Virtual voyage to Loreto : how to visit the Holy House in Spirit (seventeenth-eighteenth centuries)

Abstract

In Roman Catholic thought, the house of religious imagination has many mansions. Jean Gerson and Ignatius of Loyola recommended 'composition of place': employing the imagination to furnish all the details of a setting in which one observes and shares in the sufferings of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. Matteo Ricci advocated the construction of a 'memory palace': locating images representing religious figures, events, and doctrines in specific places within a building, where at a later time they could easily be retrieved. This paper, a tribute to Duane Osheim's most recent interest, concerns a third way of using the religious imagination: thinking one's way into a site of pilgrimage unfeasible to visit in person, the Holy House at Loreto.