English scholars ‘piece together history’ to reunite missing pages of centuries-old Catholic text

Not many literary works in medieval Europe could lay claim to the status of “bestseller.” Among them was “The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ.”

That text, which was translated by English monk Nicholas Love from a 14th-century devotional work, enjoyed immense popularity among English Catholics in the years leading up to the Reformation; a few hundred surviving manuscripts attest to the public’s love of the book.

One incomplete manuscript of the work, meanwhile, has finally been reunited with several long-lost pages thanks to recent work by English researchers Katie Walter and James Wade.

The two professors, who teach at the University of Sussex and Girton College at the University of Cambridge, respectively, recently published their findings in the journal Notes and Queries in which they detailed what Wade described as their successful effort to “piece together the history” of the manuscript.

Wade told EWTN News that it was known for years that the East Sussex public records office held fragments of a “Mirror” manuscript, though “no one knew where.”

Pages 8-9 of the “Keep Fragment,” showing thread binding, from Chapter 34, depicting an account of the raising…