The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ

This tightly-focused volume of essays derives from an AHRC-supported research collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast and St Andrews University on ‘Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping the English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, c.1350–1550’ (http://www.qub.ac.uk/geographies-of-orthodoxy/). The editors provide the basic introduction, chiefly a foretaste of the individual essays. The essays are aimed primarily at literary scholars and historians of pre-Reformation English devotion. The contributions are arranged in three unequal groups. The first, ‘History and Ideology’, comprises just two pieces: Rob Lutton on ‘The Name of Jesus, Nicholas Love’s Mirror, and Christocentric Devotion in Late Medieval England’, followed by Mishtooni Bose with ‘Reversing the Life of Christ: Dissent, Orthodoxy, and Affectivity in Late Medieval England’. Lutton is clearly history, but his tentative approach does not provide a full introduction to the cult of the Name, or convincingly locate Love’s work within the full range of Christocentric devotion. Bose covers ‘ideology’ in a short but wide-ranging discussion of Wycliffite criticism of ecclesiastical practice and writings—which ‘reversed’, and (for the critics) perverted, Christ’s true message—and attempts to counter that criticism by ‘orthodox’ preachers and writers (notably Pecock)

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