Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages
Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion
Edited by Sabrina Corbellini
This volume presents a new, interdisciplinary approach to religious reading and reading techniques in a lay environment within late medieval textual, social, and cultural transformations.
Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page. – St Jerome, 384 AD With these words, the Church Father Jerome exhorted the young Eustochium to find on the sacred page the spiritual nourishment that would give her the strength to live a life of chastity and to keep her monastic vows. His call to read does not stand alone. Books and reading have always played a pivotal role in early and medieval Christianity, often defined as ‘a religion of the book’. A second important stage in the development of the ‘religion of the book’ can be attested in the late Middle Ages, when religious reading was no longer the exclusive right of men and women living in solitude and concentrating on prayer and meditation. Changes in the religious landscape and the birth of new religious movements transformed the medieval town into a privileged area of religious activity. Increasing literacy opened the door to a new and wider public of lay readers. This seminal transformation in the late medieval cultural horizon saw the growing importance of the vernacular, the cultural and religious emancipation of the laity, and the increasing participation of lay people in religious life and activities. This volume presents a new, interdisciplinary approach to religious reading and reading techniques in a lay environment within late medieval textual, social, and cultural transformations.
Introduction - SABRINA CORBELLINI 1. Latin and Vernacular - Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy Heterodoxy or Orthodoxy of Holy Women's Texts: What Makes a Holy Woman's Text Holy? - ELSE MARIE WIBERG PEDERSEN Beyond Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: A New Approach to Late Medieval Religious Reading - SABRINA CORBELLINI Reading with a Passion: Fifteenth-Century English Geographies of Orthodoxy - JOHN J. THOMPSON Wycliffite Bibles as Orthodoxy - EYAL POLEG 2. Print and Public: The Impact of Printing on the Dissemination of Orthodoxy The Church and the Market: Vernacular Religious Works and the Early Printing Press in the Low Countries,1477-1540 - KOEN GOUDRIAAN Defining the Delft Bible (1477): From Printer-Public Dynamics to Extant Copies - MART VAN DUIJN Reading Augustine in the Fifteenth Century - KRISTIAN JENSEN 3. Socio-Cultural Contexts of Production, Acquisition and Reading of Vernacular Religious Books The Cloister or the City? The Appropriation of the New Testament by Lay Readers in an Urban Setting - SUZAN FOLKERTS The Medieval German Lives and Miracles of St. James - WERNER WILLIAMS Latin and Vernacular - Reading and Meditation: Two Polish Queens and their Books - ANNA ADAMSKA 4. Religious and Sacred Texts in the Vernacular: Methodological Aspects of a Social History of Reading "Pour faire laies personnes entendre les hystoires des escriptures anciennes": Theoretical Approaches to a Social History of Religious Reading in the French Vernaculars during the Late Middle Ages - MARGRIET HOOGVLIET Displaying Privacy: Margaret of York as Devotional Reader - ANDREW TAYLOR Plates
- Edited by Sabrina Corbellini
Other Titles in this Series
Accounts and Accountability in Late Medieval Europe
Records, Procedures, and Socio-Political Impact
Volume 50
Spoken and Written Language
Relations between Latin and the Vernacular Languages in the Earlier Middle Ages
Volume 24
The Politics of Memory and Identity in Carolingian Royal Diplomas
The West Frankish Kingdom (840-987)
Volume 19
Digital Philology and Quantitative Criticism of Medieval Literature
Unconventional Approaches to Medieval Latin Literature II
Volume 49
Transforming the Medieval World
Uses of Pragmatic Literacy in the Middle Ages (A CD-ROM and Book)
Volume 6
Epigraphic Literacy and Christian Identity
Modes of Written Discourse in the Newly Christian European North
Volume 4
Ruling the Script in the Middle Ages
Formal Aspects of Written Communication (Books, Charters, and Inscriptions)
Volume 35
Diplomatics in the Netherlands
The Use, Editing, and Study of Charters by Dutch Historians from the Middle Ages to the Present
Volume 63
Sins of the Tongue in the Medieval West
Sinful, Unethical, and Criminal Words in Middle Dutch (1300-1550)
Volume 36
Strategies of Writing
Studies on Text and Trust in the Middle Ages: Papers from Trust in Writing in the Middle Ages (Utrecht, 28-29 November 2002)
Volume 13
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