The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Tradition

✍ Scribed by Ian Johnson, Allan F. Westphall (eds.)

• Publisher: Brepols
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 528
• Series: Medieval Church Studies, 24
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This is a collection of pioneering studies by a distinguished transatlantic team of scholars on a neglected yet canonical tradition of medieval English literature. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and beyond, the remarkable 'pseudo-Bonaventuran' tradition, flowing from the Latin 'Meditationes vitae Christi' (and thought, wrongly, to have been composed by St. Bonaventure), gave Europe orthodox models for how to represent, know, and follow Jesus Christ. The 'Meditationes', in a huge variety of Latin and vernacular versions, invite their readers and listeners to imagine themselves present within the Gospel narrative. How to live, what to believe, how to feel, and how to be saved: this eloquent mainstream tradition had an impact on the public and private lives of English people more profound and lasting than any text save the Bible itself. For many, it even did the Bible's work. The tradition of the 'Meditationes' provides us with a gauge of lived religious sensibility without equal in the English later Middle Ages.

✦ Table of Contents

Illustrations vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction / Ian Johns on and Allan F. Westphall 1
I. History and Ideology
The Name of Jesus, Nicholas Love’s 'Mirror', and Christocentric Devotion in Late Medieval England / Rob Lutton 19
Reversing the Life of Christ: Dissent, Orthodoxy, and Affectivity in Late Medieval England / Mishtooni Bose 55
II. Manuscript Culture: Books and Contexts
'Some sprytuall matter of gostly edyfycacion': Readers and Readings of Nicholas Love’s 'Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ' / Ryan Perry 79
Reading Miscellaneously in and around the English Pseudo‑Bonaventuran Tradition / John J. Thompson 127
Fatherless Books: Authorship, Attribution, and Orthodoxy in Later Medieval England / Vincent Gillespie 151
Organic and Cybernetic Metaphors for Manuscript Relations: Stemma — Cladogram — Rhizome — Cloud / Michael G. Sargent 197
Seeking Salvation: Fifteenth-Century Uses of 'The Rule of the Life of Our Lady' / Amanda Moss 265
III. The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Tradition and its Textual Relations
The 'Liber Aureus and Gospel of Nicodemus': A Middle English Reading of the 'Meditationes vitae Christi' / William Marx 283
The Carthusian Milieu of Nicholas Love’s 'Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ' / David J. Falls 311
'Oon of Foure': Harmonizing Wycliffite and Pseudo‑Bonaventuran Approaches to the Life of Christ / Mary Raschko 341
What Nicholas Love Did in his 'Proheme' with St Augustine and Why / Ian Johnson 375
Ulrich Pinder’s 'Speculum passionis Christi' and John Fewterer’s 'Mirror or Glass of Christ’s Passion': Reflecting and Refracting Tradition / Alexandra da Costa 393
Bonaventure’s 'Lignum vitae': The Evolution of a Text / Catherine Innes-Parker 425
Walter Hilton’s 'The Prickynge of Love' and the Construction of Vernacular 'Sikernesse' / Allan F. Westphall 457
Index 503