Nicholas Love

Nicholas Love, prior of the Carthusian house of Mount Grace, in Yorkshire, 1410–1423, produced The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, a translation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, probably by an Italian Franciscan named Johannes de Caulibus but regularly attributed to St. Bonaventure. The earliest version of the Mirror was probably composed c. 1400, but the “original copy” of the book was said to have been submitted to Thomas Arundel, the archbishop of Canterbury, c. 1410 for approval before it was more widely circulated. The reason for this is that the Lambeth Constitutions of 1409 required, as part of an attempt to control Wycliffite translation of the Bible, that any new translations of biblical material of any kind be submitted to diocesan authority. The Constitutions failed in their intention—the Wycliffite Bible versions survive in many more manuscripts than any other writing in Middle English—but Love’s Mirror, which contained a number of anti-Wycliffite defenses of orthodox theological positions, itself came to be widely circulated. The prominence of the Mirror among surviving works of late-medieval English spirituality has led to its being considered as a focal work in the history of vernacular theology.