Die Entstehung von Johann Michael Moscheroschs Insomnis Cura Parentum (1643)

ZusammenfassungThe paper explores the multi-stage process of translation that enabled German writer Johann Michael Moscherosch to refer to the perusal of Elizabeth Jocelyn’s conduct book The Mothers Legacy to her Vnborn Childe as one of the main factors in his decision to write his own devotional book, Insomnis Cura Parentum (1643). It is argued that Moscherosch himself did not translate The Mothers Legacy from the French, but rather read it in an already existing German translation based on a French version. In addition to tracing back the ways in which The Mothers Legacy, as a result of small changes in both translations, became more compatible with the Strasbourg-specific rendition of Lutheranism that largely shaped Moscherosch’s religious views and therefore his parenting, the paper aims to show how aspects of religious confession, regional politics, and the book trade were crucial in the reception of seventeeth-century devotional writing.

Early Modern Protestant Listicles: God’s ‘Done’ and George Herbert’s ‘To Do’ Lists

Protestant devotional writing from the turn of the seventeenth century uses the list to appeal to the reason, the emotions, and the will. Though as common a device as the dialogue, meditation, catechism, or homily, the list mostly goes unnoticed because of its humble pragmatism. This article looks first at the affordances of the list per se, then at how the period’s devotional writing characteristically entices readers with lists to argue, meditate, and act. Finally, the article argues that George Herbert’s The Temple (1633) uses the list to bring out the opportunities and comedy in the solifidian paradox.

Meditating Death in Medieval and Early Modern Devotional Writing

Meditating about death and the afterlife was one of the most important techniques that Christian societies in medieval and early modern Europe had at their disposal for developing a sense of individual selfhood. Believers who regularly and systematically reflected on the inevitability of death and the certainty of eternal punishment in hell or reward in heaven would acquire an understanding of themselves as unique persons defined by their moral actions; they would also learn to discipline themselves by feeling remorse for their sins, doing penance, and cultivating a permanent vigilance over their future thoughts and deeds. The book covers a crucial period in the formation and transformation of the technique of meditating on death: from the thirteenth century, when a practice that had mainly been the preserve of a monastic elite began to be more widely disseminated among all segments of Christian society, to the sixteenth, when the Protestant Reformation transformed the technique of spiritual exercise into a Bible-based mindfulness that avoided the stigma of works piety. The book discusses the textual instructions for meditation as well as the theories and beliefs and doctrines that lay behind them; the sources are Latin and vernacular and enjoyed widespread circulation in Roman Christian and Protestant Europe during the period under consideration.

Debating early modern and modern memory: Cultural forms and effects: a critical retrospective

This discussion focuses upon the ways in which early modern and modern cultural debate examines memory both in terms of its functions and nature as human faculty and of its effects as a cultural phenomenon. It seeks to uncover some of the striking synergies as well as the contrary motions in the vigorous cultural debates surrounding the reflex to remember and its implications for various target audiences. Of particular interest will be the ways in which memory was and is pressed into service to forge critical narratives of origin and belonging at both a personal and collective level, notably with reference to Shakespeare’s history plays. Discussion ranges across a number of early modern textual genres (e.g. correspondence, drama, epic poetry, historiography, devotional writing) to probe the prevailing cultural expectations surrounding the exercise of recollection and the consequences of the failure to perform such duties.

Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader

Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world. After twenty years, Kempe began to compose with the help of scribes a book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to find spiritual comfort and how to feel about one's spiritual life. This book shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement. An unlikely candidate for authorship in the late medieval period given her gender and lack of formal education, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. This book shows how the Book reinterprets concepts from late medieval devotional writing (comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness) in its search to create a spiritual community that reaches out to and includes Kempe, her friends, family, advisers, and potential readers. It offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe's particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women's authorship.