Esercizj spirituali di S. Ignazio di Lojola, fondatore della Compagnia de Gesù.
8vo (17 x 11.1 cm). 134, [2] pp., with 25 full-page etchings/engravings in the text, woodcut Jesuit device on title, woodcut initials, headpieces and tailpieces. Inquisitor's approbation on recto of final leaf (H12); verso with publisher’s advertisement listing the books offered for sale, most of them religious. Bound in contemporary vellum, titling in ink on spine; light wear, a few very small wormholes. Generally very fresh. One of the popular editions of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius de Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, produced for the general public, here in Italian, and illustrated with 25 full page engravings. Originally written in Spanish and first appearing in Latin in 1548, the Spiritual Exercises became a widely circulated work through countless translations and editions. It is generally supposed that Ignatius composed the work in the 1520s, while at Loyola and Manresa, but it was not published until 1548 in Rome, and again in 1553 in Coimbra. Ignatius’s seminal text is fundamental to understanding the Jesuit Order, its crucial involvement in the Counter-Reformation in Catholic Europe, and its worldwide missionary activities stretching from England to Japan. The Spiritual Exercises leads practitioners through a four-week meditative process to uncover God’s purpose for their lives and to facilitate its fulfillment. “The Spiritual Exercises are a special experience to be undergone, a shock-tactic spiritual gymnastic to be undertaken and performed under guidance, at some particular moment -- perhaps of inward crisis -- when new decisions and resolutions in life are called for or held to be desirable… They were in a sense the systematized, de-mythicized quintessence of the process of Ignatius’ own conversion and purposeful change of life, and they were intended to work a similar change in others” (H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, p. 44). The engraver, Giuseppe Filosi, was active in Venice from the 1730s to the 1760s. He is primarily remembered for his 72 views in the popular illustrated guide, Il forestiero illumininato (1740), and for the majority of the 664 engravings that illustrate Theodore Salmon’s 26-volume work, Lo stato presente di tutti i paesi e popoli del mondo (1738-48).
* De Backer-Sommervogel, vol. 5, col. 71; for Filosi, see Benezit IV, p. 368, and F.G. Santori, “Giuseppe Filosi,” in Treccani: Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-filosi_(Dizionario-Biografico)/).
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