The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto

“On 2 December 1295, a small, well-traveled house fell from the sky into the middle of a road leading to the town of Recananati, in Italy’s Marche region” (3). Thus begins The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World by Karin Vélez. This “well-traveled house” was understood to be the actual house where the child Jesus had once lived in Nazareth with his mother, Mary, and father, Joseph. But in the late thirteenth century, it was carried away by angels who wished to protect it from Muslim invaders, making several short stops along the way from Nazareth to Italy. But to say that Vélez’s book takes as its subject the Flying House of Loreto is to understate the scope of this work significantly. Vélez is interested in nothing less than how Catholicism itself flew and landed in the Early Modern period—how it moved from the...

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