9 Rosette - Specific Details

[Koen G]

With Jerusalem there are a number of unique factors into play. It's a place of extreme importance for Christianity and its pilgrims, but during the late Middle Ages it was already under Muslim rule and often hard to visit. 

This gave rise to the genre of "mental pilgrimages". You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. by Hanneke van Asperen discusses two 16th century examples, but as she also explains, this way of thinking was already in full swing by the early 15th century. The "mental pilgrimage" was already popularized in the "Moderne Devotie" movement in the Netherlands, 14th century.

We see an increasing obsession with the suffering of Christ; in order to be a good Christian (read: to endure less torture in Purgatory), the devout were encouraged to imagine Christ's suffering as if they were undergoing it themselves.

To facilitate this, the manuscripts discussed by Van Asperen "allow the reader to visit the biblical sites in Jerusalem without leaving the confines of the home. One element sets them apart from the popular devotion known as the Stations of the Cross: both texts mention the exact distances between the sites. This makes it theoretically possible for the readers to duplicate the journey of Christ to Mount Calvary while trying to imagine his suffering. The mental pilgrims could earn remissions of temporal punishment ‘as if they had physically visited the holy places’."

Again, I'm agnostic about what the VM rosettes foldout represents. I can't fit everything together. But I do think that it's more of a symbolic representation rather than an actual "floor plan" of something, whether small scale or large.