Bernard of Clairvaux

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Cistercian abbot and the conscience of Latin Christendom, who prosecuted Abelard and preached the Second Crusade.

Author index: Bernard of Clairvaux

• Life of St Malachy of Armagh — Bernard’s life of his friend Malachy, archbishop of Armagh, who died at Clairvaux in 1148 — the chief narrative source for the twelfth-century reform of the Irish church. (15 notes)
• On Loving God — Bernard’s answer to the question why and how much God is to be loved: “The reason for loving God is God Himself; the measure, to love without measure.” (16 notes)
• Some Letters of Saint Bernard — Sixty-six letters to popes, kings, bishops, abbots, monks and noblewomen — the abbot of Clairvaux acting on the whole of twelfth-century Europe from a monastery. (66 notes)

Hugh of St Victor

Hugh of St Victor (c. 1096–1141), master of the abbey school of St Victor in Paris and the most influential teacher of his century.

Author index: Hugh of St Victor

• Explanation of the Rule of St Augustine — A commentary on the Rule that governed the canons regular of St Victor, and through them much of twelfth-century religious life: what it means to have one heart and one soul, to hold nothing as one’s own, and to be corrected without bitterness. (12 notes)

Bonaventure

Bonaventure (1221–1274), Franciscan minister general and regent master at Paris, the Seraphic Doctor.

Author index: Bonaventure

• The Life of Christ — Meditations on the life of Christ from the Incarnation to the Ascension, long attributed to Bonaventure and among the most widely copied devotional books of the later Middle Ages. Hutchings translates the shorter recension: the author’s Preface and a hundred chapters. (101 notes)

Thomas Aquinas

St Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), Dominican friar, priest, and Doctor of the Church. He wrote two great theological summaries.

Author index: Thomas Aquinas

• Summa Contra Gentiles — English translation from the Hanover House edition (1955–57), edited with updated Scriptural references by Joseph Kenny, O.P. (0 notes)
• Summa Theologiae — The work is arranged in Parts, each divided into Questions, each Question into Articles. (0 notes)

Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), Dominican preacher of the birth of the Word in the ground of the soul; twenty-eight of his propositions were condemned in 1329.

Author index: Meister Eckhart

• Sermons — The first English rendering of a selection of Eckhart’s German sermons: the birth of the Word in the soul, detachment, and the ground of the soul where, he says, God and the soul are one. (8 notes)

Jan van Ruusbroec

Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381), the Flemish contemplative of Groenendaal, whose work fed the Devotio Moderna.

Author index: Jan van Ruusbroec

• The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage — Ruusbroec’s masterpiece, called in Flemish Die Chierheit der gheestelijker Brulocht — the Spiritual Espousals — on the three lives of the Christian: active, inward, and contemplative, all of them the answer to Behold, the Bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet Him. (99 notes)
• The Book of Supreme Truth — Ruusbroec’s last work, written to clear up misunderstandings of what he had said about union with God — that the creature never becomes God, but is united to Him without intermediary. (15 notes)
• The Sparkling Stone — A shorter treatise on the white stone of Revelation 2:17, and on the difference between the faithful servant, the secret friend, and the hidden son of God. (15 notes)

Catherine of Siena

Catherine Benincasa (1347–1380), Dominican tertiary and Doctor of the Church, who brought the papacy back from Avignon.

Author index: Catherine of Siena

• Letters — Letters to popes, kings, mercenaries, prisoners, prostitutes and her own family, written by a dyer’s daughter who could not write and dictated them — including the letters urging Gregory XI to leave Avignon for Rome. (71 notes)
• The Dialogue — Dictated in 1378, much of it in ecstasy: a dialogue between the Eternal Father and a soul, on discretion, prayer, obedience, and the bridge that is Christ, by which the soul crosses the flood. (95 notes)

Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich (1343–c. 1416), anchoress, whose Revelations is the earliest surviving book in English known to be by a woman.

Author index: Julian of Norwich

• Revelations of Divine Love — The sixteen shewings granted to an anchoress of Norwich on 8 May 1373, as she lay expecting to die, and the twenty years of meditation she gave them: the hazelnut that is all that is made, the motherhood of God, and the answer she was given about sin — *that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner… (86 notes)

Jean Gerson

Jean Gerson (1363–1429), chancellor of Paris and the leading conciliarist of the Great Schism.

Author index: Jean Gerson

• The Snares of the Devil — A short treatise of practical discernment by the chancellor of Paris — the temptations that beset the soul at each stage of the spiritual life, and the remedies against them. (5 notes)

Thomas à Kempis

Thomas Hemerken of Kempen (c. 1380–1471), canon regular at Mount St Agnes, to whom the Imitation of Christ is given.

Author index: Thomas à Kempis

• The Founders of the New Devotion — Lives of Gerard Groote, Florentius Radewin and their followers — the Devotio Moderna of the Low Countries, the movement in whose houses Thomas à Kempis was raised and out of which the Imitation came. (62 notes)
• The Imitation of Christ — The most widely read Christian book after the Bible, written in the houses of the Devotio Moderna and circulating anonymously from about 1420. (114 notes)

Nicholas of Cusa

Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), cardinal and speculative theologian of learned ignorance and the coincidence of opposites.

Author index: Nicholas of Cusa

• The Vision of God — Written in 1453 for the monks of Tegernsee, who had asked him to explain mystical theology. (25 notes)