Book Release — The Eye of the Mind: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Preaching by Maria Grazia Bartolini
A new study, The Eye of the Mind: Vision, Memory, and Meditation in Seventeenth-Century Ukrainian Preaching by Maria Grazia Bartolini, offers the first comprehensive intellectual history of preaching and memory in early modern Ukraine.
Long before images could be projected onto screens or circulated digitally, seventeenth-century Ukrainian preachers used words to make their listeners see. Through vivid descriptions, visual symbols, mnemonic techniques, and emotional meditation, they transformed sermons into experiences designed to remain in the mind.
About the Book
In The Eye of the Mind, scholar Maria Grazia Bartolini examines how Orthodox preachers in early modern Kyiv utilized visual and verbal imagery to shape religious understanding. Reconstructing what she calls the “mental furniture” of seventeenth-century preachers and their audiences, Bartolini demonstrates how sermons created a theatrum meditationis—a “memory theater” in which listeners were encouraged to become imaginative spectators.
Focusing on influential figures such as Lazar Baranovych, Ioanykii Galiatovs′kyi, Stefan Iavors′kyi, Antonii Radyvylovs′kyi, and Dymytrii Tuptalo, this volume shows how these practices foster deep emotional engagement—ranging from suffering and fear to compassion and love for Christ. Beyond private devotion, these techniques helped preachers reinforce Orthodox identity and shape behavior during a period of intense confessional competition.
Despite the importance of preaching in seventeenth-century Ukrainian religious life, we still know remarkably little about how Orthodox sermons shaped the inner worlds of their audiences,” Bartolini said. “These preachers did more than explain doctrine: they taught listeners to visualize sacred narratives, preserve spiritual truths in memory, and experience faith through the active power of the imagination.
Placing Ukrainian preaching within the broader intellectual culture of early modern Europe, The Eye of the Mind demonstrates how Orthodox writers selectively adapted classical rhetoric, medieval memory practices, Baroque aesthetics, emblem books, and Ignatian devotional methods. By bringing sermon literature, intellectual history, rhetorical analysis, and visual studies into conversation, the study recovers a tradition that reveals early modern Kyiv’s active participation in wider European cultural and religious exchanges.
About the Author
Maria Grazia Bartolini is Associate Professor of Medieval Slavic Culture and Slavic Linguistics at the University of Milan. Her research focuses on early modern Ukrainian religious culture, particularly the intersections among preaching, memory, visual arts, and intellectual history. She is the author of Piznai samoho sebe, a study of Hryhorii Skovoroda and Christian Neoplatonism that received the 2019 Ivan Franko International Prize, and In the Tight Triangle of the Night: The Early Poetry of Yuriy Tarnawsky between Modernism and Postmodernism. Her articles on memory, meditation, and visual imagery in early modern Ukraine received the Early Slavic Studies Association Best Article Prize in 2017 and 2020 and an Honorable Mention from the American Association for Ukrainian Studies in 2021.
Excerpt from Introduction
Ukraine, and one of the most practiced literary genres of medieval and early modern Europe, sermons were worked out mentally by their authors, committed to memory to be recited in church, and put down in written form after their delivery. Memory was, therefore, a most useful craft for an orator to keep his subject matter in mind in a persuasive order. But sermons were also a powerful tool for edifying the mostly illiterate lay masses, one that transmitted the essential contents of the Christian faith that had to be remembered and internalized to gain salvation. As Carlo Delcorno has observed, the art of memory “is deeply rooted in preaching, to the ‘contrainte formelle’ of its rhetorical rules.” Sermons make, therefore, a particularly interesting case study for elucidating the status of vision, imagination, and memory, and for determining the role these faculties play in the religious culture of early modern Ukraine. Moreover—and more importantly for my argument—while we access these texts as readers, we must not forget that their original audiences were composed of listeners first and readers second. Despite the importance of the written word, and the appearance of many collections of sermons in print, their reception remained an essentially auditory experience. The orality of the genre, at the intersection of literature and public speaking, is of crucial importance for understanding its cognitive dynamics. As Mary Morrissey has aptly observed, a sermon is both a text and an event—an oral discourse that addresses an audience at a specific time and place. It is my contention that the urge to appeal to the cognitive needs of this original audience of listeners—to make them see and remember—profoundly shaped these sermons, their rhetorical strategies, and, more specifically, what might be called their “epistemological project”: their way of making people know God by combining word and image.