Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Exhibited in the] Francis A. Drexel Library, Saint Joseph's University (review)

Abstract

Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Exhibited in the] Francis A. Drexel Library, Saint Joseph's University. With a Preface by Joseph F. Chorpenning, O.S.FS. Introduction by Rob Faesen, SJ., and Catalogue of the Exhibition by Ralph Dekoninck, Agnes Guiderdoni-Brusle, and Marc van Vaeck. (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press. 2006. Pp.xiv, 103. $45.00 paperback.) This volume could be described as an exhibition catalogue, but to do so would seriously undersell a scholarly study of the early modern use of printed images within Catholic spirituality, and in particular of their exploitation by the Society of Jesus for both meditational and devotional but also for pedagogic purposes.The main body of the text is contributed by leading specialists in these areas, Marc van Vaeck from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Frank Dekoninck and Agnes Guiderdoni-Brusle from the Universite Catholique de Louvain. In the preface Joseph Chorpenning, from Saint Joseph's University Press, explains that the year 2006 commemorated three significant dates for the Society of Jesus-the 450th anniversary of the death of its founder, Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), and the 500 th anniversary of the births of Ignatius's first two companions, Francis Xavier (1506-52) and Peter Faber (1506-46). In celebration of these anniversaries, Saint Joseph's University organized the remounting in the Francis Drexel Library of an exhibition of some seventy devotional emblem books and allied works from the Maurits Sabbe Library of the Faculty of Theology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven which had been mounted in Leuven in 2005 to complement an international conference on Emblemata Sacra: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Illustrated Religious Literature. This present volume is based on the catalogue of that exhibition. The Maurits Sabbe Library is, as Rob Faesen explains in his introduction, particularly rich in Jesuitica, and this emphasis is reflected in the works discussed here, which are virtually all by Catholic, and predominantly by Jesuit writers, although some non-Jesuit writers, such as Augustin Chesneau and Abraham a Sane ta Clara, both Augustinians, are also included. Protestant emblematists, however, hardly figure here. (Cramer, for example, is mentioned only twice, while Montenay and Beze figure not at all.) The works described are primarily those published in the Netherlands (mainly Antwerp) and in France (mainly Paris). …