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This article investigates a series of additions made to JRL Gaster MS 2037, a newly identified copy of Peter of Poitier‘s Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi. Following a detailed description and dating of the manuscript, it investigates two sets of additions to the roll in depth. It establishes that the first motive behind the inclusion of such additions was educative – serving to extend the historic information given in the Compendium, while the second motive was devotional – elevating the status of the Virgin Mary through the enhancement of her genealogical record. Given the fact that the manuscript was produced in the mid-fifteenth century, this focus on the Virgin likely had a polemic purpose, situating the manuscript in the context of debates over the Immaculate Conception, and using Alexander Nequams Expositio super Cantica canticorumto this end. In identifying the sources used, as well as the limits on the compiler imposed by the physical form of the roll, this examination of Gaster MS 2037 offers an insight into the later reception of this popular text.
The beautiful Latin MS 198 of the John Rylands Library preserves one of two currently known manuscript copies of the Servite Lorenzo Opimo of Bologna’s Scriptum on the Sentences, the only such text by a Servite that survives. In 1494, the Chapter General of the Servite Order made Lorenzo the order’s teaching doctor, since the representatives declared that his work, primarily his questions on the Sentences, would be required reading for Servite students and masters of theology. No doubt as a result, Lorenzo’s Scriptum was printed in Venice in 1532. To most medieval intellectual historians, the printing, the author, and even the religious order are virtually unknown. This two-part article puts this unique text in its doctrinal and institutional context. Part I argues that Lorenzo delivered his Sentences lectures at the University of Paris in 1370–71, presents and analyses the tradition of the three textual witnesses, and offers a question list.
4 Sex, sin, and salvation: the debate over the Immaculate Conception I n 1854 the discussions about the Catholic and Protestant images of the Virgin Mary became more contentious and more complicated than at any time in English history as a result of Pope Pius IX’s promulgation of the Immaculate Conception, which declared that the Virgin Mary had been conceived without the stain of original sin. That pronouncement drew more participants than did any other aspect of the Victorian Marian debates, partly because it was publicised in the general-interest press; one
needs and preferences. The first part of this chapter charts the recruitment of four teaching communities of women religious to Scotland’s two main cities: the Ursulines of Jesus and the Sisters of Mercy in Edinburgh and the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception and the Sisters of Mercy in Glasgow. According to Canon Law, there were three types of religious institutes: contemplative, active and mixed. In contemplative institutes nuns were enclosed and took solemn, lifelong vows; active institutes were ‘chiefly The recruitment of women religious 75 devoted
Grace’, at least for Britomart’s quest, is evident in his providing no equally spectacular mythic setting for training Belphoebe in singular purity. (A convent seems inappropriate for Diana’s charge.) Third, Belphoebe and Amoret’s virgin birth is a female analogue of the Incarnation, as Chrysogonee’s impregnation by the sun re-enacts the immaculate conception. 131
communities of nuns to come to Scotland were French: the Ursulines of Jesus, founded at Chavagnes-en-Paillers in the Loire Valley, had come to Edinburgh in 1834, and the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception had been founded in Glasgow in 1847 by two nuns from the Notre Dame des Anges community in Tourcoing, an industrial town in France’s north-east near the Belgian border. Once in Scotland, these communities expanded rapidly, and before the turn of the twentieth century the Ursulines had set up three additional houses in Edinburgh and Perth. The Franciscan
Virgin was allowed. (The most controversial question, the Immaculate Conception, is discussed in chapter 5.) The Catholic portrait of the Virgin Mary was never uniform, but was rather an evolving composite created by a variety of believers, not all of whom agreed with or even liked each other. However, the striking coherence of the overall portrait testifies to shared values, both cultural and theological, among Catholics. 36 Engelhardt_01_All.indd 36 14/2/08 12:39:12 the catholic virgin mary Mary’s intimate relationship with God Catholics described Mary as
and early Protestant divines, of the Church of England (London: John Hatchard, 1808), vol. 2, p. 464. 2 Pelikan, Mary through the centuries, p. 153. 3 John E. Armstrong, Armstrong’s reply to Wiseman’s pastoral letter on the Immaculate Conception (London: Wertheim & Macintosh, 1855), p. 4. 4 W. T. Maudson, ‘The dogma of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception: a sermon’, Pulpit, 67: 1,784 (8 March 1855), 236. 5 See T. R. Birks, Modern popery: its strength and its weakness, as an aggressive power: a lecture, delivered at the request of the Bristol
continued the argument in his First letter to the very Rev. J. H. Newman, D.D., in Explanation Chiefly in Regard to the Reverential Love due to the Ever-Blessed Theotokos, and the Doctrine of her Immaculate Conception (1869), which renewed and expanded his complaints about continental devotion as leading Christians away from Jesus to Mary.13 The Eirenicon controversy was a key moment in the remaking of Mary as a saint in Victorian England, as it showed the divisions, which were stylistic as much as theological, among Victorian Catholics as well as the broad agreement
Immaculate Conception, according to which she was born free of original sin, was borrowed from the Qur’an; and as far as I know this theory has not been refuted by historians. But Siddiqui shows that what she calls the ‘doctrinal density’ associated with Mary in Christian thought has no equivalent in Islam. Whereas Catholic and Eastern Orthodox theology exalts Mary for herself as the