ABSTRACT
Spiritual landscapes form across local, transcultural, and diachronic trajectories left by holy persons, texts, images, sacred itineraries, rituals, and interior realities. A magisterial, tedious, and ornate narrative, the Mystical City of God collapses transcendent and immanent realities into a stream of instructions, visions and illuminations intended to reconstruct and explain the actual and mystical life of the Virgin. The mystical world is not given to dualities. It is fluid and continuous, as are the imaginary realities that constitute it and the visions that form there. The influence of the Mystical City of God on local iconography can be inferred with more certainty from nearby examples. The Marian theology, outlined in long speeches and prayers in the Mystical City of God, informed Franciscan preaching in New Mexico and strengthened the friars' belief in the providential nature of their presence in the colony and their own participation in apocalyptic realities.
