In the early seventeenth century William Baspoole rewrote a medieval allegorical dream-vision, Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de vie humaine. Deguileville's work, very popular in late medieval England, continued to be read after the Reformation, and often lent itself to topical updating. Baspoole's revision, surviving in three manuscripts, illustrates how manuscript circulation continued to be an important means of distributing devotional texts long after the advent of print. It was first discussed in Rosemond Tuve's Allegorical imagery (1966), and the current edition undertakes a nuanced assessment of how The pilgrime reveals Baspoole's Laudian sympathies. As a case study of how a medieval text could be deployed by later generations in support of thoroughly post-medieval issues, this has implications wider than its immediate occasion. Walls and Stobo are exemplary in the attention that they give to the work's illustrations and verbal imagery, making this edition an essential port of call for medieval and Renaissance scholars working on the iconography of pilgrimage, penitence or conscience. This weightily annotated, richly contextualised and handsomely produced study does full justice to a fascinating text, making a valuable contribution to our understanding of how medievalism was regarded in post-Reformation England.
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