Composed by Hieronymus Natalis at the behest of Ignatius of Loyola, the Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia is a key Jesuit propaedeutic that instructs novices in the rhetoric of prayer, teaching them how to convert Gospel liturgy into the matter of contemplative devotion. Using a system of annotations and meditations based on the rhetorical principle of definitio per descriptionem, Natalis expounds a series of 153 engravings that depict Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. These prints set Gospel places and events within landscape panoramas that map a series of peregrinationes, sacred journeys, whose meaning and scope the votary is invited to consider and retrace. By negotiating between panoramic prints and richly embellished texts, the novice learns to trope his own journey, which becomes a figure of the kinds and degrees of prayer he has traversed. This paper examines how the annotations and meditations on the Annunciation, Visitation, Adoration of the Magi and Christ and the Canaanite Woman, encourage the Jesuit to embrace reformatio, spiritual conversion, using prayer to find the meaning of his vocation and the strength to engage in it fully.

Les chercheurs doivent citer ce travail comme suit :

• Melion, W. S., (2025), "Artifice, Memory, and Reformatio in Hieronymus Natalis's Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Melion, Walter S. "Artifice, Memory, and Reformatio in Hieronymus Natalis's Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia." Renaissance and Reformation 34 (3): 2010. 5-34. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v34i3.10815. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.