47. Gifts to the Sacred: Portable Objects and Material Patronage Across Religious Traditions

Religious institutions have long been shaped by the donation and endowment of objects, buildings, and artistic commissions. From gifts to Islamic waqf foundations to church treasuries, reliquaries, monastic collections, and temple endowments, acts of giving played a central role in the creation of sacred spaces and their material cultures. Yet these practices are often studied within separate regional, religious, or disciplinary traditions.

This session contributes to the Association’s commitment to a broad and inclusive art history by bringing into dialogue scholarship on sacred endowment across Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious traditions. It focuses on how such objects functioned as expressions of artistic patronage and material devotion across different religious environments.

The session asks how rulers, elites, religious communities, and individual devotees used movable objects such as textiles, metalwork, ceramics, manuscripts, jewellery, and other precious or everyday items to express piety, authority, memory, and belonging. It also considers how these objects were incorporated into the visual and material environments of shrines, churches, temples, monasteries, and pilgrimage centres, and how their meanings were shaped through display, circulation, and continued use.

We welcome papers on objects endowed to shrines, churches, monasteries, temples, pilgrimage centres, and other sacred institutions across West, Central, and South Asia, and the Mediterranean. Comparative approaches are especially encouraged, particularly those that trace connections across traditions or examine parallel practices of endowment and display.

Themes: Sacred sites, Endowment, Material culture.

Additional format comment: The session will consist of four papers followed by a moderated discussion.

Lead Convenor: Zahra Khademi, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.