Middle English Devotional Compilations

Middle English Devotional Compilations
Author: Diana Denissen
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786834774

Middle English devotional compilations – consisting of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute new and unified devotional texts – have often been approached as complex collections of source texts that need to be linked with their originals. This book argues that the study of compilations should move beyond the disentanglement of their sources. It approaches compiling as a literary activity and an active way of shaping the medieval text, with the aim to nuance scholarly discussion about compiling by putting greater emphasis on the literary instead of the technical aspects of compiling activity. In addition to describing the additions, omissions and other types of adaptations that compilers made to their source texts, Middle English Devotional Compilations highlights the nature and function of compiling activity in late medieval England, and examines three major but understudied Middle English devotional compilations in depth: The Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.

Middle English Devotional Compilations

Middle English Devotional Compilations
Author: Diana Denissen
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786834782

The book offers a new perspective on late medieval compiling activity. Additionally, it offers a more nuanced perspective on late medieval religious culture in England. Lastly, it examines three major, but understudied Middle English texts in depth: the Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.

Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England

Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England
Author: Marleen Cré
Publisher:
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2020
Genre: Devotional literature, English (Middle)
ISBN: 9782503574776

This volume considers texts that are defined as devotional compilations. A compilation consists of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute a new single and unified text. The focus is primarily on devotional compilations, but the volume includes discussions of pastoral compilations as well. The texts considered here are works that invite readers to develop a personal relationship with the divine at a fairly advanced personal level. An exploration of devotional compilations allows a more sophisticated understanding of authorial roles, reading practices and patronage among religious and secular individuals and communities. In this volume, leading scholars in the field of medieval English literature consider the role and impact of a substantial corpus of devotional compilations. Their work yields groundbreaking evidence on devotional compilations and the manuscripts in which they occur. It provides new information on the way compilations are designed, on the literary role of compilers and the authorial strategies they use, on patronage, book ownership, readership, reading communities and reception, as well as on manuscript contexts and affinities with other texts.

Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, C. 1100 - C. 1530

Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, C. 1100 - C. 1530
Author: Denis Renevey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2022-08-30
Genre: Christian life in literature
ISBN: 0192894080

Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, c. 1100 - c. 1530 offers a broad but detailed study of the practice of devotion to the Name of Jesus in late medieval England. It focuses on key texts written in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English that demonstrate the way in which devotion moved from monastic circles to a lay public in the late medieval period. It argues that devotion to the Name is a core element of Richard Rolle's contemplative practice, although devotion to the Name circulated in trilingual England at an earlier stage. The volume investigates to what extent the 1274 Second Lyon Council had an impact in the spread of the devotion in England, and beyond. It also offers illuminating evidence about how Margery Kempe and her scribes used devotion, how Eleanor Hull made it an essential component of her meditative sequence seven days of the week, and how Lady Margaret Beaufort worked towards its instigation as an official feast.

Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich
Author: Elisabeth M. Dutton
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2008
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

A new reading of the Revelations in the context of late-medieval manuscript traditions. Compilation and miscellany manuscripts were widely owned in the late middle ages, by both the laity and the clergy. Here, their possible influence on Julian of Norwich's Revelations is explored. The book argues that formalfeatures of compilation are evident in the text, deployed by Julian to give authority and didactic force to the theological debate in which she is engaged. Combining study of compilation manuscripts and manuscripts of the Revelations with structural analysis, it suggests important new ways of reading the Revelations, and makes a strong case for compilation as a literary form with creative potential. Dr ELISABETH DUTTON is Senior Research Fellow, Worcester College, University of Oxford.

A Companion to Middle English Prose

A Companion to Middle English Prose
Author: Anthony Stockwell Garfield Edwards
Publisher: DS Brewer
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781843840183

The essays in this volume provide an up-to-date and authoritative guide to the major prose Middle English authors and genres. Each chapter is written by a leading authority on the subject and offers a succinct account of all relevant literary, history and cultural factors that need to considered, together with bibliographical references. Authors examined include the writers of the Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group and the Wohunge Group; Richard Rolle; Walter Hilton; Nicholas Love; Julian of Norwich; Margery Kempe; "Sir John Mandeville"; John Trevisa, Reginald Pecock; and John Fortescue. Genres discussed include romances, saints' lives, letters, sermon literature, historical prose, anonymous devotional writings, Wycliffite prose, and various forms of technical writing. The final chapter examines the treatment of Middle English prose in the first age of print. Contributors: BELLA MILLETT, RALPH HANNA III, AD PUTTER, KANTIK GHOSH, BARRY A. WINDEATT, A.C. SPEARING, IAN HIGGINS, A.S.G. EDWARDS, VINCENT GILLESPIE, HELEN L. SPENCER, ALFRED HIATT, FIONA SOMERSET, HELEN COOPER, GEORGE KEISER, OLIVER S. PICKERING, JAMES SIMPSON, RICHARD BEADLE, ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE.

Codex Ashmole 61

Codex Ashmole 61
Author: George Shuffelton
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Total Pages: 669
Release: 2008-12-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1580444423

Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance. It is hoped that the present volume will encourage study of the entire manuscript as a valuable witness to the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England.

Cultures of Piety

Cultures of Piety
Author: Anne Clark Bartlett
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2018-09-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1501726765

Devotional texts in late medieval England were notable for their flamboyant piety and their preoccupation with the tortured body of Christ and the grief of the Virgin Mary. Generations of readers internalized and shaped the "cultures of piety" represented by these works. Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas H. Bestul here gather seven examples of this literature, all written in the period 1350–1450, one in Anglo-Norman, the remainder in Middle English. (The volume includes an appendix containing the original texts of the latter six pieces.) The collection illustrates the polyglottal, conflicting, and often polemical nature of devotional culture in the Middle Ages. It provides a valuable context for and interesting counterpoint to the Canterbury Tales and other classic works of late medieval England. The introduction and the translators' headnotes discuss crucial aspects of the texts' histories and thematics, including the importance of the body in spiritual practices, the development of female patronage and of a wide audience for this literature, and the indivisibility of the political and the religious in medieval times.

Reading in the Wilderness

Reading in the Wilderness
Author: Jessica Brantley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2008-09-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0226071340

Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.

Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages

Women and Devotional Literature in the Middle Ages
Author: Cate Gunn
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2023-11-07
Genre:
ISBN: 1843846624

Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker. Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.