Vincent Gillespie has always had distinctive and important things to say on how – in the unavoidable swirl of intertextuality – texts, voices, persons, and different authorial roles mediate each other, be it in production or reception. This essay therefore alights on two Middle English religious writers, Nicholas Love and Reginald Pecock, who mediate voices, discourses and conditions of the soul across a range of textual occasions. The distinctive richness and fertile variety of textual mediation under consideration here would seem appropriate for the dedicatee of this Festschrift, whose hallmark is an extraordinary scholarly, critical, and psychological facility with a universe of texts, writers, and readers behaving diversely with other texts, writers, and readers.

In mediating between his Latin source and his own literary input, Nicholas Love takes care, in his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, to distinguish between materials translated from the mighty Meditationes vitae Christi, labelled in the margin with a ‘B’ (for Bonaventura, the revered Franciscan doctor to whom the work was then attributed) and materials he has added himself. Love's voice and words are signalled by the marginal initial ‘N’, although he does not always use it when he makes his own additions. The dialogic which Love constructs between these two initials and between the texts and voices that they represent is more complex than one might initially suppose. On the one hand, passages labelled with a ‘B’ are authoritative, rendered from the Latin auctor, with Love's vernacular offerings being correspondingly modest vernacular fare. On the other hand, ‘N’ is the mark of an ordained preacher with a confidently assertive voice sanctioned by the highest ecclesiastical authority, especially when he defends an orthodox understanding of the Eucharist or engages in anti-Lollard polemic. For our purposes, chapter 36 in the Die Jouis section of the Mirror, ‘How oure lorde Jesus came aȝeyn to Bethanye þe saturday before Palmesoneday, & of þe sopere made to him þere, & of þoo þinges done þeratte’, provides some telling examples of how Love negotiates his original, and how he changes and adds to it (pp. 135/23–139/17).