Sabrina Corbellini, Ed.: Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion

SABRINA CORBELLINI, ED. Cultures of Reading in the Late Middle Ages: Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit, and Awakening the Passion. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 25. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. vi + 295 pp., 11 color plates. For a time-pressed reviewer it is often fairly easy get the measure of a volume without feeling obliged--or inspired--to read every word. Each essay in the present collection has something worthwhile and so the whole volume (albeit with a somewhat long-winded title) more than repays close attention from the first page the last. There are four sections: and Vernacular--Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, Print and Public: The Impact of Printing on the Dissemination of Orthodoxy, Socio-Cultural Contexts of Production, Acquisition, and Reading of Vernacular Books, and Religious and Sacred Texts in the Vernacular: Methodological Aspects of a Social History of Reading. There is a degree of freedom about the categorization of some essays, but these titles give some definition the twelve essays that follow a useful introduction by the editor. Corbellini also provides a lively and engaged essay, Beyond Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: A New Approach Late Medieval Reading, which would have worked very well as an informative opening chapter. While invidious choose specific examples, no self-respecting reviewer can bypass the following essays without the highest praise: Eyal Poleg (on Wycliffite Bibles), Koen Goudriaan (on religious printing in the Low Countries from 1477 1540), and Kristian Jensen (on the printing of the works of Augustine--mostly pseudo-Augustine--in the fifteenth century). In each case these contributors manage accommodate what are book-length studies within the confines of a single essay. Focusing on some two hundred and fifty Wycliffite Bibles, Poleg carefully shows their indebtedness the standardized layout of the Latin biblical tradition. He further demonstrates that in their addenda, most importantly the tables of lections, and their omissions, especially the Interpretationes nominum Hebraeorum, the Wycliffite Bibles became dissociated from fraternal and university preaching, and in their enhanced applicability the Latin liturgy, were made more acceptable --and useful--to the orthodox, both religious and secular. Covering a span of some sixty years of early printed religious books in the Low Countries and with detailed statistical examples hand, Goudriaan's essay provides a thoughtful overview. By arguing that the authorities lacked an overall strategy and that the effects of the Devotio moderna may have been overestimated, he focuses instead on the part played by the Franciscans, who realized the potential of the new printing medium. Jensen's essay makes even greater use of statistical methods with its colorful charts, lists, and tables that are like a whole essay in themselves. It is a measure of his thoroughness that in his quest to gain greater understanding of fifteenth-century reading communities for which Augustinian texts were of central importance (141) he has identified 103 tract volumes with at least one Augustinian text produced in a German-speaking area and containing 506 copies of books owned by those who bought an Augustinian text; thirty-six of these are manuscripts. Both the quantity of material and the sheer detail are very impressive. Jensen works through geographical distribution; analyzes the number of editions, the number of sheets in one copy, the average number of sheets per edition; discusses the other works in the volumes; disaggregates the genuine Augustinian from the spurious; identifies owners; and so on and so forth. Set beside the above are other interesting essays rather narrower in range: Else Marie Wiberg Pedersen on the thirteenth-century works of Beatrice of Nazareth and Margarete Porete, and Andrew Taylor on devotional reading at the Burgundian court of Margaret of York, sister of Edward IV and wife of Charles the Bold. …