Output details

Edited from London, British Library MS Egerton 2658, and three other manuscripts. This is the first edition of this text and includes an apparatus of variant readings, a commentary, an appendix containing marginalia, a second appendix of additional textual materials, a glossary, and an introduction with descriptions of the manuscripts, analysis of the language and the evidence that this provides for the provenance of the manuscripts, an account of the sources, analyses of the processes of compilation and translation, the purpose of the text, and the variant readings to produce a picture of the textual history of the Liber Aureus and Gospel of Nicodemus.

Please also refer to 'Brief Description'. As noted there the text presents a number of difficult editorial and interpretive problems. It has a complex relationship to its main Latin source, the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi, which it does not so much translate as reinterpret. The edition examines the processes of reinterpretation that produced a Middle English version of the Meditationes Vitae Christi that ignored many of the stylistic features and aspects of Franciscan spirituality characteristic of the original and added material drawn directly from the gospels to produce a text that betrays a degree of influence of Wycliffite thought without fully aligning itself to a thoroughly Wycliffite ideology.