Image Theory in the Annotated Manuscripts of Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia
- Format:
- Conference Paper
- Year:
- 2018
- Event Date:
- May 4
- Event Institution:
- Columbia University
- Conference Title:
- From Rome to Beijing: Sacred Spaces in Dialogue: A Symposium on the History of Art, Science, and Religion in Jesuit China.
- Conference Location:
- New York, NY
- Language:
- Abstract:
Published posthumously by the Society of Jesus in 1595 after long and complicated negotiations with various printmakers in the Low Countries, Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia quae in sacrosancto Missae sacrificio toto anno leguntur [Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels Read during the Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the Year] consists of 153 large plates, mainly engraved by Jan, Hieronymus, and Antoon Wierix of Antwerp, that anchor a complex textual apparatus. The book’s primary readers, Jesuit scholastics training for the priesthood, were expected internally to imprint Nadal’s images and spiritual exercises, and to use them to negotiate between the two kinds of prayer in which they would engage daily—public and private, liturgical and meditative. The importance of the Adnotationes et meditationes cannot be overestimated, since its images and texts, having been memorized by every member of the order, anchored their efforts to interpret the Gospels and shaped their practice of meditative exegesis, rooted as it was in Nadal’s expert application of allegoria in factis (allegory verifiably based in scriptural facta and dicta). The book traveled with them everywhere they went on mission, shoring up their vocation of evangelizing the world. The two manuscripts of Nadal’s book housed at the Pontifical Gregorian University, each subdivided into two bound volumes, contain numerous marginal and intratextual references to the imagines. My paper focuses on these insertions and what they tell us about the Society’s investment in defining and controlling the images that anchor Nadal’s text, and especially in distinguishing between two registers of imago— evidentiary and inferential.
- Conference URL: