Anima Christi is frequently misattributed to Ignatius of Loyola, the sixteenth-century founder of the Jesuits, because he placed it at the very opening of his highly influential Spiritual Exercises, but manuscript evidence shows versions of the prayer circulating in Europe well before Ignatius's time, with some scholars tracing elements of its imagery back to the fourteenth century or earlier among texts of uncertain and probably composite authorship. Its structure is a sequence of short petitions, each asking to be sanctified, made drunk, hidden, protected or defended by some aspect of Christ, his soul, body, blood, wounds and passion, before closing with a request never to be separated from him and to be called into his presence at death, imagery scholars of medieval devotion connect to a broader late-medieval tradition of intensely physical, wound-focused meditation on Christ's passion.
Ignatius's decision to place an already-existing prayer, rather than one of his own composition, at the head of his Exercises has itself been read by historians of spirituality as evidence of how thoroughly this prayer had already become associated with entering a period of intensive spiritual retreat and self-examination well before the Jesuits existed as an order.