Much of human imagining is to partake in one of the many practices of imagining that have been developed in human cultures. Much of human imagination is as much an essentially social phenomenon as speaking is.

I will explicate and substantiate these claims by referring to a particular historical episode of social imagination engineering: the building of Sacri Monti in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, and its explicitly intended use as shapers of the imagination by the conservative religious reformer Carolo Borromeo.

Returning to theory, I will argue that a proper understanding of this example illustrates important consequences for theoretical issues in the philosophy of imagination. First it shows how problematic the idea of imagination as by default disembodied is. Second, it shows that what an e-theorist has to do is not to deny the existence of representational phenomena, but rather to give an embodied, practice-based theory of representational phenomena. Third, and somewhat more far-fetched, I’ll argue that the proposed conception of imagination throws light on the question whether animals imagine as well as on the question whether memory can be conceived of as a form of ‘imagining the past’.