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
Manuscript Communication
Visual and Textual Mechanics of Communication in Hagiographical Texts from the Southern Low Countries, 900-1200
Volume 32
Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Vilnius
Forms of Writing and Rhetorical Spaces in the City
Volume 55
Orality and Literacy in the Middle Ages
Essays on a Conjunction and its Consequences in Honour of D. H. Green
Volume 12
Documenting the Everyday in Medieval Europe
The Social Dimensions of a Writing Revolution, 1250-1350
Volume 42
Understanding Monastic Practices of Oral Communication (Western Europe, tenth-thirteenth centuries)
Volume 21
Seeing the Invisible in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Papers from Verbal and Pictorial Imaging: Representing and Accessing Experience of the Invisible, 400-1000 (Utrecht, 11-13 December 2003)
Volume 14
Reading Images and Texts
Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication. Papers from the Third Utrecht Symposium on Medieval Literacy, Utrecht, 7-9 December 2000
Volume 8
Stilus – modus – usus
Regeln der Konflikt- und Verhandlungsfuhrung am Papsthof des Mittelalters / Rules of Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Papal Court in the Middle Ages
Volume 44
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
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