Transmutations of the Soul: Anima and Her Heart in Christopher Harvey’s School of the Heart (1647)

Emblems of the heart form a category of emblematic literature which proposes to observe the soul’s travails via the symbolism of the heart. Christopher Harvey’s 1647 collection stages a series of operations performed by Christ on the heart: it is assaulted by arrows of love shot by Christ-Cupid and inhabited by him, who engraves its flesh with divine law; the heart is also distended, crowned with thorns, or crushed with a hammer. Heart emblems thus postulate a dialectical relationship between the material and the spiritual: spiritual processes find a material expression in the space of the book; but it is also through the body and its manifestations that spiritual progress can be achieved. How is man’s heart envisaged as an intersection between the soul and the transcendental, but also the body and the immanent?