Devotees Participate in Story and Painting: Bernardo Alcocer's Novena to Madre Santisima de la Luz

In 1737, Jesuits in Mexico City published texts recounting the origin of a new painting and advocation of the Virgin Mary, Most Holy Mother of Light. In the following decades, many devotional texts dedicated to this advocation were composed in Mexico, one of which was a novena by Bernardo Alcocer. Partly following a meditational tradition, this work was exceptional in encouraging practitioners, in prayers across nine days, to simultaneously participate in the origin narrative and enter the visual elements of the painting, such that thereby a holy story and the iconography of a painting could be integrated into practitioners' religious discipline. Keywords: Bernardo Alcocer, Madre Santisima de la Luz, text and image, novenas, religious discipline
Introduction In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, Jesuit-educated parish priest Bernardo Alcocer composed a novena in honor of a new advocation of the Virgin Mary, Madre Santisima de [...]