Memory, Place, and Mission in Hieronymus Natalis’ Evangelicae historiae imagines

Abstract

Focusing on the prints that illustrate Hieronymus Natalis’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia of 1595 (Fig. 1), the most important Jesuit meditation text of the sixteenth century, I propose to examine how pictures of the Holy Land map the journeys of Christ, the Virgin, and their followers, whose itineraries the votary is invited to memorise and retrace.¹ Addressed to Jesuit novitiates, Natalis’ text expounds the Evangelicae historiae imagines (Fig. 2), a series of 153 engravings that portray key events from the history of human salvation set forth in the liturgical Gospels of the church year. Whereas the adnotationes, expanding upon the composition of place central to Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual exercises, describe the sacred places through which holy persons passed at specified times, the meditationes, applying rhetorical devices such as hypotyposis and definitio per descriptionem, transform places and events into objects of contemplation that also function as vivid tropes for the kinds and degrees of contemplative prayer.