These insightful and rigorous essays, accompanying the new critical edition of The doctrine of the hert, will restore attention to an important family of devotional works. The doctrine of the hert is the fifteenth-century English translation of De doctrina cordis, a thirteenth-century spiritual guide written for novice monastic readers in the Liège area. De doctrina's invitation of multiple audiences, division into short sections, and appealing allegory based on the heart made the work into a ‘pan-European devotional phenomenon’ which saw translations into English, French, Dutch, German and Spanish.

The Companion combines a valuable introduction to this largely neglected group of texts with a particular focus on the Middle English Doctrine. The authors are in productive conversation with each other, and the volume is clearly introduced and nicely cross-referenced. In the first essay, Nigel F. Palmer re-evaluates medieval and modern attributions of De doctrina to Gerard of Liège op and Hugh of St Cher Ocist. He shows that compelling evidence points to a Gerard of Liège who was not Dominican, but Cistercian, and finds in the text an appeal to enclosed monastic readers, with particular solicitude for women. Ultimately, identifying an author becomes less important than understanding De doctrina as a ‘progressive’ work for Cistercian men and women in a milieu increasingly concerned with the care of nuns. Christiania Whitehead's essay complements Palmer by considering De doctrina's varied manuscript contexts, including ‘partial’ and ‘summary’ as well as ‘complete’ versions. Positing several useful categories of ‘perception and use’ (homiletic, novice guidance, catechetical guidance, mystical/contemplative advice), Whitehead examines the forms in which De doctrina appears to further these aims. An overview of the vernacular manuscripts highlights changed transmission patterns: compilers capitalised on De doctrina's ‘devotional, morally educational potential’ (p. 81) and the work appealed particularly to mendicant and canonical readers.

The volume's central section on the Middle English Doctrine of the hert develops this point about transmission with essays exploring the emphasis and impact of the translation for fifteenth-century nuns. Anne Elisabeth Mouron shows how a range of changes make The doctrine an ‘adaptation’ rather than a close translation. The adaptor alters the text for an audience of nuns, reducing intellectual contents and modifying a mystical tone, and new prologues target a less educated, female audience, encouraging ‘devotional’ rather than ‘mystical’ uses. Annie Sutherland's essay on the role of the Bible in the Doctrine shows that in some cases a loss in complexity is offset by gains in sympathy. While the English adaptor reduces biblical quotation and exposition, this abbreviated use of the Bible coexists with new literary flourishes and changes of emphasis: affective additions, the unmarked incorporation of biblical text, and a ‘reassuring’ authorial persona to guide a new set of readers.

In a more theoretical vein, Vincent Gillespie deploys Henri Lefebvre's concept of ‘representational space’ to interrogate the Doctrine's use of domestic imagery for spiritual purposes. Situating the Doctrine among contemporary texts that allegorically combine the spatial practices of the religious house with those of the secular household, Gillespie analyses translated passages that bring new force to the images of cooking and eating that construct the nun's entry into religion, experience of penance, and reception of the eucharist. Thus Gillespie identifies the places where the allegory powerfully evokes the rewards and risks of spiritual transformation for women. Catherine Innes-Parker rounds out the central section by locating the Doctrine more broadly within fifteenth-century English devotional-textual culture. Examining two manuscripts that feature the Doctrine with devotional texts the Tree and Twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost, Innes-Parker shows that the Doctrine and its manuscript companions create a dual focus on communal devotional life and individual spiritual growth. The Doctrine emerges as a text responsive to female spiritual aspirations while ensuring clerical supervision, in contrast to more overtly controlling devotional works such as The chastising of God's children.

The Companion's third section surveys the European translations of De doctrina. Anne Mouron shows that the French text is a ‘primary translation’ existing in multiple versions. While one very faithful translation may have been intended for Augustinian readers, another version, which reduces biblical exegesis and suppresses references to female readers, is associated with Clairvaux, whose monks sought out vernacular books in the late fifteenth century. Marleen Cré's contribution examines the principal manuscript witness to the Middle Dutch translation of De doctrina's long version, owned by the Augustinian canonesses of St Trudo. In the mid fifteenth century the canonesses were forbidden by their pastoral advisors, the Windesheim canons, to have contact with mystical or revelatory texts. But De doctrina, with its focus on spiritual growth in community, evidently seemed a natural fit, and the Dutch version toned down mystical elements to adapt the text to a new framework of pastoral care. Similarly, Karl-Heinz Steinmetz locates German translations of De doctrina in the context of ecclesiastical reform. The Latin text embodies ideals such as ‘vivere secundum regulam’ which were central to the reforms of the Councils of Constance and Basle. In this context De doctrina circulated widely in partial and complete forms. Partial manuscripts include summary versions and capitula selecta, excerpts reinforcing communal reform goals or shaping individual mystical experience. Complete vernacular translations complemented a campaign to reform the communal life of Dominican nuns. In the final essay Anthony John Lappin introduces the Spanish Del enseñamiento del coraçon, published in Salamanca in 1498 and followed by three revised editions. While annotations in one 1510 version indicate a monastic or conventual context, the work was was marketed in 1551 as ‘very useful and profitable for all faithful Christians’ (p. 243). As Lappin notes, this phrase, which anticipates a final movement from the cloister to the world, resonates with the record of an English laywoman's owning the Doctrine of the hert in the fifteenth century. Lappin's analysis of efforts to ‘domesticate and modernise’ the text for Spanish readers, together with his awareness of the text's pan-European impact, makes this a fitting final chapter. Taken together, these essays demonstrate De doctrina's remarkable adaptability to changing religious climates and didactic agendas (often gender- and order-specific) across late medieval Europe and England.