Geographies of Orthodoxy: mapping the English-Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, c. 1350-1550

Project start date: 2006-11

Project end date: 2010-08

Geographies of Orthodoxy offers a new account of an English devotional phenomenon and affective literary tradition usually characterised as ‘pseudo-Bonaventuran’ by modern commentators. Geographies of Orthodoxy proposes to examine and make openly accessible through the latest electronic means the entire material remains of the anglophone pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition. The handmade books belonging to this tradition that were copied, owned and read in the period have never before been systematically analysed, yet these provide a key means for understanding the aspirations and motives of the people who created and fulfilled the obvious demand for reading material containing such emotional and politicised representations of Christ’s life. The relevant extant manuscript miscellanies and anthologies also reflect the interests and identities of more than one generation of book producers, readers and owners. The 1350-1550 period is marked by many different examples of religious controversy and uncertainty, especially those associated with ‘Lollardy’ and ‘the Reformation’. Pseudo-Bonaventuran writings can be seen as offering an historically significant corpus, sometimes because of their role in the debates over Wycliffite translation programmes, or through forms of censorship and other responses to religious heterodoxy, real or imagined.