Sensuous reading in the Legatus divinae pietatis

Devotional practices in the later European Middle Ages were highly somatic, and they utilized the human sensorium to convey, incite, and engender knowledge and experiences of the divine. Reading does not normally stand out as one of the more somatic devotional practices, but as demonstrated by the example of the Legatus divinae pietatis, a devotional text written at the convent of Helfta around the end of the thirteenth century, reading was indeed imagined as a somatic, devotional experience that engaged the senses. In this article, I argue that the Legatus portrays a form of devotional reading that invokes all the senses in an effort to unite the book, the reader, and her community with the divine. Drawing on medieval conceptualizations of the human sensorium and theories of reading, my analyses of the Legatus’s sensual language, evocative imagery, and scenes of reading elucidate the embodied reading practices that the Legatus’s writers portrayed as fundamental to their communal, devotional lives.

The Book as Object of Lay Devotion in Late Medieval Transylvania (Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)

"Research on late-medieval religiosity in Central and Western Europe has shown that religious books were not only possessed, but also read, and sometimes even copied or disseminated by laymen. The need for a better definition of the relationship between the laity and the religious text leads to the formulation and intensive discussion of concepts such as devotional reading, culture of religious reading, or vernacular theology. Several examples of works that belonged to late-medieval Transylvanian laymen suggest the opportunity and, at the same time, the need to ask whether similar dynamics of pious behaviour can be discussed in their case. In order to provide a convincing answer, this study proposes an analysis of these books from at least three perspectives: theme, language, formal characteristics. The most interesting information is offered, however, by property notes, which suggest that the devotional potential of the book was not activated by reading, but rather by donation. By offering solutions to the everyday necessities of ecclesiastical institutions, these gifts were designed to ensure personal salvation as well. In order to support this hypothesis, I will also address another category of sources from which mentions regarding this kind of donations can be recovered, i.e. last wills. Keywords: religious books, devotional practices, pious donations, last wills, laity "

Competing Prose Psalters and Their Elizabethan Readers

Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.

Kathryn Vulić, Susan Uselmann, and C. Annette Grisé, ed., Devotional Literature and Practice in Medieval England: Readers, Reading, and Reception. Disputatio 29. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2016, 282 pp.

For medieval men and women, the process of reading—especially devotional reading—was far more complex that merely deciphering the letters on a page, as explained in this collection of nine distinguished essays with an Introduction and Afterword. Building on earlier scholarship, copiously cited, this volume forms “a contribution to the history of reading” (1) through its highly interdisciplinary approach that recurrently traces the influence of monastic reading practices, especially lectio divina, among the wider devout population. Most of the essays focus on vernacular materials sought after and read—or read aloud—among the laity, although the same English books (in manuscript or print) might also have been owned by religious houses.

Afterword

If we imagine that a Victorian common reader of devotion has accumulated all the devotional books and print that have been the subject of this study we might see, gathered together on a table or shelf, a jumble of things: devotional poetry, family prayer manuals, Sunday-reading books and periodicals, gift books, and daily textbooks. Reading meant for the masses lies alongside serious works, cheap print mingles with expensive gift volumes. Broad Church, Tractarian, and Nonconformist doctrine sit together in easy company. In considering the range of what counted as devotional reading materials for Victorians, I have endeavoured to think beyond generic categories and denominational affiliations. The companionability of these items, their miscellany and assortment, reminds us that they were objects that were handled and re-read by their owners. And even when they were not being read, they remained as materials on display and as available to the next reader who might come along. This was the case with Monica Madden’s only occasionally- (and possibly never-) read copy of Keble in Chapter One. The profusion of religious publishing in the nineteenth century meant that devotional observance could also be a leisurely and a consumerist pursuit. But Elaine Freedgood (2013), who has pointed out how “things … still do not get taken seriously” in literary criticism,...

Apportioning the Devotional Day

This chapter pursues the systematic dailiness of devotional reading in the form of daily-reading “textbooks,” which came on the market toward the end of the nineteenth century, not all of them explicitly religious. Textbooks extracted and re-arranged for diurnal re-reading of the works of well-regarded writers of the century. These included Alfred Tennyson, whose In Memoriam, famous for its theme of protracted mourning but also for its reputation to console the bereaved, was re-published in excerpted form as Day to Day With Tennyson and many other similar titles. With its assumption of daily and apportioned reading the textbook aligns, furthermore, with Victorian reading systems and with discourses of time-thrift. In other words, late-Victorian devotion was often less about inculcating theological content than it was about materializing reading as non-narrative, modular portions and returning the reader regularly to a sense of time as a series of renewable moments.

The Habits and Hermeneutics of Digital Bible Readers: Comparing Print and Screen Engagement, Comprehension, and Behavior

Christians in general and American evangelicals in particular are increasingly using digital media to access Scripture, but it is unclear how this shift is influencing the behaviors they value most: regular reading and in-depth study. Using survey data, assessments of comprehension, and daily reading progress, this study examines how engagement with the Bible varies between print and screens. Results indicated that American evangelicals use a combination of print and digital forms of Scripture based on the kind of engagement they want to carry out (devotional reading, in-depth study, prayer, etc.). The data also suggest readers have lower comprehension when reading the Bible on screens compared to print. Readers using mobile devices are more likely to engage scripture daily than those using printed Bibles, and these effects are more pronounced in male readers than female readers.