Overview

The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursueEDin literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of scienceEDbut also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. 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 a 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. This 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. It 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.

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9780198907923

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Working in a rhetorical vein, Mark Chinca brings new precision to another aspect of this enduring, protean componentof faith. * Barbara Newman, Northwestern University, STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER * Mark Chinca has drawn our attention to a fascinating, changing psycho-spiritual medieval and early modern tradition of contemplation... his expansive argument on the development of modes of meditation on the inevitability of death across five centuries and as many languages is indeed a remarkable accomplishment. * Steven Rozenski, The Medieval Review *

Author Information

MARK CHINCA is Professor of Medieval German and Comparative Literature at the University of Cambridge. Author of books and essays on poetics, fiction, and metaphor in medieval writing, he is also co-editor of the digital edition of the Kaiserchronik (2019) and (with Christopher Young) Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages (2022).

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