Preface

Summary

In his 2013 essay on ‘fatherless books’, Vincent quotes Thomas Gascoigne's account of Reginald Pecock's defence at his 1457 trial for heresy, that he wished to be answerable only for books he had written in the last three years. Aside from the idea of writing ‘books’ in that time period, this is a plea with which almost any modern academic could sympathize. Not Vincent though. His huge corpus (of writings), scattered across journals and decades, consistently shows vast knowledge, understanding, and literary sensitivity, whatever the subject under his eye. When a collection of his most important essays was made newly accessible in the volume Looking in Holy Books, he might have recalled Richard Whitford's explanation for printing his twenty-year-old treatise in 1537: ‘And nowe of late I haue been compelled […] to wryte it agayne & agayne. And bycause that wrytynge vnto me is very tedyouse I thought better to put it in print.’ Sending out multiple offprints is no doubt less tiring than copying the whole thing out again (especially if the thing is A dayly exercise and experience of dethe), but the long list of Vincent's publications shows how he has haunted and shaped the field, setting the agenda with a self-effacing modesty (‘This is a very simple argument’).

This volume begins with the thirteenth century, that great age of pastoral expansion, religious educational programmes, and the first real efflorescence of vernacular religious writings: in many ways, the ground for Vincent's earliest work on pastoral manuals and vernacular miscellanies. Annie Sutherland examines a resonant image in Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde, of Christ's birth taking place in a ‘house without walls’. She traces and elaborates the literal, descriptive aspects of this image – illuminating a continuity in communal, roadside life from the first-century Middle East to thirteenth-century England – and considers its implications for anchoritic readers, whose lives are seemingly defined by walls, but whose apotheosis of spiritual attainment renders all walls immaterial.

Nicholas Watson takes on the vastly influential Mirror of Holy Church of Edmund of Abingdon, arguing for its composition a decade later, and for a different audience, than is elsewhere suggested. In locating the Mirror in the context of the Salisbury canons, Watson uncovers newly available implications in the work's emphases and omissions.