PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

March 2019

Literary Echoes of the Fourth Lateran Council in England and France, 1215–1405

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 31 • 2019 • x, 322 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-831-6 • Cloth • $95

The thirteenth century saw a blossoming of religious literature aimed at the laity composed in the vernacular as well as in Latin for the preachers who ministered to them. It has been traditional in literary history to attribute this vernacular creativity to the Fourth Lateran Council. Although the Council was part of a longer tradition of Church reform, it nonetheless crystallized theological and ecclesiastical thought in a form that was a spur to composition by writers and preachers for more than a century. The aim of this volume is not to attempt a comprehensive account of the Council or its reach in religious writing of the period but to further our understanding of how lay people, largely neglected by earlier councils, received Lateran IV’s doctrinal definitions and disciplinary rules. The essays gathered here concentrate on England, where bishops enacted the Council’s reforms with particular enthusiasm, and France, where the earliest instructional literature appeared.

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.

December 2018

The Devil's Mortal Weapons: An Anthology of Late Medieval and Protestant Vernacular Theology and Popular Culture

xvi, 400 pp. 2018. ISBN 978-0-88844-427-1 • Paper • $35

To many English Protestants, the centuries before the Reformation were an inseparable part of their own early modern cultural, religious, and textual present. However, it is not easy to discern the true scope of the Protestant engagement with the pre-Reformation past in texts in which no such engagement was openly signalled by the author or printer, and it is not always easy to distinguish the influences that shaped much of such textual output.

October 2018

Books and Bookmen in Early Modern Britain: Essays Presented to James P. Carley

Papers in Mediaeval Studies 30. 2018. xxvi, 450 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-830-9 • Cloth • $95

This gathering of eighteen essays explores a period in Britain when the world of letters was brought under harness by the political centre as it had never been before or has been since. The importance of royal patronage for authors and printers alike is the subject of several of these studies; others are concerned with the dangers of unorthodox reading in Tudor England. The break-up of monastic libraries is another theme, as witnessed not only in England but also by observers in the Low Countries and Italy. Also included are studies on the post-dissolution movement of medieval books into the universities and into royal and aristocratic collections, aspects of female reading, verse composition, and the act and art of writing by hand, with some editions of hitherto unprinted texts.

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.

September 2017

The History of England’s Cathedrals

2017. xii, 304 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-441-7 • Cloth • $45

England’s sixty or so Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals are among its most iconic buildings and attract thousands of worshippers and visitors every year. Yet though much has been written about their architecture, there is no complete guide to their history and activities. This book provides the first rounded account of the whole of their 1700 years from Roman times to the present day.

Published outside North America by Impress Books

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.

June 2017

Dictionary of Old English A-H

The Dictionary of Old English, A–H, is available to order on CD-ROM. All orders worldwide for CD-ROM and previous microfiche should be sent to our Toronto office. Details are available below by clicking “Read More”.

The Dictionary is also available online; please visit the Dictionary of Old English website for details.

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.