Companion to The Boke of Gostely Grace
The Middle English Translation and its European Vernacular Contexts
Companion to The Boke of Gostely Grace
The Middle English Translation and its European Vernacular Contexts
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Paperback / softback
£34.99
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Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9781805965985
Number of Pages: 360
Published: 28/02/2026
Width: 15.6 cm
Height: 23.4 cm
The Boke of Gostely Grace is a Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae by the German visionary Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241–1298), a Benedictine/Cistercian nun at the convent of Helfta. This new Companion will add momentum to the current interdisciplinary and theoretical debate surrounding Latin texts and their translations into the vernacular, including a number of issues regarding women’s literary culture. It complements and supplements the new critical edition of the text, The Boke of Gostely Grace, edited by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and Anne Mouron with Mark Atherton, published by Liverpool University Press in 2022.
A comprehensive introduction is followed by three parts. Part 1 examines vernacular translations of the Liber specialis gratiae from the late medieval and early modern periods in German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian and French. Part 2 explores a wide-range of critical issues in The Boke of Gostely Grace, and in particular aspects of the spirituality of Helfta. The volume concludes in Part 3 with aspects of the Last Things at Helfta, more specifically purgatorial piety and the theme of the dying and the dead. The volume as a whole provides a new and nuanced understanding of how the mystical literary output of Helfta circulated and was received in the late medieval literary culture of England and Europe.
Introduction, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and Anne Mouron
PART 1: The Text: Latin Manuscripts and European Vernacular Translations
Chapter 1. Linus Ubl Liber or Libri: The Latin transmission of Mechthild’s text’
Chapter 2. Edmund Wareham Wanitzek, ‘This Has Been Written from the Book of Spiritual Grace’: Extracting, Compiling, and Printing the Liber in German’
Chapter 3. Marleen Cré, Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae in Middle Dutch: Het boek der bijzondere genade
Chapter 4. Elin Andersson, Ingela Hedström and Mikko Kauko “... because of the great love I feel for this book and its sacred knowledge”: Jöns Budde’s Swedish translation of St Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae
Chapter 5. Ugo Vignuzzi and Patrizia Bertini Malgarini, (Trans. by Alessandra Petrina), Mechthild in Germany, Melchiade in Umbria: The Gubbio Vernacularisation and the St Clare Religious Observance
Chapter 6. Anne Mouron, “Here, Madame, is a heavenly present”: The Seventeenth-Century Translation into French of Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae
PART 2: The Boke of Gostely Grace: Spirituality and the Religious Imaginary of the Helfta Community
Chapter 7. Christiania Whitehead, Church and House: Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Architectural Imaginary in its Fifteenth Century Religious Context
Chapter 8. Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, ‘“A trefold corde of þe colour of gold from our lordes herte”: Holy Mediatrix and Holy Solidarity in Mechthild of Hackborn’s Boke of Gostely Grace’
Chapter 9. Anne Mouron, “As bornyst sylver þe lef on slyde?”: Trees, Flower, Gems and Precious Metals in The Boke of Gostely Grace
Chapter 10. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Mechthild’s Flourishing Gardens: Gender, Sexuality and ‘Vegetal Being’ in the Boke of Gostely Grace
Chapter 11. Marleen Cré, Snapshots of a Role Model: Excerpts of Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Liber specialis gratiae in Late Medieval Manuscripts in England
PART 3: Death and Purgatorial Piety of the Helfta Community
Chapter 12. Alexandra Barratt, Death and the Maidens: Gertrude the Great and the Passing of Mechthild
Chapter 13. Barbara Newman, Saving Souls at Helfta
Bibliography
Index
