OPEN ACCESS
Drawing on a database of over 160 surviving monuments, this article explores the multi-faceted nature and genesis of Franconia’s rich, but under researched late medieval wayside shrine landscape. Part I begins with an overview of the extant corpus of Gothic wayside shrines, before proceeding with case studies that account for the extraordinary popularity of this type of roadside furniture during the two centuries before the Protestant Reformation. Part II sounds out the very beginnings of this sacred landscape during the fourteenth century, proposing three theses about the impact of climate change and its disastrous consequences; the rise of popular eucharistic devotion with its focus on the of the suffering body of Christ; and the formation of “peri-urban sacred zones” around towns in the decades bracketing the year 1300.