This collection of essays focuses on how the climactic episode of Christian scripture and apocrypha, the life of Christ, was repeatedly adapted for a variety of audiences and devotional uses in the Middle Ages. The collection represents an important milestone in terms of mapping the meditative modes of piety that characterize a number of Christological traditions, including the 'Meditationes vitae Christi' and the numerous versions it spawned in both Latin and the vernacular.

The interdisciplinary volume Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives examines the interaction between medieval English worshippers and the material objects of their devotion, with chapters that extend the temporality of objects and buildings beyond the Middle Ages.

Middle English devotional compilations – consisting of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute new and unified devotional texts – have often been approached as complex collections of source texts that need to be linked with their originals. This book argues that the study of compilations should move beyond the disentanglement of their sources. It approaches compiling as a literary activity and an active way of shaping the medieval text, with the aim to nuance scholarly discussion about compiling by putting greater emphasis on the literary instead of the technical aspects of compiling activity. In addition to describing the additions, omissions and other types of adaptations that compilers made to their source texts, Middle English Devotional Compilations highlights the nature and function of compiling activity in late medieval England, and examines three major but understudied Middle English devotional compilations in depth: The Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.

Just as twenty-first-century technologies like blogs and wikis have transformed the once private act of reading into a public enterprise, devotional reading experiences in the Middle Ages were dependent upon an oscillation between the solitary and the communal. In Reading in the Wilderness, Jessica Brantley uses tools from both literary criticism and art history to illuminate Additional MS 37049, an illustrated Carthusian miscellany housed in the British Library. This revealing artifact, Brantley argues, closes the gap between group spectatorship and private study in late medieval England. Drawing on the work of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Camille, and others working at the image-text crossroads, Reading in the Wilderness addresses the manuscript’s texts and illustrations to examine connections between reading and performance within the solitary monk’s cell and also outside. Brantley reimagines the medieval codex as a site where the meanings of images and words are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.

Essays exploring the great religious and devotional works of the Middle Ages in their manuscript and other contexts.

The Routledge History of Medieval Christianity explores the role of Christianity in European society from the middle of the eleventh-century until the dawning of the Reformation. Arranged in four thematic sections and comprising 23 originally commissioned chapters plus introductory overviews to each part by the editor, this book provides an authoritative survey of a vital element of medieval history. Comprehensive and cohesive, the volume provides a holistic view of Christianity in medieval Europe, examining not only the church itself but also its role in, influence on, and tensions with, contemporary society. Chapters therefore range from examinations of structures, theology and devotional practices within the church to topics such as gender, violence and holy warfare, the economy, morality, culture, and many more besides, demonstrating the pervasiveness and importance of the church and Christianity in the medieval world. Despite the transition into an increasingly post-Christian age, the historic role of Christianity in the development of Europe remains essential to the understanding of European history – particularly in the medieval period. This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of medieval studies across a broad range of disciplines.

This volume considers texts that are defined as devotional compilations. A compilation consists of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute a new single and unified text. The focus is primarily on devotional compilations, but the volume includes discussions of pastoral compilations as well. The texts considered here are works that invite readers to develop a personal relationship with the divine at a fairly advanced personal level. An exploration of devotional compilations allows a more sophisticated understanding of authorial roles, reading practices and patronage among religious and secular individuals and communities. In this volume, leading scholars in the field of medieval English literature consider the role and impact of a substantial corpus of devotional compilations. Their work yields groundbreaking evidence on devotional compilations and the manuscripts in which they occur. It provides new information on the way compilations are designed, on the literary role of compilers and the authorial strategies they use, on patronage, book ownership, readership, reading communities and reception, as well as on manuscript contexts and affinities with other texts.