The semiotics of litanies from the Middle Ages to YouTube: Interpretative, intersemiotic, and performative issues

Since their Medieval origins, litanies can be performed in a plurality of ways: in private or public occasions, employing verbal language only or a plurality of semiotic systems such as music and other symbolic resources engendering a complex and stratified process of meaning-making. The present paper aims at shedding light on this process by adopting a semiotic perspective centred on the performance of acts and their relationship with a corpus of multimodal texts (written, iconographic, and audio-visual/digital). In particular, we will look into three different types of fruition and enactment of litanies in Catholic culture. The first part (§ 2) presents considerations about the collective and oral performance of litanies in ceremonial occasions, by comparing contemporary ethnographic notes (based on two observations carried out in Poland and Italy) with Medieval testimonies. The second part (§ 3) looks into a written genre, i.e. into a corpus of 19th- and 20th-century treatises mostly authored by priests and exposing the results of an individual and intellectual meditation of the litanic text. The third part (§ 3) explores the role of new media in the semiotic elaboration of litanies by studying and classifying a corpus of YouTube videos retrieved via the Italian query litanie dei santi (“Litanies of the saints”)1. Litanies constitute an integral part of Catholic liturgy, and liturgy in turn is an important place for the construction of the identity of both the believing subject and the Church. Thus, the study of the different ways in which the litanic text is performed, meditated, interpreted, and remediated can contribute to an improved comprehension of some of the complex semiotic mechanisms that have shaped Catholic culture at least since the Middle Ages.