Signposts on the Page: Reading Devotional Texts Through Scribal Signs and Symbols

Medieval authors used an elaborate system of tools and techniques to organize texts in a transparent and orderly way. Toward the beginning of the 13th century, scribes adopted some of the old tools and put them to use in new functions. These measures are discernible, inter alia, in pastoral works devised to aid the clergy to carry out their duties more effectively. The goal of this paper is to analyse how the techniques were used on a microscale – in short texts of doctrinal importance – to convey complex theological notions in a visually clear and practical way.

Food for the Journey

The one surviving French sermon on the Eucharist of Guiard of Laon, bishop of Cambrai (1238-1247) and supporter of the movement to establish the feast of Corpus Christi, was long thought to be the record of vernacular preaching by the bishop, until the discovery of a Latin original prompted a reassessment. Using all available manuscript evidence, and carefully comparing the Latin and French sermons, I position the French sermon as a work of vernacular theology created during Guiard’s episcopate, infused with the spirituality of Eucharistic devotion that culminated in the Corpus Christi movement. It was well received by an elite lay audience, continuing to circulate in collections of devotional texts for the next two centuries.

Ravana Center Stage

Most dominant texts in the Ramayana tradition center on Rama as hero and Ravana as villain, but this chapter analyzes two innovative theatrical productions that have sympathetically represented Ravana’s life from his point of view. The oldest, a Kathakali work first staged in 1780, Rāvaṇodbhavam [Origins of Ravana], explores how Ravana’s determination to end his mother’s sorrow earned him rulership over the three worlds. The other, a Tamil mythological drama from the mid-1950s, Laṅkēswaraṉ [King of Lanka], concerns Ravana’s attempts to protect his daughter and begins in heaven, where he dwells after Rama slays him. Both plays illuminate phases of Ravana’s life absent from most devotional texts that glorify Rama; they were composed and first performed at a time of rupture in local political configurations, and point to other ideals of kingship than Rama’s reign.

Satire techniques: Early devotional texts and mukkoodarpallu - An introductory comparison

Tamil literature holds a broader research domain which still explores itself for the extensive researches. From time to time, discussions and researches occur in religious context. Even after Sangam literature, Jainism and Buddhism taught the virtues and then gradually converted to the literary forms as religious concepts. Following this vogue, Saivam / Vaishnavism used Tamil literature to promote their own religious concepts and also to oppose the other religions. Later, they dissolved their contraindication and united in order to oppose the other religions. This trend can be traced in “MUKOODARPALLU”. A comparative study between the early and later religious literature is done and a technique called SATIRE is spotted in the text and sketched its features in the introductory level.

The Material of Vernacular English Devotion: Temptation and Sweetness in Ancrene Wisse and Richard Rolle’s Form of Living

This short essay looks at how language about the material world is used to describe the spiritual world and how that language is replicated and changed in the course of medieval devotional texts for anchoresses. It specifically discusses the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) and Richard Rolle’s Form of Living.

Шинжаангийн уйгур өөртөө засах орны цөөн тоот үндэстний эртний ном бичгийн албан гэрийн тод үсгийн дурсгал бичгийн тойм байдал (= Ойратская коллекция Фонда древних рукописей национальных меньшинств Синьцзяна)

Until recently, the Oirat manuscripts from Xinjiang remained inaccessible to researchers due to a number of circumstances. Most of the manuscripts are kept in private collections. According to some data, in the Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Province alone, the Olets living there have more than 300 personal collections, in which, according to rough estimates, there are more than two thousand manuscripts. The Fund of Ancient Manuscripts of National Minorities of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of the PRC, created in the second half of the 1970s, is a large repository of texts in the ‘Clear Script’ of the Oirats. The basis for its creation was manuscripts and xylographs from private collections, which were preserved during the years of the Cultural Revolution thanks to the personal courage of ordinary lovers of book antiquity. The Oirat collection of Xinjiang contains 398 manuscripts and xylographs of various contents: Buddhist texts of the canonical content (sutras, sastras, devotional texts), works of popular Buddhist literature (jatakas, teachings, didactic instructions and sayings, framed novels, etc.), astrological, ritual folklore texts.

Marketing English Books, 1476-1550

This book sets out to show how new markets were cultivated by printers in the period 1476–1550. It argues that while print and manuscript reading continued alongside each other, developments in the marketing of printed texts began to change what readers read, the ways they read and the place of reading in their lives on a larger scale and at a faster pace than had occurred before. Rather than attempting to offer a superficial survey of how the marketing of every kind of book developed, it focuses on three broad (but not wholly discreet) categories: religious reading, secular reading, and practical reading. Within those categories, the chapters focus in detail on the development of types of book that either emerged for the first time during this period (evangelical books, news pamphlets) or underwent considerable changes in presentation (devotional texts, romances, travel guides, household works). The chapters examine the presentation of early printed editions, paying particular attention to paratexts, with the aim of illuminating the range of techniques that printers used to convince potential buyers to part with their money. The printers of these works were predominantly based in London, but this book places their efforts within a wider European context. It demonstrates that, just as English manuscripts were moulded by foreign influences, English printers responded to their European counterparts’ experiments in the marketing of books.

Religieuze literatuur tussen het Middelnederlands en het Frans

Making use of ideas and concepts from Barbara Cassin’s philosophy of translations and of l’histoire croisée, this essay explores the shared cultures of religious reading between the Dutch and French languages in the late medieval period. While religious literature disseminated in both Dutch and German has received a fair amount of attention in recent scholarship, religious and devotional texts that were available to readers in both Dutch and French have remained understudied. By providing an overview of the most important religious literature that was translated from French into Dutch and the other way around, and of texts originally composed in Latin in the Low Countries and translated into both vernacular languages, we argue that textual mobility between the two languages was frequent and reciprocal. Casestudies of two texts – Pierre Michault’s La Danse aux aveugles and Gerrit van der Goude’s Boexken vander Missen – further indicate that changes – or the lack thereof – in texts that moved between the two languages point to shared cultures of religious reading on equal terms.

“In the hands and hearts of all true Christians”

The lively contemporary reception of George Herbert’s book of poems The Temple has been clearly demonstrated by a substantial body of modern scholarship. This article shows how that body of work can be complemented through material evidence of readership drawn from from specific copies of The Temple. By investigating readers’ marks in over 120 copies of the book published between 1633 and 1709, it confirms that The Temple was received with enthusiasm and active readership. While marks in the book often suggest that it was sometimes used for the “commonplacing” of sententious phrases and religious maxims, this article demonstrates how Herbert’s poems also attracted more nuanced literary engagements. The sale and acquisition of the book in private and public libraries in the late seventeenth century likewise suggest that The Temple held a dual role, sometimes positioned in relation to other devotional texts (like the Book of Psalms), and sometimes in a relation to the emerging category of secular literature.