Bert Roest

Bert Roest (1965) studied Modern Intellectual History and Medieval Studies in Groningen and Toronto, and defended in 1996 his PhD thesis, entitled Reading the Book of History. Intellectual Contexts and Educational Functions of Franciscan Historiography. Since then, he has lived and worked in Italy, the United States, Switzerland and Canada, and published books and articles on mendicant historiography, political thought and biblical exegesis, Franciscan education, medieval preaching and the cultural production of Poor Clares during the medieval and Renaissance period. He is currently a lecturer of medieval history at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, and coordinator of the Nijmegen research project Religious orders and religious identity formation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ca. 1420-1620.

Selection of publications:

Books

Order and Disorder: The Poor Clares between Foundation and Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

Franciscan Literature of Religious Instruction Before the Council of Trent, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, CXVII (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

A History of Franciscan Education (c. 1220-1517), Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 11 (Leiden: Brill, 2000).

Edited volumes:

Medieval and Renaissance Humanism: Rhetoric, Representation and Reform, ed. Stephen Gersh & Bert Roest, Brill Studies in Intellectual History, 115 (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2003).

Aspects of Genre and Type in Pre-Modern Literary Cultures, ed. B. Roest & H. Vanstiphout, COMERS/ICOG Communications, I (Groningen: Stix, 1999).

Some recent articles and essays:

‘Ne effluat in multiloquium et habeatur honerosus: The art of preaching in the Franciscan Tradition’, forthcoming.

‘Appropriating the Rule of Clare’, Canterbury Studies in Franciscan History 3 (2011), 63-92.

‘Mendicant School Exegesis’ in: The Practice of the Bible in the Middle Ages: Production, Reception, and Performance in Western Christianity, ed. Susan Boynton and Diane J. Reilly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 179-204.

‘Francis and the pursuit of learning’, in: The Cambridge Companion to Francis of Assisi, ed. Michael J.P. Robson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 161-177.

‘Vvat salmen met sulck volck maken? Franciscaanse stadspredikers en de verdediging van het katholicisme in de Nederlanden, circa 1520-1568’, in: Stedelijk verleden in veelvud: Opstellen over latmiddeleeuwse stadsgeschiedenis in de Nederlanden, ed. Hanno Brand, Jeroen Benders & Renée Nip (Hilversum: Verloren, 2011), 245-258.

“Scollers Bredd Vp in the Monastery’: Educating English Catholic Girls on the Continent’, in: Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Essays in Honour of Barbara Todd, ed. Kim Kippen & Lori Woods (Toronto: CRRS, 2011), 179-209.

‘The Franciscan School System, Re-Assessing the Early Evidence’, in: Franciscan Organisation in the Mendicant Context: Formal and informal structures of the friars’ lives and ministry in the Middle Ages, ed. Michael Robson & Jens Röhrkasten, Vita Regularis. Ordnungen und Deutungen Religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter, 44 (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2010), 253-279.

‘In Christo absconditi sunt omnes thesauri sapientiae: Religious life in the Franciscan school network (13th century)’, Quaderni di storia religiosa (2009), 83-115.

‘Freedom and Contingency in the Sentences Commentary of Francis of Meyronnes’, Franciscan Studies 67 (2009), 323-345.

‘The Discipline of the Heart: Pedagogies of Prayer in Medieval Franciscan Works of Religious Instruction’, in: Franciscans at Prayer, ed. T.J. Johnson, The Medieval Franciscans, 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 413-448.

‘The Franciscan hermit: seeker or refugee’, Church History and Religious Culture 86 (2006), 163-189.

‘Dutch Franciscans Between Observance and Reformation’, Franciscan Studies 63 (2005), 409-442.

‘Ignorantia est mater omnium malorum: the validation of knowledge and the office of preaching in late medieval female Franciscan communities’, in: Saints, Scholars and Politicians: Gender as a tool in medieval studies. Festschrift in honour of Anneke Mulder-Bakker on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday, ed. Renee Nip & Mathilde van Dijk, Medieval Church Studies, 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 65-83.

Bert Roest is also responsible for two scholarly websites:
The Franciscan Authors Catalogue
The Franciscan Women Internet Database