Ralph Hanna & Laura Ashe 
Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures 
Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday

New approaches to religious texts from the Middle Ages, highlighting their diversity and sophistication.


From the great age of pastoral expansion in the thirteenth century, to the revolutionary paroxysms of the English Reformation, England’s religious writings, cultures, and practices defy easy analysis. The diverse currents of practice and belief which interact and conflict across the period – orthodox and heterodox, popular and learned, mystical and pragmatic, conservative and reforming – are defined on the one hand by differences as nuanced as the apophatic and cataphatic approaches to understanding the divine, and on the other by developments as profound and concrete as the persecution of declared heretics, the banning and destruction of books, and the emergence of printing.

The essays presented in this volume respond to and build upon the hugely influential work of Vincent Gillespie in these fields, offering a variety of approaches, spiritual and literary, bibliographical and critical, across the Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation and beyond. Topics addressed include the Wycliffite Bible; the Assumption of the Virgin as represented in medieval English culture; Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock; and the survival of latemedieval piety in early modern England.


LAURA ASHE is Professor of English Literature and Tutorial Fellow, Worcester College, Oxford; RALPH HANNA is Professor of Palaeography (emeritus), Keble College, Oxford.


Contributors: Tamara Atkin, James Carley, Alexandra da Costa, Anne Hudson, Ian Johnson, Daniel Orton, Susan Powell, Denis Renevey, Michael G. Sargent, Annie Sutherland, Nicholas Watson, Barry Windeatt.

Table of Content

Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde and the House Without Walls – Annie Sutherland

The Original Audience and Institutional Setting of Edmund Rich’s
Mirror of Holy Church: The Case for the Salisbury Canons – Nicholas Watson

The Category of the Poetic and the Work of Roger Bacon – Daniel Orton

Earlier Version/Later Version – in the Wycliffite Bible is that the only choice? – Anne Hudson

Patterns of Circulation and Variation in the English and Latin Texts of Books I and II of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection – Michael G. Sargent

Assumptions: The Virgin’s Ends in Medieval English Culture – Barry A Windeatt

Mediating Voices and Texts: Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock – Ian Johnson

Santa Zita and Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 3540 – Susan Powell

‘Syre, we neuer yet tasted ne haue not dronke of our best wyne’: Late Medieval Popular Religion and the Sermon for the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus – Denis Renevey

‘An hard bone for ye fleshly mynded to gnaw vppon’: reading habits in contention – Alex da Costa

Reading Late-Medieval Piety in Early Modern England – Tamara Atkin

John Leland on William, Lord Mountjoy’s Lost Manuscript of the Annals of the Mysterious John, Abbot of B. – James Carley

Vincent Gillespie: A Bibliography

Index

About the author

Nicholas Watson teaches English at Harvard University. His research focuses on medieval English and North European literature, intellectual history, visionary writing and the role of the written vernacular.