PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

July 2018

Three Anglo-Norman Kings: The Lives of William the Conqueror and Sons by Benoît de Sainte-Maure

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 57. 2018. viii, 228 pp.
ISBN 978-0-88844-307-6 • Paper • $25.00

Best known as a Medieval French romance writer, Benoît de Sainte-Maure was the author of the pioneering and widely copied Roman de Troie, composed, it is thought, around 1165. This consisted of a 30,000-verse reworking, in twelfth-century terms, of Latin narratives purporting to describe the siege of Troy, enlivened by what the poet refers to as “bons dits” (apposite amplifications). All that is known of him, apart from what can be deduced from his two works, is that he was a learned monk from the region of Tours in North-West France. His reputation as a poet must have reached the ears of Henry II who, sometime in the 1170s, commissioned him to compose a verse history of the English king’s Norman ancestors. Benoît thus found himself successor to the Norman historiographer Wace whose vernacular French Roman de Rou, named after Normandy’s founder Rollo, was abandoned in favour of Benoît’s Histoire des ducs de Normandie.

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.

April 2018

Fifteen Medieval Latin Parodies

TMLT 35 • x, 122 pp. • 2018 • ISBN 978-0-88844-485-1 • Paper • $19.95

The fifteen short texts edited here offer vivid examples of the wit and irreverence of medieval Latin parody, a tradition whose humour – sometimes bookish, sometimes ribald, and often both – was never far from the cultures of monastery, school, and court. Mock sermons, prayers, Gospel-texts, and scholastic exercises all bear witness to the wry sensibilities indulged by scholars and clerics alike in their off-hours.

April 2018

Mediaeval Studies Volume 79 (2017)

ISSN 0076-5872
Volume 79 (2017) • ISBN 978-0-88844-681-7 • $115

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.

February 2018

Etienne Gilson: Formation and Accomplishment

Etienne Gilson Series 36. 2018. 40 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–736–4 • Paper • Complimentary (on request)

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.

September 2017

From Learning to Love: Schools, Law, and Pastoral Care in the Middle Ages
Essays in Honour of Joseph W. Goering

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 29. 2017. xlviii, 776 pp. + 13 plates. ISBN 978-0-88844-829-3 • Cloth • $110

The essays in this volume show how the teaching of law and theology in the medieval schools was part of a pastoral project to foster a just Christian society and to lead souls to contemplation of God. With subjects ranging from scholastic debates about divine simplicity to disputes between parishioners over their reputations, these studies take us across Europe, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, although the heart of the volume covers England and northern France in the decades around 1200.

June 2017

The Disputatio puerorum: A Ninth-Century Monastic Instructional Text

Edited from Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, 458

TMLT 34. viii, 102 pp. 2017. ISBN 978-0-88844-484-4 • Paper • $19.95

A school dialogue most likely composed in southeastern Germany in the early ninth century, the Disputatio puerorum offers a vivid and direct glimpse into the sort of instruction received by monastic novices and oblates in abbey schools of the Carolingian and Holy Roman Empires. Its question-and-answer format between students and master deploys an elementary Latin that would have consolidated linguistic skills at the same time as offering instruction on the nature of body and soul, the books of the Old and New Testaments, the Mass, and the Lord’s Prayer. The text’s intrinsic interest for historians of early medieval education is matched by its usefulness to modern students as a short course in what constituted basic cultural literacy in the monastic schoolrooms of the ninth through eleventh centuries, as drawn above all from the works of Isidore of Seville, but also from Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bede, and Alcuin.

April 2017

Mediaeval Studies Volume 78 (2016)

ISSN 0076-5872
Volume 78 (2016) • ISBN 978-0-88844-680-0 • $110

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 2017

Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: A Sourcebook

Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Translations 6. 2017. xii, 300 pp. plus 6 plates. ISBN 978-0-88844-566-7 • Paper • $30.00

During the period ca. 1350–ca. 1520 covered by the present volume, diplomatic sources became extremely rich and abundant. This sourcebook presents a selection of primary materials, both published and unpublished, which are mostly unavailable to English readers: a broad range of diplomatic sources, thematically organized, are introduced, translated, and annotated by an international team of leading scholars of the Italian Renaissance.

February 2017

The Aristotelian Tradition: Aristotle’s Works on Logic and Metaphysics and Their Reception in the Middle Ages

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 28. 2017. viii, 395 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-828-6 • Cloth • $95

While this volume amply illustrates the set of scholarly approaches characteristic of the “Copenhagen School of Medieval Philosophy” (notably a strong philological foundation and an interest in ancient as well as medieval and Greek as well as Latin texts), its thematic diversity reflects a great breadth of interests. What unites the collection in this respect is simply a concern with different historical manifestations of Aristotelian thought on logical and metaphysical matters.

December 2016

Patron Saints of Early Medieval Italy AD c.350–800: History and Hagiography in Ten Biographies

Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Translations 5. 2016. xii, 276 pp. plus 2 plates. ISBN 978-0-88844-565-0 • Paper • $30.00

This book provides the first translation into English of the Latin biographies of nine holy men and one archangel who became the patron saints of the areas where they evangelized, documenting the conversion of pagan Roman Italy to Christianity at the dawn 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.

November 2016

Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, Volume XI

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

CTC 11. 2016. xl, 416 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-951-1 • Cloth • $95

In this volume, the eleventh in the series, five full-length articles devoted to Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Zosimus, Procopius of Caesarea, and the fictitious Dares Phrygius are supplemented by addenda and corrigenda to articles previously published on Valerius Maximus, Petronius Arbiter, Martialis, and Martianus Capella.

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.

September 2016

Historical and Intellectual Culture in the Long Twelfth Century: The Scandinavian Connection

Durham Medieval and Renaissance Monographs and Essays 5. xiv, 322 pp. 2016. ISBN 978-0-88844-864-4 • Cloth • $95

In the wake of religious conversion and the establishment of more stable political systems, the outskirts of Latin Christendom produced historical narratives providing their present identities with a foundational past. The essays gathered here all seek to illuminate the emergence of a written historical culture in Denmark from the early twelfth century onwards by situating this historical culture in a wider geographical, chronological, and cultural context.

September 2016

Ronald Knox: A Man for All Seasons

Essays on his life and works with selections from his published and unpublished writings

xviii, 386 pp. plus 16 plates. 2016. ISBN 978-0-88844-425-7 • Cloth • $65

Ronald Knox occupies a conspicuous role in English religious, cultural and literary history, and he was also one of the leading lights of the English “Catholic revival” of the first half of the twentieth century. This collection of essays examines his many interests, setting them in their historical context. It discusses the profound effect that the Great War had on his religious life, his engagement with Benedictine spirituality, the distinctive characteristics of his apologetics and preaching, and his engagement with a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. In so doing, it illuminates aspects of his life, as well as the circumstances of his several pastoral ministries, that have been neglected.