The Abbaye du Saint Esprit: Spiritual Instruction for Laywomen, 1250-1500 (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts) (Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 21)

"The 'Abbaye du Saint Esprit' was a successful work of vernacular spiritual advice for women, surviving in sixteen manuscripts and a widely copied Middle English translation. Unlike many other didactic religious texts, it offers few prescriptions for behaviour; rather, it instructs the reader to build a convent of virtues in her conscience and uses the allegorical structure of the building and its inhabitants to arrange brief teachings on prayer and virtuous practice. Between its genesis in the last quarter of the thirteenth century to its final development towards the end of the fifteenth, it was reworked several times for new audiences of women both lay and cloistered, bourgeois and aristocratic. The examination of these successive adaptations offers insights into the growth of lay religious culture, the participation of women in new religious movements, and the use and transformation of twelfth and early thirteenth-century monastic formation literature for new audiences. This book also offers, for the first time, editions of all the French versions of the Abbaye and a modern English translation of the earliest version"--Page 4 of cover The Abbaye du Saint Esprit was a successful work of vernacular spiritual advice for women, surviving in sixteen manuscripts and a widely copied Middle English translation. Unlike many other didactic religious texts, it offers few prescriptions for behaviour; rather, it instructs the reader to build a convent of virtues in her conscience and uses the allegorical structure of the building and its inhabitants to arrange brief teachings on prayer and virtuous practice. Between its genesis in the last quarter of the thirteenth century to its final development towards the end of the fifteenth, it was reworked several times for new audiences of women both lay and cloistered, bourgeois and aristocratic. The examination of these successive adaptations offers insights into the growth of lay religious culture, the participation of women in new religious movements, and the use and transformation of twelfth and early thirteenth-century monastic formation literature for new audiences.This book also offers, for the first time, editions of all the French versions of the Abbaye and a modern English translation of the earliest version.-- Provided by publisher Front Matter 1 Introduction 13 Chapter I. The Cloister of the Soulas a Lay Rule of Life 25 Chapter II. The Religion of the Heart 53 Chapter III. A Royal Cloister: The Sainte abbaye 77 Chapter IV. The Miroir des dames Compilation 95 Chapter V. A Franciscan Version: La Religion du benoit saint Esprit 113 Chapter VI. A Devotional Text for Margaret of York: The Abbaye du saint Esprit 125 Conclusion 137 Introduction to the Editions and Translation 143 La religion dou cuer de l’abbaie dou saint Esprit (α1) 149 La sainte abbaye (β1) 171 Le cloistre de l’ame (β2) 177 La religion du benoit saint Esprit (γ) 185 L’abbaye du saint Esperit (α2) 193 Enseignement (δ) 211 Back Matter 213