Waxing devotion: the economic and devotional lifecycles of wax ex-votos in Florence 1300-1500

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This project examines the production, acquisition, ownership, deployment and afterlife of wax ex-votos - a genre at once aesthetic, religious, medicinal and economic - in Florence 1300-1500 to explore the meanings, functions and visual evolution of these everyday devotional objects. It offers a broad social perspective, being concerned not only with the highest end of the wax ex-voto market, but with investigating wax ex-votos deployed across different social classes. A key aspect of this research is a digital humanities project mapping the location of wax workers' workshops. More widely, the project aims to contribute to our understanding of the ex-voto as a work of art, a category hitherto neglected, as well as fourteenth and fifteenth century conceptions of the visual representation of the individual and the visualisation of personhood.