Dislocating Holiness:City, saint and the production of flesh

Just as the making of a patron saint was an important event in baroque devotional and urban history, so the city itself was an event in holiness and sanctity. This article investigates the figuring of saint and city while resisting the tendency in historical scholarship to treat city and saint in terms of representation. Instead I examine the co-implication of saint and city in terms of event in baroque Naples, seeking to treat neither as discrete and thus their relation as more than merely sequential, in order to consider the re-imagining of the city that was implicated in the re-imaging of sanctity. I argue that reconfiguring this relation amounts to a dislocation. That dislocation also entails the question of the subject of the city and indeed of subjectivity, with which city and saint were intimately enfolded.