Publisher's description:
The late medieval and early modern period is a particularly interesting chapter in the development of meditation and self-reflection. Meditation may best be described as a self-imposed disciplinary regime, consisting of mental and physical exercises that allowed the practitioner to engender and evaluate his self-image, and thence to emend and refashion it. The volume aims at examining the forms and functions, ways and means of meditation from c. 1300 to c. 1600. It tries to analyze the internal exercises that mobilized the sensitive faculties of motion, emotion, and sense (both external and internal) and the intellective faculties of reason, memory, and will, with a view to reforming the soul, and the techniques of visualization that were frequently utilized to engage the soul’s mediating function as vinculum mundi, its pivotal position in the great chain of being between heaven and earth, temporal and spiritual experience.

Table of contents:
Introduction
I. MEDITATIO AND REFASHIONING THE SELF IN LITERATURE, 1300-1600
Meditative Frames as Reader’s Guidance in Neo-Latin Texts, KARL ENENKEL
Petrarch’s “Inner Eye” in the Familiarium libri XXIV, JAN PAPY
The Discovery of the Dialogue in Medieval Dutch Literature. A Discourse for Meditation and Disputation, GEERT WARNAR
From Meditation to Reverie: Montaigne and Rousseau, PAUL SMITH
Exscribo ergo sum. Self-Reflexion and Meditiation in Early Modern German Family Books, WOLFGANG NEUBER
II. RELIGIOUS MEDITATION IN LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN THEOLOGY
Accomplishing one’s Essence: the Role of Meditation in the Theology of Gabriel Biel, DIANA STANCIU
Twelfth and Sixteenth Century Discourses on Meditation and Contemplation. Lefevre d’Etaples’ Commentaries on Richard of Saint Victor’s De Trinitate, JACOB VANCE
Die Meditation im spirituellen Reformprogramm der Devotio Moderna, NIKOLAUS STAUBACH
Love Tricks and Flea-Bitings: Meditation, Imagination and the Pain of Christ in Joseph Hall and Richard Crawshaw, JAN FRANS VAN DIJKHUIZEN
III. EXERCITIA SPIRITUALIA: MEDITATION AND THE JESUITS
Invisible Contemplation: a Paradox in the Spiritual Exercises, WIETSE DE BOER
Meditation in the Service of Catholic Orthodoxy: Peter Canisius’ Notae Evangelicae, HILMAR PABEL
Dark Images, Clear Words. Pieter Paets’s Illustrated Devotional Literature from the Missio Hollandica, FEIKE DIETZ
IV. RELIGIOUS MEDITATION IN THE VISUAL ARTS, 13TH – 17TH CENTURY
He Must Increase, but I Must Decrease. On the Spiritual and Pictorial Intertwining between the Johannesschüssel and the Vera Icon (1200-1500), BARBARA BAERT
Cultivating Piety. Religious Art and Artists After the Council of Trent, JAN L. DE JONG
Exegetical Duality as a Meditative Crux in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Balaam and the Angel in a Panoramic Landscape of 1554, WALTER S. MELION