On Tuesday, our lecture series “Praying with Objects” continued with a truly inspiring online lecture by Dr Jolanta Rzegocka (Ignatianum University, Kraków) on “The Kraków Angelic Cross of St. Thomas Aquinas: A Figures Stone Prayer and Material Devotion.”
💡Jolanta introduced us to the Crux Angelica, an eighteenth-century marble cross in the Dominican Holy Trinity convent of Kraków (Poland) that unites image, text, and devotional practice. Inscribed with a figured Latin prayer attributed to St Thomas Aquinas, the cross turns prayer into a spatial and embodied act: worshippers don’t just read the text, they move with it, tracing, touching, and visually navigating its form.
The discussion opened up wider questions that resonate far beyond this single object, including:
- How material and spatial forms guide gesture, attention, and contemplative focus in prayer.
- How devotional media—from wall diagrams to stone monuments to prints—reshape the way prayers are learned, remembered, and shared.
- What kinds of literacy (verbal, visual, theological) such objects presuppose, and how they may have been used in Dominican formation and teaching.
- The challenges of reconstructing past devotional experiences with the tools and theories of contemporary material culture studies.
📝 Call for input:
If you’ve encountered references, depictions, or examples of the Crux Angelica / Angelic Cross in your own work—whether in manuscripts, printed books, visual sources, or archival records—Jolanta would be delighted to hear from you. Such findings could help map the wider circulation and devotional contexts of this fascinating prayer tradition.