@article{Dekoninck_Lefftz_2021, title={Et arbor et ara. Culte des arbres et culte de la Vierge dans les anciens Pays-Bas catholiques}, url={https://revistas.ucv.es/specula/index.php/specula/article/view/978}, abstractNote={<p style="text-align: justify;">This article offers an analysis of the links that the miraculous statues of the Virgin in the Southern Netherlands in the early modern age have had with trees in which many of them were found and worshiped. The aim is to shed light on the arguments put forward by Catholic authors from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century to justify the problematic analogies – which Protestant authors did not fail to point out – between these religious practices and the ancient pagan tree cults. In particular, we try to show how, through a network of arboreal metaphors, these Catholic apologists exploit the imaginary of the tree as a bridge, not only between earth and heaven, but also across the ages, the relationship to the ground being as decisive as the relationship to heaven, just as the relationship to time is as essential as the relationship to space. One of the leitmotivs in this kind of literature is to root these ancestral cults in time, thus marking the continuity of a primordial religion in relation to which pagan superstitions are interpreted only as deviations instigated by the Devil.</p>}, number={2}, journal={Specula Revista de Humanidades y Espiritualidad}, author={Dekoninck, Ralph and Lefftz, Michel}, year={2021}, month={Nov.}, pages={67–86} }