Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page. - St Jerome, 384 AD With these words, the Church Father Jerome exhorted the young Eustochium to find on the sacred page the spiritual nourishment that would give her the strength to live a life of chastity and to keep her monastic vows. His call to read does not stand alone. Books and reading have always played a pivotal role in early and medieval Christianity, often defined as 'a religion of the book'. A second important stage in the development of the 'religion of the book' can be attested in the late Middle Ages, when religious reading was no longer the exclusive right of men and women living in solitude and concentrating on prayer and meditation. Changes in the religious landscape and the birth of new religious movements transformed the medieval town into a privileged area of religious activity. Increasing literacy opened the door to a new and wider public of lay readers. This seminal transformation in the late medieval cultural horizon saw the growing importance of the vernacular, the cultural and religious emancipation of the laity, and the increasing participation of lay people in religious life and activities. This volume presents a new, interdisciplinary approach to religious reading and reading techniques in a lay environment within late medieval textual, social, and cultural transformations.

This new edition is a marvelous teaching tool and true feast for the intellectually curious. - Daniel Bornstein, Texas A&M University

This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including spiritual guidance texts, Lives of Christ and collections of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts’ frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.

The contributions to Discovering the Riches of the Word. Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe offer an innovative approach to the study of religious reading from a long term and geographically broad perspective, covering the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century and with a specific focus on the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. Challenging traditional research paradigms, the contributions argue that religious reading in this “long fifteenth century” should be described in terms of continuity. They make clear that in spite of confessional divides, numerous reading practices continued to exist among medieval and early modern readers, as well as among Catholics and Protestants, and that the two groups in certain cases even shared the same religious texts. Contributors include: Elise Boillet, Sabrina Corbellini, Suzan Folkerts, Éléonore Fournié, Wim François, Margriet Hoogvliet, Ian Johnson, Hubert Meeus, Matti Peikola, Bart Ramakers, Elisabeth Salter, Lucy Wooding, and Federico Zuliani.

This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

This book explores the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of solitude in the late medieval and early modern periods, a hitherto largely neglected topic. Its focus is on the dynamic qualities of “space” and “place”, which are here understood as being shaped, structured, and imbued with meaning through both social and discursive solitary practices such as reading, writing, studying, meditating, and praying. Individual chapters investigate the imageries and imaginaries of outdoor and indoor spaces and places associated with solitude and its practices and examine the ways in which the space of solitude was conceived of, imagined, and represented in the arts and in literature, from about 1300 to about 1800. Contributors include Oskar Bätschmann, Carla Benzan, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Dominic E. Delarue, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Christine Göttler, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christiane J. Hessler, Walter S. Melion, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bernd Roling, Paul Smith, Marie Theres Stauffer, Arnold A. Witte, and Steffen Zierholz.

Comprising forty-two selections from primary source materials, each translated with an introduction and commentary by a specialist in the field, this collection illustrates the religious cycles, rituals, and experiences that gave meaning to medieval Christian individuals and communities. The texts represent the practices through which Christians conducted their individual, family, and community lives and explore such life-cycle events as birth, confirmation, marriage, sickness, death, and burial. The texts also document religious practices related to themes of work, parish life, and devotions, as well as power and authority.--From publisher's description.

A new narrative history of medieval Christianity, spanning from A.D. 500 to 1500, focuses on the role of women in Christianity; the relationships among Christians, Jews and Muslims; the experience of ordinary parishioners; the adventure of asceticism, devotion and worship; and instruction through drama, architecture and art.

This collection of essays focuses on how the climactic episode of Christian scripture and apocrypha, the life of Christ, was repeatedly adapted for a variety of audiences and devotional uses in the Middle Ages. The collection represents an important milestone in terms of mapping the meditative modes of piety that characterize a number of Christological traditions, including the 'Meditationes vitae Christi' and the numerous versions it spawned in both Latin and the vernacular.

This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.