PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

April 2015

Religion, Reformation, and Repression in the Reign of Francis I: Documents from the Parlement of Paris, 1515–1547

Volume 1: Documents 1515–1543 • Volume 2: Documents 1544–1547

Studies and Texts 196. 760 + 768 pp. (2 volumes). ISBN 978-0-88844-196-6 • Cloth • $210

The vast treasure of manuscript archives of the Parlement of Paris – the Supreme Court of justice in ancien régime France – has been exploited over the centuries by a number of scholars in several disciplines. The notable exception is that very few historians of religion in sixteenth-century France have delved into these rich and remarkable resources. This edition of nearly 1200 documents – the great majority previously unpublished – is based on an examination of more than 100,000 manuscript pages in over a hundred of the Court’s registers and cartons.

March 2015

Réécritures: Regards nouveaux sur la reprise et le remaniement de textes, dans la littérature française et au-delà, du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance

Studies and Texts 190; Toronto Studies in Romance Philology 2. 2015. viii, 396 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-190-4 • Cloth • $95

Des variantes manuscrites aux traductions, des changements de forme ou de genre aux adaptations idéologiques, non seulement la réécriture est omniprésente dans la production littéraire de la période médiévale, mais elle se situe au cœur même de la conception de la littérature au Moyen Âge. Ce volume réunit quinze articles qui se proposent d’approfondir notre connaissance de ce phénomène dans le contexte français et roman, en l’étudiant aussi bien dans son évolution que sous l’angle des techniques d’adaptation, de l’intertextualité et de la performance.

March 2015

Historia calamitatum: Consolation to a Friend

Edited from Troyes, Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, MS 802 by ALEXANDER ANDRÉE

TMLT 32.  x, 108 pp. 2015. ISBN 978-0-88844-482-0 • $19.95

Peter Abelard’s Letter to a Friend, frequently known as The Story of My Calamities, recounts the meteoric and disastrous career of one of the driving forces of the twelfth-century renaissance. The son of a minor Breton noble family, a public intellectual who turned the academic establishment on its head, lover of Heloise, and sometimes his own worst enemy, Abelard produced in elegant prose one of the signal works of medieval autobiography. This new edition presents the Latin text as it appears in the earliest manuscript—until recently misdated by a hundred years—studded with a commentary that explicates the circumstances of its composition, context, and language.

March 2015

The Church and the Languages of Italy before the Council of Trent

Studies and Texts 192; Toronto Studies in Romance Philology 3 • x, 320 pp. • Essays in Italian and English • ISBN 978-0-88844-192-8 • Cloth • $90

In recent decades, historians of language have directed increasing attention to the relationship between the Italian language and the world of religion, transforming what was once a sidebar in university textbooks into a privileged chapter. The importance of the topic is manifest: since its beginnings, religion has been intertwined with matters of language, for the Church has continuously educated speakers and readers, especially through preaching, the translation of sacred texts, and the diffusion of devotional works in the vernacular.

March 2015

Thierry of Chartres: The Commentary on the De arithmetica of Boethius

Studies and Texts 191.  2015.  xii, 262 pp.  ISBN 978-0-88844-191-1 • Cloth • $95

Arithmetic was one of the seven liberal arts taught in the French schools just before the middle of the twelfth century, and Boethius’s De arithmetica was the principal textbook for this art. This volume provides an edition of a commentary on the De arithmetica; the accompanying introduction identifies the author of the commentary as Thierry of Chartres, and provides a careful consideration of how the commentary reflects his philosophy.

October 2014

Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, 
Volume X

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

CTC 10. 2014. xxxvi, 404 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-950-4 • Cloth • $95

This series lists and describes the Latin translations of ancient Greek authors and the Latin commentaries on ancient Latin (and Greek) authors up to the year 1600. A contribution to the history of classical scholarship, it is intended to illustrate the impact which the literary heritage of ancient Greece and Rome had upon the literature, learning, and thought of those long centuries of Western history usually known as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The articles in Volume X represent various fields (literature, history, and philosophy) and span a vast period of time, from the sixth century B.C. (Pindar) to the sixth century A.D. (Agathias).

September 2014

Ambition and Anxiety: Courts and Courtly Discourse, c. 700–1600

DMRME 3. 2014. vi, 270 pp. ISBN 978–0–88844–862–0 • Cloth • $90.00

Our knowledge of medieval and early modern courts usually depends to a large extent on their writers and artists. By examining literary works concerned with life at court, this volume hopes to address fundamental questions about high culture and its literary results within many different societies, including Tang China and the Ottoman Empire as well as western Europe.

June 2014

New Monks in Old Habits: The Formation of the Caulite Monastic Order, 1193–1267

Studies and Texts 189. 2014. xvi, 260 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–189–8 • Cloth • $85.00

The eleventh to the thirteenth centuries saw the growth of a number of movements seeking monastic reform. The Caulites, or Valliscaulians, named for the site of their first monastery in northwest Burgundy, were innovators in monastic practice. They expanded throughout a broad region in western Europe, and counted among their benefactors some of the most important noble families of their day. The order lasted almost six centuries, yet remains obscure in the historiography of medieval monasticism.

May 2014

University Education of the Parochial Clergy in Medieval England: The Lincoln Diocese, c.1300–c.1350

Studies and Texts 188. 2014. xiv, 198 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–188–1 • Cloth • $80.00

The need for an educated parochial clergy had been seen from early times. During the first half of the fourteenth century, over twelve hundred rectors of Lincoln diocese received permission to absent themselves from their parishes to attend university. Many dispensations were granted by virtue of Pope Boniface VIII's decretal Cum ex eo of 1298, but the Lincoln bishops' registers reveal a much wider practice. This volume examines this educational phenomenon and concludes with an appendix listing the Lincoln rector/students and the permissions they received.

April 2014

Celtic Cosmology: Perspectives from Ireland and Scotland

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 26. 2014. viii, 316 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–826–2 • Cloth • $90.00

The essays in this collection, many originally presented at a 2008 colloquium on Celtic Cosmology and the Power of Words, aim to examine the worldviews held by the Celtic peoples, particularly the Gaelic (Irish and Scottish) perspectives; the main sources are inscriptions and texts in Celtic languages and in Celtic Latin.

April 2014

Essays on Aesthetics and Medieval Literature in Honor of Howell Chickering

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 25. 2014. viii, 298 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–825–5 • Cloth • $90.00

This volume celebrates the fullness of Howell Chickering's reach, with contributors responding to his extensive scholarship on Old English as well as Middle English subjects – Chaucer especially, but also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gower, Lydgate – as well as his other interests from the Middle Ages to medievalisms both Romantic and modern.

April 2014

Mediaeval Studies Volume 75 (2013)

ISSN 0076–5872
Volume 75 (2013) • ISBN 978–0–88844–677–0 • $105 

An annual journal of scholarship on the Middle Ages. A description of the journal and editorial policy, as well as tables of contents for recently published volumes, and indexes in electronic form, are available on the Mediaeval Studies page elsewhere on this site.

March 2014

Augustine's Virgilian Retreat: Reading the Auctores at Cassiciacum

Studies and Texts 187. 2014. xvi, 192 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–187–4 • Cloth • $80.00

This volume historicizes Augustine's habit of turning to ancient diction through the specific act of quotation, locating this habit in pedagogical and philosophical practices owed to his training. Far from disdaining or rejecting his ancient inheritance, Augustine made his first task at Cassiciacum the articulation of a method by which the pagan auctores represented by Virgil might be made safe for Christianity.

November 2013

A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse: La Vie de saint Thomas Becket by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 56. 2013. viii, 202 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–306–9 • Paper • $25.00

Composed in the immediate aftermath of Becket's murder in 1170, Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence's 6000-line narrative poem is the earliest Life of Becket to appear in the French vernacular. It was written to be listened to by lay men and women, and provides a picture of events as they would have reached a contemporary French-speaking public avid for first-hand knowledge of their new heroic martyr.

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September 2013

The Collectio Burdegalensis: A Study and Register of an Eleventh-Century Canon Law Collection

Studies and Texts 185; Mediaeval Law and Theology 6. 2013. xiv, 248 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–185–0 • Cloth • $95.00

This book offers a study and register of the French canon law collection known as the Collectio Burdegalensis. Considerable attention is devoted to the compiler's use and organisation of legal sources, and a rich historical background of church reform in late eleventh-century Aquitaine is provided. By examining when, where, by whom, and how this collection was made, the study re-evaluates its place and value among other legal collections of the period.

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July 2013

Geoffrey Chaucer: The House of Fame

Second edition. Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts 3. 2013. xiv, 274 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–563–6 • Paper • $27.50

The House of Fame is an omnivorous poem. Like its own “House of Rumour,” it draws in a multiplicity of material: literary and technological; old and new; learned and lewde. The present edition is based on a collation of five witnesses and provides a substantial list of variants.

July 2013

Peter of Cornwall's Book of Revelations

Studies and Texts 184; British Writers 5. 2013. xvi, 616 pp., plus 2 b/w plates
ISBN 978-0-88844-184-3 • Cloth • $150.00

This volume aims to introduce to a wider audience Peter of Cornwall (c.1140–1221), the diligent and methodical compiler of monumental works, of which one, the Liber Reuelationum, preserved uniquely in Lambeth Palace MS 51, is the focus for this study.

NOTE: Co-published with The Bodleian Library (ISBN 978-1-85124-254-2).  Customers in Europe, including the United Kingdom: please order this title from Bodleian Library Publishing.

July 2013

William Caxton. The Booke of Ovyde Named Methamorphose

Studies and Texts 182; British Writers 4. 2013. viii, 652 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–182–9 • Cloth • $150.00

William Caxton’s translation of the prose Ovide Moralisé was the first English version of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Caxton's translation can be used as an entry point into the complex textual tradition of Ovidian commentaries. The present edition seeks to renew interest in Caxton’s text and to encourage study of it in its own right.

NOTE: Co-published with The Bodleian Library (ISBN 978–1–85124–253–5). Customers in Europe, including the United Kingdom: please order this title from Bodleian Library Publishing.

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July 2013

William of Auvergne: On Morals

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 55; St Michael's College Mediaeval Translations. 2013. xxvi, 250 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–305–2 • Paper • $30.00

William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249, was not only one of the most prolific writers in philosophy and theology of the first half of the thirteenth century but also one of the first to use the new translations of Greek and Islamic thought that poured into the Latin West in that century. In On Morals he extols the value of the nine virtues in a sophisticated narrative where each of the virtues speaks for itself, explaining its importance.

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June 2013

Aquinas and Antoninus. A Tale of Two Summae in Renaissance Florence

Etienne Gilson Series 35. 2013. 30 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–735–7 • Paper • Complimentary (on request)

The 2011 Etienne Gilson Lecture explores the complex issue of the way Thomas Aquinas was cited by later authors, and how Thomas's theology was moulded to meet the needs of particular local contexts.