An account of the literary origins and development of the devotion to the Name of Jesus in late medieval England, exploring the ways in which literary texts bear witness to the Name as a powerful source of contemplation and spiritual development which became central to devotional practice in the period.

Denis Renevey is Professor of Medieval English Language and Literature at the University of Lausanne. He has published eleven books as author or editor, and over forty articles or chapters of books, most of them in the field of late medieval religious literature. He has been the principal investigator of several four-year Swiss National Science Foundation research projects, such as 'Late Medieval Religiosity in England: The Evidence of Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Devotional Compilations' (2013-17), and 'Region and Nation in Late Medieval Devotion to Northern English Saints' (2016-21). He has been granted funding for a third SNSF project, 'Re-Configuring the Apophatic Tradition in Late Medieval England' (2022-26).

• Introduction


• 1: Jesus and His Name: The Emergence of New Devotional Attitude


• 2: The Dulcis Iesu memoria Tradition and the Devotion to the Name of Jesus


• 3: The Name and Spiritual Song: Anglo-Norman Lyrics, Richard Rolle, and the Fourteenth-Century Tradition


• 4: Rollean Afterlives: Fifteenth-Century Texts, Compilations, and Manuscripts


• 5: The Book of Margery Kempe, Eleanor Hull's Meditation, and Fifteenth-Century Devotion to the Name


• Afterword