PIMSPontifical Institute
of
Mediaeval Studies

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.

July 2019

Women’s History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer’s Chronicle of the Dominican Observance

Mediaeval Sources in Translation 58; Saint Michael’s College Mediaeval Translations. 2019. x, 306 pp. ISBN 978-0-88844-308-3 • Paper • $35.00

In his work The Book of the Reformation of the Order of Preachers, the Dominican friar Johannes Meyer (1422–1485) drew on letters, treatises, and other written records, as well as interviews, oral accounts, and his own personal experience, to record the blossoming of the Observant reform movement.

April 2019

Mediaeval Studies Volume 80 (2018)

ISSN 0076-5872
Volume 80 (2018) • ISBN 978-0-88844-682-4 • $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 2019

A Soul’s Journey: Franciscan Art, Theology, and Devotion in the Supplicationes variae

Studies and Texts 210; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 6 • 2019 • xviii, 354 pp. incl. 245 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-210-9 • Cloth • $150

The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence houses an extraordinary manuscript: an anthology of devotional texts and images called the Supplica­tiones variae, dated 1293 and made for use in Genoa, that ends with a remarkable series of full-page illustra­tions. Although the Supplicationes does not include or illustrate Bonaventure’s seminal text, The Soul’s Journey into God, the manuscript is effectively the site for performance of a spiritual pilgrimage, for it is through the Franciscan theologian’s mystical and poetic concepts that the deeper meanings of its images can be discerned.

April 2019

Historia Apollonii regis Tyri: A Fourteenth-Century Version of a Late Antique Romance

Edited from Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vaticanus latinus 1961

TMLT 36 • xii, 124 pp. • 2019 • ISBN 978-0-88844-486-8 • Paper • $19.95

With its shipwrecked princes, pirates, and princesses, the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri provided medieval Europe with one of its most popular and influential narratives.

March 2019

Heretics, Schismatics, or Catholics? Latin Attitudes to the Greeks in the Long Twelfth Century

Studies and Texts 216 • 2019 • xvi + 292 pp. • ISBN 978-0-88844-216-1 • Cloth • $95

The political division of the Roman world into Western and Eastern Roman Empires at the end of the fourth century spurred the divergence of the Latinised Western and the Hellenised Eastern halves. According to a pervasive and deeply ingrained belief in modern academic, educational and popular literature, the ensuing antagonism on religious and cultural grounds between the two parts of medieval Christendom eventually led to the “schism of 1054.” Less than fifty years after the schism, Greeks and Latins came into closer contact as a result of the crusades and the encounter was catastrophic, leading to the capture and sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the armies of the Fourth Crusade. This study, the first to deal exclusively with Latin perceptions of and attitudes toward the Greeks in terms of religion, aims to revisit and challenge the view that the so-called schism between the Latin and Greek Churches led to the isolation of the Byzantine Empire by the Latin states and eventually to the events of 1204.

March 2019

Imagining the Miraculous: Miraculous Images of the Virgin Mary in French Illuminated Manuscripts, ca. 1250–ca. 1450

Studies and Texts 215; Text Image Context: Studies in Medieval Manuscript Illumination 7 • 2019 • xviii, 194 pp. incl. 94 colour illus. • ISBN 978-0-88844-215-4 • Cloth • $95

This is not a book about miraculous images of the Virgin Mary (be they icons, sculptures, altarpieces, or reliquaries) but about their representations in French illuminated manuscripts from ca. 1250 to ca. 1450. Most of these depictions of the Virgin Mary cannot be identified even tangentially with particular surviving images (such as the Virgins of Rocamadour, Soissons, Chartres, and Laon). Rather, these illustrations point to the ubiquity of local miraculous Marian images in devotional practices from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century in French-speaking regions. This book analyzes depictions of material images and the animated miracles they perform, and traces their evolution from the earliest narratives of Marian miracles written in Old French to texts and images produced at the Burgundian court of the late Middle Ages.

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.