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.

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.

Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives examines the interaction between medieval English worshippers and the material objects of their devotion. The volume also addresses the afterlives of objects and buildings in their temporal journeys from the Middle Ages to the present day. Written by the participants of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded seminar held in York, U.K., in 2014, the chapters incorporate site-specific research with the insights of scholars of visual art, literature, music, liturgy, ritual, and church history. Interdisciplinarity is a central feature of this volume, which celebrates interactivity as a working method between its authors as much as a subject of inquiry. Contributors are Lisa Colton, Elizabeth Dachowski, Angie Estes, Gregory Erickson, Jennifer M. Feltman, Elisa A. Foster Laura D. Gelfand, Louise Hampson, Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Heather S. Mitchell-Buck, Julia Perratore, Steven Rozenski, Carolyn Twomey, and Laura J. Whatley.

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

Domestic devotion has become an increasingly important area of research in recent years, with the publication of a number of significant studies on the early modern period in particular. This Special Issue aims to build on these works and to expand their range, both geographically and chronologically. This collection focuses on lived religion and the devotional practices found in the domestic settings of late medieval and early modern Europe. More particularly, it investigates the degree to which the experience of personal or familial religious practice in the domestic realm intersected with the more public expression of faith in liturgical or communal settings. Its broad geographical range (spanning northern, southern, central and eastern Europe) includes practices related to Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This Special Issue will be of interest to historians, art historians, medievalists, early modernists, historians of religion, anthropologists and theologians, as well as those interested in the history of material religious culture. It also offers important insights into research areas such as gender studies, histories of the emotions and histories of the senses.

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.

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.