PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

February 2025

Johann Buxtorf, Impresario of Hebrew and Jewish Books

Studies and Texts 239; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 5 • xii, 276 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-239-0 • Cloth • $125

Johann Buxtorf (1564–1629) pursued the study of Hebrew and Aramaic and the writings and rituals of Jewish tradition through a long and productive life as a professor at the University of Basel and an impresario of Jewish texts. The focus of this work is on Buxtorf’s scholarly practices – for example, the ways in which he read and made excerpts from a wide variety of Jewish texts, recycled them in his polemical Jüden schul (1603), a treatise on the customs and ceremonies of Ashkenazic Jews, and surveyed them in pioneering if incomplete bibliographies.

February 2025

The Multiplicity of Scripture: The Making of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible

Studies and Texts 234; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 4 • xxvi, 554 pp. plus 8 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-234-5 • Cloth • $150

This is the first book-length study of how the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–1573) was made. The Antwerp Polyglot has long been recognized as one of the most ambitious typographical enterprises of the sixteenth century. Upon completion, it was the most elaborate Bible ever printed, a library of biblical erudition with editions of the ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, and Latin versions together with new scholarly instruments necessary to study and compare them. Yet powerful contemporaries also perceived it as a threat to the Church.

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

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.

May 2024

Salome and the Kin of Jesus: The Treatises of Maurice of Kirkham and Herbert of Bosham

With the assistance of Samuel Baudinette and Rina Lahav

Studies and Texts 237; British Writers 8 • cxxx, 226 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-237-6 • Cloth • $125

In the twelfth century a matter was debated that still confronts readers of the New Testament, namely, just who constituted the kin of Jesus? The question held considerable significance, politically as well as theologically. It was popularly held that St Anne, mother of the Virgin, had had three husbands, and that James the Less, James the Great and John the Evangelist were all descended from her. However, this story, proposed by the Carolingian commentator Haimo of Auxerre, included the belief that Salome, the mother of the disciples James and John, was in fact a man and St Anne’s third husband.

April 2024

Bound and Free: Voices of Mortal and Otherworld Women in Medieval Irish Literature

Studies and Texts 236 • x, 220 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-236-9 • Cloth • $90

Otherworld women feature in a number of medieval Irish tales, but they are not always powerful figures. Indeed, those who express their own desires are often disadvantaged and even threatened in the mortal world, especially when their choices are restricted by human society. The struggles they face often mirror those of mortal women; yet medieval Irish authors apparently found Otherworld women useful as vehicles for exploring social tensions and issues of contemporary concern.

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.

April 2024

The Correspondence and Unpublished Papers of Robert Persons, SJ, vol. 2: 1588–1597

Studies and Texts 235; Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval & Early Modern Periods 6 • xx, 916 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-235-2 • Cloth • $150

The rapid growth of early modern British Catholic studies, and its integration into the wider historiographical project, continues to focus attention on Robert Persons as one of the most significant public figures of the Reformation era in England. As the superior of the Jesuit English mission from 1580 until 1610, he was engaged in a controversial campaign for the reconversion of England that had wide political, ecclesiastical, pastoral, and polemical ramifications. Modern scholarship is engaged in lively debate over his role in international relations and conflicts within British Catholicism.

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.

December 2023

New Latin Contexts for Old English Homilies: Editions and Studies of Ten Sources and Analogues

Studies and Texts 233 • xii, 504 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-233-8 • Cloth • $115

This book sheds new light on the Latin background of various Old English homilies, and of certain homilies from related vernacular traditions. The texts and motifs examined here treat two broad themes: the Nativity of Christ and Christian eschatology. Critical editions and translations of five Latin texts dealing with each theme are included. These are equipped with detailed introductions and commentaries and are accompanied by case studies that demonstrate the relevance of each text to one or more homilies written in Old English, and, in a few cases, early Middle English and Old Norse.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Creation and Gender in Eriugena, Hidegard, and Hadewijch

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

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.