This is a documentary edition of Abraham Flemings 1581 devotional handbook, The Diamond of Deuotion, Cut and squared into sixe seuerall points. Protestant devotional manuals were an important part of the daily religious practices of the literate Elizabethan laity, though their place in literary history often goes ignored in Renaissance studies today. Few, if any, scholarly editions of early modern devotional handbooks have been produced and while general surveys and studies exist, there remains a tremendous amount of work to be done in this field before a thorough view of their significance can be attained. Despite his many contributions to the Elizabethan printing and bookselling industry, Abraham Fleming, too, has received less than his deserved share of critical attention. Featuring "manie fruitfull lessons, auaileable to the leading of a godlie and reformed life," and drawing on a variety of educational and literary devices, The Diamond of Deuotion is demonstrative of some of the most interesting and prevalent social and spiritual forces of the day. I have included in this edition a general introduction, discussing the genre of devotional handbooks in the early modern era, the life and works of Abraham Fleming, and the social and religious context of The Diamond. I have assembled and transcribed a complete text of the 1581 Diamond and have included explanatory annotation to clarify and describe for the modern reader obscure vocabulary and historical events, and, where possible, have documented sources for the material.

This is a documentary edition of Abraham Flemings 1581 devotional handbook, The Diamond of Deuotion, Cut and squared into sixe seuerall points. Protestant devotional manuals were an important part of the daily religious practices of the literate Elizabethan laity, though their place in literary history often goes ignored in Renaissance studies today. Few, if any, scholarly editions of early modern devotional handbooks have been produced and while general surveys and studies exist, there remains a tremendous amount of work to be done in this field before a thorough view of their significance can be attained. Despite his many contributions to the Elizabethan printing and bookselling industry, Abraham Fleming, too, has received less than his deserved share of critical attention. Featuring "manie fruitfull lessons, auaileable to the leading of a godlie and reformed life," and drawing on a variety of educational and literary devices, The Diamond of Deuotion is demonstrative of some of the most interesting and prevalent social and spiritual forces of the day. I have included in this edition a general introduction, discussing the genre of devotional handbooks in the early modern era, the life and works of Abraham Fleming, and the social and religious context of The Diamond. I have assembled and transcribed a complete text of the 1581 Diamond and have included explanatory annotation to clarify and describe for the modern reader obscure vocabulary and historical events, and, where possible, have documented sources for the material.

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Thesis (D. Min.)--Western Seminary, Portland, OR, 2001. / Abstract. Includes "A three-year daily Bible reading guidebook, 1998-2000" in Chinese. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 385-387).

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Thesis (D. Min.)--Ashland Theological Seminary, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 296-298).

In his encyclopaedic work On the Properties of Things, John Trevisa describes water as 'able'. Water is an element which has no determinate properties of its own but which takes up properties from its surroundings and, at the same time, enacts change on those surroundings. This thesis argues that the inherent flexibility or 'ableness' of water, which Trevisa and other encyclopaedic writers identify, is crucial to late-medieval understanding of the element and, in turn, informs its use in a variety of religious writings. The multivalent potential of water enables devotional writers to use references to the element to symbolise and articulate access to God whilst they simultaneously deploy it as a metaphorical limiting agent that can regulate this access. Although there has been some critical attention paid to certain kinds of water in late medieval devotional prose, this thesis contains the first holistic study of various manifestations of water. It considers the material and historical realities of water in the Middle Ages as well as representations of water in different literary genres and demonstrates the 'ableness' of water within them. These findings are then used to shed light on a specific genre: spiritual guides authored by men and addressed to women, from the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. The thesis identifies a literary language of water in late medieval devotional prose - a complex and recurrent set of images that authors draw upon to explicate Christian doctrine and portray different aspects of religious life. These images provide the organisational structure of the thesis. Three significant tropes of water are considered in light of its 'ableness': the imagined and encouraged relationship between water and the body in spiritual guidance, the importance of laundering the soul in such works, and the relationship between blood and water in Passion meditations.

This dissertation is a study of spatial allegorical representations of inwardness in late medieval devotional texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, with a focus on the topos of the garden of the contemplation of the Passion as a landscape of the heart. These representations of the self do not follow the temporal logic of autobiography but are instead organized around matrix spaces: architectures or gardens of inwardness. Named by Beaujour in opposition to life-narratives, these miroirs d’encre or literary self-portraits rely on topoï to express the most intimate contours of the individual. The first part of this dissertation considers how identity is negotiated with respect to the devotional norm in two private devotional exercises penned by cultured aristocrats. The abject vision of the penitential self in Henry of Lancaster’s Livre des Seyntz Medicines is rooted in the requirement to describe a deep self ontologically opaque to consciousness, while in René d’Anjou’s Mortifiement de Vaine Plaisance, the sinfulness lodged in the heart is considered through the lens of an anthropology focused on affect. Because of their intertextual nature, locative tropes of interiority constitute an arena in which the individual constitutes himself in relation to foundational texts. Topical representations of the self borrow their form from the setting of a particular text or reference an entire textual tradition, inviting the question of the role of reading practices in self formation. The second part of this dissertation focuses on reading as a spiritual exercise, considering how the literary setting of the Roman de la Rose came to be associated to a devotional representation of the self in the late Middle Ages. In response to the debates on language and allegoresis unfurling in the Quarrel of the Rose, Pierre d’Ailly transforms its garden into an inner Jardin Amoureux de l’Ame Devote, subjecting the infamous secular text to a reading inspired by devotional meditative reading practices. Later on, Jehan Henri mobilizes the topography of the Rose to describe the collective identity of reformed nuns in a series of texts promoting the agenda of monastic reformation ( Le Livre de réformation utile et profitable pour toutes religieuses, Livre de la vie active and the Jardin de Contemplation). Finally, Molinet’s Roman de la Rose Moralisé proposes a spiritual reading of the Rose that testifies to a paradigm shift in the status of secular literature under the influence of devotional reading modes, and which, like Pierre d’Ailly, assimilates the setting of the Rose to an inner garden of the contemplation of the Passion. No longer an innocuous pastime, literature comes to carry high societal stakes because of being invested with a definite role in self-fashioning. The race for controlling the meaning of foundational texts leads to the proliferation of late medieval literary quarrels. An edition of Jehan Henri’s Jardin de Contemplation is provided in the appendix.