[ITALIAN BROADSIDE]

The only known copy, remarkably well-preserved, of this Italian broadside, and a most interesting instance of popular religious printing. Published in Macerata (Marche), it was intended to be sold to pilgrims to the Santa Casa della Madonna di Loreto. This important shrine was allegedly the very house of the Virgin Mary, first removed from Nazareth by the crusaders in the C13, and later miraculously translated to its current site in Italy, where a church was also built in the C15-C16. The text lists the Latin litanies, or invocations, to the Virgin sung or recited at Loreto, as well as in churches throughout Italy, every Saturday and at Marian feasts. As prayers in the form of supplications, the litanies addressed Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity and, for the most part, the Virgin Mary, requesting their intercession on behalf of the faithful for healing, the resolution of personal issues, etc. The Virgin was addressed through dozens of theological attributes, e.g., Rosa Mistica, Stella Matutina, Salus Infirmorum, Refugium Peccatorum, and so on. ‘Until the late C16, many different litanies of the Blessed Virgin were current, a large number of which were ‘unofficial’, freely-composed texts’; those for the Virgin of Loreto, first published in 1558, existed in several versions too. ‘In the C17, the most frequently-set of all litanies was the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, best known as the Litany of Loreto […]. The text of this litany was considered to be a standard one, and at various times recourse was had to legislation, firstly in order to establish its status as the only officially recognised Marian litany, and subsequently to preserve it from change and to prevent the accretion of unauthorised extra invocations in orders or places where the Virgin was venerated under a particular title not already present in the litany’ (Blazey, pp.16-17). The Loreto litanies were extensively used for devotional prayers in Italy during the Plague of 1629-31.

USTC appears to record only half a dozen various broadsides of Loreto litanies, printed in Italy, France and Germany, all titled in Latin and dating to the first half of the C17. Litanies were often recited, the priest’s invocation responded to by the faithful’s ‘ora’ (pray [for us]). Thousands of copies of such broadsides would have been printed, especially, as in this case, for the use of Loreto pilgrims; that any should have survived in such a remarkable state of preservation, when all the others were customarily discarded after use, is a miracle in itself. The Litany of Loreto remained a standard feature of Catholic missals until the late 1960s