The Scale of Perfection

The Scale of Perfection
Author: Walter Hilton
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2001-02-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1580443931

Walter Hilton's The Scale of Perfection maintains a secure place among the major religious treatises composed in fourteenth-century England. This guide to the contemplative life, written in two books of more than 40,000 words each, is notable for its careful explorations of its religious themes and also as a monument of Middle English prose. Its popularity is attested by the fact that some forty-two manuscripts containing one or both of the books survive, with a relatively large number of manuscipts with Book I alone, which suggests it may have been the more popular of the two. Hilton (born c. 1343) was a member of the religious order known as the Augustinian Canons. There is reason to believe that be was trained in canon law and studied at the University of Cambridge. He was the author of a number of works in English and Latin, all much shorter than The Scale. He died at the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton in Nottinghamshire in 1396. On the basis of the content of certain of his works it can be safely inferred that he was actively involved in some of the religious controversies current in England in the 1380s and 1390s, and his principal concern, evident in The Scale , is to defend orthodox belief, especially in the conduct of the contemplative life.

Mixed Life

Mixed Life
Author: Walter Hilton
Publisher: SLG Press
Total Pages: 65
Release: 2001
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0728301563

Fairacres Publications 138 Walter Hilton (c.1343-96) offers clear and practical advice for Christians trying to balance their duty towards others with a drawing towards prayer and contemplation. He says that there is no fixed order of priority in these things, and Christ himself gives us the supreme example of the ‘mixed life’. A fresh translation into modern English.

Reading Medieval Anchoritism

Reading Medieval Anchoritism
Author: Mari Hughes-Edwards
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2012-06-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0708325068

This interdisciplinary study of medieval English anchoritism from 1080-1450, explodes the myth of the anchorhold as solitary death-cell, reveals it instead as the site of potential intellectual exchange, and demonstrates an anchoritic spirituality in synch with the wider medieval world.

Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library, Including Those Formerly in Sion College Library

Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library, Including Those Formerly in Sion College Library
Author: Oliver S. Pickering
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780859915472

Handlist to manuscripts in one of Britain's major medieval repositories. Lambeth Palace Library, which dates from a bequest by Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, is one of England's major repositories of medieval manuscripts. More than half of the ninety-six manuscripts and documents containing items of Middle English prose were already present when the library was temporarily transferred to Cambridge in 1647. In the succeeding centuries further manuscript materials have continually been added, and within the last few years the library has become home to the older part of Sion College Library, an event that has added a further seven manuscripts to the present handlist. The collection at Lambeth is large enough to be fully representative of the corpus of Middle English prose: the Brut, the Wycliffite Bible, and Love's Mirror, for example, are all present, in some cases in multiple copies, as are writings by Hilton and Rolle. There are sermon cycles (including an almost complete set of Wycliffite sermons), medical recipes, historical works, and anthologies of religious treatises. Altogether the current handlist indexes almost 800 separate items, ranging from the veterinary to the liturgical. O.S. PICKERINGis Senior Assistant Librarian and Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds; V.M. O'MARAis Lecturer in English at the University of Hull.

English Mystics of the Middle Ages

English Mystics of the Middle Ages
Author: Barry A. Windeatt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 1994-09-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521327407

First collection of late medieval English mystical writing, which has been newly edited with notes and glossary.