Scala Perfectionis (The Scale of Perfection)
A verified public-domain excerpt for this text is still being set. The folio is catalogued and linked below; an original Sub Rosa rendering will follow.
What it is
Walter Hilton's two-book guide to the contemplative life leads the soul from basic moral reform through affective devotion to contemplation, using the extended metaphor of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as an image of the soul's return to God through 'reformation in faith and feeling.' Book I addresses enclosed religious women; Book II extends to a wider educated lay and religious audience with unusual psychological precision about the stages of interior transformation. The work survives in over forty English manuscripts and fourteen copies of a Latin translation made c. 1400 by the Carmelite Thomas Fishlake; it was first printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1494 at Lady Margaret Beaufort's direct request and reprinted five more times before the English Reformation.
Why it still matters
The Scale of Perfection is available in a modern Paulist Press edition (Classics of Western Spirituality) and is among the most psychologically clear English guides to contemplative prayer; Book II in particular offers an unusually precise map of the soul's return to God for anyone in the later stages of the interior life.
Kept alongside
The Imitation of Christ (De imitatione Christi)
De imitatione Christi
The most widely read Christian devotional work after the Bible, composed c. 1418–1427 by Thomas à Kempis at the Augustinian monastery of Mount Saint Agnes near Zwolle. Hundreds of printed editions appeared across Europe before 1600; French translations were in print from 1488 (Toulouse) and 1493 (Paris), and the text was standard reading in every Jesuit novitiate, including those that trained the French royal confessors Coton and Caussin. Its four books counsel contempt of worldly vanity, interior self-knowledge, spiritual consolation, and sacramental devotion — an architecture that moves the reader systematically from self-examination to union with Christ. While no single documented ownership record for either Medici queen has been identified, its universal penetration of Catholic court culture across two centuries makes its presence in any royal household effectively certain.
Lady Margaret Beaufort's Book of Hours (MS N.24, St John's College Cambridge)
Horae ad usum Coutances
A French illuminated Book of Hours, use of Coutances (MS N.24), now in the Old Library of St John's College Cambridge, which Lady Margaret Beaufort owned and used for personal devotion throughout her life. Surviving portraits of Margaret depict her kneeling before this very manuscript open on a lectern. The illuminations are by the Fastolf Master, active c. 1415–1450, with gold-leaf borders interspersed with fruit and flowers; Margaret later inscribed the book to Lady Anne Shirley, and it is also known as the Shirley Book of Hours. As a surviving object of royal private devotion rather than a text for circulation, it bears witness to the daily prayer rhythms of the most powerful woman of early Tudor England.
Revelations of Divine Love (Showings)
A Revelation of Love
Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–after 1416), anchoress at St Julian's Church, Norwich, recorded sixteen showings (visions) received on 8–9 May 1373 and spent some two decades deepening them into the Long Text, completed probably in the 1390s–1410s. Her connection to the Plantagenet nobility is directly confirmed: Isabel de Ufford, Countess of Suffolk, left twenty shillings to 'Julian reclus a Norwich' in her will of 26 September 1416, and Margery Kempe — herself of Norfolk minor gentry — visited Julian for spiritual counsel in 1413, recording the conversation in the earliest English autobiography. Earlier bequests in the wills of Roger Reed (1394), Thomas Edmund (1404), and John Plumpton (1415) further document her sustained patronage by Norwich citizens and clergy. The three surviving Long Text manuscripts all trace to Syon Abbey (the Brigittine house of royal foundation) and were preserved by recusant exiles including descendants of Sir Thomas More and the Lowe family; the Paris Manuscript was copied c. 1580 by a Brigittine nun in Antwerp, and the Sloane manuscripts were edited by English Benedictine nuns at Cambrai for the first print edition (1670). Julian's theology of God's unqualified love — 'alle shalle be wele' — and her imagery of Christ as Mother made this the devotional capstone of 14th-century English female mysticism.