Brepols Online Books Medieval Monographs Collection 2014 - bob2014mome

This volume examines the performative and ideological functions of texts dealing with magic in contexts of social and political conflict. While the rites, representations, and agents of medieval Scandinavian magic have been the object of numerous studies, little attention has been given to magic as a discourse. As a consequence, Old Norse sources mobilizing magic have been analysed mainly as evidence for a stable extra-textual phenomenon. This volume breaks with this perspective.

The book focuses on the use of discourses of magic in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelandic texts concerned with kingship. It is argued that Icelanders constructed magic as a discursive answer to the increasingly pressing question of how to deal with the reality of their subordination to kings. This they did by telling stories of flattering Icelandic successes over kings brought about by magic in a bid to challenge dominant definitions and the social and political status quo. The book thus follows the conditions of emergence that made these subversive discourses of magic meaningful; it describes the various forms they were given, the various constraints weighing upon their use, and the particular political goals they served.

In recent years, much critical attention has been devoted to medieval texts written for recluses, such as the Life of Christina of Markyate, Aelred’s Institutio reclusarum, and the Ancrene Wisse. The Manere of Good Lyvyng, in contrast, brings the focus back to the conventual life and to the needs of a nun rather than an anchoress.

The Manere of Good Lyvyng is a late Middle English translation of an earlier Latin text, the Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem, long attributed to St Bernard of Clairvaux. Whether in its Latin form or its Middle English rendering, this work is a fascinating text and one with considerable artistic merit. It is neither a flamboyant text nor one strewn with images such as one encounters in the Ancrene Wisse. It is a quiet text, with the beauty and simplicity of a manuscript perfectly written in an elegant script, where no illustration distracts the reader from its reading.