Medieval churchmen typically defended religious art as a form of "book" to teach the unlettered laity their faith, but in late medieval England, Lollard accusations of idolatry stimulated renewed debate over image worship. Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages places this dispute within the context of the religious beliefs and devotional practices of lay people, showing how they used and responded to holy images in their parish churches, at shrines, and in prayer books. Far more than substitutes for texts, holy images presented a junction of the material and spiritual, offering an increasingly literate laity access to the supernatural through the visual power of "beholding."

Medieval Texts in Translation Series Pen Portraits of Illustrious Castilians is the first English translation of Generaciones y Semblanzas, a compilation of thirty-four biographical sketches of the most illustrious Castilians of the mid-fifteenth century. These include three kings, a queen, and thirty nobles, prelates, and scholars who represented the most prominent families of the day. Notably, this is the first collection of biographies in Spanish historiography to be published. The text was written in Spanish in 1450 by Fernan Perez de Guzman, an historian, moralist, politician, and poet whose personal contact with the most powerful nobles of the time provided him with the material for these intimate and revealing portraits. Through insightful commentary on his subjects' family background, personality traits, outstanding deeds, virtues, and vices, the author brings to the reader vivid portraits of some of the most important players in Castilian history. Within the portraits, occasional digressions provide the author with the opportunity to present his own personal beliefs on such timely issues as the situation of Jewish convers in Castilla, the greed and self-serving motives of many of his contemporaries, and the role played by Divine Providence in shaping the history of his country. Perez's introduction appears to be the first treatise written in Spanish on the nature of history and on the duties and responsibilities of those recording it. The translators have succeeded in maintaining certain stylistic characteristics of fifteenth-century Spanish without sacrificing readability. Their introduction and notes provide useful background information, as do the map and genealogical table.

Studied almost exclusively as a literary humanist, Nicolas de Clamanges (ca. 1363/1364-1437) was closely involved in the Great Western Schism, French humanism, politics at the University of Paris, and Church reform. Far more than an elegant writer, this Parisian scholar and sometime papal secretary was an important but until now unjustly neglected religious reformer. In Part One of this volume, Christopher M. Bellitto presents a biography of Clamanges' life and a survey of his writings within the multiple contexts in which he operated: schism, Hundred Years' War, Parisian humanism, French civil war. It places his literary images of a troubled Church within the framework of his ideas of the humanism of reform, identifying his great debt to Pauline and Augustinian ideas of the interplay of divine and human activities. Part Two explores Clamanges' normative emphasis on personal reform, which was essentially a via purgativa that drew on monastic piety and late medieval spirituality, especially the imitation of Christ in the Modern Devotion. His was an inside-out reform that radiated from the heart of the individual Christian through the rest of the Church. In Clamanges' writings, we hear the calls for the personal reform of the cleric-in-training ultimately directed toward improvements in the cura animarum and the demand for the renewal of episcopal leadership that were hallmarks of Trent's systematic reform program. This examination of his thought reveals Clamanges to have been in continuity with ancient and medieval Catholic reform ideas that foreshadowed not Luther, but Trent. His spirituality of personal reform may be seen as one bridge over which the Fathers' model of personal reform was passed along from the early Church to the twelfth-century renaissance, and then through the late Middle Ages to early modern Catholicism and the Council of Trent.