A Christian Mannes Bileeve. Ed. Nicole D. Smith (Middle English Texts, 60). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2021.

• Pamela M. King

A stand-alone edition of the short text known as A Christian Man’s Bileeve, a commentary on the Creed written for a female audience, was anticipated by the editor’s article on the text, “The Thinking Heart of Female Spirituality and the Apostles’ Creed in A Christian Mannes Bileeve” in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (48:2) for 2018. There, Nicole D. Smith made a detailed and convincing case for the importance of the text for understanding the theology of what the author refers to as the “thinking heart,” as well as demonstrating how the easy flow of the macaronic text between Latin and plain English suggests that the audience was assumed to be fluent in both. Also key to her argument is the excavation of the three embedded passages of unique verse, one in Latin and two in English, written as part of the continuous prose in the manuscript witnesses, but now, in the Introduction to the edition, also printed as rhymed couplets (pp. xlvi-xlvii). The lyrics invite the reader to contemplate Christ’s suffering as a conduit to learning the “skille” of kindness, or, borrowing Sarah McNamer’s words, a literary kind of “affective meditation.” Through thorough critical analysis and comparison, the article places the text within late medieval English traditions of instructive religious prose; the edition offers an equally thorough guided access to the text itself.