The Romanic Review

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INFLUENCE OF THE MEDIAEVAL CHRISTIAN VISIONS ON JEAN DE MEUN'S NOTIONS OF HELL WE have many guarantees of the popularity of Christian vision literature in the Middle Ages. It was a product of the Church, without doubt the best medium of publicity in that period. Visions are incorporated in the works of the...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INFLUENCE OF THE MEDIAEVAL CHRISTIAN VISIONS ON JEAN DE MEUN'S NOTIONS OF HELL WE have many guarantees of the popularity of Christian vision literature in the Middle Ages. It was a product of the Church, without doubt the best medium of publicity in that period. Visions are incorporated in the works of the most popular church writers, such, for example, as the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and the Venerable Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. Certain ones, appearing independently, have come down to us in many Latin manuscripts widely distributed as to place and date of origin. Such are, among others, the apocryphal Vision of Saint Paul and the Vision of Tundal. Twenty-two Latin manuscripts of the former were known to its editor, Brandes. Its form indicates that it was intended either as a sermon or as an epistle, in either case sure of coming to the notice of many persons. It begins: Oportet vos, fratres karissimi, amare delicias paradisi et timere penas inferni, que ostense sunt Paulo apostolo, quando fuit in car- cere in hoc mundo. And incorporated in the vision is another indication of the same sort: Expavescite, fratres karissimi, et benefacite, quantum possitis, et tmete deum et date gloriam et honorem deo et omnibus sanctis eius, ut vos exaltet in opere bono et perducat in vitam eternam, ne intretis in infernum, etc. Of the Vision of Tundal fifty-four Latin manuscripts are known, and its popularity may be judged by the following statement made by the French monk Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, in his chronicle dating from the first half of the thirteenth century: Facta est in Hibernia hoc anno (t. e., 1149) quedam mirabilis visio de penis inferni et gaudiis paradisi, que Tugdali visio appellatur. Hanc si quis plane scire desiderat, in multis abbatiis po...