This innovative study investigates the reception of medieval manuscripts over a long century, 1470–1585, spanning the reigns of Edward IV to Elizabeth I. Members of the Tudor gentry family who owned these manuscripts had properties in Willesden and professional affiliations in London. These men marked the leaves of their books with signs of use, allowing their engagement with the texts contained there to be reconstructed. Through detailed research, Margaret Connolly reveals the various uses of these old books: as a repository for family records; as a place to preserve other texts of a favourite or important nature; as a source of practical information for the household; and as a professional manual for the practising lawyer. Investigation of these family-owned books reveals an unexpectedly strong interest in works of the past, and the continuing intellectual and domestic importance of medieval manuscripts in an age of print.

Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books : Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an increasing interest in the medical and psychological understanding of the emotions, not only regarding their nature and origin, but also their physiological and psychological impacts. Fear is usually seen in negative terms, as provoking illness. Yet, in advanced theological and religious texts, fear sheds this negative association to become a tool for healing the soul. This essay will explore the therapeutic function of fear. It will begin by analysing the theology of fear, and the nature of sin, before moving to consider how texts from the period understood dread as having a medical potential. Finally, it will consider a text deeply concerned with evoking the ‘medecynes’ of dread: The Prickynge of Love.

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Dreadful Health: Fear and ‘Sowle-hele’ in The Prickynge of Love

Summary List of Contents of the Manuscripts Owned by the Roberts Family

Devotional Reading in the Reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I

abstract:The aim of this article is to introduce an anonymous late fifteenth-century treatise of religious guidance, A Little Treatise Against Fleshly Affections. Presently edited for the first time from London, British Library, MS Royal 17 C xviii, this short Middle English treatise was devised as a tool of diagnosis, prevention, and cure for individuals troubled by feelings of inordinate carnal love. Alongside the text itself and formal editorial considerations, the present edition offers a discussion of the treatise's textual relationship with David of Augsburg's De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione and its potential origin and relation to Syon Abbey, as well as its intended audiences.

Gerald Raymond Morgan

Papers

A critical edition of Caxton's The art and craft to know well to die and Ars moriendi together with the antecedent manuscript material