PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

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.

January 2021

Beyond the Sermo modernus: Sermon Form in Early Fifteenth-Century England

Studies and Texts 222 • 2021 • xii, 282 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-222-2 • Cloth • $95

In England, as well as on the continent, the early fifteenth century saw a slackening of rigorous academic work in theology and at the same time a stronger interest in biblical and devotional approaches and practices. This book addresses the question of whether, and if so in what way, such a change may also have occurred in preaching by investigating the form in which sermons were constructed, to determine whether a new development or innovation replaced the scholastic sermon, or sermo modernus, in use from the later thirteenth century on. The volume concludes with editions of sermons drawn from major works created in England between the final years of the fourteenth and the middle of the fifteenth century.

August 2020

From the Vulgate to the Vernacular: Four Debates on an English Question c. 1400

Studies and Texts 220; British Writers 7 • cxxxvi, 216 pp. plus 8 b&w plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-220-8 • Cloth • $150

Co-published with The Bodleian Library (ISBN 978-1-85124-563-5)

Translation is at the centre of Christianity, scripturally, as reflected in the biblical stories of the Tower of Babel or of the apostles’ speaking in tongues after the Ascension, and historically, where arguments about it were dominant in councils, such as those of Trent or the Second Vatican Council of 1962–64, which privileged the use of the vernacular in liturgy.

March 2020

Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric

Studies and Texts 217; Toronto Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Rhetoric 1 • 2020 • xii, 444 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-217-8 • Cloth • $95

Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric presents a diachronic case study of how translation is the means by which rhetoric, as the art of reasoning, becomes a part of a lineage of – and a resource for – an ethics of civic discourse. It shows how translation (as practice and as theory, via the medieval topos of translatio as the transfer of knowledge) serves as the vehicle for the transfer of rhetoric as an art of argumentation and persuasion from classical Greece and Rome to modern Paris and Brussels by way of medieval France and Italy.

March 2020

Dislocations: Maps, Classical Tradition, and Spatial Play in the European Middle Ages

Studies and Texts 218 • 2020 • xii, 348 pp. plus 32 pages of colour plates • ISBN 978-0-88844-218-5 • Cloth • $95

In Europe, during the Middle Ages, classical Greek and Roman geography continued to provide the fundamental structure for knowing the world’s places and peoples. From encyclopedic compendia such as the Natural History of Pliny the Elder and its redaction in Julius Solinus’s Polyhistor to the works of canonical Roman poets such as Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan, the geographical content of antique texts invited study and explication. Yet medieval authors well knew that classical spatial order, itself full of lacunae, only infrequently corresponded to their own reality. Dislocations: Maps, Classical Tradition, and Spatial Play in the European Middle Ages considers the ways in which medieval and, later, humanist geography absorbed and reinvented classical spatial models in order to address key questions of historical change, migration, and emerging national, regional, and linguistic identities.

October 2019

From Sithiu to Saint-Bertin: Hagiographic Exegesis and Collective Memory in the Early Medieval Cults of Omer and Bertin

Studies and Texts 219 • 2019 • xiv, 340 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-219-2 • Cloth • $95

Medieval historians who have explored the abbey of Sithiu (modern Saint-Omer) have often done so to explain the competition between the canons of Saint-Omer and the monks of Saint-Bertin, a rivalry deriving from their shared origins in the abbey of Sithiu. However, David Defries’s book centers on the cooperative relationship that developed between the saints Omer and Bertin in the monks’ collective memory. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the cults of the abbey’s two patron saints shaped the life of the community at Sithiu, and the first four centuries of its development reveal how a group of monks negotiated their place in the larger Christian West, adapting Columbanian and Benedictine identities to fit the relationship they discerned between Omer and Bertin.

April 2019

A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae

Studies and Texts 210; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 6 • 2019 • xviii, 354 pp. incl. 245 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-210-9 • Cloth • $150

The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence houses an extraordinary manuscript: an anthology of devotional texts and images called the Supplica­tiones variae, dated 1293 and made for use in Genoa, that ends with a remarkable series of full-page illustra­tions. Although the Supplicationes does not include or illustrate Bonaventure’s seminal text, The Soul’s Journey into God, the manuscript is effectively the site for performance of a spiritual pilgrimage, for it is through the Franciscan theologian’s mystical and poetic concepts that the deeper meanings of its images can be discerned.

March 2019

Heretics, Schismatics, or Catholics? Latin Attitudes to the Greeks in the Long Twelfth Century

Studies and Texts 216 • 2019 • xvi + 292 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-216-1 • Cloth • $95

The political division of the Roman world into Western and Eastern Roman Empires at the end of the fourth century spurred the divergence of the Latinised Western and the Hellenised Eastern halves. According to a pervasive and deeply ingrained belief in modern academic, educational and popular literature, the ensuing antagonism on religious and cultural grounds between the two parts of medieval Christendom eventually led to the “schism of 1054.” Less than fifty years after the schism, Greeks and Latins came into closer contact as a result of the crusades and the encounter was catastrophic, leading to the capture and sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the armies of the Fourth Crusade. This study, the first to deal exclusively with Latin perceptions of and attitudes toward the Greeks in terms of religion, aims to revisit and challenge the view that the so-called schism between the Latin and Greek Churches led to the isolation of the Byzantine Empire by the Latin states and eventually to the events of 1204.

March 2019

Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250–ca. 1450

Studies and Texts 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 7 • 2019 • xviii, 194 pp. incl. 94 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-215-4 • Cloth • $95

This is not a book about miraculous images of the Virgin Mary (be they icons, sculptures, altarpieces, or reliquaries) but about their representations in French illuminated manuscripts from ca. 1250 to ca. 1450. Most of these depictions of the Virgin Mary cannot be identified even tangentially with particular surviving images (such as the Virgins of Rocamadour, Soissons, Chartres, and Laon). Rather, these illustrations point to the ubiquity of local miraculous Marian images in devotional practices from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in French-speaking regions. This book analyzes depictions of material images and the animated miracles they perform, and traces their evolution from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in Old French to texts and images produced at the Burgundian court of the late Middle Ages.

February 2019

The Saga of the Sister Saints: The Legend of Martha and Mary Magdalen in Old Norse-Icelandic Translation

Studies and Texts 214 • 2019 • xiv + 222 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-214-7 • Cloth • $80

This book examines the cults and legends of Martha and Mary Magdalen in medieval Scandinavia, especially Iceland. While a number of parallels may be drawn between Iceland and mainland Scandinavia in terms of liturgical and artistic representations of Martha and Mary Magdalen, the Old Norse-Icelandic literary tradition stands apart from its Scandinavian counterparts in the cultural significance and relevance it gives to each of the “sister saints” in medieval Iceland, where the composite Mǫrtu saga ok Maríu Magðalenu was compiled in the mid-fourteenth century. The book concludes with a normalized edition of the only complete redaction of Mǫrtu saga ok Maríu Magðalenu, followed by its first English translation.

September 2018

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

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

April 2018

Painting the Page in the Age of Print: Central European Manuscript Illumination of the Fifteenth Century

Translated by David Sánchez

Studies and Texts 208; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 4 • 2018 • xxxiv + 330 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-208-6 • Cloth • $110

The history of the book in the late Middle Ages is associated especially with Gutenberg’s momentous invention of printing with movable type. Printing, however, hardly replaced the manuscript book overnight; in respect to content, materials, format, decoration, dissemination, and technique, the fifteenth century in German-speaking lands witnessed an extraordinary range of innovation and experimentation. Nonetheless, over a century of scholarship has tended to dismiss the illuminated manuscripts produced in central Europe between 1400 and the Reformation, the vast majority of them unknown beyond a small group of specialists, as mediocre manifestations of a culture in decline. This book – originally published in German to accompany a series of exhibitions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland from 2015 to 2017 – was written to challenge these prejudices and the weight of tradition they represent.

April 2018

Richard Rolle’s Melody of Love: A Study and Translation with Manuscript and Musical Contexts

Studies and Texts 212 • 2018 • xx + 468 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-212-3 • Cloth • $90

The Melos amoris stands as the most daring literary achievement of medieval England’s most influential mystic, Richard Rolle. Full of autobiographical glimpses and spiritual rhapsodies, this sustained étude in alliterative, rhythmic Latin prose contains Rolle’s first public account of his profoundly sensory mystical experience. The current volume provides the first full translation of this unstudied masterpiece into English, in alliterative prose that mirrors the original.

February 2018

Optics, Ethics, and Art in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Looking into Peter of Limoges’s Moral Treatise on the Eye

with the assistance of Arthur J. Russell

Studies and Texts 209; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 5. 2018. xiv + 212 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-209-3 • Cloth • $95

This volume examines afresh the various ways in which the introduction of ancient and Arabic optical theories transformed thirteenth-century thinking about vision, how scientific learning came to be reconciled with theological speculation, and what effect the results of these new developments had on those who learned about them through preaching.

January 2018

The Correspondence and Unpublished Papers of Robert Persons, SJ, vol. 1: 1574–1588

Studies and Texts 207; Catholic and Recusant Texts of the Late Medieval & Early Modern Periods 4. 2017. xx + 730 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-207-9 • Cloth • $115

Robert Persons is recognized as one of the most intriguing 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 campaign for the reconversion of England that had wide political, ecclesiastical, pastoral, and polemical ramifications. Awareness of his importance has increased with the rapid growth of early modern British Catholic studies. His career continues to prompt much debate, especially over his political attitudes and activities; hence the need for a comprehensive and up-to-date edition of his correspondence.

December 2017

Simon of Tournai, On the Incarnation of Christ: Institutiones in sacram paginam 7.1–67

Studies and Texts 211, Mediaeval Law and Theology 9. 2017. xiv + 188 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-211-6 • Cloth • $80

Simon of Tournai was a theological master who flourished in the Paris of the 1160s and enjoyed considerable renown. Composed between 1160 and 1165, Simon’s Institutiones in sacram paginam is among the earliest treatments of the Incarnation after the Sentences of Peter Lombard (ca. 1157/8). In it, Simon provided precise and lucid treatments of fundamental topics regarding the person of the incarnate Christ. Indeed, the Institutiones has proved an important witness to the development of Christology in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and had a strong and lasting influence on the theology of the Middle Ages.

December 2016

Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular

Studies and Texts 206. xvi, 228 pp. plus 12 plates. ISBN 978-0-88844-206-2 • Cloth • $85

Geoffrey Chaucer’s House of Fame has rightly been read as an ironic response to Dante’s Commedia, yet there is a larger story to tell. This study considers how Chaucer’s poem engages Boccaccio’s writings as much as Dante’s.

October 2016

Interlacing Traditions: Neo-Gregorian Chant Propers in Beneventan Manuscripts

Studies and Texts 205; Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana 8. xvi, 444 pp. plus 16 plates. ISBN 978-0-88844-205-5 • Cloth • $100

This book is the first comprehensive study of the neo-Gregorian chants for the Proper of the Mass that circulated in the Beneventan region between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. This extensive repertory demonstrates in extraordinary ways the struggles of local cantors to mediate between conformity to a standardized liturgy pursued by the Carolingians and the papacy, and a desire to maintain elements of the local musical culture.