Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion ed. by Sabrina Corbellini (review)

This collection comes out of a 2010 conference, itself of a European Research Council-funded project studying social and cultural changes in lay access to religious and textual knowledge in pre-Reformation Europe through the production, distribution, and use of vernacular Bible translations. In spite of the umbrella project’s focus on the Bible, there are studies here of a variety of instructional and devotional texts, including meditations on the Passion and saints’ lives. The volume spans a wide set of geographic and linguistic contexts, reaching from England across the Low Countries, France, Germany, and Italy, to Poland.

The twelve essays are divided into four thematic groups, exploring the intersections between Latin and vernacular, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy, the impact of printing on the dissemination of orthodoxy, the interplay between lay readership and the socio-cultural contexts of production, diffusion, and acquisition, and methodological aspects of the study of reading. The groupings are reasonably coherent, although readers will find other commonalities that cut across these divisions. The fourth grouping perhaps makes least sense, since many of the other articles also explicitly discuss methodological issues and make important contributions (in particular, those of John Thompson and Mart van Duijn).

The articles of the first group all consider the intersections of Latinity and use of vernacular with questions of orthodoxy. Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen makes a strong case for distrust of the vernacular among the guardians of orthodoxy, especially when it is used by women. The other three contributions show that in different times and places, the picture was more nuanced. Sabrina Corbellini, examining evidence from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine private libraries, manuscript colophons, interpolations in personal copies of texts, and cases of lay (male) authorship of religious texts, uncovers networks of lay readers and writers with a high degree of religious literacy, participating in a culture of exchange with religious communities in which there was room for debate and negotiation. Thompson’s investigation of reading networks in England through manuscripts of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus finds among them a diversity of ideological perspectives and practices. Eyol Poleg likewise challenges the simple equation of vernacularity with dissent: he uses evidence from the layout, composition, and annotation of Wycliffite Bibles to argue that many of their owners were using them as aids to engage with the orthodox Latin liturgy.

The articles in the second section all deal with the relation between printers and public in the formation and dissemination of early printed books. Koen Goudriaan takes on the argument that the Church actively used the printing press as a missionary tool. He challenges the theory that the Devotio Moderna stimulated the production of printed books, and concludes that the printing of religious material in the Netherlands remained a purely commercial affair, ruled by perceptions of demand, until 1520. Van Duijn also takes up the theme of supply and demand in his examination of the interplay between printers’ strategies and public appropriation in the production and dissemination of the Delft Bible. Kristian Jensen’s study of the reading of Augustine in the fifteenth century, like Goudriaan’s contribution, tests some commonly received ideas against evidence of form, content, and readership. He shows that, at the time the Augustinian canon was still being determined, there were different textual communities formed around different groupings of texts.

The third theme encompasses a wide field, and the three contributions illustrate its diversity. Suzan Folkerts’s contribution studies the circulation of manuscripts of the Devotio Moderna and translations of the New Testament in urban settings in the Low Countries. Her study shows that the text was reproduced in a variety of forms which are associated with different users. Werner Williams-Krapp’s study of...