PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

December 2021

Asceticism of the Mind: Forms of Attention and Self-Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism

Studies and Texts 213 • 2018 • x + 238 pp. 

New in Paperback (2021): ISBN 978-0-88844-429-5 • $37.50
Casebound: ISBN 978-0-88844-213-0 • Cloth • $80

Asceticism is founded on the possibility that human beings can profoundly transform themselves through training and discipline. In particular, asceticism in the Eastern monastic tradition is based on the assumption that individuals are not slaves to the habitual and automatic but can be improved by ascetic practice and, with the cooperation of divine grace, transform their entire character and cultivate special powers and skills. Asceticism of the Mind explores the strategies that enabled Christian ascetics in the Egyptian, Gazan, and Sinaitic monastic traditions of late antiquity to cultivate a new form of existence.

December 2021

Gower and Anglo-Latin Verse

Studies and Texts 226 • xii, 346 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-226-0 • Cloth • $95

This study offers a novel paradigm for explaining the late-medieval Anglo-Latin verse, by analyzing the development of the writings of the English poet John Gower (ca. 1330–1408), who made major contributions to English- and French-language poetry, in addition to being the pre-eminent Latin poet of the “Age of Chaucer.”

February 2022

Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, Volume XII

Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries: Annotated Lists and Guides

CTC 12. 2022. xxxvi, 560 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-952-8 • Cloth • $105

Volume 12 contains a single article of monographic length on the Metamorphoses of Ovid, by Frank T. Coulson, †Harry L. Levy, and Harald Anderson, a testament to the vastness and complexity of the Nachleben of Ovid’s most popular work.

April 2022

Gold in the Sanctuary: Reassessing Notker of St Gall’s Liber Ymnorum

Studies and Texts 228 • xvi, 290 pp. plus 12 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-228-4 • Cloth • $95

A meticulous reading of Notker of St Gall’s texts and their backgrounds, as well as the exploration of their multifaceted reverberation in literature and art, allow for retracing the story of a significant if forgotten aspect of the poetic tradition in the Latin Middle Ages.

April 2022

“Of latine and of othire lare”: Essays in Honour of David R. Carlson

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 35 • xii, 362 pp. plus 4 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-835-4 • Cloth • $95

Unsurprisingly, in view of the remarkable diversity of David R. Carlson’s own scholarship, the eighteen essays gathered here in his honour represent a corresponding variety of subjects across a broad range of countries and periods, but all drawing inspiration from his deep learning.

April 2022

Mediaeval Studies Volume 83 (2021)

ISSN 0076-5872
Volume 83 (2021) • ISBN 978-0-88844-685-5 • $120

An annual journal of scholarship on the Middle Ages. A description of the journal and its editorial policy, as well as indexes in electronic form and ordering information, are available on the Mediaeval Studies page elsewhere on this site.

May 2022

Oltre la mer salee: Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of the Société Rencesvals pour l’étude des épopées romanes, Toronto, 13–17 August 2018

Studies and Texts 227; Toronto Studies in Romance Philology 4 • xii, 422 pp. • Essays in French, English, Italian, and Spanish • ISBN 978-0-88844-227-7 • Cloth • $100

Oltre la mer salee collects revised versions of twenty-eight papers in English, French, Italian, and Spanish originally presented at the 21st International Congress of the Société Rencesvals pour l’étude des épopées romanes, held in August 2018 in Toronto. Specialists in the field of medieval Romance epic reconsider traditional approaches and present novel research perspectives. Their studies are divided among four major themes: family relations, manuscripts, French epic in England, and travel and exchanges.

September 2022

Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature

Studies and Texts 229 • x, 216 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-229-1 • Cloth • $90

The reader of Boccaccio’s voluminous writings, from the early Filocolo through the Decameron and to the later Epistles, cannot help but marvel at the pervasive engagement with the power and reach of consolation. Time and again, his protagonists suffer heartache and tribulation and seek comfort in the words of others or, significantly, in the reading of literature. These scenes are accompanied, tellingly, by the author’s own declarations for the care and solace of his readers. Although scholars have long recognized its importance, this wide-ranging and multifaceted exploration of the consolatory value of literature has not received the attention it deserves. Boccaccio and the Consolation of Literature is the first sustained study of Boccaccio’s consoling fictions as well as his reflections on the way literature can, and should, offer solace.

November 2022

Studies in the Sacred Page: Encounters with Medieval Manuscripts, Texts, and Exegesis; A Book of Essays in Honour of Lesley Smith

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 34 • x, 266 pp. plus 14 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-834-7 • Cloth • $95

This volume of twelve essays aims to honour the career and scholarship of Lesley Smith. The first section begins with two witnesses to Lesley’s excellence as teacher and culminates with an appreciation of her as a scholar. The second section explores the scholarly terrain in which Lesley has made her most signal contributions: the material and cultural sites and artefacts within and by which the Christian Scriptures emerged as a field of theoretical inquiry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The third and final section explores Latin Christian use of scriptural inquiry and understanding so as to engage scholarly and religious traditions outside those of the Latin Church.

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.

February 2023

Creation and Gender in Eriugena, Hidegard, and Hadewijch

Etienne Gilson Series 37 • ISBN 978-0-88844-737-1
36 pp. • Paper • Complimentary (on request)

February 2023

Philology in Turbulent Times: Joseph Bosworth, His Dictionary, and the Recovery of Old English

Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 10 • xxx, 314 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-910-8 • Cloth • $95.00

From its inception in 1838, Joseph Bosworth’s A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language was widely viewed as flawed. The denigration proved widespread by the time T. Northcote Toller revised it in 1898. Critics, however, knew very little about the creation of the Dictionary or the struggles of its creators. This book is a project of recovery: it situates the Dictionary culturally and historically, reconstructing that history from a wealth of archival materials – surviving manuscripts, correspondence, annotated books, and other documents.

February 2023

The Capital’s Charterhouses and the Record of English Carthusianism

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 36 • xvi, 300 pp. + 23 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-836-1 • Cloth • $95.00

This volume offers a substantial and versatile contribution to the history and culture of the late-medieval Carthusians in England. The nine essays presented here focus primarily on the double charterhouses built on the outskirts of London, at Smithfield and Sheen. Syon Abbey, the Bridgettine house which stood a short distance from Sheen, and was founded at the same time, is also drawn into the conversation because of its sympathetic and practical links to the Carthusians. Particular attention is paid to the London Charterhouse. This institution is revaluated here as an engineered and ornamented structure, a sanctuary nourished by books and texts, a beacon of religion, a theatre of devotion and political manoeuvres and, in the wake of its dissolution, both a dwelling-place for affluent citizenry and a lieu de mémoire for the English Carthusians in exile.

March 2023

The Bodley Glossaries: The Glossaries in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 730

Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 11 • xii, 140 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-911-5 • Cloth • $90.00

Between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries, scribes at the Cistercian abbey of Buildwas in the West Midlands copied four glossaries at the end of a manuscript containing the De institutis coenobiorum and Conlationes by John Cassian. These glossaries, preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 730, offer precious evidence of the continuity of the Old English glossarial tradition well into the Middle English period. At the same time, in their Latin (and sometimes Greek) entries followed by Latin, Anglo-Norman, and English glosses, they bear witness to the multilingual environment of their time and place.

March 2023

Learning Hebrew in Medieval England: Christian Scholars and the Longleat House Grammar

Studies and Texts 230; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 2 • x, 194 pp. plus 24 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-230-7 • Cloth • $95

The fountainhead of theology, a “doorway to wisdom,” or a philological riddle: there were many reasons to learn Hebrew for inquisitive Christian minds in the Middle Ages. Although preoccupation with the meanings of the names of the Hebrew letters and their presumed inherent virtues can be traced back to the early Church Fathers, the rediscovery of classical sources and Aristotelian philosophy and the engagement with Graeco-Arabic sciences that marked the renaissance of the twelfth century also brought about an acute awareness of the need for a philological understanding of the Hebrew language.

July 2023

Mediaeval Studies Volume 84 (2022)

ISSN 0076-5872
Volume 84 (2022) • ISBN 978-0-88844-686-2 • $120

An annual journal of scholarship on the Middle Ages. A description of the journal and its editorial policy, as well as indexes in electronic form and ordering information, are available on the Mediaeval Studies page elsewhere on this site.

July 2023

Textual Communities, Textual Selves: Essays in Dialogue with Brian Stock

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 37 • xii, 272 pp. + 9 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-837-8 • Cloth • $95.00

This volume assembles a collection of studies investigating ways that textual practices in the classical and medieval periods generated collective and individual expressions of identity. Engaging in dialogue with Brian Stock’s contributions to the history of literacy, the essays initiate new conversations about models of interpretation, habits of reading, textual communities, and forms of self-writing.

September 2023

God and the One: A Critical Tribute to Etienne Gilson

Etienne Gilson Series 38 • ISBN 978-0-88844-738-8
50 pp. • Paper • Complimentary (on request)

September 2023

Henry Constable, The Complete Poems

Studies and Texts 232; Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval & Early Modern Periods 5 • xxii, 454 pp. plus 8 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-232-1 • Cloth • $115

Elizabethan poet Henry Constable (1562–1613), a Protestant-born Catholic convert, is a fascinating case study in how religious and political preoccupations could drive the learned across the unstable confessional divide. This book provides a new comprehensive critical edition of Constable’s sonnets that returns to the primary sources – some of them newly discovered.

September 2023

Hebraism in Sixteenth-Century England: Robert and Thomas Wakefield

Studies and Texts 231; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 3 • xvi, 332 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-231-4 • Cloth • $95

Robert Wakefield (ca. 1493/5–1537) and his brother Thomas (1500–1575) were pioneers in the study and teaching of Hebrew in early modern England, but the range of their learning and their accomplishments has received scant scholarly attention.