The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text

Abstract

Sargent, Michael G, ed. Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Lite of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2004. Pp. xxxvii, 280. Anyone editing what is believed to be the most important book in latemedieval England addresses two authences, as Sargent explains in his foreword. One group of readers comprises research-oriented academics, and the second consists of all persons interested in the text itself and its spirituality as expressed in the editor's flawless modern prose style. Sargent's introduction (sixteen pages) is very valuable, because it elucidates the complex circumstances of Love's creation. At a time when Bibles in the vernacular were few and slow in coming, this text was one of the best-read spiritual sources on the life of Christ, meditations like the Franciscan Meditationes Vitae Christi (fourteenth century - henceforth MVQ, which Sargent translated. The Meditationes comprised devotions according to the gospel narratives, included apocryphal episodes, and the basic doctrines of Christianity. Containing, for example, the dual presentation of Christ's nailing to the cross (upright or tacente cruce), the MFC influenced the iconography as well as the passion mysteries. The various translations of the MVC text into the European vernaculars, estimated by Love to be one hundred, introduced yet more apocryphal elements, but many of these versions brought only the passion sequences. The modern English translation is faithful to the original MVC: Isa Ragusa and Rosalie Green, Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Elustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961). The MVC sequence can be read as distributed to the feasts of the ecclesiastical year or over the course of a week. This reviewer edited a French text (in at least twenty-three manuscripts) , commissioned by Isabeau de Baviere, Queen of France, in 1398 (see incipits), a tract which influenced the mystery plays of Arnoul Greban and Jean Michel, who adopted such details as Lazarus's report from Hell and Mary's conversation with Christ before his death (where she asks the famous four questions: see Jean-Pierre Bordier, Les quatre requetes de Notre Dame, in Bordier, ed. L'economie du dialogue dans l'ancien theâtre europeen [Paris: Champion, 1999]: 187-210; and Edelgard E. DuBruck, La Passion Lsabeau: une edition du manuscrit fr. 966 de la Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris [New York: Peter Lang, 1990]). In viewing the manuscripts, some of which have beautiful miniatures (for example, Peniarth 482 from Aberystwyth's Library of Wales), DuBruck found still other similar texts, some not yet catalogued, most in the immediate vicinity of Paris. The Passion Lsabeau starts fifteen days before Christ's death and resurrection (which is not included), when Lazarus was resuscitated; the text treats the events of Holy Week, i.e., chs. 66 to 84 of the MVC. Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life was penned in the first decade of the fifteenth century; the author (translator) was Prior of the Carthusian House of the Assumption of Our Lady in Mount Grace, Yorkshire, and died in 1424. Sargent explains the differences between Carthusians and Franciscans, variations of intent which distinguish the Mirror from the MVC and its continental translations. …