From philosophy to piety: The reappearance of ghost stories from Henry Bate’s Speculum divinorum in a late 15th century Middle Dutch devotional manuscript

The focus of this article is a hitherto unstudied cluster of seven exempla on
spirit apparitions in the Middle Dutch manuscript Utrecht, UB, 1016, a multitext
codex made in the context of the Devotio Moderna. The vernacular exempla
are translations of Latin mirabilia from parts XVII and XIX of Henry Bate’s
Speculum divinorum. This article offers an edition and comparative analysis of
the Latin and Middle Dutch versions of the three stories taken from part XIX
of the Speculum, and presents a preliminary discussion of the textual variations
in relation to the different functions the exempla fulfill in Bate’s philosophical
work and the devotional Utrecht manuscript, respectively. As no other vernacular
translations of works by Henry Bate are known to date, this article breaks
new ground in Bate studies. Moreover, it contributes to a better understanding
of the circulation of ghost stories in the context of the Devotio Moderna.