...Sabrina Corbellini; Margriet Hoogvliet This essay investigates how a specific group of laypeople, individuals and groups of literate artisans in late medieval French and Italian towns, participated in distinctive ways in contemporary devotional reading culture. Through an analysis of colophons...

... downplayed or treated as separate from its devotional aims, this essay argues that Book combines devotion and dissent to empower the mother's reading, preaching, and living, and that such a dialogue is characteristic of lollard forms of living. In its attention to polemic, this analysis is significant...

..., the York manuscript facili- tates a distinct method of reading, one that seeks first and foremost to know what the Gospels say about a practical moral, devotional, or sacramental issue.71 Readers making use of this index took a nonnarrative approach to the life of Christ that may have facilitated...

..., who turned the book into a family archive and an object of private devotion. This volume represents a vivid example of the broader shift between public and private reading, the continuity of church-state authority across the seventeenth century, and the continuing tension between this authority...

... spirituality as a physical experience, or on representing the heart as animated primarily by sexual longing, as critics have long understood women’s devotional texts to do. My understanding of the Passion lyrics fea- tured in A Christian Mannes Bileeve revises Sarah McNamer’s reading of them in her...

...Marion Turner Medical language permeated all kinds of texts in premodern Europe, including legal, literary, devotional, political, autobiographical, and philosophical writings. The essays in this special issue are particularly interested in the functions of metaphor and of narrative. Many thinkers...

...Allison Adair Alberts This essay argues that the South English Legendary 's life of Saint Margaret, patron saint of childbirth, reflects the devotional practice of imitatio Christi when it represents labor pains not as the shameful curse of Eve but as a miraculous moment in which the mother...

...David Aers This essay argues that Calvinist versions of God and human redemption cannot be adequately grasped without studying the medieval traditions from which they emerged. Beginning with a close reading of Calvin's extremely violent understanding of the atonement, the essay moves through...

... pres- ence played a key role in the devotional experience of its poetry.1 Even before it was printed, the importance of the book s physicality was recog- nized by Nicholas Ferrar on his first reading of a manuscript copy, when he embraced and kissed [it] again and again, before claiming it ought...

... be an expression of Margery s desire for bodily contact with Christ s body and, as David Aers suggests, a display of conventional late medieval devotion to the humanity of Christ. 19 But there may be something more going on here: we can also read Margery s dissatisfaction with Christ s words to Mary Magdalene...

... his performative speech makes himself a part of the audience community. The trope may work similarly for a reader, particularly one who has been trained by devotional reading, who thus enters into the “us” of which Aristorius speaks by imagining the reading experience as being directed...

... its translation into embodied forms, eventually written into the material of life. As Jennifer Summit has demon- strated for medieval women, reading and textual production are so closely intertwined, making devotional reading “an active process that enlisted the reader as the co-­creator...

...: By building up a careful picture of the Sionpilger as part of Fabri s Holy Land narratives, and in turn, the larger tradition of pilgrim- age travel writing yet also as part of the devotional reading for the women in his care we are able to embed Fabri s mental pil- grimage guide in a wider understanding...

..., funerals, and prayers for deceased members. As Corbellini and Hoogvliet show for late medieval Italy, religious confraternities with extensive librar- ies also gave artisans access to devotional reading, enabling some to deepen their spiritual practice and even to become authors in their own right...

... monitored in regular routines that combined daily lectures and study with worship, prayers, and devotional readings” (330). But this belies the claim that 592  Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 46.3 / 2016 reformers rejected the kind of experiential knowledge, the participation...

... critics acknowledge an unease that attends the experience of reading the Devotions, we might also infer that Donne discovered a way to express his illness affectively.6 While acknowl- edging the cultural richness of Donne’s descriptions of physical illness, this essay argues that the Devotions...

... of collectors and readers whose cultures of anti- quarianism and recusancy offer other sorts of drama for our understanding. The N-­Town plays, preserved in London, British Library, MS Cot- ton Vespasian D.8, already perhaps a text for devotional reading and remi- niscence by the time it was compiled...

... pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes Vitae Christi, offers St. Cecilia, a saint celebrated for the three days of public preaching she accomplished after an unsuccessful attempt to decapitate her, as an example of meditative reading. A metaphor of her devotion from the Legenda Aurea—that she always bore...

... Picciotto / Devotion and Intellectual Labor  9 Steven Justice’s essay focuses on the basic experiment that the humanities exist to make possible: the effort to think the thoughts of another. Justice focuses on a particular stumbling block that modern read- ers face when attempting to think...

... of reconsideration. This is not an imago verborum, in which the picture sug- gests the sounds of the words that describe its subject. Instead, it is an exam- ple of an imago rerum, a picture that means what it shows, and can be “read” in this context just as it would be in an altarpiece or a devotional panel...