The Mediaeval Journal

Form of Living is one of the major works of the earliest of the Middle English mystics, the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349), and one clear sign of its success is its translation from English into Latin. This essay presents the first edition of the full(ish) Latin translation of Form, preserved uniquely in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 140/80, noting the translator’s additions to the text and demonstrating that he worked from a Middle English exemplar most closely resembling what is now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1524, part 6. This full translation should be distinguished from a second attempt to translate Form into Latin, attested in a fragmentary state in London, British Library, MS Harley 106.

Although the trope of Christ as a loving mother pelican, who shed her blood to revive her children, dominated in the later Middle Ages, the symbolism of the pelican was more complex. The stereotype of pelicans as prone to anger was applied to Christ as well as to anchoresses (and other Christians) whose wrath could cause spiritual death. In speaking of anchoresses as angry birds who might even become ravenous wolves, the author of the Ancrene Wisse did not pursue the troubling Christological implications of the pelican image, though he does warn of the wrath of God. Other medieval authors, however, explain how the pelican-like Creator killed sinners and was poised to do so at the Last Judgement.

Concertina-fold calendars provide rich insight into reading practices of the later Middle Ages. They must be unfolded to be accessed and are designed in such a way that they can be unfolded and refolded in various orientations to reveal different sets of content. This article looks at one particular concertina calendar (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Libr. Pict. A 92) that still maintains its original folding structure, presents its multiple ways of unfolding through videos, and contextualizes it with a subset of similar concertina calendars dated between 1396 and 1432. The study argues how a group of concertinas are each three-dimensional models of the year, reflecting ways that time was ordered and understood in the late Middle Ages.