Héritage biblique et emblématique : le Minerva Britanna de Peacham comme art de méditation

Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612) mostly teaches the great lessons of Christian thought (temperance, virtue, compassion). The moral tuition relies upon an intense biblical intertext and quotations from the Fathers, in both poems and paratext, as in «Temperantia». The emblems also resort to the christianization of classical myths : «Divina misericordia» offers a reading of the myth of Prometheus already propounded by Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (1556) and Bacon’s De Sapientia veterum. The pictures redevelop the message of the texts. In «Divina misericordia», the victim’s tortured body conveys a sense of compassion and then of Love in the reader’s heart. The pictures operate as figurations of concepts remaining out of reach without their mediation. They are founded on a hierarchy between the visible and the intelligible and borrow from St Paul’s theology (one can see only as through a looking glass, darkly). The reading of emblems is an art of meditation understood as intellectual operation and spiritual awakening.