PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

February 2013

Roger Bacon: On Signs

Translated with an introduction and notes by Thomas S. Maloney.
Mediaeval Sources in Translation 54. 2013. xii, 148 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–304–5 • Paper • $19.95

Roger Bacon's Opus maius represents an attempt to create a whole new vision of what Christian education should be, one centered on service to the Church. One chapter of this work, “On Signs,” is the most comprehensive and innovative treatise on semiotics in the thirteenth century. To understand the myriad ways in which things and words signify, Bacon says, is “a thing of marvelous usefulness and beauty.”

View prelims and contents

July 2013

William of Auvergne: On Morals

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 55; St Michael's College Mediaeval Translations. 2013. xxvi, 250 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–305–2 • Paper • $30.00

William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249, was not only one of the most prolific writers in philosophy and theology of the first half of the thirteenth century but also one of the first to use the new translations of Greek and Islamic thought that poured into the Latin West in that century. In On Morals he extols the value of the nine virtues in a sophisticated narrative where each of the virtues speaks for itself, explaining its importance.

View prelims and contents  

November 2013

A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse: La Vie de saint Thomas Becket by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 56. 2013. viii, 202 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–306–9 • Paper • $25.00

Composed in the immediate aftermath of Becket's murder in 1170, Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence's 6000-line narrative poem is the earliest Life of Becket to appear in the French vernacular. It was written to be listened to by lay men and women, and provides a picture of events as they would have reached a contemporary French-speaking public avid for first-hand knowledge of their new heroic martyr.

View prelims and contents  

July 2018

Three Anglo-Norman Kings: The Lives of William the Conqueror and Sons by Benoît de Sainte-Maure

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 57. 2018. viii, 228 pp.
ISBN 978-0-88844-307-6 • Paper • $25.00

Best known as a Medieval French romance writer, Benoît de Sainte-Maure was the author of the pioneering and widely copied Roman de Troie, composed, it is thought, around 1165. This consisted of a 30,000-verse reworking, in twelfth-century terms, of Latin narratives purporting to describe the siege of Troy, enlivened by what the poet refers to as “bons dits” (apposite amplifications). All that is known of him, apart from what can be deduced from his two works, is that he was a learned monk from the region of Tours in North-West France. His reputation as a poet must have reached the ears of Henry II who, sometime in the 1170s, commissioned him to compose a verse history of the English king’s Norman ancestors. Benoît thus found himself successor to the Norman historiographer Wace whose vernacular French Roman de Rou, named after Normandy’s founder Rollo, was abandoned in favour of Benoît’s Histoire des ducs de Normandie.

July 2019

Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 58; Saint Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. 2019. x, 306 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-308-3 • Paper • $35.00

In his work The Book of the Reformation of the Order of Preachers, the Dominican friar Johannes Meyer (1422–1485) drew on letters, treatises, and other written records, as well as interviews, oral accounts, and his own personal experience, to record the blossoming of the Observant reform movement.

April 2021

The Llanthony Stories

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 59; Saint Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. 2021. x, 174 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-309-0 • Paper • $25.00

Compiled in the early thirteenth century, The Llanthony Stories is a fragmentary collection of exemplaria gathered by an anonymous canon at the Augustinian priory of Llanthony Secunda, Gloucester. While intended primarily for the edification of readers and those who heard the stories preached in sermons, many of the thirty-five exempla offer humorous (even ribald) glimpses of life in the Severn watershed and beyond. Filled with short tales of greedy archdeacons, licentious monks, pious laymen and prelates trying to navigate their world with decorum and piety, the work expands our knowledge of ecclesiastical politics and evangelical priorities in the Anglo-Norman church.

November 2021

Regino of Prüm. Two Books on Synodal Causes and Ecclesiastical Disciplines

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 60; Saint Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. 2021. viii, 366 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-310-6 • Paper • $35.00

Regino of Prüm (ca. 840–915), after being deposed as abbot of Prüm, became a notable musical theorist, historical chronicler, and student of the canons. His Two Books on Synodal Causes and Ecclesiastical Disciplines have generally been seen as practical handbooks to be used in the decision of synodal cases. Although they may have been used in the course of episcopal visitations, they are not to be read as limited to such use.

January 2023

Pious Fictions and Pseudo-Saints in the Late Middle Ages: Selected Legends from an Icelandic Legendary

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 61. xii, 282 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-311-3 • Paper • $35.00

This volume provides English translations of selected legends from a remarkable sixteenth-century Icelandic collection known as the Reykjahólabók. The Middle Low German originals it translates are no longer extant, apocryphal wholly or in part, and wondrous strange. The volume also includes a wide-ranging introduction that surveys the historical and literary contexts for the translation of Catholic saints’ lives on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in Iceland, as well as normalized editions of the legends accessible to readers of contemporary Icelandic.

January 2024

The Life of St Brendan and His Prayer

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 62. xii, 134 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-312-0 • Paper • $25.00

Founder of monasteries, navigator of fantastic voyages, wonder-working intercessor and confessor, Saint Brendan of Clonfert and Ardfert (c. 486–578) was among the most colourful and celebrated figures of medieval Ireland. Brendan’s renown, nurtured by his monastic community and their princely patrons, approached that of Patrick, Brigit, and Columba, Ireland’s national saints. His fame was such that stories about him were told with those of King Arthur and other worthies.

April 2024

The Medieval Clergy, 800–1250: A Sourcebook

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 63; Saint Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. xxiv, 512 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-313-7 • Paper • $47.50

The Medieval Clergy is a collection of documents from the ninth to thirteenth centuries by and about the so-called secular clergy – a group that included priests, bishops, deacons, and canons, whose primary responsibilities included ministering to laypeople.

September 2024

Found in Translation: Itinerant French Epics in Medieval Scandinavia

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 64 • x, 256 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-314-4 • Paper • $30

Customers in the US please order through UTP by email (utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca) or phone (1-800-565-9523), or through Amazon • Customers in Canada please order through UTP by email, phone, or web • Customers outside North America please order through Brepols Publishers

This volume contains English translations of three Old Norse–Icelandic renderings of French chansons de geste: Elis saga ok Rósamundu, Bevers saga, and Flóvents saga, as well as Bærings saga, an Icelandic chivalric romance.