Medium Ævum Annual Lecture 2022:

Middle English Books of Devotion and Liturgical Privatisation in Fifteenth-century England

Dr Ryan Perry (University of Kent)

4:30-to 6pm, July 2, 2022
A3 Humanities and online via Microsoft Teams

All welcome at this free public lecture. Arrive from 4:30 for the talk at 5pm, which will be followed by a short Q&A and reception. 

Dr Perry’s lecture will examine several devotional texts (such as pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi and its English redaction by Nicholas Love) alongside manuscript assemblages to investigate how vernacular religious materials were put in service of individualised or household reading programmes. Such programmes might imitate the rhythms of the official liturgy or alternatively be understood in some
respects as quasi-liturgies, reflecting improvised devotional regimens and structures of pious observance.

Dr Ryan Perry is a Reader in Medieval Literature and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of English at the University of Kent, where he also teaches in the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the Whittington’s Gift project, which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust’s large grant programme. His past research includes studies of manuscript corpora such as Robert Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne, the Middle English prose Brut, English translations of the Meditationes vitae Christi and on Middle English ‘miscellaneous manuals’ of religious instruction. Work on these manuscript traditions has led to a focus on affectivity and devotion, vernacular piety, and the conduits for vernacular textual transmission in the late Middle Ages.

This public lecture is part of the two-day Pfaff at 50: New Devotions and Religious Change in Later Medieval England conference, organised by the Department of History.