Texts and Sources – serie

This bilingual edition of the Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (1625) makes available for the first time to English readers a seminal treatise of Reformed Scholasticism. Composed by four professors of Leiden University (Johannes Polyander, Andreas Rivetus, Antonius Walaeus, and Anthonius Thysius) , it gives an exhaustive yet concise presentation of Reformed theology as it was conceived in the first decades of the seventeenth century. From a decidedly Reformed perspective, the Christian doctrine is defined in contrast with alternative or opposite views (Catholic, Spiritualist, Arminian, Socinian). Both on the academic level and on the ecclesiastical level, the Synopsis responds to challenges coming from the immediate context of the early seventeenth century. The disputations of this first volume cover topics such as Scripture, doctrine of God, Trinity, creation, sin, Law and Gospel.Volume One was published in 2014, Volume Two came out in 2016. Volume Three, the final volume, is expected late 2019.

Contrary to an old thesis, the dawning of the Reformation was not the end of Christian Aristotelianism. Rather, Protestants were again faced with the traditional question of the relationship between theology and philosophy. Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562) counts as one of the authors who endeavored to interpret Aristotelian philosophy before the backdrop of Reformed theology. In addition to numerous exegetical and theological writings, this well respected theologian left behind a commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which is edited in the present volume. It not only evidences Vermigli’s intense engagement with the source material but also his struggle for an adequate understanding of the relationship between Aristotelian ethics and Protestant theology.Entgegen einer althergebrachten These bedeutete der Durchbruch der Reformation nicht das Ende des christlichen Aristotelismus. Vielmehr stellte sich für Protestanten die traditionelle Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Theologie und Philosophie wieder neu. Zu den Autoren, die sich um eine Deutung aristotelischer Philosophie vor dem Hintergrund reformierter Theologie bemühten, zählt Petrus Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562). Neben zahlreichen exegetischen und kontroverstheologischen Schriften hinterließ dieser zu seiner Zeit hochgeachtete Theologe auch einen Kommentar zur Nikomachischen Ethik des Aristoteles. Dieser Kommentar, welcher im vorliegenden Band in historisch-kritischer Edition herausgegeben wird, belegt nicht nur Vermiglis intensive Auseinandersetzung mit dem Quellentext, sondern auch sein Ringen um eine adäquate Verhältnisbestimmung von aristotelischer Ethik und protestantischer Theologie.

In Zinoviy Otenskiy and the Trinitarian Controversy, Viacheslav V. Lytvynenko and Mikhail V. Shpakovskiy offer the first English edition of two major Slavic works written by the eminent Russian theologian Zinoviy Otenskiy (d. 1571/2). The selected texts represent our chief source on the Trinitarian controversy in sixteenth-century Russia and reveal Zinoviy as a man of profound theological thinking and Biblical exegesis.The authors provide a detailed and welcome overview of the history of the Trinitarian controversy and the role that Zinoviy played in it. The readers will find here a comprehensive discussion of the issues related to the history of the edited texts, Zinoviy's sources, and his doctrines of the Trinity, Christ, and salvation.

This book is the first complete and thoroughly commented English translation of Johannes Reuchlin’s Augenspiegel (1511). The translation sheds light on the author’s motive in appealing to the authorities for the preservation of Jewish books at a stage of great cultural change in Early Modern Europe. It also addresses the question of how the church and state dealt intellectually with Judaism at a time when it was considered a threat to the existence of Christianity. The translation of one of the most politically controversial sixteenth century pamphlets provides a view of the treatment of a minority’s culture with perhaps lessons for today’s world.

Best known for his two chronicles, the Roman de Brut and the Roman de Rou, Wace, one of the great pioneers of twelfth-century French writing, is also the author of three hagiographical works: the Conception Nostre Dame and the Lives of St Margaret and St Nicholas. The Conception is the first vernacular work to focus on the life of the Virgin Mary. Emphasising Margaret's concern for women in labour, the Margaret seemingly contributed to the saint's broad popularity. The Nicholas, with its many miracles involving children, equally played a key role in popularising its protagonist's cult. The present volume brings these works together for the first time and provides the original texts, the first translations into English, notes and substantial introductions.

The Contemplacioun of Synnaris, by the Observant Franciscan William Touris, written c.1494 and evidently intended for King James IV of Scotland, is a significant and much copied work of Older Scots, although the earliest surviving witness is the English print by Wynkyn de Worde (1499). The Contemplacioun was the very first work of Older Scots literature to be translated and to be printed. The poem’s seven sections comprise a course of meditations for Holy Week. Richard Fox, bishop of Durham, commissioned the English print, in which the stanzas were preceded by Latin sententiae, biblical, medieval and ancient. The work retained sufficient interest to re-emerge in separate versions in both Scotland (1568) and England (1578), drastically revised for Protestant readers.

The commentary of John Colet (1467-1519) on Dionysius the Areopagite’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy adapts a work widely neglected by medieval theologians to the early sixteenth century. Dionysius’s “apostolic” model allowed Colet to set ecclesiastical corruption against the ideas for re-forming the mind as well as the church. The commentary reveals Colet’s fascination with the Kabbalah and re-emergent Galenism, but it subordinates all to harmonizing Dionysius and his supposed teacher, Paul. This first new edition in almost 150 years and first edition of the complete manuscript is edited critically, translated expertly, and provided with an apparatus that advances historical, theological, and rhetorical contexts. It resituates study of Colet by identifying a coherent center for his theology and agenda for reform in Tudor England.

In Catechesis in the Later Middle Ages I: The Exposition of the Lord's Prayer of Jordan of Quedlinburg, OESA (d. 1380)—Introduction, Text, and Translation, E.L. Saak presents the first edition and translation of the Exposition of the Lord's Prayer by the fourteenth-century Augustinian hermit, Jordan of Quedlinburg. This work, the first of six planned volumes of Jordan's Opera Selecta, contributes to our understanding of late medieval catechesis by focusing on a major pillar thereof, namely, the Pater Noster, bringing to light the importance of the Lord's Prayer to late medieval religion and the impact of Jordan's text on later authors, contributing thereby as well to the understanding of the emergence of the Catechism in the Reformation.

In The Revelations of St Birgitta: A Study and Edition of the Birgittine-Norwegian Texts, Swedish National Archives, E 8902, Jonathan Adams offers a detailed analysis of the manuscript and its contents as well as a new edition of this puzzling text. The Birgittine-Norwegian texts are very distinctive from the main Birgittine vernacular corpus of literature and have taxed scholars for decades as to why and for whom they were written.The linguistic study of the manuscript is combined with contextual and historical information in order to reinforce the arguments made and offer explanations within a cultural context. This provides a welcome new dimension to earlier research that has otherwise been pursued to a large degree within a single academic discipline.

The Opus arduum valde is a Latin commentary on the Book of Revelation, written in England by an unknown scholarly author in the years 1389–1390. The book originated from the early Wycliffite movement and reflects its experience of persecution in apocalyptic terms. In England it soon fell into oblivion, but was adopted by radical exponents of the fifteenth-century Bohemian Hussites. In the sixteenth century Luther obtained a copy of the Opus arduum valde which he had printed in Wittenberg with his own preface in 1528. This remarkable document of religious dissent in late medieval Europe, highly regarded in Lollard and Hussite studies, is now for the first time made available in a critical edition.

The sermons here published for the first time are attributed to an otherwise unknown friar referred to simply as Frater Petrus. The collection provides evidence of actual preaching in a normal setting from fourteenth-century Germany, between the beginnings of the Franciscan order and the Observant reform movement, not by a major light of the order, but a regular member who may have held status as an intermediate-level teacher, to judge by the care with which the manuscripts were prepared. Theologically competent and gracefully presented in the conventional sermon style of the period, the collection, edited and translated by Daniel Nodes, offers scholars and students a reliable new resource in an area of sermon studies that is still in short supply.

In Mary Queen of Scots: The First Biography, Ronald Santangeli has recovered a long-forgotten document of great historiographical, literary and cultural importance. Written in 1624 in Neo-Latin by George Con, a young expatriate Scot in Rome, the Vita Mariae Stuartae is worthy of study, both for its content and its literary dimension. The fully recensed Latin text is presented with a meticulous translation into English and a fully-annotated commentary. The image Con creates of the Scottish Queen has prevailed in European cultural representations from poetry and drama to novels, paintings and opera, while Con's own meteoric career highlights the impact on seventeenth-century Catholic Europe by members of the Scottish diaspora. A significant addition to Marian and Scottish Neo-Latin studies.

The 183 letters which Huldrych Zwingli and Johannes Oecolampadius exchanged between 1522 and 1531 are a major resource for students of the Swiss Reformation. They have, however, been largely neglected because they have hitherto been available only in the original Latin. This volume translates them all into modern English, along with explanatory notes and a substantial introduction. The book as a whole proposes and initiates a significant re-assessment of several aspects of early Reformation history, such as the extent of Oecolampadius’s contribution, the precise nature of his relationship with Zwingli, and the strong connections that existed between the reformers of Zürich, Basel and Strasbourg.

"Dass die Mistforke leichter sei als die Schreibfeder und der Schweinestall besser rieche als die Stube der Studenten" – gegen diesen Irrtum kämpft 1525 Jacobus Montanus mit einhundert Musterbriefen an. Seine Schüler sollen sie aus ihrer Muttersprache ins Lateinische übersetzen. Ergänzende Formulierungshilfen aus antiken Autoren bahnen ihnen den Weg zu gelehrter Eloquenz.Obwohl unter Zeitgenossen hoch angesehen, liegt keines der Werke des westfälischen Humanisten in moderner Ausgabe vor. Die ‚Centuria epistolarium formularum‘ / ‚Hundertschaft Briefmuster‘ führt ins Zentrum seines Schaffens. Sie wird hier erstmals in kritischer Ausgabe vorgelegt.Ihre Briefe bieten alltagsnahe Einblicke in die Lebens- und Bildungswelt Westfalens, und ihre Lektüre bereitet oft Vergnügen. Eine moderne Übersetzung erleichtert den Zugang. Ein ausgiebiger Kommentar erschließt sie dem an vormoderner Alltags-, Bildungs- und Regionalgeschichte Interessierten.

This volume contains transcriptions of rolls 1 to 20 (1466–1500) of the 105 (1466–1636) extant rolls of churchwardens’ accounts from the parish of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, London. These financial records, along with assorted memoranda, are filled with information about the church, its operations, and the numerous people who repaired, maintained, and provisioned it. The churchwardens dealt with local problems and kept track of money they believed they were owed. These records not only present very detailed insights into a vanished world, but the resulting evidence augments and challenges existing theories about the fifteenth-century parish.