In the Footsteps of Christ: Hans Memling’s Passion Narratives and the Devotional Imagination in the Early Modern Netherlands by Mitzi Kirkland-Ives (review)

This insightful, elegantly written, and carefully argued new study is an important addition to the understandings of Hans Memling’s narrative paintings and the devotional life of the early modern Netherlands. The book convincingly contends that Memling’s Passion narratives are best understood as inviting an embodied devotional response analogous to devotional processional practices in both urban, northern Europe and the Holy Land.

Chapter 1 offers an extended description of three Memling works: a Passion panel originally from Bruges, now in Turin; the Seven Joys of Mary, now in Munich; and the Lübeck Greverada Altarpiece. Description is, of course, interpretation, and the reader of Mitzi Kirkland-Ives’s nuanced accounts is rewarded with illuminating readings that neatly demonstrate her arguments for a ‘kinetic’ epistemology of such images, and their relationships to practices of memory. Indeed, links between these images and rhetorical traditions of memory places (loci) might, I think, be extended to consider interest in the order (ordo) of narration in the Gospels in the fifteenth-century Low Countries.

The second chapter contains rich and detailed presentations of early modern pilgrimages to Jerusalem. These accounts are quoted at length, allowing readers to encounter a variety of pilgrim voices. The chapter continues the task of showing how devotional imaginations were shaped by ‘locations’, by the processional culture of Jerusalem, and by the bodily and kinetic experience of holy sites. Accompanying this analysis of ‘actual’ pilgrimage is an emphasis on ‘virtual pilgrimage’ for devout readers in the Low Countries, one frame through which Memling’s narrative images might be viewed. A final thread in the analysis attends to the ways that devotional practices from the Low Countries shaped the experiences of pilgrims in the Holy Land. This analysis means that scholars now must think further about how the particular social positions of pilgrims – priests, nobles, merchants – affected their devotional expectations and experiences, and how particular images, or image groups, shaped pilgrims’ experiences of holy sites.

Chapter 3 returns to the Low Countries and to their processional and dramatic cultures. This is well-ploughed ground, and the material here is not new. What is offered instead is patient reconstructions of the plethora of different processions and dramatic re-enactments on offer in the urban milieu: from the great civic entries of the nobility to weekly processions before or after Sunday mass. Although more might usefully be said about the variety of these regular liturgical processions, few could doubt the chapter’s conclusion, that viewers of Memling’s works were trained in experiences of ‘continuous narrative’ where scenes from the biblical past were re-enacted and mapped onto the geography of early modern towns. A processional ‘epistemology’ emerges here which, as Kirkland-Ives neatly shows, was shaped by the processional nature of many of the biblical episodes commemorated (Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, the ascent and descent of Calvary). The procession becomes not simply the mimesis of an individual moment, but the mimesis of a process.

In the fourth chapter, Kirkland-Ives lays out an array of devotional practices that brought the Passion narrative into the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century present. The chapter commences with an extended examination of the sacred geography of Bruges’s Jeruzalemkerk, a space that allowed the bodily experience of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the heart of the town. Kirkland-Ives sees a ‘more thoroughly developed spatial dimension’ in devotional texts of the period, including the works of the fourteenth-century Dominican mystic Heinrich de Suso, where the Passion is mapped onto monastic geography in a series of memory places. Suso’s texts form part of a wider culture of enacting the Passion narrative through ‘stations’ like those installed on city streets, and in episodic cycles of prayer and images like the...