Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text(Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies)

Nicholas Love's "Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ" is an important work of late medieval English vernacular theology, and is made available here in a fully critical modern edition, including notes and glossary. The volume is not merely a revision of Michael Sargent's 1992 Garland best-text edition, now out of print, but a new and completely critical edition that uses the Garland volume only as its starting-point. Although based on the same manuscript, and containing much of the same introductory material, this edition includes the results of a complete collation of the 71 known surviving manuscripts and early prints. This collation demonstrates that the text exists in two separate authorial versions, of which the first, which incorporated a separate, independent translation of the Passion section, may not in the first instance have included the "Treatise on the Sacrament". The second version, on which the edition is based, is an authorial revision, undertaken, perhaps, after Love had met with Archbishop Arundel for approval of his text. The introduction discusses the evidence for the process of composition of the text, and places Love's "Mirror", properly, at the centre of current scholarly discussion of the development of vernacular theology in late medieval England and the consequences of Arundel's anti-Lollard Lambeth Constitutions.

Table of Contents:
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION THE TEXT OF THIS EDITION SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY LIST OF MANUSCRIPTS AND EARLY PRINTS TABLE OF AFFILIATIONS PLATES TEXT: Table of Contents "Attende" Note and "Memorandum" Proem Die Lune [Monday] Die Martis [Tuesday] Die Mercurij [Wednesday] Die Jouis [Thursday] Die Veneris [Friday] Die Sabbati [Saturday] Die Dominica [Sunday] De Sacramento [Treatise on the Sacrament] EXPLANATORY NOTES SELECT GLOSSARY

About the Author :
Michael Sargent is Professor in the Department of English, Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has published a number of books, including De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England (Boydell & Brewer, 1989) and Nicholas Love at Waseda (Boydell & Brewer, 1997).

Review :
It is a most readable text, and Professor Sargent has given us back something of real worth. M.G S. is to be warmly commended on this fine edition of a major treatise in the vernacular and his book is a welcome addition to the devotional literature of the early 15th century. The publishers have been generous in their provision of space, and the book is well sized, produced on good-quality paper, with eleven plates (seven colour) which allow a snapshot of the manuscripts."...this will be the definitive edition of Love's text; Sargent's editorial labours have endowed it with a scholarly authority for the twenty-first century matching the ecclesiastical authority it enjoyed in the fifteenth. Michael G. Sargent has produced two editions of Nicholas Love's The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ:.. Sargent's introduction (sixteen pages) is very valuable, because it elucidates the complex circumstances of Love's creation."We believe that all university libraries should obtain a copy of this work.