Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is a particularly important work of late medieval English vernacular theology: it is seen as a landmark in the history of the official campaign to control lay access to vernacular paramystical texts. It is made available here for the first time in a critical modern paperback edition, complete with a short introduction, explanatory notes and a glossary. The volume is not merely a revision of Michael Sargent’s 1992 Garland best-text edition, now out of print, but a new full critical edition that uses the Garland volume only as its starting-point. Although based on the same manuscript, this new edition includes the results of a complete collation of the 71 known surviving manuscripts and early prints.Nicholas Love’s Mirror was a Middle English translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi. The Latin text, probably written at the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth, was a popular book of devotions on the events of the life and passion of Christ characteristic of late-medieval Franciscan spirituality. The Introduction places Love's Mirror, properly, at the centre of current scholarly discussion of the development of vernacular theology in late medieval England.
Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is a particularly important work of late medieval English vernacular theology: it is seen as a landmark in the history of the official campaign to control lay access to vernacular paramystical texts.
