Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ

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.