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New approaches to religious texts from the Middle Ages, highlighting their diversity and sophistication.
Looking in Holy Books is what Vincent Gillespie has been doing in most of his publications over the last thirty years. The papers collected here circle around the decades either side of 1400, a period of febrile change in English religious culture. Ranging from pastoralia through to contemplative writing, the essays explore the production, transmission, and reception of religious books in later medieval England. They show how a working familiarity with the texts and manuscripts helps to build up a rich tilth of cultural loam in which larger ideas can take root and grow. Many were originally published in hard-to-access journals, and others have not been superseded by subsequent scholarship. T...
One of the most important medieval writers studied in historical and literary context.
This volume suggests new ways of reading and thinking about the religious culture of late-medieval England. It explores an unusually wide spectrum of Latin and vernacular religious texts, from catechetic handbooks to descriptions of mystical experience, and pays particular attention to the transmission and reception of these texts. The book collects together some of Vincent Gillespie's most influential and important articles from the last twenty-five years. In addition, the author offers a substantial introduction and commentary, which looks at changes in the field, as well as suggesting further reading and areas for future research. The first section "What to Read" discusses lay access to devotional materials; the second, "How to Read," looks at vernacular texts and the modes of reading those texts facilitate and encourage, while section three, "Writing the Ineffable," considers mystical writing's affective and imaginative engagement with the ineffable.
First full-scale guide to the origins and development of the early printed book, and the issues associated with it.
Essays on the turbulent history of Syon Abbey, focussing on the role played by reading and writing in constructing its identity and experience. Founded in 1415, the double monastery of Syon Abbey was the only English example of the order established by the fourteenth-century mystic St Bridget of Sweden. After its dispersal at the Dissolution, the community survived in exile and was briefly restored during the reign of Mary I; but with the accession of Elizabeth I, some of the nuns and brothers once again sought refuge on the Continent, first in the Netherlands and later in Lisbon. This volumeof essays traces the fortunes of Syon Abbey and the Bridgettine order between 1400 and 1700, examinin...
This book is an excellent introduction to the individuals, events and currents which shaped medieval English mystical texts.
Twelve papers focus on mysticism as an experience and on the work of individual mystics.
Sometime in the first quarter of the 13th century a number of works were written for anchoresses, women who lived as religious recluses in cells adjoining churches. The most influential is Ancrene Wisse (A Guide for Anchoresses), which discusses in great detail the daily life of the anchoress, both outer and inner. This work gives a detailed sense of a powerful and multi-faceted spirituality different from that of other mystics.
Medieval literature and art abounds in descriptions of grotesque torments (punitive in hell, redemptive in purgatory) being meted out to the unhappy dead. But how can pain be experienced in the absence of the body? Can the main agents of suffering specified in Old Testament prophecies, fire and the worm, actually trouble a disembodied soul? The relative merits of material and metaphorical understandings of the economy of pain were debated throughout the Middle Ages, and extended far beyond, surviving the abolition of purgatory within Protestantism. This book brings to life many of the intellectual clashes, beginning with Augustine’s foundational yet troubling doctrines, proceeding to the problems caused by Aristotle’s insistence that death kills off all sense and sensation, and culminating in a fresh reading of Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto XXV. Wide-ranging, lucid and bristling with ideas on every page, it illustrates superbly well the variety, liveliness and continuous creativity of scholastic thought, particularly in respect of the contribution it made to literary theory.