One of the central and defining beliefs in late-medieval and
early-modern spirituality was the notion of the formability of the
religious self. Identified with the soul, the self was conceived, indeed
experienced, not as an abstraction, but rather as an essential spiritual
persona, as well as the intellectual and sensory center of a human
being. This volume investigates the role played by images construed as
formal and semantic variables - mental images, visual tropes and
figures, pictorial and textual representations - in generating and
sustaining processes of meditation that led the viewer or reader from
outward perception to various forms of inward perception and spiritual
discernment. The fifteen articles address the history of the soul as a
cultural construct, an internal locus of self-formation where the divine
is seen to dwell and the person may experience her/himself as a place
inhabited by the spirit of God. Three central questions are approached
from various disciplines: first, how was the self-contained soul created
in God's likeness, yet stained by sin and as such susceptible both to
destructive and redemptive forces, refashioned as a porous and malleable
entity susceptible to metaphysical effects and human practices, such as
self-investigation, meditative prayer, and other techniques of
inwardness? Second, how did such practices constitutive of an inner
liturgy prepare the soul - the anima, bride - for an encounter with God
that trains, purifies, moulds, shapes, and transforms the religious
self? Finally, in this process of self-reformation, how were images of
place and space mobilized, how were loci found, and how did the soul
come to see itself situated within these places mapped upon itself?
