PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

April 2025

Richard Rolle. Postille super novem lectiones mortuorum / Glosses on the Nine Lessons of the Dead

Forthcoming.

Studies and Texts 238; British Writers 9 • clvi, 260 pp. + 12 colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-238-3 • Cloth • $150

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

At the end of his career, the Yorkshire hermit and mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349) wrote a Latin commentary on the passages from the Book of Job read in Matins in the Office of the Dead. The text circulated widely in pre-Reformation England, and as it moved beyond Rolle’s close circle of earliest readers, it helped shape religious and literary attitudes in ways that have, until now, been unappreciated and unrecognized.

March 2025

A Renaissance of Rhetoric in Late Medieval Oxford: Treatises of the Oxford Rhetoricians, 1364–ca. 1435

Studies and Texts 240; Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric 2 • xii, 584 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-240-6 • Cloth • $150

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 book documents an unprecedented effort to produce new treatises on rhetoric at Oxford that began in the second half of the fourteenth century and continued through the first half of the fifteenth century.

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

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

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

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

November 2021

The Early Glossed Ecclesiastes: A Critical Edition with Introduction

Studies and Texts 224; The Glossed Bible: Editions and Studies of the Medieval Sacra pagina 1 • x, 324 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-224-6 • Cloth • $95

The Glossa ordinaria was the main exegetical instrument by which the Bible was taught and studied during the Middle Ages, a resource whose influence began in the early twelfth century and remained perceptible in theological writing beyond the sixteenth century. For much of its modern history, the sheer scale, range, and ubiquity of the Glossa have deterred scholars from sustained study of its origins, development, and reception. However, the recent growth of studies devoted to the Laon-Paris teaching milieu in which the Glossa was central has altered the scholarly landscape. This volume, like the series of which it is part, should contribute to this development by providing the first textual and historical analysis of the earliest written version of the glossed Ecclesiastes.

August 2021

The Birth of the Author: Pictorial Prefaces in Glossed Books of the Twelfth Century

Studies and Texts 225; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 9 • xxvi, 302 pp. incl. 150 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-225-3 • Cloth • $100

This book argues that the images devised to accompany medieval commentaries, whether on the Bible or on classical texts, made claims to authority, even inspiration, that at times were even more forceful than those made by the texts themselves. Paradoxically, it was in the context of commentaries that modern concep­tions of independent authorship first were forged. 

April 2021

Beyond Words: New Research on Manuscripts in Boston Collections

Studies and Texts 221; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 8 • xxxii, 362 pp. incl. 291 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-221-5 • Cloth • $150

In the fall of 2016 an international scholarly conference accompanied the exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections. The speakers were chosen because of their expertise and because they were known to have research underway pertaining to important manuscripts in the exhibition. The aim of both exhibition and conference was to provide a broad overview of the history of patronage and book production over the course of the High and late Middle Ages, to the extent that the eclectic holdings of Boston-area institutions permitted. Most of the papers delivered at the conference have been collected as essays in this abundantly illustrated volume which, while still linked to the exhibition, now has an independent purpose.

February 2021

In This Land: Jewish Life and Legal Culture in Late Medieval Provence

Studies and Texts 223; Judaism in the Medieval and Early Modern World 1 • 2021 • x, 168 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-223-9 • Cloth • $90

Jewish communities existed across the county of Provence throughout the Middle Ages. In This Land reveals the changes that those communities underwent during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the social and cultural tensions that shaped their identity.