L’Atlas Marianus de Wilhelm Gumppenberg ed. by Nicolas Balzamo et al. (review)

This beautiful edition of the German original and translation into French of Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus is of great interest to scholars of Catholic history for several reasons. First, the Atlas Marianus was both a highly successful and peculiar book in seventeenth-century Catholic literature, which makes it an interesting object of study for the history of piety. It is not an atlas, but a collection of legends about miraculous images of the Virgin Mary, with engravings representing the miraculous image. Whereas such books were usually confined to specific places, regions, or polities, Gumppenberg’s project was to assemble all the known miraculous images and to show in this way that “the world is Marian.” His goal was to defend Marian piety against Protestants, to help preachers and missionaries, and to enable the readers to deepen their spirituality by making, so to speak, pilgrimages in their mind. According to him, the copies of the images had something miraculous, so that the engravings helped one to get in touch with the Mother of God. As a collection of legends from different countries, the Atlas Marianus gives insights into the way Catholics conceived the Virgin Mary and their relation to her in the seventeenth century. It displays a confident religion having gotten rid of the doubts of the early sixteenth century, accepting popular religiosity, and endorsing an optimistic view of the relationships between believers and Heaven. It shows also that Catholic culture was clearly universalistic.

Second, the Atlas Marianus is interesting from the point of view of information history. To realize his ambitious goal, the Jesuit Gumppenberg asked the provincials and college rectors of the Society for information about miraculous images in their regions. He then integrated the material he received. The sample of images is thus quite haphazard, including hardly-known images and ignoring major ones. But the fact that the Atlas is a collective product of the Jesuit network shows what a German Jesuit could know about the Marian cult in different parts of Europe and the world. Gumppenberg always gives precise information about his printed sources, and the names of Jesuits who have given him intelligence.

The editors have decided to edit the Atlas’ first edition (1657), which comprises 100 legends, not the augmented Latin version of 1672 with 1,200 legends (but without engravings). They have added to the original engravings other baroque reproductions of the miraculous images, enabling comparisons. The translation into French is of high quality. The introduction is informative and stimulating, even if it contains some hazardous assertions. It claims that the Atlas shows the globalization of Marian cult in the seventeenth century although Gumppenberg’s book contains only two American images, and no information about images in Asia or eastern Christianity at all. To a modern reader, it is also striking that Gumppenberg thought Tenerife is in Chile. The Jesuit network obviously did not enable him to realize his universalistic project, and this may be a sign for a lower grade of globalization of information than assumed by the editors. The “ontology of images” developed by the editors is also somewhat bizarre because it suggests that, for the believers, the Marian images had a personality and acted on their own. Gumppenberg’s text, on the contrary, clearly attributes the miracles to the Virgin, not to the images. However, this does not diminish the great merit of this edition and translation which makes accessible and contributes to the exploration of a major product of baroque Catholicism.