From anti-Judaism to the fight against dissidence. Representations of the cult of the Blessed Sacrament of the Miracle of Brussels in the 17th and 18th centuries
The research project led by Manon Chaidron will study the representations of the legend of the Blessed Sacrament of the Miracle of Brussels. It tells the story of how hosts began to bleed after being stolen and stabbed by members of the Jewish community. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these figurations were recuperated by the secular and ecclesiastical powers in order to combat religious dissidence, revive devotion among the faithful and maintain the anti-Jewish polemic. This doctoral thesis will attempt to shed light on the reasons, manner and significance of this re-exploitation through formal, iconographic and iconological analyses of these images.