Overview

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: 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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Wietse de Boer ,  Christine Göttler
Publisher:   Brill
Imprint:   Brill
Volume:   96
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 3.40cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   1.112kg
ISBN:  

9789004688094

ISBN 10:   9004688099
Pages:   532
Publication Date:   25 November 2024
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements List of Figures Notes on the Editors Notes on the Contributors 1 The Space-Time Dimension of Early Modern Eschatology: An Introduction  Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler Part 1: Cosmology and Eschatology 2 Depicting the Universal Conflagration: Time, Space, and Artifice in Peter Paul Rubens’s Fall of the Damned  Christine Göttler 3 A Castle in the Air? Space, Time, and Sensation in Gabriel de Henao’s Empyreologia  Wietse de Boer 4 Kepler’s Somnium as Purgatorial Journey  Aviva Rothman Part 2: Underlands and Netherworlds 5 The Birth of Hell: An Angel, His Fall, and His Reign among Us  Matteo Al Kalak 6 ‘Oh, How Unlike the Place from Whence They Fell!’ John Milton’s Primordial Hell in Paradise Lost  Antoinina Bevan Zlatar 7 God’s Underlands: Athanasius Kircher’s Epic Journey in the Mundus Subterraneus  Monica Azzolini Part 3: Visions of Heaven and Hell 8 Ecstatic Visions: The Eschatological Imagination of Spanish Mystic Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534)  Minou Schraven 9 Describing the Inconceivable in Eighteenth-Century Methodist and Quaker Visions of the Afterlife  Martha McGill and Luke Holloway 10 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 11 Pondering Mary: Michelangelo’s Farewell to Dante  Jane Tylus 12 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 13 The Desert at the World’s End: Eschatological Space in Van Hemessen’s Hermit Landscapes  Anna-Claire Stinebring 14 ‘Abstracto igitur animo’: Eschatological Image-Making in the Emblematic Spiritual Exercises of Jan David, S.J.  Walter S. Melion 15 The Jesuit Martyrdom Landscape and the Optics of Death  Mia M. Mochizuki Index Nominum

Reviews

A “fascinating volume [...] My brief remarks can only hint at the wonderfully diverse and thought-provoking essays in this volume, which has been sensitively edited by de Boer and Göttler.” Jeffrey Chipps Smith, University of Texas, Austin. In: Journal of Jesuit Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2025), pp. 513–516.

Author Information

Wietse de Boer is the Phillip R. Shriver Professor of History at Miami University (Ohio). His research interests are focused on Italian religious and cultural history (15th–17th centuries). His books include The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (2001; Italian trans. 2004) and Art in Dispute: Catholic Debates at the Time of Trent (2021). Christine Göttler is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Bern. Her research interests focus on the intersections between art, natural philosophy, and religion, the relationship between landscape and nature, and early modern notions of materiality and immateriality. Her publications include the monograph Last Things: Art and the Religious Imagination in the Age of Reform (2010).

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