Associate Professor of Religion and History
Albert of Diessen’s “Priests’ Miorror”: Defining Religion in Late Medieval Germany
My time as a BUCH Henderson Senior Research Fellow will be spent working on a book in progress entitled Albert of Diessen’s “Priests’ Mirror”: Defining Religion in Late Medieval Germany. Organized around several versions of a late fourteenth-century Latin religious manual (The Priests’ Mirror, by an Augustinian Canon Regular named Albert from the Bavarian market town of Diessen), the book brings to light a fascinating unstudied manuscript tradition worthy of exploration on its own terms and uses it to expand our understanding of religion in medieval European Christian society. Focusing on the pastoral manual as a distinctive genre of medieval religious literature, I show how purportedly universal religious ideals and laws were adapted, reinterpreted, and repurposed by those given responsibility to implement them, thereby crafting distinctive, local expressions of Christianity. Medieval parish communities are often treated in scholarship as imperfect reflections of a universal “catholic” Christianity as taught in schools, universities, and the papal curia. This study encourages us to see medieval “Christianity”as a complex tradition that transcended apparent distinctions between formally prescribed doctrine, law, and practice, on the one hand, and religion as lived by flesh and blood people grounded in place and time on the other.