PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

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.

November 2021

Regino of Prüm. Two Books on Synodal Causes and Ecclesiastical Disciplines

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 60; Saint Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. 2021. viii, 366 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-310-6 • Paper • $35.00

Regino of Prüm (ca. 840–915), after being deposed as abbot of Prüm, became a notable musical theorist, historical chronicler, and student of the canons. His Two Books on Synodal Causes and Ecclesiastical Disciplines have generally been seen as practical handbooks to be used in the decision of synodal cases. Although they may have been used in the course of episcopal visitations, they are not to be read as limited to such use.

October 2021

Peter Comestor. Lectures on the Glossa ordinaria

Edited from Troyes, Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, MS 1024

TMLT 37 • xii, 158 pp. • 2021 • ISBN 978-0-88844-487-5 • Paper • $19.95

Edited for the first time from the late twelfth-century manuscript Troyes, Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, MS 1024, the prefatory material of Comestor’s lecture courses on the four glossed Gospels offers a unique glimpse into the classroom of one of Paris’s preeminent masters at the height of the renaissance of the twelfth century.

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

Mediaeval Studies Volume 82 (2020)

ISSN 0076-5872
Volume 82 (2020) • ISBN 978-0-88844-684-8 • $120

An annual journal of scholarship on the Middle Ages. A description of the journal and its editorial policy, as well as indexes in electronic form and ordering information, are available on the Mediaeval Studies page elsewhere on this site.

April 2021

The Llanthony Stories

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 59; Saint Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. 2021. x, 174 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-309-0 • Paper • $25.00

Compiled in the early thirteenth century, The Llanthony Stories is a fragmentary collection of exemplaria gathered by an anonymous canon at the Augustinian priory of Llanthony Secunda, Gloucester. While intended primarily for the edification of readers and those who heard the stories preached in sermons, many of the thirty-five exempla offer humorous (even ribald) glimpses of life in the Severn watershed and beyond. Filled with short tales of greedy archdeacons, licentious monks, pious laymen and prelates trying to navigate their world with decorum and piety, the work expands our knowledge of ecclesiastical politics and evangelical priorities in the Anglo-Norman church.

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.

September 2020

Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages

116 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-428-8 • Paper • $20

Etienne Gilson’s Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages, first delivered as the Richard Lectures in 1937, was published in 1938 and became an immediate success. Not only does it contribute to a major question of debate in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic philosophy and religion in the medieval period but it also insists on the validity of truth obtainable through reason as well as revelation, of rational argument alongside religious faith. This message is as important in the twenty-first century as it was in the fourth century of the young Augustine, the thirteenth of St Thomas Aquinas, and the twentieth of the mature Gilson.

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.

July 2020

Between the Text and the Page: Studies on the Transmission of Medieval Ideas in Honour of Frank T. Coulson

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 33 • 2020 • vi, 370 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-833-0 • Cloth • $95

This volume pays homage to manuscripts and early printed books as material witnesses in the Middle Ages. The essays discuss broad questions relating to the partisan interpretation of texts, but they also illustrate how small details of format, script, and decoration uncover the text, its context, and its reception.

May 2020

Mediaeval Studies Volume 81 (2019)

ISSN 0076-5872
Volume 81 (2019) • ISBN 978-0-88844-683-1 • $120

An annual journal of scholarship on the Middle Ages. A description of the journal and its editorial policy, as well as indexes in electronic form and ordering information, are available on the Mediaeval Studies page elsewhere on this site.

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

Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, Volume XIII

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

CTC 13. 2020. xl, 364 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-953-5 • Cloth • $95

Volume 13 contains two articles, both major contributions of considerable length: the first on the ancient Greek sophists, the second on the Roman poet Publius Papinius Statius.

March 2020

The Twelfth-Century Renewal of Latin Metaphysics: Gundissalinus’s Ontology of Matter and Form

Durham Medieval and Renaissance Monographs and Essays 6. xiv, 318 pp. 2020. ISBN 978-0-88844-865-1 • Cloth • $95

Medieval metaphysics is usually bound up with Scholasticism and its influential exemplars, such as Aquinas and Duns Scotus. However, the foundations of the new discipline, which would reshape the entire edifice of Western philosophy, were established well before the rise of Scholasticism through an encounter with the Arabic philosophical tradition. The Twelfth-Century Renewal of Latin Metaphysics uncovers what rightly should be considered the first attempt to construct a metaphysical system in the Latin Middle Ages in the work of Dominicus Gundissalinus. It was to prove original, powerful, and far-reaching in every way. 

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.

December 2019

New Perspectives on Thomas of Ireland’s Manipulus florum / Nouvelles perspectives sur le Manipulus florum de Thomas d’Irlande

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 32 • 2019 • x, 254 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-832-3 • Cloth • $90

The ten essays that make up this collection join the tradition of studies on the Manipulus florum inaugurated by Richard and Mary Rouse with their Preachers, Florilegia and Sermons, published by the Institute in 1979, and include close analyses of specific lemmata as well as broader studies that should appeal to students and scholars in various fields.

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.