Devotional literature

This volume investigates the vivid and emotionally intense commemoration of the Passion of Christ as a key element in late medieval religious culture. Its goal is to shed light on how the Passion was communicated and on its socio-religious function in late medieval Europe. By adopting a multidisciplinary approach the volume analyses the different media involved in this cultural process (sermons devotional texts lively performances statues images) the multiple forms and languages in which the Passion was presented to the faithful and how they were expected to respond to it. Key questions concern the strategies used to present the Passion; the interaction between texts images and sounds in different media; the dissemination of theological ideas in the public space; the fashioning of an affective response in the audience; and the presence or absence of anti-Jewish commonplaces.

By exploring the interplay among a wide range of sources this volume highlights the pervasive role of the Passion in late medieval society and in the life of the people of the time.

Linguistic fragmentation contains the risk of cultural separation while the concept of inclusion implies the recognition of the difference of the Other which must be recognised in its specificity to develop a process of inclusion. One of the main means of overcoming the dangers hidden in linguistic fragmentation is unquestionably plurilingualism and relatedly translation. Translation enables the transmission of content from one linguistic-cultural system to another. Multilingualism is not just a peculiarity of the contemporary age it is a fundamental phenomenon of the Middle Ages. The conceptual relationship between linguistic fragmentation and cultural inclusion and the inter-relationships of these two apparently opposing poles with the communicative tool of translation requires some reflection within the broader framework of translation studies in the Middle Ages. This collection of essays examines the seemingly paradoxical concept of linguistic fragmentation as an instrument of cultural inclusion thanks to the practice of translation.

The essays explain the relationship through translations between many medieval languages and texts from Icelandic to Italian from English to French and more. They examine vernacular circulation of religious texts (translation of the Bible of hagiographic or homiletic texts etc.); circulation thanks to translation of literary texts (e.g. the translation of epic-chivalric cycles); translation from a koine language to another language and vice versa; and the relationship between the choice of the target language and the socio-cultural context.

The Sisterbook of Master Geert’s House contains the lives of sixty-four Sisters of the Common Life who died between 1398 and 1456. Founded as an alms-house for destitute women in 1374 by the end of the fourteenth century Master Geert’s House had become a home for women desiring to live a life of humility and penitence as well as in community of goods without vows. The Sisterbook was likely written sometime between 1460 and 1470 at a time when the religious fervour that had characterized the earlier Sisters had begun to wane. It was to incite the readers and hearers of the Sisterbook which would have been read in the refectory during mealtimes to imitate the earlier Sisters who are portrayed as outstanding examples of godliness and Sisters of the Common Life. The opening sentence of the Sisterbook succinctly sums up the author’s reason for writing it: ‘Here begin some edifying points about our earlier Sisters whose lives it behoves us to have before our eyes at all times for in their ways they were truly like a candle on a candlestick’ and who by implication could still illumine the way for her own generation of Sisters. The first foundation of Sisters of the Common Life Master Geert’s House became the ‘mother’ house of numerous other houses in the Low Countries and Germany directly as well as indirectly and served as an inspiration for others.

This book provides a study of the Sisterbook and its significance in the Devotio Moderna and late medieval female religiosity while the accompanying translation introduces this important source to an English audience.

Long-distance ties connecting Europeans from all geographical corners of the continent during the fifteenth and sixteenth century facilitated the sharing of religious texts books iconography ideas and practices. The contributions to this book aim to reconstruct these European networks of knowledge exchange by exploring how religious ideas and strategies of transformation ‘travelled’ and were shared in European and transatlantic cultural spaces. In order to come to a better understanding of Europe-wide processes of religious culture and religious change the chapters focus on the agency of the laity in ‘new communities of interpretation’ instead of intellectual elites the aristocracy and religious institutions. These new communities of interpretation were often formed by an urban laity active in politics finance and commerce. The agency of religious literatures in the European vernaculars in processes of religious purification reform and innovation during the long fifteenth century is still largely underestimated. ‘Networking Europe’ aims to step away from studying ‘national’ textual production and consumption by approaching these topics instead from a European and interconnected perspective. The contributions to this book explore late medieval and early modern networks connecting people and transporting texts following three main axes of investigation: ‘European Connections’ ‘Exiles Diasporas and Migrants’ and ‘Mobility and Dissemination’.

While medieval Iceland has long been celebrated and studied for its rich tradition of vernacular literature in recent years attention has increasingly been paid to other areas of Old Norse-Icelandic scholarship in particular the production of hagiographical and religious literature. At the same time a similar renaissance has arisen in other fields in particular Old Norse-Icelandic paleography philology and manuscript studies thanks to the development of the so-called ‘new philology’ and its impact on our understanding of manuscripts. Central to these developments has been the scholarship of Kristen Wolf one of the foremost authorities in the fields of Old Norse-Icelandic hagiography biblical literature paleography codicology textual criticism and lexicography who is the honorand of this volume.

Taking Prof. Wolf’s own research interests as its inspiration this volume takes an unprecedented interdisciplinary approach to the theme of Sainthood Scriptoria and Secular Erudition in Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia in order both to celebrate Wolf’s profound career and to illustrate the many ways in which these seemingly different fields overlap and converse with each other in important and productive ways. From sculpture to sagas and from skaldic verse to textual editions and the translation of hitherto unpublished works the contributions gathered here offer new and important insights into our knowledge of medieval and early modern Scandinavian literature history and culture.

Les livres d’heures best-seller durant six siècles sont le meilleur témoin des mutations qui affectent l’objet-livre entre le xiv e et le xx e siècle. L’économie dans laquelle il s’insère les mutations iconographiques et textuelles enfin les usages symboliques qu’en font leurs propriétaires sont révélateurs des inflexions majeures que connaît le livre au cours du temps. Au-delà d’une classique histoire du livre cet essai entend aussi et surtout prolonger la réflexion en direction des usages patrimoniaux des livres de prière : comment un livre conçu pour les oratoires domestiques renaît-il aujourd’hui dans les réserves climatisées des bibliothèques publiques d’Occident ? Ce parcours est retracé dans le détail des cabinets des collectionneurs depuis le xvii e siècle jusqu’aux équipements culturels actuels en passant par les salles des ventes les bureaux des érudits depuis le xix e siècle les manuels scolaires les tables à dessin des enlumineurs amateurs. Une attention particulière est réservée aux politiques culturelles et aux mesures conservatoires édictées par l’État depuis le début du xix e siècle et aux effets des « classements » sur les biens patrimoniaux.

Cette histoire des livres d’heures entend donc articuler le temps de la production et de la consommation d’une part et celui des requalifications patrimoniales sur le temps long.

This volume the first in the new series Transcultural Medieval Studies draws together scholars from around the world to offer new insights into the importance and role of the Bible across the varied cultures of medieval Europe. The papers gathered here take a comparative and multidisciplinary approach to the subject focusing on the biblical background of perceptions of the religious and cultural ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’ in the Mediterranean in Latin Europe and in the Baltic. In doing so the contributions identify commonalities and differences of the ‘uses of the Bible’ in these various worlds combining and contrasting studies on Bible manuscripts their exegesis and their use for historical writing.

The Abbaye du Saint Esprit was a successful work of vernacular spiritual advice for women surviving in sixteen manuscripts and a widely copied Middle English translation. Unlike many other didactic religious texts it offers few prescriptions for behaviour; rather it instructs the reader to build a convent of virtues in her conscience and uses the allegorical structure of the building and its inhabitants to arrange brief teachings on prayer and virtuous practice. Between its genesis in the last quarter of the thirteenth century to its final development towards the end of the fifteenth it was reworked several times for new audiences of women both lay and cloistered bourgeois and aristocratic. The examination of these successive adaptations offers insights into the growth of lay religious culture the participation of women in new religious movements and the use and transformation of twelfth and early thirteenth-century monastic formation literature for new audiences.This book also offers for the first time editions of all the French versions of the Abbaye and a modern English translation of the earliest version.

The Pore Caitif is an anonymous late fourteenth-century manual of devotion and religious instruction destined for a lay readership. The text in its various forms circulated widely and was evidently very popular as the fifty of so extant manuscripts and fragments readily attest. Of them no fewer that twenty-eight transmit a full text showing remarkable fidelity to the now presumably lost archetype. As such the Pore Caitif invites comparison with the considerable production and diffusion of religious texts in English which figure prominently in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this respect it is to note that some critics have argued for the presence of Lollard interpolators or commentators in a number of the extant manuscripts including the influence of the Wycliffite Bible translation.

This edition will be published in two volumes. This the first provides a full Introduction to the manuscripts and their transmission classifying them in groups while examining some of the trends observable in some of the more notable variants they inevitably preserve. A commentary on the text is followed by a full glossary. The second volume will discuss manuscript relationships and the problems arising therefrom.

This book explores the fifteenth-century translations of Richard Rolle’s Latin and English writings into English and Latin respectively raising questions about the impact of translation on an author’s legacy through the editorial activity of his translators. The volume also discusses Rolle’s sensory mysticism - which was criticized by the ensuing generation of mystics - whilst looking into the ways in which translations of his work create a fifteenth-century version of Rolle. While the fifteenth-century translations did not represent the standard means of shaping Rolle’s authority this study illustrates individual encounters with Rolle’s writings in which interpretation was much more overt than in the devotional reuse of untranslated Rollean material. The volume asks if alternative and perhaps controversial portraits of the same author arise from the translations.

Richard Rolle has received many often conflicting labels in scholarship: the father of English prose the first medieval English author the first known mystic of English literature the runaway Oxford man the non-conformist hermit and the misogynist. This book is located in the context of the late medieval censorship culture which inevitably impacted the translators’ treatment of authority revelatory writing and theological speculations. The analysis of Rolle in translation highlights the various meanings practices and implications of translation in the fifteenth century.