Eschatological Imagination

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).

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.

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresNotes on the EditorsNotes on the Contributors1 The Space-Time Dimension of Early Modern Eschatology: An IntroductionWietse de Boer and Christine GöttlerPart 1: Cosmology and Eschatology2 Depicting the Universal Conflagration: Time, Space, and Artifice in Peter Paul Rubens’s Fall of the DamnedChristine Göttler3 A Castle in the Air? Space, Time, and Sensation in Gabriel de Henao’s EmpyreologiaWietse de Boer4 Kepler’s Somnium as Purgatorial JourneyAviva RothmanPart 2: Underlands and Netherworlds5 The Birth of Hell: An Angel, His Fall, and His Reign among UsMatteo Al Kalak6 ‘Oh, How Unlike the Place from Whence They Fell!’ John Milton’s Primordial Hell in Paradise LostAntoinina Bevan Zlatar7 God’s Underlands: Athanasius Kircher’s Epic Journey in the Mundus SubterraneusMonica AzzoliniPart 3: Visions of Heaven and Hell8 Ecstatic Visions: The Eschatological Imagination of Spanish Mystic Juana de la Cruz (d. 1534)Minou Schraven9 Describing the Inconceivable in Eighteenth-Century Methodist and Quaker Visions of the AfterlifeMartha McGill and Luke Holloway10 From the Isle of Patmos to the Territory of the Plumed Serpent: Eschatological Imaginations Sparked by the Virgin of Guadalupe in Colonial New SpainRaphaèle PreisingerPart 4: Spiritual Reckoning and Refuge11 Pondering Mary: Michelangelo’s Farewell to DanteJane Tylus12 The Calvinist Theatre of God as a Pleasure Garden at the Time of the First French War of Religion (ca. 1560)Laurent PayaPart 5: Sites of Purgation, Meditation, and Martyrdom13 The Desert at the World’s End: Eschatological Space in Van Hemessen’s Hermit LandscapesAnna-Claire Stinebring14 ‘Abstracto igitur animo’: Eschatological Image-Making in the Emblematic Spiritual Exercises of Jan David, S.J.Walter S. Melion15 The Jesuit Martyrdom Landscape and the Optics of DeathMia M. MochizukiIndex Nominum