The title page of The Discipline of Divine Love
Recently, the Repository & Digital Curation team digitized the Libraries’ recently acquired copy of La discipline d’amour divine (The Discipline of Divine Love). This exceedingly rare manuscript (one of two known copies) is a copy of a devotional treatise that was written in 1470 by an anonymous Celestine Monk at Notre Dame D’Ambert near Orleans.
Multiple scribes created this copy sometime in the last decades of the 15th century. Recent scholarship has linked La discipline to the Miroir des simples âmes (Mirror of Simple Souls) by the mystical writer Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake as a heretic in Paris in 1310. The manuscript was purchased by the Northwestern University Libraries last year, after it had been held in private collections for over 500 years. Today it holds a special place in our Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. After digitization by R&DC, the book was submitted to the online repository HathiTrust where, for the first time, it is widely available to anyone, anywhere.