhodes. The Hospital developed the preexisting cult at Phileremos and catered to both Greeks and Latins there. A similar duality of worship developed at St. John the Baptist de Fonte outside the walls of Rhodes town, where there was a miraculous well. Evidence that the religious sites and relics of Rhodes were lodged in the consciousness of pilgrims—and of Latin Christians more generally—comes from the inclusion of the churches of St. John, St. Anthony, and Phileremos in the sailor's Santa Parola listing holy sites on medieval sea routes; vows offered to Our Lady of Phileremos by pilgrims in peril elsewhere; and the acceptance in Europe of the Rhodian coin bearing the head of Apollo as the archetype of one of the thirty pieces of silver. Wax copies of some relics were distributed to visitors and were understood to have miraculous qualities.
The book is not flawless. Some of the architectural-archaeological discussions, such as that concerning the location of St. Catherine's Hospice and church, are presented with such careful neutrality that the author's own thoughts only very gradually become clear. There are occasionally questionable statements. The primary reason the order conquered Rhodes was not, I would think, because it needed to satisfy its “financiers” (6) but the rulers of Western Europe, whose support was not primarily financial. The claim that an increasing impetus to acquire relics can be attributed to the order's need to profit from pilgrims at a time of financial weakness during the papal schism (33) is not implausible, but direct evidence is not presented.
Notwithstanding these quibbles, this is an intelligent work drawing on a broad range of evidence and presenting a generally convincing picture. Zoitou brings out the order of St. John's active devotion to and promotion of its heavenly patrons and their associated cultic sites, feast days, shrines, and relics, and does the difficult job of showing how pilgrims responded to them with care and imagination. It is much to be welcomed.
