This article offers a retrospective on the last thirty years of scholarship on medieval mystics. After surveying some recent resources, such as Bernard McGinn's multivolume history, the Companions to Christian Mysticism, and the journal Spiritus, it discusses the varied approaches of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century work, notably the material turn and the linguistic turn. The former, embracing studies of the body and gender, emotions and eroticism, art and material objects, reacts against earlier conceptions of mysticism as concerned exclusively with the timeless, invisible, and transcendent dimension of human existence. Feminist scholarship, queer theory, history of the emotions, and the study of visual culture have all figured prominently, while the relationship between mysticism and political activism is identified as an area ripe for further study. Complementing the material turn, the linguistic turn has brought new interest in apophatic theology in the wake of Derridean deconstruction, but also entails fresh work on vernacular mystics and the role of vernacularity in disseminating spiritual wisdom. The essay closes with an account of imaginative theology and a call for more reading across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, as well as the artificial boundary between sacred and secular writing.

The Collectio ex opusculis sancti Augustini in epistulas Pauli apostoli is an exegetical commentary on the Pauline letters that consists of 457 fragments from the works of Augustine of Hippo. The Collectio was compiled by the Northumbrian scholar Beda Venerabilis (672/73–735), whose biblical commentaries heavily rely on patristic exegesis and theology, and, as such, function as an important mediator between patristic and medieval exegesis and theology. Though many scholars have stressed the importance of the Collectio for the study of the transmission and reception of Augustine's writings and thinking in Anglo-Saxon England, the commentary has never been edited nor have its contents been thoroughly studied. The following contribution offers the first detailed study of the Collectio’s contents by analysing the ways in which Bede presents Augustine's Pauline exegesis in his own commentary on Paul's letters. Specifically, this article will study Bede's compilation methods by means of a close analysis of one of the Collectio’s fragments, fr. 315, which offers an exegetical commentary of Eph. 3:17–18. By studying the textual channels through which Bede had access to Augustine's writings as well as by considering other passages in Bede's biblical commentaries that discuss Eph. 3:17–18, this contribution seeks to demonstrate how Bede uses, adapts, and presents Augustine's exegesis of this pericope.

The Alphabet of Words (AW), a Latin alphabet text with an interlinear Old English gloss, occurs among the additions made to the Durham Collectar (D) by the priest Aldred in the tenth century. Previously thought to be extant only in D, and possibly by Aldred himself, AW also survives (without the OE gloss) in a Kassel manuscript (K) from the second half of the eighth century, as well as in a defective twelfth-century copy in Karlsruhe (Kr). Most of AW is also incorporated in a Latin treatise on the alphabet (“Audiuimus multos”: AM) compiled probably in the ninth century. AW belongs to the genre of “parenetic alphabet,” widely attested in Greek but also sporadically in Latin, including in a ninth-century Paris manuscript (P: BNF, lat. 2796) that shares lemmata and glosses with AW for the letters X, Y, and Z. We provide the first critical edition and translation of AW from D, K, and Kr, with variants from AM and P, together with a discussion of AW’s genre and relation to other alphabetical texts as well as a full commentary on the biblical, apocryphal, and patristic lore transmitted by AW’s lemmata and glosses on each letter.

The account of the destruction of the giants in the flood presented in lines 1689b–93 of Beowulf is probably the commentary of the narrator and not part of the inscription on the hilt. It is addressed to the audience, and it completes our understanding of the significance of Beowulf's victory beneath the mere. Hroðgar's extended gaze at the hilt before he begins his speech is a sign that he is also reaching toward a new understanding of the eotenas who have plagued his people. Regardless of whether he is able to read the runic inscription on the hilt, he can read the hilt itself against Beowulf's account of his struggle. The presence of the hilt in his hands implies an extensive social nexus for his apparently solitary enemies, who are now revealed as the enemies of God as well. Hroðgar knows nothing of the biblical stories of Cain and Abel or the flood, but his understanding of the meaning of Grendel's attacks now tracks that of the audience fairly closely. Although his “sermon” is not a direct response to the brief account of the flood, this account provides us with a context for understanding his speech.

The First Crusade is one of the most intensively researched events of the Middle Ages, yet, paradoxically, the manuscript source base for the letters from the expedition is almost entirely unexplored and represents an exciting new avenue of investigation for crusade studies. This article publishes the texts of three new manuscript witnesses of First Crusade letters and explores their regional reception and transmission as a form of “scribal crusading” — that is, monastic participation in the crusades from behind cloister walls. The findings of this article reveal an extremely significant, but previously underappreciated, collective impulse among German monastic communities in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to participate in the crusading movement through the copying of First Crusade letters.

This study documents the discovery of Peter Lombard's long-thought-to-be-lost lectures on the Old Testament, which were hidden in plain view in the Old Testament lectures of Stephen Langton, who lectured on the Lombard's lectures. The presence in the Lombard's lectures on Genesis of the logical theory of supposition, the single greatest advance in logical theory during the High Middle Ages, means that those lectures not only postdate the Sentences but also represent the beginning of a radical advance in speculative theology that would continue to develop through the end of the High Middle Ages. This means in turn that lectures on the Bible from the 1150s to 1200, and in particular those of the School of Paris, headed by Peter Lombard, play a central role in one of the greatest speculative developments — logical, philosophical, and theological — of the Middle Ages.

Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova must be studied as a poem in its own right as thoroughly as it has been studied as a technical rhetorical treatise; although many scholars have acknowledged the brilliance of his style, few analyses thereof exist. This imbalance in criticism limits our understanding of his ideas and the appeal they held for medieval poets. This study, therefore, focuses on two images in the section on ornatus graves, or weighty ornamentation, the category of figures defined by its reliance on transumptio. In describing its moving effects, Geoffrey uses the imagery of a pilgrimage (peregrinatio) and of a “clear cloud” (nubes serena). Both help him explain how transumptive language at first displaces or hides meaning beneath something that is deceptively ordinary. When that meaning becomes clear to the reader, however, the recognition can be delightful, intoxicating, or even wondrously transporting. The images are not original to Geoffrey, nor are they drawn from the discourse of formal rhetoric. Rather, peregrinatio and the nubes serena have a rich history in liturgical drama, biblical commentary, and iconography where they signify a kind of spiritual transport remarkably similar to Geoffrey's conception of transumptio in terms of process and quality. Thus, the Poetria nova leverages the spiritual significance of the images to make a decisively literary point about the wondrous power of subtle, transumptive language. Only by recognizing the resonance of these images can we fully appreciate just how highly Geoffrey values transumptio. Approaching the Poetria nova with a poet's eye expands the range and scope of likely influences on the treatise and, more importantly, deepens our appreciation for his remarkable commitment as a poet to the affective potential of transumptive language.

Medieval canon law recognized detrusion (detrusio in monasterium) as a sentence for women convicted of adultery. Civil law had made adultery a capital crime, so that detrusio was a milder action. This article traces the history of detrusio in canon law, especially in the thirteenth century, and treats further questions that detrusio raised. Detrusio was originally a pastoral provision, meant to provide a woman rejected by her husband for adultery an opportunity to enter religious life. But in the hands of the jurists detrusio became a coercive ecclesiastical penalty for adultery. The practice raised further concerns, for example: how the woman's property was to be treated; whether the woman sentenced to detrusio became a religious; whether a monastery should be a site of confinement for the laity; and, under what conditions a husband could take his adulterous wife back. The case was also raised of a man who accused his wife of adultery so that he could dissolve his marriage and enter a monastery.

The early thirteenth century saw the rise of a new exegetical technique: divisio textus, or text division. Commentators engaged in subtle structural analyses, parsing texts into increasingly smaller units, and at times represented these structures as complex tree diagrams. For a case study of this technique, this essay presents a previously unnoticed series of such marginal diagrams in MS Assisi, Bib. Com. 51 that depict the structure of the first three chapters of the Book of Job. Following the manner in which the author analyzes the narrative functions of character description, dialogues, and other aspects, the essay reconstructs the narratological principles embedded in these diagrams, and compares them with other divisions of Job by thirteenth century theologians. It sets the diagramming of divisiones textus in its the broader context of medieval horizontal tree diagrams and discusses the peculiar implications of the spatialization of biblical narrative. Appendices include full transcriptions, translations and auxiliary materials for comparison.

A typological reading allows us to see that Margaret's early-medieval Latin passio, the Mombritius version upon which most later vernacular versions of her popular legend ultimately drew, is a tightly structured figural meditation on the theme of baptism and the sacraments of initiation. Examination of the prayers, the liturgically allusive gestures, and the symbolic elements of the whole narrative reveals a powerful female figure who “presides” over her own ordeal and with her prayers transforms the instruments of torture into baptisms by blood, fire, and water. This narrative's deep structure may offer further insight into Margaret's appeal as a patroness of childbirth.

The Conscriptio of Alfonso Pecha that treats the origins of the Great Schism of the West has not attracted the attention it deserves. Alfonso Pecha was the confessor and trusted familiar of Cardinal Pedro de Luna at the time of the outbreak of the Schism and was well located to be minutely informed of events surrounding the fateful conclave of April 1378. Hence his detailed narrative, albeit explicitly written to promote the cause of Urban VI, is a very valuable source. Aside from recounting numerous lively conversations and depicting vivid scenes, it contains a report of a hitherto unknown mission in the summer of 1378 to King Charles V of France that probably resulted in emboldening the cardinals to break unanimously with Urban in a new election. Moreover, the Schism narrative constitutes only one of three parts of Alfonso's Conscriptio: the other two seek to prove Urban VI's legitimacy by means of supernatural visions and confirmations from canon law. By the analysis of diverse evidence the conclusion is reached that Alfonso Pecha composed the Conscriptio in Genoa in 1386. The work was published by Franz Bliemetzrieder in 1909 on the basis of a single manuscript located in Basel. The present study with appended edition draws on a second complete manuscript copy located in Prague, particularly important for revealing the identity of the dedicatee, a councilor of Giangaleazzo Visconti. It also draws on a small portion of the text from a manuscript in Uppsala.

This article offers a study and critical edition of a group of passages (here called the “Schism Extracts”) that were compiled from the apocalyptic prophecies of Hildegard of Bingen and heavily annotated in response to the Great Western Schism (1378–1417). The article argues that the Extracts were created by someone with ties to the University of Paris to illuminate a French perspective on the Schism and that they circulated primarily within a Parisian milieu—both among masters at the university and among members of religious houses in and around Paris. The article outlines the main contents and themes of the Extracts and the manuscript contexts in which they are found, including five prophecy collections. While one prophecy collection is known to have been compiled by the Parisian master Simon du Bosc, it is here argued that three of the other collections were produced by Pierre d'Ailly or someone within his circle of associates. Many of the prophetic writings selected for these collections thematically concern the eschatological and reformist role of France and a future holy angelic pope (the pastor angelicus). These include the writings of John of Rupescissa, and parallels between the Extracts and John's reading of Hildegard suggest that the compiler of the text was well-versed in John's apocalyptic thought.