Mapping Mary: Lay Cartographies of Communist Hungary

“What the map cuts up, the story cuts across,” writes Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. This paper seeks to tell a different story of the communist period by drawing on sources like prayerbooks, devotions, and shrine cards typically seen as irrelevant to the broader geopolitical and territorial disputes of 20th-century eastern Europe. In so doing, this paper renders visible the maps created by lay Catholics as they moved between Marian shrines and rural chapels that dotted the landscape, and I argue that another map of Hungary emerges, one that participates in but is not fully subsumed by the geopolitical border disputes of the time. Through a study of Hungarian-language sources that cut across such borders, I show how these lay Catholic cartographies were grounded in the notion that Hungary was, is, and will always be Mary’s country, that Mary is, in fact, what makes Hungary.