Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction
Exploring medieval spirituality invites us to delve into a remote world. This introduction is a guide to understanding how medieval believers experienced divine presence in manifold ways. God became real in the sacraments, above all on the altar, when the Eucharist was celebrated. He remained present after the celebration in the host, piously venerated in the lives of the saints as well as in images depicting the saints or Christ himself. He spoke through his Word. Common worshipers found him at particular holy sites.

In Medieval Spirituality, Volker Leppin lays out the tapestry of how Christians in the Middle Ages encountered God. Attention is given to the particular objects thought to represent God; anyone could interact with the creator by approaching these objects through all their senses. Sometimes, even human performance made him present through reenactment, either in real life, like Francis of Assisi who became a sort of "second Christ"; or on stage, as in passion plays staged in church or public. Guided by these concepts of representation and reenactment, Leppin launches a journey not only through late medieval religious practice but through the entirety of European culture from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, particularly literature and the arts.

In six succinct chapters, the volume gives a helpful overview of how medieval spiritual culture coped with the experience of distance from God—expressed in philosophical terms or in the notion of penance—and how it overcame this distance through the tangible reexperience of God’s descent to the world. The narrative presents telling episodes from medieval sources, binding them together into a coherent theoretical framework that makes present to us medieval piety in all its temporal and mental distance from our time, witness to a single but significant component of the diverse expressions of Christianity.

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Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction
Exploring medieval spirituality invites us to delve into a remote world. This introduction is a guide to understanding how medieval believers experienced divine presence in manifold ways. God became real in the sacraments, above all on the altar, when the Eucharist was celebrated. He remained present after the celebration in the host, piously venerated in the lives of the saints as well as in images depicting the saints or Christ himself. He spoke through his Word. Common worshipers found him at particular holy sites.

In Medieval Spirituality, Volker Leppin lays out the tapestry of how Christians in the Middle Ages encountered God. Attention is given to the particular objects thought to represent God; anyone could interact with the creator by approaching these objects through all their senses. Sometimes, even human performance made him present through reenactment, either in real life, like Francis of Assisi who became a sort of "second Christ"; or on stage, as in passion plays staged in church or public. Guided by these concepts of representation and reenactment, Leppin launches a journey not only through late medieval religious practice but through the entirety of European culture from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, particularly literature and the arts.

In six succinct chapters, the volume gives a helpful overview of how medieval spiritual culture coped with the experience of distance from God—expressed in philosophical terms or in the notion of penance—and how it overcame this distance through the tangible reexperience of God’s descent to the world. The narrative presents telling episodes from medieval sources, binding them together into a coherent theoretical framework that makes present to us medieval piety in all its temporal and mental distance from our time, witness to a single but significant component of the diverse expressions of Christianity.

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Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction

Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction

Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction

Medieval Spirituality: An Introduction

Overview

Exploring medieval spirituality invites us to delve into a remote world. This introduction is a guide to understanding how medieval believers experienced divine presence in manifold ways. God became real in the sacraments, above all on the altar, when the Eucharist was celebrated. He remained present after the celebration in the host, piously venerated in the lives of the saints as well as in images depicting the saints or Christ himself. He spoke through his Word. Common worshipers found him at particular holy sites.

In Medieval Spirituality, Volker Leppin lays out the tapestry of how Christians in the Middle Ages encountered God. Attention is given to the particular objects thought to represent God; anyone could interact with the creator by approaching these objects through all their senses. Sometimes, even human performance made him present through reenactment, either in real life, like Francis of Assisi who became a sort of "second Christ"; or on stage, as in passion plays staged in church or public. Guided by these concepts of representation and reenactment, Leppin launches a journey not only through late medieval religious practice but through the entirety of European culture from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, particularly literature and the arts.

In six succinct chapters, the volume gives a helpful overview of how medieval spiritual culture coped with the experience of distance from God—expressed in philosophical terms or in the notion of penance—and how it overcame this distance through the tangible reexperience of God’s descent to the world. The narrative presents telling episodes from medieval sources, binding them together into a coherent theoretical framework that makes present to us medieval piety in all its temporal and mental distance from our time, witness to a single but significant component of the diverse expressions of Christianity.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781481320382
Publisher: Baylor University Press
Publication date: 09/15/2025
Pages: 200
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Volker Leppin is professor of church history at the University of Tübingen.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Distant Salvation
2 Bringing the Holy into Life
3 Feeling and Pursuing the Holy
4 Seeing, Smelling, and Tasting the Holy
5 Hearing and Understanding the Holy
6 Heaven So Close
Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Medieval Spirituality

What People are Saying About This

Susan C. Karant-Nunn

In this retranslation of his indispensable book, Leppin declares his primary identity as a medievalist and then demonstrates his mastery of the confluence of intellectual, social, cultural, and spiritual strains of medieval religion that enabled devotés to make the holy veritably present to the late medieval world. Leppin is almost meditative as he brings before us ritual, the emotions, visual images, gender, and the senses in a timely and compelling interdisciplinary context. He carries the impulse of the theological Heiko Oberman, who stressed the close ties of late medieval and Reformation thought, into a new historiographic era. This book, however brief, is monumental.

Ronald K. Rittgers

In this important book, Volker Leppin, one of the leading church historians of our day, invites the reader to go on an adventure with him into the foreign lands of the Middle Ages, attending especially to the spirituality of the period in all its manifold and intriguing forms. He proves an expert guide on this adventure, demonstrating on page after page his complete fluency in the languages, customs, and cultures of the medieval world. Based on over two decades of research into the alterity of the medieval past, this book is a 'must read' for anyone interested in the period.

author of Lutheran Theology: A Grammar of Fait Kirsi Stjerna

Medieval spirituality opens up in rich tapestry in Dr. Leppin's weaving together of religious experiences and expressions of men and women in search of the direct or mediated encounter with the holy. Sensual, corporeal spirituality, in many ways culminating in the celebration of the Lord's Supper, as well as in the encounters with the saints and aesthetic expressions of faith, cannot be appreciated without acknowledging the incarnate God's presence. A leading medievalist, Dr. Leppin points to the essential role of religion and its multifaceted, and embodied, expressions. Not only an 'introduction' to medieval spirituality, this book contributes to the study of religion and religiosity.

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