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Reviewed by: Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England by Clare Costley Kingoo Katy Wright-Bushman Clare Costley Kingoo, Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2012) xix + 283 pp. In the afterword to her fascinating and impressively composed monograph, Miserere Mei: The Penitential Psalms in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, Clare Costley Kingoo describes the seeds of the project sown in her early years of graduate study, when, through her reading and research, “the age of Shakespeare started to turn into the age of Fisher, Joye, Wyatt, Croke, Stubbs, Gascoigne, Hunnis, and Verstegan. Rather than playscripts,” she reflects, “I began to see primers and prayer books, Psalters and commentaries” (188). That transformation of scholarly vision, rendered so succinctly here, finds eloquent expression in Costley Kingoo’s book. In this well-structured study, composed in clear and engaging prose, she examines the appropriation and adaptation of the seven Penitential Psalms, an important historical, liturgical, and devotional grouping, from the end of the fourteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century, “from … Richard Maidstone … to …Richard Verstegan” (2). Costley Kingoo’s study focuses on a carefully chosen set of psalm adaptations used both to shape individual chapters and to buttress a broader argument cast in terms of what she calls “penitential hermeneutics.” As she herself notes, Costley Kingoo proceeds by “put[ting] the concerns of the history of the material text into conversation with the resources of literary close reading” (189), joining the good company of scholars such as Jennifer Bryan, Jessica Brantley, Nicole Rice, Heather Dubrow, Hannibal Hamlin, and Brian Cummings, who, in recent years, have worked to elucidate the entanglement of late medieval and early modern textual and religious history. Miserere Mei’s close readings center around visual illustrations of David accompanying the Penitential Psalms across the period; theological reflections on the Penitential Psalms by John Fisher and Martin Luther; adaptations by Thomas Wyatt, Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, and John Croke; the Penitential Psalms in Queen Elizabeth’s prayer book of 1569; John Stubbs’s translation of Theodore Beza’s meditative penitential prayers; and appropriations of the Penitential Psalms by George Gascoigne, John Harington, and Richard Verstegan. Costley Kingoo breaks her analysis into five chapters, framed by a very sound and interesting introduction and an afterword that, while engaging in itself, might be augmented by more sustained summary of the arguments and conclusions preceding it. The afterword is followed by an appendix that serves as something of a historical footnote, where Costley Kingoo argues for the identification of John Harington of Stepney as the John Harington tied to the publication of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s verse paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms in 1549. The concept of a “penitential hermeneutics” undergirds each chapter and is discernible in (or subverted by) each of the examined adaptations of the Penitential Psalms; that hermeneutics is, as Costley Kingoo articulates it, a “relatively systematic reading practice that foregrounds the concept of God’s wrathful (and simultaneously righteous) judgment and consequently interprets the psalmist’s multiple afflictions … in an almost wholly spiritual light” (8). Cost-ley Kingoo argues that the application of that hermeneutics can be traced across her chosen period: broadly, “penitential hermeneutics” are applied in earnest in [End Page 290] both ritual and fictional readings of the psalms through the Reformation and into the late sixteenth century, then are challenged by appropriators like Gascoigne and Harington, but embraced again by the recusant and counter-reforming impulses of adaptors like Verstegan. Costley Kingoo’s arguments and use of her guiding concept are very effective within each chapter. Indeed, her careful selection of texts serves her claims quite well within those chapters, though that same selection makes the broader historical argument perhaps too dependent on a rather small collection of texts drawn from across a two hundred year period of ecclesiological, liturgical, devotional, social, and political dynamism. Costley Kingoo’s study is at its finest and most compelling in her analysis of individual adaptations of the Penitential Psalms, where close reading merges richly with attention to historical context and textual details. Her analysis of illustrations of David...

Reviewed by: Vernacular Manuscript Culture, 1000–1500ed. by Erik Kwakkel Hannah Morcos Keywords Manuscript Studies, paleography, codicology, vernacular languages, medieval Erik Kwakkel, ed. Vernacular Manuscript Culture, 1000–1500. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Book Culture 4Leiden: Leiden University Press/University of Chicago Press, 2018. 278 pp. + 21 color plates, 25 black and white illustrations. $45. ISBN: 978-908-72-8302-5. C urated by the dynamicErik Kwakkel, this wide-ranging collection of essays on vernacular manuscript production belongs to a series that "aims to discuss material features of manuscripts in relation to the cultural context of their production" (11). Featuring contributions by eminent scholars as well as early career researchers, the chapters focus primarily on the vernaculars of northern Europe, but also include traditions less familiar to the mainstream of manuscript studies, namely Frisian and Icelandic book production. Moreover, the textual contents comprise material often at the peripheries of literary studies, such as prayers and legal texts. Together this contributes to a broader and more nuanced presentation of book production across Europe. The collection begins with Kathryn A. Lowe's intricate study of the copies of Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralisassociated with the cathedral church of Worcester. By placing the philological and paleographical evidence in historical context, Lowe provides new insights into the reading and copying of this important patristic text in Latin and Old English. In particular, she demonstrates the important role of Wales for its transmission in Latin, [End Page 214]offering further evidence of the strength of Latinity in Wales during the ninth-century Viking raids. Lowe's principal focus is Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 431, a Latin copy of the text started in the early eleventh century and completed (and corrected) in the early twelfth century. Among the additions to the manuscript page are thirteenth-century annotations by the so-called Tremulous Hand of Worcester, who referred to it while working through two tenth-century Old English copies of the text. Lowe demonstrates how the exemplar of Hunter 431 was probably Welsh, containing a system of abbreviations unfamiliar to the original scribes. Lowe thus reveals how even at Worcester (a "bastion of learning") they "had to look elsewhere in order to acquire copies of key patristic texts in their original language" (44). In the subsequent chapter, Nigel F. Palmer provides a magisterial overview of manuscripts and fragments containing Middle High German prayers copied between 1150 and 1250. Palmer distinguishes this corpus from the later vernacular prayer books that "assert themselves as a major component of German literature" (54). He traces the beginnings back to the insular tradition epitomized by Anselm of Canterbury, who played a key role "in the emergence of the 'prayer book'" (55) and whose Latin prayers were circulated and translated in German-speaking lands. In the twelfth-and thirteenth-century manuscripts under investigation, Palmer discovers a small "network" (70) of widely circulating German-language prayers often added to existing Latin collections. He traces evidence of female ownership and identifies a context of close interaction between wealthy families and the monasteries where the books were copied and illuminated. The chapter includes a useful inventory of the thirteen manuscripts in the corpus (73–85), as well as numerous figures and four-color plates. Through this important contribution, Palmer lays the groundwork for more extensive investigations of the corpus, while demonstrating its significance for our understanding of early medieval German literary culture. The third chapter jumps forward to consider rubrics in the manuscripts of Jean Froissart's Chroniques. Godfried Croenen challenges the assumption that rubrication was a standard feature of late medieval manuscripts and calls for "a better understanding of the precise dynamics, chronology, and geography" of their "generalized" presence in books (105). Beginning with [End Page 215]a useful survey of the medieval and modern (scholarly) uses of the term "rubric," he goes on to explore differences in practice across France. Croenen argues that Froissart did not compose the rubrics found in the manuscripts of his historical works. The impetus to introduce them is linked to Parisian modes of book production. Croenen compellingly articulates how rubrics became a conventional feature of Parisian vernacular manuscripts from the thirteenth century onward...

This paper traces the presence and the particular uses made of the seven Penitential Psalms in services for Ash Wednesday and related occasions, in successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer, from 1549 to 1662. A brief history of the Seven Psalms and their place in pre-Reformation liturgy, as set down notably in the Use of Sarum (though they were prescribed in ecclesiastical treatises even earlier), precedes a close examination of the evolution of their use in the first four Anglican prayer books, and in the earliest American (Episcopalian) version (1789). It is notable that the seven Psalms were included, in various groupings and at various points within the Ash Wednesday or Lenten Sunday services, throughout the period of the early revisions of the Prayer Book. The striking symmetry of the Latin incipits of the seven Psalms, and their perceived appropriateness for the services of penitence on Ash Wednesday and other services in Lent, continued to command the attention and respect of revisers of the successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer, as it had done for their predecessors since the early Middle Ages.

The lack of a local Jewish community did not prevent medieval Swedish clerics and lay people from being interested in Jews and Jewish questions. They bought, translated, read and preached from most of the available textual sources and thus spread the widely available views of the hermeneutical Jew: a cruel, stubborn and ugly person and at the same time a cipher for the entire Jewish people both in biblical times and today. This article gives an overview of the Latin and vernacular manuscripts with anti-Jewish motifs and texts and shows that the main and most common textual models and motifs were available in Swedish libraries and collections, from legends via apocryphal texts to fake disputations – adding up to a relatively complete ‘hermeneutical Jew’. A focus was, as in the rest of Europe, on Passion-related piety, which was the most common form of piety in the late Middle Ages – and usually connected with distinct anti-Jewish features. The fact that we can establish direct and indirect textual and narrative lines of tradition between the medieval codices and modern printed booklets of the nineteenth century proves the long-lasting intelligibility of anti-Jewish stereotypes in Sweden – developed and spread completely independently from the Jewish minority. The medieval perspective thus adds a much-needed nuance to the debate about antisemitism in the North: it did not need any actual Jews; it simply made up its own, based on the general Christian tradition.

Reviewed by: Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350-1500 Maidie Hilmo Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350-1500. By Kathleen Kamerick. [The New Middle Ages, Series No. 27.] (New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. xi, 292. $89.95.) Kathleen Kamerick refers to the process of working on this project as a "search for understanding holy images." The result is a kind of archaeological excavation of late medieval religious and social culture that was distinguished by its multifaceted approach to images. Her first two chapters deal with both sides of the image controversies of this period in English history. The Lollards charged that images were prohibited in the First Commandment as idolatrous and that money spent on them should go to the poor, who were the true image of God. The defenders of images argued that the Incarnation of Christ meant that images of his human nature could be portrayed. Christ himself sanctioned their use by imprinting his image on Veronica's veil. In addition to this and other defenses, Roger Dymmok stated that God ordained them because of the superiority of sight over hearing. The defenders and attackers of images were, as Kamerick observes, concerned chiefly with how laypeople used them. The rest of Kamerick's study is an attempt to recover how the largest segment of the population used images. Her third chapter examines the evidence of wills in Norfolk and Suffolk. She gives useful charts about the distribution of image gifts by gender and geographical distribution. Particularly valuable insights are offered in Kamerick's fourth chapter dealing with the social and political dimensions of the images used by various communities. The parish accounts of church wardens, as well as the membership lists and account records of gilds, indicate how individual groups gained a sense of communal fellowship in their support of specific images and the public spaces they occupied. Images could also inform political allegiances, as in the case of the cult images of the Lancastrian King Henry VI. A highlight of this book is Kamerick's sensitive and probing analysis of the role of images in the lives of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Holy images, especially the crucifix, helped Julian understand and feel Christ's Passion. Bodily and spiritual sight worked concurrently as a conduit to reveal [End Page 153] God's love. Margery Kempe also fused bodily and spiritual senses in her visions. She was able to transfer the import of Christ's suffering on the cross to the suffering of animals and people in whom she saw the Lord. It is no wonder that she reacted bodily with loud weeping! The sixth chapter deals with the variety of responses to images in prayer books that fused the acts of reading and beholding. Rather than replacing books for the unlearned, a justification for their use given centuries earlier by Pope Gregory, images combined with texts, both together comprising the book. In many cases the texts guided the viewing of the pictures. There was a dynamic interaction between image, rubric, and text. This required the reader to flip back and forth, merging visual and verbal devotion with the physical and temporal movements of reading. Kamerick goes on to discuss indulgences and charms that became associated with images. Yet, according to Kamerick, the massive iconoclasm of the early sixteenth century was sparked less by the questionable magical properties assigned to certain images than by the ways in which people attributed animate qualities to statues. This book is indispensable for scholars of late medieval culture and for those seeking to understand this period of religious transition in England. Maidie Hilmo University of Victoria Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Daniel Swift Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan AgeShakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age. Daniel Swift. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. ix+289.

Reviewed by: Teach Us to Pray: The Lord's Prayer, Catechesis, and Ritual Reform in the Sixteenth Century by Katharine Mahon Anna Marie Johnson Teach Us to Pray: The Lord's Prayer, Catechesis, and Ritual Reform in the Sixteenth Century. By Katharine Mahon. London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019. 169 pp. Historical accounts often present the early church and the Reformation as high points of Christian formation, with the Middle Ages as a deep nadir. Katharine Mahon, in this revision of her Notre Dame dissertation, challenges that view by tracing the uses of the Lord's Prayer through the late Middle Ages and Reformation in catechesis, liturgy, and private prayer. Mahon identifies three effective touchpoints in the Reformation to gauge the changing uses of the prayer: Luther's catechetical works, the catechism in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, and the 1566 catechism by Jesuit Peter Canisius. A cornerstone of Mahon's argument—and the distinct strength of this book—is her contention that medieval formation in the faith, far from being less rigorous than in other eras, was quite extensive and holistic. Mahon emphasizes that medieval Christian [End Page 97] formation was embedded within ritual systems and aimed to form Christians as ritual participants. Knowing the Lord's Prayer was a signifier of one's membership in the church and a means of formation as part of the ritual life of the church, especially in the sacrament of penance. Mahon traces a decisive shift from a late medieval emphasis on ritual to a Reformation emphasis on knowledge and understanding. In the Reformation, Mahon argues, the late medieval "unified ritual pattern" (11) of the Lord's Prayer across catechesis, liturgy, and private prayer was dissolved and replaced by a narrower emphasis on understanding the prayer's meaning through memorization and explanation. The last three chapters outline late medieval and Reformation usage of the Lord's Prayer in catechisms, liturgies, and instruction on private prayer. Mahon emphasizes that later authors encouraged readers to comprehend the prayer and to repeat it with earnest faith. At least within the catechisms, the function of the Lord's Prayer, she argues, became "a text … rather than a performance" (74). Mahon identifies the Protestant concept of faith as the rationale for this change. While she often takes pains to present Reformation-era changes in an ecumenical tone and to note continuity between late medieval and Reformation practices, her view of Protestant understandings of faith draws sharp lines and pushes distinctions too far. For example, she presents a Protestant view of faith as an arid, purely intellectual, and individualistic concept that makes the Lord's Prayer into "a piece of knowledge to be tested for accuracy and comprehension, alongside other pieces of knowledge," (73) which she contrasts sharply with medieval usage as "ritual communion, identification, or participation" (78). Elsewhere, she nuances this view, recognizing that reforms by Luther and others emphasized liturgical participation for the purposes of identification, formation, and faith (96). She also grants that, while Luther thought the liturgy should be comprehensible, he retained a belief that liturgy addresses worshipers beyond reason and can only be apprehended by faith (100). Despite these caveats, Mahon maintains that the Reformation fundamentally changed the use of the Lord's Prayer from ritual formation to knowledge. [End Page 98] For this reviewer, the sharp lines she draws between late medieval and Reformation-era use of the Lord's Prayer occlude more than they outline. In both the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, the Lord's Prayer was used to understand the faith, to move the heart towards strengthened faith, and to participate in communal and ritual Christian life. It is true that Reformation-era reformers wanted worshipers to understand what was happening in the worship service, and that they emphasized comprehension and memorization of the Lord's Prayer more than medieval teachers. Yet they, too, encouraged participation in worship for formation in a ritual community. While much changed in the Reformation, the purposes of the Lord's Prayer in catechesis, liturgy, and private prayer had more continuities than discontinuities with the late Middle Ages. In both eras, churches taught the Lord's Prayer to build up faith in...

The prayer books from Medingen and other Luneburg convents offer a unique insight into the processes of religious and linguistic transformation which shaped devotion through writing in northern Germany in the late Middle Ages. The interweaving of Latin and the vernacular is common to all of the devotional books written by the nuns of Medingen, with the proportion of the Low German components ranging from the insertion of single phrases or verses from songs to the almost complete translation into German of the Latin elements. The dual use of Latin for official monastic written documents and German for communication with lay people, extended to all areas of life in Medingen, including work on tapestries such as the Wichmannsburg Antependium . The Latin components of the textual collage originate from the liturgy, primarily the sequences and antiphons of Easter morning, from which individual verses are borrowed, in part with their musical notation. Keywords: devotional books; late Middle Ages; Luneburg convents; Medingen; northern Germany

The late medieval era exhibits a rich variety of relationships between music and devotion. These relationships range from singing songs during meditation, meditation occurring within sacred plays, and harp-playing as a spiritual metaphor for meditations on Christ; prayer books containing musical notation and pictures of angels making music; musical meditation during the liturgy; and much more. In monastic circles, spiritual songs could be performed outwardly or inwardly; biblical and mystical models exist for both methods. In the late Middle Ages, private devotion gained considerable importance not only in monastic, but also in semi-religious and even lay circles. In the 15th century, monastic reform was carried out in northern Germany in the spirit of the Windesheim Congregation. It resulted in the spiritual and musical practices of the Devotio moderna becoming far more influential in northern German monasteries. Keywords: Devotio moderna ; late Middle Ages; monastic reform; musical meditation; northern Germany

For three hundred years (from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century) the Book of Hours was the bestseller of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Book of Hours is a prayer book that contains, as its heart, the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary, that is, the Hours of the Virgin. By the early thirteenth century, an era of increased literacy, both Psalters and the combined Psalter-Hours were used by not only the clergy, but also the laity. Geert Grote (d. 1384) translated the standard Horae texts into Dutch as part of the Devotio moderna . Following the Calendar the first text proper in a Book of Hours is a series of Gospel Lessons by the four evangelists. The Office of the Dead was in the back of every Book of Hours the way death itself was always at the back of the medieval mind. Keywords: Book of Hours; Gospel lesson; horae text; Hours of the Virgin; late middle ages; Office of the Dead; prayer book; Psalter; Renaissance

Biblical texts reached the Kingdom of Piast along with missionaries arriving at Polish territories since 966. The first Bibles in Latin were imported. The oldest traces of biblical translations into Polish date back to the 13th century (Kinga’s Psalter). We can assume that the translation of the four Gospels and probably the whole of the New Testament existed in the 14th century. Half way through the 15th century the translation of the whole of the Old Testament came to exist (Queen Zofia’s Bible). The Book of Psalms enjoyed the greatest popularity (e. g. Floriański Psalter or Puławski Psalter), as well as Gospels. Biblical texts were copied in different forms: fragments of books (e. g. penitential psalms); individual books as a whole (e. g. Psalter); the whole of the New and Old Testament (usually in volumes, such as Queen Zofia’s Bible); in the form of liturgical books and prayer books taking advantage of biblical texts (e. g. Codex Aureus, breviary); as voices and quotations. Monastic manuscript writing workshops, for example in Kłodzko and Cracow, were important centers of production of books with biblical texts. It was the demand for liturgical purposes, private piousness, so-called wearing out of books, evolution of the language, and administration and education development, that were among the reasons for manuscripts with biblical texts production.

Johannes Meyer's Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens (Book of the reform of the Dominican order) is one of the most significant sources for the Observant Reform of the Dominican Order in the German-speaking regions of Europe and especially of the reform of the women's houses. Until the publication of Claire Taylor Jones's excellent translation, Women's History in the Age of Reformation: Johannes Meyer's Chronicle of the Dominican Observance, Meyer's text was available only in a flawed early twentieth-century edition and thus was accessible only to a limited audience of Germanist medievalists. Now, it is easy to imagine a more multifaceted audience for this important text. With its concise yet comprehensive introduction, useful footnotes, and clear modern English that effectively conveys Meyer's often conversational tone, it will doubtlessly find a place in undergraduate medieval history classrooms. But it should also find interested readers among scholars of the Observant Reform in non-German-speaking regions, medieval religious reform more broadly, and medieval Dominicans.Jones's introduction to the translation provides a concise overview of the Observant reform, emphasizing the importance of local politics, the connection of the movement to larger trends such as increasing lay piety and the rise of humanism, and the regional nature of Observant reform for nuns. Each of these aspects is crucial for understanding Meyer's chronicle. The “grand narrative of decline and renewal” that Meyer presents, featuring friars and nuns who face extreme difficulties and even risk death but ultimately achieve success, is of course “too simple to be true” (6). Jones is attentive to Meyer's strengths as an historian, though, and not only to his obvious biases. Meyer's career, which never included university study possibly because of ill health, was centered around the interrelated tasks of acting as a confessor to numerous Dominican convents, participating in reform efforts, and writing many works both for and about the women he seems to have admired so much. As Jones points out, not only does Meyer draw on female genres of writing and the archives of the convents he writes about as well as nuns' oral histories and personal recollections, he also offers an “expansive treatment of the skills and competencies of medieval women” (25). For instance, Meyer treats nuns' literacy and learning in both Latin and the vernacular capaciously: some nuns are skilled at translating difficult Latin into German, others copy liturgical manuscripts (of tantamount importance to the reform, as Jones showed in Ruling the Spirit: Women, Liturgy, and Dominican Reform in Late Medieval Germany [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018]), and yet others have phenomenal memories for the biblical readings and sermons that they hear during Mass despite being unable to read or write.Jones's translation comes directly from Strasbourg, Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire MS 2934, which has several advantages among the four surviving complete manuscripts of Meyer's chronicle. Although it is not related to the other three manuscripts, for which Werner Fechter identified a clear line of transmission (Werner Fechter, “Die Nürnberger Handschrift von Johannes Meyers Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens,” Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur 110 [1981]: 57–69), it is the oldest and scribal efforts to correct ich and mir (“I” and “me”) to er and ihm (“he” and “him”) suggest that it is the closest to Meyer's original text (30–31). Jones also referred to the oldest manuscript among the three other complete manuscripts, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cgm 8081, when necessary for comparison or clarification. Fortunately for interested scholars and students, all of the complete manuscripts (the other two are St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek cod. 1916 and Tübingen, Universitätsbibliothek Hs. Md 456), as well as additional short excerpts identified by Jones in a book of prayers and contemplations for Dominican nuns, Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek St. Peter pap. 9, are digitized and freely available online. Not only is this useful for scholars wishing to consult the manuscripts, but it is easy to imagine a host of classroom activities discussing manuscript production and exchange in late medieval convents after undergraduate students have read the chronicle in part or in full. Jones's transparency regarding her choices also will help scholars familiar with the 1908 diplomatic edition (Johannes Meyer, Buch der Reformacio Predigerordens, ed. Benedict Maria Reichert, 2 vols [Leipzig: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1908–9]), which relied on the St. Gallen manuscript and thus, among other problems, features some chapters regarding the reform of friaries out of the chronological order of the rest of the text. The translation is amply footnoted, identifying the various popes, bishops, princes, dukes, and Dominicans that Meyer mentions. Additionally, there are useful appendices providing a list of the relevant masters general of the order and priors provincial of the Dominican province of Teutonia and the names and reform dates of both friaries and convents in Teutonia, which collectively help to make the text more accessible to students. In general, Jones's footnotes to the translation are helpful rather than overburdensome, providing an entry into the most current scholarship of the Observant Reform in Germany; the field is well developed in Germany but much less so in the United States. Unfortunately, undergraduate students may find the accompanying map of the Dominican province of Teutonia difficult to use, as it lacks identifying landmarks and a scale; fortunately, the map of the region around Schönensteinbach is more user-friendly.Meyer's chronicle itself draws on the genre of the “Sisterbook.” Produced in fourteenth-century German Dominican convents, these books began with a foundation history of the convent and then highlighted the lives of exemplary sisters as models for future generations. Thanks to manuscript copying and exchange throughout the fifteenth century, nuns at reforming convents may very well have been familiar with this genre, making it an effective and purposeful choice for Meyer's chronicle. The Book of the Reform is a doubled version. The first two books are the foundation history of the convent of Schönensteinbach, which was at the forefront of the Observant reform for nuns. Book I deals with the original foundation of the convent by two noble daughters who asked their father for a chapel because the convent where they were nuns was not strict enough for their tastes; he gave them a barn on his freehold property instead. Meyer traces the difficulties the original generations of women had in obtaining the proper pastoral care: initially, they received this care from a Cistercian abbot, and then from a nearby Augustinian canonry. As the canons regular declined spiritually, sisters left the convent. Eventually, war and plague (probably the Black Death) decimated the convent and it was deserted. Book II traces the renewal of Schönensteinbach, spurred on by Friar Conrad of Prussia, as the first and foremost community of Observant Dominican nuns in Germany. In this book, readers first see the process of reform: reforming sisters were led into the convent accompanied by a crowd of priests, friars, important local political figures, and townspeople, especially women; the convent was officially enclosed; the liturgy was sung. Meyer also catalogs the sufferings that these sisters faced, including having to flee from Schönensteinbach four times because of war in the neighborhood. The book concludes with recommendations for right behavior to maintain observant religious life, which the Schönensteinbach sisters did despite the hardships they faced.Books III and IV are the second half of the Sisterbook genre, the vitae of the exceptional early sisters: in the case of Meyer's chronicle, the initial generations of reforming sisters in Book III and the friars who began and continued the Observance in Book IV. By 1468, when Meyer had completed the bulk of the book, he was already well familiar with the genre, having copied, edited, and/or redacted several of the fourteenth-century Sisterbooks, including those of Adelhausen, Töss, St. Katharinental, and Oetenbach. Much like their predecessors, Meyer's vitae cover the hardships that nuns experienced for the sake of the Observance, how they carried out their offices, their zeal for masses and prayer, and their good deaths. Unfortunately, Meyer informs his audience, the “imprudent humility” of the early sisters caused them to suppress many of the miracles and graces that they experienced, not sharing them with the community or recording them so that future generations might know of the fullness of virtue that the Observance brought to Schönensteinbach (87). By and large, these vitae focus on the communal values prized by the Observants, rather than the types of mystical experiences commonly reported in the fourteenth-century Sisterbooks. A representative example is the vita of Sister Lukardis, who held the office of bursar. Meyer describes her as “mild, gentle, and kind, quiet yet also firm,” skilled in managing convent affairs and carrying out her office, but also “completely humble.” Her generosity to the poor and to pilgrims, as well as to her convent sisters, was noteworthy. But even as she lived out this active life, imitating Martha, she also “never neglected the contemplative life” of Mary either. In fact, Meyer says that her “fasting, vigils, prayer, kneeling, prostrations, other devotions, and good holy exercises” were so numerous that he has no room to recount them. Upon her death, on the Feast of Mary Magdalene, a saint she held in especially high regard, the sisters found a bloody hair shirt and whip in her mattress, proving her devotion and virtue (112–14).Finally, in Book V, Meyer pivots from his focus on Schönensteinbach to the efflorescence of the Observant Reform among the Dominicans in German-speaking regions. Although Meyer's focus is on the convents of nuns, he does also include some accounts of the reform of friaries. These latter accounts Jones has returned to their chronological order within the text. Some descriptions of reform are more detailed than others—it is clear when Meyer had access to more complete sources and when he was scraping the bottom of the archival barrel—but, in keeping with his grand narrative of triumphant reform following great struggle, Meyer recounts the people and steps involved in reforming convents. As Meyer says in the prologue to Book V, “it is much easier to found a convent peacefully … than it is afterwards to reform and restore one that has fallen from its religious ways” (159). Unfortunately for modern readers, Meyer finished working on the chronicle in 1468, with some additions made in the 1470s, before some of the reform's later triumphs—and also before one of its most spectacular failures, the bitterly contested and ultimately revoked reform at Klingental in Basel, which pitted nuns, their families, and townspeople against each other for two years (for more on this failure, see Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing About Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004], 93–94, 148–51).To modern readers familiar with the Sisterbooks and almost certainly to Meyer's fifteenth-century audiences, the Book of the Reform clearly serves the same two purposes as the history recounted in the Sisterbooks: it is intended both to memorialize past generations of reforming sisters and also to act as a model for subsequent generations of how to live in a community of Dominican nuns. Jones also finds within its pages a salutary lesson for modern historians of medieval women on treating medieval women's talents and capabilities capaciously and generously (2, 25). This translation is a vital step in bringing Meyer, his chronicle, and the women about whom he wrote and to whom he dedicated his life to a much broader audience.

The purpose of this paper is to show the relationship established between women and silence during the Late Middle Ages. Silence itself was valued as a virtue for all the faithful; however it was demanded of every woman as the necessary condition to show honesty and devotion. Moreover, loquacity was considered a natural attribute of women, who, according to moralists, used the word in many negative ways, especially to criticize other women or to convince men to behave wrongly. As a result, the imposition of silence and therefore the restriction of the word – spoken or written – became tools aimed to exercise control over women and to perpetuate the prevailing models of imbalance and inequality between men and women at a time precisely in which female voices were gaining greater authority within some intellectual circles. To this end, we analysed the sermons of one of the most remarkable preachers at the time, saint Vicent Ferrer, since preaching was an effective way of propagation of role models. In addition to this, we studied images such as paintings or book illuminations, which contributed also to spread the ideal of the silent woman, following the example of the Virgin Mary, who barely spoke in the New Testament. Nevertheless, the Holy Mother and other female saints were often represented reading the Bible, which encouraged some women to read and possess Books of Hours or other Prayer Books.

The purpose of this paper is to show the relationship established between women and silence during the Late Middle Ages. Silence itself was valued as a virtue for all the faithful; however it was demanded of every woman as the necessary condition to show honesty and devotion. Moreover, loquacity was considered a natural attribute of women, who, according to moralists, used the word in many negative ways, especially to criticize other women or to convince men to behave wrongly. As a result, the imposition of silence and therefore the restriction of the word – spoken or written – became tools aimed to exercise control over women and to perpetuate the prevailing models of imbalance and inequality between men and women at a time precisely in which female voices were gaining greater authority within some intellectual circles. To this end, we analysed the sermons of one of the most remarkable preachers at the time, saint Vicent Ferrer, since preaching was an effective way of propagation of role models. In addition to this, we studied images such as paintings or book illuminations, which contributed also to spread the ideal of the silent woman, following the example of the Virgin Mary, who barely spoke in the New Testament. Nevertheless, the Holy Mother and other female saints were often represented reading the Bible, which encouraged some women to read and possess Books of Hours or other Prayer Books.

Copenhagen, Arnamagnæan Collection, AM 423 12mo is a private prayer book from the time of the Reformation in Denmark. It is composed of two independent physical parts and contains prayers written by six different people. According to an inscription at the back of the book, it belonged to the noble woman Maren Lauridsdatter Løvenbalk to Tjele (d. 24 October 1554). The owner’s name also appears in a prayer of commitment to God, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin Mary and in a prayer of intercession to the mother of God. In this first part of the book, several pages were later crossed out. These include prayers to the Virgin Mary, Saint Anne, and the holy helper Saint Erasmus. Among other prayers in the second part of the book, a version of the seven Old Testament penitential psalms has been copied from a printed prayer book from 1531. Marine Lauridsdatter’s prayer book represents a personal private prayer book tradition that lived alongside and in interaction with the printed, institutionalised prayer book. The omission of prayers to the Virgin Mary and saints, which the Lutheran church prescribed, is only partially realised, and material that was traditionally part of Catholic prayer books is included.