Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion

Description

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. Front Matter ("Editorial Board", "Title Page", "Copyright Page", "Contents"), p. i Free Access Introduction, p. 1 Sabrina Corbellini https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100948 Heterodoxy or Orthodoxy of Holy Women’s Texts: What Makes a Holy Woman’s Text Holy?, p. 13 Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100949 Beyond Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: A New Approach to Late Medieval Religious Reading, p. 33 Sabrina Corbellini https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100950 Reading with a Passion: Fifteenth-Century English Geographies of Orthodoxy, p. 55 John J. Thompson https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100951 Wycliffite Bibles as Orthodoxy, p. 71 Eyal Poleg https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100952 The Church and the Market: Vernacular Religious Works and the Early Printing Press in the Low Countries, 1477-1540, p. 93 Koen Goudriaan https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100953 Defining the Delft Bible (1477): From Printer-Public Dynamics to Extant Copies, p. 117 Mart van Duijn https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100954 Reading Augustine in the Fifteenth Century, p. 141 Kristian Jensen https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100955 The Cloister or the City? The Appropriation of the New Testament by Lay Readers in an Urban Setting, p. 175 Suzan Folkerts https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100956 The Medieval German Lives and Miracles of St. James, p. 201 Werner Williams-Krapp https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100957 Latin and Vernacular – Reading and Meditation: Two Polish Queens and Their Books, p. 219 Anna Adamska https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100958 “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, p. 247 Margriet Hoogvliet https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100959 Displaying Privacy: Margaret of York as Devotional Reader, p. 275 Andrew Taylor https://doi.org/10.1484/M.USML-EB.5.100960 Plates, p. 297