PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

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.

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.

August 2016

Liturgy and Law in a Dalmatian City: The Bishop's Book of Kotor (Sankt-Peterburg, BRAN, F. no. 200)

Studies and Texts 204; Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana 7. xxxii, 640 pp. plus 10 plates. ISBN 978-0-88844-204-8 • Cloth • $110

The manuscript that is the subject of this study and edition constitutes a rich source for the study of the society and culture of the southern Dalmatian coast. The major parts of the manuscript were written in Beneventan script in the mid-twelfth century, perhaps for the dedication in 1166 of the new cathedral of Kotor in southern Dalmatia, now Montenegro. The core of the manuscript, which contains a lectionary with epistles and gospels for major feasts of the liturgical year and a pontifical with ceremonies proper to a bishop, functioned as a liturgical compendium for the use of the cathedral and bishop of Kotor. Two gatherings of sermons were added to the codex, likely in the early thirteenth century, and ecclesiastical documents and communal statutes were copied in the margins and on blank pages.

June 2016

The Arts of Editing Medieval Greek and Latin: A Casebook

Studies and Texts 203. xx, 452 pp. 2016. ISBN 978-0-88844-203-1 • Cloth • $70

With the triumph of the codex, medieval literature became more deeply hermeneutic in character. A vast range of texts, in various languages and genres, were not only copied with the commentaries and glosses of ancient tradition, but also underwent continuous reworking and transformation. Indeed, the very act of transcribing texts into a manuscript was often an incentive to rewrite them. This practice resulted in a bewildering number of textual versions that lived alongside their originals, and sometimes displaced them, but were nevertheless fundamental to their transmission and interpretation, often resulting in complex textual layers.

May 2016

Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination

Studies and Texts 186; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 1. 2014. xii, 212 pp.

New in Paperback (2016): ISBN 978-0-88844-426-4 • $45.00
Casebound: ISBN 978-0-88844-186-7 • $85.00

The Italian priest Opicinus de Canistris fell ill in 1334 and had a divine vision that inspired drawings of continents and oceans transformed into human figures; these beautifully strange drawings relate to contemporary maps and seacharts, religious iconography, medical illustration, and cosmological diagrams.

May 2016

Power Politics in Kievan Rus': Vladimir Monomakh and His Dynasty, 1054–1246

Studies and Texts 202. xxii, 432 pp., plus 16 b/w plates. 2016. ISBN 978-0-88844-202-4 • Cloth • $95

The aim of this study is to write the political history of the dynasty of Kievan Rus′ descended from Vladimir Vsevolodovich Monomakh, which ruled from the middle of the eleventh century to the middle of the thirteenth century. In doing so, it argues, both from documented evidence and from circumstantial evidence, that Monomakh manipulated the politics of Rus′ to his advantage.

February 2016

Peter Lombard and His Students

Studies and Texts 201; Mediaeval Law and Theology 8. xii, 302 pp. 2016. ISBN 978-0-88844-201-7 • Cloth • $90

Peter Lombard is best known for his groundbreaking theological work, the Sentences. But the exclusive focus on this work has tended to divert attention away from other aspects of his life and work. This book therefore takes a broadly biographical approach to Peter Lombard, examining him in relation to his environment and milieu.

January 2016

Art in a Time of War: The Master of Morgan 453 and Manuscript Illumination in Paris during the English Occupation (1419–1435)

Studies and Texts 197; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 3. xxviii, 388 pp., including 253 colour images. 2016. ISBN 978-0-88844-197-3 • Cloth • $130

Art in a Time of War seeks to fill an important gap in our knowledge of painting in fifteenth-century France. Focusing on the work of “the Master of Morgan 453,” an accomplished, if unnamed, manuscript illuminator, Clark identifies, compares, and analyzes all extant books that can be attributed to the painter and reconstructs his career on the basis of a wide range of liturgical as well as art-historical criteria.

January 2016

Christ's Two Wills in Scholastic Thought: The Christology of Aquinas and Its Historical Contexts

ST 178; Mediaeval Law and Theology 5. 2012. viii, 358 pp.

New in Paperback (2016): ISBN 978-0-88844-424-0 • $45.00
Casebound: ISBN 978-0-88844-178-2 • $85.00

This book investigates scholastic discussions of Christ's wills from Anselm of Canterbury to John Duns Scotus, concentrating on Thomas Aquinas.

December 2015

Sin, Interiority, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West

Studies and Texts 200. xii, 172 pp. 2015. ISBN 978-0-88844-200-0 • Cloth • $85

A common refrain in twelfth-century thought is that God alone knows the secrets of the heart. Originating in Scripture, the principle was elaborated exegetically to imply two distinct domains: one of external actions open to human perception and judgment and the other including thoughts, intentions, and sentiments – the products of internal acts – visible only to God. But changes in medieval penance, especially in the Fourth Lateran Council’s demand in 1215 that all Christians fully confess their sins to a priest, reveals a shift in attitude towards the secrecy of the heart. A close reading of twelfth and thirteenth-century texts from the cathedral and monastic schools shows that oral confession was to include not only visible, external acts, but also the merely internal actions formerly limited to God’s knowledge.

November 2015

John of Morigny. Liber florum celestis doctrine / The Flowers of Heavenly Teaching

Studies and Texts 199. xxii, 632 pp., plus 8 colour plates. 2015. ISBN 978-0-88844-199-7 • Cloth • $115

This volume provides the first edition and systematic study of the Liber florum celestis doctrine by the Benedictine John of Morigny. Until recently this work was known only through a chronicle report of its burning at Paris in 1323, on the grounds that it revived a condemned ritual called the Ars notoria. However, it survives in three versions in more than twenty copies from across Europe, few of which indicate doubt as to its orthodoxy.

October 2015

The Making of the Historia scholastica, 1150–1200

Studies and Texts 198; Mediaeval Law and Theology 7. xvi + 322 pp. • 2015 • ISBN 978-0-88844-198-0 • Cloth • $95

In the theological landscape of the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Peter Comestor’s Historia scholastica stands out as a conspicuous yet strangely overlooked landmark. Like the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the History towers over the early scholastic period, and it was the extraordinary success of these twin towers that ensured the joint ascendancy of the reputations of the two masters. Indeed, we find one medieval writer after another testifying to the greatness of the man whose nickname had become synonymous with a voracious appetite for knowledge, and the encyclopedic work whose extraordinary dissemination and influence over several centuries made it the medieval popular Bible.

July 2015

Symeon of Thessalonika. The Liturgical Commentaries

ST 168. 2011. viii, 302 pp.

New in Paperback (2015): ISBN 978-0-88844-423-3 • $42.00
Casebound: ISBN 978-0-88844-168-3 • $90.00

This volume contains an edition and facing English translation of Explanation of the Divine Temple and “On the Sacred Liturgy,” the two commentaries on the pontifical (hierarchal) Byzantine Divine Liturgy by St. Symeon of Thessalonika (†1429).

June 2015

Art of Documentation: Documents and Visual Culture in Medieval England

Studies and Texts 194; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 2. xviii, 242 pp. 147 colour and b&w images • 2015 • 8x10 in. • ISBN 978-0-88844-194-2 • Cloth • $100

The later Middle Ages was a time of profound connection between the spheres of bureaucracy and art. By discussing the two together, this book argues that art-historical methods offer an important contribution to diplomatics, and that works of art are important sources for the cultural reception of documentary practices. Documents are also an important model for representation, and an understanding of the paradigmatic role of the document suggests alternative dimensions to the interpretation of late-medieval art.