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Around the year 840, Liutbirga, the adopted daughter of a noble Saxon widow, asked to be walled into a cell in a church at one of the family’s cloisters for religious women. She spent the last thirty years of her life in her cell, doing penance for her sins, fending off attacks by the devil, and instructing women in religion and handiwork through its one small window. Hathumoda, the daughter of a noble Saxon couple whose progeny would establish the first German empire, became abbess of a similar community of women when she was twelve years old. She too spent the rest of her life there, dying at the age of thirty-four in the course of an epidemic that swept across northwestern Europe. In spite of their confinement, both women made so great an impression on those who knew them that substantial biographies appeared within a few years of their deaths.
In the growing field of early medieval texts in translation, this book presents the first full English translations of the Lives of Liutbirga of Wendhausen, the first anchoress in Saxony, and Hathumoda, the first abbess of Gandersheim. The introduction and notes tell the story of the remarkable survival and transmission of the Lives and describe the ninth-century Saxon world that produced them and their authors.
Although praised by their biographers for their holiness, Liutbirga and Hathumoda are not presented primarily as wonder-working saints, but as real flesh-and-blood women, pursuing sanctity in a world driven by family and ecclesiastical politics as much as spirituality. Histories of the women’s families as well as memorials to their heroines, the Lives of Liutbirga and Hathumoda shed new light on a vibrant corner of Christian Europe in the century after Charlemagne.
The two historical works are important for the study of women’s spirituality in the Middle Ages. They are important for the life of canonesses and medieval family monasticism. These two works are important because of the transition of Saxon culture to Frankish culture and life. Finally, the two Lives move us from religious life to social transformation.
—Cyprian Davis, American Benedictine Review
Frederick S. Paxton is Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History at Connecticut College. He is the author of several works, including The Cluniac Death Ritual in the Central Middle Ages (forthcoming) and Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe.
The romantic tale of Peter Abelard and Heloise has been widely known for centuries. The legend relates in part to the letters exchanged between the two, years after Abelard had been castrated at the behest of Heloise’s vindictive uncle, Fulbert.
These “personal” letters form the basis for bestselling compilations of works by Abelard and Heloise in translation, such as the recently revised Penguin The Letters of Abelard and Heloise or the new Hackett Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings. They hold fascination for the light they shed on the relationship between the man and woman, as teacher and student, lovers, husband and wife, monk and nun, abbot and mother superior, and much more.
The popularity of the “personal” letters has generated considerable fanfare for the publication of another set of correspondence printed under the title The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard. The authorship of all these letters has been contested repeatedly, with the last-mentioned collection being the center of a present firestorm.
Generally ignored have been nearly a dozen other letters or letter-like texts, unassailably the work of Peter Abelard. Jan M. Ziolkowski’s comprehensive and learned translation of these texts affords insight into Abelard’s thinking over a much longer sweep of time and offers snapshots of the great twelfth-century philosopher and theologian in a variety of contexts. One group shows him engaging with Heloise and nuns of the Paraclete, another with Bernard of Clairvaux, and a third with four entirely different addressees on four entirely different topics. Broadening our panorama of the twelfth-century Renaissance, the picture presented by these texts complements, complicates, and enriches Abelard's autobiographical letter of consolation and his personal letters to Heloise.
No comparable book brings together this entire range of materials. Ziolkowski’s book is an impressive addition to Abelardian scholarship and will be welcomed enthusiastically.
—Peter Dronke, professor emeritus, University of Cambridge
Jan M. Ziolkowski is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin at Harvard University and director of Dumbarton Oaks. His publications include thirteen books, nearly one hundred articles and essays, and more than fifty book reviews. The books encompass critical editions of Medieval Latin texts (such as The Cambridge Songs; Jezebel: A Norman Latin Poem of the Early Eleventh Century; and two of poetry by Nigel of Canterbury), as well as literary histories such as Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex and Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry.
Introducing modern readers to the riches of preaching in later medieval England, distinguished scholar Siegfried Wenzel offers translations of twenty-five Latin sermons written between 1350 and 1450. These carefully selected and previously untranslated sermons demonstrate how preachers constructed them and shaped them to their own purposes. The sermons provide representative examples of preaching through the Church year from Advent to the Sundays after Easter; also included are sermons for saints and pieces preached on such special occasions as funerals, convocations, visitations, professions, and academic lectures.
Taken together, the sermons provide a view of the wide variety of styles and rhetorical appeals that were used by well-known medieval preachers, such as FitzRalph, Brinton, Wyclif, Repingdon, Felton, Mirk, Philip, and Dygon; a number of anonymous sermons are included as well. All but one (Mirk) have been preserved in Latin and are translated here for the first time into modern English.
The book also contains a general introduction and short historical notes on the individual selections. Besides attracting the attention of students of preaching and of Western Church history, the material will be of great interest to medieval historians and to students of Middle-English literature, especially of Chaucer, the Pearl-Poet, Langland, fifteenth-century drama, and the lyric.
These sermons are difficult to acquire, often hard to translate, and very hard to teach. Wenzel’s collection will go a long way toward enhancing the classroom experience of many teachers and students. Wenzel is a superb translator. The texts are a pleasure to read, written in a light, accessible style that flows beautifully.
—Maura Nolan, University of California, Berkeley
Siegfried Wenzel, a longtime professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is author or editor of ten books and numerous articles. He received the Medieval Academy of America’s prestigious Charles Homer Haskins Medal for his contributions to medieval literature and religion.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."