Brepols Online Books Medieval Monographs Archive v2016 - bobar16mome

Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, dating probably to the 1290s, is the oldest known mystical work written in French, and the only surviving medieval text by a woman writer executed as a heretic. This volume analyses its use of interconnected allegories that describe the soul’s approach toward God in terms of human social relationships. These include romantic love between lovers in same-sex and mixed-sex pairs, relations among people of differing social rank such as servants and nobles, and rich and poor engaged in economic transactions such as taxation and gift-giving. Gender, rank, and exchange serve as remarkably versatile allegories for spiritual states. Porete uses comparison as an organizing principle that underlies her supple and creative use of allegory, personification, parables, metaphors, similes, proverbs, and glosses. The theologian invites her audience to cross boundaries among literal and figurative registers of meaning, in ways that are emblematic of the soul’s ultimate leap toward the divine. Porete’s social allegories, the author contends, can provide us with valuable evidence of a medieval thinker’s conceptions of God, gender, language, and human capacity for change.

This study is focused on bl ms Harley 494, a small manuscript book which can be dated between 1532 and 1535 and which has many of the features of a preces privatae volume, or private prayer book. It contains prayers in English and Latin but also a number of brief devotional treatises in English. ms Harley 494 possesses two more features of interest: it belonged to a Hampshire widow, Anne Bulkeley (and possibly later to her daughter Anne, a nun at Amesbury Priory); and it emerged from a Birgittine textual community. Barratt edits and annotates the complete manuscript to provide an accessible and informative edition of this little known manuscript. However, Anne Bulkeley and her Book is not a conventional edition of a late Middle English text. Rather, Barratt carefully contextualizes the manuscript within its historical background just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and meticulously investigates the varied, and often unusual, sources of many of the individual items in the book. In addition, the discussion encompasses several related manuscripts (principally Lambeth Palace ms 3600 and the so-called Burnet Psalter (Aberdeen University Library ms 25)). This broad focus enables the volume to examine not only the evolution of the manuscript as a whole, but also to answer wider questions of its owner’s identity, her family connections, and her (and her book’s) place in literary, cultural, and religious history.

Adémar de Chabannes, un des historiens les plus connus du XIe siècle, a laissé à Saint-Martial de Limoges, avant de partir pour Jérusalem où il est mort en 1034, un remarquable dossier de textes divers. Ils permettent de reconstituer sa formation, sa carrière monastique à Saint-Cybard d'Angoulême, et ses ncroyables efforts pour promouvoir saint Martial au rang des apôtres qui l'ont conduit à produire une extraordinaire collection de faux. La Chronique, composée entre 1025 et 1028, n'est-elle qu'une œuvre de faussaire? Ses deux premiers livres y rassemblent des ouvrages historiques antérieurs, des origines troyennes des Francs à Charlemagne, "compilation" sans doute mais dont le grand mérite est de nous faire pénétrer dans le scriptorium d'un historien de l'an Mil et de nous permettre d'appréhender l'état des connaissances historiques à cette époque. La partie "originale" de la Chronique (Livre III, 16-70) s'appuie sur des annales locales, sur la mémoire cléricale et monastique et surtout sur l'inlassable curiosité d'un moine à l'écoute des bruits qui lui viennent non seulement de son pays - le Limousin, l'Angoumois, le duché d'Aquitaine - au temps de Guillaume le Grand, des conciles de paix et des guerres châtelaines, mais encore de toute la Chrétienté et des terres d'Islam. Aux yeux d'un historien critique, Adémar commet bien trop d'erreurs et d'inventions. Il n'en reste pas moins qu'il a su parfaitement nous transmettre les violences, les craintes et les espoirs de son temps.

St. Anselm of Canterbury's († 1109) Orationes siue Meditationes offers a most instructive testimony of the change that occurred in the late eleventh century in Western spirituality. Thanks to the beauty of its language and the freshness of its approach, Anselm's volume truly touched the minds of contemporaries and aroused so great a passion that the book was copied, imitated, and incorporatedinto apocryphal collections. These new books illustrate by their variety, originality, and even commonplace aspects the profuse resources of a literary genre that is too often unrecognized although most deserving of interest. After exposing the political and religious background of the Anglo-Norman world, as well as treating the rhetorical tradition of private prayers, the present work offers the first critical edition, with a French translation, of the Anselmian collections of the 12th century.