This is a collection of fourteen scholarly studies from different authors that have emerged from the Queen's Belfast—St. Andrews research project entitled: Geographies of Orthodoxy. The focus of this project and of these studies is the exceptional influence of the English vernacular Lives of Christ on late medieval piety in England that were derived from the Meditationes Vitae Christi. The very learned quality of this collection is based on an analysis of the manuscript traditions of various gospel harmonies with special emphasis on Nicholas Love's early fifteenth-century Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. Second only to the Lollard Bible, Love's Mirror, with its sixty-one manuscripts and nine early printed versions, has had the greatest impact on English religious life in the period under examination, 1350–1550. These are studies that analyze the ways in which the vividly harmonized episodes from the life of Christ reveal the complexities of popular spirituality with it moral, emotive, and doctrinal elements. Each chapter includes comprehensive bibliographies of manuscripts, primary sources, and secondary studies. All of the essays are in English, with citations in Middle English and with English translations of Latin sources.

These studies demonstrate the intense desire among many lay and religious for intimacy with the human Jesus via the audio/visual reconstruction of the biblical text that offered the experience of being immersed and actually present within the event. This scholarship is significant in its contribution to the geography of pre-reformation English piety. This collection leaves the attentive reader with a clear awareness of the complexity within this period in terms of situating these nuanced devotional documents within their proper literary and religious contexts of production and circulation. Further, the reader leaves these studies with a renewed appreciation of the powerful role in which these Lives of Christ and their medieval devotion to the humanity of Christ served as very popular vehicles of personal salvation. Because each scholar's contribution within this book reveals a solid mastery of the sources and the history of scholarship on the Vita Christi tradition, this volume should serve as a doorway into this important field of late medieval English devotional literature for both the novice and the expert.