The constitution of media, intermediality and media criticism in Italian, French and English meditational literature from the 16th and 17th century

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This sub-project will investigate what constitutes mediality, intermediality and media criticism and how these were developed and differentiated in the meditational literature of Italy, France and England – three regions of Europe with different cultures and religious denominations that are connected by having a common ascetic basis, viz. prominent late medieval and Early Modern teachings on meditation. In the first funding period, the focus will be on the transformation of meditative methods into the medium of the book and on the different theoretical positions, both explicit and implicit, on the form, function and theological justification (or restriction) of ensembles of meditative media. The research work will also look at how this was achieved in practical terms through intermediality in meditational books used by the various denominations. The project understands Christian meditation as a regulating matrix of structured, learnable, personal communication between God and the believer for achieving spiritual self-perfection; it is not limited to a particular medium. By interweaving the vertical axis of the proto-medium of Christ, which reveals itself and calls for the meditative imitation of Jesus, and the horizontal axis of human use of the senses (applicatio sensuum) in Early Modern meditational books, it produces special forms of intermedial installations which are characterised by modes of conceptual imagery and text-image relations which can be differentiated quantitatively and qualitatively according to religious denomination and by media criticism, which latently questions this horizontal intermediality, regarding it as an inadequate representation of the transcendent. While Italian meditational prose and poetry fully employs conceptual and iconic pictoriality, which is nevertheless reflected in a media-critical manner, French bi-denominational meditational literature reveals different strategies of de-imaging through the use of allegory and de-rhetorisation. In Anglican meditational literature, there is a denomination-specific focus on liberating meditation from ‘enthusiasm’ by reducing the use of images and emphasising the observation of the ‘Book of Nature’. The members of the project will work closely with SP 1, 2 and 6 and stage a joint workshop on intermediality in text-image combinations of praxis pietatis. Their findings will result in a dissertation on English meditational books and a jointly written monograph on intermediality and media criticism of Early Modern meditation in Italy, England and France.