![]() The moral message of the tale is clear enough: sins committed after baptism (or penance) are much worse than before. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. ![]() The image of the sweeping woman belongs to the typology of the Parable of the Unclean Spirit, which was often used in sermons on the first Wednesday after Invocavit Sunday (the first Sunday of Lent). Unusually, allegories from natural history were also included in the Concordiantae pictorial schema. ![]() Scenes, figures or statements from the Old Testament (‘types’) were said to anticipate (or prefigure) the actions of Christ in the New Testament (the ‘antitype’). Building on the idea expressed in the Bible verse Matthew 5: 17 – “think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy but to fulfil” – such books juxtaposed images from the Old and New Testaments to express the concept of prefigurement. The Concordiantae belongs to the typological picture book tradition that increased in popularity in the later Middle Ages. 34r (detail).Įrroneously recorded in the Rylands library catalogue as the Speculum Salutis, the manuscript is in fact a fragment of a late fifteenth-century copy of Ulrich von Lilienfeld’s Concordantiae caritatis (‘Concordance of Charity’, c. 1: Woman using a broom to sweep four demons from her house. 1) provides a keen insight into the beliefs and fears of a populace for whom attack by evil spirts was an everyday, tangible threat. However, despite its unprepossessing appearance, Latin MS 69 is certainly not without merit. Not only are the illustrations sketchy and pen-drawn, but the text itself is written in a rough cursive hand that is difficult to decipher. James, whose strong opinions of the images found in Latin MS 69 have coloured recent perceptions of one of more curious items from the Rylands collection. ‘The style of these drawings is beneath contempt’: these are the words of the famed medievalist and cataloguer M.
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