Mary A. Rouse

Authentic witnesses : approaches to medieval texts and manuscripts

A collection of 13 articles concerned with the study of medieval Latin manuscripts, whose findings are based on philology, palaeography and codicology, rather than on any theoretical grounds.

The Abbey of the Trésor de Notre-Dame: Sixteen Thirteenth-Century Charters (UCLA Library Special Collections, Rouse DOC/XIII/FRA/8)

Medieval records of women’s abbeys appear seldom in print, in comparison with those of their male counterparts. The description and transcription here of sixteen thirteenth-century charters, from a house of Cistercian women, the Tresor de Notre Dame in Upper Normandy, is one small step toward righting the balance.

Santa Barbara’s Thirteenth-Century Paris Bible: A Second Look

Abstract The Santa Barbara Bible (University of California, Santa Barbara, University Library MS BS 75 1250) was first introduced to scholarship in 1971 by Santa Barbara professor Larry Ayres. In the years since that pioneering study, art historians have advanced our knowledge of the place and date of the Bible’s production. Adding to that an understanding of commercial manuscript production in thirteenth-century Paris, the present article comes as close to clarifying the creation of this lovely book as current evidence allows.

Eloi’s Books and Their Bookcase

Audoin’s seventh-century Life of St. Eloi tells us a great deal about the place of books and reading in Merovingian monastic spirituality. The importance of reading to Eloi’s own personal style of asceticism can scarcely be overemphasized, and his providing of books to his monastic foundations is characteristic. His friend and biographer Audoin affords us an intimate glimpse into the saint’s bedroom-study, where he spent his nights alternately praying and reading, consulting the books on the revolving bookcase built perhaps by his hands.

Prudence, Mother of Virtues: The Chapelet des vertus and Christine de Pizan

The fourteenth-century treatise called the Chapelet des vertus survives in fourteen manuscripts and sixteen printed editions, including seven incunables. Descended from an earlier French treatise, the Fleurs de toutes vertus, which in turn was descended from a still earlier Italian treatise, the Fiore di virtu, the derivative Chapelet was the form in which later medieval France knew this material. A simple collection of philosophical, patristic, and biblical quotations arranged topically by the individual virtues and vices, it circulated among members of the royal family and important courtiers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Chapelet des vertus achieved its greatest impact, however, through its use by the French poet and essayist Christine de Pizan in the composition of her Epistre Othea. She was perhaps drawn to it by the Chapelet’s emphasis on prudence, a favorite theme of Christine’s. Her clever manipulation of this resource reveals an aspect of Christine’s scholarly methods previously u...

The Franciscans and Books: Lollard Accusations and The Franciscan Response 1

The Middle Ages provide us with a number of theoretical statements about the value of books and libraries to learning and society. They range from brief proverbs—’A monastery without books is like a castle without soldiers’—to full-length treatises such as Richard de Bury’s Philobiblon . What we want to examine here is a series of statements regarding the practical value of access to books and libraries that form part of the litany of criticism aimed at the friars at the end of the fourteenth century, and the formal response of the Oxford Franciscans to these.