The eschatological imagination: space, time, and experience (1300-1800)

Uittreksel

"How did the early-modern Christian West conceive of the spaces and times of the afterlife? The answer to this question is not obvious for a period that saw profound changes in theology, when the telescope revealed the heavens to be as changeable and imperfect as the earth, and when archaeological and geological investigations made the earth and what lies beneath it another privileged site for the acquisition of new knowledge. - With its focus on the eschatological imagination at a time of transformation in cosmology, this volume opens up new ways of studying early-modern religious ideas, representations, and practices. The individual chapters explore a wealth of - at times little-known - visual and textual sources. Together they highlight how closely concepts and imaginaries of the hereafter were intertwined with the realities of the here and now. Contributors include: Matteo Al Kalak, Monica Azzolini, Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler, Luke Holloway, Martha McGill, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Laurent Paya, Raphaèle Preisinger, Aviva Rothman, Minou Schraven, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Jane Tylus, and Antoinina Bevan Zlatar" -- Provided by publisher.

Inhoud

The space-time dimension of early modern eschatology : an introduction / Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler -- Part 1. Cosmology and eschatology -- Depicting the universal conflagration : time, space and artifice in Peter Paul Rubens's Fall of the Damned / Christine Göttler -- A castle in the air? Space, time, and sensation in Gabriel de Henao's Empyreologia / Wietse de Boer -- Kepler's Somnium as purgatorial journey / Aviva Rothman -- Part 2. Underlands and netherworlds -- The birth of Hell : an angel, his fall, and his reign among us / Matteo Al Kalak -- "Oh how unlike the place from whence they fell!" John Milton's primordial Hell in Paradise Lost / Antoinina Bevan Zlatar -- God's underlands : Athanasius Kircher's epic journey in the Mundus Subterraneus / Monica Azzolini -- Part 3. Visions of Heaven and Hell -- Ecstatic visions : the eschatological imagination of Spanish mystic Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534) / Minou Schraven -- Describing the inconceivable in eighteenth-century Methodist and Quaker visions of the afterlife / Martha McGill and Luke Holloway -- From the Isle of Patmos to the territory of the Plumed Serpent : eschatological imaginations sparked by the Virgin of Guadalupe in colonial New Spain / Raphaèle Preisinger -- Part 4. Spiritual reckoning and refuge -- Pondering Mary : Michelangelo's farewell to Dante / Jane Tylus -- The Calvinist theatre of God as a pleasure garden at the time of the first French war of religion (ca. 1560) / Laurent Paya -- Part 5. Sites of purgation, meditation, and martyrdom -- The desert at the world's end : eschatological space in Van Hemessen's hermit landscapes / Anna-Claire Stinebring -- "Abstracto igitur animo" : escatological image-making in the emblematic spiritual exercises of Jan David, S.J. / Walter S. Melion -- The Jesuit martyrdom landscape and the optics of death / Mia M. Mochizuki.