Connected by St. Ursula and Her Companions in the Manueline World: Kinship Networks and their Visual Traces in the Estado da India

In the course of Portuguese expansion, not only people but also materials, goods, and objects were set in motion across great distances and continents. Bones are the one material that all cultures have in common. Bones and bodily remains are a highly complex subset of objects whose status lies somewhere between actor and actant (if we want to use Bruno Latour’s categorization). Christian bodily relics were carried to all regions where the Portuguese arrived. I will, in my contribution, specifically trace the routes of the relics of the so-called 11.000 virgins during the period in question. As previous research has shown, the interest of the Portuguese crown in the cult of Ursula and her companions, who are said to have been martyred in Cologne in the 3rd century, increased at the beginning of the 16th century, precisely at the height of the Portuguese expansion. By combining a close reading of the hagiographic sources with a new attention to the specific routes of the virgin bones as well as the personal networks that enabled their transfer, I will argue that the legend of Ursula and her 11.000 companions reflects the complex kinship relations of the ruling elite: Through the circulation of these relics, a trans-regional network of saints was laid across the Portuguese world of the 16th century. My contribution argues that the interconnected world of this early Christian collective of saints was conceived as a vast rhizome in which everybody’s interrelatedness ensured that each of these saints was somehow also related to those who initiated their movement into Portuguese territories. By elaborating on the role of the Jesuits in shaping this particular network of saints, and also by taking a closer look at a reliquary made for the head of one of Ursula's companions in Goa, it becomes clear how little we can still assume a star or ray model in which all impulses would have gone out from Lisbon to the world. My contribution is another argument that the empire was co-created with the wider world.