Medieval and Early Modern Religious Cultures: Essays Honouring Vincent Gillespie on his Sixty-fifth Birthday ed. by Laura Ashe and Ralph Hanna (review)

Vincent Gillespie, J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, has made enormous contributions to scholarship in the areas of literature and religious culture of Late Medieval and Early Modern England, not least of them his monumental work Syon Abbey, in the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues series (British Academy, 2001). His scholarly output, fully catalogued in this volume, attests to his varied research interests, and is all the more impressive when balanced against the demands of teaching, research supervision, and administration that fall upon the incumbent of the Tolkien Chair at Oxford.

The twelve essays of this volume, arranged into four chronological bands extending from ‘After Lateran IV: The Thirteenth Century’ to ‘Reform or Renewal? The Sixteenth Century’ (at least the earlier part of it), all connect well with Vincent’s own research interests, and in some cases respond to his work.

Annie Sutherland explores the tradition that Christ was born in a ‘house without walls, in the street’, which in the context of Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde is an apophatic space, invoked to challenge the anchorite, actually enclosed within ‘fowr wahes’ to mirror Christ in vulnerability to the world. Nicholas Watson explores the transmission and reception of Nicholas of Abingdon’s influential and widely disseminated Mirror of the Holy Church. Daniel Orton discusses Roger Bacon’s humanistic campaign and reassertion of the category of the poetic in response to scholastic disinterest in, if not hostility towards, poetry in thirteenth-century Paris and elsewhere.

The set of essays focused on the later fourteenth century begins with Anne Hudson’s study of Oxford, New College MS 67, an ‘Early Version’ copy of the Wycliffite Bible, but with distinctive revisions, including readings from the ‘Late(r) Version’ in the latter parts, from the Pauline epistles. While this manuscript seems to be an unusual departure from the usual tendency to avoid blending of versions in manuscript transmission, it warrants further attention in itself, along with attention to revisions in other manuscripts as yet only cursorily catalogued as ‘EV’ or ‘LV’. Michael Sargent proceeds in a similar vein, exploring the patterns of circulation of, and variation in, the two books of Walter Hilton’s English text of The Scale of Perfection and Thomas Fishlake’s Latin translation and transformation of the work. Barry Windeatt explores changing spiritual and cultural currents in post-Conquest English treatments of the Assumption of the Virgin in texts (including drama) and iconography, and the delicacy with which some accounts approach the questions of bodily resurrection, the nature of Mary’s death or ‘dormition’ and other aspects of the narrative details that accreted around the story.

Ian Johnson discusses the mediation of voices and discourses in the writing of Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock, demonstrating how they reshaped their sources and spiritual discourses in distinctive ways. Susan Powell examines the textual material relating to Santa Zita (known in English as Saint Sithe), found in a later fifteenth-century English manuscript, now Biblioteca Statale di Lucca, MS 3540. Remarkably, a cult of this thirteenth-century saint from Lucca (a patron of domestic servants, and, in England at least, those who have lost keys) spread quite widely in later medieval England. Denis Renevey explores the contributions of Archbishop Thomas of Rotherham and Lady Margaret Beaufort to the popularization of devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus, which also forms the subject matter of a sermon Caxton added to his 1491 edition of John Mirk’s Festial.

In the last section of the book, Alexandra da Costa examines the changing early-Reformation contexts in which lay readers engaged in study of the Bible and devotional works in the vernacular, and the views on how such reading should be conducted, as...