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>Today (Friday after 2nd Sunday after Pentectost) is the feast of the Sacred
>Heart.
>
>This devotion received its theological formulation in the 18th century and
>has been
>popular ever since.  Nevertheless it has its roots in the Middle Ages,
>particularly
>in two treatises of St Bonaventure, 'Vitis mystica' (formerly attributed to
>St Bernard) and 'De ligno vitae' - The tree of life.
>
>An extract from the latter is included in the Office of Readings in the
>Breviary, for today.  It can also be found in the Classics of Western
>spirituality Volume of Bonaventure (trans. Ewert Cousins, Paulist Press, New
>York/Ramsey/Toronto 1978).
>See especially the section "Jesus Pierced with a Lance" beginning on p.154.
>
Members may be interested to know of a book that refers to this devotion,
and which I reviewed in the last issue of _Medieval Yorkshire_. Details
follow:

John Block Friedman, Northern English Books, Owners, and Makers in the Late
Middle Ages. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995. 23 x 15 cm,
pp.xxviii + 423, numerous illustrations.

This may be another example of a book not so well known in Yorkshire as it
deserves to be, and it complements admirably Jonathan Hughes' _Pastors and
Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire_ reviewed
in this journal last year. Friedman already had an international reputation
for dealing with themes of a pan-European scope: the Orpheus legend, and
the tradition of the exotic races widely believed to exist in farflung
parts of the world. But here he has turned his attention to a regional
study which is important for redressing some of the imbalance often
observed in studies of English manuscripts, an imbalance that has also
extended to cultural attitudes towards the north of England even among
supposedly objective scholars. The region he covers includes Durham and
Northumberland, but largely concerns Yorkshire.

There are six chapters which may be grouped to form three major sections:
Northern Book-owning Men and Women; Images of Popular Piety in the North;
and Three Northern Magnates as Book Patrons. The first section looks at
evidence from wills and extant manuscripts, as well as examining in detail
what can be recovered about northern professional scribes and scribe
families, and submitting some individual manuscripts to a detailed analysis
of modes of production, styles of writing, and in particular the wealth of
decoration and illumination. Friedman finds distinctive use of colours and
recurring motifs which mark these manuscripts out as evidence of a regional
taste, different from but not inferior to those found elsewhere.

The second section represents an enquiry into the religious sensibilities
of the region, acting as a useful comparator alongside similar studies of
other areas of the country. Of course, through the medium of the universal
church all regions shared common devotional ideas and practices, but there
are local preferences just as there are local saints. Friedman sets out to
identify the northern preferences, intelligently correlating the manuscript
evidence with represen-tations in other media such as sculpture and stained
glass. He finds a special devotion to  the life and passion of Christ, in
particular through images of the Holy Face, *the Sacred Heart*, the
instruments of the passion presented heraldically, and representations of
the Trinity. There is also extensive promotion of the heremitic life.
(These deeply entrenched images, and the policy of instruction of the laity
by a programme of vernacular works, may explain the later resistance of the
North to giving up the old religion at the time of the Reformation.)

The third section focusses on three magnates as book patrons: John Newton,
Thomas Langley and Thomas Rotherham. All three became wealthy and high
officials  of  the  church, with  personal  libraries, and  were  well
known  for their educational endowments taking the form of both colleges
and books. Friedman then appends a most impressive list of 236 extant
manuscripts of Northern provenance which he has been able to identify, many
of them widely dispersed throughout European libraries. Finally, not the
least important part of this work-about one third of the whole-is taken up
by the extensive and detailed notes and a bibliography.

This is a most impressive book, and constitutes a valuable contribution to
the picture scholars in recent years have begun to assemble of the
complexity and richness of the religious life of the north of England in
the late Middle Ages. Chaucer, from his southern perspective, may not have
represented the two northern scholars in the Reeve's Tale so
unsympathetically if he had been aware of that richness of the cultural
background from which they came.

Brian Donaghey




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