Ebook: The place of the “Speculum Humanae Salvationis” in the rise of affective piety in the later Middle Ages

The Speculum Humanae Salvationis (SHS)---composed, it is thought, by an anonymous Italian Dominican in the late thirteenth century---has long been recognized as a key witness to the world of late medieval piety. A work in Latin rhymed prose, each of its forty-five chapters is typically illustrated with a sequence of four scenes, the first representing an episode from the life of Christ or the Virgin and the others depicting prefigurations drawn primarily from the Old Testament. Although rarely noted, the SHS commonly closes with three meditational chapters presenting the Hours of the Passion, the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, and the Seven Joys of the Virgin, in which especially dramatic and poignant moments described in the typological chapters are recast as the focus of devotional exercises. This dissertation, treating the structure, organizing systems, and implied functions of the SHS, examines the earliest of the 394 surviving manuscripts---a corpus of thirty-eight illustrated codexes datable to the fourteenth century; it focuses on Vienna, ÖNB 2612, a manuscript shown to be representative in terms of content, layout, structure, iconography and style.