The Mediaeval Journal

Enclosure has traditionally been a decisive feature of female religious life, restricting the women’s movements and confining them to their convent. From the thirteenth century onwards, we find examples of enclosed women who embarked on substitute pilgrimages that emulated the route to Rome or Jerusalem. This activity not only sought to imitate the journey to sacred places but also presented a possibility to acquire indulgences. A special variety of proxy pilgrimage is found in the reform convent of the Poor Clares in Villingen, women who embraced strict enclosure as an enhancement of their spiritual freedom. The present article explores the sisters’ spiritual and intellectual background, the influence of the abbess Ursula Haider, the particular form of spiritual pilgrimage the women developed, its practical execution, and what it accomplished in the sisters’ eyes.

Scenes carved on late medieval liturgical furniture, known as misericords, have been described as surprisingly secular, considering their limited audience of male clerics. This article argues that surviving examples depicting laywomen beating submissive husbands reflect specific aspects of English culture within a framework of sexual politics. Ultimately, these images served to remind the male clerical viewer of his professional responsibility to educate the masses according to the literature of his own profession, at times utilizing popular vernacular sources as well.

Commemoration of the dead in the French language was common in later medieval England but in the absence of a published corpus these inscriptional materials are little studied and poorly understood. By drawing together evidence from existing tombs, monumental brasses, and records of lost epitaphic material, the chronology, geographical spread, and textual traditions of French commemoration are revealed. This uncovers a significant body of evidence for the period 1390 to 1480 that offers parallels with the continued use of the French language into the fifteenth century within other social, professional, cultural, and administrative networks. Further, this newly constituted corpus establishes the extent of the production of French language commemorative materials in workshops in London and the regions, and the intersections of epigraphical texts and other forms of francophone textual activity in England.

This is a study of the reading of Julian of Norwich’s Divine Revelations by an Irish immigrant, Thomas Connary, who worked as a farmer in New Hampshire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. A close examination of Connary’s annotations in Julian’s visionary autobiography reveals a remarkable intertextual dialogue of voices, in which Connary emulates, and is enabled by, past spiritual authority. By drawing parallels between the devotional practices and habits of reading of Julian and Connary, this essay thinks transhistorically about the nature of the visionary autobiography, and considers an aspect of the cultural mobility of a rich and articulate Middle English mystical tradition.

Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700 (by Peter Sarris) - Ian Wood

Testamenti di donne a Bergamo nel medioevo. Pergamene dall’archivio della Misericordia Maggiore di Bergamo (secoli xiii-xiv) (ed. by M. T. Brolis and A. Zonca) - Eleonora Rava

Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (by Roberta Gilchrist) - Christopher Gerrard

Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology (200-1600) (by C. Philipp E. Nothaft) - Immo Warntjes

The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (by Andrew Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız) - Konrad Hirschler

The Great Beginning of Cîteaux: A Narrative of the Beginning of the Cistercian Order. The Exordium Magnum of Conrad of Eberbach (ed. by Benedicta Ward and Paul Savage, trans. by E. Rozanne Elder) - Janet Burton

The Béguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (by Sean Field) - Hannah Skoda

Marie de France: A Critical Companion (by Sharon Kinoshita and Peggy McCracken) - Miranda Griffin

Death at Court (ed. by Karl-Heinz Spieß and Immo Warntjes) - Danielle Westerhof

Mixed Metaphors: The ‘Danse Macabre’in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (ed. by Sophie Oosterwijk and Stephanie Knöll) - Larissa Tracy