Abstract

Between Miracle and Reason. The “Atlas Marianus” of the Jesuit Wilhelm Gumppenberg

In 1657 the German Jesuit Wilhelm Gumppenberg published a book whose form and aim were original: the “Atlas Marianus”. This little work of handbook size was published in Latin and a year later (1658) in German by the Munich printer Jaecklin. Its purpose was to list all Marian shrines in Europe. These first Latin and German versions consisted of a hundred entries, illustrated by engravings each representing the venerated Virgin. In 1672 after long, hard work, the German Jesuit had collected 1200 entries that he gathered in a prestigious Latin edition.

In the first Latin edition the author presented the shrines classified by country, as though he were drawing the outlines of a Europe placed under the protection of the Virgin. In the last and most important edition of 1672, his project assembled 1200 shrines from around the world, which were sorted into twelve sections, each one containing a hundred entries. To make them more convenient and easy to use, Gumppenberg used remarkable classification systems. This article attempts to examine these indexes and tables contained in the atlas. Despite its title which seems to refer to sacred topographies and pilgrimages, the “Atlas Marianus” in its final version is obviously a commonplace book devoted to Mary. This article examines the different stages of its transformations and the intellectual and confessional stakes in a context where the Jesuits, attacked by defamatory Protestant and Catholic literature, lost their support in the scientific Catholic world after they fell into line with the papacy in the Copernican Debate. The classification systems of the Atlas could thus be seen as a scientific device to give an indispensable auctoritas to the text.