Military Themes in Selected Eighteenth-Century Prayer Books in Relation to the Emblem Tradition

This paper was inspired by the lack of studies that would show examples of military-erotic symbols in religious literature associated with the emblem tradition. The works discussed here, namely prayer books by Andrzej Gabriel Kasperowicz, anonymous Atak niebieskiej twierdzy [The attack of the heavens or The attack into the fortress of heavens] and Wojsko serdecznych afektów [The army of heartfelt affections] by Hieronim Falęcki, retain high formal and semantic discipline; as a result, they are examples of interesting phenomena of Baroque culture. In the first part of the study, Słomak presents three prayer books in which the concept is based on an analogy with the organisation of the army of Christ. In the second part, she presents a book in which the theme of war is combined with the theme of “holy erotica”. In part three, she discusses a print whose composition refers to the structure of military detachments. It is conceived as a collection of “affections” whose task is “to conquer” heaven and the hearts of readers. Characteristically, the formula of the discussed books will be understandable only if we reconstruct their reference to the popular allegorical images (to be found in the collections of emblems, in many treatises on religious themes or in descriptions of the great ceremonies of that era); therefore, it is necessary to take into account the emblematic model that clearly influenced their final shape.