After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England 9782503534022, 9782503542546

Table of contents :
Front Matter (“Contents”, “List of Illustrations”, “Foreword”, “List of Abbreviations”, “List of Contributors”), p. i

Free Access

Chichele’s Church: Vernacular Theology in England after Thomas Arundel, p. 3
Vincent Gillespie
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2001


After Arundel: The Closing or the Opening of the English Mind?, p. 43
Jeremy Catto
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2002


Censorship or Cultural Change? Reformation and Renaissance in the Spirituality of Late Medieval England, p. 55
Michael G. Sargent
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2003


Vernacular Theology / Theological Vernacular: A Game of Two Halves?, p. 73
Ian Johnson
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2004


Orthodoxy’s Image Trouble: Images in and after Arundel’s Constitutions, p. 91
James Simpson
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2005


Censorship and Cultural Continuity: Love’s Mirror, the Pore Caitif, and Religious Experience before and after Arundel, p. 115
Christopher G. Bradley
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2006


Voice after Arundel, p. 133
David Lawton
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2007


Conciliarism and Heresy in England, p. 155
Alexander Russell
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2008


‘Let Them Praise Him in Church’: Orthodox Reform at Salisbury Cathedral in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century, p. 167
David Lepine
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2009


London after Arundel: Learned Rectors and the Strategies of Orthodox Reform, p. 187
Sheila Lindenbaum
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2010


Common Libraries in Fifteenth-Century England: An Episcopal Benefaction, p. 209
James Willoughby
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2011


Religion, Humanism, and Humanity: Chaundler’s Dialogues and the Winchester Secretum, p. 225
Daniel Wakelin
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2012


Staging Advice in Oxford, New College, MS 288: On Thomas Chaundler and Thomas Bekynton, p. 245
Andrew Cole
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2013


Reconstructing the Mixed Life in Reginald Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun, p. 267
Allan F. Westphall
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2014


Vernacular Authority and the Rhetoric of Sciences in Pecock’s The Folewer to the Donet and in The Court of Sapience, p. 285
Tamás Karáth
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2015


‘This holy tyme’: Present Sense in the Digby Lyrics, p. 307
Helen Barr
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2016


English Devotions for a Noble Household: The Long Passion in Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience, p. 325
Susanna Fein
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2017


Lydgate’s Retraction and ‘his resorte to his religyoun’, p. 343
W. H. E. Sweet
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2018


Devotional Cosmopolitanism in Fifteenth-Century England, p. 363
Stephen Kelly, Ryan Perry
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2019


Canons and Catechisms: The Austin Canons of South-East England and Sacerdos parochialis, p. 381
Niamh Pattwell
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2020


‘Þat þine opun dedis be a trewe book’: Reading around Arundel’s Constitutions, p. 395
Amanda Moss
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2021


Gender, Confession, and Authority: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114 in the Fifteenth Century, p. 415
Jennifer N. Brown
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2022


Dressing up a ‘galaunt’: Traditional Piety and Fashionable Politics in Peter Idley’s ‘translacions’ of Mannyng and Lydgate, p. 429
Matthew Giancarlo
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2023


Richard Methley and the Translation of Vernacular Religious Writing into Latin, p. 449
Laura Saetveit Miles
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2024


Saints’ Lives and the Literary after Arundel, p. 469
Catherine Sanok
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2025


Hagiography after Arundel: Expounding the Trinity, p. 487
Karen A. Winstead
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2026


Proliferation and Purification: The Use of Books for Nuns after Arundel, p. 503
C. Annette Grisé
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2027


After Arundel but before Luther: The First Half-Century of Print, p. 523
Susan Powell
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2028


Wyclif, Arundel, and the Long Fifteenth Century, p. 545
Kantik Ghosh
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2029


‘A clerke schulde have it of kinde for to kepe counsell’, p. 563
Nicholas Watson
https://doi.org/10.1484/M.MCS-EB.4.2030


Back Matter (“Bibliography”, “Index Nominum”, “Index of Manuscripts”), p. 591

Citation preview

A FTER A RUNDEL

MEDIEVAL CHURCH STUDIES

Volume 21

AFTER ARUNDEL Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England

Edited by

Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh

H

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data After Arundel : religious writing in fifteenth-century England. -- (Medieval church studies ; v. 21) 1. Devotional literature, English (Middle)--History and criticism. 2. Christian literature, English (Middle)-History and criticism. 3. Christian life--England-History--Middle Ages, 600-1500--Sources. 4. Church history--15th century--Sources. I. Series II. Gillespie, Vincent, 1954- III. Ghosh, Kantik, 1967820.9'3823'09024-dc23 ISBN-13: 9782503534022

© 2011, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form of by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2011/0095/194 ISBN: 978-2-503-53402-2 Printed on acid-free paper

C ONTENTS

List of Illustrations

ix

Foreword

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

List of Contributors

xvii

Part I. Opening Salvoes Chichele’s Church: Vernacular Theology in England after Thomas Arundel

3

VINCENT GILLESPIE

After Arundel: The Closing or the Opening of the English Mind?

43

JEREMY CATTO

Censorship or Cultural Change? Reformation and Renaissance in the Spirituality of Late Medieval England MICHAEL G. SARGENT

55

Vernacular Theology / Theological Vernacular: A Game of Two Halves?

73

IAN JOHNSON

Part II. Discerning the Discourse: Language, Image, and Spirituality Orthodoxy’s Image Trouble: Images in and after Arundel’s Constitutions

91

JAMES SIMPSON

Censorship and Cultural Continuity: Love’s Mirror, the Pore Caitif, and Religious Experience before and after Arundel CHRISTOPHER G. BRADLEY

115

Voice after Arundel

133

DAVID LAWTON

Part III. The Dynamics of Orthodox Reform Conciliarism and Heresy in England

155

ALEXANDER RUSSELL

‘Let Them Praise Him in Church’: Orthodox Reform at Salisbury Cathedral in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century

167

DAVID LEPINE

London after Arundel: Learned Rectors and the Strategies of Orthodox Reform

187

SHEILA LINDENBAUM

Common Libraries in Fifteenth-Century England: An Episcopal Benefaction

209

JAMES WILLOUGHBY

Part IV. Ecclesiastical Humanism Religion, Humanism, and Humanity: Chaundler’s Dialogues and the Winchester Secretum

225

DANIEL WAKELIN

Staging Advice in Oxford, New College, MS 288: On Thomas Chaundler and Thomas Bekynton ANDREW COLE

245

Part V. Reginald Pecock Reconstructing the Mixed Life in Reginald Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun 267 ALLAN F. WESTPHALL Vernacular Authority and the Rhetoric of Sciences in Pecock’s The Folewer 285 to the Donet and in The Court of Sapience TAMÁS KARÁTH

Part VI. Literary Self-Consciousness and Literary History ‘This holy tyme’: Present Sense in the Digby Lyrics

307

HELEN BARR

English Devotions for a Noble Household: The Long Passion in Audelay’s 325 Counsel of Conscience SUSANNA FEIN

Lydgate’s Retraction and ‘his resorte to his religyoun’ W. H. E. SWEET

343

Part VII. The Codex as an Instrument of Reform Devotional Cosmopolitanism in Fifteenth-Century England

363

STEPHEN KELLY AND RYAN PERRY

Canons and Catechisms: The Austin Canons of South-East England and Sacerdos parochialis

381

NIAMH PATTWELL

‘Þat þine opun dedis be a trewe book’: Reading around Arundel’s Constitutions 395 AMANDA MOSS

Part VIII. Translation Gender, Confession, and Authority: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114 in the Fifteenth Century JENNIFER N. BROWN

415

Dressing up a ‘galaunt’: Traditional Piety and Fashionable Politics in Peter 429 Idley’s ‘translacions’ of Mannyng and Lydgate MATTHEW GIANCARLO

Richard Methley and the Translation of Vernacular Religious Writing into Latin

449

LAURA SAETVEIT MILES

Part IX. Acting Holy Saints’ Lives and the Literary after Arundel

469

CATHERINE SANOK

Hagiography after Arundel: Expounding the Trinity KAREN A. WINSTEAD

487

Proliferation and Purification: The Use of Books for Nuns after Arundel C. ANNETTE GRISÉ

503

Part X. From Script to Print After Arundel but before Luther: The First Half-Century of Print

523

SUSAN POWELL

Part XI. Closing Reflections and Responses Wyclif, Arundel, and the Long Fifteenth Century

545

KANTIK GHOSH

‘A clerke schulde have it of kinde for to kepe counsell’

563

NICHOLAS WATSON

Bibliography

591

Index Nominum

643

Index of Manuscripts

655

L IST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover image. ‘Thomas Arundel’, from Jean Creton, Histoire du roy Richard II, London, British Library, MS Harley 1319, fol. 12r. c. 1405. Reproduced by permission © The British Library Board. Figure 1, p. 100. Augustine, City of God, frontispiece, Paris, BnF, MS fonds fr. 22912, fol. 2v . Early fifteenth century. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Figure 2, p. 108. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim encounters Idolatry and she shows him the carpenter worshipping an image he has made’, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 65v . c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board. Figure 3, p. 109. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim’s defence of images: the high altar and its “calendar’”, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 68r. c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board.

F OREWORD

T

o mark the six-hundredth anniversary of the formal promulgation in 1409 of Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s now notorious provincial constitutions deriving from the 1407 Council of Oxford, a conference was held in the university that had been the focus of the Archbishop’s anger and concern at the spread of heterodox thought. The conference met in St John’s College between 16 and 18 April 2009. It was sponsored by the Faculty of English Language and Literature, with generous support from the Centre for the Study of the Book at the Bodleian Library, and the British Academy. Some graduate bursaries were supplied by the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, and underwriting was offered by the Oxford Faculty of History. Over one hundred and twenty delegates attended, and the three days saw thirty-three papers and four plenary lectures delivered. The purpose of the meeting was to allow scholars of later-medieval religious writing in England the opportunity to reflect on recent developments in the study of this period since the ‘religious turn’ of the 1990s; to explore the impact of emerging knowledge about English religious institutions in the fifteenth century; and to examine whether a new consensus might be emerging on the main themes and trends in the production and use of religious texts composed, copied, and circulated during this generally less well-examined period of literary and social history. 1409 has become fetishized as a watershed date since Nicholas Watson’s hugely influential 1995 Speculum article suggested that the Arundel decrees brought about a significant reorientation of the production and reception of vernacular books of religion. The conference sought to think beyond the totemic force of that date in the scholarship of the last fifteen years, and to explore if there were alternative historiographical trajectories and sociological models that spoke more eloquently or persuasively to the evidence as seen by researchers in the field.

xii

Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh

That no single such model emerged from the meeting, or emerges from these papers, is hardly surprising, and is to be welcomed as a sign of the intellectual health of a field that is being tilled with new vigour, fresh insights, and an increasing armoury of scholarly weapons. Although stopping short of the Catholic positivism of Eamon Duffy’s 1992 The Stripping of the Altars (itself a valuable corrective to the Protestant Reformation historiography of A. G. Dickens and others), the conference probably heard more about the vitality and confidence of English religious life (and the texts that supported it) in the fifteenth century than has been altogether fashionable in some strands of scholarly thought since Watson’s article. But other speakers felt that the trauma of Lollardy and the impact of John Wyclif and Thomas Arundel still resonated in the texts and contexts that they sought to explore. Some speakers felt that the new vectors of change in English religious life were international (such as the Conciliar Movement), or antedated Arundel altogether (such as the reforms at Salisbury in the 1380s). Others identified the movement of orthodox reform as an idiomatically English response to a panEuropean crisis manifesting itself most eloquently in the Great Schism, or resonating in changes in intellectual attitude in Europe’s universities. Others, again, felt that developing lay literacy, or greater availability of texts in translation, or significant developments in new forms of association (such as guilds), or new institutions (such as colleges and chantries) deserved more recognition as agents for change. What all the papers at the conference, and in this book, seemed to agree on was that England’s religious life in the fifteenth century was a site worthy of sustained, subtle, systematic, and searching analysis. Delegates and speakers showed in their contributions a highly nuanced understanding of the sociology of their texts and the mobile synergies of their contexts. So, what emerges is a portrait of latemedieval English religious theory and praxis that complicates any attempt to present the period as either quivering in post-traumatic stress, or basking in the autumn sunshine of an uncritical and self-satisfied hierarchy’s failure to engage with undoubted European and domestic crises in ecclesiology, pastoral theology, anti-clericalism, and lay spiritual emancipation. This book remains, therefore, as dialogic and questingly curious as the conference that gave rise to it. After Arundel means not just because of Arundel, or despite Arundel; it also asks what models and taxonomies will be needed to move beyond Arundel as a fixed star in the firmament of (especially literary) scholarship in the period, and to supply the next phase of scholarly exploration of this still often dark continent of religious attitudes and writing with new tools, new technical vocabularies, and new

FOREWORD

xiii

directions of travel. We see this book as a point of departure, not a port of arrival. There is still a lot of work to do After Arundel. As always in the best scholarly endeavours, the conference and this book are the work of many hands, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge the help and support of friends and colleagues. The meeting was organised by a planning committee of Helen Barr, Santha Bhattacharji, Mishtooni Bose, Kantik Ghosh, Vincent Gillespie, Annie Sutherland, and John Watts. Sterling support was provided by the staff of the English Faculty Office, especially Katie MacCurrach and Charlotte Heavens. Mishtooni Bose also curated the linked exhibition of manuscripts on show in the Bodleian Library during and after the meeting, and Richard Ovenden and Martin Kauffmann in Bodleian Special Collections were willing supporters. Wilma Minty of the Bodleian helped in the organisation of the plenary in Convocation House, and the reception in the Divinity School, a room begun in 1428 and finished in 1488, whose stones took shape during the very period that we were discussing. Our graduate helpers, Alex da Costa, Zoe Hopkins, and Rebecca Marsland were tirelessly efficient. We are indebted to the News International Fund of the Faculty of English for support towards the preparation of this book for the press, to Dr Olivia Robinson for her careful editorial ministrations to each of the chapters as they came in, and to Sebastian Langdell for his careful work on the indices. We are grateful to Dr Simon Forde and the series editors at Brepols for their faith in this volume. Vincent Gillespie Kantik Ghosh August 2010

A BBREVIATIONS

BRUC

A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963)

BRUO

A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to AD 1500, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957–59)

EETS

The Early English Text Society (1864–)

O. S.

Original Series (1864–)

E. S.

Extra Series (1867–1920)

S. S.

Supplementary Series (1970–)

Hudson, PR

Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)

HUO

The History of the University of Oxford II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. by Jeremy I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)

IMEV

Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by Carleton Brown and R. H. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press for The Index Society, 1943); with Supplement to the Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by R. H. Robbins and John Cutler (Lexington: University of

xvi

Abbreviations

Kentucky Press, 1965). Numbers transferred to and corrected in A New Index of Middle English Verse, ed. by Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards (London: British Library, 2005) MED

Middle English Dictionary, ed. by Hans Kurath and S. M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1952–)

ODNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

OED

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, by John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, 20 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)

PL

Patrologiae cursus completus: series Latina, ed. by J.-P. Migne, 221 vols (Paris: Migne, 1844–55 and 1862–65)

STC

A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 2nd edn revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and K. E. Pantzer, 3 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91)

Watson, ‘Censorship’

Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64

Wilkins, Concilia

Concilia Magnae Brittaniae et Hiberniae, ed. by David Wilkins, 3 vols (London: Gosling, 1737)

L IST OF C ONTRIBUTORS

Helen Barr is Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. Christopher Bradley is Lecturer in the Department of English and Postgraduate Research Fellow in the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Jennifer N. Brown is Assistant Professor of English and World Literature at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, New York. Jeremy Catto is an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Andrew Cole is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. Susanna Fein is Professor of English, and Coordinator of the Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies Program at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Kantik Ghosh is Stirling-Boyd Fellow and Tutor in English at Trinity College, Oxford, and a Lecturer in English at the University of Oxford. Matthew Giancarlo is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. Vincent Gillespie is the J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford.

xviii

List of Contributors

C. Annette Grisé is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. Ian Johnson is Senior Lecturer in English in the School of English at the University of St Andrews and a member of the St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Tamás Karáth is a Lecturer at the Institute of English of Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Piliscsaba, Hungary. Stephen Kelly is a Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast. David Lawton is Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis, and Executive Director of the New Chaucer Society. David Lepine is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History at Exeter University. Sheila Lindenbaum taught in the English department at Indiana University, where she was also director of the Medieval Studies Institute. She now lives in London. Laura Saetveit Miles is as Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Amanda Moss was awarded her doctorate in English Literature at Royal Holloway College, University of London, in 2009. Niamh Pattwell is a Lecturer in Middle English Language and Literature at University College Dublin. Ryan Perry is a Lecturer in Later Medieval Literature at the University of Kent. Sue Powell has a Chair in Medieval Texts and Culture at the University of Salford.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

xix

Alex Russell completed his doctorate at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2011, and is currently Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick. Catherine Sanok is Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. Michael Sargent is a Professor in the English Department of Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. James Simpson is the Douglas P. and Katherine P. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. W. H. E. Sweet completed his doctorate on Lydgate and Scottish Lydgateans at St John’s College, Oxford, in 2009. Daniel Wakelin is the Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at the University of Oxford. Nicholas Watson is Professor of English at Harvard University. Allan F. Westphall is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Geographies of Orthodoxy research project and works in the School of English, University of St Andrews. James Willoughby is a Research Fellow at New College, Oxford. Karen A. Winstead is Professor of English at The Ohio State University in Columbus.

Part I Opening Salvoes

C HICHELE’S C HURCH : V ERNACULAR T HEOLOGY IN E NGLAND AFTER T HOMAS A RUNDEL Vincent Gillespie

T

hree written recollections of moments of political pageantry that carry embedded within them important religious resonances. First, Adam Usk, whose position at the margins of English political life and European religious life gave him an interesting if highly coloured perspective on the Lancastrian regime. In his Latin chronicle, he reports the 1416 visit of the Emperor Sigismund to England: Sigismund, king of Hungary and of the Romans, after that he had striven for a year long in the general council at Constance for the unity of the church […] and after that he had visited the kings of Castile and of all Spain on behalf of the same unity, came through the realms of France into England for the stablishing of peace between those two kingdoms. But, after that he had abode in London at the great cost of the realm, the business being thwarted by the cunning of the French, he returned again to the council of Constance.1

The visit included his solemn investiture into the Order of the Garter on 24 May 1416 (an event presided over by Henry Beaufort), and the signing of the Treaty of Canterbury on 15 August, after which the emperor left and ‘With his own hands sent forth scrolls to be scattered abroad in public places’. The Latin verses reported on these scrolls were also recorded in Elmham’s Liber metricus, the Gesta Henrici Quinti, and in Capgrave’s De illustribus Henricis, and are translated into Middle English by Capgrave in his Chronicle:

1

The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. by Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. xciii; The Chronicle of Adam of Usk AD 1377–1421, trans. by Edward Maunde Thompson (Felinfach: Llanerch, 1990), p. 184.

4

Vincent Gillespie Sone after that the emperour went oute of Ynglond and in his goyng he mad his servauntis for to throwe billis in the way, in which was writyn swech sentens: Farewel, with glorious victory Blessid Inglond, ful of melody. Thou may be cleped of angel nature, Thou servist God with so bysy cure We leve with the this praising, Whech we schal evir sey and sing.2

The incorporation of the verses into so many Latin and vernacular records suggests that this was considered to be a moment of great symbolic power and significance. Sigismund, the hammer of schismatic popes, and energetic stage manager of the great ecumenical council currently in session at Konstanz, was giving his public and visible approval to the English king, lately embellished by the ‘glorious victory’ of Agincourt, to the English people, and, most visibly and strongly, to the English church. Indeed the bill places much more emphasis on the religious stature of the English (even rehashing the old Gregorian pun on Angels and Angles) than on the king’s political or military prowess, despite the fact that one purpose of the visit was in fact to confirm an alliance against the French. But an important plank of Henry’s public image was for him to be seen, in Lydgate’s words, as ‘protectour and diffence […] off Christus spouse douhtir of Syoun’.3 Syon was of course, the name chosen for one of a planned network of three new religious houses founded by King Henry V in 1415, soon after his accession (the others were the Charterhouse of Jesus of Bethlehem and an unachieved foundation of Celestines). The scale and prestige of Henry’s plans for these houses, all intended to nestle close to the royal palace at Sheen, undoubtedly sent signals about the

2 This Middle English version comes from The Chronicle of England by John Capgrave, ed. by Francis Charles Hingeston, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Ævi Scriptores (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), p. 314. 3

A Defence of Holy Church, ll. 5–7, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part I, ed. by Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS, E. S. 107 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1911), pp. 30–31. The most perceptive and sensitive guide to this historical material is Jeremy Catto: see, for example, Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, in Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. by Gerald L. Harriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 97–115; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430’, in HUO, II, pp. 175–261; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Theology after Wycliffism’, in HUO, II, pp. 263–80; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the Fifteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Association, Sixth Series, 17 (2007), 83–99.

CHICHELE’S CHURCH

5

ambition and purposefulness of the new king.4 But his choice of orders to occupy those houses sent a more subtle and significant signal: the king was making a clean break with the monastic past, and in particular with the politically and religiously troubled years of the last two kings, his father Henry IV, and the king he had usurped in 1399, Richard II. The Birgittine Clement Maidstone, a local boy who joined the order early in its life after a distinguished career as a liturgist of the Sarum rite, reports in his Latin account of the martyrdom of Archbishop Richard Scrope that the pope would only grant a plenary indulgence to Henry IV for his murder ‘on the condition that he swear [...] that he would build three new monasteries under one of the strictest rules in all Christendom in honour of the three chief feast days, and that he would endow those monasteries without the imposition of any tax on them so that the monks living in them might devote themselves freely to God in their holy offices with peace and quiet in all their hearts’, and notes that Henry IV had died before fulfilling that vow.5 So the internal mythology of the Birgittines had early associated their foundation with Henry V’s desire to make amends for the troubled past and to start anew. Not only was ‘the King’s great work at Sheen’ (as contemporary chronicles described the project) making a political statement of intent (in re-occupying the royal palace at Sheen, semi-derelict since the death of Richard’s queen Anne in 1394), but it also marked a new religious beginning after the troubles with John Wyclif and his followers. No house of Birgittines or Celestines had ever before been founded in Britain. Nor had the Carthusians (‘never reformed because never deformed’) featured prominently in either side’s arguments. None of these orders had therefore been tainted by the in-fighting, self-preservation, and name-calling that had characterized the campaigns run by the orders of friars and the older monastic

4

The standard account of the foundation of Syon is still George James Aungier, The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, the Parish of Isleworth, and the Chapelry of Hounslow, Compiled from Public Records, Ancient Manuscripts, Etc (London: Nichols, 1840). More recently, M. B. Tait, ‘The Brigittine Monastery of Syon (Middlesex) with Special Reference to its Monastic Uses’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1975) studied much unprinted manuscript material and explored the spiritual and cultural life of the House. See also Neil Beckett, ‘St Bridget, Henry V and Syon Abbey’, in Studies in St Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 35.19 (1993), 125–50. 5

James Raine, ‘Miscellanea Relating to the Martyrdom of Archbishop Scrope’, in Historians of the Church of York, ed. by James Raine, Rolls Series, 71, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1886), II, 304–11, available online at ; Stephen K. Wright, ‘Provenance and Manuscript Tradition of the Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi’, Manuscripta, 28 (1984), 92–102.

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orders to defend themselves against, first, the anti-fraternalism of Richard FitzRalph and, then, Wyclif’s increasingly strident calls for clerical disendowment and the abolition of ‘private religions’. So all three orders in the Sheen project could be said to offer a fresh start for Henry and for the English church, and one which might learn some of the lessons provided by Wyclif and Lollardy.6 Hoccleve reports that the Lollards scornfully called Henry ‘prynce of preestes’, and there is no sign that he would have felt uncomfortable with that epithet. Rather, it seems the King, his advisors, and many contemporary commentators thought of him in almost Old Testament terms as representing a vigorous new manifestation of the church militant, a new Solomon.7 The symbolic import of Sigismund’s visit and of his praise of the religious zeal of the English resonate through my second moment of pageantry, described in the famous letter to Henry V from his ‘poor, true, and continual orator’ John Forester, written on 2 February 1417 and recounting Sigismund’s return to Konstanz on 27 January of that year, wearing the livery of the garter bestowed on him the previous May: õour broder, Gracious Pryns, the kyng of Rome, entride the cite of Constaunce with õour lyvere of the coler abowte his necke (a glad syghte to alle õour lyge men to se) […] and he resseyvede õour lordes graciously with reyght god cher, and of alle the worschypful men of õour nation he touchyde thar handys only in alle the grete prees.8

Forester goes on to tell how the bishop of Salisbury (Robert Hallum, effective head of the English nation at Konstanz) raced off to the meeting place of the council and, narrowly beating the cardinal of Cambrai, Pierre d’Ailly, head of the French nation and one of the great intellectual forces behind the Church reform and conciliar movement, to the steps of the pulpit, mounted them and preached a sermon of welcome. Forester’s letter continues with an account of a ‘colation’ held

6

For more on this, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard: Wyclif at Syon in the Fifteenth Century’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. by Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchison, Medieval Church Studies, 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 131–62. 7

Thomas Hoccleve, Remonstrance against Oldcastle, l. 289, in Selections from Hoccleve ed. by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 68; all subsequent citations from this edition. Lydgate’s Defence of Holy Church also calls on Henry to imitate David and drive out the heretics from his city. 8

Thomas Rymer, Foedera, conventiones, literæ, et ujuscunque generis acta publica, Inter reges Angliæ, et alios quosvis imperatores, reges, pontifices, principes, vel communitates, 2nd edn, 20 vols (London, 1704), IX , 434–35.

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the following day by Sigismund for the English nation at Konstanz, and his praise for the ‘bretherred’ between himself and Henry V: And he tolde thame so gret worschyp of õowr Ryal person, and sythyn of alle my Lordis õour brethers, and thenne of the governaunce of holy kyrk, dyvyn servise, operaments, and alle stat ther of kepyd, as yoff hit wer in paradys, in comparison to ony place that he evere came inne to for.

The English nation repaid the compliment by inviting Sigismund to a great feast for 152 nobles on Sunday, 31 January, described in full culinary splendour in the German diary of Ulrich von Richtental, city clerk of Konstanz. The feast was in fact a repeat of a similarly lavish occasion held just a week before for all the members of the Council of Konstanz, and hosted by Hallum of Salisbury, Richard Clifford of London and bishops of five other English dioceses. At both occasions, von Richtental reports that the three feasts were separated by dramatic performances of a religious nature: During the banquet there were shows and pantomimes by players in rich and costly raiment. They played Our Lady holding her Son God Our Lord and Joseph standing beside her and three holy kings bringing their tribute. They had prepared a shining gold star that went before the kings on a fine iron wire. They played also King Herod sending after the three kings and slaying the children. All the players wore most costly garments and broad gold and silver girdles and played their parts with great diligence and modesty.9

These pageants, unlike anything else reported in the documents generated by the council, are another indication of the awareness on the part of the English at home and abroad of the importance of creating a good impression of the English church. Von Richtental also reports that on the eve of the feast of St Thomas Becket the English had sent four trumpeters throughout the city, with the king’s arms hanging from the trumpets, before singing vespers in the cathedral ‘with tall candles burning, bells pealing, and sweet English hymns on the organ’, followed the next morning by a solemn high mass concelebrated by Hallum and two other bishops.10 These public displays by the English church represent a defiant assertion of their conformity to the full majesty of the institutional church’s liturgical opulence (in

9

Ulrich von Richental’s Chronicle of the council is translated in The Council of Constance: The Unification of the Church, ed. by John Hine Mundy and Kennerly M. Woody, trans. by Louise R. Loomis, Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 63 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 146–48; on the plays, see Andre De Mandach, ‘English “Dramatic” Performances at the Council of Constance, 1417’, Records of Early English Drama Newsletter, 2 (1982), 26–28. 10

The Council of Constance, ed. by Mundy and Woody, pp. 146–47.

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contrast to Lollard ecclesiology), as well as a pointed and even ostentatious display of support for the genre of religious drama, often the target of Lollard criticism. Konstanz was an important shop window for the English church, which felt itself under pressure in the European environment because of the pestiferous, pernicious, and annoyingly persistent heresies of John Wyclif, whose teaching occupied much of the Council’s time in its early months and was definitively condemned in its eighth session in May 1415.11 The examination and condemnation of Jan Hus in June of that year had not made things any easier for the English: in the course of his interrogation, led by Pierre d’Ailly, head of the French nation, Hus had dramatically exclaimed ‘if Wyclif had disseminated some errors, let the English see to that’.12 The English were potentially on the back foot diplomatically and theologically, a situation not helped by the continuing rumblings of the Oldcastle case at home. So the victory at Agincourt and the special favour shown to England, and to the English church, by Sigismund were welcome signs of acceptance to be grappled to the collective consciousness and exploited for all they were worth. The English representatives at Konstanz kept a remarkably high profile for a relatively small delegation, and English church leaders performed prominent symbolic functions in the central actions of the council. Richard Clifford, bishop of London, the chronicler Thomas Walsingham tells us, proposed in conclave the election of Odo of Colonna as the new Pope Martin V, and placed the fisherman’s ring on his finger after his election, while William Hulles, the prior of St John of Clerkenwell, held the papal tiara at his coronation

11

Conciliarism and Papalism, ed. by J. H. Burns and Thomas M. Izbicki (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) offers a useful overview of the conciliar movement; see also Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Konstanz, 1414–1418, 2 vols (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1991). Many church historians tend to see the conciliar movement as a missed opportunity, which fizzled out and produced no policies of lasting value. But the active role played by the English delegates at the first two meetings meant that, after a period of relative isolation because of the Schism (when England supported the Roman candidates against their opponents supported by the French) and the continuing effects of the Hundred Years War, the leading figures in the English church could meet, talk to, and learn from their continental colleagues. On Anglo-Roman relations during this period, see Margaret Harvey, The English in Rome, 1362–1420: Portrait of an Expatriate Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Margaret Harvey, England, Rome, and the Papacy, 1417–1464: The Study of a Relationship (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Margaret Harvey, Solutions to the Schism: A Study of Some English Attitudes, 1378 to 1409, Kirchengeschichtliche Quellen und Studien, 12 (St Ottilien: EOS, 1983). 12

C. M. D. Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, 1378–1460: The Conciliar Response to the Great Schism (London: Arnold, 1977), pp. 87–92 (p. 91).

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service.13 English bishops regularly sat as members of the heresy proceedings against Hus and Jerome of Prague (Jeroným Pražský), and several members of the English nation delivered Latin sermons before the Council, some of which have survived.14 The alliance and brotherly connection between Henry V and Sigismund became the stuff of English legend. My third moment of pageantry occurs in Lydgate’s verses on the coronation of Henry VI in 1429, which construct themselves around two sets of paired monarchs: St Edward the Confessor and St Louis of France represent the conjoint kingdoms manifested in the bloodline of the new king, but the other paired monarchs, Sigismund and Henry V, are deployed as totems of powerful and effective leadership of church and state. The sotiltees between the courses of the coronation banquet, for example, provided an opportunity comparable to that exploited by the English bishops at Konstanz, to make eloquent political statements through the medium of pageantry, but also to invoke and exploit the intertextual archive of regal and ecclesial mythology built up during the short but epic reign of the new king’s father: Ageinst miscreauntes themperour Sigismound Hath shewid his myght which is imperial Sithen Henry Vth so noble a knyght was founde For Cristes cause in actis martial; Cherisshyng the Chirch Lollardes had a falle, To give ensaumple to kynges that succede And to his braunche in especiall While he doth regne to love God and drede.15

13 Thomas Walsingham, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, trans. by David Preest, with introduction and notes by James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 421–22. 14

These sermons, and those delivered by carefully selected preachers at the start of domestic convocations of the province of Canterbury, invariably address the need for urgent church reform and renewal under the banner of orthodoxy. Chris L. Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”: Richard Fleming’s Reform Sermon at the Council of Constance’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51 (2000), 1–36; Chris L. Nighman, ‘Reform and Humanism in the Sermons of Richard Fleming at the Council of Constance (1417)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, 1996); T. E. Morrissey, ‘“Surge Illuminare”: A Lost Address by Richard Fleming at the Council of Constance (Clm 28433)’, Annuarium historiae conciliorum, 22 (1990–91), 86–130. A sermon by Englishman Geoffrey Schale is printed in Adolar Zumkeller, ‘Unbekannte Konstanzer Konzilspredigten’, Analecta Augustinianum, 33 (1970), 5–74 (pp. 29–44). Henry Abingdon’s sermon is paraphrased by Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford’, p. 259. 15

The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part II, pp. 623–24. For relevant recent work on John Lydgate, see, for example, James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English

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The two kings are again linked in Lydgate’s ballade for the coronation: And þat þou mayst beo resemblable founde Heretykes and Lollardes for to oppresse Lych emperour, worthy Sygesmound, And as þy fader, floure of hye prowesse, At þe gynnyng of his royal noblesse Woyded al Cokil fer oute of Syon, Crystes spouse sette in stabulnesse Outraying foreyns þat cam from Babylon.16

Lydgate also invokes a train of Roman emperors (Trajan, Tiberius, Gratian, Justinian) as models for the young king, especially encouraging him to cherish the church like Constantine. That invocation of a Roman, imperial past is also part of the self-presentation engendered out of the English church’s need for historical redefinition. It is powerfully deployed in Thomas Polton’s fascinating defence of the integrity of the English as a distinct nation (that is, a group or confederation of delegates from geographically or culturally affiliated countries) at the Council of Konstanz in March 1417, a defence that followed hard on the heels of the entertainments and pageantry shown by the English nation to Sigismund in January of that year. Polton’s defence goes far beyond the internal operation of the Council to embrace not just European politics but also the English church’s growing ability to think of itself as an Ecclesia Anglicana, in a perhaps deliberate reengagement with the idealisms of Bede’s history of the early English church.17

Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350– 1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 34–67; Maura Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Shannon Gayk, ‘Images of Pity: The Regulatory Aesthetics of John Lydgate’s Religious Lyrics’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 28 (2006), 175–203; and the essays in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. by Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 16 17

The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part II, pp. 627–28.

For a slightly abbreviated translation of Polton’s fascinating speech, which prefigures (and perhaps supplies) many of the claims made by Henry VIII’s ministers during the break with Rome, see Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, pp. 110–26 (subsequent references in the text are by page to this version); J.-P. Genet, ‘English Nationalism: Thomas Polton at the Council of Constance’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 28 (1984), 60–78. Another version of d’Ailly’s attack and Polton’s defence is found in the diary of Cardinal Guillaume Fillastre, translated in The Council of Constance, ed. by Mundy and Woody, pp. 314–24 and 335–49 (subsequent references by page to this version). Bede was certainly being read by this generation of English churchmen, as Richard Ullerston, a key policy advisor, refers to possessing a copy written ‘in the most ancient English’.

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Polton, an Oxford Bachelor of Civil Law from the 1390s and later bishop of Hereford under Chichele, was responding to a calculated and detailed attack masterminded by Pierre d’Ailly against the claim by the English to form a distinct grouping or nation at the council, instead of being part of the wider ‘German’ nation as they had in the past. The French claimed that the English church, consisting of only two provinces, was tiny in proportion to other nations (which covered much larger geographical areas). Moreover they stressed the sanctity of the French monarchy and pointedly asserted ‘the length of time since [France] received the faith of Christ, from which it has never deviated as compared with the kingdom of England’ (p. 119). In his reply, Polton, referring to himself as speaking on behalf of the English nation ‘also known as the British nation’ (p. 111, Bede again), argues that England is superior in the antiquity of its faith, dignity, and honour, and at least equal in all the divine gifts of regal power and numbers and wealth of clergy and people. The royal house had emerged during the second age of the world and enjoyed an unbroken continuity. Once more drawing on a Bedan view of the conversion of England, Polton argues that many saints and pilgrims had been born in England, most notably St Helena (daughter of old king Coel) and her son Constantine the Great, ‘born in the royal city of York’, so that the power, influence, and riches of the Roman church, and the religious enlightenment it had brought to the world might be attributed directly to the blessed realm of the English (p. 118). The conversion of the Empire, the endowment of the church, the building of St Peter’s, and the finding of the true cross were all the consequence of the act of an English man and woman. Moreover, Polton argues, using the Glastonbury legends, Joseph of Arimathea came to England with twelve companions, ‘and converted the people to the faith’ (p. 119).18 This means that England was Christian long before St Denis converted France. Furthermore: that puissant English royal house never strayed from the obedience of the church of Rome, but until this day has always fought for it in exemplary Christian fashion. Several sheets of paper would not be enough to particularize the other prerogatives and gifts of that glorious line. (p. 118)

In a remarkable move, with interesting implications for our understanding of vernacularity, Polton even argues that Anglia (vel Britannia) enjoys greater linguistic diversity than the Gallic nation:

18

On the political advantages of this legend, see James P. Carley, ‘A Grave Event: Henry V, Glastonbury Abbey and Joseph of Arimathea’s Bones’, in Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, ed. by James P. Carley, Arthurian Studies, 44 (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), pp. 285–302.

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Vincent Gillespie The Gallic nation speaks in the main one language, understood as a whole or at least in part by the vulgar throughout the entire extent of the nation. But the renowned nation of England or Britain includes within and under itself five languages or nations no one of which is understood by the rest, namely English, which the English and Scots share alike, Welsh, Irish, Gascon and Cornish. (Fillastre’s Diary, p. 344)

It is hard to know how far Polton’s tongue was in his cheek in all of this, though the argument for linguistic diversity also echoes similar observations made by Bede. But it is interesting to see him ransacking the past for a sense of a distinctive English contribution to spirituality and church history, and to see him embracing Britain as a multilingual construct, bound together by the lingua franca of church Latin. Ecclesia Anglicana vel Brittania may in some senses have been re-born at Konstanz. 19 Polton’s speech is, of course, part of that turn to propaganda in the Lancastrian regime so well documented and explored by Paul Strohm and others in the domestic political sphere, and in connection with heresy.20 But it has been much less fully explored in connection with the local English iteration of the panEuropean process of reformation of the institutional church in head and members that was the publicly expressed purpose of the Council of Konstanz.21 The potential impact of that European process on English spirituality and on the English church’s conception of its mission, status and identity, has, I believe, been

19

This nationalistic language is also found in some fourteenth-century sermons by reformminded preachers such as Thomas Brinton: see Andrea Ruddick, ‘National Sentiment and Religious Vocabulary in Fourteenth-Century England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60 (2009), 1–18. Cf. the use of Augustine of Canterbury in the London alliterative poem St Erkenwald in Jennifer L. Sisk, ‘The Uneasy Orthodoxy of St Erkenwald’, English Literary History, 74 (2007), 89–115. 20

For example, Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Jennifer Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship: Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 21

Thomas Gascoigne’s Liber veritatum bristles with references to discussions at the various fifteenth-century councils, especially in relation to heresy, but also in regard to the orthodox reform of pastoral care: Loci e Libro veritatum: Passages Selected from Gascoigne’s Theological Dictionary, Illustrating the Condition of Church and State, 1403–1458, ed. by James Edwin Thorold Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881). On the European reformist orthodoxy with which English bishops would have come into contact at the councils, see, for example, Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); A Companion to Jean Gerson, ed. by Brian Patrick McGuire (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

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masked by the focus in recent years on the impact of the decrees of Thomas Arundel issued in 1409 but drafted at the Council of Oxford in 1407.22 Arundel’s decrees cast a long shadow across the following decades and encourage a sense that the role of the vernacular in innovatory religious writing was diminished, and its advocates cowed and anxious. But it was left to his long-serving successor, Henry Chichele, archbishop from 1414 until 1443, surrounded by a new cadre of bishops and intellectuals, to shape and develop the distinctive features of English spirituality in the first half of the fifteenth century.23 Thomas Arundel died on 14 February 1414, only eleven months after the accession of Henry V in March 1413. Henry Chichele had intellectual and ecclesiastical horizons that were broader than those of Arundel. At one of the first meetings of the Convocation of Canterbury after his election, Chichele promised to blow away the ‘pulvis negligentiae’ (‘the dust of neglect’) from the feet of the English church.24 This is hardly a ringing endorsement of the achievements of his predecessor, though it may contain more than a (dust) mite of truth. Chichele, an Oxford Doctor of Canon and Civil Law, was part of that generation of career clerics and bishops who had trained in Oxford 22

Chichele’s church has tended to be overshadowed by an emphasis in recent scholarship on the 1409 decrees of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, in the wake of Watson, ‘Censorship’. Many subsequent users of Watson’s argument have failed to be as subtle and nuanced in their interpretations as he is. For a critique of this emphasis, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, in Middle English, ed. by Paul Strohm, Oxford Twenty-first Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 401–20, and, in the narrower context of visionary texts, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 23

See also Gerald L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461, The New Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), especially chapters 9 and 10; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Eamon Duffy, ‘Religious Belief’, in A Social History of England 1200–1500, ed. by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 293–339; Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers 1240–1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 24

The detailed legislation of Chichele’s early years is contained in Records of Convocation, ed. by Gerald Lewis Bray (Woodbridge: Boydell in association with the Church of England Record Society, 2005), V : Canterbury 1414–1443. For this comment, see p. 33. For interlocking (and occasionally overlapping) discussions of these issues, see Vincent Gillespie, ‘Fatherless Books: Authorship, Attribution, and Orthodoxy in Later Medieval England’, in Opening the Middle English Lives of Christ, ed. by Ian Johnson and Allan Westphall (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming); and ‘1412–1534: Culture and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. by Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 163–93.

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alongside Wyclif or the next generation of his intellectual supporters.25 That generation shared more common ground with the Wyclivisiti than Arundel’s, and their analysis of the state of the institutional church would have frequently overlapped, even if they disagreed about the necessary remedies.26 Chichele had been blooded on the European stage at the Council of Pisa, and he had also served on diplomatic missions to the papal curia. Indeed, the eventual promulgation of Arundel’s decrees in 1409, after their drafting in Oxford in 1407, may well owe something to the activities and experiences of the English nation at the Council of Pisa that year. Chichele’s marked and damaged, perhaps even mildly traumatized, generation of church leaders had a real if pragmatic and politically aware agenda for reform. It was Chichele who between 1414 and 1416 standardized and regularized the English liturgy on the model of the Sarum rite, and who oversaw some of the new liturgical feasts designed to foster and direct orthodox lay piety.27 It was Chichele who, in 1415, enacted the king’s will that the national and regional saints George and David, Cedd, Winifred, and John of Beverley should be raised in liturgical stature in the wake of Agincourt alongside that of Thomas Becket, foreshadowing the ‘national unity in regional diversity’ argument that Thomas Polton would formally make at Konstanz in his 1417 speech.28 This fostering of hagiography and reinvigoration of liturgy are part of a sustained attempt to mark the English church under Henry and Chichele as decisively different from Lollardy in its orthodoxy

25

For an outline of Chichele’s biography and career (and that of many of the ecclesiasts mentioned here), see the relevant entries in ODNB. Ernest F. Jacob, Archbishop Henry Chichele (London: Nelson, 1967) is still a useful introduction. 26

This ideological common ground has been repeatedly emphasized by Jeremy Catto. See, for example, his seminal chapters in the HUO (n. 3 above), and Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Fellows and Helpers: The Religious Identity of the Followers of Wyclif’, in The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life, ed. by Peter Biller and Barrie Dobson, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 11 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), pp. 141–61. 27

Sherry L. Reames, ‘Lectionary Revision in Sarum Breviaries and the Origins of the Early Printed Editions’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 9 (2006), 95–115, identifies a distinctive ‘Chichele group’ of books, suggesting that the initiative came from close to him. On the liturgical changes, see Richard W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) and Richard W. Pfaff, Liturgical Calendars, Saints, and Services in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). 28

On this legislation, see Records of Convocation, pp. 18–22. See also The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1414–1443, ed. by Ernest F. Jacob, 4 vols, Canterbury and York Society, 42 and 45–47 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937–47).

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and full participation in the life of the universal church. Indeed, hagiography is one of the most sprightly genres of vernacular textual production in the fifteenth century.29 To approve of saints and the efficacy of their prayers was one very clear way of marking out the orthodox from the heterodox. Lydgate’s occasional poems and verses for public tabulae often work to fuel popular national or local pride in the achievements of the English church. Particularly notable are his prayers to Thomas Becket and his legend of St George and St Augustine at Compton, the latter staging a recreation of the Bedan view of the primitive years of English Christianity, and presenting Augustine of Canterbury as the kind of clerical ideal that the conciliar age English bishops sought to foster: His liff was lyk his predicacioun As he tauht, sothely so he wrouhte: By his moost holy conuersacioun Into this lond the feith of crist he brouhte.30

The turn to history required by these acts of public self-definition can, I think, be seen as part of a change in the way the English church thought, wrote, and expressed itself. Because it took place most publicly, in the context of an ecumenical council of the Church, that conversion process was thought through and acted out largely in Latin, of course, and in the semi-juridical context of the sessions of the Council, or in the equally rhetorically charged context of sermons delivered before the assembled delegates. Indeed, the English case for church reform had been most powerfully articulated in a document produced in 1414 in preparation for Konstanz by the University of Oxford, the Articuli concernantes reformationem universalis ecclesiae editi per universitatem Oxoniensem.31 Up until his death in 1417, the English case was led and enforced by Robert Hallum, pugnacious bishop of Salisbury and previous chancellor of Oxford

29

For a very useful starting point, see the discussion by Oliver S. Pickering, ‘Saints’ Lives’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 249–70; and for excellent further reading Karen A. Winstead, ‘Saintly Exemplarity’, in Middle English, ed. by Strohm, pp. 335–51. 30

Legend of St Austin at Compton, ll. 77–80: The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part I, p. 195. Lydgate’s Life of St Edmund, written for Henry VI in 1434, clearly figures Henry V’s religious orthodoxy in his portrait of the Anglo-Saxon royal martyr (‘Lollards that tyme fond in him no comfort / To holichirche he was so strong a wal’ [ll. 934–35]); John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund and the Extra Miracles of St Edmund, ed. by Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards, Middle English Texts, 41(Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), p. 61. 31

The articles are edited in Wilkins, Concilia, III, 360–65.

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University. The English position supported that of Sigismund, which was that the church must undertake a thoroughgoing reform of itself before it could credibly elect a new pope. Hallum’s surviving and reported sermons from 1415 stress the support of Henry V for the union of the church and for its reform in head and members. Complaining in a sermon preached in December 1415 that the luminous serenity of the church had become eclipsed, Hallum preached on a text ‘Erunt signa in sole et luna’ (There will be signs in the sun and moon, Luke 21) found ‘in the Gospel of the present Sunday according to the use and observance of the English church’. He argued that the spiritual sun of the church, that is the pope, along with the bishops and prelates (perhaps an interesting glimpse of his view of collegiate power), should stand for and hold to an extension of clear-sightedness (claritas) and justice, holy life and honest conversation, sound preaching and teaching, and, above all, contempt for avarice, like bright lights in the midst of clouds, and like a full moon in those days.32 After Hallum’s death, intellectual leadership passed to Richard Flemyng, an Oxford scripture professor, future bishop of Lincoln and founder in the 1420s of the anti-heretical Lincoln College, Oxford. Sermons preached by Fleming in 1417 pursued a reform agenda that he argued had been needed since the time of the Council of Pisa in 1409 (perhaps significantly, the same year that Arundel’s famous constitutions were finally promulgated after their drafting at the Council of Oxford in 1407): Ad sanctificationem nempe seu reformacionem ecclesie vocavit nos Dominus in Pisano concilio. Sed voce corvina utebamur, dicentes et promittentes: ‘cras, cras et reformabimur’. (Beyond doubt, the Lord called us at the Council of Pisa to the sanctification or reformation of the Church. Yet we have been using the voice of the crow, saying and promising: ‘Tomorrow, tomorrow, we shall be reformed.)33

Flemyng’s allusion to Pisa is, I think, telling. Many of the main players in the English delegation at Konstanz, and in those of Chichele’s administration at home, had also been active at Pisa or in the preparations for it. Many of that same cohort went on to be members of Henry VI’s minority council or active participants in the heresy trials of the 1420s, another way in which the conciliar age impacted on the timbre of English spirituality after 1409. Indeed, the Oxford petitions for reform produced in 1414 were largely based on an earlier document drafted at the request 32

Edited in Heinrich Finke, Acta concilii Constanciensis, 4 vols (Münster: Regensbergsche, 1896–1928), II, 423–25. 33

Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”’, pp. 21–22.

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of Robert Hallum in 1408 by Richard Ullerston, an Oxford academic with connections to Wyclif’s own college, Queen’s (as had many of that reforming cadre and as, according to legend, had been the future Henry V in c. 1398), and to the diocese of Salisbury.34 These petitiones called for widespread reform of the church militant on issues such as simony, the appropriation of benefices, exemptions, plurality of benefices, the abuse of privileges, clerical apostasy, and the holding of secular office.35 Most of these had been on Wyclif’s own reform agenda. Hallum had originally presented Ullerston’s petitions to the Council of Pisa in 1409, so while the main concern of that Council was the unity of the church and the healing of the schism (which, in fact, it made worse by inadvertently electing a third pope), reformation was already firmly on the agenda of the thinkers within the English church. Oxford, of course, felt that it had been tainted and weakened by the Wyclif saga, so it was notably energetic in stressing its orthodoxies and its appetite for reform. Arundel’s decrees had put the university on notice in no uncertain terms, using what became the imagistic commonplaces of the reform movement: the infected vineyard and the damaged city wall (imagery given new currency by, and perhaps largely borrowed from, the prophecies of Birgitta of Sweden): The gracious university of Oxford, which like a luxuriant vine was accustomed to extend its fruitful branches as a many-layered covering to the honour of God and the shelter of his church, is now partly turned to wild vines and produces bitter grapes […] and our province is soiled with diverse and barren doctrines and is stained with the new and damnable name of Lollardy, to no small scandal to the same university and extending to foreign and remote parts, and leading to maximum disgust in the same; and furthermore to the scandal of the English church, which by its virtuous teaching was accustomed to be defended as by an

34 Margaret Harvey, ‘English Views on the Reforms to Be Undertaken in the General Councils 1400–1418’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1963); Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford 1356–1430’. Ullerston (see ODNB), a central policy maker in this reforming cadre, is best known for his role in the Oxford debate about Bible translation around 1400 (see below). Many of Chichele’s bishops and confidants have a common background in Oxford, especially Queen’s College, and in the diocese of Salisbury, where Chichele’s orthodox reform movement may perhaps have begun under the pioneering deanship of Thomas Montague (1382–1404) at the General Chapter of 1387 (see David Lepine’s essay in this volume). Robert Hallum, bishop of Salisbury 1407–17, had similar connections to Oxford and Salisbury before his leadership of the English delegation at Konstanz. 35

The Petitiones are edited in Hermann von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium de universali ecclesiæ reformatione, unione, et fide, 6 vols (Frankfurt, 1700), I, 1126–70.

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Vincent Gillespie unassailable wall and is now split and divided stones, and unless it is more swiftly helped according to the truth it will be irretrievably doomed.36

This theme of the shame of Oxford (our sun, as the preacher calls it) is also found in the macaronic sermons of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649, composed by a reform-minded Benedictine monk sometime before 1422: Sicut hec vniuersitatis fuit olim verus fons fidei et virtutis sic reputatur iam a chef […] hereticorum et lollardorum. Isto modo mater noster scandalizatur. Non est meum verbum est communis clamor in patria. ( Just as this university was once the true fount of faith and virtue now it is regarded as a major […] of heretics and Lollards. In this way our mother is scandalized. This is not my word, it is the common cry in the country.)37

Polton had cited the antiquity and eminence of Oxford in his defence of the English nation, and Richard Flemyng used one of his 1417 Konstanz sermons to argue for the need for peace and concord not just between France and England but between ‘illa duo mundi illuminaria’, the universities of Oxford and Paris.38 The effective influence of Oxford on Konstanz can be measured by comparing the Oxford articuli with the concordats issued by Martin V at the end of the Council to each of the nations, and in particular by noting the extent to which the headings and wording of the Concordat with the English nation echo those of Ullerston’s Petiticiones and their reworking in the 1414 articuli. The Concordat’s provisions on restricting the proliferation of indulgences in England, for example, are more specific and more generous than those found in the concordats with the other nations.39

36

Constitution 11, Wilkins, Concilia, II, 314–19 (this translation by Sarah James). See also the version in The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. by Josiah Pratt, 4th edn, 8 vols (London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), III, 242–48 (p. 246). The vineyard imagery, historically commonplace in the lexis of Church reform, is also found in the prologue to Birgitta’s Regula salvatoris; see Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard’, for more discussion. The imagery is also prominent in the documents of the fifteenth-century Church councils. 37

Sermon 8 is entirely on the subject of Oxford’s fall from eminence and virtue. A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England: Oxford, Ms Bodley 649, ed. by Patrick J. Horner, Studies and Texts, 153 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2006), p. 213. See also Robert N. Swanson, Universities, Academics and the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 38

Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”’, p. 30.

39

Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1082.

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The nature of the reforms called for by Ullerston in 1408 and in the 1414 Oxford articuli show that, conscious as it was of the dangers of Lollardy, a vocal, influential, and soon to be powerful segment within the university remained persuaded that many of the criticisms of the church and the calls for reform made by Wyclif himself, particularly in his earlier work, remained valid and needed addressing. The leaders of the English church in the first half of the fifteenth century were not just scarred by the institutional instability brought about by schism and heresy, in particular by Lollardy, at home.40 They were also intellectually and professionally persuaded of the correctness of Wyclif’s diagnosis that the cause of schism and heresy lay in the corruption of the institutional church. Another English sermon at Konstanz, preached by Geoffrey Schale in 1417, called for a return to the values and ideals of the apostolic church. Using the head and members analogy, Schale, an Augustinian hermit, argues that the Church must reconstruct a Pauline model of itself, with prophets ‘ad futura praedicandum’ (for the preaching of the future), pastors ‘ad curam animarum’ (for the care of souls), doctors or teachers ‘ad informandum populum’ (for the instruction of the people), all working ‘ad consummationem sanctorum, id est perfectionem fidelium in fide et moribus instruendorum et aedificationem spiritualem corporis Christi mystici quod est ecclesia’ (for the fulfilment of saints, that is, the perfection of the faithful by instruction in faith and morals, and the spiritual construction of the mystical body of Christ, which is the Church).41 In one of his sermons, Richard Fleming calls for a proper valuing of scholarship and scriptural learning among the episcopate, noting that although many learned doctors and professors are present at the Council ‘ultra duos prelatos in sacra theologia doctores non video’ (I do not see more than two members of the episcopate who are doctors of theology).42 No doubt some of this was special pleading from an academic, but it does seem to reflect a wider recognition among the English episcopacy of the need to reinforce sana doctrina by the promotion and strategic placing of theologically trained scholars in positions of influence inside English dioceses, and Oxford successfully lobbied Chichele for a mechanism for the promotion of graduates in the same year that Fleming’s sermons were preached at Konstanz.43 Another Oxford academic, Henry Abingdon, in a surviving sermon to 40

The continuing engagement of Chichele’s bishops with the battle against heresy is documented by Ian Forrest, The Detection of Heresy in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 41

Zumkeller, ‘Unbekannte Konstanzer Konzilspredigten’, p. 39.

42

Nighman, ‘“Accipiant Qui Vocati Sunt”’, p. 29.

43

Records of Convocation, pp. 64–67, 70–74. The idea for a scheme to promote recent graduates to parish posts was also presented by the English nation at Konstanz as a remedy for the

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the Council delivered in October 1417, explicitly quoted the Oxford reform programme of 1414, and argued that ‘true prelates before everything else took care of doctrina, the craft of instructing the people in religion’. Doctrina was an art, he argued, that no cleric in authority should scorn to learn ‘though too many, immersed in lawsuits and the “lucrative sciences”, cared little for the science of morals and the struggle for heresy’.44 The phrase ‘lucrative sciences’ comes from Robert Grosseteste, the reforming thirteenth-century bishop of Lincoln, who was a favourite authority of Wycliffite critics of the institutional church, and who was systematically and energetically reclaimed by the orthodox reformers of the early fifteenth century as an example of episcopal zeal and idealism. Indeed, one of the many ways in which these utterances at Konstanz are shadowed by the repressed memory of Wyclif is the way that they share his respect and admiration for the pastoral teachings of Robert Grosseteste (another former Oxford academic) whose own sermon at the papal curia was used extensively by Wyclif and the orthodox reformers alike. Indeed, his own pastoral constitutions for Lincoln diocese, promulgated in 1239, fed directly into Pecham’s provincial decrees in the 1280s and therefore into Arundel’s constitutions in 1409.45 With his high-minded zeal for the importance of the care of souls, and his epigrammatic ability to stress the need for properly disciplined and carefully trained priests, Grosseteste was a hero to both wings of the reform movement. His own pastoral handbook, the Templum dei, enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in early fifteenth-century English clerical miscellanies. Flemyng and other preachers at Konstanz claim him proudly as a son of Oxford, and there is a

decline in good preachers available to instruct the faithful and to combat heresy: Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1076. 44 45

Quoted by Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford 1356–1430’, p. 259.

F. A. C. Mantello, ‘“Optima Epistola”: A Critical Edition and Translation of Letter 128 of Bishop Robert Grosseteste’, in A Distinct Voice: Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O.P., ed. by J. Brown and William P. Stoneman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), pp. 277–301; Servus Gieben, ‘Robert Grosseteste at the Papal Curia, Lyons, 1250: Edition of the Documents’, Collectanea Franciscana, 41 (1971), 340–93; James McEvoy, ‘Robertus Grossatesta Lincolniensis: An Essay in Historiography, Medieval and Modern’, in Robert Grosseteste and the Beginnings of a British Theological Tradition, ed. by Maura O’Carroll (Roma: Instituto storico dei Cappuccini, 2003), pp. 21–102 (pp. 58–68); on Thomas Gascoigne’s use of Grosseteste, see R. M. Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship, Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Monograph 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2006), pp. 5–7 and 116–25. I am indebted to Dr John Flood of the University of Groningen for his invaluable help with this reference.

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similarity in the way that his reform programme emerged from a group of Oxonian academic reformers who then became reforming bishops under Henry III, and the way that Oxford manoeuvred to position itself as the home of orthodox reform under Henry V and the Oxonian Henry Chichele.46 Arundel’s decrees certainly marked a sharp change of institutional direction for the English church. But they happened against a background of continuing selfanalysis at Oxford (such as the debate on bible translation in which Ullerston was a key player) and within monasticism, especially the Benedictines. It is arguable that the English church under Chichele came to adopt pastoral positions that reflect those of Richard Ullerston more closely than those of his opponents in the Oxford translation debate of 1401.47 The real story about vernacular theology in the fifteenth century is that, in the end, John Wyclif had more impact on the language and attitudes of the English church in the fifteenth century than his arch enemy Thomas Arundel. One example: the Ullerston-influenced Oxford articuli of 1414 contained a section on ‘de anglicatione librorum’ (concerning the Englishing of books) which complained that inept and incompetent translation into the vernacular was hindering and misleading the ‘simplices idiotas’, and asked the king to legislate to order the confiscation of books in English until proper scholarly translations were available. This probably reflected the aspiration in chapter 6 of Arundel’s decrees for a university-based system of examination and distribution of such texts through exemplars held by university stationers.48 The Oxford articuli argue only for a deferral of translation, not a prohibition of it, and in calling for proper scholarly translations to be made under orthodox clerical supervision, in effect concede the cautious case for the transmission of theological

46

Templum dei, ed. by Joseph W. Goering and F. A. C. Mantello (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). 47 The various works of Margaret Harvey and Jeremy Catto cited in this paper map out this terrain very clearly. For a summary, and some parallel discussion, see Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’; and Vincent Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume One: To 1500, ed. by Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 234–83. There is more specific discussion of the Nachleben of Wyclif in Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard’, on which subject see now, definitively, Anne Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 48

‘[Q]uod libri et tractatus novelli ab ortu schismatis Anglicati confiscari valeant et eorum possessoribus subtrahi, donec per sciolos non suspectos ipsorum in linguam maternam translatio approbatur’ (that new books and tracts Englished since the beginning of the schism should be confiscated and taken away from their possessors, until, through junior scholars not suspected, a translation into their mother tongue be approved), Wilkins, Concilia, III, 365.

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materials in the vernacular outlined by Ullerston in 1401.49 So the issue of translation and the status of the vernacular was never far away from the intellectual agenda in the decade after Arundel’s decrees. This has, perhaps, been masked by the perception that there was a turn to Latin in the English church, born from a desire to protect the ‘privetees’ of theology and to stifle foolish and unlearned tittle-tattle, especially about controversial institutional issues like pluralism, provision, simony, and tithes. However, this move probably also reflects a stated desire to drive up the educational attainments of the clergy, especially through the campaign to encourage and promote university graduates to the cure of souls, and to improve the in-service training of clerics. It is striking and perhaps surprising to record how many new Latin pastoral manuals are produced in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, many of which also contain vernacular or macaronic elements in a subordinate mnemonic role. The Speculum christiani, surviving in sixty complete manuscripts, many alongside copies of episcopal decrees or other pastoral legislation, was probably produced in Lincolnshire in the first two decades of the fifteenth century, though the first securely dateable manuscript copy comes from 1425.50 It has established patterns of ownership and use in the northern province of York, including priests attached to York minster, and offers an interesting perspective on orthodox pastoralia in the

49

On the Oxford bible translation debate and Ullerston’s role in it, see Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, which draws heavily on earlier work, such as Anne Hudson, ‘The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401’, English Historical Review, 90 (1975), 1–18, repr. in Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books (London: Hambledon, 1985), pp. 67–84. Key Latin texts remain unedited. In particular, the fullest form of Ullerston’s determinacio exists in a still unedited manuscript, Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Vindobonensis Palatinus 4133, fols 195r–297v . I am grateful to Prof. Anne Hudson for permission to consult her transcription of this text. The arguments of Butler and Palmer, and a vernacular version of Ullerston’s tract have been edited by Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920); and by Curt Bühler, ‘A Lollard Tract: On Translating the Bible into English’, Medium Ævum, 7 (1938), 167–83. A new edition of the major vernacular tracts in favour of Bible translation is available as The Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate, ed. by Mary Dove (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2010). 50 Speculum Christiani, ed. by Gustaf Holmstedt, EETS, O. S. 182 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1933), with all subsequent references to this edition; Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Evolution of the Speculum Christiani’, in Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. by Alastair J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 39–62; Vincent Gillespie, ‘Chapter and Worse: An Episode in the Regional Transmission of the Speculum Christiani’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 14 (2008), 86–111.

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immediate aftermath of Wyclif. Some of its popularity no doubt comes from its decision to incorporate and address the Pecham decree on Ignorantia sacerdotum, which Arundel’s decrees had established as a baseline and indeed a parameter for lay catechesis, and which those decrees had required to ‘be made available in the separate parish churches of our province of Canterbury within three months of the publication’ of the decrees. The Speculum opens with a canonical distinction between preaching and teaching (very similar, in fact, to the one used by Margery Kempe in her own defence): Magna differencia est inter predicacionem et doctrinam. Predicacio est, ubi est convocacio sive populi invitacio in diebus festivis in ecclesiis seu in aliis certis locis et temporibus ad hoc deputatis, et pertinet ad eos qui ordinati sunt ad hoc et iurisdictionem et auctoritatem habent, et non ad alios. Informare autem et docere potest unusquisque fratrem suum in omni loco et tempore oportuno, si videatur sibi expedite, quia hoc est Elemosina, ad quam quilibet tenetur. (p. 3, ll. 4–11)

This is rendered by the later Middle English translation of the whole work as: A grete differens es be-twene prechynge and techynge. Prechynge es in a place where es clepynge to-gedyr or foluynge of pepyl in holy dayes in chyrches or other[r] certeyn places and tymes ordeyned ther-to. And it longeth to hem that been ordeynede ther-to, the whych haue iurediccion and auctorite, and to noon othyr. Techynge es that eche body may enforme and teche hys brothyr in euery place and in conable tyme, os he seeth that it be spedful. For this es a gostly almesdede, to whych euery man es bounde that hath cunnynge. (p. 2, ll. 5–13)

And the work ends with the Gregorian aphorism that ‘Nullum sacrificium ita placet deo sicut zelus animarum’ (No sacrifice pleases God as much as a zeal for souls). In between, it covers the catechetic syllabus and provides a compendium of pastoral instruction, replaying for a new generation of parish priests many of the mnemonic aphorisms about the nature of sacerdotal life that had been generated in the thirteenth-century canonical reinforcement of that century’s new emphases in pastoral theology. Its eighth section or tabula is an anthology of exhortations and patristic citations about the priestly life, covering many of the same issues attacked by the Lollards and addressed by the councils, and including a lengthy citation of Grosseteste (p. 173). In a final act of self-justification, which probably sounded innocuous enough when it was drafted perhaps around 1400–1405, but felt slightly different when read after 1409, the Speculum argues that the production and circulation of such texts is an act of charity and spiritual almsgiving:

24

Vincent Gillespie Magnum enim meritum est illi & multum premium habebit in futuro, qui scribit uel scribere facit doctrinam sanam ea intencione ut ipse querat in ea quomodo sancte uiuat & ut alii eam habeant ut per eam edificentur. Hoc certissime scito quod tot premia pre aliis habebis quot anime per te salue fiant (p. 241, ll. 1–5). Grete meryte is to hym, and he schal haue myche mede in tyme to come, that wryteõ or dooõ to write holsom doctrine for that entente that he may lyue holily ther-by, and also that other men mowe be edifyede ther-by. Knowe that certenly that thou schalt haue so many medes bi-forne other as many soules as be sauede by the (p. 240, ll. 1–6).

This is supported by a citation from the fashionable (if still contestable) revelations of Birgitta, calling for the conversion of others as one of the primary responsibilities of all Christians: Legitur in libro beate Brigide quod amici dei non debent attediari in seruicio dei, set laborare ut homo malus sit melior & homo bonus ueniat ad perfectori. Nam quicumque uoluntatem haberet sibilandi in aures omnium transiencium quod Iesus Christus esset uere dei filius & faciendo conaretur quantum posset ad aliorum conuersionem licet nulli uel pauci conuerterentur nihilominus eandem mercedem optineret ac si omnes conuerterentur (p. 241, ll. 7–14). It is red in the lyfe of seynt Bride that frendes of god owen not to be wery in godes seruice; bot labours that the wicked man be amendede and the gude may come to more perfyte thynges. For who-so-euer hath wil to soune in mennes eerys that Criste Ihesus were truly goddes [sone] and desyre wyth gud seele in doynge what he may to true conuersyon of other, althoue now or fewe be conuertede, nertheles heschal haue the same mede as if al were turnede and conuertede to god (p. 240, ll. 6–15).

I do not think it at all accidental that the dissemination of this text was at its height between 1420 and 1460. Some of this turning back to Latin probably also reflects the greater European perspective of a growing number of English churchmen.51 The sustained exposure

51

The standard discussion of early fifteenth-century English humanism has for many years been Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, Medium Ævum Monographs 4, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967); 4th edn edited and prepared for electronic publication by David Rundle and Anthony John Lappin, available online at . Exciting new work is now under way, stressing the importance of episcopal humanism to the developments in England: see, for example, James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle, c. 1350–1440 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004); Andrew Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, in Middle English, ed. by Strohm (2007), pp. 421–37; Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and the essays by Cole and Wakelin in the present volume.

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of English bishops, abbots, and academics to their colleagues from other European countries may have impacted both on the sense of common purpose felt by the English nation with their co-adjutors in the rest of the Church Militant and on their awareness of the distinctiveness of the English church and its spiritual and institutional history. Although the process of book lending, book borrowing, and book buying is much better documented at the later Council of Basel (described by Lehmann as a veritable entrepôt of books), it is likely that similar horizonwidening encounters took place at Pisa and Konstanz, after a period of relative isolationism for the English church during the schism.52 One of the English delegates at Pisa and Konstanz, the Benedictine Thomas Spofforth (some of whose reformist-minded vernacular sermons survive, full of the buzzwords of the new ecclesial lexis), perhaps carried his copy of Rolle’s Latin Incendium amoris to Konstanz.53 It was at Konstanz that Nicholas Bubwith probably acquired a translation into Latin of Dante’s Commedia, made by an Italian delegate at the Council.54 Surviving copies of the acta of Konstanz made by, or for, Englishmen often contain copies of the two great reform treatises of Pierre d’Ailly and the works of that other French reformer Jean Gerson.55 Similarly, the library at Syon was stocked from early on with advanced reformist writings by d’Ailly, Gerson, Nicholas of Clamanges, the controversial Speculum aureum of Petrus Wysz ‘de reformatione triplicis erroris in ecclesia’ (sometimes attributed to an Englishman),

52

Paul Joachim Georg Lehmann, Erforschung des Mittelalters: Ausgewählte Abhandlungen und Aufsätze (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1941), I, 253–80. On the musical impact of the cultural encounters at Konstanz, see Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Music (1380–1500) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 106–24 (part I. 3: ‘The Council of Constance’). 53

Cambridge, University Library, MS Mm. 5. 37. See The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. by Margaret Deanesly (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915), pp. 8–9, 51–54. On Spofforth’s vernacular sermons, see Four Middle English Sermons: Edited from British Library Ms Harley 2268, ed. by Veronica M. O’Mara, Middle English Texts, 33 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002); A Repertorium of Middle English Prose Sermons, ed. by Veronica M. O’Mara and Suzanne Paul, 4 vols, Sermo: Studies on Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Sermons and Preaching, 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), II, 1210–23. 54

David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 139–80 (chap. 3, ‘Dante in Somerset’). 55

C. M. D. Crowder, ‘Constance Acta in English Libraries’, in Das Konzil von Konstanz; Beiträge zu seiner Geschichte und Theologie, ed. by A. Franzen and W. Müller (Freiburg: Herder, 1964), pp. 477–517. Thomas Polton’s copy of the complete Acta (written by a French scribe) survives as London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero E. v.

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and others.56 New ideas flowed into the English church, and its sense of its historical anchorage was reinforced by the two greatest texts of institutional selfdefinition produced in this period: the Carmelite Thomas Netter’s Doctrinale fidei antiquitatum ecclesiae catholicae (1427), a systematic reply to Wyclif and Lollardy by appeal to the precedents and history of the English and the universal church, and William Lyndwood’s Provinciale (by 1429), a codification of English episcopal legislation for the province of Canterbury by one of Chichele’s right-hand men.57 Works like this created a sense of historical antiquity and doctrinal stability that was much needed in Chichele’s church. When we try and calibrate more carefully and subtly the fate of vernacular theology after Arundel, we need to pay careful attention to this Latin, European, and conciliar stratum in the output of religious books. But that pan-European Latin perspective served to give depth and resonance to a continuing institutional exploitation of the catechetic and doctrinal potential of the vernacular. The reformist Zeitgeist of Chichele’s church was most nobly embodied in the spiritual idealisms of Syon Abbey,58 probably a centre of orthodox translation into the vernacular, and manifests itself elsewhere through the peppery correctness and patristic scholarship of Thomas Gascoigne at Oxford;59 or the

56

See the indexes in Syon Abbey, ed. by Vincent Gillespie, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 9 (London: British Library in association with the British Academy, 2001). 57

On Netter, see ODNB, and now Thomas Netter of Walden: Carmelite, Diplomat and Theologian (c. 1372–1430), ed. by Johan Bergstrom-Allen and Richard Copsey, Carmel in Britain, 4 (Aylesford: St Albert’s Press, 2009), which reproduces an early printed text of the Doctrinale on CDRom. On Netter’s use of the lexis of orthodox reform, see Mishtooni Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’, New Medieval Literatures, 7 (2005), 73–99. On Lyndwood, see ODNB; Brian E. Ferme, ‘The Provinciale of William Lyndwood: The Sources, Contents and Influence’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1987); Brian E. Ferme, Canon Law in Medieval England: A Study of William Lyndwood’s ‘Provinciale’ with Particular Reference to Testamentary Law, Studia et textus historiae juris canonici, 8 (Rome: LAS, 1996) and C. R. Cheney, Medieval Texts and Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 158–84. 58

See, for example, the discussion of good and bad priests in part 5 of The Orcherd of Syon, a fifteenth-century reworking of Catherine of Siena’s reformist Dialogo, composed in the Schism years; The Orcherd of Syon, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson and Gabriel M. Liegey, EETS, O. S. 258 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1966). The brothers of Syon also had in their martyrology a series of added marginal exhortations to the priestly life that reveal a high-minded seriousness: Vincent Gillespie, ‘“Hid Divinite”: The Spirituality of the English Syon Brethren’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004, ed. by E. A. Jones (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 189–206. 59

On his energetic and enthusiastic bibliographical scholarship, see Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship.

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theological conservatism of colleges such as Pembroke Hall at Cambridge and the avowedly anti-Lollard Lincoln College at Oxford; or in the preaching and educational activities of the powerful rectors of London city; or through the clerical in-service training provided by institutions such as Whittington College in London (praised by Gascoigne for its sound life, teaching, and learning);60 or even in the eccentric excesses of one of that college’s early masters, Reginald Pecock.61 Pecock was, for example, co-founder in the 1440s with John Somerset of the socially, spiritually, and textually well-connected Guild of All Angels ‘iuxta Syon’. This guild, which also featured John Colop as one of its members, was almost certainly the intermediary for the passage of works of vernacular theology from Syon into the London mercantile common-profit books.62 The common

60

On links between Lydgate, John Carpenter (the Common Clerk of London) and civic piety, see Amy Appleford, ‘The Dance of Death in London: John Carpenter, John Lydgate, and the Daunce of Poulys’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 38 (2008), 285–314; Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); see also Nicole R. Rice, ‘Profitable Devotions: Bodley Ms 423, Guildhall Ms 7114, and a Sixteenth-Century London Pewterer’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 10 (2007), 173–81. 61

Important new work is being done on the religious life of fifteenth-century London. See, for example, Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Medieval London Widows, 1300–1500, ed. by Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (London: Hambledon, 1994); A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Sheila Lindenbaum, ‘London Texts and Literate Practice’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 284–309; Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F. R. H. Du Boulay, ed. by Caroline M. Barron and Christopher M. Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1985), pp. 13–37; Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education in Fifteenth-Century London’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays on Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. by John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 219–45; and the essays in London and the Kingdom: Essays in Honour of Caroline M. Barron, ed. by M. P. Davies and Andrew Prescott, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 16 (Donington: Tyas, 2008). The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580: Papers Given at the Archaeology of Reformation Conference, February 2001, ed. by David R . M. Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (Leeds: Maney, 2003) contains useful essays on London libraries and parochial and guild devotional life. Sheila Lindenbaum’s essay in this volume on London rectors, and James Willoughby’s on public libraries in the capital and elsewhere will greatly add to our understanding. 62

Wendy Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books: Aspects of Book Ownership and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century London’, Medium Ævum, 61

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profit book in London, Lambeth Palace, MS 472, which collects and extracts paramystical texts by Hilton exactly parallels the contents of a manuscript once at Syon (original class mark M.26). The All Angels guild, led by Pecock and Somerset, was probably an important interface between the Latin, highly orthodox, and austere world of Syon and the lay, mercantile audience for vernacular theology among the elites of the city of London. The post-Konstanz public message of the universal church ostensibly remained the same timeless call to repentance. It was the local delivery medium — in particular the clergy and the institutional church in England — that needed reform and renewal. The reformation in head and members envisaged by Konstanz was locally to be manifested as a conversion of the English clergy. Unlike Arundel’s decrees, which impacted directly on lay experience, this conversion was more esoteric, but potentially more radical. Much of the debate about reform and policy at Konstanz was, of course, conducted at a high level of generality and abstraction. The sermons of the English nation are elliptical and allusive, weaving networks of commonplaces into skeins of patristic and scriptural proof texts. The hard bargaining and often harder words that must have occupied the negotiating sessions are scarcely recorded in the surviving documents. But in a way that generality, that official blandness, and the idealism that characterizes both the preparatory documents and the Council’s official acta should not blind us to the highly specialized literary competence of that audience to read behind the rhetoric and to decode the issues and the ideals that are being explored in such contexts. The Latin sermons delivered by Englishmen at Konstanz and at Pavia-Siena (1423–24) establish a vocabulary of orthodox reform that spills over into vernacular poetry and Latin theology.63 The church as a ship needing careful

(1992), 261–74; Wendy Scase, Reginald Pecock, in Authors of the Middle Ages, Vol. III: nos 7–11, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), pp. 75–146; Vincent Gillespie, ‘Walter Hilton at Syon Abbey’, in ‘Stand up to Godwards’: Essays in Mystical and Monastic Theology in Honour of the Reverend John Clark on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 204 (2002), pp. 9–61; Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘The Cult of Angels in Late FifteenthCentury England: An Hours of the Guardian Angel Presented to Queen Elizabeth Woodville’, in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. by Lesley Smith and Jane Taylor (London: British Library, 1997), pp. 230–65. The documents relating to the guild are edited by Aungier, Syon Abbey, pp. 459–64 (translated on pp. 215–20). 63

As a sampler of recent work on the religious writing of this period, see the essays in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison; and Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).

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steering, the need for rebuilding Syon, the imperative to guard and maintain the walls of the vineyard are all themes that recur in these sermons, just as they do in the English vernacular poetry of the time.64 John Lydgate’s A Defence of Holy Church is a deliberate checklist of the lexis of the episcopal reform project.65 The poem Lo He that Can be Cristes Clerc plays with these same images in its punning allusions to Oldcastle’s destabilizing activities: An old castel, and not repaired. With wast walles and wowes wide... (33–35) An old castel draw al done, Hit is ful hard to rere hit newe... (57–58) That castel is not for a kynge There the walles ben overthrowe. (65–66)66

The king’s important role as a peacemaker in the church is echoed in several of the Latin sermons given by Englishmen at Konstanz. And the extraordinary macaronic sermons in Bodley MS 649, also apparently aimed at a clerical audience, contain many passages in praise of Henry V, figured in one sermon dateable to 1421/22 as a master mariner who has led the embattled ship of state in safe waters after the dangers and struggles of previous times: Nostra navis was so feble, so litel oure emnys set of us. Nostra navis was so hurled and burlid inter ventos et freta quod erat in grandi periculo et sepe in puncto pereundi […] Nostra navis fuit in tanto periculo quod nisi noster graciosus rex set honde on þe raþer and stirid nostrum navem tempestivius, nostra navis had schaplich to go al to wrek. […] In isto mari prosperitatis our maistur mariner oure worthi prince hath sailet many wyntur […] Suus amor figitur in deo et bonitate. Suum attentum est ut dicitur destruere vicia, nutrire virtutes, fortificare fidem, manutenere ecclesiam at augmentare honorem dei. […] Sic ipse augmentavit cultum dei per fundacionem locorum sacrorum et destruccionem Lollardorum. […] Ideo magister marinarius oure sovereyn lord qui stirrid totam navem per suam prudenciam, graciam et virtutem, desiringe ex corde nostrum omnium wele et

64 The vineyard imagery has Biblical origins of course, and could easily be collocated for liturgical purposes: see, for example, Isaiah 5. 1–7 (which describes the rebuilding of the ruined vineyard); Psalm 79 (which echoes this imagery); Matthew 21. 33–43 (where Christ clearly responds to these earlier texts in his parable). The ship imagery is also found in part 7 of The Orcherd of Syon, as well as in many sermons and lyrics. 65 66

The Minor Poems of John Lydgate: Part I, pp. 30–35.

London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian B. xvi, fols 2v –3r , in Medieval English Political Writings, ed. by James M. Dean, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996), consulted online at .

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Vincent Gillespie honorem, besied him per magna media reparare þe brekkes nostre navis and rere up aõen nostrum spiritum ad deum.67

The rudder by which this newly spruce ship of state and the church is to be steered is, inevitably, ‘predicacio et doctrina’. The new mood placed huge stress on the probity of the priesthood and the shift to preaching and oral confession as the most extensive media of vernacular instruction and edification. An impeccably orthodox, traditional, and widely attested verse expressing the clerical ideal was included in Speculum christiani, showing how the English church was reaching back to a feared-lost golden age of clerical uprightness and commitment: Sacerdos debet esse sanctus / a peccatis segregatus Rector non raptor / dispensator non dissipator Pius in iudicio / iustus in consilio Verax in sermone / humilis in congregacione Paciens in aduersitate / benignus in prosperitate Diues in virtutibus / miles in bonis actibus Sobrius in choro / castus in thoro Sapiens in confessione / securus in predicacione. (p. 231, ll. 9–14) [not laid out as verse]

Securus in predicacione: one important aspect of the conversion of the English church was the new emphasis on preaching as the primary medium of scriptural instruction and exposition in the wake of Arundel’s cautions about the dangers of written vernacular translations of scripture.68 This placed new stress on the quality of that preaching. The style of English sermons changed, and their importance was enhanced, both in parochial practice and in English pastoral theory. Thomas Gascoigne — himself much obsessed with high-quality preaching — reports in his 67

Sermon 25: A Macaronic Sermon Collection, ed. by Horner, pp. 521–23. Attention had previously been drawn to the importance of these sermons by Roy M. Haines, Ecclesia Anglicana: Studies in the English Church of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), and in other articles; see also Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late-Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 68

Helen Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England: Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The fifteenthcentury vernacular tract What the Church Betokeneth, a small-scale pastoral manual (drawing on the Speculum ecclesiae and Durandus) which circulates with the hagiographical collection Gilte legende (a translation of the Legenda aurea made c. 1438), describes preachers as the roof, roof beams, and bells of the allegorical church building: Supplementary Lives in Some Manuscripts of the ‘Gilte Legende’, ed. by Richard Hamer and Vida Russell, EETS, O. S. 315 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2000), pp. 85–128.

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notebooks that Richard Flemyng introduced a new form of preaching to Oxford that moved away from scholastic distinction towards a clearer and more easily digested form of exposition, and we can see that return to a homiletic style in use in his own Konstanz sermons, and in Gacoigne’s own fascinating later sermon Super septem flumina Babilonis.69 This new style was typified by the preaching at Syon. The brethren were enjoined by Christ in one of Birgitta’s revelations that their sermons had to use simple and few words, founded on the reading of Scripture; they must avoid verbal pyrotechnics and complexities, and should pay careful attention to the needs and capacities of their audience. Sunday sermons should expound the Gospel, using Christ’s own words, those of his mother, and of the saints, as well as the Vitae patrum, and miracula sanctorum. They should address the Creed and provide remedies against temptations and vices. Above all, they should avoid dullness and going over the heads of the audience, remembering that Mary was ‘simplicissima’, Peter was an ‘ydiota’ and St Francis ‘rusticus’, but together they have done more for the good of souls than many ‘magistri eloquentes’.70 It is not accidental that those sections of the Book of Margery Kempe describing events that are broadly dateable to the years 1414 to 1418 — that is, the precise years in which the Council of Konstanz sat — are full of references to Margery’s hunger for good preaching, her praise for traditional clerical values and ideals, and her sorrow at being excluded from some sermons:71

69 Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 183; the Super flumina Babilonis sermon is found at pp. 53–99. 70

Den Heliga Birgittas Reuelaciones extrauagantes, ed. by Lennart Hollman, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, ser. 2 (Latinska skrifter), 5 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1956), chap. 23, p. 133, which glosses and expands on chap. 15 of the Regula Salvatoris: Den Heliga Birgitta: Opera Minora I: Regula Salvatoris, ed. by Sten Eklund, Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet, ser. 2 (Latinska skrifter), 8.1 (Lund: Berlingska, 1975), p. 121. The preaching office of the Syon brethren has been studied by Susan Powell, ‘Preaching at Syon Abbey’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 31 (2000), 229–67; see also Susan Powell, ‘Cox Ms 39: A Rare Survival of Sermons Preached at Syon Abbey?’, Medieval Sermon Studies, 52 (2008), 42–62; and Susan Powell, ‘Syon, Caxton and the Festial’, Birgittiana, 2 (1996), 187–207, which discusses Syon’s possible involvement with printed sermons. 71

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Hope Emily Allen and Sanford B. Meech, EETS, O. S. 212 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1940), identified in text by book and chapter to facilitate comparison with The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Longman, 2000).

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Vincent Gillespie On a tyme as þe forseyd creatur was in contemplacyon, sche hungryd ryth sor aftyr Goddys word & seyd, ‘Alas, Lord, as many clerkys as þu hast in þis world, þat þu ne woldyyst sendyn me on of hen þat myth fulfillyn my sowle wyth þi word wyth redyng of Holy Scriptur, for alle þe clerkys þat prechyn may not fulfillyn, for me thynkyth þat my sowle is euyr a-lych hungry. Õyf I had gold i-now, I wolde õeuyn euery day a noble for to haue euery day a sermown, for þi word is mor worthy to me þan all þe good in þis world’. (I, 58)

Margery visited Konstanz on her 1414 pilgrimage to the Holy Land, when the city would have been in the throes of preparations for the opening of the Council in the autumn of that year, and claims to have talked to an unidentified English papal legate there. Structurally the two sections dealing particularly with her need for good-quality pastoral care (chapters 23 to 25 and, particularly, 56 to 60 of Book I) are pivotal in establishing her own orthodox teaching authority and demonstrating her struggle against disruptive elements in the church (particularly friars, whose status as preachers and confessors remained a hot topic of debate during this period). Chapters 56 to 60 follow on immediately after her receipt from Henry Chichele of a letter authorizing her to be confessed and to receive communion at will, which must have happened late in 1417 or early in 1418, exactly when the English hierarchy was restating the ideals of the priestly office so strikingly and challengingly articulated by Margery Kempe: Beheldyng how fast þe pepyl cam rennyng to heryn þe sermown, sche had gret joy in hir sowle, thynkyng in her mende, ‘A, Lord Ihesu, I trowe, and þu wer here to prechyn þin owyn persone, þe pepyl xulde han gret joy to heryn þe. I prey þe Lorde, make þi holy word to sattelyn in her sowlys as I wolde, þat it xulde don in myn, & as many mict be turnyd be hys voys as xulde ben be thy voys õyf þu prechedist thy-selfe’. (I, 61)

To be an alter Christus is a pretty daunting job description and person specification. Christ’s words to Margery about the career development of a vicar who came to her for advice could have been drawn from any number of English episcopal documents of the period 1414 to 1422, or indeed any number of sermons or documents emanating from Konstanz: Bydde þe vykary kepyn stylle hys cure & hys benefyce & don hys diligence in prechyng & techyng of hem hys owyn persone and sumtyme procuryn oþer to teche hem my lawys and comawndmentys so þat þer be no defawte in hys parte. (I, 23)

The English church is negotiating a new understanding of its teaching role in these conciliar years. These same sections report her delight in being read to by her priest, and the great worth he drew from those books when he moved into ‘gret cur of sowle’ later in his career. ‘Thus, thorw heryng of holy bokys & thorw heryng of holy sermownys, sche euyr encresyd in contemplacyon & holy meditacyon’ (I, 59): Margery is a paradigm of the new, orally instructed laity envisaged by the English

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episcopacy at this period, though she often encounters severe shortcomings in the local implementation of that policy.72 Indeed the difficulty of implementing these models of clerical idealism is playfully hinted at in one contemporary satirical version of the difference between sacerdotal ideal and reality, found in a firstquarter copy of the Confessio Amantis (Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 307): Trvsty \ seldom/to their frendys vniust\/ Gladd for to help \ no Crysten creator/ Wyllng to greve \ settyng all þeir ioy and lust/ Only in þe plesour of god \ havyng no cvre/ Who is most riche \ with them þey wyl be sewer/ Wher nede is \ gevyng neyther reward ne Fee/ Vnresonably \ thus lyve prestys parde/73

Cura animarum and cibus animarum went hand in hand, as texts like the Speculum christiani begin to articulate. A sacerdotal conversation is underway in search of a new paradigm of priestly life. This conversation was taking place between clerics, legislators, and members of the executive, and largely taking place in the heavily coded discourses of canon and civil law. It is in the context of this search for a new paradigm that we ought to be reading the religious texts of John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, John Audelay, and the poet of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102, all of whom reveal assumptions about vernacular theology that often engage respectfully and seriously with the institutional critique initiated by Wyclif, while seeking to reinforce the centrality of the priesthood. Lydgate offers scathing criticism of clerical covetousness in the Troy Book (see, for example, Book IV, ll. 5846–5867): For douteles, õif þe sentuarie Be pollut founde in conuersacioun Naked and bare of deuocioun And þat þe shynyng of her parfit liõt I-turned by by derknes vn-to myõt Vn-to what place shal men ferþer go To take ensaumple what hen ouõte do.

Digby 102’s poems are insistent on the sacramental power of the priest, but (or even ‘therefore’) also fiercely critical of clerical abuses and failings. Their criticism

72

For example, during her interrogation by Henry Bowet in Yorkshire, she criticizes the liturgical and pastoral negligence of parish priests: I, 52. 73

IMEV 3809; printed in Secular Lyrics of the 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. by R . H. Robbins, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 101.

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of careless curates is linked to passionate denunciation of usury, simony ‘and holy chirche rebel to goddis sawe’ (XIV, p. 63).74 Sometimes its poems verge on a Lollard ecclesiology (‘the folk is cherche’) (VIII, p. 32): There as gadryng of goode men ys, Is holychyrche of flesch and bones. (XXIII, p. 103)

Several Digby poems (e.g. XXI, XXIII), describe priests as ‘lanterns of light’, perhaps reflecting Lollard diction (a popular Lollard compilation had this title), as does John Audelay in his The Counsel of Consciens (‘thai are the lanternys of lyf the leud men to light’ (2, p. 12)).75 In applying the great and unchanging truths of moral complaint to the particular (though obliquely invoked) circumstances of their own age, the Digby poems oscillate between a declamatory and satirical standpoint that seems fired by contemporary zeal and perhaps by allusion to contemporary events, and a more routine and unfocused invocation of moral generalization. The other works in that manuscript (an incomplete C-text of Piers Plowman, Richard Maidstone’s Penitential Psalms, the Debate of the Body and Soul, and the Lessons of the Dirige) suggest its affinity with traditional collections of moral and penitential verse. Yet all these texts also have the potential to carry substantial political freight. The poems, probably all by the same person, obsess on the themes of truth and trouthe betrayed; on the power of ‘glosers’ and flatterers to pervert true doctrine and good legislation; on the need for Reason, Will, and Conscience to work together; on the tensions between Wit and Will; on the role of money and Meed; on the need for religion and sound doctrine (the author was probably a cleric himself); on the merits of keeping quiet and listening attentively (a major

74

References are to Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, ed. by J. Kail, EETS, O. S. 124 (London: Kegan Paul for the Early English Text Society, 1904), but readers should now use The Digby Poems: A New Edition of the Lyrics, ed. by Helen Barr, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2009), which offers important new considerations on their links to the orthodox reform movement, and argues that the poems are by the same reform-minded Benedictine responsible for the macaronic sermons in MS Bodley 649. Even if they are not by the same man, they share many of the images, commonplaces, and proverbial emphases found in the vernacular reformist writings of this period. 75 The Poems of John Audelay, ed. by Ella Keats Whiting, EETS, O. S. 184 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1931); subsequent citations are from this edition, but see now John the Blind Audelay: Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library Ms Douce 302), ed. by Susanna Fein, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009); My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on John the Blind Audelay, ed. by Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2009). See also Fein’s essay in the present volume.

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and perhaps newly prominent theme); and, more satirically, on the need to learn duplicity and double-talk to survive in public life. These themes are reminiscent of those commonly found in Piers Plowman and in what has been called ‘the Piers Plowman tradition’, and all those poems can profitably be studied in the context of this kind of moral verse. Indeed, the Digby poet’s apparent links with the church, law, and government in Westminster and London place him firmly in the milieu that provided the main readership of Langland’s poem.76 More significantly, however, this is precisely the same audience of clerics, legislators, and executives who were, in Latin, having the debate about the reform of the church in head and members. The prose moralizations in Hoccleve’s Series explicitly read their antecedent fables in terms of broad issues of contemporary ecclesiastical reform, religious observance, and clerical idealism.77 The lexis of all these writers reflects a consciously fostered aureation as part of a self-aware turn to a Latinate English vernacular, perhaps in the face of Lollard calls for a wholesale ‘simple’ translation of religious materials. The membrane between the registers and lexis of clerical Latin and those of the English vernacular seems to have become increasingly permeable in the early fifteenth century. Aureation created a lexical and stylistic bridge between the Latin language of formal theology and the vulgar tongue of vernacularity. Metonymic of this process, Syon Abbey, royal flagship of the orthodox reform movement, emulated the example of its mother house at Vadstena, to become a notable centre of vernacular translation of Latin religious texts.78 Far from eschewing vernacular theology, these

76 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Moral and Penitential Lyrics’, in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric, ed. by Thomas G. Duncan (Cambridge: Brewer, 2005), pp. 68–95. On Langland’s fifteenthcentury London readership, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice, ‘Langlandian Reading Circles, and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380–1427’, New Medieval Literatures, (1997), 60–83. 77

Conveniently now available in ‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Roger Ellis, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). For a discussion of Hoccleve in the context of reform orthodoxy, see Sebastian J. Langdell, ‘“What World Is This? How Vndirstande Am I?”: A Reappraisal of Poetic Authority in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series’, Medium Ævum, 78 (2009), 281–99. See also Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt, chap. 3, pp. 88–129. 78

On Vadstena as a centre of translation, see Lars Wollin, ‘The Monastery of Vadstena: Investigating the Great Translation Workshop in Medieval Scandinavia’, in The Medieval Translator 2, ed. by Roger Ellis (London: Centre for Medieval Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, 1991), pp. 65–88. On Syon, see Susan Powell, ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’, in Saint Birgitta, Syon and Vadstena, ed. by Claes Gejrot, Sara

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writers of Chichele’s generation created for it a whole new high-style register, seeking to reclaim the vernacular for orthodoxy, and to make it fit for precise and nuanced theological thought, just as Ullerston had said they should do in his defence of translation in the Oxford debate. Pecock’s linguistic innovations, though hardly nimble, are of a piece with this attitude to aureate diction.79 John Audelay provides some exhortations to reform in a sequence of poems, completed by 1426, and suggestively named by him The Counsel of Conscience in what I believe is a deliberate play on the reforming Council of Konstanz.80 For all their conventional satirical weight, the exhortations might usefully be explored in the light of the themes of the English nation’s writings at the Council of Konstanz and of episcopal policy at home. James Simpson’s recent re-reading of the Marcolf and Solomon poem shows how Audelay is pitching his poem in terms of the reform conversation between clerics and the executive (though I think Solomon here is Henry V and not Henry IV as Simpson suggests), and this is further signalled by the Latin headnotes to each stanza that express exactly the bracing scriptural, patristic, or canonical idealism found at Konstanz and in other utterances from the English church.81 His criticism of clerical ignorance, echoing the renewed

Risberg, and Mia Åkestam, Konferenser 73 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien och antikvitets akademien, 2010), pp. 50–70; C. Annette Grisé, ‘“Moche profitable unto religious persones, gathered by a brother of Syon”: Syon Abbey and English Books’, in Syon Abbey and its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion c. 1400–1700, ed. by E. A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), pp. 129–54. 79

The role of aureation as a lexical manifestation of reform orthodoxy has not yet been fully considered. For some preliminary discussion, see Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, pp. 234–39, 254, but I intend to address the subject at more length in ‘Translation after Arundel: Chichele and the Birth of Aureate Diction’, originally given at The Medieval Translator conference in Lausanne, summer 2007. Important recent discussions include Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’, pp. 840–46; Roger Ellis, ‘Figures of English Translation, 1382–1407’, in Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness, ed. by Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, c. 2001), pp. 7–47; Fiona Somerset, ‘Professionalizing Translation at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century: Ullerston’s Determinacio, Arundel’s Constitutiones’, in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 145–57. 80

The essays in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, edited by Susanna Fein, give an excellent sense of the conservative theological issues and the reformist nature of poems that make up The Counsel of Conscience, as does her essay in this volume. 81

Poem 2 of the sequence in The Poems of John Audelay, ed. by Keating, pp. 10–46, which runs to over 1000 lines. See also James Simpson, ‘Saving Satire after Arundel’s Constitutions: John Audelay’s “Marcol and Solomon”’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and

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prominence given to Pecham’s Ignorantia sacerdotum in Arundel’s 1409 decrees, is immediately followed by a call for graduates to be promoted to benefices, paralleling the petition from Oxford to Arundel in 1402 and to the Convocation of Canterbury in 1417, and which had been debated at Konstanz at the request of the English nation. In the final poem of The Counsel of Conscience, Audelay offers the sequence of poems as a compendium of spiritual instruction, also calling it a ladder of heaven: Fore al þat is nedful to bode and soule Here in þis boke þen may õe se. (Poem 18, p. 133)

But Audelay also employs a Hocclevian notion of recovery from sickness to dramatize the potential and the imperative for personal and national spiritual recovery: Fore as I lay seke in my dremyng Me þoõt a mon to me con say ‘Let be þi slouþ and þi slomeryng Haue mynd on God boþ nyõt and day; Behold and se a reuful array. Al þe word on foyre brenyng Warne þe pepul now I þe pray Þai louyn here God ouer al þyng; Aryse anon and awake. (Poem 18, p. 134)

The call to arise (surgite) occurs repeatedly in the Latin and vernacular writings of the conciliar period. One of Flemyng’s Konstanz sermons was on the theme Surge illuminare Jerusalem (‘Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you’). For Flemyng (as for many vernacular writers) Jerusalem stands for the macrocosm of the church and the microcosm of the human soul ‘que est templum dei’ (which is the temple of God), and the ship of the church has been buffeted by heresy and error ‘sicut maris fluctus’ (as by the buffeting of the waves).82 Audelay has a sense of national history and of the historic mission and identity of the English church which is more than mere rehashing of auctoritates and precedents, but rather urges a return to a simpler and purer faith:

Hutchison, pp. 387–404; Derek Pearsall, ‘Audelay’s Marcolf and Solomon and the Langlandian Tradition’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 138–52. For the underlying Latin satirical tradition, see Jan M. Ziolkowski, Solomon and Marcolf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 82

Morrissey, ‘Surge Illuminare’, esp. p. 121. The MS Bodley 649 sermons regularly use this imagery.

38

Vincent Gillespie Takys fayre ensampyle be õour faders þat were õou before Hou þai worschypd hole cherche hyly to Godys honore. (Poem 2, p. 19)

Such stylish obliquity relies for much of its effect on an audience competent to detect the subtle nuances that are being inflected on the surface of conventional sentiments and commonplace moral teachings. In the writings of Thomas Hoccleve (d. 1426), writing, like the author of the Digby 102 poems, for a literary coterie of fellow civil servants, holders of public office, book lovers, and scribes in Westminster and the City of London, we see that obliquity being deployed in more playful and virtuosic forms. Many of his poems can be read in the light of the changing domestic ecclesiastical mood, with which he seems to have been closely in touch, perhaps through professional circles. The Regiment of Princes, the Male Regle and the Remonstrance against Oldcastle (with its calls to Oldcastle to ‘torne again’ and ‘retourne’) have been widely discussed in this light.83 Like Audelay, Hoccleve enacts a call to return to an older, purer, idealized English Church: Oure fadres olde and modres lyued wel And taghte hir children as hemslef taght were Of holy chirche. And axid nat a del […] Our fadres medled nothing of swich gere. Þat oghte been a good mirour to vs. (Remonstrance, ll. 153–60)

But the concern with reform is endemic through his works, and not only in the most obvious places. There is, for example, an undated Ballade, made ‘au tresnoble roy H. le quint (que dieu pardoint) et au tres honourable conpagnie du Iarter’ (to the most noble king Henry V (may God pardon him) and to the most honourable company of the Garter). Seymour argues that this was made for the meeting of the Garter in 1414, though he also acknowledges that by far the highest profile meeting was that in 1416 at which Sigismund was invested with the regalia of the order. Just as Lydgate will later encourage Henry VI to emulate Justinian and Constantine, so Hoccleve exhorts Henry V to copy Justinian and, in particular, Constantine: O lige lord, þat han eek the liknesse Of Constantyn, th’ensaumple and the mirour To princes alle, in loue and buxumnesse

83

Ethan Knapp, The Bureaucratic Muse: Thomas Hoccleve and the Literature of Late Medieval England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001); Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship; Stephen Rozenski, ‘“Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour”: Hoccleve’s Amplification of the Imagery and Intimacy of Henry Suso’s Ars Moriendi’, Parergon, 25 (2008), 1–16; Langdell, ‘A Reappraisal of Poetic Authority’.

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To holy chirche, o verray sustenour, And piler of our feith and werreyour Ageyn the heresies bittir galle, Do foorth, do foorth, continue your socour Holde vp Crystes baner let it nat falle. (ll. 9–16)84

My own preference for the 1416 date for this ballade is based partly on a general sense that it gives of Henry having been on the throne for a while (‘continue your sucour’, ‘This yle or this had been but hethenesse, / Nad been of your feith the force and vigour’), and more specifically on two linguistic moments in this slight, but eloquently conventional poem. The first occurs at the end of the third stanza: But ay we truste in yow, our protectour. On your constance we awayten alle. (ll. 23–24)

In this the last line, there is surely a concealed play on the location of the still sitting ecumenical Council, on which the hopes of Christian Europe are waiting, especially as ‘constance’ in this kind of nominal form is only attested by the MED in one instance before Chaucer, and is most widely and richly attested in texts later than Hoccleve. The second moment is in the next stanza, where Hoccleve, calling for an end to the idle disputation among laypeople on matters of faith, addresses his plea to ‘our worthy kyng and Cristen emperour’, which may have been framed to embrace Henry and Sigismund in a single address and as co-workers in a common cause. There are, I think, strong grounds for suspecting that Hoccleve had a weather eye on the events unfolding at Konstanz. In a widely disseminated letter dated 30 October 1413, Sigismund had summoned the Council to meet on All Saints’ Day (1 November) 1414, though in the event the first session was delayed for a few days to allow straggling delegations to arrive. In many monastic and religious contexts, All Saints was viewed as a propitious date for new beginnings.85 For Hoccleve it certainly marked a new beginning in his personal fortunes, for he tells us in his Compleinte, which forms the first part of the Series, that he recovered his disordered wits on All Saints’ Day. John Burrow has argued that the series was begun in 1419–20.86 Hoccleve reports: 84

Selections from Hoccleve, p. 59.

85

This is one reason why Gawain leaves on his quest after this feast in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 86

J. A. Burrow, Thomas Hoccleve, Authors of the Middle Ages, Series 4 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994); J. A. Burrow, ‘Thomas Hoccleve: Some Redatings’, Review of English Studies, 46 (1995), 366–72; Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. by John A. Burrow, EETS, O. S. 313 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1999).

40

Vincent Gillespie But alþouõ the substaunce of my memorie Wente to pleie as for a certain space, Õit the lorde of vertue, the kyng of glorie Of his hiõe myõt and his benigne grace, Made it for to retourne into the place Whens it cam, wiche at Alle Halwemesse Was fiue õeere, neither more ne lesse. (My Compleinte, ll. 50–56)87

If Burrow’s dating (and indeed Hoccleve’s) is reliable, then Hoccleve recovered his wits on the very day that marked the symbolic opening of the Council of Konstanz, whose mission was to reform the Church in head and members and to create new unity and peace in the body ecclesial by purging it of error and waywardness.88 Celebrating the new harmony between mind and body in his own life, Hoccleve thanks God for the ‘good and gracious reconsiliacioun’ made between his wits and himself, since which time they have lived in accord, although his friends and neighbours refuse to believe that he has been fully cured. Personal conversion may be figuring national conversion here. The Series can be read on one level as a coded and allusive account of the English church’s return from sickness with the beginning of the Council at Konstanz and its determination to reform in head and members. It is another of Hoccleve’s mirrors, permitting him to adopt postures and pull faces that fit the mood and style of the times, allowing him, as he does in the ballade translated from the French for Archbishop Chichele’s brother Robert, to ask God to ‘graunt pardon of our stynkyng errour’ (l. 152), while playing with Konstanz themes in asking for ‘vnioun’ between God, described as ‘Avctour of pees and concord’ (l. 67) and his soul (and not in the mystical sense).89 When Hoccleve’s Friend asks at the end of the Fabula de quadam imperatrice romana, ‘Wher is the moralizynge Y yow preye / Bycome heerof?’, the question can

87

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, p. 116. All subsequent references are to this edition. 88

I am grateful to my former student David Watt, now of the University of Manitoba, for first drawing my attention to this possibility during work on his dissertation. His forthcoming study Among the Prees: Thomas Hoccleve, The Series, and Fifteenth-Century London’s Social and Textual Practice is eagerly awaited. Recent work on Hoccleve’s scribal career suggests that in reality his absence through sickness may have been in 1416 rather than 1414: Linne R . Mooney, ‘Some New Light on Thomas Hoccleve’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 29 (2007), 293–340. But this does not, of course, in any way preclude the possibility that Hoccleve may have artfully contrived the coincidence between the account of his return to mental and spiritual health and the opening of the Council of Konstanz. 89

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, pp. 82–86.

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be more widely applied to the self-effacing allusiveness of Hoccleve’s poetry. But the prose moralizations throughout the Series explicitly read their antecedent fables in terms of broad issues of ecclesiastical reform, religious observance, and clerical idealism, and are themselves susceptible to a further moralization where the general issues can be layered over contemporary events and personalities. The moralization of the Fabula de quadam muliere mala asserts the value of penance and the eucharist, precisely the two sacraments most repeatedly assailed by the Lollards, offering no forgiveness for heretics and schismatics, and echoing the language of the Konstanz reform sermons in its call to ‘Ryse vp fro thy synne, ryse vp, for al to longe haast thow slept in the lappe of carnalitee’.90 In the schematization of the story of Jereslaus’s wife, the emperor and his brother invite comparison with the fraternal relationship between Henry V and Sigismund, and the romance fable sufferings and torments of the wife are wrenched (perhaps self-consciously uncomfortably) into an elaborate allegory of orthodox ecclesiology: The soule þat is wel beloued of God, and vnto Cryst weddid and oned, wole not forsake God and consente to synne, wherfore the wrecchid flessh despoilith often and robbith the soule of hir clothes (þat is to seyn, goode vertues) and hir hongith on an ook (þat is to seyn, worldly delyt and delectacioun) by the heeres (þat is to seyn, by wikkid concupiscences and desirs) til the erl (þat is to seyn, the prechour or discreet confessour) hunte in the foreste of this world with vertuous sarmonynge and precheynge, yeuynge conseil and reed to do goode and vertuous deedes, berkynge (þat is to seyn, pronouncynge the wordes of holy scripture). And thus the discreet confessour or prechour ledith the lady (þat is to meene, the soule) vnto the hows of holy chirche for to teche and norisshe the maiden (þat is to seyn, to hele the conscience with the wirkes of mercy).91

I am even tempted to suggest that the initially missing moralization at the end of Jereslaus’s wife is intended as a hermeneutic satire on the Wycliffite stress on discovering the literal sense alone: Thomas, it is wel vnto my lykyng, But is there aght þat thow purposist seye More on this tale? ‘Nay, my freend, nothing’. ‘Thomas, heer is a greet substance aweye’. (ll. 960–63)92

In an anti-Lollard sacramental pun typical of the time, substance has been mislaid and attention has been mistakenly focused on the accident or vehicle, just as the substance of the Church’s mission has been lost in incidentals. Like the self-

90

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, p. 254.

91

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, p. 189.

92

‘My Compleinte’ and Other Poems, ed. by Ellis, pp. 187–88.

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reforming English church in the wake of Wyclif, Hoccleve hoped that, after his recovery from illness, he would now be considered a safe pair of hands. I suspect that what he thought he was doing in the Series was, in fact, very deliberately preaching to the converted.93 The vernacular moral poetry of the conciliar period is part of a broad European spectrum of traditional re-assertions of orthodox teaching, and a local reflection of the English church’s subtly nuanced but radical self-appraisal in the wake of Wyclif.94 Chichele’s church was to be a very different animal from Thomas Arundel’s: certainly more European, perhaps more confident, more flamboyantly liturgical, passionately interested in orthodox reform, and in the exploitation of the vernacular as a medium of orthodox, but still imaginative and inventive, texts suitable for the growing lay audience for vernacular books of religion.

93

David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 761–99, presents a remarkably prescient argument that benefits from re-reading in the light of our developing understanding of English reformist orthodoxy. 94

For a provocative and insightful overview of the ecclesiastical history of this period, see John Van Engen, ‘Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church’, Church History, 77 (2008), 257–84.

A FTER A RUNDEL: T HE C LOSING OR THE O PENING OF THE E NGLISH M IND ? Jeremy Catto

A

fter Arundel: that the phrase can be plausibly used is a tribute to the defining influence, in current historiography, of Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s primacy on the course of English history. It marks the high tide of initiative on the part of Lollard preachers and their latter-day patron Sir John Oldcastle. After Arundel’s death on 19 February 1414, only a few weeks after the abortive Lollard rising, the ebbing of the radical preachers’ influence on public life is hard to miss, whatever the imprint of their teaching on more secretive congregations in the following generation.1 Some historians have gone further and seen Arundel as the architect of ‘orthodox reform’, a constructive programme on the part of the English church and government, in response to the challenge of Wyclif and his followers, to renew the religious life of the nation through the traditional sacraments, ceremonies, and doctrines of Catholic Christianity.2 None has yet been so rash as to attribute to him personally the palpable broadening of the insular cultural tradition in the succeeding three decades, under the influence of French literary and artistic models, as thousands of Englishmen and Englishwomen participated in Henry V’s imperial project — though Arundel himself and many

1

On which see Maureen Jurkowski, ‘Lollard Book Producers in London in 1414’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 201–26. 2

Harriss, Shaping the Nation, pp. 317–19; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Shaping the Mixed Life: Thomas Arundel’s Reformation’, in Image, Text and Church: Essays for Margaret Aston, ed. by Linda Clark, Maureen Jurkowski, and Colin Richmond (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009), pp. 94–108 (pp. 104–05).

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leading figures of his generation, including some of the ‘Lollard knights’, had anticipated fifteenth-century patterns of European cultural contacts. ‘After Arundel’ can be interpreted in a broad sense as well as in terms of the archbishop’s narrower efforts to weed out the Lollard evangelists. All the same, the negative effects of Arundel’s measures, and especially his Constitutions as issued definitively in 1409, on the English cultural and intellectual world have been much in evidence in recent scholarship. Admittedly, it would be difficult not to agree with Anne Hudson that they had little effect on the independent beliefs of his spiritual subjects; they seemed merely to anger both Lollard preachers and orthodox evangelists resentful of the restrictions on their popular preaching.3 However, much larger claims have been made for the stultifying public consequences of these measures of apparent censorship. Herbert Workman had already made them in 1926, and they have more recently been enlarged by Nicholas Watson.4 This is a bold claim, but to all appearances a plausible explanation for the undoubted sparseness of theological and other works originating in the English universities after 1409. The case seems stronger in that in other European universities, where the Constitutions did not apply, theological books and tracts continued to be produced, notably by masters of Paris. In the English academic world, the vigorous cut and thrust of debate before the Constitutions is succeeded, to all appearance, by silence. A claim of intellectual decline, or aridity, needs to be put into the widest possible cultural framework, and in this case, outside the traditional sources of learned Latin texts in Oxford and Cambridge, there is abundant evidence of vitality on the part of the educated laity and their largely monastic suppliers of spiritual instruction. This evidence consists of a new religious literature both in Latin and in the vernacular, which principally originated in Carthusian houses, and, after their foundation in 1415, especially in the Carthusian house at Sheen with its twin across the Thames, the Birgittine house at Syon. In close literary relation with these works, the elegant texts in English which followed the Ricardian poets and which were read, it seems, by much the same educated lay milieu as the

3

The Works of a Lollard Preacher, ed. by Anne Hudson, EETS, O. S. 317 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2001), Egerton Sermon, pp. 48–50, ll. 1159–62; Dives and Pauper, ed. by Priscilla Heath Barnum, 2 vols in 3 parts, EETS, O. S. 275, 280, 323 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1976–2004), II, 22; Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 34–35, 61. 4

Herbert Workman, John Wyclif, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), Watson, ‘Censorship’.

II,

374–76;

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literature of contemplation, provide further witness to lively minds and sensibilities in the England of the Lancastrian era. Perhaps the flowering of musical composition in England, at the hands of John Dunstable, Leonel Power, and their associates, should be taken into account as well, since the new music accompanied both spiritual texts which had been taken up into the rites of the church, and songs both religious and secular. Literary and intellectual currents in early fifteenthcentury England continued, therefore, to flow vigorously, even if the cut and thrust of philosophical debate in the limited space of the university lecture-room, the medium of Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, Richard Fitzralph, and John Wyclif, was no longer in evidence. Within this frame, however, there can be little doubt that the theological exercises and disputations at English universities, which had stimulated countless original solutions to the great philosophical questions of the day from about 1290 to the end of the fourteenth century, no longer stirred up such passionate speculations. We have direct evidence of their character in the Oxford notebooks of John Lawerne OSB, which contain his theological exercises for the doctorate, performed in 1448–49. Though they touch on questions of grace and the nature of the Trinity, Lawerne made no attempt at original speculation. The nature of divine grace and human free will, which had been debated urgently in Oxford a century earlier, was clearly not a living issue in 1449.5 In the absence of stimulus to internal debate, the theologians of the early fifteenth century, insofar as they produced literature of any kind, made compilations of passages of existing works, making, it would seem, a positive fetish of unoriginality. Richard Ullerston, for instance, an Oxford theologian whose capacity for original thought had been amply shown in two lectures of 1401, chose to lecture in 1415 on the Psalter and the cantica sacra, deliberately expounding the teaching of Nicholas of Lyra and Peter of Herentals without adding anything of his own.6 The Doctrinale of Thomas Netter, written in the 1420s, probably in the Carmelite priory in London, is a string of passages from the Latin Fathers, put together to refute the propositions of the Lollard masters by unimpeachable patristic authority, and so to demonstrate how shallow were the roots of Lollard ideas in that rich and sustaining soil. It is immensely long, and even so unfinished: the product of great industry and considerable learning, but a work of scholarship rather than of philosophical thought, in which there was 5

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 692. See Catto, ‘Theology after Wycliffism’, 263–80 (pp. 268–69). 6

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 20; on his probable lecture on Herentals see Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430’, in HUO, II, 175–261 (p. 257).

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room for the evaluation of authorities and brief discussions of the authorship of works such as Ambrose’s De divinis officiis.7 Both Ullerston and Netter avoided philosophical issues they were easily capable of addressing; they do not tell us why. A sermon of Dr Henry Abingdon, the warden of Merton, before the Council of Konstanz in 1415, goes some way to explaining the standpoint of academic theologians. True prelates, he told the fathers, made their first task to master the art of doctrina, the craft of instructing the laity in religion. Moral and pastoral teaching and the refutation of heresy were all part of doctrina; prosecuting lawsuits and practising law, the ‘lucrative science’, he reminded them sternly, were not.8 It was a preoccupation of prelates and preachers of the early fifteenth century who had been participants in the movement for orthodox reform: of Henry Hallum, Philip Repingdon, and Richard Fleming among bishops, and of the prolific preachers William Lichfield and Thomas Gascoigne in the next generation. For the most part they put their faith in preaching. The rather solitary scholar Dr Reginald Pecock, reflecting on a similar project, how to demonstrate the truth of orthodox doctrine to his neighbours — Londoners whom he called Lollards but who were perhaps merely sceptical or anticlerical in disposition — disagreed: he was dubious of the long-term impact of preaching, preferring to project his message in private conversation and argument.9 These views contributed to his ultimate downfall; but he shared with the preachers the aim of communicating orthodox doctrine, his version of which, to judge from his few surviving tracts in English, was original only in its rearrangement of older theology under different headings. The proposition that theology was a practical, not a speculative science, on which the art of doctrina was founded, had gradually prevailed in the fourteenth century. It had been justified by numerous theologians: Richard FitzRalph had famously dismissed speculative theologians as frogs and toads, croaking in the swamp; Wyclif himself had contrasted their intellectual constructs with the light of biblical truth. For

7 Thomas Netter, Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei, ed. by B. Blanciotti, 3 vols (Venice, 1757–59), 293–94. On Netter see Hudson, PR, pp. 50–55 and D. Dubois, ‘Thomas Netter of Walden O.C., c.1372–1430’ (unpublished B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1978).

II,

8

Henry Abingdon, sermon on Sitis repleti fructu iustitiae in Monimenta medii aevi ex bibliotheca regia hanoverana, ed. by Christian W. F. Walch, 2 vols (Göttingen: sumptibus Bossigelianis, 1757–64), I, fasc. 2, pp. 182–205. 9

Wendy Scase, Reginald Pecock, in Authors of the Middle Ages Vol III: nos 7–11, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), pp. 75–146; Jeremy I. Catto, ‘The King’s Government and the Fall of Pecock, 1457–58’ in Rulers and Ruled: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. by Rowena E. Archer and Simon Walker (London: Hambledon, 1995), pp. 201–22.

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Gerson, scripture and the fathers, and not the schoolmen’s ‘useless learning, frivolous and without solidity’, provided a basis for the mystical theology on which he lectured at Paris in 1400. In accord with his teaching, his most prolific successors there, John Capreolus OP and Guillaume de Vaurouillon OFM, who commented on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the natural place for theological speculation, would generally confine themselves to expounding an existing body of theological ideas.10 Their German contemporaries were no more ambitious: absorbed in the Wegestreit, a debate on different methods of teaching the subject, they virtually ignored speculative theology.11 The great scholastic debates seem to have run their course in every European theology faculty by the end of the fourteenth century, to be succeeded by the task of exposition of an older, more biblical and patristic sacred science, on which there might be scholarly controversies on the authenticity of particular texts or items of doctrine, such as the Donation of Constantine or — as Pecock notoriously speculated — the article on Christ’s descent into Hell in the Apostles’ Creed. The theological unoriginality of Ullerston and Netter in England, therefore, accorded with a change of direction in European thought, from metaphysics towards scholarly and historical study of the textual basis of orthodox belief: a new interest which would overflow the confines of theology faculties and lead to the great scholarly editions of the Bible and the church fathers, by Erasmus and others, a century later. It would be perverse, then, to accord the initiative in this slow and broad evolution to Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions for the English church, which at the most, by discouraging speculation on matters of doctrine, nudged the Oxford theologians towards the mainstream. Going with the flow at Pisa and Konstanz with an impressive selection of continental theologians and canon lawyers soon came easily anyway to Oxford masters such as Henry Abingdon. As an English delegate to the Council of Konstanz he was one of the vanguard of university masters, generally in the service of the English government and church but independent in their judgement on numerous issues, who between 1414 and 1418 enjoyed there the invigorating and abrasive 10

Richard FitzRalph, De questionibus Armenorum (Paris, 1512), xix.35; John Wyclif, De veritate sacrae scripturae, ed. by R . Buddensieg, 3 vols (London: Wyclif Society, 1905–07), I, 14, 54; Jean Gerson, letter to Pierre d’Ailly, in Jean Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Palémon Glorieux, 10 vols (Paris: Desclée, 1960–73), II, 23–28 (p. 27); Franciszek Tokarski, ‘Guillaume de Vaurouillon OFM et sa commentaire sur les Sentences de Pierre Lombard’, Mediaevalia Philosophica Polonorum, 29 (1988), 49–119; Guy Bedouelle, Romanus Cessario, and Kevin White, Jean Capreolus en son temps: 1380–1444 (Paris: Cerf, 1997). 11

James H. O verfield, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 49–60.

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company of other European intellectuals. They were followed by a host of graduates into the service of Henry V at home and abroad: theologians, lawyers, and simple masters of arts, they soon monopolized the episcopal bench and the diplomatic service of the crown, and took up most of the seats at the king’s council table which were not occupied by the military nobility. Henry Beaufort, Richard Courtenay, Richard Fleming, Henry Chichele, Philip Morgan, Henry Ware, and John Stafford were only a few of the university masters serving the house of Lancaster who were rewarded with a mitre. Busy as they were in the tasks of government, their pastoral duties, where they can be traced, were not neglected; the expertise of theologians and canon lawyers converged in the promotion of the art of doctrina and the improvement of the parish clergy, in accordance with the decrees of the Council of Konstanz. As Abingdon’s sermon reveals, they were not speculative thinkers, but they had absorbed the dialectic of university training, and their books, where evidence survives, point to broader interests than the apparatus of their professions. If theology in the European universities was now a practical art, and canon law its agreed framework, the civilian servants of the house of Lancaster (like their counterparts in foreign princes’ service) brought its patterns of thought and preoccupations into the wider world of public affairs. A mindset of lively interest in the world around them seems to have united university masters of this generation with the educated laity. The intellectual interests of graduates cannot easily be reconstructed from the literary remains — so far as they exist — of busy servants of the crown; the books of a few of them, notably Henry Chichele and Richard Fleming, are recorded; they indicate a catholic pattern of reading, beyond the demands of their profession.12 Further insight may come from the collections of Thomas Gascoigne, a theologian independent of government service, but involved in affairs as chancellor of Oxford, or commissary, and as a notable preacher in and out of the university. His Liber de veritatibus is a patchwork of passages from the fathers and early medieval theologians, laced with comments on the authors he read, and roughly arranged as a dictionary of themes useful for sermons; frequent comments on contemporary issues, especially ecclesiastical matters, reveal his passionate involvement in the contemporary world. The voracious reading on which it depended was not confined to what he could find in Oxford libraries (which he nevertheless scoured for materials) but ranged though numerous monastic collections and even bookshops; comments on his reading can be found in

12

Neil R. Ker, Records of All Souls College Library, Oxford Bibliographical Society publications, n.s., 16 ([London]: Oxford University Press for the Oxford Bibliographical Society, 1971), pp. 5–17; Emden, BRUO, II, 698, s.n. Richard Flemyng.

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at least a hundred surviving manuscripts. His sense of historical periodization and his book-hunting is reminiscent of Italian contemporaries such as Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolo Niccoli, though his Latin style was entirely innocent of humanist artifices. Gascoigne’s combination of private reading with a public voice was nurtured in the moralizing theology of the English universities and conformed, so far as it can be reconstructed, to the outlook of the London preachers of his time.13 But he shared both his concern with current affairs and his inward disposition with the world of the court. Like many of the nobility, he found inspiration among the brethren and sisters of the Syon community, to whom he left the original of his Liber de veritatibus, and had connections with the Carthusians at Sheen, where John Dygoun copied his Life of St Jerome. Sheen and Syon provided spiritual refreshment to the Lancastrian political world, either through brethren hearing confessions or through the circulation of spiritual literature; many public figures were benefactors of Syon, including the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester, Margaret, Duchess of Clarence, Henry Chichele, Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, and numerous London merchants.14 The two houses from the literary point of view belonged to a European network of shared devotional texts, assembled from originals in various vernaculars, typically translated into Latin and sometimes retranslated into another vernacular, a process which is only gradually being mapped. An example is the reception in England by stages of the short tracts now collectively known as the Imitation of Christ between about 1427 and the 1440s, apparently through copyists at Sheen. Their readers were both academic theologians and educated laity, on equal terms. In these establishments, the keepers of the conscience of Henry V and his colleagues, Gascoigne’s more political graduate contemporaries could share equally with the high nobility and the captains of war the spiritual harvest of the Carthusians, just as they co-operated in the direction of public affairs. Several bishops and noblemen shared with Gascoigne a penchant for wide reading, even more evident in the libraries of the dukes of Bedford and Gloucester than in those of learned prelates such as Chichele. It is one sign of the convergence

13

R . M. Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecok’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), 230–62. On Gascoigne see W. Pronger, ‘Thomas Gascoigne’, English Historical Review, 53 (1938), 606–26 and 54 (1939), 20–37, and Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship. His Liber de veritatibus is in Oxford, Lincoln College, MSS Lat. 117 and 118. 14

See Roger Lovatt, ‘The Imitation of Christ in Late Medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 18 (1968), 97–121; Syon’s benefactors are listed in the Martiloge of Syon, London, British Library, MS Additional 22285, fols 70r–71r.

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of the academic world, no longer separated from its social context by a high wall of theological terminology, with the court and metropolitan milieu of the Lancastrians. In this mixed environment, new interests could flourish, especially where foreign contacts could be forged. Arundel himself had been a precursor, employing his leisure in exile in 1397–99 to share literary interests with Coluccio Salutati. Two of the English bishops at Konstanz, Robert Hallum of Salisbury and Nicholas Bubwith of Bath and Wells, had encouraged another bishop, Bertoldo da Serravalle OFM, bishop of Firmano, to translate into Latin and comment on Dante’s Commedia for readers unversed in Italian history. Working at the Roman curia brought others into contact with Italian scholars, notably Dr Adam Moleyns, whose humanist Latin as a result met the most stringent criteria.15 The massive influx of English soldiers and officials into France after 1417 in the wake of Henry V allowed a much broader swathe of the Lancastrian world, lay and clerical, to experience a Parisian court culture in many ways more sophisticated than the native variety. The court of the regent duke of Bedford provided a focus for a fruitful Anglo-French cultural interchange, which was not however all in one direction: his employment of English musicians who had already developed in Henry V’s service the new contenance angloise, notably John Dunstable, profoundly influenced French and Burgundian music in the next generation. But inevitably the English had more to learn and absorb. Among the captains open to Parisian influence, beside Bedford himself, reputed learned among his contemporaries, were the brilliant soldier Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, Sir John Fastolf, Richard Sellyng, the lieutenant of Calais Castle, and Sir Richard Roos, all of them readers of, and some translators of, or contributors to, contemporary French literature. Disciplined to duty in the stern service of Henry V, they shared the inquiring mentality and open-mindedness of the graduate clerisy with whom they daily co-operated in the task of governing the Anglo-French double monarchy. The Parisian court world over which Bedford presided until his death in 1435 had itself been transformed by the deliberate formation of a corpus of classical works in French translation inspired by Charles V (1364–80).16 The Regent

15

Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati, ed. by F. Novati, Fonti per la Storia d’Italia, 4 vols (Roma: Forzani, 1891–1911), III, 497–501, 618–21. Bertoldo’s work is in London, British Library, MS Egerton 2629. On Moleyns see Roberto Weiss, Humanism in England in the Fifteenth Century, Medium Ævum Monographs, 4, 3rd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), pp. 80–83. 16

On these works see Daniel Poirion, Littérature française: Le Moyen Âge, 1300–1480 (Paris: Arthaud, 1971), pp. 95–105. On Charles V’s library in Bedford’s possession see Jenny Stratford,

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inherited the royal library, consisting of some 843 volumes in 1424, together with the impressive objets de luxe of the Valois; there he would have found Pierre Bersuire’s translations of Livy, Jacques Bauchant’s of Seneca, Nicholas Oresme’s of Aristotle, together with the Sophilogium, an anthology of ancient poets translated into French as the Archiloge Sophie and Le livre des bonnes meurs; Laurent de Premierfait’s renderings of Cicero and Boccaccio, and Nicholas de Gonesse’s of Valerius Maximus. There too was the French translation of the Bible, begun by Jean de Sy in the 1350s for the house of Valois. The work of translation continued after Charles V’s death, influencing the literary renaissance of his successor’s court, including authors such as Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pisan and, in the Lancastrian era in France, Alain Chartier. Many of the translators had stressed the public utility of their work, which reached numerous readers in the French political world. Political prudence, civic virtue, and philosophic resignation in the face of misfortune were the qualities to be distilled from their pages. They supplied historical models and parallels through which readers could come to terms with the searing recent experience of the Anglo-French wars; the renewal of violent civil conflict after 1400 moved Christine de Pisan to further literary efforts at its reconciliation on the basis of ancient wisdom. In the dark days of civil war and defeat by English arms which followed, the French princes were constantly reminded, if less often persuaded, of the virtues of political restraint and stoicism under the wheel of fortune. For the English occupiers too, the corpus of classical political works in French was potentially a transforming cultural inheritance, not entirely unfamiliar to readers of Chaucer, of course, but offering them a much broader selection of ancient texts. They in their turn would respond creatively to its stimulus. It was, perhaps, characteristic of the atmosphere of Bedford’s court that he and his associates should have turned first to the religious strand in Charles V’s legacy, commissioning English versions of the fourteenth-century Cistercian Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de l’âme and Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, the first for Bedford himself and the second for the earl of Salisbury. The translator of at least one of these was the Bury monk John Lydgate, a pivotal figure in the converging clerical and lay cultures of the era.17 Not only a monk but an Oxford student,

‘The Manuscripts of John, Duke of Bedford: Library and Chapel’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by D. Williams (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1987), pp. 329–50. 17

The first work survives in a Caxton print (STC 124026); for manuscripts, see The Pilgrimage of the Soul: A Critical Edition of the Middle English Dream Vision, ed. by Rosemarie Potz McGerr,

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probably of theology, about 1407, he had already enjoyed the patronage of Henry V as prince of Wales, and celebrated in English verse several episodes of his reign. From about 1425 he spent a few years in Paris, apparently in Bedford’s household, and his translations must have been made at that time. His absorption of Parisian culture went further: he seems to have introduced the theme of the danse macabre into England, by translating the verses inscribed on the mural painting in the cemetery of the church of the Innocents in Paris; these verses were later set up in London, on a set of boards in the cloister of the Pardon churchyard at St Paul’s. But his greatest debt to French literature, and perhaps directly to Bedford’s inherited royal library, was his translation of Laurent de Premierfait’s version of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium: his greatest poem, the Fall of Princes, which was commissioned by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Bedford’s brother, about 1430. This massive work, whose influence extended into the sixteenth century, conveyed into English literature the note of melancholic resignation characteristic of the Valois world. Further evidence of the vitalizing influence of Bedford’s court on this generation could be found in Richard Roos’s translation of Alain Chartier’s La belle dame sans merci, and in the numerous ‘plesaunce’ poems sometimes attributed to him, but in any case written under French literary influence.18 The poems ascribed to William de la Pole, earl and later duke of Suffolk, in French and English must have owed something to his experience in Paris in the 1420s, though more perhaps to the influence of his friend Charles, duke of Orléans, his sometime prisoner in England and a similarly bilingual poet.19 These works brought

Garland Medieval Texts, 16 (New York: Garland, 1990). A surviving presentation miniature from a now-lost copy of the second is found in London, British Library, MS Harley 4826. On Lydgate, now taken more seriously as a poet than in the past, see Walter F. Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the XVth Century, trans. by Ann E. Keep (London: Methuen, 1961); John Lydgate, ed. by Scanlon and Simpson, and Andrew Galloway, ‘John Lydgate and the Origins of Vernacular Humanism’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 107 (2008), 445–71. 18

See Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos c. 1410–1482: Lancastrian Poet (London: Hart-Davis, 1961), where the Roos corpus is greatly exaggerated; and Ashby Kinch, ‘A Naked Roos: Translation and Subjection in the Middle English La belle dame sans merci’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 105 (2006), 415–45. 19

See Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16, ed. by John Norton-Smith (London: Scolar, 1979); Derek Pearsall, ‘The Literary Milieu of Charles of Orléans and the Duke of Suffolk, and the Authorship of the Fairfax Sequence’, and A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Translation, Canons and Cultural Capital: Manuscripts and Reception of Charles d’Orléans’s English Poetry’, both in Charles d’Orléans in England, ed. by Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 145–56 and 183–214.

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something of the elegance and sophistication of the Valois court world into Lancastrian England; but the most explicit evidence of its enduring intellectual influence came later, from the East Anglian circle of Sir John Fastolf and from the pens respectively of his Oxford-educated secretary, William Worcester, and his stepson Stephen Scrope. Master of the duke of Bedford’s household in the 1420s, Fastolf had spent the prime of his life in Lancastrian France, where he made a considerable fortune. Retiring to England in 1439, he brought with him a number of French servants and a taste formed in Paris; a few fragments of his elegant appointments at Blickling Hall remain, as do at least one of his manuscripts, a copy of Christine de Pisan’s Epistle of Othea to Hector.20 This ‘Book off Knyghthode, as wele off gostly and spirituell actis of armys for the sowle-hele’ was a handbook of noble conduct taken from ancient authors.21 Together with a similar collection of traditional wisdom attributed to Hermes and other classical figures, the Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, it was translated by Scrope, and the two texts had some circulation in the later fifteenth century.22 William Worcester turned Laurent de Premierfait’s Cicero translations into English as Tullius of Friendship and Tullius of Olde Age, which were later printed by Caxton. More creatively, he brought the moral authority of ancient authors to bear on the national disaster of the loss of the English dominions in France, its causes and its possible remedies. His notebooks are full of examples of ancient heroes, vindications of the hope of victory in adversity, and appeals backed by historical precedents and modern military and political papers to the ‘coragious hertis putting forthe theire prowis in dedis of armes’.23 His Boke of Noblesse, originally composed about 1452, is a clear-sighted analysis of the rise and decline of English arms against a background of Greek and Roman history.24 Worcester, even more than Lydgate, exemplifies the fruitful

20

Now in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 570.

21

Stephen Scrope, The Epistle of Othea, Translated from the French text of Christine de Pisan, ed. by Curt F. Bühler, EETS, O. S. 264 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1970), p. 122. 22

On Scrope see Jonathan Hughes, ‘Stephen Scrope and the Circle of Sir John Fastolf’, Medieval Knighthood IV: Papers of the Fifth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1990, ed. by Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), pp. 109–46. 23

On Worcester’s notebooks, see Daniel Wakelin, Humanism, Reading and English Literature, 1430–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 4, pp. 93–125. 24

K. B. McFarlane, ‘William Worcester: A Preliminary Survey’, in his England in the Fifteenth Century (London: Hambledon, 1981), pp. 199–224. For the Boke of Noblesse, see William Worcester, The Boke of Noblesse, ed. by J. G. Nichols (London: Roxburgh Club, 1860).

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conjunction of university book-learning and academic disputation with the sophisticated milieu of the Lancastrian court and government, in which French canons of culture could be imbibed. The generation which came to maturity after Thomas Arundel’s death in 1414 was perhaps the least insular, both in its experience of activity on the European continent and in its creative absorption of foreign literary and cultural influences, since the mid-twelfth century, and was arguably not matched in that respect until the era of Byron and Coleridge. It was an age of libraries, in which new and elegant copies of classical, patristic, scholastic, and contemplative authors were more widely available than ever before. Their readers were equally variegated: scholars, lawyers, soldiers, craftsmen among whom a burgeoning new literature in the vernacular could supplement the vast heritage of Latin learning. Arundel’s generation of university-educated intellectuals had been troubled by moral and spiritual uncertainties, posed by the scandal of the great schism and the challenge of Wyclif and the Lollards; the painful evolution of the lawyer Walter Hilton’s contemplative calling seems to encapsulate the dilemmas of the age. The era of Henry V, by contrast, offered broader horizons to his subjects. Their lively and intelligent response is evident not only in the achievement of English arms in France, but in the emergent literary culture into which the influence of French civilization infused fruitful and abundant life.

C ENSORSHIP OR C ULTURAL C HANGE? R EFORMATION AND R ENAISSANCE IN THE S PIRITUALITY OF L ATE M EDIEVAL E NGLAND Michael G. Sargent

H

ow shall we think of English spirituality after Arundel? Was it as divided into the binary of proto-Catholic and proto-Protestant (or the trinary of proto-Protestant, proto-Anglican, and proto-Roman Catholic) as its historians over the centuries have tended to be? Was heretical dissent stamped out by the mid-fifteenth century, surviving only as feeble embers until it flared up once more in the sixteenth? Was More the lineal descendant of Arundel (or of Chichele)? Was Luther (or was Tyndale) the lineal descendant of Wyclif? I am reminded of the observation with which Herbert Grundmann opened his study of the Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter:1 that because all of the religious movements of the later Middle Ages in continental Europe ended up either as religious orders or as heretical sects, historical treatments of these movements were written either by members or adherents of these orders, or by Protestant historians who considered themselves the heirs of medieval dissent. The result, Grundmann

1

Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik, 2nd edn, with the Anhang: Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der religiösen Bewegungen im Mittelalter (Hildesheim: Olms, 1961), pp. 5–12; Grundmann originally wrote this study as his Habilitationsschrift in 1935. See Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy and Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. by Steven Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 1–5.

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observed, was that scholars tended not to study these movements for what they had in common — and how they differed — as religious movements. Scholarship dealing with the spirituality of England in the long century before the Reformation has had a similar history. Over the years, Protestant and Roman Catholic historical apologists from John Foxe to Eamon Duffy have identified in the church of Thomas Arundel and Henry Chichele, of John Fisher, Thomas More, and the ‘Forty Martyrs’ on the one hand, and in John Wyclif and William Tyndale, in Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, and Thomas Cranmer on the other, the harbingers of their own post-medieval mentalities. More recent, secular liberal accounts have reversed the polarity, finding a pre-modern creativity and freedom in late medieval English vernacular theology, and the roots of twentieth-century religious fundamentalism in the sixteenth-century Reformation.2 But they have kept the same Hegelian epistemology, treating historical periods, religious movements, and national identities as if they were ideal essences, having a natural life and development — an evolution, an Entwicklung (literally an unrolling) — of their own. It is with this essentialist historicism, with its tendency to read the present (or the not-so-distant past) into the more distant past, that I disagree. Let me begin by invoking two examples of post-modern historical discourse that I believe would be useful to keep in mind as models for our work: the first derives from the work of the theorist of biological evolution, Stephen Jay Gould; the second from the work of queer theorists of the medieval, Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger. One of Gould’s primary observations is that for most of the period from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, the discourse of biological evolution was captivated by what he terms the ‘iconography of the cone of increasing diversity’ — the tendency to visualize the appearance of new species as a gradual, ineluctable progression moving from the simple and primitive to the complex and superior.3 We may add to Gould’s observation the fact that under the influence of Herbert Spencer, the inventor of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, a teleological emphasis was added to this conceptualization of the evolutionary process, which was then further applied to racial and cultural history, political and

2

See especially James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. 2: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 3

Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989); see especially the figures on pp. 40–42.

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economic policy, and public morality, (falsely) identified as ‘social Darwinism’.4 The historiographic reflex of this ameliorative view of development, according to which history is seen as the inexorable march of political liberty, was famously described by Herbert Butterfield as The Whig Interpretation of History.5 In its nineteenth-century British form, this kind of historical writing focused on the rise of constitutional government; in its present-day American form, the focus of the narrative has shifted, in a capitalist mirror-image of the materialism of Marxist theory, to the (assumed) inevitable progress of human liberties under the aegis of free enterprise.6 A major part of Gould’s revision of the theory of biological evolution came out of his consideration of the implications of the massive explosion of new life-forms — not just new species, but entire new phyla — of which the fossil record in the early Cambrian Burgess Shale of British Columbia gives evidence. From this consideration Gould developed the concept of punctuated equilibrium: that the fossil record demonstrates long periods of relative stability of species in ecological equilibrium (with a great deal of individual variation within species, but relatively little development of new species) interrupted by events of catastrophic ecological change that destroy the existing species that are best fitted to their current ecological niches; such events are followed by periods of massive diversification that are marked by widespread development of new species (but relatively less individuation within species), which eventually re-establish equilibrium in their new ecological setting.7 Further, Gould points out, stressing the original Darwinian description of natural selection, the development of species is random: no guiding hand lifts life-forms to new and higher levels; rather, new species thrive in a new ecology because they feature adaptations that were at best neutral characteristics 4

See Barry Werth, Banquet at Delmonico’s: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America (New York: Random House, 2009). 5

Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1931). Note that James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution is a simple inversion of the historical narrative that Butterfield describes: Simpson’s is a narrative of the retrogression of liberty brought about by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, according to which the Reformation turns out unexpectedly to be the source, not of present-day Protestant liberalism, but of closed-minded fundamentalism. Cf. the second sentence of the Introduction, p. 1: ‘If literary history and criticism is, as I believe it should be, ancillary to the complex history of freedoms, then this is a narrative of diminishing liberties’. 6 7

See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1992).

See Gould, Wonderful Life; also Gould’s final, full statement, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

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beforehand, but which are advantageous now. There is development, but not in a smooth process of gradually, inevitably increasing diversity. There is survival, but without an overriding ‘fittest’: evolution isn’t going anywhere. The second historical model that I would like to invoke here was proposed by Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger in the introduction to their critical anthology, Queering the Middle Ages.8 Burger and Kruger begin with a reference to Lee Edelman’s discussion of a scene in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure in which Fanny Hill observes two men having sex. Her attention is drawn to the erection of the man being penetrated: ‘His red-topt ivory toy, that stood perfectly stiff, shewed that if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before’ — as she describes it, a ‘project of praeposterous pleasure’. Edelman focuses on this, because it signally condenses the disturbance of positionality that is located in and effected by the sodomitical scene; sodomy, that is, gets figured as the literalization of the ‘preposterous’ precisely insofar as it is interpreted as the practice of giving precedence to the posterior and thus as confounding the stability or determinacy of linguistic or erotic positioning.9

Burger and Kruger draw from this an application to historiography that strikes me as particularly apposite in describing the way that modern critics have tended to divide up the literature of late medieval English spirituality into proto-Reformist and proto-Roman Catholic streams, projecting the sixteenth-century Reformation back onto the preceding period. As Burger and Kruger note, Mainstream historicism insists on understanding the ‘flow of time’ as uninterruptedly ‘progressive’. In Walter Benjamin’s formulation, ‘Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history’. Traditional historicism is anything but preposterous; instead, it insists on straight chronologies that privilege a value-based movement of supersession and progress — classical antiquity, Dark Ages, Middle Ages, modernity; pre-, modern, and post-. The preposterous thinking of queer theory might usefully interrupt such teleological sequences and the causal explanations — of decadence and decay, efflorescence, Renaissance, and Enlightenment — that accompany them. [...] In other words, might we need (preposterously) to rethink what we have come to know as the Middle Ages not as preceding modernity but as the effect of a

8

Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glenn Burger and Steven Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. xi and xii. 9

Lee Edelman, ‘Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex’, in his Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 173–91 (pp. 183–84); Edelman is citing Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. by Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 157–58.

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certain self-construction of the modern, which gives itself identity by delimiting a ‘before’ that is everything the modern is not?10

The application that I see in a ‘preposterous’ re-thinking of the history of late medieval English spirituality is that we would thus consider it, not as the Entwicklung of a Hegelian Geist of English spirituality according to which the result was the ‘Premature Reformation’ of the fifteenth century,11 or the ‘Stripping of the Altars’ and the ‘Bare Ruined Choirs’ of the sixteenth.12 It is the very idea that there is an impersonal, external, objective history, according to which things may be said to be ‘premature’ — before (or after) their time — with which I am taking 10

Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Burger and Kruger, p. xii, citing from Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 263. 11

Hudson, PR. It should be noted that — with the partial exception of the ‘rough outline’ of a ‘curriculum vitae of the Lollard movement’ traced in its opening pages — Hudson’s work is remarkably free of the historiographic weaknesses that I am describing here. 12

The third volume of David Knowles’s Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), of which his Bare Ruined Choirs: The Dissolution of the English Monasteries is an abridged, illustrated version (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), employs throughout the imagery of corruption, effeminacy, and morbity, overlaid with a plangent nostalgia, as is evident in his description even of those he most admires, the Carthusians of London: ‘In Chauncey’s pages [i.e. the account of the torture and death of the Carthusians for refusing to swear to the Act of Succession of 1534 and the ecclesiastical supremacy of Henry VIII as required by the Treason Act of 1535], written when the old age had gone downstream in the cataclysm, there is a poignant, if inarticulate cry to Time to cease his passage: Verweile doch, du bist so schön’ (p. 226 — quoting the fatal phrase upon whose utterance Goethe’s Faust is to be damned, ‘Stay yet a while, thou art so beautiful’). Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Marking the Hours are more historiographically sophisticated, portraying fifteenthcentury English spirituality rather as being in full flower when cut off prematurely by the cupidinous king and his cabal — like Simpson’s, a tragic inversion of the progressivist narrative. On the naïveté of Duffy’s elision of groups of believers of varying degrees of literacy and sophistication, see David Aers, ‘Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars’, Literature and History, 3rd ser. (1994), 90–105. My own objections to Duffy’s argument begin with his portrayal of a fifteenth-century English spirituality in which the works of the two most prominent writers, Walter Hilton and Nicholas Love, can be ignored (Love is mentioned only twice, on pages 62 and 79; Hilton — who died, admittedly, just before the end of the fourteenth century, but whose works circulated widely throughout the fifteenth — is never mentioned at all), while a major part of the narrative depends on the works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, who were virtually unknown during the fifteenth century, and the circulation of books of hours, which only became truly popular in the late fifteenth century and (particularly in print) in the early sixteenth, and which probably influenced the spirituality of Duffy’s paradigmatic ploughman considerably less than Hilton and Love did.

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issue here.13 What I propose, rather, is a ‘preposterous’ history of English spirituality from the late fourteenth century through the early sixteenth, seen in its remarkable complexity and diversity, not ‘headed’ anywhere in particular, with various voices in contention for control of the field of discourse, but with the outcome, at that time, as it happened, undetermined. Equally problematic is the tendency to treat orthodoxy — on its own ideological terms — as always already known, always identical, so that orthodoxy can always be assumed, and heterodoxy must always be defined.14 We spend considerable time asking ‘What was Lollardy?’ because we assume that we already know what orthodoxy was — it always was what it is now. The essentialist privileging of orthodoxy as unproblematic in turn leads to such inversions of perception as that according to which the extended discussion of the ownership and use of manuscripts of the Wycliffite Bible versions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Mary Dove’s The First English Bible occurs under the rubric of ‘Censorship’.15 Further, although we may applaud the attention that present-day scholarship is paying to the richness of the ‘grey areas’ between orthodox and heterodox theology in late medieval England, it might be more useful metaphorically to think of late medieval English spirituality — Latin or vernacular — not as black, white, or grey, but as multicoloured. Difference needs not be binary. Attempts to identify the essence of Wycliffite heterodoxy in the past halfcentury have become far more sophisticated than earlier historical treatments that tended to treat Lollardy as Protestantism writ small. It is now recognized that even when both Wycliffite and sixteenth-century Reformist theology disagreed with high medieval Church doctrine, they still differ in important ways from each other: a clear example can be seen through the gaps in James Simpson’s discussion in

13

Although I will admit that I have made use of the idea myself in referring to Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ as representing a ‘Premature Counter-Reformation’; see p. intro. p. 75. Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005). 14

The classic example of this kind of doctrinal history is John Henry, Cardinal Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Toovey, 1845). 15

Mary Dove, ‘Censorship’, in her The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 37–67. What I find interesting is that Dove does not treat the expanding transmission of the text as a case of expansion and transmission (as would be done, for example, in the case of a text by Chaucer, or Hilton, or Piers Plowman), but as a case of the failure of censorship to achieve its goals — that is, not as a positive thing, but as the negative of a negative: the absence of the absence of the Wycliffite Bible.

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Burning to Read of Miles Coverdale’s remarks on his Lutheran objection to Roman Catholic doctrine on sacramental penance.16 Simpson makes a point of the fact that Coverdale advertises his lack of aversion to the use of the term ‘penance’ (a term that Coverdale says ‘the adversaries of truth’ expect him to abhor), tracking the discussion of the translation of the Greek term metanoia from the New Testament text through Erasmus to Tyndale and More. Surprisingly absent from Simpson’s discussion, however, is any mention of Wycliffite aversion to the use of the term ‘penance’ (as opposed to ‘repentance’), as implying the practice of oral confession.17 That is, although they both disagreed with the orthodox church teaching of their times on the matter of confession and penance, Wycliffites and sixteenth-century reformers disagreed with each other on the basis of their objection: the Lutheran objection was grounded in a rethinking of the theology of repentance that was a consequence of a revision of the place of works in the economy of salvation that was particular to Lutheran and post-Lutheran Reformist thought.18 Coverdale’s advertisement of his willingness to use the term ‘penance’, in contrast to what, he says, was expected of him, thus both alludes to and denies the role of Wycliffism as a precursor to the sixteenth-century Reformation. Tyndale and More, on the other hand, stand at the head of a centuries-long tradition of Roman and Protestant collusion in a narrative according to which the Reformation had no roots in the traditional church of the later Middle Ages.

16

Simpson, Burning to Read, pp. 72–79. My thanks are due to Mr Dan Barnett for his useful observations on this point. 17 18

See Hudson, PR, pp. 294–301.

Something quite similar to Luther’s radical anti-Pelagianism can, in fact, be seen in the thought of other exponents of the Augustinian tradition, such as the fourteenth-century English canon regular Walter Hilton: ‘And þan bigynniþ þe soule for to knowen [God] gostly and brennandly for to lufen him. Þan seeþ þe soule sumwhat of þe kynde of þe blissed godhed of Ihesu, how þat he is al and þat he wirkiþ al, and þat alle gode dedis þat are done and gode þouõtes arn only of him. For he is alle souereyn miõt and alle souereyn soþfastnes and alle souereyn godnes; and þerfore euerilk gode dede is don of him and bi him, and he schal only han þe wurschip and þe þanke for alle gode dedis, and noþinge bot he. For þawõ wrecched men stele his wurschip here for a while, nerþeles at þe last ende schal soþfastnes schewen wel þat Ihesu did al and man did riõt noõt of himself. And þan schal þefes of Goddis gode þat are not acorded with him here in þis liif for here trespas be demyd to þe dede, and Ihesu schal be fully worsciped and þankid of alle blessid creatures for his gracious wirkynge’ (cited from The Scale of Perfection, Book II, chap. 34; London, British Library, MS Harley 6579, fols 112v –113r , as edited by S. S. Hussey (I am currently at work preparing this edition for press with the Early English Text Society)). Hilton has more in common with Luther here than Luther has with Wyclif.

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Among historians, the work of scholars such as K. B. McFarlane, Margaret Aston, and Eamon Duffy has marked a turn to the analysis of social practice rather than strictly intellectual or doctrinal history.19 More recent attempts, particularly by scholars in faculties of languages and literature, to identify just what constituted Lollardy, like the work of Anne Hudson, have based themselves rather in philology and linguistic philosophy. In fact, even the work of McFarlane can already be seen as having a ‘linguistic’ tendency: his focus particularly on the evidence of ‘Lollard wills’ in Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights amounts to asking ‘Was there a Lollard semiotics?’ — a system of signs that could be read societally as demonstrating allegiance to the cause.20 At the same time, McFarlane recognized how intensely problematic it was that Archbishop Arundel left just such a will. It provoked McFarlane to ask: Does anyone think that Arundel was a secret Lollard? Must we therefore conclude that the Lollard wills are a false clue, that the coincidences to which I have drawn attention were pure coincidences and no more? The answers to both these questions, it seems to me, must be ‘no’.21

A Lollard will, it seems, is what a post-modern semiotician would call a floating signifier — despite MacFarlane’s attempt to pin it down. More recently, in her essay, ‘Lollardy: The English Heresy?’, Anne Hudson asked a similar semiotically-based question: can the choice of language in which theological discussion is written function as a presumptive sign of heterodoxy?22 Obviously, it was taken as such by a considerable number of contemporary officials, although we must also note that, with the exception of the copies of ‘a book of our Lady’s Matins in English, [...] the Prick of Conscience [...] and The King of Beeme’, in the possession of Richard Colins of Ginge in Berkshire in the early sixteenth century — an active Lollard proselitizer — there is remarkably little evidence that the possession of non-Wycliffite books in English was used as evidence for more

19

See particularly K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon, 1984); Faith and Fire: Popular and Unpopular Religion, 1350–1600 (London: Hambledon, 1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars and Marking the Hours. 20

McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, pp. 207–20.

21

McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings, p. 219.

22

Anne Hudson, ‘Lollardy: The English Heresy?’, Studies in Church History, 9 (1972), 147–57; repr. in Hudson, Lollards and Their Books, pp. 141–63.

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than prima facie suspicion of heresy.23 In particular, we must note that the oftencited example of John Phip, the sixteenth-century physician of Hughendon, who is reported by Foxe to have averred ‘that he had rather burn his books than that his books should burn him’, should not be taken by itself as demonstrating a generalized fifteenth- and sixteenth-century anxiety about book ownership that extended even to those who were not heretics. Non-heretical books in English owned by people who were not heretics, but which happened to be examined by the authorities, appear to have been returned to their owners without prosecution. Hudson also took a semantic approach to the definition of Wycliffism, asking whether there was such a thing as ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’24 As Jill Havens has pointed out,25 a number of studies have followed this line of investigation, ranging in approach from Matti Peikola’s semantic survey of the use of the phrase ‘trewe men’ to Kantik Ghosh’s analysis of Wycliffite hermeneutics.26 Yet, as Havens has also pointed out, texts occupying the ‘grey area’ between the ‘conservatively Lollard and the radically orthodox’ could be read and copied comfortably by both; Ghosh’s analysis, too, comes up with problematic results — what to do with Nicholas Love’s use of Lollard semantics and Thomas Netter’s of Wycliffite hermeneutics? The use of Wycliffite hermeneutics — the privileging of the literal, historical meaning of scripture — is often remarked upon, but it, too, is problematic. In the first place, the privileging of the literal and historical sense occurs throughout the scholastic tradition generally, and secondly, as Fiona Somerset has demonstrated, ‘Lollard writings display a sophisticated engagement with the terms and possibilities of what they most often call “goostli speche” or “goostli under-

23

Hudson, PR, pp. 166–68, 186–88, 460–64, 467–68, 470–71.

24

Anne Hudson, ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’, in So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediæval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. by Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Benskin and Samuels, 1981), pp. 15–30; repr. in Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 165–80. 25

Jill C. Havens, ‘Shading the Grey Area: Determining Heresy in Middle English Texts’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 337–52. Havens’s approach is primarily semantic; on pp. 339–40, n. 13, she usefully lists a number of studies that have focused on the identification of a ‘Wycliffite sect vocabulary’. 26

Matti Peikola, Congregation of the Elect: Patterns of Self-Fashioning in English Lollard Writings, Anglicana Turkuensia, 21 (Turku: University of Turku, 2000); Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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standing”’.27 In other words, neither the privileging of the literal meaning nor aversion to allegory is specifically characteristic of Lollardy. Hudson’s observation of the role of vernacularity, if not in the semiotics of Lollardy, then at least in the semiotics of the official reaction to Lollardy, was provocatively extended by Nicholas Watson,28 who argued that the strictures of Archbishop Arundel’s Lambeth Constitutions ushered in a period of fearful selfcensorship that effectively ended the efflorescence of vernacular theology that marked the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth. Watson’s observations have occasioned an examination of the literature of vernacular spirituality in late medieval England that has resulted not only in a greater general understanding of the field, but — as is to be expected — in a more nuanced framing of his observations themselves.29 I have argued, for example, that the literature of Latin and vernacular spirituality in England in the fifteenth century may well demonstrate a polarization into relatively ‘conservative’ orthodox forms such as translations of, and compilations from, thirteenth and fourteenth century contemplative and devotional literature, saints’ lives and sermon collections on one side, and relatively ‘radical’ Wycliffite polemics, including works critical of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the sacraments and in defence of the translation of

27

Fiona Somerset, unpublished paper entitled ‘Lollard Allegory’. I thank Prof. Somerset for allowing me to cite from this piece, which she intends at some point to expand and publish. Much of Somerset’s recent work demonstrates the complexity of fifteenth-century English vernacular spirituality — its inability to resolve itself clearly into the binary polarity of ‘Lollard’ and ‘orthodox’. See her ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, in Text and Controversy, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 375–86. 28

Watson, ‘Censorship’; see also ‘Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God’, in New Medieval Literatures, 1 (1997), 85–124; ‘The Middle English Mystics’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 539–65; ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 331–52. 29

See Sargent, ‘The Mirror and Vernacular Theology in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, pp. intro. 75–96; ‘Mystical Writings and Dramatic Texts in Late Medieval England’, Religion and Literature, 37 (2005), 77–98; ‘What do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission’, in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. by Margaret Connolly and Linne R . Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 205–44; and ‘A Talking of the Love of God and the Tradition of Meditative Writing in the Isadorean Style’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. by Susannah Chewning (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 178–93.

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scripture and sermon collections, on the other — although I will have to admit that I am no longer entirely comfortable with the dualism of even that formulation. I would also note that the term ‘vernacular theology’ is as equally anachronistic as ‘medieval English mystics’, and over-determines its content to an even greater extent: specifically, that the exclusion of sermons, saints’ lives, the drama, and Wycliffite writing from the survey of vernacular theological literature appended to ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’ seriously distorts our view of the field. It is hard to imagine that the Lambeth Constitutions were as successful as Watson portrays them in the secondary result of creating an ‘atmosphere of fear’ in which selfcensorship prevented the production of new vernacular theological writings in the fifteenth century when they were so spectacularly unsuccessful in accomplishing their primary aim of curtailing the circulation of the Wycliffite Bible (which, at some 250 surviving manuscript copies, is far and away the most ‘popular’ work written in Middle English). Furthermore, when translation and compilation played so great a role in the writings of vernacular spirituality in England in the fifteenth century (if the restriction of translation was a primary object of the constitutions), then why was it original works, not translations, that (it is claimed) ceased to be written? Lastly, we must also note that our view of the manuscript circulation of fifteenth-century literature is foreshortened by the fact that many of the works produced in this period had less than the quarter-to-half-century in circulation that it normally took for a text to achieve large-scale manuscript transmission, before the production of vernacular books in England made the transition to print.30 Although Watson was right to focus on vernacularity, we must also remember that English was not the only vernacular of England in the later Middle Ages, and that the relationship between the vernacular and Latin was so complex that Latin can never be completely left out of the picture. Among the most important works of vernacular theology in French, for example, were Guillaume Deguileville’s trilogy of the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, the Pèlerinage de l’âme, and the Pèlerinage de Jesus Christ.31 All but the Jesus Christ were translated into English over the course of the fifteenth century (the need for an English meditation on the life of Christ being supplied by other works). The Vie was translated both into English verse, in a version attributed to John Lydgate, composed in the late 1420s and dedicated to Thomas Montacute, earl of Salisbury, and into prose, as The 30 31

See Sargent, ‘What do the Numbers Mean?’

See Guillaume de Digulleville: Les Pèlerinages allégoriques: Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, 5-8 octobre 2006, ed. by Frédérique Duval and Fabienne Pomel (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008).

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Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhood. The Âme was translated into English prose as The Pilgrimage of the Soul — as well as into French prose (and that version further translated into Latin) by Jean Gallopes in the mid-1420s, for John, duke of Bedford.32 Nor should we forget the medieval Welsh tradition of contemplative and devotional writings represented by, for instance, the Llyfr Ancr Llanddewibrefi.33 What all of this suggests to me is the problem that Michel Foucault demonstrated in his discussion of intellectual history in The Archaeology of Knowledge:34 intellectual history tends to infinite regression. There is always someone else, earlier or elsewhere, who can be identified as an antecedent or a parallel — intellectual movements always turn out to have no beginnings, or to be surrounded by immense ‘grey areas’, rather than borders. What Foucault’s archaeological approach offers is the observation that shifting relationships of power in society both cause and reflect shifts in discursive formulations. It is in these terms, in his essay ‘What is an Author’,35 that he notes that Freud and Marx are ‘authors’ insofar as, whether one agrees with them or not, the discourse that one uses to discuss psychology, in the one case, or political economy, in the other, is changed by the fact of their writing. I would observe that John Wyclif is equally an author in this sense, because — whether his contemporaries agreed with him or not — his is the name that identifies a particularly important node of change in the discourse of late medieval English spirituality. 32

Galopes, who was dean of the collegiate church of Saint-Louis de la Saussaie in the diocese of Évreux, also translated the Meditationes vitae Christi into French, in a version dedicated to Henry V and Bedford. See Josephine E. Houghton, ‘The Works of Guillaume Deguileville in Late Medieval England: Transmission, Reception and Context, with Special Reference to “Piers Plowman”’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 2007); Sargent, ‘Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ and the Politics of Vernacular Translation in Late Medieval England’, in The Medieval Translator / Traduire au moyen âge: Lost in Translation?, ed. by Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead, The Medieval Translator, 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 205–21. 33 See Idris Llewelyn Foster, The Book of the Anchorite: Sir John Rhys Memorial Lecture 1949 (London: British Academy, 1952); The Elucidarium and Other Tracts in Welsh, from Llyvyr agkyr Llandewivrevi, ed. by J. Morris-Jones and John Rhys, Anecdota Oxoniensa Mediaeval and Modern Series, 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894; repr. AMS Press, 1989). 34

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972); originally published in French as L’Archéologie du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 35

Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. by Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); originally published in the Bulletin de la Société française de la philosophie, 63 (1969), 73–104.

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I am invoking Foucault here particularly as a theoretician of the relations of discourse and power, because his work as a historian of discursive formations, especially in The History of Sexuality,36 has left the impression in many readers of the power of discursive hegemony as somehow ineluctable. I would focus rather on the ways in which the totality of diverse uses of discourse within a culture — even within and in reaction to a hegemony — constitute a constant renegotiation of power. What interests me is the ways in which the hermeneutics that determined what constituted knowledge of scripture, and the public sense of who was entitled to deploy those hermeneutics, changed — and that the cultural node around which that change took place came to be identified with the name of the author, John Wyclif. To invoke another model of cultural relations, we may note with Pierre Bourdieu that the knowledge of scripture was a particularly potent form of cultural capital in late medieval England, but that in the period from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth, the habitus governing access to the text of scripture — the unspoken, self-perpetuating set of cultural practices that determined who had access to that capital, what cultural investments justified that access, and the purposes for which it was culturally acceptable to deploy that access — changed.37 Bourdieu, like Foucault, is much better at describing systems in stasis, but I am interested in the possibility of looking at what happened before, during, and after Arundel in terms of the negotiation of power-relations within the habitus of late medieval English society. The result of this kind of socio-cultural analysis of the spirituality of late medieval England is to de-essentialize the discourse: instead of examining texts to determine whether they are orthodox or heterodox — black or white (or grey) — we can look at them in terms of the many different kinds of work that they do in the cultural economy in which they are situated. Equally, we can ask questions of the kind that the queer theoretician Judith Butler has posed with increasing precision and sophistication over the past twenty years, with regard to the

36

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. by Robert Hurley, 3 vols (New York: Viking, 1979–90); Histoire de la sexualité, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1976–84). 37

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), first published as Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (Genève: Droz, 1972); The Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), first published as Le Sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1980); Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), first published as La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979).

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performativity of gender:38 are there acts, expressions and gestures that — under certain societal conditions — are constitutive of identity as a Lollard; is there a Lollard performativity? Such performative gestures might range from breaking up a statue of St Catherine to make a fire to cook one’s pottage to expressing sympathy with ‘victims of persecution’. Further, is there something equivalent to what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as the Epistemology of the Closet:39 is there a policing of the boundaries of the socially acceptable? Is there such a thing as Lollard panic? Again, these should not be binary questions: we should not ask only whether a text is performative of Lollardy or of orthodoxy — we should ask what other roles were available to be constructed, negotiated, enacted, embodied. Finally, we might also speak of a Lollard deconstruction of Latin medieval scriptural hermeneutics that demonstrates the fundamental instability of a shifting system of levels of explication upon which was erected a superstructure of fixed and determined meaning. Monastic interpretation of scripture, after all, was characterized by an exuberant multiplication of meaning in the text, the truth of any particular reading being guaranteed not by the method by which it was reached, but by its agreement with an interpretative tradition presumed to be always already in place, and by the membership of the writer and reader in an interpretive community. In parallel with Jacques Derrida’s discussion of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, ‘The Purloined Letter’,40 we may observe that the meaning of scripture is hidden in the medieval Latin interpretive tradition until you look for it in the gloss (where, of course, it is hidden in plain sight). Lollard reading of the ‘plain’, ‘open’, and ‘reasonable’ meaning of scripture, on the other hand, returned the gloss to its authoritative centre — in the (vernacular) text of scripture itself.

*** I would not begin a history of English spirituality in the later medieval period with Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409 any more than I would attribute the

38

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). 39

Eve Kofovsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 40

Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in Writing and Difference, trans. by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); originally published in French as ‘Freud et la scène de l’écriture’, Tel Quel, 26 (1966), 10–41.

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encyclopaedic works of vernacular theology of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries simply to Archbishop Pecham’s Constitutions of 1281.41 In fact, I would be wary of attributing large-scale social change directly to the actions of ‘historical individuals’, no matter how influential in the eyes of their contemporaries.42 I would propose rather that there was a confluence of several major cultural changes, some with roots in the relatively distant past, and with divergent origins (e.g. scholastic privileging of the literal and historical senses of scripture; centralization of political power in royal, imperial, and papal hands — and contestation of that power by the aristocracy and the rural and urban wealthy; population growth and the rise of the urban capitalist economy; rising rates of literacy, particularly among women; changing gender relations — including relations of men and women, celibacy and marriage). If it is important to locate a ‘tipping point’ in the general socio-cultural effect of these long-term changes, then I would rather locate it in their conjunction, occurring as it did in the context of the catastrophic population disruptions that followed the Great Death of 1348/49.43 To invoke Stephen Jay Gould’s model of punctuated equilibrium, the plague represents a radical destabilization of the habitus that governed the political economy of social and religious life and spirituality, in the aftermath of which a large number of social changes already under way, but not yet dominant, began to manifest themselves in remarkable new ways.44 Nor would I characterize the spirituality of late medieval England on the basis only of its vernacular literature in English: a full discussion depends on an exploration of English, Latin, and French writings — and also of large numbers of other manifestations of changing social practices. Nor, particularly, would I use a

41 As, for example, in the discussion of such Middle English works as Pore Caitif or (despite its title) Ignorancia sacerdotum, or the works of Deguileville, either in their original French or their English (or Latin) versions. 42

In this, Nicholas Watson’s dichotomy of ‘not [...] a centennial coincidence, the product of a new [Z]eitgeist, but [...] the result of specific historical forces and acts’ (‘Censorship’, p. 823) presents us with a false alternative: superstitious coincidence or naive Hegelianism on the one hand, or Archbishop Arundel’s specific historical act on the other. 43

See Colin Platt, King Death: The Black Death and its Aftermath in Late-Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 44

It is important to remember here that the invocation of Gould’s model does not imply that there was a causal relationship between the plague and the social changes that followed it: catastrophic ecological change does not determine the structure of the new ecology that will develop afterwards, but by sweeping away dominant antecedent structures, opens the field for the development of other forms.

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modern sense of what is and is not ‘interesting’, ‘exciting’, or ‘innovative’ as a criterion in evaluating cultural influence in the past. An important point of entry to the field would be the observation of the growth of associational forms of relationship in the purgatorial economy in the aftermath of the plague — including corrody and confraternity as well as innovations in the patterns of religious foundation.45 Only some sixteen houses of the religious orders were founded in England in the aftermath of the plague: most, like the houses of the Carthusians, the observant Franciscans, and the Birgittines, represented orders whose pious strictness of discipline could stand as a guarantee of the efficacy of their prayers for their benefactors.46 The vast majority of religious foundations in the period were rather of hospitals, secular and academic colleges, and chantries. It should also be noted that the size of most of the foundations in the aftermath of the plague was such that they were within the reach of the gentry and the wealthier bourgeoisie as investments in the economy of spirituality. This includes even some of the larger houses, like those of the Carthusians at London and Coventry, where most of the cells were endowed separately according to the same economic pattern as that which governed lesser hospitals and chantry chapels.47

*** Beside these new mortuary practices, we should also continue to examine and consider new living practices, such as the development of ‘mixed lives’ and the ‘journées chrétiennes’ of the kinds described by Nicole Rice and Geneviève 45

The concept of associational forms of relationship derives from David Wallace’s Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 46 The Carthusian houses of London (1371), Hull (1377), Coventry (1381), Axholme (1397–98), Mount Grace (1398), and Sheen (1414); the friaries of the observant Franciscans at Greenwich (1482), Richmond (c. 1400), and Newark (Notts., 1507); of the Carmelites at Northallerton (1356) and Sele (1493); of the Austin Friars at Thetford (c. 1387); of the Crutched Friars at Donnington (c. 1376); of the Bonneshommes at Edington (1352); and the abbeys of the Poor Clares at Bruisyard (1364) and the Birgittine double house of Syon (1415). See David Knowles and R . Neville Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales (London: Longmans, 1953); Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: Gift Giving and the Aristocracy, 1307–1485 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972). 47

See Andrew Wines, ‘The Founders of the London Charterhouse’, in Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Julian M. Luxford (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 61–71.

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Hasenohr;48 new practices of authorship (including in particular translation and compilation), readership (particularly among women) and book culture, as detailed by Jessica Brantley, Jennifer Bryan, Mary Erler, and Catherine Sanok, among others;49 liturgical and para-liturgical practices and spaces, as examined by Roberta Gilchrist, Virginia Chieffo Raguin, Sarah Stanbury, and Nancy Bradley Warren;50 as well as practices of dissent and reformation.51 But it is important to remember that these various new forms and practices did not develop in isolation, but rather in dynamic relation to each other. For example, although it is common enough for critics to discuss ‘devotional miscellanies’ and ‘Lollard miscellanies’, the fact is rather that many of the works collected in such manuscripts sat (apparently comfortably) side-by-side with works that would be collected into completely different anthologies by modern critics. If we pay attention only to the prescriptions of archbishops and the criticisms of their major opponents we will miss the fact that many people, while listening to both, were willing to make up their own minds. It was not only the great and powerful among

48

See Nicole R . Rice, ‘Spiritual Ambition and the Translation of the Cloister: The Abbey and Charter of the Holy Ghost’, Viator, 33 (2002), 222–60; Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Geneviève Hasenohr, ‘La Vie quotidienne de la femme vue par l’église: l’enseignment des “journées chrétiennes” de la fin du moyen âge’, in Frau und spätmittelalterlicher Alltag. Internationaler Kongress: Krems an der Donau, 2. bis 5. Oktober, 2004 (Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986), pp. 19–101. 49 See Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 50

See Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994); Women’s Space, ed. by Virginia Raguin and Sarah Stanbury (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005); Nancy Bradley Warren: Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 51

See Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Robert Lutton, Lollardy and Orthodox Religion in Pre-Reformation England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006); Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England, ed. by Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003).

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the orthodox who owned copies of the Wycliffite Bible versions,52 but many others — including a large number of people (or local churches or chapels) whose copies were apparently formatted for para-liturgical use. This is not to say that Lollardy was not a dominant strand in English spirituality in the fifteenth century, or that it was a local or a passing movement, or that it was not a major vector of social change: demonstrably, it was.53 What I would argue is that we must be careful methodologically in deconstructing the semiotic basis upon which scholars of the past few decades have built the current narrative of an anxious, troubled, repressed English spirituality after Arundel, sliding inevitably (or not) toward the cataclysm of the sixteenth century, and in constructing beside, within, and around that narrative another, queer narrative of polyglossia, of performativity, of negotiation and contestation of power — a preposterous historical project.

52

The fact that we find few names of owners in copies of the Wycliffite Bible versions other than those of the rich and powerful does not necessarily signify much: they are the people who usually left their names on their belongings. We do not know many of the names of the original owners of Piers Plowman or of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection either. 53

I am consciously using the image of a vector here, in the way that physical analysis looks at the motion of a diagonally-falling object in terms of its outward and its downward movement forces. Looking at Lollardy as a vector of momentum in its social-intellectual world — rather than as a pie-slice — seems more useful methodologically, since the definition of a vector requires the identification of a direction of movement, while the definition of a pie-slice requires the identification of borders.

V ERNACULAR T HEOLOGY / T HEOLOGICAL V ERNACULAR : A G AME OF T WO H ALVES? Ian Johnson

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he possibilities of the collocation ‘vernacular theology’ are the main subject of this essay, which is in part a reconsideration of this thought-provoking term, and which will also suggest three ways in which an understanding of vernacular theology, or the theological vernacular, may be developed beyond what has so far generally been the case.1 Each of these involves the vernacular repackaging or adaptability of texts for purposes of theological performance, whether such performance involves the more or less programmatic nurturing of spiritual discipline; or the demonstration, shaping, or display of Christian ethics and rudiments of the faith; or the interpretation and application of biblical matter; or the enactments of devotion and the exercise of the affecciouns; or the exposition or implementation of particular theological positions. Each of these three ways depends on, and opens up, its own particular discursive possibilities. The first of them is concerned with the implications of punctuabilitas in texts of vernacular theology; the second involves theological play with genre; the third attempts to imagine possible behaviours and attitudes of post-Arundelian vernacular readers of manuscripts containing seemingly clashing mixes of heterodox and orthodox materials. Before this, however, there needs to be some revisiting of the high-

1

The support of the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) towards costs for conference attendance and the preparation of this essay is gratefully acknowledged. This essay develops features of the paper given at the ‘After Arundel’ conference and also of an essay, entitled ‘Vernacular? Theology? Vernacular Theology?’, lodged on the Geographies of Orthodoxy website at: .

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conceited term itself, commencing with an anecdote, inside whose storiale husk of latter-day scholarly confusion and terminological obduracy lies a kernel of awkward but productive truth. At Kalamazoo in 2007 some speakers on late medieval English religious literature and culture talked of vernacular theology as if it was still very much the vital paradigm. Others, however, spoke of ‘vernacular theology’ whilst gesturing scare quotes for the expression. Others went so far as to consign it to the past tense. All this was evidently rather unsettling; someone in the row in front of me started talking about having to change what she had put in her paper. However exciting or inconvenient (or illusory) this moment of possible paradigm shift was, everyone was still, in effect, carrying on speaking about vernacular theology nonetheless, and no better locution or concept came over the horizon to take its place, nor has done since — unless I have missed it. A chief moral of this brief tale of clerks in commotion is that vernacular theology cannot be jettisoned or avoided. Intransigently useful, ‘vernacular theology’ is a problematic yet attractive combination of terms. As Nicholas Watson points out, it has the advantage of: encouraging reflection on the kinds of religious information available to vernacular readers without obliging us to insist on the simplicity or crudity of the information: that is, the term is an attempt to distance scholarship from its habitual adherence to a clerical, Latinate perspective in its dealings with these texts.2

Vernacular theology, like its Latin counterpart, is definitely intellectually worthy of being called theology. What is more, it shines with the lustre of the designation ‘vernacular’, an invariably positive term, charged with connotations of access, freedom of expression, and incipient democratization. On one level, this yokingtogether of heterogeneous categories seems straightforward enough, but such a conceit needs to be used with tact, for although the two component terms may engage each other in the arena of linguistic usage they may not always be playing the same game: the agenda or situation of theology are not necessarily the same as those of the vernacular/vernacularity. ‘Vernacular theology’ has been in play for quite a while. Although the expression was used by Ian Doyle as long ago as 1953, and although Bernard McGinn has had significant dealings with the term, it was with Nicholas Watson’s extraordinarily influential article of 1995 in Speculum, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, that vernacular theology entered

2

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 823, n. 4.

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the consciousness of so many medievalists in English Studies.3 It is impossible to name an article that has, in the last three decades (or longer), had a greater agendachanging impact on Middle English Literary Studies. Watson’s narrative of vernacular theology is all the more moving and depressing because it is powerfully written as well as being academically engaging — a tale of lost opportunities, of something precious snatched away by stifling small-mindedness. His story certainly taps into the modern academic penchant for seeing medieval vernacular textuality in terms of competition against colonial, clerical Latin culture and sources. This partiality has its own agonistic idiolect: ‘appropriation’, ‘supplanting’, ‘resistance’, ‘displacement’, ‘rupture’ — such is the idiom favoured in modern forays into medieval ‘vernacularity’.4 However, this politically excited and at times teleologizing binarism, if unchecked, is in danger of overlooking the common ground between Latin and English texts/culture, let alone their rich intertextual relations, and of thereby impairing a sound and fully productive understanding of vernacular theology. ‘Vernacular theology’ is a suggestive and fluid category, and should be seen as opening up more than it closes down. On the one hand, as a meeting point of the sacred and the politico-linguistic, it can be used to account for the translatio of aspects of a clerical Latinate over-culture into the lay sphere and the formation and release of spiritual authority and difference into new textual, personal, and cultural loci.5 On the other hand, if pushed into indiscretioun, vernacular theology can slip into an essentialism which represents culture, personal experience, and authenticity 3

Our attention is drawn to Doyle’s first use of the term in a very useful and informative recent discussion of vernacular theology, Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–20 (p. 401). The collocation is used in A. I. Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th and Early 16th Centuries with Special Consideration of the Part of the Clergy therein’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1953). See also Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–02, for acknowledgement of McGinn’s use of the term in the Introduction to Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. by Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 1–14, and also in McGinn’s monograph, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1500) (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1998). For further recent reconsiderations of vernacular theology, see Literary History and the Religious Turn, a special issue edited by Bruce Holsinger of English Language Notes, 44 (2006), 77–137. 4

The biggest influence in this area is Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Those who have followed in the wake of this pioneering study have not always matched its sophistication and interpretative flexibility. 5

For an important study of the adaptation and transmission of clerical theology and spiritual guidance in the vernacular for the laity, see Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline.

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too much as a reflex of linguistic vernacularity. Moreover, its tendency to be coopted into a liberationist narrative, which imagines linguistic and social boundaries as fault lines, is, understandably enough, tempting fare to modern academic taste, especially for monoglot Anglophones. Such a moralized narrative is much more appealing than the unthrilling fact that medieval people and texts crossed such boundaries routinely without transgression or trauma. The vernacular theology ‘movement’ may have shed its own invaluable light on discourses of the sacred by being sensitive to the unique contingencies of vernacular difference, but it has sometimes averted its gaze unwisely from the unstruggling harmoniousness that also characterizes larger Latin, European, and vernacular traditions of holy textuality and culture. In dwelling on textual examples of personal spiritual distinctiveness or initiative and in valorizing these against an allegedly unadventurous backdrop of mainstream devotional performance, vernacular theology, as we have known it, has also been running the risk of underplaying the personal possibilities and subtleties of interpretative leeway arguably permitted, licensed, and encouraged in the more ‘conventional’ and less adventurous times ‘after Arundel’. If the category/conceit ‘vernacular theology’, then, is to prove itself adequately capacious it has to be able to cope with, and be interesting about, less exotic materials, especially after Arundel. It has to be able to accommodate, where appropriate, a repertoire of abstractable ideology of transcendent Christian truth and doctrine not only in mainstream texts which can with some confidence be designated as vernacular theology but also in works and genres which may not present themselves primarily or obviously as vernacular theology. The term ‘repertoire’ is deliberately chosen here because it encompasses a notion of performative variety applicable across a range of works — running from clear-cut texts of vernacular theologizing to works of more oblique or intermittent religiosity that may deploy or reshape the tiniest nuance of vernacular theological significance alongside other agenda. In other words, vernacular theology may be, and perhaps should be, regarded as a competence or langue, inasmuch as it is a type of discourse informing individual works and genres, attitudes and behaviours, and impacting broadly and productively on religious life and culture at large. It is therefore perhaps proper and profitable to conceive of ‘vernacular theology’ not just as a cultural phenomenon or a set of texts but also as a condition, mode, circumstance, attribute, or aspect of texts and culture which can best be appreciated in terms of transactions of production, reception, and circulation, each instance of which produces different but related significance for different readers/hearers — not just a theologically vernacular what but a theologically vernacular how that incorporates circumstances of mouvance and ideology (and

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even divine perspective and the ‘otherworldly’). Not so much ‘vernacular theology’, then, as its slightly defamiliarizing complement, the ‘theological vernacular’.6 This sibling term, ‘theological vernacular’, implies a degree, or degrees, of theological (in)competence in people, behaviours, and culture. Each text is a sign of what is possible. The notion of a ‘theological vernacular’ is therefore a reminder that extant holy English works, to the extent that what they utter is recognizable and possible within the competence of the vernacular, are, in one sense, paroles to the theological vernacular’s langue, whilst at the same time being more like langue themselves in being able to generate a range of further readerly performances and further textual adaptations. The formulation ‘vernacular theology’ is a noun-based term implying the existence of a discrete phenomenon, an integral ‘thing’ or corpus. Somewhat differently, the more adjectival and conditional collocation ‘theological vernacular’ suggests a more contingent, discontinuous, and dispersible coming into being in terms of attributes and modalities as a circumstance of not only actual textual/oral utterances but also as a factor in traffic amongst texts and, most importantly, amongst people and their institutions (Latin to vernacular, intervernacular, and intravernacular). The term ‘theological vernacular’ is, therefore, more intuitively attachable than its twin to behaviours, transactions, and practices affecting and affected by written texts. When, therefore, we see in texts evidence of which affective and hermeneutic choices were or were not made in, for example, expounding, translating, compiling, dramatizing, preaching, liturgizing, chanting, reciting, confessing, praying, meditating/imagining, or asserting, we are also in a position to imagine, as a corollary, what kinds of other choices might have been made and we may thereby infer, to some useful extent, repertoires within and beyond texts. And where better to examine the variegated repertoire of mainstream theological textuality than in the manuscript and textual tradition of a work condemned as the most paradigmatically leaden and monolithically repressive of them all, Nicholas Love’s villainously Arundelian Mirror?7 This essay, however, is not chiefly interested in how Love is not so oppressive after all. Nor shall it discuss how Love does not actually infantilize and spiritually hamstring his readership.

6

This discussion of the ‘theological vernacular’ uses materials presented in my paper, ‘What Theology? W hat Vernacular? Holy English Texts and Contexts in the Later Medieval Period’, given at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2000. 7

Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005).

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Nor shall it deal with the issue of how Love’s work is a sophisticated witness to a mainstream European tradition, and how it has been critically undervalued by modern scholarship, and how it should be accorded the cultural centrality it merited in its own times.8 Instead the focus is on the supple subtlety of vernacular theology as evidenced in the punctuabilitas, the ‘punctuability’, in the handwritten repertoire of its texts, with Love’s Mirror as test case. For this purpose we shall now turn to Malcolm Parkes’s contribution to the Waseda proceedings volume, ‘Punctuation in Copies of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’.9 Parkes’s essay is not per se about vernacular theology or the theological vernacular. Its implications, however, for our appreciation of the theological nuances and delicate mouvance achievable in the vernacular are profound indeed, for Parkes shows how a mutable profusion of rhetorical and hermeneutic possibilities are articulated in the punctuabilitas of what, from an editorial view, is a rather stable and carefully disposed text. The same words and the same linguistic structures recur across codices, but the varied punctuational repackaging of these words and structures by scribes reflects and generates, from manuscript to manuscript, richly different emphases of theological understanding. These variations frequently show finesse and intelligence. The lesson for modern scholars is that that even in the chilly deeps of an ‘oppressive’ and constraining work, licensed against heretics by Arundel himself, the theological vernacular could thrive on choice. One of Parkes’s chief examples from the Mirror involves the biblical episode in the Garden of Gethsemane when the Archangel Michael admonishes Christ, tells him to be of good comfort and to work manfully, comments on his plight, and transmits to the Son words of reassurance from God the Father. Analyzing and comparing textual extracts from a number of manuscripts at his customary subatomic level of unsummarizable terseness, Parkes elicits, with critical tact, a remarkably detailed variability of theologically salient emphases.10 The punctuation

8

For disapproval of Love’s Mirror along these lines, see Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’, 85–124 (pp. 93–98). For a defence of Love, see Ian Johnson, ‘The Non-Dissenting Vernacular and the Middle English Life of Christ: The Case of Love’s Mirror’, in The Medieval Translator, ed. by Renevey and Whitehead, pp. 223–35. 9

Malcolm Parkes, ‘Punctuation in Copies of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’, in Nicholas Love at Waseda: Proceedings of the International Conference 20–22 July 1995, ed. by Shoichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), pp. 47–59. 10

For instance, commenting on the treatment of this passage in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A 387 B, fol. 26r, Parkes notes that ‘the speech has been presented as a single paragraph.

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of, for example, tropology or anagogy, or of features of division, conditionality, sequencing, complement, association, juncture, grouping, or revisionary repointing are scrutinized to great effect. The question of the degree to which the text of a particular manuscript is marked up directively or let loose equiparatively, with a light punctuational touch, to the vagaries of lectoris arbitrium, is also addressed. Each act of punctuation both marks and makes something performable in the interlinked repertoires of text, of readerly experience, and, more importantly, of vernacular theology itself. Punctuabilitas is thus an agent and a consequence of the most delicate contingencies, nuances of variability, decisions, and confusibles that can be read into the rhetorical, grammatical, logical, or expository levels of such texts. Not only the smallest, medial, larger, and agglomerated divisions of narrative sense, moralization or interpretative significance, but also the isolable articulations of sentiment and opportunities for ruminative development consort with each other in a gallery of possible performances and decisions. These performances would of course be complicated further depending on whether the text involves a lector reading out loud, or a listener, or a private reader visually taking in the words laid out on the page. Vernacular theology, then, is a matter of the pragmatics of what can be done, large-scale or small-scale, with discourses. It is not just a corpus of overtly theologizing texts but also a tradition informing and enabling the production, reception, circulation, and development of theological thoughts and sentiments in diverse cultural places, obvious and less obvious, formal and informal. Vernacular theology should therefore be seen as encompassing a range of forms of behaviour that involve modes of vernacularizing theologically when the opportunity or obligation arises. The theological vernacular can also be seen as a habit or a temper that may, among other functions, translate materials theologically, perhaps even in a text that

Both the admonition of the angel and his comments on the situation are contained in a single sententia (lines 1–5) separated from that containing the reassurance from the Father. The long second sententia contains a set of antitheses which are given equal prominence as result of this separation, and the punctuation emphasizes the function of the comments as an expansion of the admonition (‘Bith now of good comfort my lorde .’). This link, and the punctus after ‘my lorde’, also emphasize the relationship between the angel and Christ. A reader is therefore invited to construe the following antitheses as referring to the paradox of the dual nature of Christ as both lord of angels and man, and the concomitant paradox of suffering and glory with joy as proper to His nature. In line 2 a single application of the punctus elevatus (after ‘hye degre’) was deemed sufficient to indicate the complement of ‘it is semly’ whilst at the same time emphasizing the lordship of Christ, ‘Punctuation in Copies’, pp. 49–50.

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does not have theology or devotion as its central feature. Its reach and ability to rework such discourse is visible, for instance, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Boece. When, in Book IV Metre 1, Chaucer comes to translate an account of the soul ascending towards the light/summum bonum, he seems to do so with a fourteenth-century taste for heavenly hope and with a contemporary theological decorum in rendering and colouring his sources that can best be described as theological vernacularizing.11 In the very details of translating a not-primarily-pious text, a value-adding discourse of highly discriminating vernacular theology (with a tinge of affective piety) is evidently at work. That the theological vernacular should cross generic boundaries for its own ends with particular vernacular audiences in mind is inevitable. Genre produces modes of reading, predisposing and playing with reader expectations as to the content and agenda of texts. In casting a particular world view, and as a bearer of themes and attitudes towards those literary materials it processes, genre has an especial interpretative and ideological purchase on sources and readership alike. So when the theological vernacular touches, however glancingly, an untheological genre, complex and interesting meanings and reorientations may emerge. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider how the theological vernacular breathes on a text outside the normal run of vernacular theology. This text is no treatise or manual of spiritual ambition. It does not teach imitatio clerici, nor raise the reader up towards the contemplative ether. Far from it: the Passion of Our Lord in Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29 (c. 1285–1300 or earlier?) is an accurate and systematic gospel harmony in fast-paced couplets.12 It is notable for its lack of homiletic amplification. However, it appropriates and implicitly subverts, in its own distinctive way, the genre of the chanson de geste as part and parcel of reinforcing the authority of Christ and his life in its sovereign textuality, and recolouring generic values and sentiments for its intended audience. It is also desirable to examine this work because it is so much earlier than those usually discussed by modern scholars interested in Middle English vernacular theology. Reading the Passion of Our Lord in terms of the theological vernacular may, then,

11

See Ian Johnson, ‘The Ascending Soul and the Virtue of Hope: The Spiritual Temper of Chaucer’s Boece and Retracciouns’, English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, 88 (2007), 245–61 (pp. 245–51). 12

An Old English Miscellany, ed. by Richard Morris, EETS, O. S. 49 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1872), pp. 37–57. For dating of the scribal hand of the manuscript see Betty Hill, ‘Oxford, Jesus College MS 29, Part II: Contents, Technical Matters, Compilation, and its History to c. 1695’, Notes and Queries, n.s., 50 (2003), 268–76 (p. 271).

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be fruitful in helping to decouple vernacular theology somewhat from its habitual fifteenth-century preoccupations with heterodoxy and orthodoxy. The Passion of Our Lord presents itself in terms of a literary fashion whilst playing with it and marginalizing it. It offers, however briefly, a gospel-driven critique of chansons de geste/Charlemagne romances, rising above them at the same time as cashing in on their appeal. Proceeding from the unimpeachable textual substrate of the harmonized Gospels, the maker of the Passion is all the more free to take liberties with geste idiom in order to legitimate his work and maximize its effect, as can be seen from the opening rhetorical throw: Ihereþ nv one lutele tale. þat ich eu wille telle. As we vyndeþ hit iwrite. in þe godspelle. Nis hit nouht of karlemeyne ne of þe Duzeper. Ac of cristes þruwinge. þet he þolede her. (ll. 1–4)

The first word of the work, before any subject matter has been divulged, immediately pitches the poem into the genre of the orally delivered tale; yet this orality is, paradoxically, derived from the ultimate in what is written, the Bible. The term ‘lutele tale’, just about the least suitable description imaginable for the vast written truth of the most important part of scripture, carries its own theological irony.13 This irony is sharpened straightaway by a highly conventional citation of textual auctoritas and scriptural fidelity: the tale is as it is to be found in the gospel (‘As we vyndeþ hit iwrite. in þe godspelle’). The subsequent proclamation (with its flurry of negatives) that this tale is neither about Charlemagne nor his twelve retainers, implies that Christ can be seen, yet nevertheless must not be seen, in terms of the chanson de geste and of all that Charlemagne stands for. As Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne was the historical embodiment par excellence of a Christianizing translatio imperii subsuming and overgoing the Roman Empire, but in this text it is Christ who overgoes ‘karlemeyne’ in the greatest translatio of all. Medieval tales of heroes characteristically begin with a familiar catalogue of worthies, and the star of any given story would, predictably enough, have his name trumpeted as the climax to a prefatory roll call, and this happens here. The invocation of Charlemagne’s ‘Duzeper’ alludes to Christ’s own ‘Duzeper’, the disciples who, instead of roving abroad conquering kings and earls, baptize them

13

Likewise, in line 68 the tag indicating oral delivery, ‘as ich eu segge may’, would normally be mere pleonasm, but here, however, literal meaning breaks through the formula, which now means what it says: in other words ‘I really can tell you this because it is indubitably true’. Thus, the bluff of the genre is called; the vernacularized gospels are valorized as sovereign discourse, and the appeal of geste idiom is productively redeployed.

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(l. 678), thereby outdoing the Carolingian dozen. Charlemagne himself is not denied his fame but is pointedly elided in favour of Christ when, in the fourth line, the hero of this story is named, and his deeds, the matter of the tale, declared alliteratively in a manner echoing antique English heroic poetic tradition: ‘Ac of cristes þruwinge. þet he þolede her’. This line significantly alters the rhetorical pattern set up by the previous line. Whereas the syntactic parallel, ‘of karlemeyne […] of þe Duzeper’ generates the expectation that the next line would continue the pattern by categorizing the tale as being one ‘of Christ’, the anticipated ‘of criste’ is wrong-footingly extended as ‘of cristes þruwinge’ (of Christ’s Passion). A routine bombastic catalogue of heroic name and fame modulates nimbly in mid-word into the citation of the divinely ordained process of the Passion, which takes priority over any mere name or reputation as the dynamic of the sententia of this holy work. The verb ‘þolede’, ‘suffered’, in being active, invertingly mimics an active feat worthy of celebration in verse. Such passive agency befits the epic virtue of heroic endurance and glorious death — only this time (reminiscent of the Old English poem, The Dream of the Rood) death will be no glorious defeat but a yet more glorious victory. Thus the poet gets the spiritual best of this world and the next while the theological vernacular gets the generic better of Charlemagne and the chanson de geste. In a theologically-freighted point about the translatability of Christ and, by implication, about the generic values recontextualized in this work, the poet takes care to tell us that Christ ‘þolede her’, suffered here. Though not a meditative text, the Passion of Our Lord undoubtedly draws on the everyday tradition of thinking on Christ’s Passion and his insistent suffering and redemptive presence. The heroes of the chanson de geste are, in contrast, not here, being unalterably gone: legendary and distant. Christ’s story, moreover, is true and, for all that it occurred long ago in a place far away, is held to have happened here in our midst (a point which would have added impact if this text were to be recited to an audience). The values and sentiments of the legendary past, as exemplified by geste heroes, were, nevertheless, clearly enjoyed and ‘owned’ by later medieval audiences. Familiar generic and chivalric virtues of morality and prowess, and the codes of fellowship, loyalty, affection, and hospitality are accordingly put to work, however glancingly, by this Passio Christi, with considerable theological intelligence. Such Christological reorientation of features and values of genre is effected not solely to make gospel matter attractively and intuitively comprehensible to an Anglophone audience. It also constitutes an affective process of sentimental education in the theological vernacular. This type of theology is in line with the common medieval understanding, exemplified by Bonaventure, that theology does not so much prove

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as move.14 Here, clinching moments of stylistic play make rudimentary but important theological points immediately emotionally intelligible to the vernacular affecciouns. The reader/listener, after the experience of taking in this text, may perhaps be able to see or feel such values and sentiments a little differently in a new perspective connected to Christ and his story, and may thereby be more susceptible to a beneficial change of habitus. The Passion of Our Lord testifies to the resourcefulness and flexibility of the theological vernacular in re-slanting and remixing materials for an audience/ readership. A separate but related story of flexibility may be told about the ways in which texts were remixed with each other in codices after Arundel. This story forces us to rethink the nature of what the theological vernacular was allowed to do, and was capable of doing, after the alleged epistemic shift instigated by the Constitutions. Indeed, the title of this essay could also be taken to be referring to another ‘game of two halves’ — the Big Match between Orthodoxy and Dissent. The first, ‘golden’, half of this game, played on the field of vernacular theology, brims with Middle English textual examples of individual inventiveness, ideological latitude, and a fecundity of spiritual ambition, but comes to a not entirely sporting end with the anti-heretical legislation De heretico comburendo and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1407–09, which this conference celebrates. The post-Arundelian second half, so the story goes, is a relatively leaden affair. In comparison with the fourteenth century’s dazzling individual runs of spiritual athleticism from the likes of the Cloud-author, Richard Rolle, and Julian of Norwich, and some magisterial passing from clerics to laity in Hilton’s Mixed Life or Book to a Mother, the unadventurously pious fifteenth century is bogged down in conformity, formula, and aureation; it is unsubversive, unambitious, unironic, neither individual nor witty, and rather tame and fearful: all in all ‘safe’ and ‘dull’. Or is it? One fact brings into question such a narrative: the fact that the ‘Golden Age’ texts produced in the fourteenth century were copied, circulated, wanted, and read much more in the fifteenth century than they were in the 1300s. Does this mean then that vernacular religious culture and experience after the ‘Arundelian’ era was not, after all, stripped of much of the ideological latitude and creative energy enjoyed in the late fourteenth-century glory days of vernacular theology? Was it, then, the fifteenth century that was the true Golden Age of Vernacular Theology? The Geographies of Orthodoxy project addresses this problem with a particular concentration on the key area of Middle English pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of 14

Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar, 1984), p. 127.

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Christ.15 One exciting aspect of this enterprise is that it is working variously to reconsider the notion that vernacular religious writing becomes enfeebled in the wake of Arundel’s Constitutions. The various cohabitation, within particular codices and social networks, of English pseudo-Bonaventuran materials with less orthodox religious and secular writings certainly problematizes modern understanding of the properties and health of post-Arundelian vernacular theological sensibilities.16 Take, for instance (thanks to Ryan Perry, who has produced the codicological descriptions of this and another manuscript, to be discussed below), Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 38 (322).17 Its fascinating conjunction of texts raises questions about what being Lollard, or orthodox, or reformist, for both texts and people, or being categorized as such by others, might or might not have involved.18 When apparently clashing texts are made to be neighbours in a codex, we have to try to imagine how they might speak with and against each other (or not) in readers’ minds. This manuscript started life as a somewhat Lollard-leaning late fourteenth-century collection of texts, to which, intriguingly, the orthodox pseudoBonaventuran Middle English Meditationes de Passione Christi was apparently added in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The collection starts with some

15

The web site of this AHRC-funded joint Queen’s University-St Andrews research project is: . 16

See the strand of discussion which ran from 29 April 2009 to 11 October 2009 [accessed 23 August 2011] following on from the paper given by Ryan Perry and Stephen Kelly at ‘After Arundel’, in which Nicholas Watson, Fiona Somerset, and Michael Sargent engage in a productive discussion with the authors of the paper which, amongst other things, reconsiders the problematics of theorizing and understanding the implications of codices with ‘mixed’ textual populations of ‘heterodox’, ‘Lollard’, ‘Wycliffite’, ‘mainstream’, ‘reformist’, and ‘orthodox’ materials. 17

Such profiles of manuscripts and texts are available: . See also Linne R. Mooney, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XI: A Handlist of Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995), pp. xviii, 10–11. 18 The sense in which I am using the term ‘Lollard’ here acknowledges that there is in modern times, and there was in the Middle Ages, a well-established want of consensus as to what the term might mean in general — let alone for users of an individual book. Such a caveat notwithstanding, it can be said that this protean term may be used to designate someone following the academic movement associated with Wyclif, and it may also be used to describe someone in a more popular tradition which may originally have had its roots amongst Oxford theologians but which mutated variously over time so as to become rather different in its ideology as well as in its personnel.

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Wycliffite sermons (Set 5 in Hudson’s edition), followed by Thomas Wimbledon’s famous sermon of 1389 delivered at Paul’s Cross.19 Though the latter contains prophetic elements from Joachim of Fiore and Hildegard of Bingen which John Wyclif himself would presumably have particularly hated, nevertheless, as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has pointed out, this kind of material was regarded with such suspicion by the Church that it became guiltily associated with Lollardy itself.20 Next in the manuscript is Richard Rolle’s Form of Living — temperamentally and theologically a long way from Lollard treatments of Scripture but jammed up right next to, of all things, a Wycliffite exposition of the Paternoster.21 But then, the Lollards had something of a taste for Rolle, and for the Form of Living in particular. Intriguingly, the version of the text copied into this manuscript is the original Form of Living, as composed by Rolle, and not the Lollard adaptation and its ‘alternative spiritual program’ aiming to inculcate ‘active Lollardy rather than contemplative anchoritism’ — on which Fiona Somerset has written illuminatingly in discussing this manuscript in the context of Wycliffite spirituality.22 Rolle’s Form of Living was reframed in Latin, perhaps by Wyclif himself, in De amore siue ad quinque quaestiones: there is an English counterpart to this, The Five Questions.23 This ‘alternative program’ involves ‘a confident rejection of the selfdoubting continual focus on one’s own interior state that Rolle attempts to instil. This is rejected in favour of trust in one’s knowledge of Scripture and one’s capacity to prove one’s love by performing what Scripture demands’.24 Here, ‘love

19

English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983–96), I, ed. by Hudson (1983). 20

Perry’s description of the mansucript cites Hudson, PR, p. 424, and Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 42, 67, 79, both of whom point out that this sermon appeared in Lollard manuscript contexts. 21

Richard Rolle, Form of Living, in Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse, ed. by S. J. OgilvieThomson, EETS, O. S. 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1988), pp. 1–25. 22

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, pp. 375–86 (p. 380).

23

For discussion of the ascription to Wyclif, see Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, p. 378. For an edition of De amore, see John Wyclif, Opera minora, ed. by Johann Loserth (London: Paul, 1913; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1966), pp. 8–10. For The Five Questions, see Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869–71), III (1871), 183–85, and Wyclif: Select English Writings, ed. by Herbert E. Winn (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 110–12. 24

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, pp. 382–83.

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is a form of work, whereas for Rolle love is an alternative to action in the world’.25 The Latin and English Lollard adaptations of the Form of Living focus accordingly on the community rather than on the solitary soul.26 What might it signify, then, in this manuscript, which is not exactly shy of Lollard matter, that Rolle’s Form sits unadapted? Is this not so much mouvance as a kind of stickaunce that might be modified or compensated for by feints of mouvance in a reader with heterodox leanings? That the Form of Living is recorded in its pre-Lollard format here indicates the possibility that a Lollard-friendly reader could cope with, and even benefit from unLollardized Rolle. We do not know if such a reader would simply accept the Form on its own terms or read it more adaptively: Rollard spirituality was a complex mix. Things become even more complex when we also take into account the addition to the texts of this manuscript of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes de Passione Christi. Although this non-dissenting addition does not seem to sit comfortably alongside Lollardleaning materials, it is more obviously compatible, spiritually and politically, with the Form, even though the two works are so different in temper and purpose. This was not the only codicological occasion on which an English version of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi kept company with dissenting material. In the mid-fifteenth-century New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 648, Scribe A’s penning of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life is followed, in the hand of a second scribe, first by a Middle English Lollard adaptation of Richard Ullerston’s Latin defence of Bible translation, and then by a passage in Latin from St Birgitta’s Revelationes.27 However, as Ryan Perry observes, the material towards the end of the book, the Lollard tract and the Bridget extract, exhibit a pattern of water damage mapping precisely onto the leaves near the beginning. These items were therefore originally bound in ahead of Love’s Mirror.28 This leaves us with the strange possibility of a Lollard-cum-Birgittine run-up to the most institutionally sanctioned Arundelian text of the day. Even more intriguingly, the scribe who copied out the dissenting tract on translation also writes ‘Amen’ below Arundel’s Latin memorandum on fol. 141v (immediately to the right of the other scribe’s ‘Amen’), thereby apparently endorsing Arundel’s endorsement of a text ‘for the confounding of heretics or Lollards’ (ad […] hereticorum siue 25

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, p. 383.

26

Somerset, ‘Wycliffite Spirituality’, pp. 383–84.

27

For the translation tract, see the edition in Curt Bühler, ‘A Lollard Tract: On Translating the Bible into English’, Medium Ævum, 7 (1938), 167–83. 28

Perry’s observations are available at .

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lollardorum confusionem).29 So much for a riven culture of orthodox versus heterodox: things are clearly more fluid for this literary labourer. The collocation of these texts in this codex might mean that someone of non-heterodox theological tastes could be in favour of Bible translation but could also be attracted by the albeit-circumscribed scripturalism of the Mirror. Or could it mean that a reader with some sympathy for a heresy of the vernacular might also find spiritual fruit in meditative tradition outside scriptura sola? Complexity, latitude, possibility, discretion, spiritual ambition, and choice: these are all characteristics of the Trinity and Pierpont Morgan manuscripts: such qualities should not be denied to the post-Arundelian world which made and used these two books. Perhaps we should also imagine, more than has been the case hitherto, that fifteenth-century piety encompassed other less exalted elements of flux, mood, or eclecticism, or plain unworked-through inconsistency. Such textual mixes make one wonder if readers read adaptively, or perhaps even provisionally, not necessarily or always asserting the text to themselves, but using it for the effect/affect of edification and stirring of devotion for the time being (as medieval tradition of imagination and meditation would have put it), without necessarily needing to accept all the ipsissima verba. Might we, then, entertain a notion of the theological vernacular as pragmatic post-Arundelian negative capability — that is, as a sensibility of devout reading, involving degrees of suspension of (dis)belief, that intermittently hung fire with decisions of interpretation and position-taking? Or if it did not hang fire perhaps it just kept itself a bit quiet in order to stay out of trouble. After all, as Ian Forrest has shown, those who were prosecuted for heresy had often caused some social offence or alienated the wrong people.30 To sum up: whatever reformulations are made of it and whatever is alleged or asserted about it at medievalists’ gatherings, vernacular theology is in all probability not going to go away. It is too rich and productive a compound to be set aside. This essay has made a modest attempt to think of a few ways in which the collocation can perhaps be put to more use, initially by applying to vernacular theology a translatio of ‘theological vernacular’, which serves as a reminder of how, in addition to being a classifiable group of texts, it functions in terms of competence and modalities. Then, in discussing the theological vernacular with regard to the punctuabilitas of texts, we saw how its fine-tuneable theological energies were rechannelled with productiveness and intelligent variety after Arundel. In another 29

Love, Mirror, ed. by Sargent, p. 7, which reads ‘confutacionem’ rather than ‘confusionem’ — slightly different but with the same substantive meaning and intent. 30

See Forrest, The Detection of Heresy.

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instance of fine-tuning, the Passion of Our Lord shows how, in a work with very little theological elaboration, the resources of the theological vernacular could extend obliquely to deft touches of motivated generic play. And finally, two manuscripts, containing an apparently clashing combination of orthodox and heterodox materials, invite us to imagine significantly more complexity and latitude in post-Arundelian textual behaviours than has generally been entertained hitherto. These codices ask us to countenance a mutable and variegated reading sensibility capable of accommodating and/or compartmentalizing texts in tension. Presumably, a concomitant ‘compartmentalité’ might have been applied by readers of such manuscripts to elements at odds with each other within texts too. On the one hand, theology is provisional, insufficient, artificial, necessary, fruitful, transcendent, and boundless. On the other, the vernacular is an irregular complex of enabling and constraining circumstances. In vernacular theology (and the theological vernacular), each constitutes the other’s condition. Together, they demand of us no little caution — and no little imagination.

Part II Discerning the Discourse: Language, Image, and Spirituality

O RTHODOXY’S IMAGE T ROUBLE: IMAGES IN AND AFTER A RUNDEL’S C ONSTITUTIONS James Simpson

W

hen I first read John Capgrave’s remarkable Life of St Katherine (c. 1445) in the late 1990s I was struck, among many other things, by the text’s apparent repudiation of images. After the tyrannical emperor Maxentius has decided that the cult and ‘dew rente’ of the old gods must be renewed, Katherine confronts Maxentius directly with a double and unresolved attack on the idols by which he is surrounded: they are either devils, or else they are irredeemably dead matter: Thi goddis are develes, and thi prestis eke, Deceyvoures of the puple, rith for covetyse; Thei wote as weel as I, thow men hem seke These maumentis, I mene - thei can not sitt ne ryse, Thei ete not, thei drynke not in no maner wise. Mouth wythout spech, fote that may not goo, Handes eke have thei and may no werke doo.1

Between the ultimate source of this passage (Vulgate Psalm 113) and Capgrave’s text must surely stand Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale. There too the early Christian female convert Cecilia repudiates her powerful male suitor by repudiating pagan idolatry. Like Katherine, Cecilia insists on the insensate, material deadness of the pagan statues to the gods:

1

John Capgrave, The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. by Karen A. Winstead, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1999), IV , 305, pp. 589–95.

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James Simpson That ilke stoon a god thow wolt it calle. I rede thee, lat thin hand upon it falle, And taste it wel, and stoon thow shalt it finde.2

Capgrave, however, massively expands his sources, both Psalm 113 and Chaucer’s saint’s life: Katharine demystifies the statues and the pagan gods through euhemerism (IV, 632), and in Book V she recurs to, and further expands on, the following: the material wastefulness of the proposed statue; the violence associated with it, designed to punish those who refuse to kneel down before it; and, again, its irremediable deadness, the deadness of its legs, hands, eyes, and tongue. It will be fit for nothing but birds to defile (V, 400–525). Now of course, as is obvious, Capgrave has his saint repudiate pagan statuary, in which case there is nothing surprising whatsoever about the iconoclastic impulse. But in the context of orthodox fifteenth-century English defences of religious imagery in the face of Lollard attacks, Katharine’s repudiation is surprising. The effort of imagination required to shift the referent of Katharine’s speech from pagan to Christian imagery is minimal. Here is a Christian saint vigorously repudiating the visual cult of what would be a statue to her. What is more, she does so by using the topoi and vocabulary of Lollard polemic concerning images, including ‘maumetis’ and ‘stokes’ (IV, 701).3 When I first read this passage, I was, as I say, struck by the fact that an indisputably orthodox text was voicing views that could easily be aligned with heterodox views. In this essay I argue that, even if my surprise was justified, Capgrave is by no means alone. For the first half of the fifteenth century, at least, there are many orthodox writers who voice deep anxieties over images. They did so because the orthodox position with regard to the vivacity of images was perilously close to a heretical position isolated and attacked by Lollards.4

2

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Jill Mann (London: Penguin, 2005), VIII, 501–04, p. 641. 3

For Lollard ‘signature’ use of ‘maumetrie’, see Hudson, ‘A Lollard Sect Vocabulary?’, pp. 15–30 (p. 19). For an example of Lollard use of ‘stock’, see W. R . Jones, ‘Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 34 (1973), 27–50 (p. 33). 4

This essay’s field of investigation, and some paragraphs, overlap with James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 2, pp. 49–84.

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I The question of images clearly occupied high and visible profile in early Lollardy, both in the self-presentation of Lollards, and in presentations hostile to Lollardy.5 The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards of 1395, for example, declares that the prayers made to ‘deve ymages of tre and of ston, ben ner of kin to ydolatrie’. The learned Lollard author acerbically evokes, in order to invert, St Gregory’s famous dictum about images being books for the illiterate: deaf images of tree and stone are, he asserts, ‘forbodin ymagerie’ that is ‘a bok of errour to the lewid puple’.6 Thus the relatively early proponent of Lollardy; so too, however, the early enemy: Henry Knighton, writing earlier than 1396, distinguished Lollard heresy primarily by reference to rejection of images. ‘[I]t was’, he says, ‘characteristic of that sect of Lollards that they hated and inveighed against images, and preached that they were idols, and spurned them as mere simulacra’.7 Knighton refers more than once to the ‘doctrines’ of the Lollards; of these doctrines, however, we hear but one: rejection of images, by way of introducing the striking narrative of two iconoclastic Lollards of Leicester who, as early as 1382, burned an image of St Katherine to prepare some soup.8 In early descriptions of Lollardy, then, the image question evidently had high profile. Despite this, by contrast, images played a lower role than the sacraments in the legislative arsenal against, and legal pursuit of, Lollardy. I look briefly at both these orthodox counters to Lollard views of the image, before turning to the orthodox theological arsenal in the following section.

5

For Wyclif’s own, moderate views on images, see John Wyclif, Tractatus de mandatis divinis, ed. by Johann Loserth and F. D. Matthew (London: Paul, 1922), chap. 15, pp. 152–62 especially. For a detailed account of Wyclif’s position, see Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Volume 1. Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 98–104. 6

Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Anne Hudson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978; repr. 1997), p. 27. For Gregory the Great’s defence of images, see Celia M. Chazelle, ‘Pictures, Books and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I’s Letters to Serenus of Marseilles’, Word and Image, 6 (1990), 138–53. 7

Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. by G. H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 297. I have altered the translation. 8

For which see Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Vivacity of Images: St Katherine, Knighton’s Lollards and the Breaking of Idols’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England, ed. by Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 131–50, and the same author’s book The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), chap. 2, pp. 76–94.

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The list of twenty-four heretical and erroneous conclusions of Wyclif isolated by the Blackfriars Council of 1382 nowhere mentions images.9 Neither do the 267 heresies and errors extracted from the works of Wyclif in 1412 anywhere mention Wyclif’s views on images.10 In 1409 the text of Arundel’s Constitutions does target the image question. The Constitutions award the issue, however, a distinctly lower profile than the textual and sacramental issues on which they lay primary emphasis. While promising completely to extirpate heresy, the text focuses almost singlemindedly on verbal, textual, and pedagogic, rather than visual, control. Draconian formal strictures occupy most of the separate articles: strictures on preaching, teaching, reading, and language use for scriptural books. The Constitutions come closest to definition of a precise heretical subject with reference to the eucharist. After the formal and textual stipulations of the previous articles, article eight sounds like a catch-all: That no one should assert conclusions or propositions being against good morals. Only in article nine, however — the penultimate substantial article — do we find reference to images as part of a general interdiction on disputing ‘established articles of the Church’. Let no one teach contrary to the determination of the Church, ‘especially about the adoration of the glorious cross, of images, the veneration of saints, or pilgrimages to places, or their relics’. The cross and images of the saints are to be duly honoured, as by custom, with ‘processions, genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, embraces, offerings, kindling of lights and pilgrimages’.11 In sum, the legislative response to Wyclif and to Lollardy awards the question of images a relatively low place. Let us also look briefly to the status of images in the legal pursuit of Lollardy, before turning to the deeply equivocal theological repudiation of Lollard views on images and popular idolatry. On 26 January 1401 the Convocation of the English Church recorded William Sawtre’s condemnation as a relapsed heretic. Sawtre was burned as the first victim, indeed a premature victim, of the statute De heretico comburendo of 1401, formally promulgated only some weeks after. The first list of Sawtre’s errors and heresies is adduced from a prior interrogation in Norwich. There are seven items, five of which focus on images, and one on pilgrimage.12 The last defines a eucharistic 9

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 157–58.

10

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 339–49.

11

III,

For the text of the Constitutions regarding images, see Concilia, ed. by Wilkins, Article 9, 317–18. The translation is by Sarah James, to whom I am grateful. 12

I assume that item 5 concerns images: ‘quod tenetur magis adorare hominem, quem scit praedestinatum, quam aliquem angelum dei’ (that he is considered rather to worship a man he knows to be predestined, than any angel of God), Wilkins, Concilia, III, 255.

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heresy. The errors concerning images all state what Sawtre would rather worship than the cross: suffering Christ; a temporal king; the bodies of the saints; a truly contrite and confessed man. The second item, for example, reads thus: ‘Quo magis vellet adorare regem temporalem, quam veram crucem Christi’ (That he would much rather worship a temporal king, than the true cross of Christ). In short, the grounds for which the first heretic burned in England is arraigned primarily concern images. The ground on which he is interrogated and convicted, however, concerns the eucharist. The trial record is perhaps revealing in its emphases. After Sawtre has explicated the offending statements, Arundel himself takes over the prosecution: ‘And immediately following this, all the other articles having been left aside, the […] archbishop interrogated […] Sawtre especially concerning the sacrament of the altar; after the uttering of the sacramental words, did true bread remain or not?’ (my emphasis). Arundel continues hammering Sawtre on the question of the eucharist, that day and the next, looking for a yes or no clinching answer. Sawtre’s evasions suffice for a conviction of heresy.13 Sawtre’s views on idolatry, then, are evidently set aside as Arundel’s legal trap closes; a yes or no on the real nature of eucharistic bread is a readier, surer way to conviction. In the later heresy trials of Norwich, conducted between 1428 and 1431, the position in which views on images labelled heretical appear might also suggest their inferior status as evidence. Views on images are routinely listed, coupled with views on the saints and pilgrimage; but the gatherings of views on these topics usually come low down the lists of heresies, which almost always start with sacramental heresies concerning, in the case of John Skylly for example, baptism, confirmation, confession, and the eucharist. Of the eighteen heretical positions listed for Skylly, this comes in at number thirteen: ‘quod nullus honor est exhibendus ymaginibus crucifixi, Beate Marie vel alicuius sancti’ (that no honour is to be shown to images of the crucified [Christ], of the Blessed Virgin, or of any other saint).14 Another list (that of Richard Fleccher) follows the same pattern: after the three initial sacramental heresies, this one appears at place number ten: ‘that no worship shuld be do to ony ymages, but that all ymages owyn to be destroied and do away’.15

13

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 256.

14

Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428–31, ed. by Norman P. Tanner (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 53. 15

Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 86. Sometimes the image charges head the list. The list for William Colyn, skinner, begins with images (Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 91). His is a very odd list, though, including the proposition that all women should be held in common. The list for John

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That evidence could be extended: the trial of John Oldcastle in 1413 lists two sets of positions judged heretical; the first list requires Oldcastle to abjure his views on images: he is to declare that images are ordained ‘to be kalendars to lewed men, to represent and brynge to mynde the passion of our lord Jhesu Crist’.16 After Oldcastle refuses to recant, another, more specific list is produced, which really counts. This one starts with the eucharist, and, although mentioning pilgrimage and relics, makes no mention of images.17 Oldcastle is convicted as a heretic on the basis of this second list.

II If images play very much a secondary role in the legal conviction of Oldcastle, one might contrast that with the relatively high profile of the image question in the theological campaign against him. Thomas Hoccleve’s Remonstrance against Oldcastle (published in the summer of 1415), for example, while beginning the list of Oldcastle’s heresies with the sacraments, as do the legal texts, ranges very freely among many Lollard positions, attributing them all to Oldcastle, including communal possession of women. Among these, Hoccleve dwells for two full stanzas on images: we all know that the image of the saint is not the saint; and just as a pair of spectacles helps a man of poor sight to see better, so too with images: we do not look at them but through them.18 Why should the question of images be awarded apparently lesser status than the management of words, spoken and written, and than the issue of certain sacraments, in the legislative pursuit of Lollardy? In what remains of this essay I suggest that orthodoxy is in fact confused about images. Dangerously, orthodoxy shares with heterodoxy a distrust of illiterate reception of images. Excellent studies by

Goodwin places images at number two, but the list is very short (only three items) (Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 207). 16

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 355.

17

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 355. It is true that Oldcastle himself does affirm his views on images in this closing sequence of the trial, but in a way that neither affirms nor denies the heretical view (Wilkins, Concilia, III, 356). 18

Thomas Hoccleve, Remonstrance against Oldcastle, in Selections from Hoccleve, ed. by M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 71. For the larger question of Hoccleve’s complex account of images, see Simpson, Under the Hammer, chap. 2, and Shannon Gayk, Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chap. 2, pp. 45–83.

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Jones, Aston, Hudson and, most recently, Kamerick have delineated the positions of both image attackers and defenders.19 Here I look further at the way these opposed positions, heterodox and orthodox, might interact and, more especially, overlap. The question of images is, in the words of the Twelve Conclusions, ‘ner of kin’ to other many issues. I focus here on one point of contiguity — the question of whether or not the unlearned think that images are vivacious, an issue on which both the unorthodox and the learned orthodox found themselves divided. Lollards treat images sometimes as dead, sometimes as alive. One early fifteenthcentury Lollard writer, for example, takes his cue from Psalm 113. 4–8, writing about the idols of surrounding peoples. This psalm, a stand-by for Christian iconoclasts, reads thus: 4

The idols of the Gentiles are silver and gold, the works of the hands of men. 5 They have mouths and speak not: they have eyes and see not: 6 They have ears and hear not: they have noses and smell not: 7 They have hands, and feel not: they have feet and walk not: neither shall they cry out through their throat. 8 Let them that make them become like unto them; and all such as trust in them.20

Taking his cue from this insistent denial of vivacity, the Lollard writer emphasizes the deadness of images, even as they are being treated as if alive: they neither thirst nor experience hunger, neither feel cold nor suffer disease, ‘for they may not feel, nor see, nor hear, nor speak, nor look, nor help any man of any disease’.21 At this point, however, he goes one further than the biblical source, by attributing deadly voracity to the images, since they eat the food of the poor. Those who sustain the images should instead be nurturing the ‘meek true poor man that is the true image of God’. This is the clearest Lollard emphasis, that the images are definitively dead matter, even if they are somehow hungry. On the other hand, some Lollard attacks unequivocally attribute liveliness to images. The dead idols are potentially inhabited by the devil. The Lollard William

19

For these excellent summaries of the Lollard positions on images, see Jones, ‘Lollards and Images’; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, chap. 4, pp. 96–159; Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, pp. 179–81; Hudson, PR, pp. 301–09; and Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 19–27. 20

Cited from The Holy Bible, translated from the Latin Vulgate (London: Baronius, 2003), Psalm 113. 21

Cited in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 119.

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Thorpe was, by his account, interrogated by Archbishop Thomas Arundel (probably before 1407). Among the many points on which Arundel tests Thorpe, he presses him about the miracles that are reported to have occurred at sites of especially famous images of the Virgin. Thorpe charged that such miracles were diabolical: on account of human unfaithfulness, the ‘fend [devil] hath power for to worche manye of these miraclis that now be done in siche [such] placis’.22 At her trial for heresy in 1429, the Lollard Margery Baxter declared that demons had entered images in churches; hiding within the images, these demons lured the people into idolatry.23 Lollards were not the only ones uncertain about the vivacity of images. The learned orthodox were also self-divided on this question. On the one hand, orthodoxy had encouraged a dramatic, living relation with the image in the tradition of devotional piety. Orthodoxy had also claimed miraculous power for certain images; that miraculous power legitimated extensive systems of pilgrimage to specific places. On the other hand, orthodoxy was obliged strenuously to deny that the images were anything more than memorials and purely material representations. Learned orthodoxy in fifteenth-century England certainly had a problem with the reception of images by the unlearned but orthodox. When the Constitutions brand certain textual practices heretical, and when they promise monthly surveillance of the University of Oxford, they project intellectual repression of a known enemy — that is, of other intellectuals. Intellectuals are most at ease attacking and repressing other intellectuals. When, however, the Constitutions come to the question of images, they evoke, just once, the practices of the unlearned: ‘genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, embraces’. As they target the practices and beliefs of other intellectuals, the Arundelian attack on Wycliffism feels secure; about the practices and unarticulated beliefs of the unlearned, and in particular about their visual imagination, the orthodox learned are, however, much less certain. For everything the Lollards say about images and idolatry had been, and would continue to be said, by orthodox figures.

22

See William Thorpe, The Testimony of William Thorpe, 1407, in Two Wycliffite Texts, ed. by Anne Hudson, EETS, O. S. 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1993), p. 60. 23

She is reported to have said that ‘devils, when falling to earth, entered images standing in churches, and lived in these continuously and still reside there lurking, so that the people adoring the same [images] thus commit idolatry’. See Heresy Trials, ed. by Tanner, p. 49, and Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art, p. 14 for discussion.

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There are very few Western monotheistic cultures in which the image is not in any kind of trouble. Very often those who defend images with their right hand turn out to be destroying images with their left.24 All the cultures of Western Christianity, from late Antiquity to the Reformation, nevertheless managed a delicate balancing act between the transcendent and immanent, between the invisible and the visible, between the desire to see and the need to pass beyond sight.25 In differing contexts, and with differing accents, the image’s balancing act was maintained between heaven and hell, and between competing cults regarded as idolatrous. We can see as much in this early fifteenth-century frontispiece to a Parisian text of Augustine’s City of God (Fig. 1).26 The image mediates between the living Christ and the eucharist, a relation that legitimates this very image by distinguishing it from pagan idolatry on the left and Jewish idolatry of the Word on the right. Dangerously poised (idolatry is the highway to Hell), the image nevertheless manages to preserve a licit space of transit between the earthly seen and the heavenly unseen. That said, fifteenth-century England betrays signs that this delicate balance was becoming unstable.27 We have already observed heterodox, Lollard attacks, from the late fourteenth century, on images. There are also signs of images being in trouble in various orthodox traditions.

24

If Gregory the Great is credited with legitimating the Christian image, he was also remembered as the iconoclast of pagan images in Rome; see Tilmann Buddensieg, ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols: The History of a Medieval Legend Concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965), 44–65. 25

See Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 203–08; and Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Turning a Blind Eye: Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 413–39. For the heightened tension between the material seen and the invisible unseen in late medieval art, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ‘Seeing and Believing: The Suspicion of Sight and the Authentication of Vision in Late Medieval Art and Devotion’, in Imagination und Wirklichkeit: zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit, ed. by Klaus Krüger and Alessandro Nova (Mainz: von Zabern, 2001), pp. 46–69. 26 27

Discussed in Camille, The Gothic Idol, pp. 191–93.

I am here influenced by this remark of Jeffrey Hamburger: ‘If anything, the expressions of skepticism regarding images, let alone outright hostility, running right through the fifteenthcentury, even within the religious mainstream, have been underplayed, as if the period were one of unabashed and unopposed iconophilia’ (‘Seeing and Believing’, p. 48). See also Horst Bredekamp, Kunst als Medium sozialer Konflikte: Bilderkämpfe von der Spätantike bis zur Hussitenrevolution (Frankfurt am M.: Suhrkamp, 1975), Part 3, pp. 231–329, devoted to late medieval Bohemia.

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Figure 1. Augustine, City of God, frontispiece, Paris, BnF, MS fonds fr. 22912, fol. 2v . Early fifteenth century. Reproduced by permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Orthodox, Christian-Platonist, aniconic traditions found vernacular expression in late medieval England. The most vibrant such figure in Middle English was the iconoclastic author of the late fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing and related texts, who paradoxically encourages his elite, probably Carthusian, readers to make ‘an ymage of his nakyd, unmaad and unbigonne kynde’ (an image of God’s naked, unmade, and uncreated nature). We must ‘pare awaye’ all hindrances to this imageless image, every ‘merveilous fantastik ymage, conielid as it were in a kumbros clogge abouten hym’ (marvellous fantastic image, congealed, as it were, in a cumbrous impediment around him).28 Such Christian-Platonist attacks on the image were, however, institutionally restricted, and they were resolutely epistemological rather than theological. They certainly contained no larger project of image demolition, even if these same Carthusian circles did make the first English welcome, in the mid-fifteenth century, to the imageless devotio moderna, in the form of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.29 Outside these elite traditions of aniconic spirituality, however, orthodox defenders of the devotional image struggled to maintain the image’s unsteady, increasingly untenable balance. A vast tradition of orthodox late medieval spirituality, known as ‘devotional piety’, had, from the thirteenth century, promoted imaginative, theatrical, visual engagement with the narrative of Christ’s life.30 As Nicholas Love says about the readers of his Mirror of the Blessed Life, in 1410, ‘symple creatures […] as childryn haven nede to be fedde with mylke of lyghte doctryne and not with sadde mete of grete clargye’ (unlearned people […] like children, need to be fed with the milk of easy doctrine, and not with the solid food of high theology). Even though these simple creatures can read, they need images: for them ‘is pryncipally to be sette in mynde the ymage of crystes Incarnacion, passion and Resurreccion so that a symple soule that kan not thenke bot bodyes or bodily things mowe have

28 Deonise Hid Divinite and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to the Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson, EETS, O. S. 231, repr. with corrections (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1958), p. 6. 29 30

For late medieval Carthusian visual culture, see Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness.

See, for example, Denise Despres, Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Norman, OK : Pilgrim, 1989). The tradition’s most widely disseminated text, the Meditationes vitae Christi (composed between 1336 and 1364), is described as ‘the single most influential devotional text written in the later Middle Ages’. See Sarah McNamer, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi’, Speculum, 84 (2009), 905–55 (p. 905). Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is a translation of this text.

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somwhat accordynge unto is affection’.31 These readers must actively imagine, but never believe, that what they see is alive; they must ‘ymagine by reson […] not by errour affermyng bot devoutly ymaginyng and supposyng’ (p. 72). This tradition had immediate and vast upshot for the visual arts, since it was inherently visual. It also had immediate upshot for the relation of text and image, since it simultaneously made images speak, and submitted those words to the power of the image.32 As we have seen, in the late fourteenth century English Lollards charged that images were being treated idolatrously, as if they were alive. As they responded to that charge, orthodox defenders of the image found themselves colliding with the vast tradition of devotional piety, of the speaking image. On the one hand, the orthodox needed to defend the imaginative, salutary vivacity of images; on the other, those same orthodox needed absolutely to deny that the images were in any way alive. This was a fine balance across a fine psychic boundary; it produced trouble, since to get the balance wrong was to incur the charge of idolatry. Orthodox repudiation of Lollardy’s theology of images often expresses deep anxieties about what happens between the unlearned and their images. In bringing those anxieties to light, I follow, and attempt to extend, the fine perception of the late Michael Camille that the orthodox early fifteenth-century English images he discussed in his 2002 article are ‘a premonition of the crisis that would convulse England for centuries to come — not so much the ends of the idolater’s deludedness, as the very beginnings of the iconoclast’s desire’.33 Fifteenth-century anxieties concerning the image, expressed by both heterodox and orthodox, are symptoms of a visual culture in trouble; they unknowingly point towards the drama of 1538, which marks the beginning of a century and more of iconoclastic legislation in England.

31

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 10. All further references to this text will be made by page number of this edition in the body of the text. Obsolete letter forms have been modernized. 32

Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; first published in German, 1990), p. 410: ‘The image’s speech either was delivered to the beholder, or it occurred within the image between the figures, which were talking about the beholder. In this way the image forsook its traditional aloofness and was ready to address the beholder in a way that produced a private dialogue as it happens between living persons’. 33

Michael Camille, ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire: Deguileville’s Idolatry in France and England’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. by Dimmick, Simpson, and Zeeman, pp. 151–71 (p. 171).

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III In what remains of this essay, I offer three examples of orthodox, or apparently orthodox, hesitancy over images. The three examples I consider are as follows: Dives and Pauper (c. 1410); John Lydgate’s 1426–28 translation of the second version of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (1355); and Reginald Pecock’s Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (c. 1455). If none of these texts expresses outright rejection of images of the kind we seem to find in Capgrave, they all, nonetheless, do express only guarded, suspicious acceptance. Dives and Pauper Unlike the principal orthodox defenders of the image in Latin, Roger Dymmock and Thomas Netter, writing soon after 1395 and 1415–28 respectively, Dives and Pauper, written between 1405 and 1410, deploys a dialogic form.34 This dialogue gives cogent voice to what are effectively Lollard positions.35 In Dives and Pauper both speakers express views forcefully and academically, just as both treat each other with respect. Even as, however, we observe the orthodox view on images being propounded forcefully (by Pauper), we are also aware of an absence and a silence in the debate: as the wealthy, secular speaker debates with his poor, spiritual instructor, their differences cannot disguise their joint hostility to credulous reception of images. Dives objects vigorously to images, which are discussed at the very opening of the text, under discussion of the first precept of the Decalogue. The first commandment forbids the making and worshipping of images, and yet ‘meen doon makyn these dayis ymagys gret plente bothin in cherche and out of cherche, and alle meen [...] wurshepyn imagys’. If, he clearly declares, he worships images as other

34

See Roger Dymmok, Liber contra XII errores et hereses Lollardorum, ed. by H. S. Cronin (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1922), and Thomas Netter, Thomæ Waldensis Carmelitæ Anglici Doctrinale antiquitatum fidei Catholicæ ecclesiæ, ed. by F. Bonaventura Blanciotti, 3 vols (Venice: Typiis Antonii Bassanesi, 1757–59; repr. Farnborough, 1967), III, 902–52. See also Joy M. Russell-Smith, ‘Walter Hilton and a Tract in Defence of the Veneration of Images’, Dominican Studies, 7 (1954), 180–214; and Nicholas Watson, ‘“Et que est huius ydoli materia? Tuipse”: Idols and Images in Walter Hilton’, in Images, Idolatry and Iconoclasm, ed. by Dimmick, Simpson, and Zeeman, pp. 95–111. 35

See Dives and Pauper, ed. by Barnum. References to this text will be to this edition, made by part, chapter and page number in the body of the text. For the broader context of this work, and another work by the same author, see Hudson, PR, pp. 418–21.

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men do, then ‘I doo ydolatrye and ayens Godys lawe’ (I, 1, p. 81). So, he logically follows, he wants images destroyed — ‘I wolde’, he says, ‘they weryn brent everychon’ (I, 1, p. 82). The very fact of this debate between a spiritually-committed, well-read secular figure and his more learned spiritual advisor defamiliarizes the question from the beginning. Nothing can be taken for granted here. As common ground is gained, the big unknown between both parties remains whether or not the unlearned think images are alive. Dives affirms that ‘mechil of the peple’ worship images, since ‘thei staryn and lokyn on the ymage wyt wepynnge eye. They heldyn up here hondys, they bunchyn [knock] here brestys and so [...] they doon it al to the ymage’ (I, 3, p. 86). Pauper instantly agrees that if the ignorant do indeed ‘doon it to the ymage’, then they ‘synnyn wol heyliche in ydolatrie and they been nought excusyd’. But, he immediately goes on to argue, the ‘lewed’ do not worship the image; they worship God above all things, and saints in their degree; ‘al the wurshepe that he doth aforn the ymage he doth it noght to the ymage but to hym that the ymage representyght hym’ (I, 3, p. 86). Eventually Dives concedes that no one could be so brutish as to think that the image itself, which neither sees nor hears, could offer any help (I, 5, p. 90). Pauper’s refusal to excuse the ‘lewid’ who worship images from the charge of idolatry contrasts with the position of the tract attributed to Walter Hilton in defence of images.36 Hilton argues that the simple do indeed worship the image: the ‘simplices laici’ (unlettered lay folk) do not, however, sin, since their intention is good, even if they do indeed worship the image, ‘licet actualiter feratur mens eorum in ipsas ymagines quas vident, et non in Deum’ (even if their mind is actively raised up to the images that they see, and not to God). They act as the unlearned inevitably do when they see a beautifully painted, beautifully adorned image: ‘they worship that image more than another, and the image more than

36

For which see Walter Hilton, De adoracione ymaginum, in Walter Hilton’s Latin Writings, ed. by John P. Clark and Cheryl Taylor, Analecta Cartusiana, 124, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1987), I, 179–214. See also Russell-Smith, ‘Walter Hilton and a Tract in Defence’.

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God’.37 Nonetheless, they are to be forgiven, since what Hilton calls their ‘implicit intention’ is virtuous. Between Hilton and the Dives and Pauper author, one can see the cleft stick on which the orthodox defender of images for the unlearned is caught: either one concedes, as Hilton does, that the simple do worship the images, but can be forgiven, or one strenuously denies that the unlearned worship images. The learned must either allow that idolatry can be forgiven, or that the unlearned never worship the image as image. Both positions are vulnerable, as we can see in Pauper’s own defence of images. The iconoclastic view is forcefully represented and forcefully repudiated in favor of orthodox defence of images. Are orthodoxy and iconoclasm, however, so cleanly distinguished? The only way that Pauper can defend images is via their devotional, affective impact: Take heid to the ymage how his heid is bowid doun to the, redy to kissyn the and comyn at on wyt the. See how hese armys and hese hondys been spred abrod on the tre in tokene that he is redy to fangyn [clasp] the and halsyn [embrace] the and kissyn the and takyn the to his mercy. [...] On this maner, I preye the, rede thin book and falle don to grounde and thanke thi God that wolde doon so mechil for the, and wurshepe hym abovyn alle thyngge, noght the ymage, nought the stok, stoon ne tre, but hym that deyid on the tree. (I. 2, pp. 84–85)

This passage reveals how certain it is that the learned will inevitably imagine the illiterate worshipping the image itself. For the centre of the learned position is itself an imagination, as distinct from a belief, that the image is alive, forever suspended in an agonizingly static posture of desiring embrace. That is what Dives must imagine, but he must also be capable of making the very fine, purely psychological, distinction between imagining and believing. The distinction may be exceptionally fine; it may be maintained only by especially self-conscious agents. For all its fineness, this distinction is no less than the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy.

37

‘[S]icut solent simplices facere quando vident pulcram ymaginem artificiose depictam et preciose ornatam: statim reverencia quadam carnali movetur mens eorum ad adoracionem cum humiliacione corporali faciendam illi ymagini magis quam alteri, et magis quam spiritualiter ipsi Deo quia eorum intellectus et affectus quasi occupantur in sensu exteriori’ (just as the unlettered are accustomed to do when they see a beautiful image artfully painted and gorgeously adorned: immediately, by a certain carnal reverence, their mind is moved to worship with bodily submission that image above another, and their reason and will are occupied in the outer sense rather than spiritually occupied with God himself). Hilton, De adoracione ymaginum, ed. by Clark and Taylor, p. 206.

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It is, nevertheless, a fine distinction from which orthodoxy cannot retreat, precisely because, as Nicholas Love says about the readers of his Mirror of the Blessed Life, in 1410, ‘symple creatures [...] as childryn haven nede to be fedde with mylke of lyghte doctryne and not with sadde mete of grete clargye’. Even though these simple creatures can read, they need images: for them ‘is pryncipally to be sette in mynde the ymage of crystes Incarnacion, passion and Resurreccion so that a symple soule that kan not thenke bot bodyes or bodily things mowe have somwhat accordynge unto is [his] affection’ (p. 10). These readers must actively imagine, but never believe, that what they see is alive; they must , ‘imagine by reson [...] not by errour affermyng bot devoutly ymagining and supposyng’ (p. 72). In the Mirror, Love seems unaware of the danger of the fine boundary line between actively imagining but never believing. Pauper’s repetitiveness, by contrast, underlines the flimsiness of the boundary line: Knele [...] aforn the ymage noght to the ymage. Make thin preyere aforn the ymage but noght to the ymage, for it seeith the noght, it heryth the nought, it understondiyth the nought. Make thi offryng [...] aforn the ymage but noght to the ymage. (I, 2, p. 85)

These repeated denials are themselves dangerous, since the very insistence on the deadness of the image, drawn from Psalm 113, attributes agency to the image even as it denies agency. But the heated rhetoric of the repetitions also exposes the proximity of danger, and concedes the very charges of idolatry made by Lollards: ‘For yf thu do it for the ymage or to the ymage thu doist ydolatrye’. If Dives and Pauper was written near to and after the Constitutions, as seems likely, then it approves of the legislative defence of ‘genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, [and] embraces’ before images. Its approval is, however, very finely cut against consciousness of the profound objections to bodily response to images. If the learned should allow imagination to become belief, then they ‘synnyn wol heyliche in ydolatrie and they been nought excusyd’. Certainly Archbishop Arundel is himself represented, at least, as being aware of the fineness of the purely psychological boundary line between orthodoxy and idolatry. In The Testimony of William Thorpe of 1407, Thorpe has Arundel agree with the Thorpe figure. In the second question of Thorpe’s interrogation, concerning images, Thorpe argues that only things created directly by God deserve worship, not imagery nor things ‘in likness of mannes crafte’. He represents Arundel agreeing, but going on to make a very fine, Aquinian distinction: ‘I graunte wel that no liif owith to do worship to ony siche ymage for itsilf. But a crucifix owith to be worshippid for the passioun of Crist that is paintid thereinne,

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and is brought therethorugh into mannes mynde’.38 This had been the orthodox position since at least Aquinas formulated it in the mid-thirteenth century. In this context, we can see how fragile it is.39 Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man I referred earlier to Michael Camille’s description of the fifteenth-century image question as a ‘premonition of the crisis’ of 1538, which marks the first iconoclastic legislation in England. Camille was discussing Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man,40 and in particular the orthodox defence of images made in that text by the pilgrim to the Villain who worships Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies (Fig. 2). The Villain, rebuked by the learned pilgrim for worshipping a lifeless ‘marmoset’, replies in terms that take us directly and dangerously into heterodox territory: how do you dare reprove me for doing my observance to this ‘ydoles set on stages’, Syth pylgrymes, in ther passages Honowre and worshepe, everychon, Ymages off tymber and off stone; And crystene peple, ful nyh alle, On ther knes to-forn hem falle; And whan al-togydre ys souht, They may helpe yow ryht nowht, Nor done to yow noon avauntage, No mor than her, may myn ymage. (Pilgrimage, ll. 20,966–74)

As Camille astutely points out, the villain does not believe in the vivacity of the idol, and so the words of this ‘image maker become indistinguishable from the words of the contemporary Lollard’.41 Lydgate makes the apparently unlearned idolater voice entirely cool, learned positions about the deadness of statues. Even more strikingly, it could be argued, the villain’s voice is also, suddenly, indistinguishable from that of the learned orthodox, who, faced with what the 38

The Testimony of William Thorpe, ed. by Hudson, pp. 56–57.

39

For the Aquinian position, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. by Peter Caramellus, 3 vols (Torino: Marietti, 1956), IIIa q. 25 art. 3, III, 146. 40

John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. by F. J. Furnivall and K. B. Locock, 3 Parts, EETS, E. S. 77, 83, 92 (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1899–1904). All further references to this text will be cited by line number in the body of the text. 41

Camille, ‘The Iconoclast’s Desire’, p. 166.

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Figure 2. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim encounters Idolatry and she shows him the carpenter worshipping an image he has made’, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 65 v . c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board.

Constitutions called ‘genuflections, bowings down, burning incense, embraces’, instantly goes on to argue that the worshipped statues are decidedly dead. For an unsettling moment, learned pagan-idol maker, the Lollard, and the orthodox Christian all share the same position against the only non-voiced player here, the credulous Christian who bows to the statue he or she is believed to believe is invested with life. For a vertiginous moment, then, we catch a glimpse of the structure of discourse: this villain is not a true idolater, because he does not believe that the statue is alive. His learned understanding of the deadness of the idol throws into relief the point that Voltaire was to make in his Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764: that no one ever confesses to idolatry; idolatry is only ever a charge, never a confession, and it is a charge usually made by the learned about the ignorant.42 It is a charge about the

42

I cite from the English translation of 1765. See Voltaire, ‘Idol-Idolater-Idolatry’, in The Philosophical Dictionary for the Pocket: Written in French by a Society of Men of Letters, and Translated into English from the Last Geneva Edition. With Notes (London: for Thomas Brown, 1765; first published in French in 1764), Item 266, pp. 183–200.

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belief of others that can only ever itself be a matter of belief; the voice of the credulous can never be heard, precisely because it cannot be heard by definition, since no one owns up to idolatry, and the ‘illiterate’ are by definition inarticulate: what they really think can only be intuited and articulated by the learned. The credulous believer in the statue’s vivacity is, then, always already a construction of the learned. And the learned here are, potentially, and unsettlingly, the pagan image maker, the Lollard, and the learned orthodox. They all agree. Oh, no, the pilgrim instantly goes on (as he must): we, and the unlearned, never honour the artefact itself; we honour the saints represented by the artefact (Pilgrimage, ll. 20,975–95) (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. English illuminator, ‘The pilgrim’s defence of images: the high altar and its “calendar’”, from John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII, fol. 68 r . c. 1430. Reproduced by permission © British Library Board.

Is Lydgate treading here on dangerous territory? Now of course one could argue that Lydgate was translating. And Lydgate, we all know from a recently standard view, was a dull fellow who produced translations as a machine produces sausages,

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unthinkingly. This, it might be argued, is a kind of embarrassing cultural hangover from a mid-fourteenth-century French context that has suddenly become inapposite in an English context. Lydgate, such a view would argue, has merely not noticed that such talk about images has become not altogether à propos. The same argument could be extended to Capgrave’s representation of the iconomach Katherine. The argument could be extended to the larger cultural environment, since orthodox Christian hagiography and historiography were powerfully charged by the cultural memory, often vibrantly represented, of iconoclasm.43 Destruction of images is precisely what marks the Christian dispensation; Lydgate, along with contemporary orthodox hagiographers such as William Parys, elsewhere makes extended and heated reference to pagan idolatry. In orthodox Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1443–47), too, the following saints either break images, or otherwise insist on their insensate materiality: Cristina, Agnes, Dorothy, Mary Magdalene, and Cecilia.44 Lydgate marks the Christian dispensation as a triumphal moment of spontaneous iconoclasm, when ‘Ther was non ydole upright myght stonde / But to-schiverede unto pecis smale’.45 The new moment of Lollardy, it could be argued, takes the orthodox by surprise, since their standard archive is rendered suddenly vulnerable: what orthodox Christians object to about pagan idolatry can suddenly be directed at orthodox Christians. The orthodox will need to be careful in replaying their standard views of iconoclasm, since those very materials from the orthodox archive might now be directed against the orthodox themselves. Was Lydgate aware of this danger? I think so, for the following reasons: first, the pilgrim’s defence of orthodox image worship is added to his source (a point

43

See William Parys, ‘Life of Saint Cristina’, in Sammlung altenglischer Legenden, ed. by Carl Horstmann (Hildesheim: Henniger, 1875), pp. 183–90. See further Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), pp. 83–84. For discussion, see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 406–07. 44

See Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. by Mary S. Serjeantson, EETS, O. S. 206 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1938). 45 See John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS, E. S. 97, 103, 106, 126 (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1935), II, 302, ll. 5502–03. For early Christian iconoclasm and its continuing reverberations in the later Middle Ages, see Buddensieg, ‘Gregory the Great, Destroyer of Pagan Idols’. For violent, though metaphorical, late imperial, Christian iconoclasm, in a text still readily available to late medieval English writers, see Augustine of Hippo, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), Book IV , pp. 135–78.

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made by Camille); and, second (not mentioned by Camille), this orthodox defence of images evokes a proximate, earlier passage in the Pilgrimage about images. In this earlier passage Lydgate elaborates his source, and, I think, cites Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner, to attack excessive, spectacular, and deceptive use of both images and their close companions in this field of discourse, miracle-working relics. Avarice confesses to walking about with pardons, ‘with reliks, and dede bones, / closyd undar glase and stons: / I shew them undar sell and bull, / And thus the pore people I pull’ (Pilgrimage, ll. 18,105–08).46 Avarice gulls the simple minded not only with fake relics; she also uses ‘ymagis of tre and stone’: these she paints anew, with ‘colours bothe whit and redd’, and bores small holes so as to create the illusion of miraculous liquids flowing. She sets these images ‘in stretis and at hermitagis, and in a subbarbys at many a towne’, where the lame are encouraged to prostrate themselves before them (ll. 18,127–54). In both passages concerning images, then, Lydgate adds to his source.47 The additions are complementary: the forceful statement of the orthodox position (images are dead representations; they provoke memory) is unsettled, hedged as it is by frank recognition that images are being abused. It is also unsettled by the recognition that three groups of learned folk all agree about how deceptive images can be when adored by the unlearned: the Lollards, the pagan image maker, and the orthodox Christian. Reginald Pecock’s Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy Pecock’s treatment of images in the Repressor is the most extensive and systematic vernacular treatment of the image question in the period between Arundel and the first iconoclastic legislation of 1538.48 Pecock astutely understands the fundamental issues on which the orthodox must engage ‘the lay party’, as he politely calls Lollards. Part One of the Repressor is devoted to biblical interpretation, and Part Two to images,

46 See Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner in the ‘General Prologue’, The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Mann, ll. 699–704, p. 29; the reference is complex, because Chaucer seems also to have known this passage from the Pèlerinage in the first place. Translating the Pèlerinage, Lydgate cites Chaucer translating the Pèlerinage. 47

Lydgate is translating from the second version of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage. See Le Pèlerinage de l’Homme (Paris: Vérard, 1511), fol. 70v . The passage running from lines 18,103–10 is not found in the source. 48

Thomas More competes with Pecock for the accolade just given him. For the broader picture up to and including 1538, see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, chap. 8, pp. 383–457, and further references, and Aston, England’s Iconoclasts.

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taking up 143 pages of the only modern edition. Pecock recognizes the centrality of the issue, describing ‘the havyng and using of ymagis’ as the ‘first governance for which the lay peple overmyche and untreuly wijten the clergy’.49 My treatment here is necessarily brief, and I focus on the one key issue: whether or not the orthodox laity treat, and whether they are in any way permitted to treat, images as alive. Pecock’s fundamental position is the fundamental position of the learned orthodox, even if he characteristically invents a new phrase for that position: images are legitimate as ‘rememoratijf or mynding signes’. They are in no way forbidden in Scripture or by any ground of the faith (II, 2, p. 137). They are in no way treated as alive. Solomon may have become an idolater, but these days no one could be so ‘foond, masid, and dotid’ that they would worship ‘ydolis as Goddis’ (II, 2, p. 145). This is the core of Pecock’s entire, extensive section. Once stated, Pecock qualifies the standard position in various ways. Very quickly, he goes on to concede that iconoclasm is justified in cases of idolatry. ‘Images’, he says, ‘mowe leefulli be broke, whanne thei ben usid in ydolatrie irremediabili’ (II, 2, p. 147). But on what grounds might that be the case? The lay party erroneously assert that the ‘peple trowen [...] that sum godli vertu is in tho ymagis, or that tho ymagis doon miraclis, or that thei ben quyk and seen, heeren, or speken at sum while, or that they sweten at sum while’ (II, 3, p. 148). Now that the charge of vivacity is more explicit, so does Pecock repudiate it more explicitly: no adult in Christendom, who is not simple minded (‘a natural fool’) believes such a thing. Unlike any of his contemporaries, Pecock acknowledges that it is in fact very difficult to know whether or not idolatry is being practised. He also recognizes how easily such charges are made and how difficult to prove (II, 3, p. 150). All that said, Pecock, than whom there is no Middle English writer more committed to logical consistency, shifts position. Even if men do believe that images sweat and speak, wise people ‘oonli laughe at suche folies [...] of which no moral harme cometh’ (II, 3, p. 156). The evils that arise from misuse of images are no worse, he says in a cunning bridge-building argument, than the evils that that arise from lay men reading the Bible in the vernacular (II, 3, p. 159). After a long defence of images and their affective power, however, Pecock moves to the intimately related question of relics and pilgrimage. Here, however, his orthodox defence of pilgrimage sites depends precisely on what he described earlier as the risible fancy of the credulous, or even of the ‘natural fool’. God does 49

Reginald Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. by Churchill Babington, 2 vols (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), Part 2, chap. 2, p. 136. All further citation will be made from this edition by part, chapter and page number in the body of the text.

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choose one image over another as the fit destination of a pilgrimage; therefore, Pecock declares in his own voice, it is not inconvenient that God make thilk ymage of stoon or of tre forto swete and that the ymage be mooved fro oon place unto an othir place withoute mannis bering and [...] that the yghen of the ymage be turned hidirward and thiderward verrili or semyngly as though the ymage sie, and that the ymage (in such maner as God made the asse of Balaam) speke. (II, 8, p. 186)

In short, Pecock shifts ground a good deal in the Repressor. In one section, images are most certainly dead; it is inconceivable that any, even the brutish, contemporary should think otherwise. In another, he concedes that the ignorant do treat statues as if they were alive, but dismisses the idea of moral harm from such well-meaning idolatry. In a third and separate section, however, he actively promotes the idea that the images have shown signs of life, by sweating, eye movement, and apparent speech.

Conclusion In conclusion, may I outline the directions we might take with regard to this material. The superb scholarship on Lollardy since the 1980s has, for the most part, been analytical, defining positions. This has been true of the excellent work on images. Thanks to that work, we might now also move to a more synthetic view, as we try to understand how given positions are interconnected. In the case of images, this is not simple, precisely because the issue of images is deeply connected, by more and less visible links, to a wide variety of related issues, the most significant I list here: pilgrimage, relics, saints, miracles, the charisma of place, the relation of learned and illiterate, the eucharist, the presence of the past, periodization, the functions of the psyche itself, the relation of Christianity to Judaism and classical paganism, materiality, information technologies (both text and image), money, and intercession. Some of these interconnections were easily visible to contemporaries: saints, pilgrimage, and images are, for example, always collocated in heresy trials. The deeper, larger cultural dramas of, for example, writing supervening over images, and of images giving way as forms of intercession give way, are always going to be visible only from afar. But whatever the issue, visibility and audibility are the real problems, since the entire debate implies x-ray vision in the learned; all talk about images is conducted by people (namely, the learned) who agree about key aspects of image worship by the rest (namely, the illiterate). For both simple and profound reasons, the illiterate cannot be heard.

C ENSORSHIP AND C ULTURAL C ONTINUITY : L OVE’S M IRROR , THE P ORE C AITIF, AND R ELIGIOUS E XPERIENCE BEFORE AND AFTER A RUNDEL Christopher G. Bradley

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he author of the Cloud of Unknowing addresses his work to an unnamed student seeking spiritual instruction. Before instruction commences, the author appeals to his personal relationship with the student and begs restraint in further circulation of the lengthy, advanced work: I charge thee and I beseche thee, with as moche power and vertewe as the bonde of charite is sufficient to suffre, whatsoever thou be that this book schalt have in possession, outher bi propirte outher by keping, by bering as messenger or elles bi borowing, that in as moche as in thee is by wille and avisement, neither thou rede it, ne write it, ne speke it, ne yit suffre it be red, wretyn, or spokyn, of any or to any, bot yif it be of soche one or to soche one that hath (bi thi supposing) in a trewe wille and by an hole entent, purposed him to be a parfite folower of Criste, not only in actyve leving, bot in the sovereinnest pointe of contemplatif leving the whiche is possible by grace for to be comen to in this present liif of a parfite soule yit abiding in this deedly body; and therto that doth that in him is, and bi thi supposing, hath do longe tyme before, for to able him to contemplative levyng by the vertuous menes of active levyng. For elles it acordeth nothing to him.1

1

The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Patrick J. Gallacher, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1997). I have for clarity introduced my own punctuation for Middle English quotations throughout. For background and bibliography, see Ad Putter, ‘Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and The Cloud of Unknowing’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 33–51, and Valerie Lagorio and Michael G. Sargent, ‘English Mystical Writings’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. by Albert E. Hartung (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993), pp. 3068–73.

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The breadth and passion of this injunction is striking. Here and in several similar passages, the author sternly enjoins anyone who comes across his book not to read, discuss, or copy it unless both that individual and any others with whom he or she intends to communicate concerning the book’s contents are possessed of true will and holy intent to be perfect followers of Christ to the ‘sovereinnest pointe of contemplatif leving’ that is possible for them in this life — ‘[f]or elles it acordeth nothing’ to them. The restriction is fearsomely strenuous, a requirement that potential readers go through the eye of a needle. The strenuousness of the prohibition reflects the author’s realization of just how difficult it was to control texts in a time of increased lay hunger for what the author had produced — a vigorously written, rigorously considered, vernacular spiritual manual. Because his authoritative position as author/teacher is threatened once the text leaves his hands, the author appeals to the ‘bond of charity’ as an attempt to extend his personal influence over a less personal future. The audience broadens, and the author truly becomes an author, with readers, rather than a teacher, with students.2 Wide readership represents a relinquishment of stable, authoritative interpretation; once passed on, a text, particularly a vernacular text, takes on a new ‘openness’.3 It is at least apparently available on equal terms to all comers, its interpretation subject to the vagaries of linguistic and theological context, to uncertain means and manners of circulation. The Cloud author perceived that ‘open’ text — text not moored to personal relationship, its interpretation not governed by institutional authority — is subject to decontextualization and distortion, to chaotic and dialogic hermeneutic forces. ‘Having’ a text, whether materially or intellectually, includes the power to use, or abuse, that text. The author lists how the book might come to someone’s hand, ‘bi propirte outher by keping, by bering as messenger or elles bi borowing’. Possible points of uncontrolled contact between readers and these instructional materials proliferate. This list emphasizes the book as a material artefact, susceptible to being circulated, borrowed, bought, inherited, copied, partially copied, mis-copied, but the materiality functions as a surrogate for anxiety about the at least partially distinct matter of the interpretation of whatever version of the text ends up in a given reader’s hands. The tone and exhaustiveness of this

2

I intend to discuss this interesting shift of audience from students to readers in the Cloud (among other vernacular theological texts), and the corresponding shifts of pedagogical discourse, in a forthcoming essay on the Cloud. 3

For exploration of the different and occasionally conflicting valences of ‘open’ text in this period, see Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy.

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recitation of possible means of holding a manuscript reflect the author’s anxiety as he confronts the disjuncture between spiritual teacher and student that occurs when holy teaching has been entrusted to text, to the material form of a manuscript, to a certain worldliness. The author seeks to limit this multiplicity by attempting to re-personalize the delicate instructional relationship threatened by uncontrolled contact between readers and instructional material. He seeks precise definition of an intended audience; he seeks a reading community that is also a spiritual community.

Injunctions on Readership In light of the appeal by the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, the question arises: how do we modern scholars of medieval literature and intellectual history read such passages? We form a reading community but not, of course, a spiritual community. Are we not precisely the sort of readers — as the author colourfully puts it, the ‘fleschely janglers, [...] tithing tellers, rouners and tutilers of tales, and alle maner of pinchers’ — who the author feared would grab hold of his book and misuse it, pinching off the bits that suit our questionable purposes?4 What is more, scholarly ‘misuse’ of devotional works stretches far beyond the Cloud. Devotional writers insist that the reader should not get caught up in their words, because words cannot express the essence of their spiritual insights; indeed, they assert, their words are useless if severed from personal commitment to an active devotional programme. Scholarship mining devotional texts is at best superfluous and at worst, it is misguided, irresponsible, and foolish. There are clever ways of avoiding the problem by focusing on the ancillary insights that can be derived from such passages, ignoring the core claims of the work while isolating its rhetorical or theological features and allegiances. For instance, the Cloud passages serve rich rhetorical functions, preparing readers to approach the work with a more reverential attitude and placing blame for any perceived shortcomings on the shoulders of an inadequately committed audience. Or, these restrictive passages can be placed within the institutional framework of Carthusian-influenced spiritual instruction, and within the context of the ‘negative theology’ tradition.5 Indeed, such readings may seem the only option,

4 5

Cloud, ed. by Gallacher, Prologue.

Carthusians cherished mystical and contemplative experiences of many colours, but they remained vigilant in policing boundaries between active and contemplative, secular and religious.

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since the author’s restrictions cannot be treated seriously by scholars without risking a paradox: all but the most pious modern readers fall short of the author’s requirements, and in any case no scholarly project could be oriented toward using the text as the author commands. If scholars chose to heed the author’s terms and use his book as he prescribes, they could not use it at all, qua scholars. In a sense, scholarship does not violate the spirit of this injunction because scholars do not purport to use these texts for spiritual purposes; perhaps the restrictions apply only to those who seek devotional insight.6 Scholars may be wasting their time, but their worst harm is to produce more scholarship, which though spiritually worthless will lead few souls to perdition. But even this response avoids the core of the author’s point, which could be loosely paraphrased: this text will speak properly only to those who take religion very seriously, who seek religious insight, and who are determined to lead a religiously exemplary life. Thus, at a minimum, we must admit that we are in fact violating the Cloud author’s ‘terms of use’ — and I believe we might want to offer reasons for why we do so. We might seek a theory of engagement. The underlying question in these pages is: do medieval English religious texts not seem somehow, and at least somewhat, recognizably religious, thus demanding of us some sort of scholarly consideration — say, even, a theory — of what religion is or how it works? To answer this question in the affirmative is not to say that we must cordon ‘religion’ off as a sealed-off, sacrosanct realm of human endeavour or scholarly inquiry. As scholars of the subject have long realized, the concept of ‘religion’ serves more as useful shorthand for a range of practices and expressions than as an essentialized, Other category of human experience.7 Nor does my suggested approach

See for background, Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, pp. 28–57; Michael G. Sargent, ‘Introduction’, in Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 1–154. Here and throughout, more than can be acknowledged in footnotes, I owe a debt to Michael Sargent for his exemplary and inviting work on the Mirror. As far as negative theology is concerned, the tradition itself, and the Cloud’s place in that tradition, remains cloudy, but it is introduced by Putter, ‘Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and The Cloud of Unknowing’, pp. 45–47. 6

Of course, many modern readers do use the Cloud in the pursuit of spiritual insights. See for instance John Main, Word into Silence (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1980). Such writing is as a rule removed from dominant historicist or theological discourse on the texts, and faces its own challenges beyond my scope here. 7

In addition to the work of the scholars of religion discussed later in this article, a still useful introduction might be Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. by Michael Banton (London: Tavistock, 1966), pp. 1–46. James Simpson has stated: ‘No one argues now as if religion were a mere allegorical reflex of or code

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require commitment to orthodox religion of any sort. (Indeed, works of scholarship offering pious accounts of devotional literature often fail to present a satisfactory theory of engagement, because they are not sufficiently distanced from the presuppositional universe of the works they study.) What is required is not the conviction that the beliefs of those being studied are substantively correct. Rather, the required scholarly commitment is a commitment to understanding, so far as possible, the perspective, the Weltanschauung, of those historical persons to be studied: a commitment to inquiry into how religious texts made sense to those persons who created or read them; along with a conviction that the ways in which they made sense to those individuals, not just rationally but emotionally, culturally, and practically, are worth scholarly attention. This commitment can, of course, be made by scholars of any religious persuasion, or none at all. More specifically, I propose that the Cloud’s restrictions be interpreted as invitations to heightened sensitivity to the nature of the Cloud not just a repository of some interesting literary or historical data but as a record of serious religious commitment — that is, a thoroughgoing emotional, intellectual, and literary involvement — on the part of both writer and (some) readers. Such a perspective would shift many of the emphases in studies of medieval English religious literature. It might deepen our understanding, or at least warn us away from oversimplification, regarding the complex responses to contemporary culture and politics, cross-cutting intellectual and institutional allegiances, and relationships to language, pedagogy, and textual culture that are evidenced in medieval devotional texts. In the sections that follow I test some of the readings Nicholas Watson uses to support the argument in two of his enormously influential ‘vernacular theology’ articles: ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, and ‘Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God’.8 I suggest that Watson’s readings of Love’s Mirror and the Pore Caitif, driven by his literary-historical and political interests, fail to give due consideration to plausible

for the true reality (usually politics or economics)’ ( James Simpson, ‘Confessing Literature’, English Language Notes, 44 (2006), 121–26 (p. 121)). Unfortunately, this seems to me a somewhat premature conclusion, at least if it is intended to include implicit or methodological features of arguments, although Simpson seems rightly to point to rising uneasiness with the typical reductivism. My agenda is to stir up further unease. 8

Appearing respectively in Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64 and New Medieval Literatures, 1 (1997), pp. 85–124.

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alternative explanations for certain features of the texts, features that might relate to functional aspirations the authors had for their texts based on their views of religious experience and the devotional aims of their readers. Watson’s literary and theological perceptions are notably sharp.9 That, in this case, his argument takes insufficient account of some crucial aspects of the works in question suggests there may be an underlying problem deserving of wider airing and more detailed consideration.10

A Mirror Reflecting Cultural Change? The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is an early fifteenth-century adaptation, in Middle English, by the Carthusian leader Nicholas Love, of the popular Latin Meditationes vitae Christi. The Mirror, circulated widely in late medieval England, offers a series of gospel narratives rendered suitably for meditation, with instructions for devotional use. After the promulgation of Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions — a set of decrees which among other things laid out an aggressive programme of ecclesiastical control over vernacular spiritual writings — a memorandum appended to the text noted the Archbishop’s endorsement of it as an orthodox work of spiritual instruction, an unsurprising endorsement given Love’s close connection with Arundel’s ecclesiastical circle, as well as the conservative, and militantly anti-Wycliffite, tenor of the work.11 Reading the Mirror in light of his view that the Constitutions represented a sharp turning point in English religio-literary history, Watson characterizes the 9

Possible citations abound. His and Jacqueline Jenkins’s recent annotated edition of Julian of Norwich offers an unprecedented abundance of brilliant, sensitive readings of a difficult English religious masterpiece: The Writings of Julian of Norwich: ‘A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman’ and ‘A Revelation of Love’, ed. by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, Brepols Medieval Women Series (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006; also published in hardback by Brepols in 2006). 10

Because I agree with Gillespie that Watson’s ‘Censorship’ article ‘remains the most richly nuanced and powerfully contextualized discussion of vernacular theology in Middle English, and asks many questions that still require answering’, a statement almost equally applicable to the second article treated here, I believe that these, more than most, reward continued engagement and scrutiny. See Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, p. 405, n. 11. 11

Sargent discusses the timing of the Mirror’s composition and release with regards to the Constitutions and Memorandum. See Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 36–37, 147–50. For Sargent’s summary of the Mirror’s political and ecclesiastical context, see pp. 23–37; for its anti-Wycliffism, see pp. 54–75.

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Mirror as a work of cynical, politically driven condescension. It should be understood, he asserts, as Arundel’s ‘means of putting a positive face on the draconian restrictions he was imposing’, in that it ‘offers the uneducated reader more than catechesis: substituting the rational and social concerns it so scrupulously shuns with an offer of a life of affective intensity’.12 It provides for an emotionally intense but doctrinally ‘safe’ set of carefully worded meditations couched in a set of clear instructions for edifying orthodox use. The Mirror is, Watson says, ‘designed to divert lay readers from doctrinal inquiry and to remind them of their childlike dependence on clerics who think for them’.13 He has argued that this emphasis is explicable by reference to the Mirror’s place in the postArundel decline of vernacular theology, a decline that contrasts with the preConstitutions vibrancy of English vernacular theology, exemplified by texts such as Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, and the Pore Caitif. This article does not assess Watson’s claims about the Constitutions and the before-and-after eras of English religious writing which he suggests that they respectively curtailed and inaugurated. Rather, I focus on the argument that casts the Pore Caitif as a pre-Arundelian foil to the Arundelian Mirror. Considering the pastoral context and content of these works in addition to their political context opens up more textured awareness of both texts — dimensions of their attitudes toward tradition, audience, religion, and even politics that might go unnoticed.

Adaptation and Responsiveness Love himself provides compelling explanations of his goals and composition process, explanations that focus on responsive, pastoral motivations more than cynical, politically driven repression. While these explanations need not be taken at face value, they are sufficiently plausible that they cannot be disregarded out of hand. Throughout the Mirror, Love offers reasons for omitting significant stretches of his source text, the Meditationes vitae Christi, as well as for rearranging numerous sections and inserting his own comments and exposition. Love selfconsciously references his Latin source to bolster the authority of his project but also, in doing so, shows a striking willingness to criticize it explicitly and implicitly

12

Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 855, 854.

13

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 853.

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for its shortcomings.14 Two particularly colourful passages exemplify Love’s statements of his purposes, and his views on his source-text: Bot for also miche as hit were longe werke & perauenture tediose boþe to þe rederes & þe hereres hereof, if alle þe processe of þe blessed life of Jesu shold be wryten in englishe so fully by meditaciones as it is õit hidereto, aftur he processe of he boke before nemede of Bonauenture in latyne, þerfore here aftur many chapitres & longe processe þat semeþ litel edificacion inne, as to þe maner of symple folk þat þis boke is specialy writen to, shal be laft vnto it drawe to þe passion.15 ... And þus shortly we passen ouere here miche processe of þe gospel & many chapitres of þe forseid boke of Bonauenture, for þe litel edificacion of hem as it semeþ nedeful to symple soules, to whech þis boke is specialy writen in english as it haþ oft be seide here before. And so leuyng þis processe in many places we shole onely telle þe notabilitees þere vpon shortly to edificacion.16

Love portrays himself as tailoring the source-text to make the Mirror more ‘userfriendly’; that is, appropriate for the ‘symple soules’ for whom he writes. He looked, he says, for ways of maximizing impact on his readers, redacting, rearranging, and supplementing his source-text to that end. His stated goals include warning against heresies, expanding the passages most suitable for affective meditation, trimming down the ‘tediose’ bits, and rearranging stories to suit meditative practice. Love’s aspirations for his Mirror, as reflected in his many decisions to accept, reject, or modify his source text, remain open for scholarly exploration; a sensitive reader could discern many layers of motivation pursued in this rhetorically sophisticated and strikingly self-conscious work.17 But there is no reason to discredit Love’s statements of his goals as one significant part of his project. In fact, this emphasis on practical effect can be discerned in a number of other devotional texts of pastoral theology. The Pore Caitif, for instance, refuses theological categorization in favour of practical purpose when it discusses the classification of sins: ‘summe of hem ben deedli synne & sum venyal but it is hard to discusse riõ tli whiche ben oon & which ben oþir’.18 He goes on to note that the 14

Love’s practice therefore contributes to our still-evolving understanding of the vigorous, creative, adaptive project that was ‘translation’ throughout the medieval period. 15

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 75–76.

16

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 86.

17

See Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 38–54, and the extensive notes provided on the main text. 18

In the unfortunate absence of a published Pore Caitif edition, I rely on the works here cited

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risk involved in any sin (i.e., a slide toward damnation) is sufficiently grave that to focus on fine categorizations is sheer foolishness: ‘if a man hadde eiõ te peris & he knewe þat summe of hem weren venemyd with deedli poisoun and wist not verili which he wolde refuse hem ech oon & ete noon of hem alle’.19 The emphasis here is not on formulaic doctrinal instruction but on integration of the commandments with each other and with the lived experience of the believer.20 The motivating factor is a practical desire to affect the audience morally and affectively, not to explicate a theological point or interpret a passage of scripture. Pastoral goals structure many passages in both the Pore Caitif and the Mirror, passages that from a theological or doctrinal point of view are not entirely consistent or thorough. The passages may not constitute proper ‘vernacular theology’, but surely their stated desire for simplicity and practicality emerges as much from pastoral concern as from explicit or implicit solidarity with an agenda of social control and literary repression. The direct authorial claims and specific characteristics of the Mirror, as with a number of similar texts, support its being crafted in response to a burgeoning, powerful desire for — and market for — pastoral theology, written in English and presented to allow for easy consumption of spiritual teachings. The vibrant literature of devotional guidance that flourishes in late medieval England emerges from this same responsiveness and concern for the nourishment of active lay piety.21

and my perusal of most of the surviving manuscripts. Mary Theresa Brady, ‘The Pore Caitif: Edited from MS. Harley 2336 with Introduction and Notes’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Fordham University, 1954) remains by far the most important and encyclopedic discussion of the work. The quotation here is from p. 72. For Brady’s published work, see Mary Theresa Brady, ‘Lollard Interpolations and Omissions in Manuscripts of The Pore Caitif’, in De cella in seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 183–203, which includes further bibliography. 19

Pore Caitif, ed. by Brady, p. 72.

20

Another comment that is theologically underdeveloped but pastorally on the mark: ‘þus he þat hatiþ man hatiþ god & brekiþ alle þe comaundementis of god for þei ben conteyned in loue to god & man’. Pore Caitif, ed. by Brady, p. 88. 21 Similarly, for instance, the Cloud, which in so many ways differs from the Mirror. Responsiveness underlies the Cloud passages cited at the beginning of this essay, in which the author portrays his work as contingent, circumstantial, occasional — as opposed to universal, systematic, all-purpose. Devotional instruction is, according to the Cloud author’s framework, dependent on the context and the individual. A related common ground is that both the Pore Caitif and the Mirror repeatedly mention that their readers’ good intentions and perseverance are crucial to their success. See, for instance, Mirror, pp. 61, 69, 84; Pore Caitif, p. 1; Kantik Ghosh, ‘Nicholas Love’,

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Love and his fellow devotional writers struggle with how to reconcile history and tradition with their present day, how to preserve the continuity of time-tested and authoritative devotional practices and teachings in the face of changing institutional and socio-cultural environments. These self-conscious passages from the Mirror are in a sense Love’s way of considering the historical narrative of which his work forms a part — by situating historical changes in the context of the religious experience of those to whom it was seeking to minister. The author/translator’s job is in a sense to be a careful student of the past, and of the techniques of transmitting knowledge of the past, all with an eye towards making it speak powerfully in the present. It is in light of these practical, pastoral challenges that the impact of legislation such as the Constitutions may begin to be weighed. What may emerge is a sense of cultural continuity — of a surprisingly robust and varied sort — in the face of would-be ruptures. Love’s Mirror appears in this light as a conflicted work, defying any simplistic categorization of it as a tool of the establishment, or as an instrument of resistance. In his Mirror, Love reflects the difficulties of his position in his time: the work is at once obsessively, and selfconsciously, polemical; self-consciously both devotionally empowering and theologically limiting; and throughout, because of its self-consciousness, disarmingly genuine in its conflictedness.

Intertextuality, Rumination, and Sufficiency Preoccupations with history and context arise again in Love’s attitude towards the other texts with which his audience would be familiar. Two examples demonstrate that Love expects his audience to have access to other books: In þe whiche processe bene many gude notabilitees touchyng temptacion of man in þis world, of þe whiche seynt Gregoury & oþere doctours speken in þe exposition of þis gospell, Ductus est Jesus in desertum, &c. & specialy Crisostome in inperfecto, þe whech for þei bene sufficiantly writen, not onely in laytne, but also in english, we passen ouere at þis tyme spekyng forþermore of þe turnyng aõeyn of oure lord Jesus home to his modere at Nazareth.

in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by Edwards, pp. 53–66 (p. 61). My observations on the tensions in the Mirror are present in one form or another in Ghosh’s discussion. Another sensitive treatment of the Mirror is Sarah Beckwith’s, in her Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writing (London: Routledge, 1993), especially pp. 1–6, 60–66. Her conclusions fall perhaps somewhere between my position and Watson’s, although she offers much additional religious and intellectual depth.

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[Concerning the Pater Noster:] Bot for als miche as þis matere is spoken of in many oþer tretees & bokes boþe in latyne & in english & þis praiere sufficiantly expowenet, þerfore we passen ouer more shortly at þis tyme hereof.22

Love frequently alludes to and refers the reader to other devotional works and assumes the reader will keep exploring these different texts, searching out new material and growing in understanding as a result.23 Some such comments could be considered asides to clerical or educated readers, but this is belied by Love’s emphasis on the availability of discussion in English. Further, even where such comments are absent, Love demonstrably relies on prior knowledge of biblical stories. Narratives are often oblique and compressed, and he assumes that his audience has foundational knowledge even of relatively obscure stories, whether that knowledge was gained from books such as the Wycliffite Bible or from public teaching.24 Rather than writing so thoroughly as to render such external sources of knowledge obsolete, Love merely draws out a suitable meditation from known narratives. This observation forces reconsideration of Watson’s assertion that: Love presents his Mirror not only as a means of spiritual and intellectual education but as a bastion against such education. To learn its lesson, the reader must emulate the passivity of the infant, receiving nourishment from a clerical writer who retains full control over what he dispenses and how he dispenses it.25

Watson’s perspective draws support from any number of passages in the Mirror, but these passages are in tension with the fact that Love clearly believed — indeed, took for granted — that his audience would have at least some other sources of devotional ‘education’ aside from the Mirror.26 Maybe, then, the Mirror remains

22

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 75, 84.

23

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 31, 46.

24

For example, Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 33.

25

Watson, ‘Conceptions’, p. 95.

26

Compare part two of The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by John Henry Blunt, EETS, E. S. 65 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1873), pp. 68–69: some bokes ar made to enforme the vnderstondynge & to tel how spiritual persones oughte to be gouerned in all theyr lyuynge that they may knowe what they shall leue & what they shall do [...] And when ye rede eny suche bokes, ye oughte to beholde in yourself sadly whether ye lyue & do as ye rede or no [...] Other bokes there be that ar made to quyken & to sturre vp the affeccyons of the soule as som that tel of the sorowes & dredes of deth [...] to sturre vp the affecyons of drede & of sorow for synne. Some tel of the grete benefites of oure lord god [...] to sturre vp oure affeccyons of loue and of hope in to hym. Somme telle of the ioyes of heuen, to sturre vp the affeccions of ioye to desyre thyderwarde. And some

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under the ‘full control’ of the ‘clerical writer’ only in terms of technique: Love goes to great lengths to demonstrate (whether successfully or not) how fervent devotion can be properly managed, and the possibility of developing this personal practice is what the Mirror holds out to its ‘infant’ readers. No doubt that Love did not believe most of his audience would achieve high contemplation, and he warned against aiming directly for such heights, but he could not have hermetically sealed off the devotional education of his readers. He did not seek to do so. The ramifications of this intertextuality may be that even the Mirror, a most Arundelian-affiliated text, partakes fully and enthusiastically in the flourishing of vernacular devotion, albeit along the lines of the reform-oriented conservatism that emerged most fully after Arundel’s death. Love allows his work to be shaped by the context within which his audience is likely to encounter it — that is, in dialogue with other vernacular religious works. His user-driven approach demands a keen awareness of the immediate situations of actual devotees, as he struggles to make traditions and existing bodies of pastoral and devotional wisdom speak to that newly formed, growing audience. He explores the possibilities of safely orthodox devotional production amidst such pressures, and what emerges from this experiment is a multi-faceted and internally conflicted artefact. This internal conflict comes to the fore again in the Mirror’s presentation of St Cecilia, which is Watson’s prime example of how Love offers his readers only static, limited devotional experience.27 Love writes: Among oþer vertuese commendynges of þe holy virgine Cecile it is writen þat she bare alwey þe gospel of criste hidde in her brest [...] In þe which she set her meditacion & her þouht niõt & day with a clene & hole herte. And when she hade so fully alle þe manere of his life ouer gon, she began aõayne. And so with a likyng & swete taste gostly chewyng in þat manere þe gospell of crist, she set & bare it euer in þe priuyte of her breste. In þe same manere I conseil þat þou do. For among alle gostly exercyses I leue þat þis is most necessarye & most profitable, & þat may bringe to þe hyest degre of gude liuyng.28

Watson describes the passage thus: ‘Cecilia lives her days in a repetitive round of devout meditation on episodes from Christ’s life selected for their affective impact’; he observes that ‘her energies are entirely directed within’.29 There is merit

telle of the foulnes & wretchednesse of syn to sturre vp your affeccyons accordingly to the matter that ye rede. See also Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 44–46. 27

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 855.

28

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 11.

29

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 854.

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to Watson’s observation concerning the strikingly inward-focused piety that the Mirror encourages, although its Carthusian authorship may furnish as plausible an explanation for its inward orientation as does recent legislation. In discussing the Longleat Sermons as representing one instantiation of non-Arundelian vitality, Watson claims that ‘[u]nlike the Mirror (though like Pore Caitif, the Chastising, Dives and Pauper, and especially Julian’s Revelation) [the Sermons] presupposes a reader capable of, and interested in, concentrated study’.30 But the Cecilia passage, at the very least, does not so clearly deny the possibility of a reader ‘capable of, and interested in, concentrated study’. True, Cecilia’s study, as described in the Mirror, sounds repetitive, but to dismiss her meditations as the changeless and unending consumption of devout, childish pabulum would be to ignore the passage’s crucial and evocative image of meditative rumination — Cecilia’s ‘gostly chewyng’. In this striking phrase are echoes of a time-honoured meditative practice well known to Love. Cecilia’s meditative labour, so heartily endorsed by Love, does not differ greatly from the spiritual rumination that apparently provoked Julian of Norwich’s remarkable, long-term reworking of her visions, or the embodied responses to devotional texts that inspired Margery Kempe.31 Devotional continuity is not stasis. Rather, meditation on familiar images, narratives, and doctrinal mysteries can form the core of profound religious experience, a continually renewed awareness of religious truths affectively ‘chewed’ over many years — not simply swallowed whole. Parts of the Mirror also complicate Watson’s portrayal of the Pore Caitif as breaking down the hierarchical barrier between laypersons and clerics assiduously maintained in Love’s Mirror. For instance, Love notes at one point that his discussion has reached the limit not just of ‘lewde’ reason but of all ‘mannes’ reason.32 Here and in similar passages he fails to maintain a strict separation between matters fit for clerical audiences and those fit for lay audiences. At times,

30

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 855.

31

For example Vincent Gillespie, ‘Strange Images of Death: The Passion in Later Medieval English Devotional and Mystical Writing’, in Zeit, Tod und Ewigkeit in der Renaissance Literatur, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 117 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1987), pp. 111–59, and Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England V, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 53–77. More expansively on the practice, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. by Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961). 32

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 23.

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that is, he acknowledges that whether learned or humble, we are all in it together, limited by our human weaknesses. Watson focuses on part of the prologue to the Pore Caitif: This tretyse suffisith to eche cristen man and womman. This tretyse compiled of a pore caitif & nedy of gostly help of al cristen peple [...] shal teche simple men & wymmen of gode wille, þe right way to heuene, yf þei wille besye hem to haue it in mynde & to worche ther after, wiþouten multiplicacion of many bokes. And as a child willing to ben a clerk, begynneþ first atte grounde, þat is his a.b.c., so he, this desiring to spede þe betir, begynneþ attte grounde of helthe, þat is cristen mennes bileue.33

To Watson, this passage exemplifies the ‘universality to which the [Pore Caitif] aspires’; he argues that the ‘egalitarian language of the [Pore Caitif’s] opening points a different way, towards a readership liberated by the education it provides and responsible for its own reform’.34 Parts of the Pore Caitif support this reading, but others support an alternative reading: that this prologue imagines devotional instruction distributed only on a ‘need to know’ basis, with a certain minimum amount of knowledge ‘sufficing’ for most. The treatise may serve, that is, to provide a bare adequacy to its readership. The author indicates: choose my instructional text, and do not seek ‘multiplicacioun of many bokes’ — a multiplication that here, more than in the Mirror, seems frowned upon. This passage serves as an effective promotional message for the Pore Caitif as a one-stop-shop for every would-be

33 As quoted by Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 849. Watson takes this prologue from Downside Abbey, MS 26542, fol. 94r , which formed the basis of the Pore Caitif transcription in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 239–41; as well as in Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’, p. 107. As far as I can tell, the first sentence should not be relied on as authorial. Although the Downside manuscript may have been unknown to her, Brady, in the introduction to her dissertation, characterizes this head sentence as the way ‘a scribe who copies his book advertises it’, and cites the language as appearing in only two other manuscripts out of the more than forty that she knew of: Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds anglais 41 and Glasgow, Hunterian Museum, MS 520. She notes ‘somewhat similar’ language in British Library, MS Harley 953 (p. lxxxiii). Whether the language is original or not, Watson treats the passage in general as aptly representing the Pore Caitif’s pastoral approach, and I do not disagree, although I draw different conclusions, in particular as regards the question of how we might read ‘sufficiency’ in light of the broader instructional stance taken in the text. 34

Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word’, p. 108. He here writes that the ‘Pore Caitif sees itself as democratizing the spiritual life by reminding everyone, lay or cleric, that only a certain set of religious truths [...] matter and that these truths are common to all’. Along the same lines, Watson briefly revisits the Pore Caitif in ‘Cultural Changes’, p. 134.

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student of devotion, but it hardly reflects the sentiment of an egalitarian, ‘powerto-the-people’ writer. An underlying image in ‘suffisith’ is the sufficiency of food, and this lexical undertone is apt: what suffices for a simple diet could provide bare sufficiency to anyone, and in that narrow sense be ‘universal’, but that is not to say that richer food would not be expected by, and appropriate for, a more refined palate.35 The Pore Caitif prologue could introduce it as a work designed to assuage the spiritual hunger of a curious, non-Latinate audience, while also insinuating that for such readers to seek further knowledge would be exceeding that which ‘suffisith’.36 It may be a discussion-ending gesture, a way of closing off dialogue with no more than an assurance of bare satiety.37

Conclusion: Devotion, ‘Religious Experience’, and History In these pages, I have suggested that we can discern significant continuity in the face of cultural change, even in a work as profoundly implicated in the Arundelian project as Love’s Mirror. This continuity emerges directly from the theory of tradition evident in many devotional works, including the Mirror, a conception founded less on authority — ‘this can be trusted’ — than on experience — ‘this has worked and will work for you’. (For similar reasons, the fruits rather than the roots of Wycliffism are often as not the central objects of orthodox criticism of the heresy — it led, so defenders of orthodoxy said, to arrogance and decadence.) Underneath political, ecclesiastical, institutional, and doctrinal pressures is the beating heart of pastoral theology and personal spiritual instruction; and the way practical, pastoral goals work themselves out in the face of constantly evolving pressures deserves more scholarly attention than it has received.

35

See MED entry on this word (esp. 1a and 1b at ‘suffisen’). Complicating matters is that a ‘sufficiency’ of food, of course, is never permanently satisfying: more is required, all too soon. 36

Against this view, one could point to the structure of the tracts of the Pore Caitif, noting its varied and at times rather ‘mystical’ components as evidence that it adheres more closely to a ‘progressive devotion’ model than to a rudimentary didactic one. This argument strikes me as potentially compelling, as does Watson’s overall thesis, which certainly survives this essay. 37

This is the way in which forms of the word ‘suffice’ are used in the instances I have found in Love’s Mirror and in the Cloud author’s Book of Privy Counselling. See Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, pp. 22, 55, 63; The Book of Privy Counselling, in The Cloud of Unknowing and Related Treatises on Contemplative Prayer, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson, Analecta Cartusiana, 3 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1982), p. 79.

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This proposed focus explains my insistent use of the term ‘devotional’ to describe ‘vernacular theological’ texts. The term ‘devotional’ is not used with a view to ousting other classifications, but because without a real interest in the devotional aspects of texts we risk missing much of their historical meaning. Devotion looks to the function of religion — it is a currency of psychological intensity.38 Doctrines matter, but that they actually affect an individual’s religious experience is the sine qua non of devotion. A ‘vernacular theology’ emphasis may fail to capture this crucial aspect of these texts (although it brings others to the fore). As I have shown in the Mirror, we can observe specific ways in which Nicholas Love self-consciously helps his audience along, and what he helps them to is an encounter with religious feeling via gospel narratives and meditations. From this perspective, the Mirror’s success depends almost wholly on the listener’s or reader’s ability to break down historical barriers and experience the events of the gospels and especially the passion, with immediacy, with passionate intensity. The responsiveness of the Mirror and of similar texts to the actual needs and position of its readers deserves special attention because a dominant characteristic of late medieval English devotion is a Church struggling to make room for precisely the same categories of affective response, of ‘religious experience’, for which our modern histories have not found a place.39 My thesis is not that before and after Arundel there is a continuity of religious practice or belief. Instead, I argue for a continuity of engagement with certain fundamental questions, questions particularly 38

Watson objects to the term by noting ‘the aura of otherworldliness that often surrounds terms like “devotional,” or indeed “spirituality”’ (‘Censorship’, p. 824, n. 6). Still, there are costs to forsaking such terms, their ‘otherworldliness’ notwithstanding. For further terminological and classificatory exposition, see Nicholas Watson, ‘The Middle English Mystics’, pp. 539–65. As used here, in line with most medieval usage, ‘devotion’ means religious observance animated by emotional attachment or fervour, in contradistinction to ceremonial, ritualistic, or pro forma performance of ritual. To be sure, Watson has disavowed, in his previous reflections on the ‘Censorship’ article, an overly reductive ‘alignment’ between politics and religion, noting: ‘However closely politics and religion are aligned — and “Censorship and Cultural Change” is all about that alignment — the study of religion as religion at some junctures inevitably moves [...] critics away from the political and towards the difficult, because novel, terrain of the affective and the transcendant’ (‘Cultural Changes’, p. 134). 39

There are exceptions, including those considered in Watson’s moving ‘Desire for the Past’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 21 (1999), 59–97, some of whose goals I hope I here advance. Watson cites exemplary, wide-ranging, and contentious works by Caroline Walker Bynum, Louise Fradenburg, Carolyn Dinshaw, Barbara Newman, and David Aers. Despite these and other brilliant and varied contributions, many open questions remain.

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pressing in the decades following hard upon the rise of Wycliffism, which was both an embarrassment to the English church and an undoubted harbinger of change, left to the historical players (and not just Arundel, dead by 1414) to work out. The Mirror presents one example of a general problem in the study of religious writing, which is precisely that it makes religious demands on its readers, striving to make its impact a living one in its time. The pervasiveness of normative, moral, or emotional demands (demands that I here call ‘religious’, but that stretch beyond that categorization) in historical texts, forms one of the main difficulties for scholars who seek to understand reform and social change, to write or understand history, especially literary history. Simply put, the political, formal, and conceptual dimensions of texts provide firmer (or at least easier) ground for analysis. But when we omit considerations of more subjective matters, we tell history wrongly, and we tell the wrong history. Here, for instance, we misunderstand Nicholas Love unless we see how he takes account of his audience’s experience, tailors his text to it, and strategically pursues his goals in light of it — goals that are demonstrably not just social control. Were we to talk about medieval religious experience explicitly, we might find ourselves considering, doubting, and revising our assumptions about medieval religious experience, and in doing so contribute to a dialogue about comparative dynamics of religious experience, a dialogue hitherto largely dominated by theorists of religion, in religion faculties, seminaries, and departments of psychology and sociology.40 The potential pitfalls of my proposed approach are manifold. Scholars may be tempted to anachronism, to essentializing, to narrow piety. But laying out a history 40

‘Religious experience’ itself is a term of art from the scholarly discourse in religion. It has developed as a way of framing discussions of individual and corporate religious practice. It relates to the more theoretically oriented ‘phenomenology of religion’. It recognizes the otherness of the object of study while acknowledging (and theorizing) revealing commonalities or continuities between the object and the researcher. While such an approach has influenced many medievalists, a ‘religious experience’ approach has had limited impact on the study of historical religions. Still, the tensions it was formulated to express — if not resolve — are applicable. For basic discussion and bibliography, see Douglas Allen, ‘Phenomenology of Religion’, in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. by Lindsay Jones (New York: Macmillan, 2005); and the remarkable contribution of a leading scholar of religion, Ann Taves, Religious Experience Reconsidered: A Building-Block Approach to the Study of Religion and Other Special Things (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). Another way of analysing the literature is as ‘psychological’, on the strength of the analogy between the practical goals of the authors of devotional texts and the similar emphases of modern clinical psychology, which focuses on manipulating, ‘curing’ the self, or giving it the tools (especially self-knowledge) to ‘cure’ itself. So, for instance, Masha Raskolnikov, ‘Confessional Literature, Vernacular Psychology, and the History of the Self in Middle English’, Literature Compass, 2 (2005), 1–20.

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based only on reassuringly straightforward and factual (as contrasted with interpretive or speculative) bases is no more intellectually honest, or accurate, than risking one that cannot be so confidently laid out. Furthermore, everyone writing on religious topics has a ‘theory’ of religion whether they admit it or not — of what counts as religion, and how it works. In these early articles, Watson may give too much credit to Arundelian gestures of control, and paints a picture of an orthodoxy narrower than it may have been. I want to take seriously the notion that the Church’s jealousy for authority reflects not the pervasiveness but the fragility of its control over the religious life of English persons. This situation resulted in more strategically sophisticated, and perhaps more respectful, approaches to the experience of lay believers than has been recognized. In any case, different underlying views of religion and authority such as these merit explicit discussion; during which discussion, history of a sort remains the scholarly focus, a history requiring attentiveness to the affective dimensions of medieval devotion, to the actual social and cultural arrangements which permitted and facilitated devotion, as well as to how devotion worked or did not work under those circumstances, based on whatever evidence we can find. This shift of approach might provide one way forward, in filling out our story of devotion before, during, and after Arundel.

V OICE AFTER A RUNDEL David Lawton

I

n 1413, of all years, Margery Kempe went to see Julian of Norwich in her anchorhold at Norwich. According to The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery told Julian about:

the grace that God put in hir sowle of compunccyon, contricyon, swetnesse and devocyon, compassyon wyth holy meditacyon and hy contemplacyon, and ful many holy spechys and dalyawns that owyr Lord spak to hir sowle, and many wondirful revelacyons whech sche schewyd to the ankres to wetyn yf ther wer any deceyte in hem, for the ankres was expert in swech thyngys and good cownsel cowd gevyn.1

This sentence is an extraordinary microcosm, raising questions of penance, vision, voice, authority, and contemplation as well as order, sexuality, and gender under the seemingly innocuous heading of ‘holy spechys and dalyawns’. Margery Kempe’s strong association of voice and vision underscores her awareness that the conversation / ‘comunyng’ she has with Christ is spiritual: the most important voices you hear are the ones other people do not. Revelations are images appearing in the soul, not before the eyes; sacred voice and vision are therefore equally communications to the soul. Julian talks, it would seem at some length, of how to distinguish true from false spiritual communication: the rule is charity. She proceeds to encourage Margery in her course, whatever the world may think, and the two women — affirmed as soul-mates — go on to recapture the sweetness of sacred conversation in their own. While neither is in doubt that speech here is a metaphor, like Augustine they see it as a wholly indispensable and theologically necessary one; and the book’s references to holy conversation encourage us to keep 1

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Lynn Staley, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1996), Book I, chap.18, accessed online at: .

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in sight the spoken interchange between the two women. Julian is implicitly authorizing not only the spiritual speech within Margery’s soul but also her vocalized response to it, which includes unverbalized crying, voice even without words, as the surplus of spiritual communing. In spite of their recognition that voice may be used in malo, Margery and Julian are as far away as possible from the view of voice that informs pastoral rhetoric, which takes its text from such authorities as James 3. 6: ‘the tonge is fuyr and universitye of wikkednesse […] it is a wicked thing, & withouten reste, & ful of dedlyche venym’.2 Their easy conjunction of voice and vision is ruptured in the surrounding culture, in which Lollards distrust images, and Arundel, one might suppose, distrusts voice. The Constitutions are pastoral rhetoric imposed as a national state of exception. Though their greater target is probably writing, most of their provisions target the voice: in reading aloud, in preaching, and in teaching. Margery Kempe’s text enacts its scrupulous obedience to them even as it violates their spirit — most egregiously in its representation of her meeting with Arundel himself, which must be dated a little before her meeting with Julian. As she tells it, she walks unscathed from his fiery furnace; they converse amicably, if not, as with Julian, for ‘many days’, but still ‘tyl sterrys apperyd in the fyrmament’.3 This is not unimaginable, but it still seems to me quite surreal, the lion and the lamb at play. The Arundel who takes the time to argue with Thorpe, who cemented his king’s succession with a vernacular sermon on the theme Vir dominabitur in populo, is invested enough in vernacular voice to set a premium on controlling it. It is in the shadow of such control that the conversation between Margery and Julian functions as sanctuary during a period of social and political upheaval. It expresses something like a countervalue to the mood of the Constitutions, a positive value for personal religious experience and its public voicing. Personal experience often speaks to us in voices, especially in a memorial culture, at the level of auctoritates (voces) or at the sometimes lower cultural level of secondary orality, manifesting, to adapt a phrase of Paul Zumthor’s, ‘the desire of text to be made voice’.4 I would argue that voice is a useful category with which to analyse the literature and culture of the fifteenth century, and forms a useful supplement to the

2

A Fourteenth-Century English Biblical Version, ed. by Anna C. Paues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 32. 3

Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, I, chap. 16, accessed online at: . 4

Paul Zumthor, Introduction à la poésie orale (Paris: Seuil, 1983), pp. 159–60 (‘Toute poésie aspire à se faire voix’).

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questions we ask about the effect of the Constitutions. It may be especially useful in contexts where hard evidence is lacking — about the dating of texts, or about their orthodoxy or otherwise. In cases open to doubt we may sometimes find voice working as a screen, set in place for a spectrum of reasons. We need to give such indeterminacy its readerly due. Recent work paying heed to voice gives us valuable examples of how we might do this: Mishtooni Bose’s essay on Pecock’s voice,5 and its fashioning of a rhetoric of vernacular argumentation; two essays by Annie Sutherland, one showing how in Julian of Norwich biblical citation is internalized in the thinking structure of the vernacular text, the other showing how the author of The Chastising of God’s Children does something like the opposite, keeping biblical text ‘almost hermetically sealed from the narrative voice’;6 and Vincent Gillespie’s study of Julian’s writing as ‘a vast echo chamber of allusion and imitation’, with his persuasive claim that ‘the range of textual voices she uses, and her subtle and strategically shifting nuances of style and register, demand a different way of listening’.7 Such listening for multiple voices can help with questions about the Constitutions. Were they as culturally coercive as Nicholas Watson powerfully suggested (in an essay itself attentive to textual voice)? 8 If so, was this only for a limited period, say into the late 1420s? Or were they largely ineffective, as suggested by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton’s work on European religious discourses in England,9 or by Ralph Hanna’s conclusion that Bible translation remains the main game in town,10 or by Vincent Gillespie’s argument that vernacular theology prevails over Arundel’s attempt to censor it?11 Or should we

5 Mishtooni Bose, ‘Reginald Pecock’s Vernacular Voice’, in Lollards and their Influence, ed. by Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 217–36. 6

Respectively Annie Sutherland, ‘Oure Feyth is Groundyd in Goddes Worde: Julian of Norwich and the Bible’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition: England, Ireland and Wales. Exeter Symposium VII : Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004, ed. by E. A. Jones (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 1–20; and her ‘The Chastising of God’s Children: A Neglected Text’, in Text and Controversy, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, pp. 353–73 (p. 366). 7

Vincent Gillespie, ‘“[S]he do the police in different voices”; Pastiche, Ventriloquism and Parody in Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008), pp. 192–207 (p. 193). 8

Watson, ‘Censorship’.

9

Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion.

10

Ralph Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts before Lollardy and their Fate’, in Lollards and their Influence, ed. by Somerset, Havens, and Pitard, pp. 141–53 (p. 150). 11

Vincent Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–19 (p. 418).

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modify our understanding of the Constitutions, either as merely one more link in a chain of controls going back at least to Blackfriars in 1382, or as more limited in their intentions than has recently been understood? (The fullest exposition I have found of this argument is in Sarah James’s 2004 Cambridge thesis.)12 Listening to voice may help reframe the questions we ask and the answers we expect. Take the frame in two manuscripts of the so-called ‘fourteenth-century biblical version’ edited by Anna Paues in 1902 — so-called because it may not be (at least entirely) fourteenth-century, attempts nothing of the Old Testament and only half a gospel of the New, and is a compilation of several texts perhaps newly combined.13 I would like to register indeterminacy rather than disencode it, that of the senior brother in the frame. Asked in the name of ‘Cristis lawe of charite’ by his ‘lewed’ brother and sister to teach them ‘thinges that beth needful to the hele of oure soules’, he agrees that he has a moral duty to do so, but famously demurs, adding what seems like contemporary context to a traditional complaint: ‘we beth now so far yfallen from cristis lawe, that yif I wolde answere to thin axynges y moste in cas underfonge the deth, and thou wost wel a man is yholden to kepe his lyf as long as he may’.14 This is a crux of long standing. The fear of capital punishment seems to point to De haeretico comburendo, but the specific context of biblical translation is more pertinent to Arundel’s Constitutions. Though one might be more inclined than Paues to a date post-1409, the reference is frustratingly inexact (as well as not quite clear: what does ‘in cas’ mean?). The context is as shadowy as 12

Sarah James, ‘Debating Heresy: Fifteenth-Century Vernacular Theology and Arundel’s Constitutions’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2004). 13

On this, see Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts’, and London Literature, 1300–1380 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 306. The ‘Paues’ version exists in whole or part in the following manuscripts: Cambridge, Selwyn College, MS L. 108. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 434; Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 14. 39 (Acts); Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 250; and Bodleian Library, MS Holkham misc. 40. Of these, only the first two contain the prologue and frame. It is clear that Selwyn is assembled from discrete parts already transmitted elsewhere. In the Holkham manuscript, the Paues Epistles appear with Wycliffite Early Version Gospels, and with the Middle English translation of Gretham’s Miroir, translated in Northamptonshire c. 1400: The Middle English Mirror: An Edition Based on Bodleian Library MS Holkham misc. 40, ed. by Kathleen M. Blumreich, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 182 and Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 9 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in collaboration with Brepols, 2002). There are also connections with other composite texts, such as The Lyfe of Soule (n. 43 below). 14

Biblical Version, ed. by Paues, p. 4. Paues accepts the prologue at face value, and assumes a monastic provenance: ‘brother and sister, that is, a monk and a nun on the one hand, and on the other their brother superior’.

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the date. Do we follow Paues in automatically taking ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ to be certain sign of a monastic provenance? I would like to direct attention to the following sentence, in which the senior brother urges his brother and sister to put their heads down: ‘& parawnter it is spedful to holden oure pes a whyle forto that God foucheth saf that his will be yknow [...]’.15 The prevailing sense of the passage is one of uncertainty, of not quite knowing what may happen next or where, for the time being, solid ground may lie. Some traumatic cultural change is clearly in the wind. It is registered very differently and less tentatively than in the Constitutions themselves or the explicit condemnation of them in The Lantern of Light (‘thise newe constituciouns, bi whos strengthe anticrist enterditith chirchis’), though there is real despair in its talk of these days of great tribulation.16 Even in the less partisan texts, we are no longer in the discursive world of Cursor mundi or Gretham’s Miroir, where it is safe pastoral advice to tell people to stop reading romances and learn about the Bible. So, for example, Hoccleve advises Oldcastle to improve his life expectancy by means of less biblical and more romance reading.17 What are the private consequences of major public change? It is precisely the moment of indecision and demurral that we should be hearing here (albeit disingenuous — the senior brother is being talked into saying yes). This voice is remarkably reluctant to speak to the actual political facts of the case, but it does give access to perception and feeling. How does it feel to be subject to an untested degree of cultural and political coercion, real or apprehended? One might discuss this question by drawing on the life experience of more recent times, in eastern Europe, or in Germany, or even in the land of the First Amendment and the Patriot Act. But I wonder, nevertheless, whether our response to the fifteenth-century situation is a little too coloured by Foxe, and seen not only through the prism of righteous martyrdom but also through the state 15

Biblical Version, ed. by Paues, p. 5.

16

The Lantern of Liõt, ed. by Lilian M. Swinburn, EETS, O. S. 151 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1917), pp. 17–18. 17

For Gretham’s Miroir, see n. 13 above; on Cursor mundi and earlier translation, see Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts’; David Lawton, ‘Englishing the Bible, 1066–1549’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 454–82, and David Lawton, ‘The Bible and the Biblical in English, from Caedmon to 1550’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume One: To 1500, ed. by Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 193–233; and for Hoccleve’s Remonstrance against Oldcastle, see Hoccleve’s Works, II: The Minor Poems in the Ashburnham Ms. Addit. 133, ed. by Sir Israel Gollancz, EETS, E. S. 73 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1925 for 1897), p. 8, s.n. ‘Address to Sir John Oldcastle’.

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mechanism of a more centralized and effectively coercive government than Arundel had at his disposal. The patchy and contingent impressions from many of the fifteenth-century texts we read often tell us something valid about differences among sub-communities, dioceses, regions, classes, and indeed temperaments. Surveillance may sometimes be more fear than fact, but it is nonetheless legible in textual voices. Voice is a real category in this culture, not an imposition upon it. When Margery Kempe brings her case before Julian, Julian’s expertise would lie in her knowledge of a book such as The Chastising with its extensive differentiation of trustworthy from untrustworthy visions and voices, or a treatise such as the related one in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39. This manuscript contains not only a copy of The Chastising, but also the Lay Folk’s Catechism and the Stimulus amoris, showing therefore a profound concern with the classification of sins and virtues, with the active and the mixed lives. Its concern for voice goes beyond lay penitential instruction to the kind of self-help that might have found its original place in a monastic context. The treatise sets out ‘How a man schal knowe which is the speche of the fleisch in his herte, & which is of the world, and which is of the fend, & which is of god’. Stirrings of appetite are ‘the speche of the fleisch’; the speech of the world is whatever leads to self-regard or self-aggrandisement, ‘that thou weenest thyself be betere than anothere man is’; thoughts hostile to one’s neighbour are ‘the spechis of the fende’. The speech of God leads one ‘to beholden non othere mannus defautis but thin owne with sorowe and forthenkyng’, and to active thoughts of virtues and good deeds. If such thoughts ‘be euere medlid with mekenesse and lownesse of thin owne herte’, says the writer, you may be sure that ‘it is a spekyng of god and not of thi silf’.18 Though the framework and terminology are penitential, the process is interior: only, in this ‘privy counsellyng’, one’s advisors must be not Will and Lust but Reason and Need — that is, an awareness of living in a Christian community, a fair field full of folk. That community, however, is a place of contested and deceptive voices, in which one must beware ‘a wikked, fayre spekyng tunge’, which, according to A Myrour to Lewde Men and

18 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 39, fols 149r–150r, my transcription. The sentiments chime not only with those ascribed to Julian in The Book of Margery Kempe but with The Chastising and other texts such as Gretham’s Miroir, which also foreground voice: ‘For many there ben that speken right faire and deliciousliche, and han her tunge al so deliuer that thei ne douten hem noght of nothinge, and cunne teche wel the folk, but al thei don it for her owne profite, other for to ben holden wys, other for to ben preised therfore, other for to wynnen, other for to disceyuen, other for to han gret worshipe’(Mirror, ed. by Blumreich, p. 516).

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Wymmen, is the sterile tree cursed by Christ (such as the Pardoner).19 On this authorities agree. The problem is the subsequent one, of determining which voice is which. There is no cordon sanitaire between religion and literature, and I therefore find myself unable to restrict an examination of voice to ‘religious writing’. The ever-increasing upsurge of interest in vernacular theology over the last half-century tends to pose a distinction such as we find in some scholarly formulations — as in Ralph Hanna’s: The Lancastrians fostered one literary endeavor, courtly poetry, and tried to root out the other, the Bible in English. […] In contrast to the Chaucerian mode, a vernacular bible has, since the tenth century, always been central to English literary production.20

The polemical opposition here is fruitful, but there is a potential correction to make about voices and communities, and there are also some reciprocities to demonstrate between these very different traditions of writing. Nor should we assume a link between Arundel’s Constitutions and the ‘narrowing of the Chaucer tradition’ detected by Paul Strohm.21 The premise behind it is that most English literature, especially poetry, of the fifteenth century is monologic; and, whether one looks at the courtly or the biblical or both, it is simply not so. On the contrary, I would argue that the fifteenth century plays quite extraordinarily with voice; that its accomplishments with voice, though less ostentatious, are often more nuanced, complex and subtle than those of the Ricardian generation; and that Arundel’s Constitutions, and the intellectual climate these portend, contribute to their design. It is in the voice that we hear complicity, or resistance, or anxiety. In what follows on the subject of fifteenth-century voice I have concentrated for the most part on texts that can be dated close to the Constitutions, or that, even if belatedly, can be seen as their intellectual contemporaries. I have kept in view both religious and secular, courtly and biblical, and have focused on two questions: what are the resources for voice in the fifteenth century, and what inflects the choices individual writers make? I have concentrated on three major repertoires of voice that can be read through a range of major texts of the pre- and 19

‘For ye schal vnderstonde that a wikked, fayre spekynge tunge is the tree that oure Lord Ihesu Crist cursed for he fond theron no fruyt but all leues. By leues may be vnderstonde euil wordes’ (idle speech, avaunting, flattery, swearing, forswearing, backbiting, chiding, cursing, grucching, etc.): A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen, ed. by Venetia Nelson (Heidelberg: Winter, 1981), p. 211. 20 21

Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts’, p. 153.

Paul Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the Chaucer Tradition’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 4 (1982), 3–32.

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post-Arundel period: the Boethian, the Psalmodic, and the Pauline.22 I shall claim that they are public resources for interiority. The Boethian is the bedrock for voice throughout the fifteenth century, in religious as well as courtly contexts: Boethius has theological standing, the De musica is one of the foundational texts for voice itself,23 and Book III, metre 12 of the Consolation is one of the definitive treatments of what Ian Johnson has called the sapient Orpheus.24 The vernacular Consolation is Walton’s, not Chaucer’s. Johnson describes Walton’s relation to Chaucer as that of corrective imitation, and locates the point of difference in Chaucer’s classicism.25 The relevant passages in Walton’s two Prefaces are so steeped in reminiscences of Troilus, and so openly cite its renunciation of the pagan gods at the end of Book V, that I am more inclined to stress imitation over correction, except that what is being imitated is Chaucer’s high style in the Troilus, not at all his relatively bare though technical prose in the Boece. It is less likely that Chaucer creates the English taste for Boethius than that he shares it with a reading community in London, Oxford, and beyond, to which presumably Usk, and later Walton, also belong. Walton’s correction of Chaucer is therefore probably best seen as stylistic and rhetorical, replacing the plain prose that falls beneath Chaucer’s own poetic standard. Walton’s translation might then be said to be more Chaucerian than Chaucer’s, and one should visualize it at the beginning of a serious programme to upgrade English written language for serious argumentative and philosophical purposes. This is hardly an anti-intellectual programme. It is an attempt to raise the level of English translation, as with Nicholas Love, as with the Deguileville versions, especially the prose Pilgrimage of the Soul of 1413: the latter, like Love’s text, more pictorial and less abstract than 22 This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. There are many other important voices — the vox clamantis, the prophetic (including individual biblical prophets such as Jeremiah or Ezekiel, on which Mishtooni Bose has an essay forthcoming), the mythographic (Ovidian, Orphic), and so on. I pay attention here to those voices most conducive to maintaining public interiorities. 23 On the Boethian voice in English, see, for example, David Lawton, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 761–99; on Boethius and music see Henry Chadwick, Boethius: The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), especially pp. 84–101; and on both topics see also Katherine Zieman, ‘Chaucer’s Voys’, Representations, 60 (1997), 70–91. 24

Ian Johnson, ‘Walton’s Sapient Orpheus’, in The Medieval Boethius, ed. by Alastair J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), pp. 139–68; and Ann Astell, ‘Orpheus, Eurydice, and the “Double Sorwe” of Chaucer’s Troilus’, Chaucer Review, 23 (1989), 283–99, reprinted in her Job, Boethius and Epic Truth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 25

The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, p. 35.

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Piers Plowman, more suited to orderly sequential reading than a kind of concorded skimming, but of high linguistic register and stylistic quality — all three texts in their ways extending, rather than narrowing, the literary and intellectual range of the vernacular.26 Boethius, however, has a special relationship with statescraft, serving not as a fossilized topos of resignation and detachment but to express the personal dangers, as well as the moral and political indeterminacies, of access to power, to which its readers had reason to be sensitive. Boethius remains an intellectual force from Usk to The Kingis Quhair because people continue to be, or to take, political prisoners, or fear that others may. The Boethian voice is divided and potentially hazardous, redolent of the contest between worldly place and spiritual status (as in the Trinity treatise), set at issue in the lifestyle of prominent Londoners. The Boethian subject is within the circle of power, and simultaneously its victim. As such, it is remarkably assimilable to the voice of the Psalms. In Version B of Richard Maidstone’s translation of the penitential psalms, for example, the Psalmist is not just weakened but sent to his bed in what is plausibly a Boethian reminiscence.27 The poet who occupies and transforms the Boethian voice most fully after Arundel is Hoccleve in The Regement of Princes — also found in his bed, fearful of the world’s inconstancy; but Hoccleve’s handling of this voice is complicatedly intertextual. I want to reconsider Hoccleve’s notorious passage on the burning of John Badby, not in order to extenuate it but rather to ask why the episode is so prominently foregrounded only a couple of hundred lines into the Prologue to the Regement. It is of course topical, and it allows Hoccleve to mythologize his patron, but is it also structural and conceptual? There are three or more significant intertextual strands working at once here: the Boethian, in which Hoccleve stands in place of the prisoner and the Old Man is a Loathly Male metamorphosis of Lady Philosophy; the Chaucerian, in which the Old Man’s unwelcome truthtelling and unattractiveness — as Age and as Poverty — invoke the Pardoner’s Tale, again, as it were, in the wrong key; and the Langlandian. Crucially, the Old Man begins by interrogating the poet about his moral and professional qualifications for writing the poem, and he puts Hoccleve through a process like that run by Reason and Conscience in Piers Plowman, C-Text, Passus V. The framework is pointedly

26

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent; The Pilgrimage of the Soul, ed. by McGerr. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Sarah Noonan for much productive discussion about late medieval reading habits. 27

Richard Maidstone, The Seven Penitential Psalms, ed. by Valerie Edden (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990).

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penitential: the Old Man’s initial ‘Awak!’ needs to be heard on several different notes, not just that of Pandarus with Troilus. The concern is that the poet’s Boethian Thought is, in effect, at best Sloth: the moral of the interview is that the poet should be able to turn his voice to the public good — as he will, echoing the Vigilate: ‘Knyghthod awake! Thou sleepist to longe’.28 In response Hoccleve as character establishes his credentials, to the Old Man’s evident surprise, by his disowning of Badby and his ideas. As poet he becomes one of the principal chroniclers of the episode, and goes into the detail of Badby’s heretical ideas, transgressing the letter and arguably the spirit of the seventh Constitution by light quotation and translation of biblical verses. The interview itself enacts a form of licence (in Henry’s name, rather than Arundel’s). The episode, however, is designed to function as a public defence of literature. Over a century later we see an even more bizarre version of such self-licensing, even without a longer poem to authorize, in Skelton’s 1527 Replication against Certain Young Heretics Abjured of Late.29 Though Skelton’s macaronic, allusive and teasing poetics could hardly have less formal resemblance to Hoccleve’s, the generic similarity in itself constitutes a case for continuity (as Skelton himself asserts, with his usual cool impartiality): Among the scabbed skyes Of Wycliffes fleshe-flyes Ye strynged so Luthers lute That ye dawns all in a sute The heritykes ragged ray.

Skelton’s poem applies for, and grants itself, licence; it curries favour, characteristically at the wrong moment, with Wolsey; and it too contains an outraged vindication of orthodox attitudes. The doctrinal issues are more limited in Skelton’s poem — Mary, the saints, pilgrimage, the defence of Latin (implicitly of Latin scripture) — but this is because Thomas Bilney was an Erasmian moderate, not an extreme Lutheran. Skelton’s poem is also a vigorous apologia for archiepiscopal policing of the universities (such as Arundel carried out in Oxford).

28

Thomas Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. by Charles R . Blyth (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1999), p. 65, line 897. On the Badby burning, see Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987). 29

John Skelton, The Poetical Works of John Skelton, ed. by Alexander Dyce, 2 vols (London: Rodd, 1843), I, 230–50, lines 165–69. See also Vincent Gillespie, ‘Skelton’s Replycacion’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 273–311.

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His gleeful taunting of the two young scholars, including the unpleasingly accurate forecast that Bilney would one day burn at the stake, is frankly enthusiastic about ecclesiastical violence (as is Lydgate’s ‘In Defence of Holy Church’), whereas Hoccleve plays out the full drama of Prince Henry’s attempt at conciliation — having the flames doused and offering Badby a lifelong pension in return for recantation — and takes care to represent Badby’s bleak fate as his own choice, an early form of road rage. But Hoccleve’s and Skelton’s poetic performances are recognizably similar interventions by poets in defence of heresy hunting, and both are above all concerned with the public vindication of their competence to do so. The rhetorical climax of Skelton’s poem is not his easy victory over the already humiliated young scholars but his response to detractors, enemies he imagines impugning his right to speak on such a subject. His poem becomes the last of his obsessive apologies for his own craft, proving Howe there is a spyrituall, And a mysteriall, And a mysticall Effecte energiall, As Grekes do it call, Of suche an industry, And such a pregnancy, Of heavenly inspyracion In laureate creacyon Of poetes commendacion

— and so on (lines 365–74). This is not at all like Hoccleve in tone, but it is not at all unlike him in substance: in both, the public punishment of heresy enables the poet to demonstrate his indispensability, and to speak to, and on behalf of, power, albeit from a petitionary position — as Hoccleve to Oldcastle: ‘Rys up, a manly knight, out of the slow / Of heresie’.30 It is Skelton who appeals to the ultimate biblical authority, by way of Jerome’s prefaces to the Vulgate: I call to this rekenyng Dauyd, that royall kyng, Whom Hieronymus, That doctour glorious, Dothe bothe write and call Poete of poetes all, And prophete princypall. (ll. 316–22)

30

Hoccleve, Remonstrance against Oldcastle, lines 105–06.

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Skelton’s poem helps reveal something that is already happening in Hoccleve’s: the Boethian voice in Hoccleve is amplified into that of the Psalmist, especially in the penitential psalms. The poet who is depressed, weak and unworthy is called to penance in dialogue with the Old Man; both speakers, the old Man’s echoing Hoccleve’s in this, feel beset by their enemies. Hoccleve’s voice, the voice of one completely fallible, can also speak for and to the King and the community; and the claim, no less foundational than Skelton’s though more discreet and coded early in Hoccleve’s quiet scripturalism, is that God speaks through that voice. This is the situation of the Psalms. Where Skelton claims its authority, Hoccleve more subtly and more thoroughly puts it to use in and as the voice of his poem. And it is important for Hoccleve’s whole career to recognize him under the sign of the penitential psalms. The single most powerful moment is well-known, when, in the Complaint, Hoccleve writes the Latin text of Vulgate Psalm 30, Qui videbant me foras fugierunt a me, and translates: As said is in the psalter mighte I saye; They that me sy fledden away from me Foryete I was al out of mynde awaye As he that deed was from hertes cheartee.31

We may not always hear the Psalm as loudly as we should in the depiction of Hoccleve’s mental breakdown. For there is little distance between the subject position of the Complaint and that of the Preface to the Regement. ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’ is Hoccleve’s trope before it is Wyatt’s; the mirror in which he looks is penitential and scriptural; and the voice of Psalm 30 is always a trace in Hoccleve’s voice. In this instance it is the major key, Boethius the minor. James Simpson has given compelling readings of both Wyatt’s and Surrey’s fraught meditations on personal and political crises through their internalizing of the penitential psalms.32 I am suggesting here that the precedent is set in English writing a little after Arundel’s Constitutions. The centrality of the Psalms is not in itself surprising, of course — in personal devotion, in the liturgy, in the culture, for orthodox and Reformers alike: it is a target already too broad for the Constitutions. What is striking, however, is the use of the Psalms to explore and extend vernacular voice. Admittedly, the potential is not always fulfilled: most of the religious vernacular material of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries

31 32

Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint and Dialogue, ed. by Burrow, lines 78–81.

Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 322–29 (Wyatt); and his Burning to Read, pp. 154–76.

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flattens or normalizes the voice of the Psalms. Maidstone’s popular paraphrases, in this and other respects unimproved by Thomas Brampton’s of 1414,33 embrace the dialogue form of the penitential psalms but not the nuances of speaker — the ways in which, for example, David’s voice moves from extreme sinner to king or prophet, from despair to hope, from fear of enemies to triumph over them. The Psalms become a regular alternation of Penitent and Christ, with David — and, one might add, the God of the Jewish Bible — drained of any specific historical vitality. In other texts, the ‘I’ of the Psalmist is glossed, even more inflexibly, as ‘the just man’. Rolle’s Psalter sets out the common sacramental mood sequence from the penitential psalms: ‘The seuen psalms […] bigynnys all in sorrow and gretynge and bitternes of forthenkynge, & thai ende in certaynte of pardoun’.34 Even though David gets his due — Psalm 50, for instance, ‘is the psalme of Dauid when he had synned with Vris wife’ — he becomes the representative penitent, since, after all (the gloss is on even so specific a Psalm as 131, Memento domine Dauid): ‘In this psalme spekis Crist and his kirke’. Such narrowing has a historical basis in Augustine’s Enarrationes in Psalmos, acutely sensitive to voice though these are, because for Augustine the historical circumstances, the particular historical voice, are integuments. So he glosses Psalm 7, of David: ‘we are not going to consider the actual story with which the prophet has veiled its inner meaning but, assuming we have been converted to Christ, let us draw the veil aside’.35 But there is from the first an alternative and more multivocal tradition of Psalm commentary to supplement this sometimes reductive Christology: the prosopological, to which Marie-Josephe Rondeau devotes the second volume of his study of patristic commentaries on the Psalter.

33

For Maidstone, see n. 27 above. For Brampton, see the edition by James R . Kreuzer, ‘Thomas Brampton’s Metrical Paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms’, Traditio, 7 (1949), 359–403; for the ‘A’ Version, A Paraphrase on the Seven Penitential Psalms in English Verse, ed. by William Henry Black, Percy Society, 7 (London: [n. pub.], 1842). I am grateful to Annie Sutherland for showing me her forthcoming essay on Brampton’s version. 34

The Psalter or Psalms of David and Certain Canticles, with a Translation and Exposition in English, by Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. by H. R . Bramley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884), Psalm 6, p. 21. 35

Augustine of Hippo, Aurelii Augustini opera, Pars 10: Enarrationes in Psalmos, ed. by E. Dekkers and others, Corpus Christianorum series latina, 38–40, 3 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956); Augustine on the Psalms, trans. by Dame Scholastica Hegbin and Dame Felicitas Corrigan, 2 vols (Westminster, M D : Newman Press, 1961), I, 75. In general, see the fine study by Michael Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

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Rondeau opens with Hilary of Poitiers: ‘The main question in understanding the Psalms is to be able to discern in whose names one must understand the words to be spoken, and to whom’.36 This inquiry remains a viable enterprise in Peter Lombard’s Commentary, and is to hand as a measure of the unambitious character of Maidstone’s or Brampton’s generic paraphrases. It asks questions sometimes about how many authors the Psalms may have had (Augustine and Jerome insist on a single Psalmist, David); and about whether David was writing in his own voice or in persona, and, if the latter, how many personae he may employ and how distinctly. While ultimately in medieval exegesis a Christocentric reading is inevitable, much of the commentary acknowledges, for example, that in literary terms the Psalmist who expresses ‘his own’ sinfulness in ‘his own’ complaint also writes the answer to it, the divine voice; while in theological terms God writes the Psalmist writing God. ‘Hyt ys not ye that spekyn, but hyt ys the speryt of your fader that speketh in you’. This is an answer to the charge: ‘Your mouthe is not the mouthe of God’.37 It expresses the same, hard-won, confidence in interiority as a last resort that marks the treatise in Trinity, MS B. 14. 39. Such commentary responds creatively, without flattening, to what Rondeau calls la complexité dramatique of the Psalms, to the huge tides of mood and feeling that sweep through them and give them their spiritual and poetic life — moods that include negativity, fear, anger, despair, and dissent. The Psalms are the place where Christianity does its most urgent and extensive thinking about voice and persona, both religious and literary. They are a culture’s score for public interiorities. This tradition is finely represented in English writing of the fifteenth century by the Commentary on the Penitential Psalms by Eleanor Hull. I would add this to the list on which Annie Sutherland has placed The Chastising of God’s Children, of underrated, if not (given the superb work of Alexandra Barratt) neglected, texts. Hull’s text is handicapped by the fact that it is a commentary, takes no visible part in the controversies of the day, and was described by its later fifteenth-century scribe Richard Fox as translated from a French book — though no specific French source has yet been identified, and Hull’s writing has a clarity and scope that makes it clear that she fully understood whatever material she may have used. As Barratt

36

Marie-Joseph Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques du psautier (IIIe– V e siècles), Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 220, 2 vols (Roma: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1982–85), II, 29. 37

The Seven Psalms: A Commentary on the Penitential Psalms Translated by Dame Eleanor Hull, ed. by Alexandra Barratt, EETS, O. S. 307 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1995), p. 4.

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says, her book is ‘one of the most sustained pieces of spiritual exegesis in English’.38 And it is throughout a sustained essay on voice, Hull’s inquiry into the sweetness and beauty that David is able to make from his pain and trouble of soul. She holds firm to the particularity of the historical David, while representing him as a penitent, ‘this penaunt’ (p. 11) — at times distinguishing between verses that reflect his specific situation and those places where he ‘spekyth in the person of every true repentant soule’ (p. 19). She is ready to deal with multiple voices and interlocutors, distinguishing, for example, between what David saw ‘by the speryt of prophecye’ (p. 23) and what he speaks as a leader for the sake of ‘all synners’ (p. 24). In her commentary on Psalm 6, she defends ‘the taryying of our Lord’ (p. 12): God delays his response to human prayer until the recipient is ready for the call. Only a fool, she writes, feels perfect enough to say: ‘See me here al redy; sey what thou wylt’. David, she adds, was ‘non of hem, but he speketh in oure persone and answeryth ous by wordys that God put in his mouthe forto chastyse them that mysdoth ayenst him’ (p. 12) — a superbly unshowy sentence containing six or so separate subject positions. Layers of voice, temporality, and agency are quietly and lucidly combined in this remarkable commentary, its literary complexity quarried from the Psalms. There is no question about Hull’s orthodoxy; she was a member of the confraternity of St Alban’s, served briefly in the household of Joan of Navarre, and had Beaufort connections. Barratt suggests that her treatise may have helped inspire John Fisher’s sermons on the penitential psalms, commissioned by Lady Margaret Beaufort.39 There is no other evidence that her text was widely circulated. At the time of Arundel’s Constitutions Hull was an adolescent preparing for marriage. Had her text been to hand in 1413, it would have delighted Julian of Norwich, and its subtle attention to voice might have engaged Hoccleve. My point is that the Psalms confer an education in voices, an interiority. In times of censorship or oppression they are a cleft in the rock, to be accessed by orthodox and heterodox alike according to training, preconception, culture, community, or temperament. It is almost but not quite as Lynn Staley concludes an important article: ‘In the language of and responses to the penitential psalms we can find the

38

Alexandra Barratt, ‘Dame Eleanor Hull: a Fifteenth-Century Translator’, in Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation, ed. by Roger Ellis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 87–101 (pp. 95–96). 39

The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, ed. by John E. B. Mayor, EETS, E. S. 27 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1876); Exposition of the Seven Psalms, trans. by Anne Barbeau Gardiner (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998).

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tools for the expression of a subjectivity that will, in the end, separate itself from the outside figures of moral authority’.40 To my mind there is no ‘will’ about it. It will not necessarily; but it may. The potential is there, already in the voices. These voices exist in pre-existing scripturalism and in the heart of orthodoxy, even beyond the containment of literacy — and quite beyond the reach of Constitutions. The range of psalmodic voice gains even greater potency when associated, as often in religious writing throughout the Arundel period, with the third and final strand in this brief inventory of resources, the Pauline. I do not mean to exclude the non-Pauline epistles here, which are also crucial, but Paul is the Apostle, no longer the least of them, and the force of his writing and personal narrative overwhelms the New Testament from the Gospels to the apocalypse. Especially when Hebrews is attributed to Paul, the non-Pauline epistles appear formidably as his adjuncts. The association between Paul and the Psalms has the authority of Augustine, in his commentary on Vulgate Psalm 31 (Beati quorum), Augustine’s favourite (he kept it in his study, and read it on his deathbed): While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, I will confess my transgressions to the LORD , and you forgave the guilt of my sin. (Psalm 32. 3–5, New Revised Standard Version)

According to Augustine, the psalm treats ‘of the grace of God and our justification through grace, not through any preceding merits’;41 and the authority is Paul in Romans 4, with which Augustine’s second discourse on this psalm is suffused. Christ speaks through David, the Prophet; but Paul the Apostle speaks for Christ, and mediates between the sinful and righteous voices of the Psalms, the divine and the human. Paul is Saul before he becomes Paul, because he must precede himself as David. The voice of Paul merging with David’s confers a poetic interiority that speaks both of community and of persecution. The link is momentous for vernacular writing of the Arundel generation: translations of the epistles abound, with or without their narrative frame in Acts. This is the substance of the Paues version, and accounts for many of the biblical

40

Lynn Staley, ‘The Penitential Psalms: Conversion and the Limits of Lordship’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37 (2007), 221–60 (p. 260). 41

Enarrationes, Psalm 31, I, 189; St Augustine on the Psalms, II, 13.

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passages translated in The Book to a Mother.42 There is an excitement in hearing Paul’s powerful voice in the vernacular, just as there is to be a reawakening for Thomas Bilney when hearing Paul’s voice as if for the first time in Erasmus’s Greek. Yet it is a voice at once unmistakable and metamorphic, with a history, barely containable in one identity, as persecutor and apostle, as Roman citizen and tentmaker, as Gentiles’ champion and Pharisee; it is a voice that moves across temporalities, before and after his conversion, the time of travel, the age to come, the time in between; and it is a voice that weaves through a complex series of rhetorical occasions and culturally variable audiences, the voice of one who sets out to be all things to all people. It is therefore a universal resource, expressive of both affiliation and alienation: ‘Frend in Cryste, as Seynt Paule saith, we ne hauen here no cyte that is dwelling, but we seche on that is to come hereafter’.43 There is much here that can be coded, articulate, and yet remain unspoken, or at the least veiled in ambivalence. In the Digby play of the Conversion of Paul, his prior service as knight of the Christ-slayers Annas and Caiaphas is depicted, and they are called Jewish bishops, but no possible bearing on contemporary affairs is made explicit until the later and clearly Protestant addition to the play, which portrays these bishops explicitly as the servants of devils. In what seems to have been the proto-version, c. 1500, by contrast, this is not spelled out: Saul simply stands as the zealous servant of a persecuting state.44 But the relevance and appeal of Paul’s voice to persecuted subgroups is evident, and in many respects it seems to me the most difficult scriptural virus for orthodoxy to disinfect, one that yields a certain discreet immunity from institutional control. Just as Julian of Norwich assures Margery Kempe, so the author of The Lantern of Light tells his community: the Spirit speaks in you, though you are not graduate men in schools. From the first, in Paul the Church is not one: we hear it in his work as a series of segmented,

42 Book to a Mother: An Edition with Commentary, ed. by Adrian James McCarthy, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 92 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981). 43

The Lyfe of Soule: An Edition with Commentary, ed. by Helen M. Moon, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 75 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1978), p. 1. 44

‘The Conversion of St Paul’, The Digby Plays with an Incomplete ‘Morality’ of Wisdom who is Christ, ed. by F. J. Furnivall, EETS, E. S. 70 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1896), pp. 26–52; The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. by Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1986), pp. 98–105.

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if not fragmented, subgroups, a hotchpotch compilation not altogether unlike the Paues New Testament version. Paul’s voice, and its history, becomes a resource for orthodox and heterodox alike; the history of Arundel’s time echoes both its impassioned conviction and its duality. In the name of orthodoxy Arundel’s Constitutions seek to regulate irregularity, and its concomitant belief in individual inspiration. Yet such a subject position — allied, as in the Psalms, to antecedent sinfulness — is itself Pauline. So a Pauline voice can be a form of textual sanctuary, a sustained ambiguity about community, as in those texts we often find hard to date addressed to ‘Frende in Christ’, or ‘Brother’, or ‘Sister’. I suspect that we play the game of some of these texts when we identify them as monastic (or even as Wycliffite): The Book to a Mother, for one, teases its readers with hints about female enclosure, allied, uneasily or strategically, to the opening general claim that all one’s fellow Christians are one’s ‘Mother’. (Is the echo of Augustine’s Confessions accidental?) The Pauline or apostolic is a real voice. It can be a claim, as when Margery Kempe’s travel narrative switches from ‘this creature’ to ‘we’ (surely an invocation of the Acts of the Apostles?), but it is also easily and obviously deployed as a disguise, a persona. Again, as with the Psalms, such a voice, or even persona, does not have to separate itself from outside authority. But it potentially may; and again, out of the combat zone of the usual polemicists, the hearing of that separation depends largely on the particular reader. Its subject is the spiritual discrimination of voice. It would have appealed as much to Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as to polemicists such as Richard Wyche. It does not require a gloss. Even Thomas Arundel might have wished to make his peace with it. One may imagine how a reader even a little disenchanted with the Church’s authority, coupled by Arundel with that of the state, may have received a vernacular translation of I John. I quote again from the Paues version: Bote, my smale children, ye beth of god; & euerych spirit that vndoth Crist ne is noght of God; and this is Antecrist; of whom ye han yherd that he schal come: & now he is in the world. Bote, my smale children, ye beth of God, and ye han ouercome hym: for he that is in yow is gretter than he that is in the world. Thai beth of this world, and therefore thei specheth of the world, and the world yhereth them. Bote we beth of God: and he that knoweth God yhereth ous; and who that is nought of God he ne hereth ous noght. In this we han yknowe the spirit of trewthe, and the spirit of errour. My dereste bretheren, loue we togydere; for charyte is of God, & euerych man that loueth is yboren of God, and knoweth God.45

45

Biblical Version, ed. by Paues, p. 40.

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For those who are moved by this (as I am), it is worth asking: are we moved more by the passage itself or by its vernacular translation — by the voice, at least as much as by the theology, vernacular or otherwise? Its distinctions, of course, on the public level, are just those that the Trinity treatise prescribes for interpreting voice. If we interpret voice differently, we may come to a more nuanced view of the fifteenth century. It will not, in itself, dispense with terms such as propaganda, opposition, and even oppression. But voice is the inside of such terms, and it is vital to the texts that the fifteenth century imagined. To speak of public interiorities, if somewhat (though not entirely) paradoxical, seems just — and apt above all for the new work of fifteenth-century writing. I have tried here to begin a description of some major fifteenth-century resources for voice, with a view not only to what they were but to how they may have been received. The evidence is that the fifteenth century produces some extraordinary achievements in the field of mixed voice, and does so consciously. The extent of these achievements has only now begun to be recognized. They are in many respects more subtle and more complex than the more famous achievements of the late fourteenth century, sometimes necessarily so. Many of the options of that time — such as a debate structure in which extremes do not have to be moderated, or monologues in character, raising a question about the extent, if any, of authorial endorsement — are no longer safe options in the cultural circumstances of the new century; and much of the rethinking begins at the time of Arundel’s Constitutions. Do the Constitutions have anything to do with the achievements? In spite of all the timely revisionism in the present volume: almost certainly. It is not always the intent of regulatory censorship that counts so much as the atmosphere it creates, the blundering attempts at enforcement, and the inhibitions that suggest themselves as urgent subjects for internalizing. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the last years of his life, the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub used to baulk at the crowds of his compatriots that would come out to greet his readings in Anglophone countries. In Tasmania he once asked me: ‘Why? The Wall is down. What any longer do we have in common?’ And he added: ‘The great loss is in poetry. In those days we could not write about commissars, so we wrote about kings, and the commissars were pleased and passed our work. Then we felt very smart. But now what do we have to write about, without them?’ A pause. ‘Nature. Sex. Just like in English. Flowers’. Arundel ensures that fifteenth-century writers, of religious prose or of public poetry, need not write about flowers. He is therefore their sponsor: a Maecenas, more likely the Pontius Pilate, of voice.

Part III The Dynamics of Orthodox Reform

C ONCILIARISM AND H ERESY IN E NGLAND * Alexander Russell

J

ean Gerson, addressing the Council of Konstanz in February 1417, railed against the corruption of the Church. Contemporary habits could not be favourably compared with the purity of apostolic times, and Gerson drew the well-worn conclusion that as the Church had swollen in size it had abandoned the selfless spirit of Christian brotherhood. This applied especially to its centralized government. Gerson lamented that ‘the pope and his curia are engaged in many profane and unsuitable cases and law-suits, and are consumed by their anxious preoccupation with business’.1 Joshua’s criticism of Moses was equally true of the pope and his flock: ‘You will waste away with foolish labour, both you, and this people that is with you’.2 Gerson’s words were not dissimilar from those being used by Thomas Gascoigne in England writing thirty years later. Gascoigne had great respect for the ideal of papal government, but had no illusions about how it functioned in practice. He pointed out that ‘the pope often misleads and is himself misled, and it should be made clear how he errs, so that the truth be known’.3 Like Gerson, he condemned those who had embraced a spirit of narrow legalism, whilst abandoning their

* I would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Arts & Humanities Research Council which has made possible the research on which this article is based. 1

Jean Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, VI, 224: ‘Rursus si judicia minora reprobantur in Moyse, videamus in Summo Pontifice et curia sua quid de tot profanissimis et indignissimis causarum et litigiorum continuis et anxiis occupationibus?’ 2 3

Gerson, De potestate ecclesiastica, VI, 224; cf. Exodus 18. 18.

Oxford, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 118, p. 164 (this MS and Lat. 117 are both paginated, not foliated): ‘Item papa sepe fallit et fallitur ergo in quo fallit et fallitur manifestaretur ut veritas cognoscatur’. See Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 152.

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Christian duties. The burdensome consequences of misgovernment were plain for all to see. Rome was ruining ‘the church by promoting bad men whom it and the king have agreed upon’.4 These men were only appointed when bribes had been paid to papal courtiers. ‘Alas, Alas’, wails Gascoigne, ‘[corrupt prelates] have entrusted Jerusalem to the blind and the drunk, and they exclude those who are willing and able and know how to help the souls of the faithful!’5 Although their diagnoses of the Church’s ills were similar, Gerson and Gascoigne had very different perspectives on the prospects for reform. Gerson not only believed that reform was possible, he was convinced that it could be given an institutional footing in the frequent gatherings of general councils.6 He was unequivocal in condemning the popes for failing to call councils regularly.7 As a body truly representing the Church, a general council was infused with the Holy Spirit and could be trusted to provide guidance on matters of doubt. Gascoigne was clearly sympathetic to this programme. After wringing his hands at the intolerable abuses arising from the reservation of benefices by the pope, he invokes the corrective authority of the general council: ‘may God, if it please him, grant us relief in a general council, either through the appeal of the king or the realm!’8 But this was not a typical refrain in Gascoigne’s work. More usual was his frustrated recognition that the papacy would have to be relied upon to reform itself. The best that could be hoped for was that the pope himself would be a good man who would resist the efforts of his curial officials to corrupt him. Gascoigne pointed out that at the time he was writing, 1447, the Church was ruled by an admirable pontiff: Nicholas V. For a long time, he says, the church has tried to 4

Oxford, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 117, p. 291: ‘Item [Roma] destruit ecclesiam malos promovendo secundum quod rex et ipse consentiunt’. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 13. 5

MS Lat. 118, p. 157: ‘Heu! heu! posuerunt Jerusalem in custodiam cecorum et ebreorum […] et excludunt eos quis sciunt, possunt, ut optant magis animabus prodesse’ (Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 146). 6

This view was accepted at Konstanz and was enshrined in the decree ‘Frequens’ of October 1417, which required the regular assembly of general councils. See Phillip H. Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, 1414–1418 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 105–09, 137 and L’Église au temps du Grande Schisme et de la crise conciliaire, ed. by E. Delaruelle and others, 2 vols (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1962), I, 199. For a translation of ‘Frequens’, see Crowder, Unity, Heresy and Reform, pp. 128–29. 7

Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, VI, 225: ‘nulla fuit hactenus nec erit in posterum perniciosior pestis in Ecclesia quam omissio generalium conciliorum’. 8

MS Lat. 117, p. 438: ‘In concilio generali deus si sibi placeat det remedium vel per appellacionem regis et regni’.

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excuse its corruption by pointing out that the problem has been the lack of a good head in the Roman curia. He then remarks plaintively: ‘If a reformation of many wrongs cannot be brought about at present, you wonder when it will ever come, for “if the green tree does not bear fruit, what shall be done in the dry?”’9 This was not a particularly hopeful outlook. In Gascoigne’s mind reform was as necessary in the 1440s as it had ever been. Why then was the general council largely missing from his bad-tempered commentary? Had the English ever placed their hopes in the efficacy of the general council as a reforming body, and if so, what had happened in the interim?10 The rest of this paper will attempt to provide an answer to these questions. Before we can understand the place of the general council in English thought in the fifteenth century, we must touch upon the ideology used to justify its authority. Gerson’s hope that the general council could act as a reforming body to cleanse the church hierarchy of its corruption rested on the controversial doctrine that under certain circumstances the authority of the general council outweighed the authority of the pope.11 This idea was at the heart of the conciliarist theory, and it was crucial to the reformers’ plight, because if the general council did not possess the power to correct the pope, a corrupt pope would be very unlikely to submit to it willingly, and the evils arising from papal misgovernment could become endemic. How was conciliarism received in England? On one hand, there seems to have been a strong reforming movement within the English Church in the fifteenth century. The complaints that we have heard from Gascoigne were by no means exceptional. The reform proposals drafted by Richard Ullerston for the English delegates to the Council of Pisa in 1408, and the articles drawn up by Oxford University for the Council of Konstanz, shared a commitment to the improvement of pastoral care, the spread of preaching, and the removal of the abuses stemming from the centralized government of the Church.12 As Chris Nighman has shown,

9

MS Lat. 118, p. 171: ‘Si ergo iam non fiat plurium malorum reformatio, putas quando veniet, “si in viridi ligno” non fiet fructus, “quomodo in arido fiet?”’. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 157; cf. Luke 23. 31. 10

For a detailed study of the reception of conciliarism in England during the Great Schism, see Harvey, Solutions to the Schism. 11

For a recent analysis of Gerson’s thought on this matter, see G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, Jean Gerson, Apostle of Unity (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 272–78. 12

Ullerston’s proposals are reproduced in von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, cols 1126–71. For a study of these and their context, see Harvey, ‘English Views on the Reforms’. The Oxford University reform articles are printed in Wilkins, Concilia, III, 360–65. For

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these concerns resurfaced in the speeches of the English delegates who lamented the greed and corruption prevalent in the Church.13 But it was not all doom and gloom: there was also a mood of expectation. The bishop of Salisbury, Robert Hallum, greeted the Council of Konstanz as a new dawn for the Church when it would lay aside its faults and be born anew.14 But even here, the English delegates were separated from their conciliarist colleagues in one crucial respect. The Oxford reform articles for Konstanz were silent about the supremacy of the general council over the pope. Indeed they warned the English delegates that they should not play any part in the deposition of Pope John XXIII against his will.15 It seems ironic that this is exactly what the English did. Nor did they take a back-seat in the proceedings. They sent some of their party to persuade Pope John to return to the council after his flight, and then played their part in collecting depositions against him to serve in his trial.16 The English were prepared to renounce their obedience to the pope in practice. But they seemed less committal when it came to theory. Traces of conciliarist rhetoric are rare in the surviving speeches of the delegates. Even Hallum, the staunch reformer, seemed to have pinned all his hopes on bringing about reform before the election of the new pope. He does not seem to have envisaged a new ecclesiastical order in which the frequent gatherings of the general council would safeguard the ideals of the reformers. In Hallum’s view

one of the manuscript sources from which this was collated, see Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 183, fols 17r–21 r. 13

Nighman, ‘Reform and Humanism’. See also Chris L. Nighman, ‘Rhetorical SelfConstruction and its Political Context in Richard Fleming’s Reform Sermon for Passion Sunday at the Council of Constance’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 33 (2001), 405–25. In addition to Nighman’s many articles on the reform sermons preached at Konstanz (too many to list conveniently here), see C. M. D. Crowder, ‘Some Aspects of the English Nation at the Council of Constance to the Election of Martin V, 1414–17’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1953), pp. 379–85. 14

For Hallum’s role at Konstanz see C. M. D. Crowder, ‘Henry V, Sigismund and the Council of Constance’, in Historical Studies, IV: Papers Read before the Fifth Irish Conference of Historians, ed. by G. A. Hayes-McCoy (London: Bowes, 1963), pp. 104–05. See also, Ernest F. Jacob, Essays in the Conciliar Epoch (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953), pp. 53, 58–59, 83–84. 15 16

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 360. Corpus Christi, MS 183, fol. 17r.

John Spofford and John Catterick acted as the representatives of the English nation on the committee which took depositions against the pope. They declared him guilty of the charges brought against him; von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, IV , 182. For an analysis of the English involvement see Crowder, ‘Some Aspects’, p. 233.

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reforms needed to be legalized and set in train before the coronation of the pope, for they would be unlikely to follow after it.17 The uncomfortable dualism of the English stance towards the general council is captured in the work of Thomas Netter. The first book of Netter’s Doctrinale, which contained his statement on ecclesiastical authority, was presented to Pope Martin V in April 1426. It was written after the disappointment of the Council of Pavia-Siena, in which the cause of reform had been derailed by the chaos of international politics and the indifference of the pope, but before the Council of Basel had shattered the harmony of the conciliarist movement, alienating moderates by its extremism.18 Netter himself attended the Council of Pisa, and it is possible that he was at Konstanz as well.19 He praises the general council, saying that it is the institution which is closest in form to the universal Church.20 Some commentators have taken this to mean that Netter was a conciliarist.21 It is vital to distinguish, however, between the unexceptional view which recognized the importance of general councils and the controversial standpoint which acknowledged that under certain conditions the general council could be superior

17

For the view that Hallum was working for reform before the election of the new pope, see Crowder, ‘Henry V’, p. 105. 18

For Pavia-Siena, see Walter Brandmüller, Das Konzil von Pavia-Siena, 1423–1424, 2 vols (München: Aschendorff, 1968–74). For ideas and diplomacy at Basel see Antony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy, 1430–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), and his Council and Commune: The Conciliar Movement and the Fifteenth-Century Heritage (London: Burns and Oates, 1979). The English participation (and non-participation) at Basel is covered by A. N. E. D. Schofield, ‘England and the Council of Basel’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum, 5 (1973), 1–117. 19

Netter was not one of the official English delegates at Konstanz, but there are suggestions that he visited the council. See BRUO, II, 1343–44. In his history of the English Carmelites, John Bale says that Netter was present at Konstanz. See Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 41, fol. 177r. 20

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 376: ‘ipsa convocatio Synodi est tam conformis Ecclesiae universali; non tamen est universalis Ecclesia, nec ejus decretum, ut sit fides Symbolica; sed Ecclesiae Catholicae imago propinquior’. 21

Kirk S. Smith, ‘An English Conciliarist? Thomas Netter of Walden’, in Popes, Teachers and Canon Law in the Middle Ages, ed. by J. R . Sweeney and S. Chodorow (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 290–99 (p. 295): ‘There can be no doubt that Netter deserves the label “conciliarist”’. I agree with Smith’s general interpretation of Netter’s thought, but take issue with this particular identification. To be fair, Smith later admits that ‘Netter’s conciliar thought is highly erratic, at times even contradictory’ (p. 298).

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to the pope.22 Only the latter view can meaningfully be called conciliarist. If we examine it closely, Netter’s opening statement on the general council is very revealing. Whereas Gerson had been sure that the general council represented the Church, and its decisions embodied the consensus of the universal Church, Netter will only admit that it comes close to attaining this ideal.23 There is a tension in Netter’s thought between the value of communal consensus in the Church and the sacred status of papal authority. For Netter, a dichotomy existed between the traditions of the Church, accepted by all the faithful from the apostolic church onwards and the aberrations of the heretics who ignored the common interpretation of Christian doctrines in order to walk in the path of error.24 He was at pains to refute those who argued that consensus and tradition provided no guarantee that any doctrine was true. In this view, only doctrines which could be founded upon scriptural precedent had any claim to legitimacy. Netter ascribes this view to Wyclif and alleges that Wyclif applied it to the general council, denying that there was anything intrinsically sacred about conciliar decrees.25 Wyclif, in Netter’s citation, argued that since doctrinal matters had been resolved by the teaching of the scriptures, it would be dangerous to call general councils superfluously. The word of God, working through the scriptures and the spirits of the righteous, already provided sufficient guidance.26 Netter had to respond to this attack by defending the general council and with it the value of

22

For a judicious attempt to define ‘conciliarism’ in this period, see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 72. 23 For the problem of representation in the thought of the conciliarists, see Black, Monarchy and Community, pp. 15–22. In the thought of the early conciliarists, Black argues, the general council ‘simply was the church in its jurisdictional form’. 24

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 381.

25

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 383. ‘Blasphema (inquit) haeresis foret, quod si major pars talium sententiae cuicumque consenserit, tunc est verax’. I have not been able to find any of the following passages of Wyclif quoted by Netter in Loserth’s printed edition of Wyclif’s works. For Netter’s detailed knowledge of Wyclif’s works, see Hudson, PR, pp. 53–54. For his use of earlier compilations of Wyclif’s errors, see Hudson, ‘Notes of an Early Fifteenth-Century Research Assistant, and the Emergence of the 267 Articles against Wyclif’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 685–97 (pp. 695–96). 26

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 378: ‘Non quaeramus ergo superflue Concilium qualiter facere debeamus, cum verbum Dei, quod est Scriptura Sacra et impulsus Spiritus in recte viventibus satis doceat’.

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consensus in the Church. Jerome and Augustine were called into the ring on his side. Paul did not address the Galatians in his own name alone, but called upon all his brothers as witnesses of the faith. He did this, in the words of an authority taken to be Jerome, ‘so that he should not be considered unworthy to bring forth the doctrine alone’.27 Netter then cites Augustine’s answer to the Donatists and uses it as an answer to Wyclif. The only reason that Cyprian of Carthage dared to question the instruction of the bishop of Rome about the rebaptism of heretics was that a general council of the whole world had not yet put the matter beyond dispute.28 Netter’s emphasis on communal values soon gave way to a firm defence of hierarchical principles, however. This defence shows us just how far Netter was from sharing the views of the conciliarists. It also suggests why he chose to distance himself from them. A comparison of Gerson’s and Netter’s treatment of the key texts pertaining to papal authority will show us why the basic contentions of conciliarism were unacceptable to Netter. In Matthew 16. 19, Christ granted Peter the keys of binding and loosing within heaven and earth. Gerson glossed this text to mean that the ‘keys were given not to one man, but to the whole church’.29 Further, he alluded to the text in which Paul had admonished Peter to his face, for having kept the Jewish rites hypocritically. Gerson declared: ‘Disquiet was caused in the church by Peter’s hypocrisy, and so he was compelled to follow the doctrine that he himself had taught in his writings, and he appeared in front of the church to account for his actions on matters touching the faith. Had he not done so, the church would not have trusted him’.30 Gerson takes this scriptural example as an

27

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, col. 379. ‘Ne (inquit) solus indigne ferre putaretur, suam conculcari doctrinam, Apostolus objurgaturus Galatas propter conversationem suam, non tantum ex sua persona scribit ad eos, sed ex omnium fratrum’. In fact, the passage is not by Jerome, but had been mistakenly attributed to him. See Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi […] operum tomus primus, ed. by D. Vallarsi, 11 vols (Verona, 1734–42), XI, cols 835–36 for an explanation and col. 980 for the passage itself. 28

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 380. See Augustine, De baptismo contra Donatistas in PL, XLIII, col. 129. ‘Nec nos ipsi tale aliquid auderemus asserere, nisi universae Ecclesiae concordissima auctoritate firmati; cui et ipse [Cyprian] sine dubio cederet’. 29

Gerson, De auferibilitate sponsi ab ecclesia, in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, III, 301: ‘Claves datae sunt nedum uni sed unitate’. 30

Gerson, De auferibilitate sponsi ab ecclesia, in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, III, 302: ‘Subortum est murmur in Ecclesia ita ut compulsus sit Petrus doctrinam insequi quam scriptis tradidit, ut scilicet paratus esset coram tota Ecclesia rationem reddere de ea quae in ipso erat fide et spe; alioquin non sibi credidisset Ecclesia’.

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indication that the pope may be disciplined by his subjects. Other popes have also had to account for their actions to their church, Gerson points out, and he states that they did this ‘by no means out of humble condescension as some pretend, but out of necessity and obligation’.31 Unfortunately for the conciliarist cause in England, Wyclif had made similar use of the same passages of scripture. It must have been with no small unease that Netter read Wyclif’s comments on Matthew 16. 18, where Christ told Peter that he was the rock upon which he would build his Church: It should not be understood that Peter personally was this rock, but that the rock referred to Peter figuratively, so that the true rock upon which the Catholic church must be built is Christ.32

This interpretation had, of course, originally been advanced by Augustine.33 But Wyclif and Gerson were both using it to undermine papal pretensions to unlimited authority within the Church. When Netter read Wyclif’s comments on Matthew he must have been struck that an argument which had been used by orthodox theologians to solve a very unusual crisis in the government of the church was also being used by a heretic to further his savage attack upon the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy. This was a worrying sign, and Netter could not afford to mince his words in response. He runs through all the texts of the New Testament referring to Peter’s place among the Apostles and glosses them to show that, in his own words, Peter is ‘the master of all causes, he is the master of the whole faith [...] and there will be no virtue of which Peter is not the guardian and the master’.34 Netter’s commentary on the passage in which Paul rebuked Peter to his face is worth quoting in full, because it sheds light on the triangular relationship between conciliarism, heresy and the conservative reaction in England. Wyclif had used the

31

Gerson, De auferibilitate sponsi ab ecclesia, in Gerson: Œuvres complètes, ed. by Glorieux, III, 302: ‘sic alii plures judicium subiere concilii; nequaquam ex humili condescensione, sicut fingunt aliqui, sed ex debito et obligatione’. 32

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 262: ‘non intelligendo quod Petrus erat personaliter illa petra, sed quod Petrus figurative dicebatur a Petra, quae est Christus, super quam petram est Ecclesia catholica erigenda’. 33

Augustine, Retractiones in PL, XXXII, col. 618: ‘ac sic Petrus ab hac petra appellatus personam Ecclesiae figuraret […] Non enim dictum est illi, Tu es petra; sed, Tu es Petrus. Petra autem erat Christus’. 34

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 263: ‘Petrus magister ergo est omnis fidei, innocentiae, castitatis, parsimoniae, charitatis, tolerantiae: et nulla erit virtus, cujus custos, cujus magister non fuerit Sanctus Petrus’.

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passage to make much the same point as Gerson: papal authority could be overruled if it worked against the interests of the Church. In Netter’s words, [Wyclif] recounts how Paul rebuked Peter concerning his deceitful observance of the laws. If he wishes to demote Peter from pre-eminence with this excuse and to equate Paul’s authority with Peter’s, he knows that he has taken no authority away from the true pastors of the church who are occasionally humbly subjected to the reproaches of their subjects, indeed who are willingly laid low [...] Peter showed his superiority and his humility joined together at one and the same time, for afterwards in his second letter, in the manner of a mild superior and prelate who had been willingly humiliated, he approved and defended the letters of Paul, even those passages in which Paul relates his being rebuked.35

Gerson may have agreed with Netter’s basic assertion here: that no power was taken away from Peter by Paul’s act of criticism. But he would not have agreed that Paul’s rebuke was only validated by Peter’s acceptance of it. As we have seen, Gerson had emphasized in direct contrast that on occasion popes were obliged to account for their actions. It is not difficult to understand why Netter defended the doctrine of Petrine supremacy so uncompromisingly. An attack on the pre-eminence of Peter was, for Netter, an attack on the entire hierarchy of priestly offices in the church. He reacts with horror to Wyclif’s suggestion that all the Apostles possessed a plenitude of power: What are you doing Wyclif? If you destroy the priestly order, you destroy the Church. Nor do the snares that you lay aim only to undermine the primacy of Peter, but without cause bishops will be made priests, and if bishops should be made equal with priests, their superiority will be nullified.36

Netter never mentions any conciliarists by name in the Doctrinale, and never enters into an explicit rejection of their doctrines. This would hardly have been a very diplomatic move in the circumstances of the 1420s when the Church was trying to heal the wounds of the schism. But I cannot believe that a theologian of Netter’s 35

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 255: ‘Commemorat item, quomodo Paulus Petrum reprehenderit de observatione simulata legalium. Quod si velit ex hoc colore Petrum a Principatu dejicere, et aequare illi Paulum, sciat a veris ecclesiae pastoribus nihil authoritativae potestatis imminui, quod subditorum suorum interdum increpationibus humiliter sunt subjecti, sponte prostrati […] immo significans Petrus majoritatem suam simul et humilitatem esse conjunctas, postmodum Epistola sua secunda, Pauli authorizat et defendit Epistolas, tamquam Major mitis, et Praelatus sponte dejectus, etiam illas, in quibus eum Paulus commemorat reprehensum’. 36

Netter, Doctrinale, ed. by Blanciotti, I, col. 249: ‘Quod facis Wicleff? Si tollis ordinem, tollis Ecclesiam. Nec tantum contra Primatum Petri proficit quod moliris; sed sine causa Episcopi, sine causa Presbyteri fiunt, si Episcopi ad Presbyterum statuatur aequalitas, majoritas abscindatur’.

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calibre, who had attended the Council of Pisa, could have been unaware of what the conciliarists were saying. I think that he was afraid that if he were to accept the conciliarist tenets about the conditional basis of papal authority he would play into the hands of the heretics. After all, there were signs that authors inspired by Wyclif could also find canonistic texts which contradicted the prevailing interpretation of the papal monarchy. Entries in Wycliffite commonplace books pointed to passages from the canon law which said that the pope should not necessarily presume to call himself the vicar of Peter. They also made clear that popes were under obligation to act as good pastors and that wicked popes, such as the heretical Pope Anastasius II, had been punished in their own lifetimes by God.37 Other canonistic texts were cited to demonstrate that the pope could not create new laws which contradicted the Gospel or the words of the apostles.38 These Wycliffite scholars often drew on much the same material as the conciliarists, but used it with the more subversive aim of questioning the legitimacy of the Church hierarchy.39 For those, like Netter, who saw themselves as warriors for the traditional Church, to accept the arguments of Gerson was to give the game away in England. On the issue of conciliarism, Wyclif had forced his hand. At this point we come back to the question which was posed at the outset. Why was the general council largely absent from Gascoigne’s vision of church reform?40 One answer is that he was writing as the Council of Basel was finally drawing to its ignominious end. It had put the most extreme pretensions of the conciliarists into practice by ignoring the pope’s bull of dissolution in 1431 and by refusing to acknowledge his transfer of the council to Ferrara in 1437. It had further appalled conservatives and moderates alike by suspending the pope from his duties in 1438. The English government had developed a complicated relationship with the council. It had been extremely wary of its extremism, but for diplomatic reasons could not 37

The Wycliffite Floretum made this point. See London, British Library, MS Harley 401, fol. 209 . For studies of the Floretum and its English translations see Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 13–29 and Christina von Nolcken, The Middle English Translation of the Rosarium Theologie (Heidelberg: Winter, 1979). For the reference to Pope Anastasius in the Decretum, see D. 19 c. 9. r

38

MS Harley 401, fol. 316 v : ‘Iudicet ergo militans ecclesia si papa sit [...] domino et legi sue obedientissimus, maxime de legis sue limitibus contentatus, non presumens ad legem suam addere vel ab ea minuere’. 39

For the place of Pope Anastasius II in canonistic thought, see Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 38, 42–45. 40

For some illuminating comments on the reception of conciliarism in England during the fifteenth century, see Harvey, England, Rome and the Papacy, pp. 214–46.

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afford to absent itself entirely. Its main intention had been to use the council as a forum for the condemnation of the Hussite heresy, and the views of its English spokesman, Peter Payne.41 But it appears from the surviving documents that as far as the English government was concerned, reform of the Church was never really on the agenda.42 The disaster of the Council of Basel must have crushed the expectation of reformers that they could bring about the purification of the Church through a general council. The lesson was not lost on Thomas Gascoigne. After having condemned the fiscal abuses of papal government, he pointed out that the Council of Basel had recently tried to abolish the payment of annates. But in England, despite the bitterness that annates aroused, this decree had proved a dead-letter. Gascoigne observed that in his own country ‘we do not see this remedy being put into place, and whether it is being carried out in France, I do not know’.43 So much for the prospects of conciliar reform. In Gascoigne’s off-hand comment it appears a distant enterprise, whose success was by no means guaranteed even in those places where secular rulers were sympathetic towards it. After having fleetingly surveyed the intellectual context in which Gascoigne wrote, I hope that we are in a better position to make sense of his pessimism. The English had been hesitant about conciliarism from the beginning, and their hesitation stemmed in large part from their fear that its doctrines were too close for comfort to the heretical attacks, real and imagined, upon the Church hierarchy in England.44 Although Gascoigne did not entirely agree with this view, he seems to have recognized that its strength in England had dampened the establishment’s enthusiasm to make use of the general council as a tool for reform. No-one with influence in England could be expected to support a self-assertive general council in its drive towards reforming the Church. In such circumstances, there was nothing left to Thomas Gascoigne, the self-styled prophet in the wilderness, but to lift up his voice to the Creator: ‘O God: look down from heaven, and behold, and visit the vine of your Church’!45

41

Schofield, ‘England and the Council of Basel’, pp. 24–25.

42

Schofield, ‘England and the Council of Basel’, pp. 55–57.

43

MS Lat. 117, p. 438: ‘Consilium enim basiliense [...] statuit et ordinavit remedium contra ista annata que anglici vocant primos fructus episcopatuum sed illud remedium non vidimus excecutum [sic] an sit exsecutum in francia nescio’. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 52. 44

For the view that English loyalty to the papacy was strengthened during the Schism by fears of heresy, see Harvey, ‘Lollardy and the Great Schism: Some Contemporary Perceptions’, in From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. by Anne Hudson and M. Wilks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 385–96. 45

15.

MS Lat. 117, p. 438: ‘Deus respice de celo et vide et visita vineam ecclesie tue’. Cf. Psalm 79.

‘L ET T HEM P RAISE H IM IN C HURCH ’*: O RTHODOX R EFORM AT S ALISBURY C ATHEDRAL IN THE F IRST H ALF OF THE F IFTEENTH C ENTURY David Lepine

S

ecular cathedrals had an important place in the early fifteenth-century reform programmes of the English Church. Reformers, recognizing the potential and importance of the pastoral role of theologians and canon lawyers, envisaged cathedrals as centres of learning and renewal for their dioceses staffed by resident, university-educated clergy. One of the first to do so was the Oxford theologian Richard Ullerston. Article V of the Petitiones quoad reformationem ecclesiae militantis, which he drew up for Bishop Hallum in 1408 for the Council of Pisa, proposed that the prebends in cathedrals reserved for theologians should not be given to the ignorant so that preaching would flourish.1 The Articuli de reformatione ecclesiae drawn up by Oxford University in 1414 were more concerned to correct abuses. Three of its forty-six articles addressed those particularly found in cathedrals: the appointment of younger sons of the aristocracy, often under age and not in orders, to prebends; pluralism, especially the accumulation of richer prebends in a few hands; and the high cost of residence which prevented poorer canons from residing and thereby reduced the level of ‘divine worship’.2 The most far-reaching programme, De collationibus beneficiorum pro natione Anglicana, discussed at the Council of Konstanz in 1417, proposed that every fourth vacant

* Psalm 106. 32, the text used by Richard Ullerston for his sermon on the canonization of St Osmund. 1 Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1126–70. In most cathedrals it was the chancellor’s duty to lecture or preach. 2

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 362.

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dignity or prebend should be reserved for unbeneficed doctors, bachelors or licentiates of theology and canon law from the diocese, and insisted they reside, preach, and teach.3 As the petition of Oxford and Cambridge universities to the Commons in 1416 put it, the lack of promotion for university graduates had resulted in ‘great and intolerable sins and heresies against God […] and rebellion and defiance against you, most sovereign lord’.4

Salisbury’s Role in the Reform Movement Salisbury played the most prominent role of the nine secular cathedrals in the reform movement. Its liturgy, the Sarum Use, and its campaign to canonize St Osmund were used as vehicles of orthodox reform, and its chapter, which included many leading reformers, lived up to the reformers’ ideal of a scholarly resident community in the first half of the fifteenth century. But it is also important to note that reform at Salisbury had its own dynamic which predates the reforms of Arundel, Ullerston, Chichele, and Henry V by twenty years. Only in the early fifteenth century did the Salisbury and national trends converge. The beginning of reform at Salisbury can be precisely dated to the calling of a general chapter on 29 July 1387 by the new dean, Thomas Montagu.5 By the early 1380s the cathedral had reached its medieval nadir. In the forty years after the Black Death, during Bishop Wyville’s later years and the episcopate of Bishop Erghum (1375–88), the chapter was largely undistinguished, with few scholars or clerics of more than diocesan significance, the core of whom comprised middleranking crown servants and ecclesiastical administrators. Several dignities, the deanery, treasurership, and two of the four archdeaconries, were held by absentee French and Italian papal provisors for much of this period and some of the richest prebends were also in their hands or were disputed.6 A succession of absentee deans left the chapter without leadership. This was of critical importance during

3 Von der Hardt, Magnum oecumenicum Constantiense concilium, I, 1076–77; Ernest F. Jacob, ‘A Note on the English Concordat of 1418’, in Medieval Studies Presented to Aubrey Gwynn SJ, ed. by John A. Watt, John B. Morrall, and Francis X. Martin (Dublin: Lochlainn, 1961), pp. 349–58. 4

The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, ed. by Christopher Given-Wilson, 16 vols (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), IX , 160. 5 6

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Coman, p. 70.

John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1300–1541: III, Salisbury Diocese, comp. by Joyce M. Horn (London: Athlone, 1962), pp. 3–4, 7, 9, 19, 41–42, 59, 73.

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Erghum’s episcopate. He ended the good relations Wyville had with the chapter by seeking to recover the exemption from episcopal visitation that it had been granted in 1262. This began a protracted, bitter, and expensive dispute that involved appeals to Canterbury and Rome and was not finally settled until 1392.7 Furthermore the fabric of the cathedral was in serious disrepair, with the bell tower in danger of collapse. The election of Thomas Montagu as dean in 1381/2 was a turning point, though his position was not secure until 1383 and was challenged as late as 1390–91.8 Montagu, the first resident dean of the fourteenth century, is a neglected reformer who undertook wide-ranging reforms in the cathedral which laid the foundations for its distinction in the first half of the fifteenth century. Of aristocratic birth, he was the nephew and brother of earls of Salisbury and was, perhaps, brought up in the household of John Grandisson, bishop of Exeter, his great uncle and a formidable episcopal role model.9 Grandisson presented him to his first two benefices, prebends in the Cornish collegiate churches of Glasney and St Probus in 1364, and the dean owned a missal that had once belonged to him.10 Montagu was educated at Oxford, had graduated as a bachelor of civil law by 1371 and remained there for most of the rest of the decade, engaged in further study. Oxford also gave him an awareness of the danger of heresy. The teachings of his contemporary Wyclif were censured by the pope only a few months before he acted as visitor of Exeter College in September 1378. A decade later, in 1387, he had personal experience of heresy when his brother Sir John Montagu was accused of Lollardy.11 Something of the nature of his piety emerges from his will; indeed, some aspects of it, for example the request for an absence of funeral pomp, might once have been

7

The Register of John Waltham, Bishop of Salisbury 1388–95, ed. by T. C. B. Timmins, Canterbury and York Society, 80 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), pp. xix–xx. 8

Le Neve, Fasti: III, Salisbury, p. 4.

9

BRUO, II, 1296–97.

10

The Register of John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter (AD 1327–1369), with Some Account of the Episcopate of James de Berkeley (AD 1327), ed. by Francis C. Hingeston-Randolph, Episcopal Registers of the Diocese of Exeter, 3–5, 3 vols (London: Bell, 1894–97), III, 1495; London, The National Archives, PROB 11/2A. 11

K. B. McFarlane, Wycliffe and English Non-Conformity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 131. Montagu was accused of removing images in his chapel, and of sheltering Lollard preachers. The term Lollard is used in this paper to describe the heterodox beliefs that originated in the ideas of Wyclif.

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interpreted as Lollard.12 His devotion to Our Lady, the cathedral’s patron, was well known and is recorded in the chapter act book.13 The invocation of his will describes her not just as the glorious Virgin but as the ‘most’ glorious. It also lists his four patron saints, Michael, Peter, Paul, and Andrew. His fervent belief in the resurrection was expressed in the inscription he wished to be incised on his tomb slab, based on Job 19. 25–27, a revealing and unusual text: I believe that my redeemer liveth and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth and in my flesh I shall see my God whom I shall see and my eyes shall behold [him] and not another; this is my hope laid up in my bosom.

As dean he was a forceful presence at Salisbury. His grand formal entry into residence on 11 July 1390 is described at length in the chapter act book. He was received at Palace Gate with the full honour due his rank, with the choir robed in silk copes as on a double feast and the bells pealing, where he was asperged and censed and then made a solemn procession round the Close entering the cathedral through the great west door.14 The Westminster Chronicle records his reputation for ‘varied and elegant entertainment’ at the deanery which helped settle the dispute which had arisen between Bishop Waltham and Archbishop Courtenay over the latter’s visitation rights.15 On his death in 1404 the chapter praised him for his ‘zeal for the church of Salisbury’.16 Montagu’s reforms began with the 1387 general chapter which was called to consider three specific issues: the canonization of St Osmund, the dangerous condition of the bell tower, and the escalating dispute with Bishop Erghum.17 Twenty-two canons attended, double the average at this time, and agreed that all members of the chapter would contribute a seventh of the value of their prebends for seven years to fund the difficulties it faced. Despite the bishop’s opposition, the chapter decided to seek royal support for Osmund’s canonization. Erghum did, however, agree to grant indulgences to raise funds for repairs and was willing to enter negotiations with the chapter to resolve their dispute. The general chapter

12

London, National Archives, PROB 11/2A.

13

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Draper, p. 48.

14

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Dunham, p. 141.

15

The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. by L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 438. 16

Register Draper, p. 48.

17

Register Coman, pp. 70–77.

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began a decade of reform by Montagu that extended to most aspects of the cathedral: its liturgy, the minor clergy, the library, muniments and archives, and the chapter farms and property. There were visitations of the altars, chantries, and library, inventories were compiled, surveys made of chapter farms and prebends, and statements drawn up of the chapter’s rights and privileges in what Kathleen Edwards has described as ‘a great overhaul of the cathedral’s administration’.18 While these reforms were to some extent driven by the imminent prospect of an episcopal visitation after the settlement of 1392, they were already well-established by then. Montagu’s reforms culminated in his revision of the statutes in 1399. Fourteen modest ‘additions’, mainly administrative efficiencies, were made to the comprehensive statutes drawn up by Bishop Martival in 1319.19 One of Montagu’s principal aims was to raise liturgical standards. In October 1387, within three months of the general chapter, and his second major act as dean, he began a visitation of the cathedral altars and chantries to ensure they were properly equipped; a second visitation took place in May 1396.20 Under his leadership the chapter undertook a sustained campaign to raise the standards of the vicars choral. The disciplining of unruly, tavern-going, fornicating minor clergy to ensure their presence and appropriate behaviour in the choir was a routine part of capitular life at all medieval secular cathedrals. Montagu, however, went further than this. He was particularly concerned with their musical skill. It was standard practice at all cathedrals for vicars to be required to learn the psalter, hymnal, and antiphoner by heart by the end of their probationary year when their skill and suitability were examined. Such mundane, routine chapter business is usually recorded briefly, if at all, in formulaic entries. At Salisbury in the early 1390s, however, there was an increase in the importance and rigour of the examination process which is reflected in the fuller records made of it in the chapter act book. Both William Jakis and Robert Everad were ‘examined rigorously’ before their appointment in October 1393 and Thomas Forest was considered suitable because of his ‘good character and commendable skill’.21 At a special meeting after vespers on 27 January 1394 the dean warned all the vicars about the quality of their singing and ordered the succentor to discipline those who did not reach an acceptable 18

Kathleen Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, in Victoria County History: Wiltshire, III, ed. by R . B. Pugh and Elizabeth Crittall (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 156–210 (p. 176). 19 Statutes and Customs of the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Salisbury, ed. by Christopher Wordsworth and Douglas Macleane (London: Clowes, 1915), pp. 306–07. 20

Register Coman, p. 94; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Holme, p. 40.

21

Register Dunham, pp. 241, 252–53.

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standard.22 Wider recruitment was also used to raise standards, with the appointment of vicars from as far as Hereford and Worcester dioceses, rather than the Salisbury region from which most were drawn.23 Montagu sought to raise liturgical standards in other ways too: repeated steps were taken in 1387, 1388, 1389, and again in 1395 to ensure that chantry masses were celebrated in succession, not simultaneously, so that visitors would always be able to hear one, and in 1394 the chantry chaplains were warned to attend all the offices on feasts of nine lessons to carry out the more elaborate ceremonies.24 This revival of liturgical standards in the 1390s laid the foundations for the later promotion of the Sarum Use in the early fifteenth century. These reforms led to a period of sustained liturgical development over the next twenty years. The cult of Our Lady, to whom the cathedral was dedicated, was enhanced twice: in 1395 when the chapter established a Marian antiphon, Sancta Maria Virgo, to be sung by the choristers each evening after compline ‘in honour of the glorious Virgin’ and for Bishop Waltham, and in 1406 when the feast of her Conception was raised to the rank of a double feast.25 Later the same year the feast of Corpus Christi was also upgraded.26 The celebration of mass was dignified and elaborated also in 1406: two torches were to be lit at the elevation of the host at high mass on double feasts and those with nine lessons and the obit masses at St John’s altar were to be celebrated by a priest, deacon, and subdeacon with four additional vicars present to chant.27 Two residentiaries made generous bequests explicitly to sustain and enhance the performance of the liturgy. In 1410 the executors of John Maidenith gave £40 to support the minor clergy ‘on account of his devotion to the liturgy and wishing to increase divine service’, to which the chapter added a further £20.28 Five years later, in May 1415, William Loring added £20 to his obit endowment on the same terms.29 To ‘increase divine service’ was

22

Register Dunham, p. 259.

23

Register Holme, p. 6.

24

Register Coman, p. 92; Register Dunham, pp. 26, 100; Register Holme, p. 32.

25

Register Holme, p. 10; Register Draper, p. 65.

26

Register Draper, p. 66.

27

Register Draper, pp. 56, 65.

28

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Viring, fols 20v–21 v.

29

Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Pountney, fol. 9v.

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also the reason Archbishop Arundel gave when he established his obit in 1414, though he had no other connection with the cathedral.30 The scale of Montagu’s achievement was made clear in Bishop Waltham’s 1394 visitation when only minor faults were found.31 Thereafter, regular episcopal visitations helped maintain standards. Having lost its exemption from episcopal visitation in 1392, Salisbury became one of the most visited English cathedrals. There were ten visitations between 1394 and 1454, at roughly the seven-year intervals set out in the 1392 composition.32 In 1418 Bishop Chandler found twenty-six faults, most of them relatively minor and over half relating to the conduct of individual vicars.33 This impression of generally good order was confirmed by Archbishop Chichele’s visitation in 1423 which found so little wrong that verbal corrections sufficed.34 However, it proved hard to maintain this standard. Bishop Aiscough’s visitation in 1440 listed sixty-eight faults which reveal considerable slackness in the performance of the liturgy and, although there had been a significant improvement by the time of his next visitation in 1447, Bishop Beauchamp found ninety faults in 1454.35

Promoting the Chapter Personnel Montagu’s reforms were paralleled by changes in the membership of the chapter. Half a century ago E. F. Jacob and Kathleen Edwards noted how unusually distinguished the Salisbury chapter was in the early fifteenth century.36 The transformation of the personnel of the chapter from an undistinguished, if worthy, provincial corporation into a dynamic, learned body with wide horizons is more complex than it first appears. It was not simply the result of enlightened episcopal policy. In theory the right to appoint to all prebends and dignities except the dean, who was elected by the chapter, belonged to the bishop. However, his patronage 30

Register Pountney, fol. 4v .

31

Register Dunham, pp. 290–91.

32

In 1394, 1397, 1404, 1411, 1418, 1425, 1432, 1440, 1447, 1454.

33

Register Pountney, fols 51r–53r.

34

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, III, 512–15.

35

Trowbridge, Wiltshire and Swindon Archives, D1/2/10 ii, fols 80v –85r , 86r–87v ; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Register Burgh, fols 47r–52v . 36

Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, pp. 176–79; Ernest F. Jacob, ‘The Medieval Chapter of Salisbury Cathedral’, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 51 (1947), 479–95.

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was considerably circumscribed. A new bishop found the chapter full of his predecessor’s men and had to wait for vacancies. Direct intervention by the pope and the king still took place in the late fourteenth century and although the former largely ceased in the early fifteenth century, royal pressure continued, if more covertly. Exchanges of benefices between clerics also diminished episcopal patronage; this was the era of ‘chop churches’ when exchanges reached their peak. In 1404, an exceptional year, there were as many as thirteen at Salisbury.37 Bishop Erghum’s translation to Bath and Wells in 1388 allowed a fresh start in the dispute between the bishop and chapter which was finally settled in the bishop’s favour in 1392 and good relations between the two were resumed. Erghum’s successors, John Waltham (1388–95) and Richard Mitford (1395–1407), began the transformation of the chapter. Waltham, though he had remarkably few opportunities (there were vacancies in only a quarter of the dignities and prebends during his episcopate) appointed Robert Hallum and two members of Archbishop Arundel’s circle of clerks, Richard Pittes and Ralph Selby.38 Two other prominent members of the chapter, John Chandler and Robert Ragenhull, sought and acquired prebends by exchange during Waltham’s episcopate. Mitford, with far more vacancies to fill, had a greater impact and most notably brought Henry Chichele to the cathedral and diocese. He began to collate more scholars, the theologians Robert Broun, Roger Corringham, and Richard Dereham.39 By the mid-1390s there was a core of active learned residentiaries in sympathy with Montagu’s reforms. Thomas Southam (d. 1404) and John Turk (d. 1397) were experienced clerics of an older generation. Southam had been in the service of Archbishop Langham and had been active in the suppression of heresy in the 1380s, and Turk was a theologian, former fellow of Merton College, and chancellor of Oxford University.40 William Loring (d. 1416) and John Maidenith (d. 1407) were, as we have seen, generous benefactors of the liturgy.41 Richard Pittes (d. 1415) combined assiduous residence with an active pastoral role as examiner general in the diocesan consistory court. Robert Ragenhull (d. 1407), like Pittes a protégé of Bishop Arundel at Cambridge and Ely before following Bishop

37

Le Neve, Fasti: III, Salisbury, pp. 10–12, 17, 20, 24, 27, 51–52, 67.

38

BRUC, pp. 467, 517.

39

BRUO, I, 280–81, 494–95; BRUC, pp. 184–85.

40

BRUO, III, 1733, 1916–17.

41

BRUO, II, 1163, 1246–47.

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Waltham to Salisbury, combined parish ministry and preaching.42 The most distinguished member of this group was John Chandler (d. 1426) who was active both in royal service and as a residentiary canon.43 A diligent pastor, he was elected dean in 1404 and bishop twice, first (unsuccessfully) in 1407 and again in 1417, and proved himself a worthy successor to both Montagu as dean and Hallum as bishop. Although not as distinguished as the next generation of canons, they had a wider experience of the Church and greater learning than their immediate predecessors and together made a significant contribution to the revival of the 1390s. It was Robert Hallum, however, who brought the chapter to its full eminence in the second decade of the fifteenth century, a position it held for at least the next fifty years. The appointment of scholars, particularly theologians, reached its apogee during his episcopate. He appointed five leading Oxford theologians, three of whom, John Fyton, John Luke, and Richard Ullerston, entered residence.44 He also appointed the canonist William Lyndwood, and senior papal servants and royal diplomats such as Thomas Polton and Nicholas Ryssheton.45 Hallum’s successors, Bishops Chandler (1417–26), Neville (1427–38) and Aiscough (1438–50) continued this trend. They collated many future leaders of the Church, among them Thomas Bourgchier, Thomas Brouns, John Chedworth, and John Stafford, but Andrew Holes and Gilbert Kymer, two of the chapter’s most loyal and distinguished members, were royal appointments.46 A disproportionately large number of the English delegates to the church councils of the early fifteenth century were members of the Salisbury chapter; there were three at Pisa, seven at Konstanz and four at Basel.47 Salisbury was the only chapter to appoint its own representatives at the Council of Konstanz, two resident and two non-resident.48 The presence of so many of the leading clerics of their generation among the chapter further enhanced the cathedral’s status and reputation which was already

42

BRUC, p. 470.

43

BRUO, I, 397–98.

44

BRUO, II, 737–38, 1175–76; III, 1928–29.

45

BRUO, III, 1494–95, 1619–20.

46

BRUO, I, 230–32, 281–82, 401–02; III, 1750–52; II, 949–50, 1068–69.

47

Henry Chichele, Richard Dereham, and Nicholas Ryssheton at Pisa; William Chichele, William Clint, Richard Dereham, John Fitton, Hugh Holbeach, Thomas Polton, and Thomas Teynton at Konstanz; and Thomas Brouns, Reginald Kentwode, Alexander Sparrow, and John Symondsburgh at Basel. 48

Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, p. 177; Register Pountney, fol. 8r.

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high, even if some had only a nominal connection.49 As a result of the late fourteenth-century reforms, Ullerston’s ideal of a resident scholarly cathedral chapter was to a large degree achieved in the first half of the fifteenth century, guided by a succession of distinguished resident deans from Thomas Montagu to Gilbert Kymer. This was a period of stable and relatively high levels of residence: from the 1390s to the mid-1430s between twelve and sixteen resided and in the 1440s between ten and twelve.50 However, although there were scholars among the resident canons, it is much harder to establish how active they were and the extent to which residence was simply comfortable retirement. There is little direct evidence to answer this question. Book ownership, even when it can be definitively established, is notoriously unreliable. While there are examples of residentiaries with significant libraries, for example Nicholas Wykeham, who had twenty-five volumes, it is much harder to establish the use of these manuscripts at Salisbury.51 For some, though, a convincing case can be made. Richard Ullerston himself was one of the most distinguished members of the early fifteenth-century chapter.52 For him residence was at least partial retirement from his engagement at the heart of the most important religious controversies of the day: the battle against Wyclif, the Schism, conciliarism, and the translation of scripture. His major theological works were written at Oxford before he moved to Salisbury. But he brought this experience to the Close where he put the reformers’ ideals into practice by keeping assiduous residence and promoting two reformist causes, the canonization of St Osmund and the Sarum Use. Perhaps the most attractive and admirable of the Salisbury canons was Andrew Holes, resident for nearly twenty years from 1446 to 1467 and probably until his death in 1470, apart from a two-year absence in 1450–52 when he was keeper of the privy seal.53 He settled at Salisbury soon after his return from royal and papal service in Italy late in 1444 with a library so large that it required a ship rather than

49

They spent little, if any, time at Salisbury, sometimes not even being personally installed in their prebend, a detachment reflected in their surviving wills, which often make no mention of the cathedral. 50

David N. Lepine, A Brotherhood of Canons Serving God: English Secular Cathedrals in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 211–15. 51

BRUO, III, 2111–12.

52

BRUO, III, 1928–29.

53

BRUO, II, 949–50; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Communar’s Accounts nos 48a–60 and Registers Burgh and Newton passim.

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the customary cart to transport it to England.54 Once thought almost entirely lost, Margaret Harvey has recently identified twenty-five of his books.55 They reflect the wide range of his intellectual horizons. The emphasis was on law, both civil and canon law texts as well as commentaries; several of the latter were recent works by Italian masters. There was a limited amount of theology but of greater interest is his collection of Christian humanist texts and works of the early Christian fathers. Holes had a love of poetry and a habit of noting verses in the margins of his books. Many have signs of heavy use, probably mainly in Italy. During his time in Italy Holes gained a very high reputation. The Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci, usually a critical observer, praised his ‘great learning’ and ‘holy way of life’: ‘after saying the office he would spend two or three hours on his knees in prayer, and the rest of his time reading. He gave alms freely and he and his household fared very soberly’. Vespasiano says that on his return to England he withdrew from service and took his books to a benefice, presumably Salisbury, ‘putting aside all temporal cares as one who wishes to be dead to the world for the love of God’. Holes’s life at Salisbury suggests he broadly deserves this encomium. His copy of Petrarch’s De vita solitaria is heavily and revealingly annotated, particularly the passages on the merits of serving God through study, meditation, and writing. He resided at Salisbury most of the year, well above the minimum requirement, promoted scholarship as patron of the library and its lectures, and his post mortem almsgiving was generous. However, his ‘frugality’ is best understood in relative terms; he lived at Leadenhall, one of the grandest houses in the Close, and his will refers to a substantial amount of plate and some Italian ‘designer clothing’, a long scarlet cloak made in Rome of Florentine cloth using English wool.56 Like most late medieval higher clergy he made a careful distinction between the ownership of wealth and the misuse of it.57 There was already a notable scholar at Salisbury when Holes arrived, Gilbert Kymer. Treasurer from 1427, elected dean in 1449 and resident from 1440 until his death in 1463, Kymer was a leading physician in the service of Humphrey, duke

54 Josephine W. Bennett, ‘Andrew Holes: A Neglected Harbinger of the English Renaissance’, Speculum, 19 (1944), 314–35. 55

Margaret Harvey, ‘An Englishman at the Roman Curia during the Council of Basel: Andrew Holes, his Sermon of 1433 and his Books’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 42 (1991), 19–38 (pp. 30–34). 56

Anon., ‘Will of Andrew Holes, AD 1470’, Wiltshire Notes and Queries, 4 (1902–04), 566–71; original will at London, National Archives, PROB 11/5. 57

Harvey, ‘An Englishman at the Roman Curia’, p. 29.

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of Gloucester and served as chancellor of Oxford University in 1431–34 and again from 1447 to 1453.58 During his second term he combined residence at Salisbury and Oxford.59 At Salisbury he was an active patron of book production. Four medical texts he commissioned between 1448 and 1460 from Herman Zurke, a German scribe working in Dragon Street, have survived.60 He also supervised the building of the new library.61 Thomas Cyrcetur was a much less remarkable man but more typical of the chapter as a whole.62 A conservative, anti-Wyclifite theologian, as R. M. Ball has shown, he was an indefatigable preacher; ‘among all the works of mercy’, he wrote in his copy of a sermon collection, ‘preaching is the most pleasing to God’.63 He was partially resident in 1431–35 and fully resident from 1440 until his death in 1453.64 The annotations in his books, fourteen of which are still in the cathedral library, reveal that he used them at Salisbury in the 1430s and 1440s. Cyrcetur’s predecessor Robert Ragenhull (d. 1407) was probably as active but we know much less about his preaching simply because his books have not survived.65 Those listed in his will show that he was well equipped to preach.66 As well as three popular collections of Sunday sermons he owned an ‘exposition of words of the Bible’ and a treatise on the seven deadly sins and the sins of the tongue which together suggest an audience of lay parishioners. After training as one of Arundel’s clerks, a fellowship at King’s Hall, Cambridge, and diocesan service for Bishop Waltham, Ragenhull combined cathedral and parish life. In October 1395, seven months after his appointment to the provostship of St Edmund’s church, one of the three Salisbury parish churches, he entered residence at the cathedral

58

BRUO, II, 1068–69.

59

Communar’s Accounts nos 48b–57 and Registers Burgh and Newton passim.

60

Andrew G. Watson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts c. 435–1600 in Oxford Libraries, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) I, nos 80–81, 610, 843. 61

Edwards, ‘Salisbury Cathedral’, p. 178.

62

BRUO, I, 531–32.

63

R. M. Ball, ‘Thomas Cyrcetur, a Fifteenth Century Theologian and Preacher’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 37 (1986), 205–39. 64

Communar’s Accounts nos 48a–b; Salisbury Cathedral Archives, Registers Harding, Hutchins and Burgh passim. 65 66

BRUC, p. 470.

The Register of John Chandler, Dean of Salisbury 1404–1417, ed. by T. C. B. Timmins, Wilstshire Record Society, 39 (Devizes: Wiltshire Record Society, 1983), no. 449.

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and remained a residentiary until his death.67 His generous bequests to St Edmund’s and its parishioners and his wish to be buried in its churchyard rather than the cathedral also suggest that he was an active pastor and preacher there. During the last decade of his life Ragenhull embodied the reformer’s ideal of a scholarly resident chapter, disseminating university learning at parish level to raise pastoral standards. He bequeathed all his books to the chaplains of St Edmund’s, including a contemplative work, the Stimulus amoris, Walter Hilton’s reworking of the meditation on the Passion and the spiritual life by James of Milan ( Jacopo da Milano). Further detailed study of surviving manuscripts at Salisbury would probably identify other scholarly residentiaries. Even the much poorer, more remote and less distinguished Hereford chapter had active resident scholars in the fifteenth century.68 Collectively, the chapter promoted learning by building a new library and lecture room above the east walk of the cloisters in January 1445 ‘for the increase of faith, knowledge and virtue […] for the use of those wishing to study there’.69 This was a major undertaking. It occupied all ten bays of the cloister, approximately 165 feet (50 m), and cost £447 18s. 8d., a substantial outlay on top of an expensive canonization campaign.70 The scale of the library may have been in anticipation of the arrival of Holes’s library. Although the decision to build it was taken before he entered residence, it was soon after his return to England, and he was already well known to the chapter as chancellor and active on their behalf on canonization business. Holes was certainly a benefactor of the library and instrumental in developing its use; in 1454 the lectures held there were increased to once a fortnight at his expense.71 If his books were placed there it was only during his lifetime. In accordance with his will, his library was dispersed after his death. How much use was made of the library is hard to ascertain, but Thomas Cyrcetur’s annotations of its copy of a thirteenth-century book of sermons demonstrates some at least. The chapter also promoted learning through its patronage of De Vaux

67

Register Holme, p. 27.

68

David N. Lepine, ‘A Long Way from University: Cathedral Canons and Learning at Hereford in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Church and Learning in Late Medieval Society, ed. by Caroline M. Barron and Jenny Stratford, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, 11 (Donington: Tyas, 2002), pp. 178–95. 69

Register Hutchins, fol. 40.

70

Register Burgh, p. 99.

71

Sarah Brown, Sumptuous and Richly Adorn’d: The Decoration of Salisbury Cathedral (London: The Stationery Office, 1999), pp. 91, 94.

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College, whose warden was a resident canon. This thirteenth-century foundation was unique to Salisbury and was once thought to be a nascent university college. Originally intended as a chantry and to provide for twenty poor scholars to study theology and the liberal arts, the limited surviving evidence suggests that it supported scholars until the Reformation but on a smaller scale.72 Its modest endowments resulted in fewer fellows, about a dozen, and meagre fellowships. Even so, it gave educational opportunities to able local clerics from the diocese of Salisbury, several of whom went to university, predominantly Oxford, including some who later played an important role in cathedral administration as chapter clerks.

Promotion of the Sarum Use and Attempts to Canonize St Osmund In the early fifteenth century Salisbury and national reform trends combined in two closely related reform campaigns, the promotion of the Sarum Use and ongoing attempts to canonize St Osmund. The context of this convergence was the growing crisis of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: endemic plague; popular revolt in 1381; political crisis in the 1380s and 1390s, culminating in Henry IV’s usurpation in 1399; schism within the Church; Wyclif’s attack on its most fundamental doctrine, the mass; and the threat of Lollardy.73 In response there was a vigorous reassertion of orthodoxy in its most fundamental and efficacious form, the liturgy, especially the celebration of the mass. There was a renewed emphasis on its importance, enhancement, and augmentation, often simply expressed in the familiar but opaque phrase ‘for the increase of divine service’. This rested on the belief that the worship of God, in essence the performance of the liturgy to the highest standard, was a paramount duty of all Christians. It was the best means to secure God’s blessing and ensure good order in society. Its vigorous performance would reinforce orthodoxy and satisfy lay spiritual demands. The growth in importance of the liturgy was accelerated by two developments in the political theology of kingship: the belief that the king was God’s vicar and that the English were God’s chosen people. Henry V, a monarch

72

Kathleen Edwards, ‘The College of De Vaux Salisbury’, in Victoria County History: Wiltshire, III, pp. 369–85. 73

Clive Burgess, ‘An Institution for all Seasons: The Late Medieval English College’, in The Late Medieval College and its Context, ed. by Clive Burgess and Martin Heale (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), pp. 3–27.

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of unusual piety, enhanced the cults of ‘national’ saints such as St George and placed a new emphasis on the Virgin as England’s special protector; both of which reflected the growing national consciousness and sense of Englishness.74 Salisbury was at the heart of this revival of orthodoxy and enhancement of the liturgy in the early fifteenth century: there was a renewed promotion of its Use, the Virgin was the cathedral’s patron and the king was a member of its fraternity. The importance of liturgy, the pre-eminence of the Sarum Use and its Englishness were major themes of a sermon Richard Ullerston preached in the cathedral in May 1416 to promote the canonization of St Osmund, and were put forward as evidence of his saintliness. He commended Osmund as the founder of what he called the ‘incomparable’ Sarum liturgy and praised him for increasing and embellishing the cultum Dei. The Englishness of the Sarum rite and its superiority are stressed.75 Ullerston argued that it eliminated earlier errors by selecting the best elements of other rites, quoting Pope Gregory’s instruction to St Augustine to collect what was pleasing to God from ‘pious, holy, and righteous’ English churches. It followed therefore, that English rites were ‘more perfect’ than any other in Christendom and that the Sarum Use was pre-eminent in the world. This hyperbole was at least partly shared by the authors of two Wycliffite tracts, The Order of Priesthood and Of Feigned Contemplative Life.76 They were vehement in their condemnation not only of elaborate liturgy but specifically of the Salisbury Use, its principal vehicle. The use was one of ‘sathanas disceitis’, devised by ‘proude prestis, coueitous, lecherous & dronkelewe’.77 It was a hindrance to faith because it prevented preaching; instead, if priests say their ‘matynes, masse & euensong aftir salisbury vsse’ it is considered enough.78 This remained a theme in Lollard sermons:

74

Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, pp. 97–115.

75

A. R. Malden, The Canonization of St Osmund (Salisbury: Wiltshire Record Society, 1901), pp. 236–42. 76

Wyclif himself had more complex views on liturgical elaboration; see Ian C. Levy, ‘Wyclif and the Christian Life’, in A Companion to John Wyclif, Late Medieval Theologian, ed. by Ian C. Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 293–363. 77

The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. by F. D. Matthew, EETS, O. S. 74 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1880), pp. 193–94. 78

The English Works of Wyclif, ed. by Matthew, p. 193.

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‘for Salusbury us […] be not nedfulle to come to heuene’.79 Indeed a Lollard plot in 1431 sought to raze the cathedral to the ground.80 The response to such criticism was to promote the liturgy as a bulwark against heresy that would also satisfy lay spiritual demands. Although Nigel Morgan has convincingly argued that the Sarum Use had largely been adopted in the province of Canterbury by about 1325, rather than the mid-fifteenth century, it is equally clear that there was a second campaign to promote it during Archbishop Chichele’s primacy, particularly in the reign of Henry V.81 Four key promoters can be identified: Richard Ullerston, probably at the instigation of Bishop Hallum, though there is no direct evidence of this, Archbishop Chichele himself, Richard Clifford, bishop of London, and the canonist William Lyndwood. All four had close connections with the cathedral. The first to promote it was Bishop Clifford who introduced it to St Paul’s cathedral in 1414 as a means of ensuring uniformity. During his visitation he found that the St Paul’s Use was followed in the choir but elsewhere, in chantries, the Sarum Use was favoured.82 Clifford had been a canon of Salisbury, and was resident in 1392 and an occasional visitor in 1393 and 1395, when he was the chapter’s choice to succeed Bishop Waltham.83 He witnessed the liturgical revival of the mid-1390s. The most influential and important promoter was Archbishop Chichele. His strong ties with both the cathedral and diocese of Salisbury consisted of a succession of four prebends, two archdeaconries, and the chancellorship between 1397 and 1409 and service to Bishop Mitford from April 1397 to March 1399.84 Brief periods of residence in 1398 and 1405–06 and a house in the Close from 1400 until 1420 made him familiar with the revived liturgical standards resulting from Montagu’s reforms.85 He held the use in particularly high regard, describing

79

English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. by Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–96), II, ed. by Pamela Gradon, pp. 362–63. 80

Ball, ‘Thomas Cyrcetur’, p. 235.

81

Nigel Morgan, ‘The Introduction of the Sarum Calendar into the Dioceses of England in the Thirteenth Century’, in Thirteenth Century England, 8: Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1999, ed. by Michael Prestwich, Richard H. Britnell, and Robin Frame (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), pp. 179–206. 82

William S. Simpson, ‘A Mandate of Bishop Clifford’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, 2nd ser., 14 (1891–93), 118–28. 83

Richard G. Davies, ‘Clifford, Richard (d. 1421)’, entry in ODNB.

84

BRUO, I, 410–12; Wiltshire and Swindon Archives D1/2/6, fols 17, 64.

85

Communar’s Account no. 17 and Register Draper passim; Wiltshire and Swindon Archives D1/2/6, fol. 160r; D1/2/8, fol. 25r.

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it in 1425 as ‘renowned and praiseworthy’, and actively promoted it.86 Following a visitation of Chichester cathedral in 1423 he persuaded the chapter to adopt it.87 The following year the dean of Chichester, William Milton, a former registrar of Chichele and active canon of Salisbury, bequeathed the cathedral a great missal of the Sarum Use.88 However, there is some doubt about whether the use was fully introduced. Both Milton’s bequest of Sarum liturgical books and a later bequest by Simon Northlew in 1429 were conditional on the adoption of the new use.89 It was probably at Chichele’s behest that Bishop Heyworth introduced the Sarum Use at Lichfield cathedral in 1428; though, as at Chichester, there is subsequent evidence of incomplete adoption.90 Sarum’s established high status is evident in its use as the model for liturgical developments. When the cults of Sts George, John of Beverley, Chad, David, and Winifrid were raised to double feasts across the whole province of Canterbury in 1415–16 the Sarum liturgy was prescribed.91 Its authority was confirmed and enhanced by William Lyndwood’s Provinciale of 1434, which cited the Sarum Use as the ultimate liturgical authority.92 Lyndwood seems to have been responsible for strengthening its authority with a spurious justification, that the bishop of Salisbury was the precentor of the college of bishops and therefore responsible for the celebration of the divine offices. Like Chichele, Lyndwood was familiar with the use having started his career in the service of Bishop Hallum from 1408 to 1411; he was a canon for twenty years and regularly visited the cathedral in 1412.93 Clifford and Chichele were primarily concerned with the adoption of the Sarum Use at cathedrals. At much the same time, the early fifteenth century, its influence at parish level was strengthened by the spread of the Sarum Manuale, the book 86

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, IV , 274.

87

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, III, 505.

88

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, II, 287.

89

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, II, 401.

90

Ann J. Kettle and D. A. Johnson, ‘The Cathedral of Lichfield’, in Victoria County History: Staffordshire, III, ed. by Michael W. Greenslade (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 140–99 (p. 161). 91

The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, III, 28–29, 256.

92

William Lyndwood, Provinciale (seu Constitutiones Angliæ) (Oxford: Hall, 1679), pp. 103–04. 93

BRUO, II, 1191–93; The Register of Robert Hallum, Bishop of Salisbury 1407–17, ed. by Joyce M. Horn, Canterbury and York Society, 72 (Torquay: Devonshire, 1982), nos 129, 166, 864, 945, 1130 on pp. 18, 22–23, 114, 139 and 215; Communars’ Accounts nos 31–32.

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containing the services used in parishes rather than greater churches. Its popularity contributed to the growing sophistication of parish liturgy, especially in wealthier urban parishes. The campaign to canonize St Osmund, first begun in 1228, revived in 1387, but not finally achieved until 1457, was initially a local concern. However, the second revival by Bishop Hallum in 1411–12 took on a wider dimension. As well as the usual generic claims of a virtuous life and miracles, other arguments were put forward as evidence of his sanctity which reflected the reform debate within the Church. Richard Ullerston’s canonization sermon in May 1416 firmly placed Osmund in the wider context of church reform at the Council of Konstanz.94 It began with prayers for the Emperor Sigismund and Henry V and portrays Osmund as a vigorous reforming bishop, a model of episcopal leadership in the service of renewal. Osmund is commended for his foundation of the cathedral, which is likened to Pope Gregory the Great’s foundation of seven monasteries, and justified by St Birgitta’s revelation that Christ sanctioned endowments to the church so that the clergy would have quiet places in which to pray. Ullerston is remarkably specific about the details of Osmund’s foundation, giving the date, 1091, location at Old Sarum, and the number of prebends, thirty-two. Such an explicit defence of church property was a direct response to Wyclif’s and Lollard calls for disestablishment and to recent events, namely the proposal to disendow the Church made at the 1410 parliament, and Oldcastle’s revolt in 1413–14. Ullerston had already written a strong defence of church property, the Defensiorum dotacionis ecclesiae, in 1401, a copy of which was in the cathedral library at Salisbury.

Conclusions Cathedrals had an important role in orthodox reform in the early fifteenth century as centres of learning and renewal staffed by resident university-educated clergy. Many of the English chapters, Exeter, Hereford, Lichfield, and Wells among them, were active centres of learning. What was unique about Salisbury was that as well as fulfilling its role at diocesan level it had national significance. Reform at Salisbury started earlier than elsewhere and was self-generated. Dean Montagu and a succession of learned, active deans in conjunction with vigorous, pastorally committed bishops, raised the cathedral chapter from comfortable complacency

94

Malden, Canonization of St Osmund, pp. 236–42.

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to far-sighted distinction. At the core of its reforms were Montagu’s revival of liturgical standards in the 1390s and the building of a scholarly community of resident canons. This community had close connections with the universities, especially Oxford, a strong commitment to the transmission of scholarship to achieve pastoral renewal and an awareness of the problems of the wider Church. Salisbury’s distinctively English liturgy was a counter to the threat of heresy and the leading members of its chapter played a significant role in reform, both nationally in the reforms of Archbishops Arundel and Chichele, and internationally in the church councils of the early fifteenth century.

L ONDON AFTER A RUNDEL: L EARNED R ECTORS AND THE S TRATEGIES OF O RTHODOX R EFORM Sheila Lindenbaum

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eginning in the 1430s, the city of London’s ecclesiastical landscape was perceptibly altered by a cohort of learned rectors arriving to take up benefices in parish churches. Prior to this time, most of the London rectors who were university graduates had been absentees, leaving the pastoral work to less qualified substitutes while seeking higher preferment as churchmen or officers of the crown.1 The London rectors that are my subject here were a different breed. A special branch of the Church Militant, animated by missionary zeal, they committed themselves fully to London, determined to enact the programme of orthodox reform being promoted by their universities: namely, ‘the extirpation of heresies and errors, the augmentation of the faith, the dignity of the clergy, and the security of the holy mother church’.2 The strategies they pursued in executing this project were consistent with Arundel’s Constitutions, but were far more diverse,

1

In keeping with this pattern, Alison K. McHardy finds that the graduate rectors of Chaucer’s time were non-resident ‘high flyers’, while the others were ‘undistinguished and obscure’:‘The Churchmen of Chaucer’s London: The Seculars’, Medieval Prosopography, 16 (1995), 57–87 (pp. 65, 63). A list of the ‘high flyers’ in the 1430s and 1440s would include a number of future bishops and statesmen (Thomas Beckington, Adam Moleyns) and the early humanists Andrew Holes and Vincent Clement. 2

In 1446, Queens’ College Cambridge was dedicated ‘ad [...] extirpationem heresium et errorum, fidei augmentum, clerique decorem ac stabilimentum sacrosancte matris ecclesie’. W. G. Searle, The History of the Queens’ College of St Margaret and St Bernard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1867), pp. 4, 8. The dedication reflects the goals of all the reform foundations, starting with Lincoln College in 1427.

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theologically inventive, and appealing to local parishioners than such conformity might suggest.3 These strategies were addressed, first of all, to securing an influential position in the city, and then to shaping a distinctive theology and mode of preaching that would eradicate all forms of controversy in religion. The campaign that ensued, which produced a remarkable body of theological writing, proved to be the most important intervention in London’s religious life in the generation after Arundel, one which brought the universities to the city in an immediate, practical way. The ‘pastoral imperative’ that energized the new rectors had been gaining strength since the time of Archbishop Arundel. As the conciliar era began, it was clear to English churchmen that the necessary work of reform was not only a matter of rooting out heretics, but also of curbing the clerical abuses that provided dissidents with ammunition for their cause. High on the list was the evil of nonresidence: a pastor’s failure to care for his flock because he was simultaneously in possession of a better job elsewhere. In a convocation of clergy in 1410, nonresidence was judged ‘scandalum manifestum’ because it deprived parishioners of the preaching and moral example which were needed for salvation (the pastor’s presence ‘verbo et exemplo’) and also, it was implied, because Wycliffite preachers could more easily gain access to parish churches when the pastor was negligent or just not there.4 The remedy was to be a new generation of priests, who would not only reside in the parishes but be a match for Wycliffite preachers in learning, and who would be cleansed of heretical views by new forms of academic censorship, such as the ones proposed for Oxford in Arundel’s Constitutions. Between 1410 and 1439, the need to put orthodox graduates into parish livings was a continuing theme in

3

The Constitutions were readily accessible to London clergy in William Lyndwood’s Provinciale, a digest of ecclesiastical law compiled in 1422–34 while he was rector of All Hallows Bread Street and officiating in the Court of Arches. Quotations from the Constitutions in this paper are taken from the version in Lyndwood, Provinciale (seu Constitutiones Angliæ) (Oxford: Hall, 1679), which includes Lyndwood’s important glosses noting clarifications and exceptions. 4 R . M. Ball emphasizes the London rectors’ commitment to a ‘pastoral imperative’ in his seminal article on their ‘common theological culture’: ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecok’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), 230–62 (pp. 234, 261, 230). For ‘scandalum manifestum’, see Records of Convocation, ed. by Gerald Lewis Bray (Woodbridge: Boydell in association with the Church of England Record Society, 2005), IV : Canterbury 1377–1414, p. 371. A quota of graduates to be appointed to vacant benefices was established in 1418 but frequently ignored: Records of Convocation, ed. by Bray, V : Canterbury 1414–1443, p. 65.

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the Canterbury convocations of clergy, and by the end of this period, it had become full-blown ideology within the English church. As envisioned by Thomas Gascoigne, the Oxford chancellor, whose job it was to produce the desired personnel, the new priests would exemplify a life of Christian morality illuminated by learning. They would stay clear of the trade in benefices whereby church livings were used for financial speculation, to be accumulated, sold, or exchanged. They would recruit and educate young men for the priesthood. Above all, they would be Christ-like preachers, full of spiritual and prophetic insight.5 This vision of a learned, evangelical priesthood explains the new London rectors’ remarkable unanimity of purpose (Reginald Pecock always excepted) and the shared strategies they pursued in their urban campaign. By their time, the ideal had become implicit in the education of promising students, ready to be put into practice by a select few, either as conscious intent or an internalized guide to behaviour, whenever the pressure of events should call them into action. And that is what happened in the early 1430s. It has been said that by this time, the English church was no longer seriously threatened by dissent: ‘a devoutly orthodox nation, […] willing to obey the ecclesiastical law and to accept the pattern of worship and private devotion approved by government, must have appeared to be achieved’.6 But the clergy in London parishes, working at the grass-roots level, would not have seen things this way. Schism and anticlericalism were everywhere in the air. In 1431, the year Reginald Pecock became a London rector, Wycliffite priests could still be found in the heart of the city, as Bishop Gray’s recent showtrials had taken pains to reveal. In that same year, it was the execution of a Wycliffite priest from the London diocese, Thomas Bagley, which set off the revolt of ‘Jack Straw’, whose brief was to ‘take owte the temperalteys of Hooly Chyrche’. Handbills in the parishes of St Clement Danes and St Giles Cripplegate revived the Lollard disendowment bill of 1410, this time naming actual workmen from London neighbourhoods who would soon be taking over the lands and titles of great prelates and noble lords. As the revolt spread, it resonated strongly with the terrible religious wars abroad. In Bohemia, the London clergy knew, the Hussites had cast priests out of their parishes, confiscated their goods, and slaughtered

5

Records of Convocation, IV : Canterbury 1377–1414 and V : Canterbury 1414–1443, passim (promotion of graduates). Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 198, 188–89, 58. 6

Jeremy I. Catto, ‘The World of Henry Chichele and the Foundation of All Souls’, in Unarmed Soldiery: Studies in the Early History of All Souls College (Oxford: All Souls College, 1996), pp. 1–13 (p. 7).

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civilians by the thousands in the process. Now it seemed that English insurgents, acting on similar principles, were on the verge of doing the same thing.7 The London rectors were not prepared to take up arms, like the pope’s soldiers against the Hussites, but they could respond to anticlericalism according to the script they had learned at the universities. Their first course of action was therefore to take up residence in their London parishes — to exemplify the ‘dignity of the clergy’ in the flesh. And they appeared in significant numbers. The list of graduate rectors in Appendix A may seem small in view of London’s more than one hundred churches, but it is probably not complete, and even as it is, there were enough new rectors to have a considerable impact within a city that did not occupy much more than a square mile. Until the fall of Pecock in 1457, which concluded the initial phase of their campaign, learned rectors became increasingly more numerous in London, their impact enhanced because many of them stayed for very long periods and in many cases moved into parishes where there had formerly been disgraced clergy.8 In 1428, the rector of St Leonard Foster Lane was John Scarle, who was indicted by his own parishioners ‘for a Paratour (pandar) and a scolde and a discurer of confessioun of the which women that wole not asent to his lecheri. [...] He presentith hym self a surgeoun & a visicioun to disseive the people with his false connynge, […] by the which craft he hath slayn many a man’. By the 1440s, the same parish was served by the young Edmund Coningsburgh, a canon lawyer of promise on his way to a bishopric, but resident in London at that point in his

7 For Ralph Mungyn, a London priest prosecuted in 1428 for opposing the killing of Hussites, see Charles Kightly, ‘The Early Lollards’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of York, 1975), pp. 537–44. On the uprising of 1431, see Maureen Jurkowski, ‘Lollardy in Coventry and the Revolt of 1431’, in Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), pp. 145–64; Margaret Aston, ‘Lollardy and Sedition 1381–1431’, Past and Present, 12 (1960), 1–44 (pp. 24–28); and the continuation of ‘Gregory’s’ chronicle, which is possibly the work of a London rector: The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by James Gairdner, Camden Society, n.s., 17 (London: Camden Society, 1876), p. 172. Londoners were well aware that the Hussites had an English leader, the Oxford master, Peter Payne (Historical Collections, p. 176). 8

I have focused on university graduates whose London benefice was their primary concern. Included are a few learned rectors not known to have taken a degree. For their churches and dates, see George Leyden Hennessy, Novum repertorium ecclesiasticum parochiale Londinense, or, London Diocesan Clergy Succession from the Earliest Times to the Year 1898 (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898). The trend to appoint graduates to London benefices can be seen in Hennessy’s data, starting around 1430. The presentations were mainly in the hands of religious houses or ecclesiastical bodies (e.g., St Paul’s), but also other patrons: for example, the Merchant Tailors (St Martin Outwich) and Balliol College, which held the rectory of St Lawrence Jewry.

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career. Similarly, the university graduate Robert Briggham took over a parish where a predecessor had been taken in adultery with the wife of the parish clerk; and John Greene moved into St Clement Danes, where the insurgents of 1431 had been allowed to post bills and the parishioners had strongly defended a man brought up for heresy by Bishop Gray.9 As in these instances, the learned rectors strove to replace incontinence, blatant venality, and ‘false conynge’ with professional credentials and an austere style of life. Like their fellow professionals, the learned physicians, they configured themselves as a recognized group with earned qualifications, standards of excellence to be met, and mechanisms for self-regulation — the last of which they would brutally deploy in attacks on their former colleague, Reginald Pecock. They could be seen about the city in their professional role, visiting the bookshops of Thomas Veysey and John Pye, who specialized in ‘books of divinity’, or Peter Bylton’s, where Richard Hopton of St Alban Wood Street shopped, or John Scot’s, where Thomas Faux bought a Bible. To judge from their wide reading, they made good use of the city’s important theological libraries — the Carmelites’ was strong in the patristic works they favoured, and they frequented the study centre at St Paul’s, where from 1423 to 1449 their fellow rector, Thomas Chace, and later William Ive, supervised the training of new clergy.10 Their idea of recreation, unlike the scurrilous Scarle’s, was to gather in literary clubs to compose Latin epigrams or enjoy Christian-classical poems about Lady Liberal Arts lamenting the decline of Grammar.11 Thus established and esteemed, the rectors were positioned to take

9 London Metropolitan Archives, Corporation of London, Plea and Memoranda Rolls A50, memb. 6 (Scarle). The city had jurisdiction over the clergy in disturbances of the peace and sexual offences. Briggham’s errant predecessor is mentioned in an incomplete list of offenders from 1400–39: Corporation of London, Letter Book I, fols cclxxxvi–ccxc. In 1428 Bishop Gray ordered an all-purpose round-up of suspected clergy, which included sexual offenders, heretics, and nonresident pastors: Irene Zadnik, ‘The Administration of the Diocese of London: Bishops William Gray, Robert Fitzhugh and Robert Gilbert: 1426–1448’ (unpublished D Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1993), chap. 5, pp. 188–227. 10

For the bookshops, C. Paul Christianson, ‘Evidence for the Study of London’s Late Medieval Manuscript Book Trade’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. by Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 87–108 (p. 104). Thomas Eborall bought London, British Library, MS Royal 5 C. iii, an important collection indicative of the learned rectors’ interests, from Pye. For London’s scholarly libraries, see Ball, Thomas Gascoigne, Libraries and Scholarship, pp. 26–28. 11

The rectors’ interest in grammar, rhetoric, and versification can be traced from somewhat earlier in the fifteenth century. The master ‘J W’ to whom the London schoolmaster John Seward

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high forms of collective action, such as their petition to the king for more grammar schools in London, or their ban on Margery Kempe, whom they shut out of their churches because of her overly enthusiastic spirituality. They could also claim exceptional authority to mediate theology and biblical exegesis for the city’s elite: this can be deduced from the book of Chrysostom that David Fyfyan copied for his patroness Margery Nerford, and the Wycliffite Bible that Thomas Eborall and William Ive licensed for a wealthy female owner to read.12 In the petition for more grammar schools, the rectors claim to act on behalf of ‘all vertue and ordre of well puplik’. This is professionalism of a very high order, much like that of our modern public intellectual who achieves celebrity by using his academic expertise to illuminate a problem of society at large. The most eminent London rectors — John Cote, Thomas Eborall, Gilbert Worthington, John Pynchbeck — earned this kind of celebrity with their sermons to large crowds at St Paul’s and St Mary Spital, which were lauded in the city chronicles for improving public morality. They also became social critics in a political sense, launching blistering attacks on the royal court or city governors when commissioned to preach before those bodies. William Ive was once deprived of his fee because he dared to touch on things ‘that longyd unto the comyn wele’ in a sermon at court; in 1445 another rector was censured by the Common Council for speaking against the mayor, aldermen, judges, and civic organization.13 Normally it was the rectors’ strategy, however, to cultivate profitable associations with the civic elite. There was a social affinity between them that made them natural allies, beyond their shared interest in prosecuting heretics. Both were at the top of their respective hierarchies: the city clergy and the London citizenry. Both

addressed some of his epigrams is almost certainly John Whitby, rector of St Peter Cornhill, where Seward kept a school until 1435. For Christian classicism in that milieu, see Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans, pp. 218–26. See also London, British Library, MS Royal 10 B. x, which includes a document of 1437–38 naming the London rector Thomas Faux, together with mythological letters regarding the empress Sapientia, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 496 Part A, written mainly by the London rector Thomas Graunt (St Margaret Lothbury 1450–54), which contains Latin satirical and religious verse and fables. 12

The Parliament Rolls, ed. by Given-Wilson, XII, 26. For Kempe’s persecution by the ‘curates’ of London (meaning the rectors, those with a cure of souls), see The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, Book Two, chapter 9, lines 602–07, available online at: [accessed 15 June 2010]. On David Fyfyan, see Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety, pp. 48–67 (p. 60). The licensed New Testament is Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Eng. 77. 13

The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London, ed. by Gairdner, p. 210. I thank Caroline Barron for the reference to the fined preacher.

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were experienced in the running of corporate bodies: the learned rectors had served on university governing committees and had helped to manage the considerable estates that supported their colleges. So, in the split between the city’s merchants and artisans that was coming to an impasse in the 1430s, the rectors identified with the merchants, the governing elite, making a distinction between the worthies of the parish, for whom they procured special privileges — like the right to sit in the chancel, which was by invitation of the rector only — and the ordinary parishioners.14 On their part, the merchant elite had every reason to welcome a more learned and sober clergy with whom they could interact on terms of equality and mutual respect; and they employed the rectors in a number of secular capacities: to inspect a jail, serve on a piracy commission, or negotiate with Lancastrians holding out in the Tower in the civil wars.15 The most frequent associations, however, were financial, for the elite had customarily employed the city’s rectors as executors of their wills and feoffees of their worldly wealth, entrusting them with money to be given to charities, including the parish churches, in exchange for prayers and masses for their souls. Especially if the rector was a distinguished man, the sums could be vast. Even after donating substantially to the Cambridge college of Godeshouse founded by his parish rector, William Byngham, the rich draper John Brokley was said to have around five thousand pounds left over to bestow on local charities in his will.16 It was such bequests that fuelled the prodigious development of intercessory ritual in London’s parish churches — an endless round of commemorative masses featuring new service books, endowed choirs, and stipendiary priests. Robert Rook of St Lawrence Jewry had around sixteen of the latter in his parish, all practising the rites endorsed in the ninth article of Arundel’s Constitutions: adoration of the glorious cross, veneration of saints and images, worship by ‘processionibus,

14

For a heresy trial in which rectors and civic authorities were both accusers, see Kightly, ‘The Early Lollards’, pp. 538–39, 541, 543. Maureen Jurkowski explains the kinds of administrative and financial experience that university students could acquire in ‘Heresy and Factionalism at Merton College in the Early Fifteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 48 (1997), 658–81 (p. 660). 15

London Metropolitan Archives, Corporation of London, Letter Book L, fol. 22 v (on jails); Plea and Memoranda Rolls A59, memb. 5 (on piracy); Journals of the Common Council 6, fol. 252v (on the Lancastrians). 16

Hundreds of documents concerning the rectors’ administration of bequeathed property can be found in the city’s Letter Books and Plea and Memoranda Rolls, and in formularies such as London, British Library, MS Royal 17 B. xlvii. See A. H. Lloyd, The Early History of Christ’s College, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934), p. 385.

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Genuflexionibus, Inclinationibus, Thurificationibus, Deosculationibus, Oblationibus, Luminarium accessionibus’.17 The downside of the rectors’ financial activities was, of course, their conspicuous and ethically questionable involvement in the London property market, whether as trustees of real property or recipients of an income from tithes, which in London were based on rents. Prior to the Reformation, the clergy’s ownership of personal property, together with their profits from fees and rewards, remained the major source of anticlericalism in London; and the resentment was understandable. London tithes, when they were paid as assessed, were actually 17 per cent not 10 per cent; Thomas Eborall was given four pounds for overseeing William Gregory’s will, that gift alone adding 50 per cent to the annual income he had from his church.18 But the rectors had a strategy to address this problem as well. They modelled both themselves and the laity in pious terms as would-be contemplatives, involved in worldly affairs out of necessity in order to support a life of meditation and prayer. An adaptation of the Ancrene Wisse attributed to the London rector William Lichfield explains that, just as laymen must often tear themselves away ‘fro the messe heryng or fro the sermon’ to return to their daily occupations, priests with cures of souls must often go from their ‘dedis of contemplacion as redyng and preying’ to ‘actiue dedes for thir owne nede’.19 Given that some of the learned rectors eventually became brethren of Syon, this was a powerful form of selfrepresentation, one that tapped the London laity’s longstanding attraction to the idea of a mixed life. And if the mass and parish sermon (which included prayers) were the laity’s own forms of contemplation, as Lichfield seems to suggest, it

17

The Church in London, 1375–1392, ed. by Alison K. McHardy, London Record Society Publications, 13 (London: London Record Society, 1977), pp. i–xvii; Lyndwood, Provinciale, p. 298. 18 Richard Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1981), pp. 108–13 (on tithes); The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London, ed. by Gairdner, p. xlviii. 19

The English Text of the ‘Ancrene Riwle’ Edited from British Museum MS. Royal 8 C. I, ed. by Albert C. Baugh, EETS, O. S. 232 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1956), p. 58. This adaptation has sometimes been considered too early to be Lichfield’s, despite the near-contemporary attribution in the single surviving manuscript. Anne Hudson suggests that Lichfield may just have owned the book: ‘Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London’, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), chap. XV , pp. 1–18 (p. 7). The rectors’ affinity with Syon is best explained by the brethren’s ‘highminded evangelicalism’ and the ‘patristic clerical idealism’ reflected in their books, for which see Gillespie, ‘The Mole in the Vineyard’, pp. 131–62.

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follows that the parish church could now be attractively figured as a centre of contemplative practice. In what we have seen so far, then, the learned rectors found the city a hospitable place. They were able to execute an important aspect of their programme — to restore the dignity of the clergy, or at least their small segment of the clergy — by taking advantage of urban patterns of professionalization and affinities with the civic elite. They also strengthened the English church by providing responsible oversight of its London endowments and enhancing the appeal of intercessory ritual. But this successful work of acculturation and development of resources was only preliminary to their intellectual work, the exercise of their learning that would increase the orthodox faith among the people and banish dangerous heresies from their minds.20 That work, as I have said, amounted to an active campaign of theologizing in the capital, undertaken at the same time as Pecock’s better known theological project. It consisted of two kinds of religious writing: theological compilations for the clergy in Latin, and sermons for the laity in English. Both bodies of work promoted a distinctive theology: patristic in orientation, free of speculation and doubt, relentlessly focused on the moral life, but cautiously open to affective spirituality. To appreciate the freshness of these productions, it helps to consider how they depart in important respects from the rectors’ university training. There were places in the city, such as the ‘schools’ for educating clergy at St Paul’s, where the learned rectors could dispute formally with opponents, much as they had at the university, and where they put on spectacular displays of academic learning, first against Reginald Pecock on the value of preaching and later against the friars on the issue of tithes. The procedure was for two opponents to raise objections to one another’s positions prior to a master making a determination, or for a single scholar to consider opposing opinions before arriving at a conclusion. But these disputations were specialist productions in Latin for an audience of clerics, and, to judge from the extended debate between the rectors and Reginald Pecock on the 20

A letter from Oxford to the Canterbury Convocation of Clergy, dated 1439, requests the promotion of learned graduates so that ‘cultus unius Dei ortodoxaque fides indies magis ac magis in populo Christiano accrescat, idolatria necnon hereses procul a fidelium mentibus expellantur’ (the worship of the one God and the orthodox faith may be increased more and more daily among Christian people, and idolatry and heresies expelled from the minds of the faithful): Epistolae academicae Oxon., registrum F: A Collection of Letters and Other Miscellaneous Documents Illustrative of Academical Life and Studies at Oxford in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Henry Anstey, Oxford Historical Society Publications, 35–36, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), I, Part I (1421–1457), 169.

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subject, it was still not clear to many orthodox reformers, even in the 1430s and 1440s, how the skills they required might legitimately be translated to a parish setting. The rectors were of course opposed to the solution represented by the Lollard classroom, where the laity were encouraged to appropriate, along with the techniques of biblical exegesis, the posture of questioning and examining positions that characterized academic argument.21 Such practices were notoriously productive of heretical thinking; thus it was against the eighth article of Arundel’s Constitutions for anyone, lay or clerical, to advance theological propositions or conclusions except in the context of university teaching.22 But the alternative to the Lollard classroom that Pecock developed in his London ministry was unacceptable as well. The rectors were in harmony with the anti-Lollard features of his programme, whereby Pecock assumed the superiority of the clergy, disapproved lay biblical study, and refused to teach the laity the ‘hiõ est, hardist and suttilist treuþis to be vnderstode which ben tretid in scolis and bokis of dyuynyte’. But they stopped short of teaching their parishioners to use syllogistic logic — the special vocabulary of deduction and proofs used in theologizing for a university degree — to confirm the fundamentals of the Christian faith.23 In their view, even this limited use of logical argument was dangerous for the laity, and, except in a strictly academic context, also dangerous for the priest. When Pecock later used logic to argue against certain parts of the Creed, they considered it heretical for him

21 For the London disputations, see Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecok’, p. 242, and F. R. H. du Boulay, ‘The Quarrel between the Carmelite Friars and the Secular Clergy of London, 1464–1468’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 6 (1955), 156–74 (p. 162). The major study of the Lollard classroom is Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22

Arundel’s eighth constitution stipulates: ‘ne quis […] conclusiones aut propositiones de fide Catholica […] praeter necessariam doctrinam facultatis suae […] asserat vel proponat’ (that no one maintain or put forward conclusions or propositions concerning the Catholic faith unless [it be done in the course of] teaching required by his [university] faculty): Lyndwood, Provinciale, pp. 286–87 (with such extensive glosses as to indicate difficulty of interpretation). 23

Reginald Pecock, The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. by William Cabell Greet, EETS, O. S. 171 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1927), p. 21; see also Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by J. L. Morison (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1909), p. 126: ‘the leernyng and knowing of ech treuthe and conclusioun of feith muste nedis be hadde and gete bi argument, which is a sillogisme’. Pecock refers to his disagreement with ‘sad and wel leerned divinis’ (the learned rectors) on this point in Book of Faith, pp. 138–39.

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to prefer ‘the iugghement of naturall resinz’ to scriptural truth and the church’s approved doctrine.24 The solution the London rectors proposed to this dilemma might not have been predicted from such highly trained university graduates, some of them doctors of divinity with extensive scholarly libraries and deeply read in speculative theology. Their basic strategy — not only when addressing the laity, as might be expected, but, surprisingly, when defining their own theology for themselves in their Latin compilations — is to put much of their university training aside, replacing academic exercises with more widely diffused literary genres and skills, and drawing energy from an inspired priesthood rather than rational argument. By agreeing to avoid argument in their own academic work, they carve out a segment of discursive ground where clergy and laity can meet to consider the subject matter of theology, without either involving the laity in prohibited textual practices or sacrificing the clergy’s academic charisma. The three books whose contents are listed in Appendix B are unusually purposeful examples of the user-produced compilation, conceived with this strategy in mind. They are books of Robert Whyte (London, British Library, MS Harley 5436, from c. 1451), Walter Crome (Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee. I. 25, from c. 1442) and Robert Rook (Oxford, Balliol College, MS 220, from before 1458). All three compilations were produced by London rectors, in practically adjacent parishes just south of the Guildhall, and they are strikingly similar in content, comprising items that when brought together in each book define the same distinctive theology.25 They all look to the early church for

24

John Benet’s Chronicle for the Years 1400 to 1462, ed. by Gerald L. Harriss, Camden Miscellany, 24. 3 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1972), p. 219. For the Lollards’ ‘attitude of intellectual questioning and criticism’ and Pecock’s utter reliance on the rational faculties of the soul, see Kantik Ghosh, ‘Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Idea of “Lollardy”’, in Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale, ed. by Barr and Hutchison, 251–65 (pp. 265, 264). 25

Appendix B lists the contents of the three books. Robert Whyte, owner of the first, incepted as an MA at Oxford around 1424 (BRUO, III, 2042–43); his church in London was St Peter Cheapside. The dating of his book is problematic, as the original dates are written over with ciphers, possibly by his executors in the process of transferring his other books to Merton College. Walter Crome, owner of the second book, was a doctor of theology (University of Cambridge) by 1427 and became rector of St Benet Sherehog in 1442, the same year he dated the pseudo-Augustinian Quaestiones in his compilation. His book is one of 93 volumes that he bequeathed to Cambridge University (BRUC, p. 168). The third book, Rook’s, differs from the others in lacking sections written in the owner’s own hand, but it is reasonably clear from his will of 1458 that Rook had it put together (‘cum diversis contentis’) in London, with the intention of leaving it to Balliol. Rook was

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Christian testimony as it was communicated by inspired teachers to their students and correspondents: hence the dominant presence of Augustine and Jerome. They all include a handbook that supplies a basic narrative of salvation history — the redemption of mankind from the Creation to the Last Judgement, with an emphasis on the moral life of a Christian within this great scheme. All treat the faculties of the soul and its capacity to be saved. In form, they all favour dialogues, specifically the vertical kind, between a superior informant and an ardent disciple, in which the teacher often poses the questions (stated as topics in the quaestiones and handbooks) as well as the answers. As Valerie Flint says of the Elucidarium, they are dialogues that do not seek to encourage inquiry but to lay questions to rest, that ‘substitute the answers of learning for its process and [...] render that process unnecessary by the deft finding of shortcuts’.26 In selecting these texts, the compilers establish a strategic relationship to academic discourse. The books’ many user-friendly devices — indices, dictionaries, tables of contents, chapter summaries — bear the marks of intensive scholarly work; but the texts themselves stand at a distance from university disputations and their written equivalent, the kind of question and answer commentaries that involve opposition to a proposed thesis or consideration of a possibly incorrect or even heretical conclusion. Thus the Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti in Crome’s book includes much of the same doctrinal material as Lombard’s Sentences, the theology student’s basic text, but presents it in the mode of a handbook, without speculative discussion of such topics as the Trinity and the Incarnation. When a classroom is evoked, as in the teacher-student dialogues, it is on a lower level of the curriculum than theological study, one more suited to artful exposition than argument. Whyte includes a short accessus to Jerome’s letter to Paulinus, possibly his own composition, which explains the author’s intent, how the letter came to be written, and how the work divides into three parts; and he supplies a phrase by phrase explication of difficult words and concepts. In other

MA by 1426 (BRUO, III, 1589) and was presented to St Lawrence Jewry by Balliol in 1438. I have not listed the last three items in the manuscript which, on evidence of the table of contents, were added after the others; but they are consistent with the other choices. 26

Valerie Flint, ‘Heinricus of Augsburg and Honorius Augustodunensis: Are They the Same Person?’, Revue Bénédictine, 92 (1982), 148–58 (pp. 150–51). Mishtooni Bose finds fifteenthcentury scholars themselves making just this distinction between a ‘disputative theology’ and an ‘affective theology whose literary modes were essentially confirmatory rather than analytical’. See Bose, ‘The Issue of Theological Style in Late Medieval Disputations’, Disputatio, 5 (2002), 1–21 (p. 11).

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words, he writes the kind of commentary made possible by the study of grammar, a favourite preoccupation of the rectors, as we have seen, despite their more advanced learning. There is also a pervasive rhetorical aspect to the compilations, not just in the Mary Magdalene sermon, which famously uses all the standard figures of speech to produce emotion, but more importantly in the selections from Augustine and Jerome, which invest instruction in the faith with a simple, persuasive eloquence. In this intimate version of the academic classroom, the teacher seems inspired or wise, rather than a product of advanced theological schooling. It is not argument that animates the texts, but the affecting style of the teacher–student encounter, the master so patiently explaining doctrinal matters to the student, the listener so anxious to learn and delighted to have a guide to show him the way, as Jerome does for Paulinus. In the Enchiridion ad Laurentium included by Robert Rook, the master points out that the best way to acquire religious instruction is not through academic study at all, but ‘grandi studio pectus accendi’ (to have a great zeal kindled in one’s heart), presumably by a feeling teacher, for the familiar matter of the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, elements of the faith on which various texts in the compilations expound.27 As always with the rectors, however, there is a larger ecclesiological dimension to their thinking; according to De disciplina christiana, also in Rook’s book, the ultimate classroom is the church and the teacher Christ himself. These are not, then, the usual compilations of sermon materials, made to be mined for exempla and scriptural interpretation to suit a wide range of purposes; instead, a highly specific theological position is built into the books’ ensemble of texts and methods. They could not be Lollard work because of the radically unequal teacher–student relationship and lack of controversy. Nor could they belong to one of the city’s alternative orthodoxies: they could not be Pecock’s because he valued the Fathers much less and rational proofs more, and the rectors’ spirituality is more austere and more dogmatically based than we might expect from the London mendicants. The rectors remained focused on doctrine, even when zeal was kindled in the heart. They were not influenced by the antiintellectual drift of Arundel’s Constitutions to make an intensely affective popular devotion the main vehicle of their urban campaign — as we have seen, they disapproved of Margery Kempe. And they remained a world apart from the 27

I quote the texts of the compilations from modern editions and translations: Enchiridion ad Laurentium, in PL, XL, col. 235; On Christian Doctrine, The Enchiridion, trans. by J. F. Shaw (Edinburgh: Clark, 1873), p. 239.

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popular religion being practised by the London vicar, Thomas Vyrby, a nongraduate whose mistaken idea of orthodoxy was to organize a saint’s cult around the perfumed ashes of the heretic, Richard Wyche.28 It is fascinating to see — and this is the art of these compilations — how each of the included texts is drawn into the desired theological orbit by its relation to the others in the volume. The compilers use a variety of textual strategies to bring these relationships to the fore: most obviously, the dictionary that opens Whyte’s book moves from Abstinence to Zeal, focusing the entire compilation on these two poles of the learned priest’s existence. Such pointers often encourage a specific reading of texts that were elsewhere subject to widely different interpretations. The verses on the unwordly qualities of a good priest that Whyte appends to the Mary Magdalene sermon call attention to the mixed-life reading that can be given to that text, whereby the Magdalene is the pure soul in search of its saviour, contemplative by choice, but often so hampered by the demands of the world that it cannot see or find God. In Rook’s book, the Enchiridion’s uncontroversial doctrine tells us how to interpret signs of controversy in the other texts. The reader understands that the heretical opinions to which Anselm responds in Cur deus homo do not challenge Christian doctrine so much as they prompt him to assert the true faith as a matter not to be disputed. Boso, the student who voices the infidels’ views for this purpose, is actually the most faithful of Christians, whose role is to concur at every point with what his master says: ‘Non possum negare.’ [...] ‘Ita credimus.’ [...] ‘Non possum aliter intelligere’ (I cannot deny it. [...] Thus we believe. [...] I cannot think otherwise).29 Most often in these books, it is a patristic text that exerts a pull on the others. In the Epistola ad Paulinum included by Whyte, St Jerome regrets that he is writing rather than speaking: ‘Habet nescio quid latentis energiae viva vox; et in aures discipuli de auctoris ore transfusa fortius sonat’ (Spoken words possess an indefinable hidden power; teachings that pass directly from the mouth of the speaker into the ears of the disciples are more important than any other). This is our cue to hear the voices of the teacher in that compilation’s other texts: the kind

28

Vyrby was allowed to keep his benefice; see Caroline M. Barron’s review of J. A. F. Thomson’s The Later Lollards, in Journal of the Society of Archivists, 3 (1967), 257–59. 29

See the edition and translation of ‘The Homily of Origen Concerning the Lamentation of the Magdalene at the Tomb of the Lord’ (from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 137), by Rodney K. Delasanta and Constance M. Rousseau, ‘Chaucer’s Orygenes upon the Maudeleyne: A Translation’, Chaucer Review, 30 (1996), 319–42 (pp. 324–42); and see Sancti Anselmi libri duo: Cur Deus Homo, in PL, CLVIII, cols 377C, 377D.

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magister in the Elucidarium, the gentle confessor who gives the Mary Magdalene sermon, St Paul conveying ‘sublimiores et venerabiles sensus’ (exalted and venerable thoughts) about Christianity to Seneca. One can see how textual ‘dragging’ of this kind may have controlled the Wycliffite texts that have been discovered in some of the London rectors’ books.30 However successfully these compilations defined the rectors’ theology, they were nevertheless in Latin and intended for use only by the clergy. It remains to be seen how the rectors’ theological work carried over to their preaching, which the compilations were intended to inspire and assist (‘bona pro predicacione’, as Whyte notes of his dictionary of terms). The rectors’ parochial sermons were their main work in the vernacular, their great motive for coming to the city, and along with their preaching in the public sphere, the crowning activity of their priesthood. They formed a massive corpus of applied theology that has practically disappeared, since, as will be seen, the rectors had a disinclination for publishing their work. Some remarkable sermons do survive, however, in the notebooks of John Dygon, one of the rectors to arrive in the 1430s, and, although recorded in Latin rather than the language of delivery, these examples vividly suggest how the group captured a lay audience for their distinctive theology.31 A sermon Dygon wrote for the feast of the Annunciation manages to encompass all the rectors’ social and textual strategies at once. Dygon came to London from a troubled Essex parish where a later rector was murdered by Lollards, and he ended his career as a recluse at Sheen: hence the anti-heretical zeal and desire for spiritual purity that we discover in his writings. His use of sermon form is highly strategic: he abandons the elaborate thematic divisions and subdivisions of the ‘modern’ sermon practised at the universities for a simple

30 Epistola LIII ad Paulinum, in PL, XXII, col. 542; The Principal Works of St Jerome, trans. by W. H. Fremantle (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1893), p. 97; L. Annaei Senecae opera quae supersunt, ed. by Friedrich Haase, 3 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), III, 478; The Apocryphal New Testament, ed. and trans. by M. R . James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 482. For Wyclif texts owned by London rectors, see Jeremy I. Catto, ‘A Radical Preacher’s Handbook, c. 1383’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 893–904, and Hudson, ‘Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London’. 31

For Dygon’s manuscripts, see Ralph Hanna’s ground-breaking work in ‘Producing Magdalen College MS lat. 93’, Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 142–55, and ‘John Dygon, Fifth Recluse of Sheen: His Career, Books, and Acquaintance’, in Imagining the Book, ed. by Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson, Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe, 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 127–44.

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treatment of the biblical text, the ‘ancient’ form used by the church fathers.32 He takes up the text ‘singillatim’ (step by step) and relates it briefly at each point to the moral virtues exemplified by the Virgin.33 Strikingly, the effect of the verse by verse explanation, preacher to audience, is to replicate the teacher–student dyad we have seen in the rectors’ compilations. This occurs within the sermon as well: the Angel Gabriel initiates a friendly dialogue with Mary, and kindly offers her vital information about the Incarnation which she is grateful to receive. Like the ardent student in the compilations, the Virgin seeks answers, but not because she wavers in her belief; her ‘doubts’ merely prompt the Angel to explain the Incarnation in terms appropriate to simple faith. There is no need for the Angel, or the preacher, in his similar role, to deal with difficult theological issues like the precise mechanics of the Incarnation (the ‘modum in particulari de materio tam sublimi’) — the Angel himself declares such an investigation out of his purview. Rather, the sermon is like a review session on the Bible led by a distinguished expert, covering a good deal of exegetical ground, but introducing only the kind of erudition that can be expressed non-technically in the mother tongue. The preacher notes, for example, when referring to the house of David, that the divine scriptures do not customarily give the pedigrees of women.34 Many of Dygon’s readings in this sermon, like the Virgin’s doubts, come from standard commentaries, but they are shaped by the London rectors’ characteristic preoccupations. At ‘hail full of grace’, for instance, all present in the church are asked to imitate the Virgin, who is found in her chamber, devoutly praying for the redemption of all mankind. Here, the parish church becomes a place for would-be contemplatives to offer their prayers. Then, when the preacher reaches the Messianic verse ‘and he shall reign in the house of Jacob forever’, that is his cue to explain, with rhetorical zeal, the crucial role the institutional church plays in salvation. For grace rules only ‘in veris catholicis […] in Ecclesia militante’ (in true catholics, in the Church Militant). Only within the church can one fight ‘strenue’

32

Gascoigne recommends the ‘ancient’ form in Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 179.

33

The learned rectors typically had served in other parishes before coming to London. For Dygon’s troubled Essex parish, Sible Hedingham, see Larry R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350–1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 259, 264–69. 34

I am most grateful to Professor Siegfried Wenzel for providing me with his transcription of the Latin text of Dygon’s sermon from Oxford, Magdalen College, MS lat. 79. I have quoted from his transcription and from his modern English translation of the text in Preaching in the Age of Chaucer: Selected Sermons in Translation (Washington, DC : Catholic University of America Press, 2008), pp. 165–81.

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against the devil and ‘viriliter’ overcome temptations. Finally, in the sermon’s two endings, the rectors’ customary social distinctions come into play: there is a general review of the Virgin’s virtues ‘pro morali instruccione vulgarium’ (for the moral instruction of the common people), but a fierce admonition to the ruling elite to imitate her humility and mercy, in the mode of the rectors’ public sermons. From the perspective of contemporaries like Thomas Gascoigne, the theological campaign represented by this sermon was an evident success. The rectors became the unchallenged face of orthodoxy in the city, tirelessly revalidating their theology in hundreds of sermons, while Pecock’s books were consigned to the fire. Only in the 1460s, when they became embroiled in an unseemly controversy with the friars over tithes, did their enterprise falter; the issue of tithes would haunt them until the Reformation, as would the distinction they created between an elite priesthood of preachers and ordinary priests, whose consequent neglect of preaching contributed to its later parochial decline. Whether the rectors banished heretical views from the minds of their parishioners is harder to say. Perhaps the best evidence of their considerable impact on belief lies in Pecock’s bitter complaints about the great popularity of the city’s preachers — those ‘sad and wel leerned divinis’, his former colleagues, who successfully convinced the laity that their sermons were ‘substancial divinitie’, even though the religious truths they preached were put forward as untested conclusions.35 From our own perspective, it is tempting to agree with Pecock on both points: the rectors’ success, and also the questionable way they achieved it. Certainly the rectors infantilized the laity by restricting their access to intellectual resources, and arguably they infantilized themselves at the same time by self-censoring practices, such as venturing into the vernacular only in sermons and narrowing the range of academic inquiry, in keeping with Arundel’s Constitutions. These aspects of the rectors’ work require further comment, however, since practices that were the effects of censorship in earlier years can have a rather different explanation in midcentury London; they can become strategies to be used by orthodox reformers for other ends, such as the self-representation and cultural positioning the rectors found so essential to their London campaign. This would seem to be the case when we consider the rectors’ puzzling disinclination to circulate their written work. Because the rectors themselves loved

35

For Gascoigne on London preachers, see Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, pp. 188–89. For Pecock’s complaints, see Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by Morison, pp. 138–39. The number of heresy trials in London falls off in mid-century, but that is not the best evidence of belief.

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to collect and copy the books of other clerical authors, one might have expected them to follow the example of their French counterpart, Jean Gerson, who exploited every opportunity for publication available to a person of his time, or their English counterpart, the Oxford rector, John Felton, whose sermons (as recorded in Latin) could be purchased in bookshops specializing in divinity. Yet they took a different course. The three compilations that have been discussed were all passed by bequest to Oxford or Cambridge libraries, for the use of a highly select group of clergy. As for the sermons, in only a few cases are copies known to have passed out of their hands, notably some by William Lichfield and Hugh Damlett, now lost, that went to Syon, and a copy of Damlett’s that was bequeathed to a fellow rector, William Storey. Typically, Lichfield’s immense corpus of 3083 sermons had only the narrowest circulation, some reaching Syon, but the main body of them simply left in his own copies to be found after his death.36 Fear of prosecution on religious grounds is not a likely reason for this reticence, since the compilations did not include prohibited works, such as Wyclif’s, or speculative theology. Sermons were normally circulated in Latin, even if originally delivered in the vernacular, so there was no risk of prosecution for including translations of the Bible into English (these were exempt from prohibition in oral sermons but not in writing). Instead, it would seem that, when it came to their own work, the rectors had a deeply felt, ideological preference for word of mouth teaching and preaching over the written word, one that marked them as evangelists on the patristic model and sharply distinguished them from Pecock, who vigorously supported lay study of written books of instruction in preference to attendance at sermons.37 The London location may also have been a factor, for the great size of the metropolis paradoxically inhibited widespread distribution of written work. The city’s complex social hierarchies, and the fear of unstable texts moving far beyond the author’s control, as Pecock claimed his writings had done, dictated a more strictly controlled circulation to special groups.

36

Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecock’, p. 240; Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, English Historical Literature of the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913), p. 296. The same reticence may lie behind Eborall’s directive that London, British Library, MS Royal 5 C. iii never be put up for sale. There may have been fear of political repercussions, however, of the kind reported by Gascoigne in Loci e Libro veritatum, ed. by Rogers, p. 191. 37

Pecock, The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. by Greet, pp. 9–10, 21, and elsewhere in his œuvre. On Gascoigne’s preference for preaching over the written word, see Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecock’, p. 238.

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The rectors’ failure to produce theology in English, other than for oral delivery in their sermons, is a similarly complex question. The prohibitions against vernacular theology in ecclesiastical law do not fully explain it. Pecock wrote for the laity in English for twenty years before being stopped, primarily on other grounds, and one of the rectors, William Lichfield, did not hesitate to produce at least one poem in English: his ‘Complaint of God to Sinful Man’, which translates the scheme of redemption in the rectors’ handbooks into the vernacular, in the manner of a morality play.38 Along with Lichfield’s adaptation of the Ancrene Wisse, which has already been discussed, this poem points to the vast possibilities for influencing the laity through English writings that the London rectors might easily have exploited, had they been inclined that way. Indeed, it would have been a very short step for them to take, since certain items in their compilations like the Elucidarium and the Mary Magdalene sermon had already been translated into English (the latter by Chaucer, according to the Legend of Good Women). The rectors’ stubborn Latinity makes a kind of sense, however, if we consider that a new group entering a complex environment of literate professionals, such as London presented in the 1430s, inevitably sets off a train of adjustments, a slight reformulation of roles, in the kind of cultural work being done. It is likely that, because their Latinity was practically unrivalled in the city, the learned rectors became the new placeholders for the Latin standard that prevailed in all aspects of the city’s textual life, freeing up other groups (chroniclers, aureate poets, clerks of the city companies) to write in English while still deferring to the Latin tongue. If that is the case, however, what can be made of the learned rectors’ apparent under-utilization of their university skills, so at odds with their claim to be a highly trained professional elite? The rectors may seem to exemplify the current view that, when it came to theology, orthodox reformers beat a retreat from Wyclif’s speculative mode to take refuge in doctrinal simplicity and recycling the works of earlier scholars. To think of their work only in this way, however, would be to underestimate the pressure it put on Pecock to define his more obviously intellectual position, and the theological vibrancy the rectors helped to create among alternative orthodoxies in London, despite the lack of controversy in their own teaching and preaching. It would also undervalue the inventiveness of their productions, which were only deceptively simple, requiring as they did a virtuoso

38

Only Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 174/95, fol. 525 has the Lichfield attribution, but it tellingly refers to the poem as a theological production: ‘tractatus compilatus p(er) Mag(is)t(ru)m Will(elmu)m lychefelde doctorem theologie’. The poem survives in fourteen manuscripts, indicating wide distribution, but possibly not in Lichfield’s lifetime.

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command of theological materials and academic styles. Although not speculative thinkers, the rectors were nevertheless innovators in the academic sphere, anticipating the rehabilitation of grammar and rhetoric, as opposed to logic, in the university curriculum, as well as the ‘declarative’ theological style preferred by sixteenth-century theologians.39 In at least one respect, the willingness to move beyond scholastic modes of argument, they were more innovative than Pecock, and they represent a strand of Christian humanism, centred on moral education and the perfectibility of mankind, that would come to fruition in the Oxford circle of Thomas Chaundler. Of all their strategies, those that tested the boundaries of academe are perhaps the most worthy of our attention. Far from disengaging from the challenges of theology, the London rectors were bravely redefining what theology should be.

39

Ball, ‘The Opponents of Bishop Pecock’, p. 261, finds the orthodox reformers’ theology disappointing for a different reason, in that it fails to pursue ‘patristic theology’ far enough; this, I have suggested, is not true for the rectors’ compilations. For ‘declarative’ theology, see Bose, ‘The Issue of Theological Style’, p. 11.

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Appendix A I: London Rectors Arriving in the 1430s (University Graduates) Robert Briggham (St Andrew Hubbard, 1428–42 d.) Robert Oppy (All Hallows Honey Lane, 1429–64 d.) John Daventre alias Horne (St Mary at Hill, 1430–39 d.) Reginald Pecock (St Michael Paternoster Ryole, 1431–44) Robert Whyte (St Peter and Paul Westcheap, 1433–61 d.) William Kyrkeby (St John the Baptist Walbrook, 1433–45) John Dygon (St Andrew Holborn, 1433–35) John Greene (St Clement Danes, 1434–45) Robert Rooke (perpetual vicar, St Lawrence Jewry, 1438–58 d.) Thomas Faux (St Bride Fleet Street, 1436?–59 d.) *Gilbert Worthington (St Andrew Holborn, 1439–47 d.)

II: Other Rectors (In Order of Mention) William Lyndwood (All Hallows Bread Street, 1418–33) *Thomas Gascoigne (St Peter upon Cornhill, 1445) John Scarle (St Leonard Foster Lane, 1421–29) Edmund Coningsburgh (St Leonard Foster Lane, 1448–49) Thomas Chace (St Gregory by St Paul, 1426–1438; Chancellor of St Paul’s, 1423–49 d.) *William Ive (St Michael Paternoster Ryole, 1464–70) David Fyfyan (perpetual curate, St Benet Fink, 1420–51 d.) *Thomas Eborall (St Michael Paternoster Ryole, 1444–64 and All Hallows Honey Lane 1464–71 d.) John Cote (St Peter upon Cornhill, 1446–47 d.) *John Pynchbeck (St Mary Abchurch, 1457–59) William Byngham (St John Zachary, 1424–51 d.) *William Lichfield (All Hallows the Great, 1425–48 d.) Walter Crome (St Benet Sherehog, 1442–53 d.) Thomas Chaundler (All Hallows the Great, 1467–70) *denotes an opponent of Pecock

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Appendix B I: Robert Whyte’s book: London, British Library, MS Harley 5436 (c. 1451) Dictionary (‘tabula’) of theological concepts A–Z, with illustrative biblical personages Pseudo-Origen, sermon on Mary Magdalene (with verses at end by Whyte) Jerome, letter to Paulinus, with commentary (signed Whyte) Elucidarium, sive dialogus de summa totius christianae theologiae Apocryphal correspondence between Seneca and St Paul

II: Walter Crome’s book: Cambridge, University Library, MS Ee. I. 25 (c. 1442) Treatise analysing the soul, with articles of the faith Poem, ‘Ad mensam magnam sedisti’ Pseudo-Grosseteste, portion of Dialogus inter corpus et animam Pseudo-Augustine, Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti (with table of chapters at end, signed Crome) Augustine, Questiones evangeliorum (signed Crome) In-progress index to Questiones veteris et novi testamenti, A–Z

III: Robert Rooke’s book: Oxford, Balliol College, MS 220 (before 1458) Anselm, Cur deus homo Anselm, De similitudinibus Pseudo-Augustine, Tractatus de spiritu et anima Pupilla oculi, with table of contents Augustine, Enchiridion ad Laurentium, preceded by list of chapters Pseudo-Augustine, De conflictu viciorum atque virtutum Augustine, De disciplina christiana, with summary of chapters Pseudo-Augustine, De igne purgatorio Augustine, De agone christiano Augustine, De sermone domini in monte

C OMMON L IBRARIES IN F IFTEENTH-C ENTURY E NGLAND : A N E PISCOPAL B ENEFACTION James Willoughby

E

ndowed libraries that were the free resort of any who could make use of them were rarely encountered in medieval England. Assembling even a small collection of books was a significant expense; ensuring their safe preservation for posterity required the institutional support of an undying corporation, and books held in such a way were not normally available to readers outside that body corporate. At the two English universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where the need for books was felt most intensely and where a corporate will could impose itself, central reference collections were established in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but access to them was restricted.1 Outside the universities, arrangements were made on an ad hoc basis. Small collections of useful texts might be chained in a parish church or oratory, and lending arrangements were sometimes available, usually under the caution of a pledge for the book’s value.2 But what would be

1

At Oxford and Cambridge, access to these collections came further to be restricted to secular clerks, who could not draw on the resources of a conventual library; see most recently Roger Lovatt, ‘College and University Book Collections and Libraries’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 1, to 1640, ed. by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 152–77 (pp. 170–71). 2

For example, seven books were chained in the oratory of the priest’s house at Saffron Walden (Essex) by the founders of the almshouse he was to serve. They were to be freely available for consultation by any priest of the town, and could be borrowed by priests in the surrounding district after a proper pledge had been received, to be returned after three months (Saffron Walden, Town Council, D/B2/CHR11/13, fols 17v –18v ); text edited by Nigel Ramsay and James M. W. Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues,

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recognizable as the ancestor of all modern public libraries — in other words, a staffed building containing a reference collection that was made freely available to any reader able to make use of it — was a rare bird indeed. The most famous example of such a library was at the Guildhall in London, the first library in England to be administered by a civic authority. Two others certainly existed, at Worcester and Bristol, and I should argue for a fourth, at Norwich.3 All of these were fifteenthcentury foundations, all were staffed by a librarian and open to readers at set hours in the day, all were theological in character, and all seem to have been intended to buttress the orthodoxy of the local clergy. What they also had in common was the nature of their formal organization, since each was founded on a pre-existing chantry college, the simplest means by which a collection of books might be incorporated to ensure its permanent stability as a resource. The foundations are so plainly kindred that one might naturally suspect a relation between their founders, and that is indeed the way the evidence tends. It is the intention of this paper to tease out these interrelations, and to suggest the manner in which these libraries can be understood as having been conceived and founded together as institutions of reform, with a concern for right teaching at their core. The most celebrated of this small clutch of common libraries was established in London between 1423 and 1425, in the collegiate chapel of the Guildhall.4 It was an endowed foundation open to all readers at specified times, and, according to John Stow, adjoining the south side of the Guildhall chapel was built what he 14 (London: British Library in association with The British Academy, 2009), pp. 368–70 (SH88). The library that Walter Smyth of Eton College left to the church at Saltfleetby in 1524 was to be a lending stock available for a year’s lease to the learned of the district, this time with no pledge specified (Eton, Eton College Records, 60/3/2, Register 1 (1457–1536), p. 144, fol. 72 v). On parish libraries in general, see Arnold Hunt, ‘Clerical and Parish Libraries’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 1, to 1640, ed. by Leedham-Green and Webber, pp. 400–19 (esp. pp. 410–14). 3

I have discussed these foundations at greater length in Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions (n. 2 above). 4

The library’s pre-Reformation history has been often rehearsed. A useful initial summary was given by Charles Welch, ‘The Guildhall Library and its Work’, The Library, 1 (1889), 320–34; some of the salient facts were set forth by Raymond Smith, ‘The Library at Guildhall in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, Guildhall Miscellany, no. 1 (1952), 3–9, and no. 6 (1956), 2–6. Another summary, including archaeological observations, was given by Nick Bateman, ‘John Carpenter’s Library: Corporate Charity and London’s Guildhall’, in The Archaeology of Reformation 1480–1580, ed. by David R. M. Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist (Leeds: Maney, 2003), pp. 356–70. The building history of the library was established by Caroline M. Barron, The Medieval Guildhall of London (London: Corporation of London, 1974), pp. 33–35.

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described as ‘a fayre and large library, furnished with books’.5 Only two of these books are known to survive, both containing theological texts: the first is an early fourteenth-century copy of Book II of the Sentences-commentary by Thomas Aquinas, now London, British Library, MS Harley 32, reported in an inscription (fol. 253r) to have been bought for twenty shillings and given to be chained in the library; and secondly, London, Guildhall Library, MS 3042, an early thirteenthcentury copy of Petrus de Riga’s Aurora, recovered for the modern (refounded) library in 1926.6 That the library collection was chiefly intended for the instruction of the local clergy is established by a report of July 1549, part of a petition by the City for the purchase of the premises after the chantry’s suppression, which stated that it was ‘a house appointed by the saied Maior and cominalitie for […] resorte of all students for their education in Diuine Scriptures’.7 These readers were admitted under the eye of a librarian who was a secular priest, one of the chaplains of the small chantry college that served the chapel. His duties were apparently quite onerous: in 1444, Master John Clipstone, described as ‘Capellanus et Custos librarie’, petitioned the mayor and aldermen to be confirmed in his office and in his occupation of the house and garden that went with it, in consideration of ‘greet attendaunce and charge’ upon him.8 It must be the first time in England that a professional librarian has commented on his situation. The foundation of the Guildhall library, as is well known, is connected with the name of London’s benevolent grandee, Richard Whittington, who during his lifetime had stood patron to the new library of the London Greyfriars, erecting and largely furnishing at his own expense a magnificent building 128 feet in length and 31 feet across (approx. 39 m × 9 m), wainscoted throughout and fitted with

5 John Stow (writing in 1598): A Survey of London by John Stow, Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. by Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908; repr. with additions 1971), I, 275. 6

Neil R. Ker, Medieval Libraries of Great Britain, 2nd edn (London: Royal Historical Society, 1964), pp. 126–27. These two are survivors from the library, as distinct from the office books of the City that were kept in the record-room of the Corporation of London housed in the camera of the Guildhall, a room between the Mayor’s Court and Inner Council Chamber (Ker did not distinguish between the two collections). On these separate libraries, see Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions, pp. 148–65. 7

John E. Price, A Descriptive Account of the Guildhall of the City of London (London: Blades, 1886), pp. 138–39. 8

London, Corporation of London Record Office, Letter-Book K, fol. 219r. Master Clipstone’s request was well received and in view of ‘the merits of the petitioner and his great diligence’ he was granted the office for life. He died in 1457 and, according to Stow, was buried in the Guildhall chapel.

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twenty-eight desks and eight double settles equipped with books.9 The Guildhall library was therefore directly in the line of Whittington’s philanthropic interests, but it went up after his death, largely with capital from his estate.10 In 1421 he had left his entire estate to good works and full discretionary powers to his executors, and although it is inconceivable that he would not have discussed desirable projects before his death, the library was properly a project of his executors, to whom was granted blanket residual authority. The moving spirit in the library’s foundation seems to have been John Carpenter, Whittington’s chief executor.11 Carpenter was a considerable figure, the common clerk of London from 1417 to 1438, twice the City’s representative in parliament, and the compiler of the Liber albus, the great memorial of the City’s customs and ordinances, completed in November 1419 when Whittington was mayor.12 By his own testament of 8 March 1442, Carpenter left to the common library at Guildhall any books which might be thought beneficial, as he put it, ‘for the profit of the students there and those discoursing to the common people’; he owned an interesting collection, to which it will be necessary to return in due course.13 Two similar libraries were established later in the century, at Worcester and Bristol, by the Common Clerk’s namesake, John Carpenter (c. 1402–1476), the redoubtable bishop of Worcester. The two men were in fact close associates and almost certainly kinsmen: John Carpenter the churchman was named supervisor of the citizen’s executors, and they were associated in the royal grant of the Hertfordshire estate of Theobalds to the hospital of St Anthony of Vienne in London’s Threadneedle Street.14 John Carpenter the churchman was at this time (between

9

Survey of London by John Stow, ed. by Kingsford, I, 318.

10

Whittington’s place in the nexus of London citizens and clerics who sought to promote sound reading is set out in a valuable forthcoming article by Anne F. Sutton, ‘Mercers and the Written Word: Books for Worship and Pleasure in the Later Middle Ages’. On Whittington’s career see Caroline M. Barron, ‘Richard Whittington: The Man Behind the Myth’, Studies in London History Presented to Philip Edmund Jones, ed. by Albert E. J. Hollaender and William Kellaway (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), pp. 197–248; and the biography by Anne F. Sutton in ODNB. 11

Carpenter’s biography is given most accessibly in the article by Matthew Davies in ODNB.

12

William Kellaway, ‘John Carpenter’s Liber albus’, Guildhall Studies in London History, 3 (1977–79), 67–84. 13 14

For references, see below, n. 47.

Cal. Pat. Rolls 1436–1441, pp. 510–11. By John Carpenter’s testament, the junior man was to receive the book on architecture that had been given to the testator by the chaplain and architect William Cleve.

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1433 and 1444) the warden of St Anthony’s, and he therefore had the oversight of one of London’s most important schools, attached to the institution, for which he provided an annual stipend of sixteen marks to employ a grammar master.15 It was also during his term of office that the hospital acquired the manor of Povyngton in Dorset for the exhibition of five scholars in the arts course at Oxford, with the proviso that the boys should previously have been given the rudiments of the arts course at the college of Eton.16 As chaplain-confessor to Henry VI in the 1430s Carpenter would have been well abreast of the king’s plans for the promotion of English education, and particularly his hopes for Eton; it is not possible to gauge the degree to which he himself was in a position to promote and encourage the king’s plans, however much the extent of his influence might be suspected. Carpenter was consecrated bishop of Worcester in the chapel of Eton College on 22 March 1444. Carpenter carried this concern to promote the education of the clergy with him into his diocese. Since Worcester was a monastic cathedral priory it offered no equivalent to the secular dignity of chancellor, and so there was no one formally charged with lecturing in theology or canon law to the local clergy. Bishop Carpenter responded by setting up arrangements of his own. Both of his new common libraries were to serve as centres for orthodox study and preaching. Both seem to have incepted at about the same time, in the 1450s, but they were each given their formal statutes in 1464. At Worcester, for premises Carpenter fastened on to the chapel of St Thomas, a detached building that had been built by Bishop Blois (1218–36) on the north side of the cathedral before the entrance to the bishop’s palace (now the deanery).17 It was called the Carnary Chapel (Capella carnaria) after the charnel-house which it contained for the bones of the city’s dead. The original chantry of six priests had by the time of Carpenter’s refoundation dwindled to one, and this priest became the librarian. Between 1458

15

Discussed by Barron, ‘The Expansion of Education in Fifteenth-Century London’, pp. 219–45 (pp. 228–29). From 1439 the church of St Benet Fink, London, was appropriated to the hospital, its revenues taken over for this purpose (Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1436–1441, pp. 238, 279–80). 16 17

Cal. Pat. Rolls 1441–1446, p. 43.

The Worcester library was first noticed by John Willis Clark, The Care of Books: An Essay on the Development of Libraries and their Fittings, from the Earliest Times to the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), pp. 126–28, and it was also considered by Roy M. Haines, ‘Aspects of the Episcopate of John Carpenter, Bishop of Worcester 1444–1476’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 19 (1968), 11–40 (pp. 33–34), and by Nicholas I. Orme, ‘The Medieval Schools of Worcestershire’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, 3rd ser., 6 (1978), 43–51 (pp. 44–45), revised and reprinted in his Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon, 1989), pp. 33–48 (pp. 36–37).

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and 1464 the chapel was rebuilt to include a chained library and at the end of it a set of chambers, upper and lower, for the chaplain-librarian to live in. The appointment of the chaplain, now under the supervision of the bishop, was vested in the sacrist of the priory, whose ancient responsibility for the upkeep of the chapel was acknowledged by the bishop at the beginning of his regulations. At Bristol, where there was no cathedral, premises were found in the guild-house belonging to the Guild of Kalendars, where the new library was fitted out at the bishop’s own expense.18 This house abutted All Saints church, where the guild met, which was in the centre of the city and had been rebuilt in 1443; the library was apparently housed in the attic over the north aisle of the church. The guild at this time was supporting four permanent chantry priests, who together formed an administrative body that elected its own membership. The holder of the first chantry served as prior of this little college of priests, and it was the prior who was to administer the new library. Ordinances for the libraries in Bristol and Worcester are preserved in the registers of Bishops Carpenter and Silvestro de Gigli respectively.19 They were issued in 1464 and are couched in nearly identical terms. They state that the rooms were to stand open every weekday, for two hours before noon and two after noon for the use of any who wished to enter in order to learn. For each collection an inventory was to be drawn up in triplicate: at Worcester, copies were to be held by the bishop, the sacrist of the cathedral, and the library-keeper, and at Bristol by the

18 The history of the guild, with a full discussion of the library, was written by Nicholas I. Orme, ‘The Guild of Kalendars, Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 96 (1978), 32–52 (abbreviated in his Education and Society, pp. 209–19). Many of the records pertaining to the guild were printed by Francis B. Bickley, The Little Red Book of Bristol, 2 vols (Bristol: Crofton Hemmons, 1900), I, 186–89, 202–11; II, 129–30, 133; and those pertaining to the church of All Saints by Clive Burgess, The Pre-Reformation Records of All Saints’, Bristol, Bristol Record Society, 46, 53, 56 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1995–2004). 19

The library ordinances for Bristol were originally set forth in an indenture of 5 April 1464, subscribed by the prior and the mayor on 17 April, in a composition settling the matter of the regulation of chantries in Bristol (in favour of the mayor and commonalty): Worcester, Worcestershire Record Office, Register of Bishop John Carpenter, I, fols 197 r –198r; the ordinances were ‘Englished’ and printed by William Barrett, The History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol (Bristol: Pine, 1789), pp. 453–55, and from there by Henry John Wilkins, Westbury College from a. 1194 to 1544 AD (Bristol: Arrowsmith, 1917), pp. 158–59. The Worcester library ordinances were recited in the record of an inquiry in 1513, when the priory sacrist was summoned for neglect, and therefore survive in a later episcopal register: Worcestershire Record Office, Register of Bishop Silvestro de Gigli, fols 132r–133v; references to the library’s building are in the Register of Bishop John Carpenter, I, fols 167v, 175r–v.

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mayor, the rural dean, and the prior. Under the supervision of the same men, new accessions were to be fairly valued within three days of receipt and then chained in the library, and a record made in the inventory with a note of the book’s value. There were to be annual audits performed in the autumn, at Worcester by the sacrist and librarian, and at Bristol by the prior, rural dean, and a deputy of the mayor’s. At the audit, if a book was found to be missing through the librarian’s carelessness then he was to replace it or the value of it within one month, under penalty of forty shillings. This fine, together with the cost of replacing the book, was to be taken from his stipend. The unusual and important part of the bishop’s reform affected the status of the library-keeper, for he was to be as much a custodian of orthodoxy as he was to be keeper of the books. Whenever the library was open, the keeper was to remain on hand to supervise the room and be ready to explain obscure points of scripture. In addition, he was also required to lecture once or twice a week on the Old or New Testament to any who wished to come, and also to preach publicly. His educational background had therefore to be competent to this demand, so Carpenter stipulated that the librarian should be a university graduate and preferably a bachelor of theology. The bishop’s reorganization of the guild chantry at Bristol was formally carried out in 1464 but, as Nicholas Orme has shown, the appointment of John Hemming as prior in September 1451 marked a significant first step, for Hemming was an Oxford Master of Arts, where previously the guild had been served by non-graduate priests.20 In 1454, Bishop Carpenter gave Hemming leave of absence to study at Oxford, and it is likely that his subject was theology since he had already completed the arts course.21 The Oxford theologian John Harlow, Reginald Pecock’s secretary, was collated to a chaplaincy in the house of Kalendars in April 1458, and was prior by 1466.22 Subsequent holders of the office were most often men of similar academic distinction.23

20

Orme, ‘Guild of Kalendars’, p. 41.

21

He was licensed for the degree of Master of Arts on 10 December 1449; BRUO, II, 906.

22

BRUO, II, 875. The date of collation is significant; Carpenter was doubtless rescuing Harlow after Pecock’s conviction for heresy in November 1457 had made Harlow vulnerable, he being refused admission, on royal orders, to the degree of doctor of theology; see further Orme, ‘Guild of Kalendars’, p. 41, and Catto, ‘Theology after Wycliffism’, in HUO, II, 263–80 (p. 278). 23

For instance, Roger Edgeworth, who held the priorate in the 1520s, was a fellow of Oriel College and doctor of theology and, as well as being a noted preacher (his sermons were printed), he was a strong conservative, thus amply filling the role set out for the prior by Bishop Carpenter (see Janet M. Wilson, Sermons very fruitfull, godly and learned by Roger Edgeworth: Preaching in the Reformation, c. 1535–c. 1553 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1993), p. 22.

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To set alongside these three common libraries is suggestive evidence for a fourth, established within the precinct of the cathedral priory at Norwich. The telling remark is found in the testament, dated 26 February 1462, of John Leystofte, vicar of St Stephen’s in Norwich.24 He requested that if a library was begun in Norwich within two years of his death then it was to have his copy of the sermons of Philip Repingdon.25 If the library was not built, then his executors were to sell the book and distribute the money for the sake of his soul. The first scholar to notice this interesting bequest was the Norfolk antiquary John Kirkpatrick (1687–1728), who found no sign that the library had ever come into being or the legacy into effect.26 More recently Norman Tanner has drawn the same conclusion.27 But some sort of library certainly did exist by the end of the century and it existed — as at Worcester — in the Carnary Chapel of the cathedral. This comes by another piece of testamentary evidence, a bequest by James Goldwell, bishop of Norwich (1472–99), of a clutch of legal works, which he directed should be chained ‘in the library’ at the Carnary so as to be accessible to those engaged in legal work in the consistory as well as to others who wished to go there to study.28 In this way, the

24

Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Consistory Court Register of Wills, Brosyard, fol. 272v . On Leystofte’s career, see BRUC, pp. 367–68. His testament is dated Friday after St Mathias apostle 1461 (i.e. the Friday after 24 February 1462), but ‘Mathie’ has previously always been misread as ‘Mathei’, for Matthew (21 September) and the document consequently dated to 1461. Probate was granted on 12 March 1462. Leystofte bequeathed his ‘books of philosophy and rhetoric’ and a copy of Nicholas de Gorran’s Commentary on the Psalms to Pembroke Hall in Cambridge, where he had been a fellow from 1444 until 1457/8; see The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, ed. by Peter D. Clarke, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, 10 (London: British Library in association with The British Academy, 2002), p. 714 (UC144). 25 ‘… volo quod si incipiat fieri librarium in Norwico infra duos annos post obitum meum, lego eidem librum meum vocatum Repyngton’. 26

John Kirkpatrick, History of the Religious Orders and Communities, and of the Hospitals and Castle, of Norwich: Written about the Year 1725 (Yarmouth: Sloman, 1845), p. 80. 27

Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532, Studies and Texts, 66 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), p. 35. 28

‘Item lego Domui Carnarie infra cepta ecclesie mee Cathedralis Norwicensis situat’ Abbatem super decretalibus et Henricum Bohyc’ vna cum libro decretalium, cathenand’ in libraria ibidem ad vtilitatem eorundem qui Consistorio laborant in decisionibus causarum et aliorum studere volencium. Et lego magistro et fratribus eiusdem Carnarie xl s.’; PRO, PCC Will Registers, PROB 11/11 (35 Horne), fol. 283v. The bishop’s testament is dated 15 June 1497; there is no note of probate. The named works of canon law are the Lectura in Decretales by Nicholaus de Tudeschis (known as Abbas), the Distinctiones in libros V Decretalium by Henry Bohic, and the Decretals, promulgated in 1234 by Gregory IX.

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principle is clear that this library in the Carnary was the free resort of readers who did not need to be priests of the foundation; it must therefore have been a separate proposition to whatever books were owned corporately and privately by the chantry college itself.29 The consistory court of Norwich normally met in the Bauchun Chapel in the cathedral, for which the Carnary College, standing by the cathedral’s west front, was conveniently close at hand.30 The other advantage of the building was that it offered a stable curatorial environment and the safe husbandry provided by a permanent staff, since chantry priests were tied to the altars at which they were required to celebrate and would have been a part of the life of the cathedral close in a way that the canons and lawyers of the bishop’s household were not. Even though Bishop Goldwell is the sole known donor to the library, he was surely not its instigator. The words of his bequest indicate that he was adding to the collection of a library that was already in existence: he gave the books ‘to be chained in the library there’.31 He claimed nothing of the foundation for himself, which he surely would have done had it been his; instead he troubled to specify that the books would be of use to those engaged in legal work, which may suggest that he was adding to the utility of an existing collection that was more theological in scope. John

29 A small stock of service-books owned by the Carnary was inventoried in 1478 (Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Dean and Chapter records, DCN 3/4) and others were mentioned in a deed of gift made over by the master, Ralph Pulvertoft, in 1497 (ibid. dorse) and in his testament of 1505 (Norwich Consistory Court will registers, Register Ryxe, fol. 208r); but there is no list of library books known to survive. For these booklists, see James M. W. Willoughby, The Libraries of Collegiate Churches, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (forthcoming). 30

Roberta Gilchrist in her discussion of the Carnary chapel (Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), pp. 100–05) has argued, from the same evidence, that the Carnary had become an ‘inn of court’ by the late fifteenth century, providing accommodation for the lawyers working in the consistory court. But inns of court were used by common, not canon, lawyers, and it should be noted that the Carnary continued to be described as a collegiate chantry and was staffed by a master and chantry priests until the time of its surrender under the terms of the Chantries Act. 31

Had there not already been a library to which the local clergy had free access, then Goldwell need merely to have chained the books in the cathedral, following the example of Haimo Hethe, bishop of Rochester, who established in 1346 a chained collection of key texts in the church of his cathedral priory for the use of the local secular clerks (Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, Register of Bishop Haimo Hethe, DRb Ar1/1, fol. 223r). Closer in time to Goldwell’s benefaction, in 1469 the lawyer Thomas Kent left twenty-seven law books, canon and civil, to the lawyers of the Court of Arches in London, that they might ‘conveniently have access at proper times’ (PRO, PCC Will Registers, PROB 11/5 (26 Godyn), fols 205r–206v ). For all this, see further Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns and the Professions, pp. 230–33, 123–30 (SH61, SH38).

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Leystofte’s testament shows that a public library was being discussed in Norwich at least as early as 1462, which was in the time of Goldwell’s predecessor, Walter Lyhert, bishop of Norwich from 1446 until his death in 1472. That the choice of the Carnary College at Norwich so precisely parallels the situation at Worcester is suggestive. For if the library was indeed an initiative of Lyhert’s, then there are leading clues that the notion belonged to his long-standing friendship with Bishop Carpenter.32 In his earlier career Lyhert moved entirely in Carpenter’s shadow, and when Carpenter vacated one benefice for a greater preferment Lyhert often filled the vacancy. It is impossible to see Lyhert’s various promotions as having been bestowed independently of the senior man’s influence. The two men had in fact been friends since their university days. Lyhert first encountered Carpenter in July 1425 when he was admitted a fellow of Oriel College. Carpenter was provost of Oriel from 1428 until 1435, and when he vacated the position it was Lyhert who took it over, setting the pattern for his subsequent career by jumping for the first time into Carpenter’s empty shoes.33 When Carpenter was raised to the bishops’ bench in 1444 he vacated the wardenship of St Anthony’s, and his place there was filled immediately by Lyhert.34 That was a significant preferment but it was attended by political difficulties, since a technicality of their admission to the wardenship — both men being secular priests — was their admission to the Augustinian order. The pope conceded that Carpenter need only wear the habit within the hospital precincts, but none the less it seems highly unlikely that either man would seriously have considered taking vows. In fact, Carpenter’s holding of the wardenship was impugned by papal

32

Another piece of evidence that might be mentioned in support of Lyhert’s claim is that the bishop stood sponsor for the construction of a fine new entrance porch for the south side of the Carnary, the so-called Lyhert Porch (showing the bishop’s rebus in the central boss), which made a new, common entrance to all the buildings — college, chapel, and carnary together — and perhaps also provided access to a library. The Lyhert Porch intervenes at the point where the collegiate range abuts the west end of the chapel; at Worcester’s Carnary the library colonized part of the west end of the chapel. Lyhert also set up a preaching-yard at Norwich next to the Carnary, mirroring the situation at Worcester (preaching yards were also sited by the charnel chapels at Exeter and St Paul’s). 33 34

BRUO, I, 360–61 and II, 1187–88.

Cal. Pat. Rolls, 1441–1446, p. 266; Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland. Papal Letters, 20 vols (London: H.M.S.O., 1893–; hereafter Cal. Papal Letters), IX (1912), 497. It had proved impossible to keep the preceptory of St Anthony’s in French hands under the pressures of the Hundred Years’ War and by the end of the fourteenth century the prebends were being farmed to royal clerks and servants; Cal. Papal Letters, IV (1902), 430; VII (1906), 374; Adalbert Mischlewski, Un Ordre hospitalier au Moyen Âge: les chanoines réguliers de Saint-Antoine-en-Viennois (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 1995), p. 70.

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mandate in 1438, and the archbishop was directed to assign it to the preceptor of the sister house at Rouen.35 But Carpenter not only held on to this office until raised to the episcopate, he must also have ensured his succession: to have passed the wardenship to a friend who was also a secular, in the teeth of papal opposition, implies a loyal friendship as well as powerful support. In this case, the men were sheltering under the protective wing of royal patronage: where Carpenter had been the king’s confessor, Lyhert was Queen Margaret’s.36 Following this promotion Lyhert was advanced quickly once more, and again he followed the same trajectory as his friend; he vacated the wardenship in 1446 when elevated to Norwich.37 The close alliance between these two conservative court bishops strengthens the proposition that the common library established in Norwich belonged to Lyhert’s initiative; and that proposition in turn suggests that these endowed common libraries were established as a deliberate, allied act of policy. In making available free access to sound texts, and in Carpenter’s injunctions that the learned keepers should preach and publicly expound doctrine, these libraries carry the savour of the same desire for good teaching that underlies the provision of common-profit books; they were seeded in the same atmosphere, and in a condition of life in which the texts most needful for the priestly proletariat to know were prohibitively expensive to own.38 In an important article Wendy Scase has illuminated the circle of churchmen and civic leaders in London who were concerned with common-profits.39 Her identified circle included John Carpenter the Common Clerk, and by extension his namesake, along with a group of thrusting London rectors that included William Lichfield, John Colop, and Reginald Pecock. London has always been taken to be the locus of this community of scholars and clerics united in their attitudes to the ownership and circulation of religious texts, and of correct texts as guarantors of orthodoxy.40 However, with a separate centre of gravity discernible around Lyhert 35

Cal. Papal Letters, VIII (1909), 504; IX (1912), 3–4, 219.

36

References cited in BRUO, I, 361 and II, 1188.

37

His seat on the episcopal bench was in fact secured by William de la Pole, then Marquess of Suffolk, in supersession of the king’s original candidate. 38

In that condition must also stand the parish library established at St Peter upon Cornhill in London by its rector, Hugh Damlett, another theologically conservative, graduate rector and ultimately an opponent of Pecock’s; see further Ramsay and Willoughby, Hospitals, Towns, and the Professions, p. 162. 39 40

Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, pp. 261–74.

A picture that now stands in need of some small adjustment, since even Colop’s book contains certain devotional material that blurs the line between orthodox and heterodox. On this subject in general, see further the essay by Kelly and Perry in the present volume.

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and Carpenter, together with their old Oriel ally Pecock, one would be entitled to make a separate case that an Oxford milieu, at Oriel College, had been an important seed-bed. With regard to the common libraries themselves, while simple chronological determinism would argue that it was London’s Guildhall library that was the progenitor of the three episcopal foundations that followed later in the century, and that accordingly the two churchmen must have encountered, and been inspired by, the Guildhall library during the periods of their wardenship of St Anthony’s, it is instead a real possibility that the fuse had been lit earlier, in Oxford, which happened to produce the first visible ignition in London. Oriel had briefly been Archbishop Arundel’s own college, although the turbulent fellows at the time of Arundel’s visitation of the university in 1411 were not minded to show him fellow-feeling; their behaviour brought on the college a subsequent inquisition whose detecta survive at Oriel.41 As is so often the case, it appears that the inquisition managed only further to embed the factions that it should have reconciled. After the initial visitation, the fractious dean John Rote — later elected provost — was reported to have said of the Archbishop, ‘May the devil go with him and break his neck!’ Although Arundel’s commissaries had encountered and reproved sufficient extra-mural misbehaviour to provoke individual outcry among the fellows, what had divided the fellowship as a whole was the question of Arundel’s authority within the university.42 The fellow John Birch, proctor, was charged with having brought forward a motion in the greater congregation to deprive of their power the council of twelve elected to examine heretical writings.43 In a disputed election for provost in 1417, Carpenter put his vote behind Thomas Leintwardine, who was an upholder of Arundel’s authority.44 Along with Carpenter, Leintwardine’s faction included Reginald Pecock among its number.45 Both men eventually lifted themselves out of this divided society, and Pecock

41

Printed by H. E. Salter, Snappe’s Formulary and Other Records, Oxford Historical Society, 80 (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, 1924), pp. 194–215. 42

The business is set out by David Watson Rannie, Oriel College (London: Robinson, 1900), pp. 41–48; and in greater detail by Salter, Snappe’s Formulary, pp. 95–115, 194–96. 43

Snappe’s Formulary, p. 198.

44

Leintwardine’s support for the archbishop can be seen at the time of the inquisition when he argued against John Rote’s opinions; see Snappe’s Formulary, p. 201. In 1402 Arundel had protected Leintwardine from molestation by certain enemies and the attempt that had been made to remove him from his fellowship; see Rannie, Oriel College, p. 41. On Leintwardine’s career, see the article by Jeremy I. Catto in ODNB. 45

Rannie, Oriel College, p. 48.

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became in 1431 master and rector of the recently founded Whittington College of St Michael Paternoster Royal.46 At that time Whittington College was under the supervision of John Carpenter the common clerk, and Pecock must have been commended for the post by the other Carpenter, his old Oriel ally, then warden of St Anthony’s. John Carpenter the citizen certainly approved of his controversialist rector. He requested by his testament of 8 March 1442 that Pecock, with William Lichfield, supervise the disposal of his choicer books to the Guildhall library, which he bequeathed, as mentioned above, ‘for the profit of the students there and those discoursing to the common people’. He otherwise bequeathed to friends twenty-six books named by title (including Roger Dymock’s treatise against Lollardy, and the Philobiblon, a suggestive text).47 This clause naming Pecock, as Wendy Scase has pointed out, is even more interesting given that one of the thrusts in Pecock’s preaching was that the scarcity of books in lay hands was a potential cause of error; he argued that prelates should distribute authoritative copies of texts among laymen since books could teach perpetually and were much less likely to be misinterpreted than sermons.48 Again, there is the savour here of what both John Carpenters and Walter Lyhert accomplished in their promotion of common libraries of orthodox texts, attended by learned custodians. What they managed to do chimes naturally with Arundelian concerns for correct teaching under episcopal supervision. Chained libraries in this respect may be considered to be an expansion of the common-profit culture, and — remembering London’s particularity — they were perhaps the way to establish a common-profit culture in provincial cities that could not match the capital’s magnificent accumulation of reading communities. If we are entitled to site the locus of discussion at Oriel College in the second decade of the fifteenth century, then these finished libraries were the accomplishment of a long-cherished plan. None of them, however, was greatly long lived. At the

46

He held the mastership until promoted to the bishopric of St Asaph in 1444; BRUO, III,

1447. 47

London, Guildhall Library, Commissary Court of London, Register 4 (Prowet), MS 9171/4, fols 84r–85v . A translation of the entire document was printed by Thomas Brewer, Memoir of the Life and Times of John Carpenter, Town Clerk of London (London: Taylor, 1856), pp. 131–44, with a discussion of Carpenter’s books at pp. 121–30. This list of books has been often discussed; the most recent, and fruitful, discussion, along with many insights on the circle of clerics that included Pecock and William Lichfield, has been by Hudson, ‘Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London’. 48

Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’, pp. 265–67.

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time of the Reformation they might have been enabled to continue in some altered form within the new evangelical Church of England as bases for instruction in the new orthodoxy. As it was, they were bound in too tightly to institutions offering intercessory prayers, with no future in protestant England; the evangelism they existed to further was of an older type, intended to improve the education of the clergy and anchor them in the faith. It was not until Humphrey Chetham, by his will of 1653, established an endowed town library for Manchester with a full-time librarian and funds for purchasing books, that England could claim to possess anything comparable to its pre-Reformation public libraries.49

49

On Chetham’s Library, see Michael Powell, ‘Endowed Libraries for Towns’, in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 2, 1640–1850, ed. by Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 83–101 (pp. 85, 90–100); also The Life of Humphrey Chetham, ed. by Francis Robert Raines and Charles W. Sutton, Chetham Society, n.s., 49–50 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1903).

Part IV Ecclesiastical Humanism

R ELIGION , H UMANISM , AND H UMANITY: C HAUNDLER ’S D IALOGUES AND THE W INCHESTER S ECRETUM * Daniel Wakelin

F

ifteenth-century England often seems most vividly characterized by its Church: by wonderful stained glass and illuminations, or by sporadic extirpations of Lollards. Yet during the fifteenth century scholarship of secular, indeed pagan, literature also thrived in England, if not reborn, then reorganized and galvanized under the banner of the studia humanitatis. What was the relationship between these two trends? They need not have been mutually exclusive or even hostile discourses: of course, few humanist scholars were ever truly irreligious; rather, as Paul Oskar Kristeller put it, they had ‘nonreligious intellectual interests’ alongside their faith. If humanism is defined closely as the studia humanitatis, the study and imitation of antiquity or ‘the humanities’, then this humanism is merely a scholarly pursuit, distinct from Christian belief, and thus able to co-exist with Christianity in the lives of its adepts.1 Yet did coexistence result in combination? It sometimes seems not, for, unlike the renowned Christian humanism of the sixteenth century, fifteenth-century English humanism has more often been noted for nurturing secular thought instead, such as reverence for political ideas of the commonweal or res publica, or secular skills, in practical

* Besides the editors and conference respondents, I must thank Richard Beadle and Kathleen Tonry for useful advice on this essay. 1

Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Classics and Renaissance Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955), pp. 71–72; although Kristeller adds that humanist activities were thus ‘competing’ for people’s ‘attention’.

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governance.2 Such secular influences on practical governance have even been observed astutely in the Church itself, in what Andrew Cole tentatively and insightfully titles ‘ecclesiastical humanism’. Cole argues that in the mid-fifteenth century many English ecclesiastics turned aside from fighting heresy and embraced the humanities for ‘new models of identity that are not “theological,” “religious,” or preoccupied with heresy, but rather resonant with the secular virtues and germane to the obligations of running institutions of the ecclesia successfully’.3 This is to locate humanism well, for most men interested in the studia humanitatis in fifteenthcentury England spent most of their time in the church or in the educational institutions it supported (the milieux of the works discussed in this essay). Yet it is important to remember that alongside their considerable secular activities — indeed, administering the commonweal on behalf of English kings — churchmen also drew on humanist scholarship in their devotion, pastoral care, and theology. Just because they turned to Virgil, they did not turn away from the Virgin. Many patrons of humanist studies or owners of humanist books could be as fierily devout as their peers. For example, Bishop William Waynflete had given to him a grammar based on Perotti and Valla and a translation from Cicero, but also a work by an Italian humanist on the Triumphus amoris Domini nostri Jesu Christi (the triumph of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ).4 Moreover, such churchmen were also involved in trying heretics or preaching against heresy, when piety was in danger: many bishops who received humanist dedications or owned humanist books, such as Thomas Bekynton, John Chedworth, Richard Fox, William Gray, John Morton, Thomas Rotherham, and John Russell, are also all recorded interrogating heretics suspected of Lollardy.5 Even if they were humanists — and it is not clear how far

2 Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 20, 91–92, 122–25; Strohm, Politique, pp. 3, 18; David Rundle, ‘Was There a Renaissance Style of Politics in Fifteenth-Century England?’, in Authority and Consent in Tudor England: Essays Presented to C. S. L. Davies, ed. by G. W. Bernard and S. J. Gunn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 15–32. 3

Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, pp. 421–37 (p. 426).

4

Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 97, 132–34, 141, and on Traversagni’s Triumphus amoris in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 450, see Virginia Davis, William Waynflete: Bishop and Educationalist (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1993), pp. 91–99, and P. R. Robinson, Catalogue of Dated and Datable Manuscripts in London Libraries c. 888–1600, 2 vols (London: British Library, 2003), no. 83 (noting an oddity in the dedication). 5

John A. F. Thomson, The Later Lollards 1414–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 68–72 (Chedworth), 86 (Chedworth, Russell), 132 (Chedworth), 134 (Fox), 135, 182, 184, 188 (Morton), 212 (Rotherham), 218 (Russell), 225 (Bekynton), 226, 232 (Gray), 233 (Fox),

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owning a few books or having books dedicated to them might characterize these men as humanists — there was nothing unorthodox about this group. But they might also be cast as inhumane, as closed-minded or hypocritical, in discouraging thinking for oneself in religious matters, despite themselves pursuing intellectual openings in the studia humanitatis. For instance, another noble ecclesiast, William Sellyng, prior of Christ Church Canterbury, managed to combine humanist interests with attacks on heresy too. Sellyng studied in Italy, read and loaned Livy’s Ab urbe condita and translated Greek texts into Latin.6 Yet he also gave sermons, of course, such as one against a local Lollard,7 and one on John 10. 16 made to a convocation of the clergy in 1483 on the importance of unity in the Church in the face of attacks by John ‘Wikliff’ who is ‘ab iniqua vita suorum sequentium rectissime nominatus’ (aptly named for the wicked life of his followers) and Reginald Pecock, the ‘Pauo Cicestrensis / cum suis anglicis (ne angelicis dicam plumis)’ (peacock of Chichester, with his English works, and let’s not say angelic feathers).8 Yet despite the need for orthodoxy, Sellyng can dabble in humanist studies even on this occasion. He addresses the clergymen as ‘litteratissimi viri’ (most literary men) and at the outset as ‘patres conscripti’ (conscript fathers), the Roman senators. One possible source for this mode of address is a miscellany of model letters and classical works owned by an earlier monk of Sellyng’s priory, Henry Cranebroke, for the miscellany includes some speeches to the senate, excerpted from Livy’s Ab urbe condita, which include such phrasing.9 And another sermon copied into Cranebroke’s book, and once

and on Italian humanist comments p. 251; for these men, see the index to Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, ideally in the 4th edition. 6 Canterbury College, Oxford, ed. by W. A. Pantin, Oxford Historical Society, n.s., 6–8, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941–44), III, no. 134 (letter about Livy); Josephine W. Bennett, ‘John Morer’s Will: Thomas Linacre and Prior Sellyng’s Greek Teaching’, Studies in the Renaissance, 15 (1968), 70–91 (p. 79). 7 Christ Church, Canterbury: The Chronicle of John Stone, ed. by William George Searle, Cambridge Antiquarian Society Publications, octavo series, 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1902), pp. 108–09; for reference to another sermon by Sellyng see p. 105. 8

London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 116v–117r (following the most recent, pencil foliation in the bottom-right corners of rectos). All transcriptions from manuscripts expand abbreviations silently; all translations are my own. 9

BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 108r–112v , 115r–118r, esp. fol. 108r echoing Livy, Ab urbe condita, ed. and trans. by B. O. Foster and others, 14 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919–59), XXVIII. 40. 3 to XXVII. 42. 22, or XXVIII. 43. 2 to XXVII. 44. 18, excerpted in London, British Library, MS Royal 10 B. ix, fols 53v –55r, in the hand of Henry

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more on John 10. 16, also addresses its auditors as ‘senatores’ and makes many classical allusions, possibly including one to Vitruvius.10 So Sellyng and others from Christ Church Canterbury could indulge in humanist imitation even while caught up in English ecclesiastical business. Nevertheless, humanists in England did not completely shed their ‘fear of supernatural anticiceronian warnings’ — as Roberto Weiss once said the good humanist should.11 Italians writing humanist educational books in England did sometimes have to defend their study of secular classical literature as something useful to salvation; so for example did the aforementioned Traversagni.12 Others, such as the English scholar John Doget of King’s College, Cambridge, tried to erase the difference between classical paganism and Christian studies. When Doget wrote a commentary on Plato’s Phaedo, using Leonardo Bruni’s Latin translation, in his prologue he defended his topic for commentary: Mihi igitur quum aliquando plato esset in manibus illicque de animorum immortalitate preclara legissem : dignus mihi uisus fuit in quem ocium transferrem meum . et si que sancte ac religiose dixerit : ea uerbis meis probarem et exaggerarem . que uero aliena : aut exploderem . aut castigata dimitterem 13 (Whenever I had Plato’s work to hand and I read there very clear statements of the immortality of souls, it seemed to me worthy to spend my leisure on; and I will demonstrate and amplify in my own words whatever he has said that is holy or religious, and anything not like that I will explode or castigate and dismiss.)

The same idea of purifying classical learning in order to study it in Christian schools recurs later in his commentary:

Cranebroke, on whom see Weiss, pp. 131, 154, and on which manuscript see Canterbury College, ed. by Pantin, III, nos 14–15, 83, 107, 123–25. Other drafts and notes in Sellyng’s hand in MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 119r–134 v, make classical allusions. 10

BL, MS Royal 10 B. ix, fols 124v –126r (not in Cranebroke’s hand): a reference to De Architectura by ‘Victorinus’ might be to Vitruvius. 11

Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century, p. 1.

12

Lorenzo Traversagni, Margarita eloquentiae castigatae, ed. by Giovanni Farris (Savona: Sabatelli, 1978), pp. 26–30, 168–69, discussed by Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 141–43, and Richard Rex, The Theology of John Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 15–16. 13

John Doget, In examinatorium in Phedonem Platonis (c. 1473–86), in London, British Library, MS Additional 10344, here citing fol. 5r, printed by James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, 17, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990), II, 500.

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Mirificus sepe plato et ad christianam philosophiam uerbis quam proxime accedens . ut adhibita castigacione sentencias prope modum ad nostras aptemus scholas14 (How remarkably often Plato approaches Christian philosophy in his writings, so that we might admit his sayings to our schools after some castigation of them.)

These passages, one carefully placed at the start of Doget’s work like a disclaimer, are indeed defensive in their overemphatic synonyms and adjectives. Reading Plato needs justifying: the question of how far one can sharpen Christian beliefs by reading the pagan classics was especially vexed with Plato, as opposed to, say, Aristotle or Cicero who had long been better known.15 Yet the passage is not merely defensive, for what Doget describes is a reading-process which is very aggressive — certainly an ahistorical or solipsistic one. Doget reads Plato’s work and finds in it things that he already knows; and what he finds different (‘aliena’) he will chasten or castigate — a word which evokes textual emendation, schoolmasterly spanking, and strict sexual purity. The differences between Plato’s thought and Christian thought have been spotted — this is why Doget does need some defence — but they are to be interpreted away, in an act of hermeneutics that erases difference and sees Plato ‘proxime accedens’ (closely approaching) Christianity. The humanities and theology have been combined into one. To accomplish this, Doget not only presents Plato looking like a Christian but also presents the Christian authors looking towards the pagans for help: lege si placet cum reliquorum catholicorum plurium tum Iheronimi augustinique libros : tam eos philosophorum sentencijs poetarumque carminibus abundare perspexeris : quasi omnem Graecorum . poetarumque bibliothecam reuoluissent16 (If you like, read the books of Jerome and Augustine as well as of many more Catholics, and you will see that they abound in sayings of the philosophers and the songs of the poets, as if they had pored over the whole library, as it were, of the Greeks and of the poets.)

He adds that St Paul also makes use of poetry in his Epistle to Titus 1. 12, and wisely neglects to note that St Paul then goes on to reject ‘fabulis’ or ‘fictions’. For Doget here invokes the Fathers and the Apostle as models for studying the

14

BL, MS Additional 10344, fol. 59v.

15

Hankins, Plato, I, 49–51, 360–61 and Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Gianozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 11–12 note that Bruni’s translation of Phaedo, Doget’s source, began with its own pious and defensive preface. 16

BL, MS Additional 10344, fol. 5v, printed by Hankins, Plato, II, 500.

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humanities — poetry and philosophy. Doget was not alone among fifteenth-century humanists in drawing on patristic precedents to justify his studies. For example, among the texts by Italian humanists which argued for the study of pagan authors, one of the most widely diffused was Leonardo Bruni’s Latin translation from the Greek Ad iuvenes by as saintly a scholar as St Basil. It circulated widely in England: it was available, for example, copied by Cranebroke of Sellyng’s monastery, and in many other manuscripts circulating in England.17 Moreover, the patristic authors — notably Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Lactantius — were widely available to fifteenth-century English humanists: the books given by Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester to Oxford included patristic works alongside pagan and Italian secular ones;18 a member of Humfrey’s household, Antonio Beccaria, translated the Greek works of Athanasius against heretics;19 and the surviving Greek scholarship by the aforementioned William Sellyng is a translation not of a Platonic dialogue, say, but of a sermon by Chrysostom.20 A few English writers also offered some nicely explicit attempts to justify the study of pagan antiquity by putting it alongside the study of patristics. Most interesting are two works (on which the rest of this essay will focus) by writers influenced by the studia humanitatis: the Collocutiones and Allocutiones of Thomas Chaundler and the anonymous translation into Middle English of part of Petrarch’s Secretum. For example, Chaundler, in his Allocutiones, speaks of studying patristic texts with his patron Thomas Bekynton, bishop of Bath and Wells:

17

BL, MS Royal 10 B. ix, fols 68r–70v , and others described by A. C. de la Mare and Stanley Gillam, in Duke Humfrey’s Library and the Divinity School 1488–1988 (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1988), nos 37, 74, 76–80. Botley, Latin Translation, pp. 7–8, and Hankins, Plato, pp. 49–58, contextualize Bruni’s translation amid defensiveness about studying pagan texts in the early 1400s. 18

As importantly noted by Jeremy I. Catto, ‘Conclusion: Scholars and Studies in Renaissance Oxford’, in HUO, II, 769–83 (p. 772). 19

To be discussed by David Rundle, ‘From Greenwich to Verona: Antonio Beccaria, St Athanasius and the Translation of Orthodoxy’, forthcoming in the journal Humanistica. 20

London, British Library, MS Additional 47675, fols 2 r–28 r, and MS Additional 15673, fols 3 –28 v (translation from Chrysostom, discussed by J. B. Trapp, ‘Notes on Manuscripts Written by Peter Meghen’, The Book Collector, 24 (1975), 80–96, no. 17). The patristic authors crop up in Sellyng’s sermons too: The Chronicle of John Stone, ed. by Searle, pp. 108–09 (sermon citing ‘sacram scripturam et sanctorum ecclesie ortodoxorum dicta’ and ‘auctoritatibus quamplurium doctorum sanctarum’ [sic]; ‘holy scripture and sayings of the orthodox saints of the Church’, ‘so many authorities of the holy doctors’); MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fol. 110v (sermon citing St Augustine). r

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Nam uti cum sepe apud te hospes essem catholicos doctores feceras manibus interdum et lingua sumi ; ita apud me non oblitus tui quidem exempli plerumque sanctissimum Aurelium Augustinum . et ceteros interea quos rapere possem ; catholice fidei doctores inspicio (fol. 32v)21 (Because, whenever I often stayed with you, you had the Catholic doctors at hand and on your lips, and so, for my part I have not forgotten your example; and I study in particular the most saintly Augustine and also the other doctors of the Catholic faith I can lay my hands on.)

These lines offer the imagery of scholarly amicitia and of hunting books that it is hard to ‘get one’s hands on’ which is habitually used to describe secular studies — but here these images characterize patristic studies too.22 As with Doget, the study of Christian texts is fully integrated into the humanist vision of scholarship. Chaundler’s pair of works from which these words come, his Collocutiones and accompanying Allocutiones, worry in several places about studying and imitating pagan antiquity and they direct such studies to patristic antiquity and Christian teaching. These Latin colloquies and addresses were completed after 15 May 1461, when Chaundler ceased to be chancellor of the University of Oxford, an event noted in the prologue, and before the death of Bekynton, the dedicatee, on 14 January 1465.23 Despite relinquishing the chancellorship of Oxford, Chaundler seems in these works still to be wrapped up in education, both practically — in his involvement with New College in Oxford and with Winchester College, a school in southern England — and imaginatively.24 He says that the Collocutiones were written by a pupil, but that he, the teacher, has rewritten them and given them to Bishop Bekynton. He seems to imply that the Collocutiones were spoken ‘publicly’, 21 Thomas Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones (c. 1461–64) are cited from Oxford, New College, MS 288, fols 5r–45 v, with parenthetical folio-references. They also appear in London, British Library, MS Cotton Titus A. xxiv, fols 15r–63 r, which lacks folios between fol. 51v and fol. 52r, losing most of the last of the seven Collocutiones and the first of the two Allocutiones, besides other eye-skips and small divergences. 22

Though compare David Rundle, ‘On the Difference between Virtue and Weiss: Humanist Texts in England during the Fifteenth Century’, in Courts, Counties and the Capital in the Later Middle Ages, ed. by Diana E. S. Dunn, Fifteenth Century Series, 4 (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), pp. 181–203 (pp. 184–87). 23 24

M. R. James, The Chaundler MSS (London: Nichols, 1916), p. 30.

On the milieu, see Guy Fitch Lytle, ‘“Wykehamist Culture” in Pre-Reformation England’, in Winchester College: Sixth-centenary Essays, ed. by Roger Custance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 129–66, and Virginia Davis, William Wykeham: A Life (London: Continuum, 2007).

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as if in a game or even an interlude before ‘the king of festivities’ (‘publice coram Rege solatii’, fol. 7r).25 That seems possible, because the Collocutiones are colloquies or dialogues between two young men, later joined by the ‘chancellor’, Chaundler himself, who wraps up the debate. Then, in the Allocutiones, Chaundler writes two addresses or speeches in his own voice to Bekynton on the same theme. The theme is the nature of virtue, and especially the virtue of William Wykeham, founder of New College and Winchester. The model seems to be the dialogues of Italian humanists on moral questions, or perhaps such works as Leonardo Bruni’s Isagogicon moralis discipline (‘introduction to moral learning’) which digested classical wisdom into pithy form. The Collocutiones and Allocutiones are full of quotations from both classical and patristic authors in order to illustrate what virtue is. The quotations are so long — even pages long — that some stretches of the works largely consist of quotations, with only a few sentences joining them. Chaundler habitually writes this way: for example, his charming Libellus de laudibus duarum civitatum (‘little book in praise of two cities’) is in many places silently plagiarized from Italian humanist texts.26 In the Collocutiones and Allocutiones, though, Chaundler does not plagiarize his sources: with one exception, he identifies them carefully and openly. The exception is a supposed quotation from Cicero’s then lost work De republica which he takes from Augustine’s De civitate Dei but presents in wording that suggests that he is paraphrasing Cicero directly (‘Hec Cicero’, fol. 42r), as did other fifteenth-century English scholars.27 This is revealing: for Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones offer instead of silent borrowing an explicit demonstration of the act of borrowing — of how, why, and what one might borrow and learn — from the pagan or Christian classics. At one point in his own voice Chaundler advises his young pupils,

25

Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. by George Williams, Rolls Series, 56, 2 vols (London: Longman and Trübner, 1872), II, 315–26 (here citing p. 320), prints the prologue and a few unrepresentative excerpts; James, The Chaundler MSS, pp. 47–56, prints two short excerpts and a codicological description. 26

Thomas Chaundler, ‘Libellus de laudibus duarum civitatum […]’, ed. by George Williams, Proceedings of the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 19 (1873), 99–121, discussed by Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 163–65, and David Rundle, ‘Humanist Eloquence among the Barbarians in Fifteenth-Century England’, in Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. by Charles Burnett and Nicholas Mann (London: Warburg Institute, 2005), pp. 68–85 (pp. 70–71). See also the useful edition of Thomas Chaundler, Liber apologeticus de omni statu humanae naturae, ed. by Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri (London: MHRA, 1974). 27

Compare Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, pp. 101–02, 115–16.

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‘Ciceronem legendum esse uolo . item Aristotili ceteris que preterea studendum et innitendum esse philosophis’ (I want you to read Cicero and to apply yourself to and rely upon Aristotle and other philosophers; fols 21v–22r). Yet it seems that this course of study runs too far for Chaundler, for the very next clause retracts the former: he wants us, he continues, ‘secularibus deinde litteris et autoribus omnibus tamen doctores christianos maxime ; augustinum anteferre’ (then, however, to prefer best the Christian doctors, especially Augustine before all secular works and authors; fol. 22 r). It seems that he feels obliged to add a Christian modification of the humanist programme, and elsewhere in his Collocutiones and Allocutiones he repeatedly stresses this hierarchy: classical, pagan authors are good but not as good as patristic, Christian ones.28 For example, at one point he notes that his works happily include quotations from classical philosophers but stresses that the ‘perfect praise’ of William Wykeham requires the help of Christian writers: Quoniam tamen in hisce dumtaxat moribus quos tradunt philosophi non stat perfecta viri laus ; habet rursum libellus iste pro reliqua sui parte allocuciones tibi O. pater electissime alciori quidem tractas principio de catholicorum doctorum collectas apicibus (fol. 7r)29 (However, because the perfect praise of this man rests not only on those morals which the philosophers teach, on the contrary this little book has in its final section some speeches for you, O most select father, drawn indeed from a higher source, and collected from the writings of the Catholic doctors.)

Christian works are here drawn from an ‘alciori’ or ‘higher’ source and ‘apicibus’, a word which is often used to mean ‘writings’ in late Latin but which literally means ‘high points’. Because of this opening statement by Chaundler that the ‘final section’ of his work is more Christian, we might expect the seven dialogues to be pagan and the two addresses which follow to be a sort of Christian palinode or retraction. But in fact the Collocutiones and Allocutiones do not follow a retrograde movement, beginning in ‘Renaissance’ humanism and reverting to ‘medieval’ faith; rather, they constantly shift back and forth between pagan and Christian wisdom. Moreover, because this statement about the ‘final section’ occurs in the prologue, it looks suspiciously like a pious disclaimer. Occurring in the prologue, it frames

28

Oxford, New College, MS 288, fols 33r, 34r , 38 v . Ironically, the pastedowns of this manuscript now are fragments of a table indexing St Jerome’s letters; so at some point in history patristic learning was cut up to preserve Chaundler’s learning. 29

Printed in regularized spelling in Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. by Williams, p. 320.

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the rest of the work within a debate about the merits of two intellectual traditions; and the repeated statements about this debate — indeed, once using very similar wording at the start of the Allocutiones — emphasize it as a theme to be kept in mind.30 Chaundler himself pops up as a character as early as the fifth dialogue in the Collocutiones to debate the limits of classical scholarship for inculcating virtue, not in rejection but in constant exploration. There is a complex counterpoising of advice to read Cicero and Aristotle with reminders that such reading is futile, reminders based themselves, nevertheless, on reading — but on reading patristic texts. For Chaundler turns to St Augustine and Lactantius, whose De civitate Dei and Divinae institutiones respectively fit into a long history of intellectually capacious Christian responses to classical thought: Age . imperfectum hominis intellectum esse . eleuatum preterea nobiliter ab Aristotile . a .M. tullio . a ceteris denique philosophi“ preceptoribus ostendit Lactancius . Inter philosophos tamen non ciceronem . imo nullum sapientem esse tam lactantius quam Augustinus fatetur . Verum quia suis in libris clarissime docent non nisi diuinis scripturis et gracia perfectum esse quemquam (fol. 22r) (Well, Lactantius shows that the intellect of humankind is imperfect, despite being nobly elevated by Aristotle, Cicero and indeed other teachers of philosophy. However, both Lactantius and Augustine claim that neither Cicero nor anybody among the philosophers was wise. Moreover, in their books they very clearly teach that nobody can be made perfect except by Holy Scripture and grace.)

Several such passages are direct quotations from patristic sources, and always duly identified as such, as in this quotation from the opening of Lactantius’s Divinae institutiones: neque adepti sunt id quod uolebant ; et operam simul atque industriam perdiderunt . quia veritas . id est archanum summi dei qui fecit omnia ingenio ac propriis sensibus non potest comprehendi . Alioquin nihil inter deum hominem que distaret . si consilia et dispositiones ipsius maiestatis eterne . cogitacio assequeretur humana (fol. 21r)31 (They did not achieve what they wanted and all at once lost their work and industry, because the truth — that is, the secret of the highest God who made all things — cannot be comprehended with wit or our own senses, otherwise there would be no difference

30

Compare the previous quotation with New College, MS 288, fol. 32v: ‘Verumtamen in hisce dumtaxat moribus . non stat perfecta uiri laus . Idcirco philosophiam ueluti minus perfectam transuolans ; tecum insignissime pontifex nitar temptare sanctorum doctorum rimari apices’. 31

L. Caelius Firmianus Lactantius, Divinarum institutionum libri septem: 1. Libri I et II, ed. by Eberhard Heck and Antonie Wlosok (München: Saur, 2005), I. i. 5 (identical, except that the printed edition has ‘illius’ for ‘ipsius’).

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between God and humankind, if human thought could reach the thoughts and plans of his eternal majesty.)

Given such intelligent sources, it is interesting to see Chaundler’s explanation for the limits of pagan wisdom. Their understanding of virtue was limited because they relied on human learning, and the human mind and its thinking processes are limited — ‘the intellect of humankind is imperfect’ in comparison with the mind of God. So if pagan philosophy had taught us too much, there would have been a sort of lèse-majesté, the studia humanitatis as a human rivalling of God. Yet although conceived of as limited, there is at least a conception of the human mind here. The idea that the human mind might rival God is denied, but also echoes as a possibility in that subjunctive verb ‘distaret’ (‘there would be no difference’). And the following lines from Lactantius, which Chaundler continues to quote word-for-word, and with which he concludes his quotation, proceed to state that because the human intellect was too feeble to comprehend the divine alone, God in fact helped to open humanity’s eyes (‘Aperuit oculos’, fol. 21r). The metaphor of eye-opening is suddenly optimistic and also gives human intelligence a plausible, experiential feel. And the human mind becomes a very plausible thing to contemplate thanks to the repetition throughout the text of psychological vocabulary such as intellectum and cogitatio as well as the words homo and humanus (the noun ‘human being’, the adjective ‘human’) — which seem used advisedly in contrast to the word vir for an individual or somebody specifically male.32 Describing the human mind’s limit, faced with divinity, does at least require Chaundler to begin to conceptualize and describe that mind. Moreover, while the penultimate few pages do quote Lactantius on the need for divine aid in saving humankind, the quotation in fact offers hope in the ability of humankind to save itself. This is because Lactantius describes the incarnated Christ not as winning our salvation by his sacrifice in some cosmic righting of wrongs, but by serving as a ‘doctor e celo missus’ (a teacher sent from heaven; fol. 44r). Lactantius is careful not to deny Christ’s divinity, but he certainly does stress Christ’s humankind in this passage, and he stresses it not only because it makes him a suitable surrogate in paying penalties for other human beings, but because it makes him a simpler exemplary role-model — as, for the humanist scholars, so many classical pagan heroes could be — or even a grammar-teacher or magister: 32

For example, Oxford, New College, MS 288, fols 27v –28r, a passage lifted from Cicero, De Officiis, I. 130, on distinguishing ‘uirilem’ dignity befitting the ‘uiro’ (‘masculine’, ‘male’) from beauty befitting women.

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Once again, the term homo and its variant forms echo throughout the passage, both in the plural form hominum (‘of men’) referring in the plural to individual people, but also in the singular forms hominem (‘man’) and homini (‘to man’) which imply some abstract agglomeration of men into one category of humanity. And this passage implies something interesting about that category: it implies that Christ’s efficacy depends on human wisdom and free will in learning from him, and he becomes just one more ‘doctor’ or teacher — albeit a perfect one. And finally, despite the expressed favour for patristic over pagan quotations, after this citation from Lactantius Chaundler’s Allocutiones end with one last quotation from Virgil — one used and allegorized by other humanist writers in Italy and England — which identifies both divine aid and human virtue as ways to heaven (fol. 45r–v ).33 And with this balance between human striving and help from Jupiter (of course, for Virgil, not God), Chaundler ends. Ultimately, the very workings of his Collocutiones and Allocutiones depend on the ability of both the Christian classics and the classical humanities to educate, and on the ability of humankind to be educated. A similar sense of human self-determination can be found in other dialogues and interludes from fifteenth-century. For example, in Chaundler’s Liber apologeticus, a retelling of the debate of the Four Daughters of God and of the Passion, there is a striking stress on humanity’s own ability to respond to the divine.34 Yet the link between this human self-determination and the secular humanist studies is explored beyond Chaundler’s work, in other contemporary debates in a humanist idiom. One interesting exploration emerges in a translation of Book I of Petrarch’s Latin Secretum into English verse (the second dialogue on which this essay focuses).

33

Virgil, Aeneid, ed. and trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934–35), VI. 126–30, also allegorized, for example, by Doget, In examinatorium in Phedonem Platonis, in BL, MS Additional 10344, fols 65v –66r, and Collucio Salutati, De laboribus Herculis, ed. by B. L. Ullmann (Zürich: Artemis, 1951), pp. 484, 547. 34

Chaundler, Liber apologeticus, for example, pp. 60–62 on ‘self awareness’ and salvation (‘sui noticiam’).

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It survives in only one manuscript copied a decade or so later than the Collocutiones, perhaps in the 1470s or 1480s; it was copied at Winchester, probably by somebody involved in education at the priory’s school, or possibly at Winchester College, the school with which Chaundler had connections.35 There are two other Middle English dialogues which can tentatively be linked to Winchester College, and which even suggest the use of moral dialogues in education, grounded in Christian sources such as the Legenda aurea or Honorius of Autun’s Lucidarium.36 Petrarch’s Secretum is also an educational dialogue: Petrarch laments the miserable state of humankind, until St Augustine pops up to teach him — so, as in Chaundler’s Collocutiones or the other Winchester dialogues, an older, wiser man (‘cancellarius’, Lucidus, ‘Doctrine’) instructs younger men. And, like Chaundler’s work, Petrarch’s Secretum also struggles to orient humanist studies in a Christian direction and to discover whether the humanities might be an ethically serious pursuit.37 It was certainly scholarship in service of Christian belief that shaped Petrarch’s reception in England during the fifteenth century — after Chaucer’s and before Wyatt’s dabbling in his love poetry. Exemplary of this pious reception is a translation of parts of Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae (‘remedies for both kinds of fortune’) into English which strips it of its classical allusions and turns it into an austere dialogue about the misery of human life.38 It was the ‘orthodox sententiae’

35

BL, MS Additional 60577, fols 8r –22r , reproduced in facsimile by Edward Wilson with Iain Fenlon in The Winchester Anthology: A Facsimile of British Library Additional Manuscript 60577 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981), but not yet edited. On the provenance, see pp. 9–10, 13–14. 36 Non-Cycle Plays and the Winchester Dialogues, ed. by Norman Davis, Leeds Texts and Monographs: Medieval Drama Facsimiles, 5 (Leeds: School of English, University of English, 1979), pp. 179–208. On the date and provenance, see Richard Beadle, ‘Occupation and Idleness’, in Porci ante Margaritam: Essays in Honour of Meg Twycross, ed. by Sarah Carpenter, Pamela King, and Peter Meredith, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 32 (Leeds: School of English, University of English, 2001), pp. 7–47 (pp. 7–8), and Ralph Hanna, ‘Miscellaneity and Vernacularity: Conditions of Literary Production in Late Medieval England’, in The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany, ed. by Stephen G. Nicholas and Siegfried Wenzel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 37–51 (p. 39). On the sources, see Beadle, ‘Occupation and Idleness’, pp. 8–9, 13 (n. 11) and B. S. Lee, ‘Lucidus and Dubius: A FifteenthCentury Theological Debate and its Sources’, Medium Ævum, 45 (1976), 79–96. 37

Ronald Witt, ‘In the Footsteps of the Ancients’: The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 231, 249–51, 254–56, 290; Brian Stock, ‘Reading, Ethics and the Literary Imagination’, New Literary History, 34 (2003), 1–17 (pp. 11–12). 38

A Dialogue between Reason and Adversity: A Late Middle English Version of Petrarch’s De Remediis, ed. by F. N. M. Diekstra (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1968), esp. pp. 32–33.

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of works such as his De remediis and his Secretum and not ‘his humanistic qualities’ which were popular in fifteenth-century England.39 But the English translation of Secretum differs a little from this strictly pious reading of Petrarch, or from the other two dialogues of Winchester provenance. Though it offers Christian teaching, and in dialogue with St Augustine, Book I of Petrarch’s Secretum also teaches us to study pagan antiquity. In it, Petrarch’s St Augustine — unlike Chaundler’s Lactantius — does not ever dismiss the pagan writers. Late in the section rendered into English, St Augustine quotes in Latin some ‘wordes poetable’ on the soul from Virgil’s Aeneid, and then adds of their message that: To thys accordethe þe Apostle noble seynt powle The body corrupte he seythe / dysesethe the sowle (fol. 20v )40

This comment is followed by St Paul’s words. To say that St Paul agrees or ‘accordethe’ with Virgil might reflect some nascent humanist historical insight here, for St Paul certainly did cite the classics — as the aforementioned English humanist John Doget noted, for example. So it might be significant that Petrarch misascribes the lines: they in fact come from Wisdom 9. 15 in the Old Testament, but Petrarch ascribes them to St Paul in the New Testament, who did live later than Virgil and therefore feasibly might have read and agreed (‘accordethe’) with him: was Petrarch here trying to suggest a Biblical precedent for studying the classical humanities, or trying to historicize the early Church in late antiquity?41 The error, preserved silently in the English translation, suggests that here is such a precedent. Yet the precedent gives priority in time and powerfulness to the humanities: St Paul now merely ‘accordethe’ passively with Virgil, whereas in the Latin original he had the power to have Virgil’s words ‘verificatum’ (verified).42 In the English Secretum the priority of secular studies is in fact confirmed a page later, when Petrarch, holier than St Augustine himself here, says that he recently read St Augustine’s De vera religione: Specyally in thye boke I lokede vppon but late De vera religione / and caste all oþer oo syde .

39

Nicholas Mann, Petrarch Manuscripts in the British Isles, Censimento dei Codici Petrarcheschi, 6 (Padova: Antenore, 1975), pp. 141–42. 40

Quotations come from BL, MS Additional 60577 with parenthetical folio-references.

41

The notes in Francesco Petrarca, Secretum, ed. by Ugo Dotti (Roma: Izzi, 1993), I. 15. 2 to I. 15. 4, identify sources in Virgil, Aeneid, VI. 730–34 and Wisdom 9. 15. Cf. Doget in n. 15 above. 42

Cf. Petrarca, Secretum, I. 15. 4.

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Bothe phylosophy / and poesy / and toke þat to my guyde And redde hytt for my dysporte and Solace (fols 20v–21 r)

St Augustine, however, modestly says there is no need for that, and asserts that his own works are themselves simply responses to pagan philosophy: Saufe chaunge of þe wordes ; þer ys non oþer dyfference But þat þou shalt fynde / that may the plese The phylosophye and doctrine of plato and Socrates And for to tell the shortelye in a clause Oon worde of Cicero was þe cause That y began that werke euery delle (fol. 21r)

This is extremely positive about the value of Plato, Socrates, and Cicero, and the rough English poet’s filler phrases such as ‘euery delle’ echo the gung-ho Latin here very closely.43 Moreover, the English poet develops the reference to speaking differently in the Latin (‘aliter’), in order to stress that there is little difference between different intellectual traditions: he says that only the ‘chaunge of þe wordes’ and not the ideas distinguishes pagan philosophy. As for Doget in his commentary on Phaedo, so for this translator of Petrarch’s Secretum, one can read Platonic texts and find the same lesson in them as in Christian books. However, what is the lesson? What is surprising is that it is not a lesson about the capabilities of human virtue, as for Chaundler, but about the limitations of human mortality. The dialogue starts glumly, with Petrarch ‘soore astoned’ by dread of death (fol. 8r); it includes a grim scene of the indignities of death, piling up rotting body-parts in anaphoric lines which seem devoid of logic or sense (fol. 18r–v ); and even after the praise of Virgil’s and Cicero’s lessons it ends with Petrarch reverting to ‘sorowe’ and ‘grief’, as what he is learning from these lessons is the misery and mortality of humankind (fol. 22r).44 Petrarch was already a century dead by the time this English translation was copied, and so the translation 43

Cf. Petrarca, Secretum, I. 15. 7: ‘unum maxime Ciceronis tui verbum’ (mostly one word of your Cicero). 44

It may be an accident that the text ends here: the surviving translation ends with a request to say no more ‘to nyght’ (fol. 22r ): this echoes the Latin (‘hodiernum colloquium’; Petrarca, Secretum, I.15. 14). That the English translation of Book I keeps this reference to further possible text, however, might suggest that Books II and III were also once translated. Moreover, the English translation requests to postpone book II not today (‘hodiernum’) but ‘to nyght’ and ‘with the lycens of my lorde’ (fol. 22r), phrases which suggest performance before a patron and over several nights, like other known interludes. Petrarch’s opening statement in the English that ‘I appere to youre presence a processe to proclame’ (fol. 8r; not in the Latin I. 1. 1) might also suggest performance.

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might reflect older strains of pious reflection. But gloom is not the keynote; the keynote is in fact an oscillation of mood, from wailing and penitential horror to reasoning and learning. Throughout the translation there are competing comments about human mortality and human intellectual power which it is difficult to reconcile. (Indeed, the reconciliation could, as a critical process, risk interpreting the work as complex, when it might just be inconsistent.) Moreover, the competing comments are delivered too in dialogue, with all the uncertainty that the dialogic form brings, and by characters who shift their point-of-view within the work. However, the apparent inconsistency of mood between rue for human mortality and hope for the studia humanitatis is resolved by defining humanity in bipartite terms, as coherent but combining body and soul, sensuality and reason. The soul is weighed down by the ‘contagius bodye’ but does have a ‘dyvyne lykenesse’ (fol. 20r). After Petrarch’s opening astonishment at death, Augustine tells him that people should not ponder ‘wrecchydnesse’ in their ‘ymaginacyon’ but should ‘studye’ it with ‘reson’ (fol. 10r): not wallowing in woe, but reflecting. For though humankind is miserable, people can escape misery by the exercise of reason. This is what Augustine says outright when Petrarch asks him for ‘the diffinicyon of man’: That man ys a beste and prynce of bestys alle Endued with reason and clothede with flesshe mortall [. . .] Iff thou see a man soo ferre shynynge in reson That all hys lyff hathe growndyde ther vppon And with here brydell . hathe streyned hys appetyte And put vnderfote / hys foule delyte Vnderstandynge hym selfe / by hys wytt resonable Dystincte in dyfference / fro brutes vnresonable Ne that he ys nott worthy for 1to¬ bere the name Off a man ; but reason hym entame Remembrynge and reducynge to for hys eye Euery daye and houre / that he shall dye . (fol. 17v )

So humankind is a ‘beste’ but is also ‘prynce of bestys alle’, and what distinguishes humankind from ‘brutes vnresonable’ — beasts here recast in harsher terms as ‘brutes’ — is the exercise of reason and intellectual processes: a man must let reason ‘entame’ his animal parts by ‘Remembrynge and reducynge to for hys eye’ his mortality (fol. 17v ).45 The metaphor of eyesight again, as for Chaundler, makes this

45

Closely following the shift from ‘Hominem’ to ‘animal’ to ‘brutorum animantium’ in Petrarca, Secretum, I. 10. 5–10. 6, but misreading Petrarch’s classical Latin adjective brutus (‘irrational’) modifying ‘animantium’ (‘creatures’) as the medieval Latin noun brutus (‘brute’), modified by animans (‘living’). English brute as a noun far predates OED, brute, B.1.a, but not as

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reflection sound so doable. Moreover, the gloomy fact of mortality is transformed, in some odd piece of positive thinking or cognitive analytical therapy, into an opportunity — something on which to exercise one’s reason and thereby to rise above the beastly. As Augustine said earlier: That perfyght knowynge of mannys wrecchednes Engendrethe a perfyght desyre to ryse The whiche powere folowythe in euery wyse (fol. 15r)

In a neat pair of parallel phrases, perfect knowledge leads to perfect will and the uplifting of humankind; and the last line suggests human self-determination, with human power sequent upon human cognition and will or desire.46 This argument presents the human intellect as extremely powerful — indeed, ‘perfyght’ — whereas Chaundler called it ‘imperfectum’; and that might be why this English poet says more openly positive things than Chaundler about the power of the human sciences, poetry and philosophy, to teach us. Moreover, the positive hope for the intellect’s power is not only stated but underpins the humanist style of the text itself. The use of the dialogue form invites reflection and debate, and other verbal tics in the dialogue seem to invite the reader to think. The reader as much as Petrarch is told to ‘Consydre hitt well’ (fol. 17v), ‘it’ being bipartite humanity, and ‘merke hym well’ (fol. 15r), ‘him’ being Ovid, marked in a phrase that might translate the engaged reader’s jotting of nota bene. Furthermore, the style of the translation might encourage considering and noting. It challenges readers with some learned vocabulary for logic (‘subsequent’ and ‘antecedent’, fol. 11r; ‘ambiguite of thy proposycyon’, fol. 13v), for philosophical schools (‘Stoiciens’, fol. 12v), for academic life (a humanist’s dismissal of each scholastic ‘faculte’ of ‘divyne’ or ‘legistre’, fol. 17r), and for psychology (‘a scripul in thy conscience’, fol. 15r; ‘puerylite’, fol. 17r). Few of these words are coinages,47 but cumulatively they and others require a reader comfortable with the intellectual life and its terms of thought. Similarly challenging, there are various Latin quotations from Cicero (fol. 12r), ‘vers of virgyll’ or Virgil’s ‘eneyde’ (fols 12v, 15r, 20r–v ), Ovid (fol. 15r) and Horace (fol. 16v ), and not all of them are translated. But, an adjective (OED, brute, A.1; MED, brut, (a)). Entame also far predates the first citation in this sense in OED, entame, v.2 , although OED, entame, v.1, or MED, entamen (v.), has the attested meaning ‘To make a cut into’, or, figuratively ‘To open (a discussion, conversation, etc.)’. 46 47

Closely following Petrarca, Secretum, I. 6. 5.

The few other possible coinages (cf. n. 45 above) predating all entries in OED and MED, are ‘Interpretesse’ (fol. 15v), the calqued Latin ‘certamen’ (fol. 16 r), ‘poetable’ (fol. 20 v) and ‘rethorius’ (fol. 21r).

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then, the manuscript miscellany in which the dialogue occurs comes from a school, and includes bilingual vulgaria for learning Latin, and other texts offering education or counsel.48 That context reminds us of the educational workings of this text too. Overall, the implied readers are credited with being learned or rather becoming so, and becoming so in part through reading this text — for thereby they acquire the means to ‘reson’ their way to salvation. The text does not talk down to the readers or listeners; it talks up, and thereby talks them up. Thus it is not particular ideas in pagan books which prompt these two humanist writers to think about humanity; pagan or patristic books alike can teach similarly divided ideas about human self-determination or imperfection, about reason or sensuality; there’s no obvious link between the classics and human dignity. (Indeed, John Doget argued in his commentary on Plato’s Phaedo that some classical ideas such as those of Pythagoras might debase the human being.)49 Yet both of these works emerge from educational institutions, from schools and universities which, almost by definition, encourage people to improve themselves. And it is not just any education but an education in the secular humanities or studia humanitatis which will contribute to the knowledge of self and ethical living that these works encourage. For Petrarch recognized that the secular, human processes of reading (and writing) might enable the cultivation of ethical living and the encounter with the divine.50 And Augustine too had long ago seen that ethical living and Christian living could best be comprehended and achieved through the use of narrative, imagining and reflection on temporal existence — the subjects of the humanist study of rhetoric, poetry and history.51 Within these long traditions, the Middle English translation of Book I of Petrarch’s Secretum and Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones all suggest that human reading and thinking, and about the humanities, will help to secure salvation. This interpretation fits these works into various maps of fifteenth-century English culture. It fits them into general arguments for the increased trust in

48

BL, MS Additional 60577, fols 67r–77 r (vulgaria). The Winchester Anthology, ed. by Wilson with Fenlon, pp. 18–36, identifies the various contents. 49

BL, MS Additional 10344, fols 49v –51r.

50

Among many studies of this process, see for example, Carol E. Quillen, ‘A Tradition Invented: Petrarch, Augustine, and the Language of Humanism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992), 179–207 (pp. 205–07); Timothy Kircher, The Poet’s Wisdom: The Humanities, the Church, and the Formation of Philosophy in the Early Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 170–71. 51

Brian Stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 3–4, 12, 24–25.

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secular reasoning, as traced in recent studies of rational ‘politique’, of humanist reading, or of the everyday ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ of running the church. Humanist influences might thus seem like points of origin for ‘modernities’, as Cole has noted; yet, he adds, we might beware such ‘longer historical trajectories’.52 And indeed, two elements of these dialogues by Chaundler and the translator of Petrarch make it hard to place humanism on the map of fifteenth-century English religious life — an important corner of that larger map often supposed to trace routes from ‘medieval’ to ‘Reformation’. Firstly, to study the Christian faith through the lens of the humanities makes humanism not only part of the Church but also an observer of it, and this process of observing can let us see the Church in fresh perspectives. To take just one example, in Chaundler’s work, even the fleeting adoption of procedures of the secular humanities — notably rhetoric and history — make the revered Church Fathers into elements of human history. Quoting their works at length clarifies how their ideas grow organically in textual context, as rhetorical acts; and quoting their works side-by-side with their contemporaries and sources helps to historicize their ideas within wider intellectual currents in late antiquity, one vital context. So, for example, in short comments which frame his long quotations, Chaundler historicizes St Augustine’s De moribus ecclesiae as a work engaged in a particular conflict, with the Manicheans, worth comparing with the near contemporary works of St Ambrose, because St Augustine had been an ‘auditor’ (listener) of St Ambrose, thus suggesting some human genealogy and agency for the Christian intellect (fols 36r, 36v –37r, 37v ). Chaundler’s comparisons of Lactantius’s ideas with Cicero’s — even though Cicero’s are said to be superseded — or the fleeting comments in the English Secretum on St Augustine’s dependence on classical sources or St Paul’s agreement with them (cited above) all work similarly to present the founders of the Church as human beings engaged in the flow of history and rhetoric. So humanism not only serves the Church but analyses it — and ultimately in the work of Valla and others undermines some of its authorities and authority.53 In that larger map, then, humanism marks a forking path or crossroads for the Church.

52

Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, p. 436. See Strohm, Politique, p. 4, for a similar balance between invoking novelty and eschewing oversimplification. 53

For example, see one English encounter with humanist debunking of the Church’s authorities in J. B. Trapp, ‘Erasmus on William Grocyn and Ps-Dionysius: A Re-examination’, in J. B. Trapp, Studies of Petrarch and his Influence (London: Pindar, 2003), pp. 477–94 (pp. 479, 484–88, 493).

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Secondly, though, the Church was a powerful institution and could recuperate such scrutiny of its history. For example, in his sermons to convocation William Sellyng comments on the history of the ‘primitiua ecclesia’ (early Church) as an institution on earth, and on some past time when ‘incertus fuerat status ecclesie priusquam plurimis sanctis consilijs’ (the state of the Church was uncertain before many holy Councils);54 but these historical reflections lead him to stern attacks on heresy and to a call to unity — which might seem more typical of the vigorous orthodoxy of fifteenth-century England. Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones and the English translation of Petrarch are not so edgy about free thinking; they encourage it to some extent. But not to a full extent, for they argue over the value of the humanities and ultimately incorporate them into theological thinking, and as they develop beyond their opening nods to patrons such as Wykeham, Bekynton, and Waynflete, these works remain resolutely interested in the theological category of the soul and the definition of the human. Recent secular historicist analyses of the institutions, practices and politics of humanists have still not fully encompassed these pious and often theological interests.55 Yet these interests in Chaundler’s Collocutiones and Allocutiones and the English Secretum remind us that on the map of the English church’s journey from orthodoxy to Reformation, humanism leads in one of its directions to the traditional theology of Colet and Fisher.56 And that theological direction can lead to a dismissal of the secular humanities — even in works which encourage us to think through them, through meaning with them but then beyond them.

54

BL, MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii, fols 116r, 117v .

55

For a useful note of this oversight, and others, see Maura Nolan, ‘The New Fifteenth Century: Humanism, Heresy, and Laureation’, Philological Quarterly, 87 (2008), 173–92 (p. 185). 56

For example Rex, The Theology of John Fisher, pp. 21–22; Trapp, ‘Erasmus on William Grocyn and Ps-Dionysius’, p. 493.

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I

n Passus 17 of the C-text of Piers Plowman, William Langland writes:

In sauacioun of mannes soule seynte Thomas of Canterbury Amonges vnkynde cristene in holy kirke was slawe And alle holy kirke honoured thorw that deyng. He is a forbisene to alle bisshopis and a briht myrrour [… ] Euery bisshope bi þe lawe sholde buxumliche walke And pacientliche thorw his prouynce and to his peple hym shewe, Feden hem and follen hem and fere hem fro synne.1

Liberum Arbitrium, speaking here, admonishes bishops to follow the example of Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury (1162–70), who in English lore had been sanctified and idolized as perfectly pastoral, preaching against sin and

* I would like to thank the editors for their comments and the invitation to speak at the ‘After Arundel’ conference at the University of Oxford in April 2009 before a crowd who asked terrific questions, just as the audience did at the University of Virginia, where I presented a version of this essay to the Medieval Studies Program. I am also grateful to the Bodleian Library for permission to use and cite from their manuscripts, and to the librarian of New College, Naomi van Loo, for quality images of New College, M S 288. Thanks, finally, to Maura Nolan for her tremendously clarifying reading of this paper. 1

Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. by George Russell and George Kane (London: Athlone, 1997), XVII. 274–77 and 283–85. As the notes to the Russell and Kane edition of the C-text make clear, the lines quoted present many editorial difficulties; see pp. 559–60. See also Lawrence Warner’s hypothetical reconstruction of these lines, as the ur-B-text, as he persuasively calls it; ‘Becket and the Hopping Bishops’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 17 (2003), 107–34 (pp. 107–09).

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conducting himself, even in his final frightening moments, in morally upstanding ways ‘[i]n sauacioun of mannes soule’.2 Becket here emerges as an exemplum or ‘forbisene’, a ‘briht myrrour’ to ‘all bishoppis’. The hagiography about Beckett is extensive — it even features obliquely in the overture of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ‘the hooly blisful martir for to seke’ (1. 17).3 But it draws from an even larger tradition of posthumously praising bishops as perfect moral authorities, or lambasting living bishops who meddle too much in secular affairs and consequently neglect their office.4 We might think of this larger tradition as something like a ‘literature of bishops’,5 consisting of conduct books for bishops, ranging from Gregory the Great’s widely disseminated Liber regulae pastoralis to Gratian of Chiusi’s ‘Mirroir l’évêque’ contained in the Decretum — a ‘mirror’ text that commends sobriety, prudence, temperance, hospitality, and chastity.6 Often in this tradition, praise of pastorally perfect bishops and archbishops will come from papal quarters, as when Urban III recognizes Archbishop Henry of Bourges as ‘a prudent and discreet man, noble in his conduct’.7 From the mid-fourteenth-century constitutions of the archbishop of Canterbury, John of Stratford (c. 1275–1348), to the decrees at the Council of

2

See, generally, Warner, ‘Becket and the Hopping Bishops’. Becket’s example, however, was hardly realized by his successors; see John D. Cotts, ‘Monks and Mediocrities in the Shadow of Thomas Becket: Peter of Blois on Episcopal Duty’, Haskins Society Journal, 10 (2002), 143–61. 3

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson and others, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 4

On the posthumous exemplarity of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester (1469–1535), see Maria Dowling, Fisher of Men: A Life of John Fisher, 1469–1535 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). More generally, see Rex, The Theology of John Fisher and The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (1469–1535): Sermons and Other Writings, 1520–1535, ed. by Cecilia A. Hatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 5

See the essays by Eric Palazzo (‘The Image of the Bishop in the Middle Ages’) and John Eldevik (‘Driving the Chariot of the Lord: Siegfried I of Mainz (1060–1084) and Episcopal Identity in an Age of Transition’) in The Bishop Reformed: Studies of Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages, ed. by John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 86–91 and 161–88 respectively. 6

On Gratian’s ‘Mirroir l’évêque’, see I. S. Robinson, ‘The Institutions of the Church, 1073–1216’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History: Part 1, c. 1024–c. 1198, ed. by David Luscombe and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 368–460. 7

On Archbishop Henry of Bourges, see Robinson, ‘The Institutions of the Church’, p. 452, n. 563.

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Trent in the mid-sixteenth,8 we have at hand a tradition in which episcopal identity is figured for bishops in ideal terms, emphasizing that their pastoral obligations be distinguished from secular and political concerns so as to guarantee that the bishop be not mired in temporalities, possessions and the saeculum — the things of the world and of time. Yet something in fifteenth-century England pushes against this body of writing and instead figures ecclesiastical identity — whether that of archdeacon, bishop, or archbishop — in terms not unlike those for secular rulers found within the Mirror for Princes and de casibus traditions, as embodied by works running from Aquinas and Ægidius Romanus (Giles of Rome) to Boccaccio, Chaucer, Hoccleve, Premierfait, Lydgate, all the way through to the Mirror for Magistrates recensions. Certain authors and readers in the fifteenth century were seeking literary authorities to imagine ecclesiastical secularity, patronage, mastery, and power, but also to offer counsel on the limits of authority and the consequences of heeding bad advice. Part of my account here joins up with critical studies of humanism in England, beginning with Roberto Weiss, and including subsequent modifications of Weiss’s work by David Rundle and Daniel Wakelin.9 My own broad contribution to the critical discussion involves the analysis of ecclesiastical and politico-theological materials as a way of thinking through questions about how and where humanism intersects with religious and reformist discourse. An example should clarify my focus. In London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 211, there is a letter dated 1441 by Thomas Bekynton, secretary and diplomat for Henry VI. Writing to an Englishman residing at the papal curia in Florence, one Richard Caunton, Bekynton sends his congratulations on a job well done in executing the king’s business — triumphing over his detractors and gaining the admiration of the pope and certain cardinals. The great interest of this letter, however, lies in Bekynton’s opening reference to John Gower’s Tripartite Chronicle (Cronica tripertita), which Bekynton says he read and enjoyed, before enthusi8

See Roy M. Haines, Archbishop John Stratford: Political Revolutionary and Champion of the Liberties of the English Church, Studies and Texts, 76 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986); for the relevant material from the Council of Trent, see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Norman P. Tanner (Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press, 1990), pp. 737–38. 9

Weiss, Humanism in England during the Fifteenth Century. See also David Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants: Aspects of Quattrocento Humanist Writings and their Reception in England, c. 1400–c. 1460’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1997) and his ‘On the Difference between Virtue and Weiss’, pp. 181–203; and Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature.

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astically sending on the copy to the Lord Chancellor and bishop of Bath and Wells, John Stafford. One might marvel at Bekynton’s remarks, in an official letter, about sharing his private reading, were it not for the fact that later in the letter, he uses Gower’s text to advise Caunton. Bekynton cautions him ‘Noli curtisanorum, maximae nationis nostræ, pravos mores æmulari, qui in invidia æstuantes, proximos rodunt et de aliena jactura lucra sua sperant’ (not to imitate the depraved manners of the courtiers, especially those of our nation, who seething with envy gnaw at their neighbours).10 Bekynton makes use of his reading by applying it. His advice about courtiers reflects Gower’s own: Gower everywhere berates the deceased Richard II who ‘took the base, immature counsel of fools to himself, and caused the principles of older men to be rejected’.11 What is fascinating about the letter, then, is Bekynton’s use of the negative types described by Gower in order to contrast the positive virtues of Caunton. In exhibiting mores (or ‘manners’) wholly different from those expressed by the false courtiers, Caunton emerges as an exemplum or exemplary figure in this praise from his superior. We will return to the issue of mores as a kind of humanist self-fashioning. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that Bekynton not only absorbs counsel from Gower and passes it on to Caunton but also forwards the entire cautionary work to an ecclesiastical superior — in this case, Bishop Stafford, who later would become archbishop of Canterbury and who previously held offices as Keeper of the Privy Seal and then Treasurer of the Realm. My principal question here, as below, concerns the meaning of such exchanges. Did Bekynton intend to advise Stafford with a work that would appeal to his secular identity and occupations, which Stafford himself pursued quite vigorously — to the relative exclusion of his pastoral responsibilities — in seeking to remain a powerful head of government?12 This anecdote represents a trend in which 10

Memorials of the Reign of King Henry VI: Official Correspondence of Thomas Bekynton, ed. by George Williams, Rolls Series, 56, 2 vols (London: H.M.S.O., 1872), I, 230. 11

More fully from Part I of Gower’s Tripartite Chronicle: ‘He took the base, immature counsel of fools to himself, and caused the principles of older men to be rejected. He absorbed the poisonous counsels of brash youths to the effect that he was to prey upon the goods of his nobles. […] In such fashion did the wicked King cling to wicked men and become their ally, since he had lost all piety’ (The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying, and The Tripartite Chronicle, trans. by Eric W. Stockton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), p. 290); also note Gower’s words in the Preface, ‘May this tripartite chronicle which follows be heeded with experienced judgement’ (Ibid., p. 289). 12

‘Stafford made no effort to inspect the other parts of his province or promote any reforms, and remained fully occupied by his work as chancellor. […] His will does not survive, in many ways

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ecclesiasts in the fifteenth century, as well as those within their circle of patronage, derive advice not from pastoral literature (as mentioned at the outset) but from sources of a secular variety, what might be called in some instances a ‘mirror for bishops’ tradition. I am less interested in cases in which it can be shown that an ecclesiast had owned this or that book, because it is difficult to tell if particular books were read by their owners; the only evidence, if any, is occasional marginal notations or, as above, citations of certain works. Bishops always had books. And, granted, there are a host of important and earlier examples of ecclesiastical ownership, and many prominent instances in England: Philip Tripolitanus, for instance, dedicated a copy of the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum to his episcopal patron, Guido Vere de Valentia, bishop of Tripoli — copies of which survive in English manuscripts, as in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 495 and MS Auctarium F. 5. 23 (fols 87–111).13 However, I am interested in discussing how ecclesiasts and those within their circles in the fifteenth century identify with and activate such literature in their own literary performances of giving and receiving advice. These performances, I suggest, demonstrate a nascent culture of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ in England. The emergence of this culture can be seen in a quick comparison between an earlier archbishop and a later bishop’s responses to the same author. Although Archbishop Thomas Arundel (1353–1414) received a dedicated copy of the vox clamantis from John Gower (in what is now Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98), he ignored the gift, at least in official proclamations and correspondence. In contrast, as we have seen, a fifteenth-century bishop such as Bekynton praises Gower’s Chronica tripertita explicitly in an official epistle meant to guide the King’s clerical representatives.14

a pity, given that he had a mediocre performance as archbishop to consider, and also the reputed complexities of his personal life. […] It is difficult to advance beyond such faint praise for him as leader of the English church’ (Richard G. Davies, ‘Stafford, John (d. 1452), administrator and archbishop of Canterbury’, in ODNB). 13

See also Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 67; MS Bodley 495 was owned by the humanist John Colet. See also M S Bodley 181, fols 98–115, compiled with Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. More generally, see Steven J. Williams, ‘Philip of Tripoli and the Complete Translation of the Secret of Secrets’, pp. 60–108 in Williams’s The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 14

See Gower’s dedicatory ‘epistola’ in Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98, fol. 1v .

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After Wykeham The kind of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ that concerns me here runs through a few generations of ecclesiasts who are affiliated with Bishop William Wykeham (c. 1324–1404) who, while not penning any humanist works of which we are aware, fostered a climate in which humanistic studies and literary production would flourish. A word about Wykeham at this point would help to convey a sense of his gravity. For if ever there were a princely bishop, it was he. He was a royal councillor and courtier: collector of benefices; founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford; Keeper of the Privy Seal under Edward III; and Chancellor under Richard II.15 He was one of the most powerful churchmen of late medieval England, often embroiled in political contretemps, such as the Good and Merciless Parliaments. And he left a legacy as a patron of the arts, an innovator in education, and a maker of careers. The rest of my essay will assess a piece of writing that is on the surface a celebration of Wykeham as a bishop so suffused with secular virtues as to be comparable to rulers from antiquity. Yet a closer look at my central example will reveal that all this Wykeham worship overlays a much more complex literary and cultural practice — namely, a curious mix of officialese, autobiography, and institutional history that dramatizes a scene of advice, in which a secular work provides the salve to an author who worries about his address to a patron. Although this description evokes Thomas Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, the author is in fact a different Thomas, Thomas Chaundler, who wrote many letters to Bekynton, especially during the time Bekynton was bishop of Bath and Wells. The epistle in question is found in Oxford, New College, MS 288 — a presentation book written in the humanist hand of John Farley that Chaundler gave to Bekynton sometime between 1463 and 1465.16 The letter is actually a dedication to Bekynton of works contained in the manuscript: seven collocutiones and two allocutiones about the virtues, education, and patronage of Bishop Wykeham and his circle. These 15

On the details of Wykeham’s life, see Peter Partner, ‘Wykeham, William (c. 1324–1404), bishop of Winchester, administrator, and founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford’, in ODNB. 16

Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Century: Catalogue of an Exhibition Held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, comp. by Tilly de la Mare and Richard Hunt (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1970), p. 21. Leland describes this book in John Leland, De rebus Britannicis collectanea, 2nd edn, 6 vols (London: White, 1774), III, 156; see Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, I, xiii, n. 1. Rundle, ‘Of Republics and Tyrants’, pp. 452–57 offers a thorough description of the manuscript.

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works, which also praise Bekynton and even Chaundler, are authored by an unnamed student and revised by Chaundler.17 My particular interest, however, will be in Chaundler’s dedicatory letter as a special kind of performance that blurs the boundaries between the giving and receiving of advice, as well as the distinctions between official epistolography and literary figuration, text and context, and patron and his library of advisory books. Chaundler’s dedication of a rather illustrious book to Bekynton offers yet another example of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ in which figurations of episcopal identity, whether Wykehams’s or Bekynton’s, are concerned less with pastoral forms of self and more with modes of dealing with secular affairs.

The etc. of the res: From New College, MS 288 to the Bekynton Anthology Before proceeding, a word about the principal players: Thomas Chaundler graduated from Wykeham’s foundation, New College, Oxford in 1455 as a doctor of theology only to become shortly thereafter the chancellor of Oxford (1457–61 and 1472–79). At various times he also held offices as warden of Winchester College (1450), another of Wykeham’s foundations, and warden of New College (1454–75). While he also once served as the chaplain of Edward IV — putting him in touch with persons at the top of the political order — his most lasting, fruitful, and interesting contact was with Thomas Bekynton, admirer of Gower and an ecclesiast of considerable influence. Graduate of Winchester and New College, he was chancellor to Duke Humphrey, before rising to the position of secretary to Henry VI. He took on the keepership of the Privy Seal and served as a diplomat negotiating with the French at Calais in 1439, among other things. A few years later, in 1443, he was confirmed as bishop of Bath and Wells and remained in that office until his death in 1465. The relation between Chaundler and Bekynton was of mutual support and exchange: Bekynton made possible Chaundler’s various appointments, and Chaundler returned the favours by giving the bishop books, such as New College MS 288. The first textual item in this manuscript, beginning on fol. 5r, is the dedicatory letter from Chaundler to Bekynton. And what better way to dedicate a work to

17

See Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, I, 320. For the other texts in New College, MS 288, see Shirley F. Bridges, ‘Thomas Chaundler’, 2 vols (unpublished B.Litt. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1949), II. New College, MS 288 also contains a vita of Wykeham, Wykeham’s will, a poem in praise of Wykeham, and three letters from Pope Pius II.

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someone else than by talking about oneself? Chaundler begins by speaking about the problems he experiences in administering his office as chancellor of Oxford University — a job he finds to be equivalent to the thankless role of keeper of the peace. He especially laments the ill effects of envious speech and backbiting talk — the sorts of disruptive taunts and murmuring by malidici […] viri (slanderous men) who always ‘aliorum et nomen et famam semper depeculantes’ (diminish the name and reputation of others).18 Chaundler immediately, and rather boldly, compares himself to other rulers of great places, few of whom — be they kings, popes, or governors — experience a world without danger.19 Yet there are exceptions, such as the Stoics, who (he says) are happy men, who suffer no crises while they rule, and to whom adversity is nothing.20 Chaundler quickly acknowledges that he is unequal to these persons, and then proceeds to list more examples of those who pursue governance while managing to enjoy themselves during their down time — Cato, Cicero, and Seneca (‘Sic Cato Censorius, sic Marcus Cicero, sic Annæus ille Seneca, post senatorios labores conquieverunt’).21 However, Chaundler again acknowledges his difference from such persons, and moves on to clarify his occupation and desires by confronting his enemies in a passage that reads a bit like free association: Nolo tamen in hoc nefandissimum genus hominum vindex esse. Pacem cupio; opto eorum emendam. Nolo irrationales expungere; nam ratione digna satis ad vincendum. Soleo tales plus abhorrere quam timere. Sed O utinam, quotiens obtrectatores æmulique mei me accusant, adessem præsens. An ne tunc sibi ipsis nocuerint obloquia sua? Ne perfidiam vicerit veritas? Ne innocentia malitiam condemnaret? (I wish not to be a punisher of these most nefarious kind of men. I desire peace. I wish for their improvement. I do not want to conquer these irrational men, for worthy reason would conquer them sufficiently. I am accustomed more to abhor than to fear such persons. But O, if only I might have been present as often as my critics and rivals accuse me! Would not then their abuses only injure themselves? Would not truth have conquered treachery? Would not innocence condemn malice?)22

Chaundler repeatedly uses the literary device of the rhetorical question as he seeks to distinguish himself and to find his place within an institution rife with what he

18

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 316.

19

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 315.

20

‘Aiunt tamen Stoici, quosdam ita felices esse hominess, ut cum regant nullum patiantur discrimen: adversum eis nihil’, Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 315. 21

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 315.

22

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 316.

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calls ‘horribiles dissensiones ac schismata’.23 He continues in this plaintive mode for a good while until he finally gets round to explaining why is talking about himself in a letter meant to be about other people — namely Bekynton. He wants to say that Bekynton’s friendship means — and is — everything in the world to him. While one can give great thanks to auctores such as Plutarch for their lore, even more (‘plures’) thanks go to ‘te’, to you, to Bekynton for your great friendship. It is at this point, in this turn to his patron and reader, that Chaundler speaks of ‘a thing that instructs the mind’ (‘Res animum docet’), and which — as we soon find out — moves Chaundler to view his work as chancellor with a renewed confidence. What is this thing? It is embodied in a poem that Chaundler enjoins Bekynton to read, ‘Legisti, reor, illa poetæ elegantissima metra’ (‘You have read, I believe, the most elegant of verses of that poet’). It goes as follows: Ipsam sibi odium parit; aulica rodit Serra virum mores; et laudis eclipiticat astrum Livor; et in tenebris ingloria pallet honestas; Et virtus titulos, sua mater pignora, perdit. Et alibi: Sit procul invidiæ suspecta novacula, solis Ingeniosa dolis &c (Virtue even brings hatred upon herself for the sawteeth of the courtier gnaw at the character of men; Envy eclipses the star of praise, honor languishes in shadowy ignominy, and mother virtue is deprived of those tributes which are her proper offspring. And in another place (‘Et alibi’): But let the slanderous razor of envy, keen only in treachery, remain far off — etc.)24

Before getting to the particulars of the poem as a lesson on virtue and envy, I would first like to note Chaundler’s way of quoting and organizing these two bits of text. To begin with, there is the ‘Et alibi’ that falls between his quotations. It is a bookish kind of reference, whereby reading from line to line on fol. 5r in this book requires

23 24

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 316.

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 317. The translation in the main text is from Architrenius, ed. and trans. by Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 78, 17; the formatting is my own, including the quotation marks around the two excerpts of poetry.

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thumbing from folio to folio in another book, were one interested in tracking this extract in that ‘other’ postulated place. Likewise, the ‘etc.’, seven lines from the bottom of fol. 5v and at the end of the line ‘let the slanderous razor of envy […] remain far off’, serves a codicological function. When using this kind of abbreviation for — say — scripture, the author or scribe assumes that the remaining lines are known to the learned reader by rote, as in ‘per speculum in enigmate &c’ and need not be quoted because they are memorially present. Explicits in Latin manuscripts often use ‘etc.’, as do the salutary honorifics addressing important persons in Latin epistles. Yet in a poem, especially one quoted as a metrical sample in the middle of a prosaic exposition, the ‘etc.’ can take on a different meaning. The ‘etc.’ both reminds us that a piece of text has been taken from somewhere else, and links that text back to its original source. This practice has been picked up by Langlandians, always fond of reading the ‘etc.’ of select quotations in Piers Plowman.25 Chaundler, I suggest, is using these indexical conventions to a known reader who is invited to read more of the source text, if he happens to have access to the poem in question. It would seem, indeed, that this unassuming ‘Et alibi’ and ‘etc.’ point to an object beyond the text of New College MS 288, beyond the cover boards, and perhaps on the shelf next to it in the library at Wells Cathedral, where Bekynton resided. Nowhere else in his letter does Chaundler engage in this indexical mode of situating a text within a bookish frame. Examining the nature of that text begins to clarify Chaundler’s reasons for using such indexical conventions; though he does not identify the author of these lines, he would have expected Bekynton to know them. I have identified the quotations as extracts from Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius, book three, chapter 17 and book one, chapter 7.26 This identification explains Chaundler’s referential style: it is his way of pointing to a book that Bekynton himself owned, which contained Johannes’s Architrenius — namely, that much celebrated Bekynton anthology, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional A. 44.27 This book, as A. G. Rigg puts it, is ‘[t]he anthology par excellence of this — perhaps of any — period of Anglo-Latin. […] A reading of the whole collection, in fact, would provide a student with a very solid basis in Medieval Latin literature’, because it contains all kinds of religious, secular, and satirical prose and poetry, 25

As John Alford said, ‘indeed, the whole point of some quotations [in Piers Plowman] resides in the “etc”’, ‘The Role of the Quotations in Piers Plowman’, Speculum, 52 (1977), 80–99 (p. 82). 26

Now correcting Bridges, ‘Thomas Chaundler’, II, 100, nn. 1–2, who was ‘unable to trace these quotations’. I thank Shirley (Bridges) Court for permission to cite from her thesis. 27

And not the fifteenth-century, much-glossed Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 64.

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upwards of one hundred and thirteen items.28 Johannes’s Architrenius featured most significantly in the volume, taking up about a third of its space — occupying fols 139v –218v — making it likely that Bekynton knew the work and would have recognized Chaundler’s quotation.29 If I am right in suggesting that Chaundler is referring to Bekynton’s anthology30 — making his reference one of the earliest in its long history of reception and celebration — then we discover a unique intercodical form of reference that maps neatly onto the relation of patronage, as imagined and lived by Chaundler: that is,

28

George Rigg writes that Bodleian Library, MS Additional A. 44 ‘was originally compiled c. 1200 in six sections by nine hands’ (A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 153). Among the works included in this extremely various manuscript are (as noted by Rigg, p. 153): ‘the Gospel of Nicodemus, Isidore’s Synonyma’, antimatrimonial prose ( Jerome, Map’s Dissuasio Valerii, and Theophrastus), Eraclius’ prose denunciations of William de Longchamps, Hugh Nonant’s letter on the same, and two biblical parodies (Adulterous Monk, Collacio on wine)’, ‘Bernard Silvester’s Mathematicus, two comediae (Matthew of Vendôme’s Miles Gloriosus, Vitalis of Blois’ Geta), and two verse debates (“Ganymede and Helen,” [and] Turaldus on Flesh and Spirit)’. There are also seventy-five shorter poems by, among others, ‘Peter of Blois, Walter of Châtillon, Berter of Orléans, Hildebert, and the pseudonymous Eraclius. […] In the fifteenth century the collection was expanded by, or for, Thomas Bekynton . […] The antimatrimonial section was supplemented (by a commentary on the Epistola Valerii and the De coniuge non ducenda) and a few other poems and items were added that were appropriate to the collection (e.g. the letter from the Old Man of the Mountain, exonerating Richard I from complicity in the death of Conrad of Mont-Ferrat); rubricated titles and a new contents list were also supplied’ (Rigg, p. 153). See also André Wilmart, ‘Le Florilège mixte de Thomas Bekynton’, Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1940), 41–84 and 4 (1958), 35–90 (this second instalment edits 26 of 113 texts). 29

The ratio is Rigg’s; see A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, p. 153. My reference to the foliation corrects the serial catalogue: on fol. 139v begins the table of contents for this work, and fol. 141r contains the first line of the Architrenius proper. The work poem ends at fol. 218 v with ‘Magistri Joha[nn]is Hauvillensis Architrenius explicit’. 30

A word about the text is in order. This line in New College, M S 288, ‘Sit procul invidiæ suspecta novacula, solis ingeniosa dolis’, reads almost identically in the Bekynton anthology: ‘Sit procul invidie suspecta novacula, solis ingeniosa dolis’ (fol. 144v ), with a difference of ‘invidiæ’ and ‘invidie’. Technically, there is textual variation here, but we can bear in mind that Chaundler’s ‘æ’ for the genitive case is likely a matter of neo-Ciceronian style (of which Bekynton was fond), replacing the usual medieval ‘e’ with ‘æ’ in precisely such cases, as generally exhibited in the ubiquitous ‘ecclesie’/’ecclesiæ’ distinction. There is no definitive way to prove that Chaundler’s text is copied from Bekynton’s anthology, as there is not enough material for the comparison. Suffice it to say that the difference in ‘invidiæ’/’invidie’ proves nothing apart from Chaundler’s habits of stylization, and that my point concerns the ways in which Chaundler uses codicological conventions to refer to the bishop’s books.

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the relation between books is a relation between persons. But Chaundler’s version of this notion suggests that he sees patronage as intimately connected not only to the giving and receiving of books, but also to the giving and receiving of advice. In referencing the Bekynton anthology, Chaundler demonstrates its value by showing its utility to a seemingly inconsolable man (himself), who learns to accept his situation by reading one of the poems it contains. This poem teaches that the virtuous inevitably are attacked by the envious, and counsels patience, moderation, and relaxation. For it is only after Chaundler cites the poem that he tempers his laments, accepts his situation, and begins to speak about Bekynton’s friendship and fine personal qualities, including his ability to do what Chaundler cannot — ignore naysayers. This tonal change tells us that the poem, and by deduction, Bekynton’s book, has served its purpose. Chaundler has advised himself within the bishop’s library. Yet it is not only that Chaundler demonstrates his access to the symbolic capital represented by Bekynton’s library, in which he finds a cure. Rather, he makes the book a piece of symbolic capital when he thematizes its importance by identifying the dominant work of the anthology. His choice is spot on, too. Johannes’s Architrenius, if it is about anything, is about precisely those topics germane to Chaundler’s institutional experience of chaos and squabbling. In his long poem, Johannes comments on courts and schools, the vain machinations of hypocritical courtiers and clerics, the outrageous abuses of patronage, the learned lectures of ancient philosophers waxing lyrical about virtues and vices, and — my favourite — depicts hell not as Hell but as a chaotic household, in what is an almost existentialist point about human disorganization within the structures of organization. Indeed, this image vividly anticipates Jean-Paul Sartre’s line in Huis Clos, ‘l’enfer, c’est les Autres’ or, ‘Hell is other people’.31 Chaundler would agree.

Mores: ‘Maner maketh man’ One last word on Chaundler’s poetic extract from the Architrenius, a part of which reads (as above): ‘Virtue even brings hatred upon herself for the sawteeth of the courtier gnaw at the “mores” (character) of men’. The poem, I would argue, has a function beyond making reference to a specific book within a finely scripted and wonderfully illuminated manuscript. Rather, it also points to what motivates the entire endeavour of literary exchange and episcopal address, a collective enthusiasm

31

Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos, ed. by Keith Gore (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 95.

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or ambition that is — in its ideal form — shaped by virtue and good ‘mores’. By using lines from Johannes to claim that that his ‘mores’ are gnawed by petty, sawtoothed busybodies, Chaundler identifies both a major theme of the texts of New College MS 288 and a certain sensibility within the coterie in which the manuscript finds itself. In several places throughout the manuscript, we read about the ‘mores’ Chaundler seeks to defend against his detractors; the ‘mores’ of Cato and the withering effects of vice against ‘moribus’; the ‘gravitas morum’ of Bekynton. We can also include here Bekynton’s letter to Caunton (cited at the outset), in which a reference to Gower illustrates the value of good mores in contrast with ‘pravos mores’.32 All of these expressions fall under the aegis of that famous Wykehamite aphorism ‘maner maketh man’, which remains the slogan of Wykeham’s foundation today, Winchester College. Chaundler cites it at the very end of his epistle to Bekynton but does so in Latin, rendering it ‘mores componunt hominem’.33 He tells us that he translated this phrase from English into Latin, which points to his substitution of ‘mores’ for ‘maner’, and makes the claim that ‘mores’ themselves embody the esprit de corps of what can be called ‘Wykehamist culture’.34 Chaundler’s translation of this phrase, in other words, works as an heuristic that renders visible the institutional practices of his institutional culture. That is, the Wykehamist slogan refers not just to the lore surrounding Wykeham — the story that he was born into humble circumstances but became the right-hand man of Edward III, and, in turn, the benefactor of select poor scholars at Oxford. It also denotes the forming and reforming of the individual through education, reading, and writing — practices on display in New College MS 288 in the seven student texts that immediately follow Chaundler’s letter. In fact, Chaundler cites this slogan while introducing these works in order to forge connections among himself, the student author, and the entire institutional setting in which those texts were likely performed, read out in hall on special feast days. In the same way that Chaundler performs a scene directed at his benefactor, in which he learns from a text in Bekynton’s anthology, here, he proffers the student texts as similar examples of beneficent patronage, mentorship, instruction, and clerkly self-fashioning — this time with himself as the benefactor and teacher. These texts are also performances,

32

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 319 and II, 323.

33

Official Correspondence of Bekynton, ed. by Williams, II, 319. Note that a glossator of MS Digby 64, which contains the Architrenius, singles out this line, ‘Serra virum mores et laudis eclipticat astrum’ and supplies an interlinear gloss to ‘virum mores’, which reads ‘detraccion bonaso[rum] viro[rum]’ (fol. 68v ) — the ‘detraction of bovine [i.e., animalistic] men’. 34

See Lytle, ‘“Wykehamist Culture” in Pre-Reformation England’, pp. 129–66.

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dialogues that demonstrate how to speak to and about a patron about his support of other patrons who beget yet more patrons. In one of the dialogues, two scholars named Ferrandus and Panescius discuss the glorious town of Wells, its buildings, and bishop (Bekynton), whom Wykeham (mentioned only after Bekynton in the dialogue) discovered at Winchester school. The discussants then turn to Chaundler as a representative of the best of both worlds (of Wells and Oxford), and compose a poem praising him. In this complex layering of patronal address, the students who would presumably perform the parts of Ferrandus and Panescius — probably before at least two of the subjects of the dialogue itself — partake of a certain dramatic courtliness while also schooling themselves in the kinds of petitionary rhetoric some would go on to write in secular, university, or ecclesiastical offices. This confluence of genres and personas, fact and fiction, patron and student shows that the texts in New College MS 288 are not simply typical examples of clerical education, lessons in the memorization and repetition of the official ‘forma’ on display in formularies. Instead, these texts enact a performative ‘making’ that composes, fashions, and makes legible the clerkly self in context. These amateur efforts, these student colloquies about the virtuous Bishop Wykeham and his circle, thus demonstrate that the ‘manner of making’ and the ‘making of manner’ is a dialectical process, a literary and dramatic activity that simultaneously shapes the identities of both the patron and the patronized. In seeking patronage through books, texts, and documents — in other words, by representing the patron in writing — a subordinate creates the very model he wishes to emulate. In the process, he inflates his own worth and advances his own status by associating himself with the idealized patron he has constructed. Not all praise is flattery, granted, and some of it is indeed criticism, but that is the subject of another paper.

Wycliffism after Wykehamism; or, Heresy and Humanism All of this material presents a picture of ecclesiastical habits that looks far more complex and compelling than the image revealed by generalities about the ‘prelacy’, ‘orthodox church’, or ‘heresy hunters’. These advisory, ecclesiastical texts raise questions about the now-ubiquitous Wycliffite paradigm.35 Does ‘ecclesiastical

35

I use the term ‘Wycliffite’ (and not ‘lollard’) to refer to writings that cite or echo the ideas of John Wyclif — a usage explained more fully in my Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chaps 2, 3, 7, and Intermezzo. Likewise, I argue

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humanism’ fall into such standard critical categories as ‘orthodox’ or ‘reformist’? The materials I have discussed certainly look orthodox in contrast to Wycliffite thought, but that contrast might not be the best paradigm for investigating the relation between heresy and humanism. For Wycliffites consider prelates like Wykeham special targets for criticism on account of — among other things — the practice of absent pluralism. In this light, constructing heresy and humanism as a binary opposition means that orthodoxy is defined according to the terms of this Wycliffite critique, which in turn distorts the contributions made by such prelates to the literary, plastic, and architectural arts in the fifteenth century. Yet Wycliffism cannot be excluded entirely from consideration, because even a cursory glance at the works of John Wyclif and his followers shows that they were concerned with these ecclesiastical advisory traditions. For instance, Wyclif clearly understands that bishops are political figures involved in the highest affairs of the kingdom. In his De officio regis (1379) — itself an advisory piece of writing36 — he singles out the king of England for wrongly succumbing to the blandishments of his episcopal advisors. Tellingly, however, Wyclif does not say (here at least) that

that ‘lollard’ is not synonymous with ‘Wycliffite’, because its sense changes drastically depending on its application. Persons hostile to Wycliffism frequently utilized the word as an epithet in order to simplify and dismiss Wycliffite assertions about the sacraments and the church. Lists of condemned conclusions, whether in ecclesiastical decrees, sermons, or poems, did the work of constructing Wycliffism as a heresy named ‘lollardy’ (pp. 47–48). Yet Wycliffites appropriated and redefined the term ‘lollard’ as an apostolic ideal for lay men and women, who are enjoined to live moderately, embrace virtuous poverty, and brook persecution and shame (pp. 47, 50, 51, 54–60, 63–66). Rarely do anti-Wycliffites attack this ‘lollard’ ideal; Wycliffites were able to construct a positive identity as ‘lollards’ in the face of orthodox efforts to anathematize them by using ‘lollard’ as a synonym for ‘heretic’. It is this double meaning of the word ‘lollard’ — defined by both Wycliffites and their adversaries — that makes it particularly unhelpful when modern scholars employ it as a blanket term. Instead, I recommend that scholars use the term ‘Wycliffite’ to describe the followers of Wyclif and ‘lollard’ to refer to the forms of lay apostolic piety advanced by Wycliffites. Further, given the divided history of usages of the word ‘lollard’ found in Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite texts alike, it stands to reason that we should call people ‘lollard’ only if they freely name themselves as such and not project the term onto them if they speak nothing of ‘lollardy’. A forthcoming essay, ‘“Lollardy”: An English and European Heresy Revisited’ will provide additional substantiation of my claims in Literature and Heresy, as well as a much needed reconsideration of continental ‘lollardy’. 36

John Wyclif, Tractatus de officio regis, ed. by R. A. Pollard and C. E. Sayle (London: Trübner, 1887). It would be interesting to consider seriously, along with Michael Wilks, that Wyclif had a real advisory ambition, if not opportunity, in writing works like De officio regis. See Wilks’s collection of essays in Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice, ed. by Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow, 2000).

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bishops should never advise the king. He only says that they should put themselves to better use than being chatty ‘comensales’ or table companions. They should offer, instead, ‘consilium’ or advice.37 They must be, along with the entire clergy, schooled ‘in sciencia et virtute’ and become acquainted with the ‘law of God’.38 By these means, bishops become ‘exemplares consiliarii’, or exemplars of counsel.39 Wyclif goes on to offer apostrophic instruction to bishops themselves, citing the Secreta secretorum in order to speak of the virtues and the benefits of moderate living.40 Wyclif evidently takes a page from Philip Tripolitanus (cited above), and suggests that certain kinds of advisory secular texts can be held up as mirrors to bishops, not just princes and kings, the ostensible addressees of the Secreta. In a more strident vein, there are the followers of Wyclif, such as William Thorpe, who describes Wyclif ‘as of þe moost virtuous and goodlich wise man þat I herd of owhere eiþer knew’ — an example that stands in marked contrast to his characterization of the ‘Archebischop of Cauntirbirie and chaunceler þanne of Ynglond’, Thomas Arundel, as ‘ever the sower of vices’.41 In his Testimony, which stages his examination before Arundel, Thorpe contrasts Wycliffite virtue with the lack of virtue displayed by the ‘prelatis of þis londe and her mynystris’ in their commission of ‘tirauntrie’.42 And appropriately, he declares the terms of his obedience to any such tyrannical prelate: ‘I wole submitte me oonly to þe rule and gouernaunce of hem aftir my knowynge who, bi þe hauynge and vsynge of þe forseide virtues, I perceyue to ben þe membris of holi chirche’.43 Obviously, the criticism applies to Arundel first and foremost. And Thorpe says that to accept Arundel’s ‘counseile’ is to reject ‘vtterli al my loore’ and harm so many others ‘bi my yuel ensaumple’ as to ‘neuere deserue to haue grace of God to edifien his chirche’.44 Later in the work, his criticism is more trenchant, arguing that Arundel encourages obedience to tyrants, a point that opens out to a longer discussion

37

De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, p. 51.

38

Wyclif offers special emphasis here: ‘precipue episcopos [especially bishops]’ (De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, p. 52). 39

De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, p. 52.

40

De officio regis, ed. by Pollard and Sayle, pp. 53–55.

41

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, pp. 41, 29.

42

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, p. 24.

43

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, p. 33; on the virtues in question, see pp. 40, 62–63, 65. 44

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, p. 38.

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about sovereigns and virtues and how subjects are compelled to disobey any sovereign who comports himself tyrannically.45 In variously naming his Testimony ‘þis sentence’ and ‘þis conseile’, then, Thorpe is bringing us within the ambit of advisory traditions for secular rulers and appropriating its discourse, as Wyclif does when he cites the Secreta secretorum at a key moment in his discussion about episcopal advisors surrounding the king. Other, anonymous Wycliffite texts speak of tyrants and bishops in the same breath — using these advisory traditions to speak of ecclesiastical vice rather than virtue. What do we make of these examples? Some Wycliffites seem to combine the two traditions I have been viewing as relatively distinct — the pastoral tradition and the tradition of secular advice. This combination makes for an effective criticism of prelates because it moves beyond satire and the usual mockery of ecclesiastical abuses, such as we see in Speculum stultorum,46 towards philosophical resources that purport to offer a remedy to such abuses and vice — namely, virtue. This union of the pastoral and secular advisory traditions betrays the academic origin of Wycliffism; it relies on an institutional experience of the university, the church, and the court that few other heresies of such magnitude can claim. Wyclif associated with heads of state; he was a known quantity at court; and he had quarrelled with Wykeham himself in the 1370s. In another instance, Philip Repingdon became a reputable and powerful ecclesiast and royal advisor after having recanted his Wycliffite views decades earlier. Wycliffism was on the inside of the traditions from which later forms of ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ emerged, and it is no surprise to find certain Wycliffite scholars wellread in Thomistic and Ægedian traditions of advice to princes. Yet however acceptable certain theological and philosophical teachings within that advisory tradition were to Wycliffites, their occasional hostility to ‘fables’ meant that they viewed the adjacent literary tradition — the de casibus, or ‘fall of princes’ genre — as nothing more than distracting stories that have no scriptural basis, ‘longe talis of fablis’ told by friars to ‘grete men’.47 The cultural categories of ‘heresy’ and ‘humanism’, which came to be antagonists, did not necessarily begin as poles of a binary opposition. Our critical eye, therefore, should be attentive to the sifting and shifting of textual resources over the course of the fifteenth century, as the Wycliffite polemic unfolds and as ‘ecclesiastical 45

‘The Testimony of William Thorpe’, ed. by Hudson, pp. 46, 48–49.

46

Speculum stultorum, ed. by John H. Mozley and Robert R . Raymo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960). 47

The English Works of Wyclif, ed. by Matthew, p. 50.

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humanism’ turns inward to figure forth its own customs, practices, and power in forms of literature either created from scratch or merged with Fürstenspiegel writing.48 I have proposed elsewhere that the fact that Wycliffite controversies subsided in the middle of the fifteenth century should be viewed in relation to the changing cultural concerns of some bishops, who were very much a generation ‘After Arundel’ and even ‘After Chichele’. Wycliffism does not disappear — far from it — but the intense episcopal interest in interrogating suspects certainly does, at least for stretches of time.49 Compare episcopal behaviour during the period spanning Arundel’s provincial constitutions in 1407/09 and Archbishop Chichele’s synod of 1428, to the stretch of years in the middle of the century, and there is, indeed, no comparison at all. Of course, it would be impossible to argue that bishops and other ecclesiasts were so busy with all things humanist that they did not have any interest in persecuting heretics. But what can be shown is a difference of interests and emphasis between two groups — the Wycliffites and the humanist clerics — emerging from the same culture, each pursuing different models of reform. Whereas Wycliffites articulate a reform that seeks to change ecclesiastical institutions from the ground up, including those ‘Of the bisshop of Bathe’, with the goal of replacing them with secular establishments50 — and from a theoretical perspective there are extraordinary humanist possibilities in the wish to multiply the number of universities in England — the ecclesiastical humanists propose models of reform that have a practical aim, seeking to consolidate the gains made in the foundation of educational institutions in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century. Foundations such as Wykeham’s New College and Winchester grammar school were premised consciously on what were, to the humanists, new and exciting ideas. It is within these contexts that authors like Chaundler and his students would personify the institutional experience in an intense way, figuring forth the idea of the institution itself as a world in which the stakes are not only sin and sacraments. It is a world of particular demands and specific protocols, in which persons find themselves in named places, with named persons, engaged in official tasks. Some would fashion themselves as educators, others, as students — but all would construct themselves as readers. While Wycliffism reflects on episcopal advice gone wrong and indicts the ecclesiast who confuses the temporal and the spiritual as ‘hermafrodita’, ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ holds a mirror up to Wycliffism 48

See my ‘Heresy and Humanism’, pp. 421–37 (pp. 430, 436).

49

See Cole, ‘Heresy and Humanism’, pp. 422–26.

50

See the ‘Lollard Disendowment Bill’, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, pp. 135–37 (p. 136).

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to show that its generalities about ‘prelates’ or ‘palaces’ are detached and abstract, lacking the particularities and specifics of place, time, and behavior that humanism can provide — and indeed, create.51 But ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ should not be defined merely through its difference from Wycliffism. It is a literary and cultural movement that should be regarded as a major component of English literary history. It reveals striking, if not epistemic, similarities between Latin and English writing — parallel postures of dullness, poetries of petition and praise, institutional rhetorics, mirrors for princes and bishops alike, literary-cum-official epistolography, and Latin and English aureation. Research may well eventually show that ‘ecclesiastical humanism’ connects the medieval to the early modern in what is a genealogy that is very much ‘After Wykeham’: Henry Chichele, Thomas Bekynton, and Chaundler, Gilbert Kymer, Andrew Holes, Robert Stillington, John Russell, William Grocyn, and William Warham. This list is a partial one, limited to some individuals who were educated at Wykeham’s foundations, either Winchester College, New College, or both; many other humanists remain to be identified and their writing explored. The biographies of such persons are an untapped resource for literary historians — and some of them open doors to the Renaissance.

51

See the ‘Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards’, in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. by Hudson, p. 26.

Part V Reginald Pecock

R ECONSTRUCTING THE M IXED L IFE IN R EGINALD P ECOCK ’S R EULE OF C RYSTEN R ELIGIOUN Allan F. Westphall

B

ishop Reginald Pecock’s religious treatises are motivated by a perceived need for urgent reform. Particular challenges to ecclesiastical stability, as he notes, underscore this urgency: Hussite Bohemia provides a worst-case scenario, with the unmonitored private interpretation of Scripture and a lack of trained exegetes bringing about interpretative and social anarchy.1 On the national scene, the main challenge had for decades been the Lollards, the ‘wickedli enfectid scole of heresie among the lay peple, which is not õit conquerid’ (with ‘wickedli enfectid’ perhaps being an acrostic of Wyclif?). Pecock (c. 1395–c. 1460) responds robustly to the Wycliffite heresy in The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy (incidentally providing us with possibly the most comprehensive and systematic overview of the tenets of Lollard belief that we have), but his concerns are usefully understood more broadly: the threat of schism is imminent in England, he claims, where a lack of synergy between, on the one hand, a new social reality of increasing literacy and expanding readership, and, on the other hand, novel forms of catechetical instruction means that the Church has rendered itself unable to channel the critical drives of what Pecock terms ‘competently wittid lay men’. In fact, outside of the Repressor, Lollardy does not appear as a monolithic, clearly demarcated challenge to be refuted, but rather as the manifestation of tendencies and demands latent in a critical, proactive, and textually competent ‘lay partie’ — a capacious category indeed, comprising the full spectrum of conformists and

1

Pecock, The Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, ed. by Babington, I, 86–87.

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dissenters (and the many indifferent to or oblivious of any such divide).2 As several fifteenth-century religious writers recognized, an attitude of intellectual questioning in a particularly volatile lay environment could mean that people might easily deviate from the path of sanctioned religious practice if not provided with an adequate syllabus of pastoral and catechetical instruction. It is against such drives in private and corporate religion that Pecock presents a view of a Church stuck in the stagnating mire of its own obsolete curricula and pedagogy, proposing inadequate forms of instruction that are unable to meet the challenges of the time. As a result of the irrational orderings of traditional liturgies, doctrines, and catechetical systems, propounded by a clergy lacking requisite academic training, there can be only ineffectual exchange with a lay readership eager to participate actively and critically in theological debate, and more generally to engage in spiritual ambition.3 As is well known, Pecock’s systematic theology is a surprisingly outspoken, selfproclaiming attempt to re-invent lay theology and to de-polemicize the religious scene in England. At its centre is an overhaul of the Church’s existing catechetical schemata, proposed as a reassertion of orthodoxy against religious singularity and dissent. Furthermore, his theology propounds a declaredly exoteric teaching of general accessibility and transparency. The exotericism is apparent at various levels: firstly, Pecock’s reformulation of religious teaching proceeds on a methodological principle of generality that assumes the innate capacity of rational judgement in all individuals. Claiming the broad intelligibility and appeal of his speculative theology, he opens up the possibility of lay participation in the endeavour to determine Christian doctrine. Secondly, the tendency is against divergent opinions and private devotions in religious practice. Pecock imagines a homogenous system

2

The challenge from the ‘lay partie’ and Pecock’s response to an articulate, and still orthodox, laity receive extended treatment in Charles Brockwell, Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Lancastrian Church: Securing the Foundations of Cultural Authority (Lewiston: Mellen, 1985), especially Chapter Two, ‘A Church Worthy of Obedience’, pp. 25–56. Kantik Ghosh provides important discussion of Pecock’s complex theological positioning in relation to a Lollard heresy which ‘is perhaps to be defined less by the appurtenances of a “sect” than by an attitude of intellectual questioning and criticism, fostered and supported by books in English, including of course the Bible’: Ghosh, ‘Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Idea of “Lollardy”’, pp. 251–65 (p. 265). 3 Fifteenth-century experimentations with vernacular orthodoxy, and especially the dissemination of ‘clergie’ in religious writing, are examined, for example, in Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’. See also her essay ‘Reginald Pecock’s Vernacular Voice’. Kantik Ghosh considers the involvement with logical method in Wycliffite and anti-Wycliffite writings, and provides some discussion of Pecock’s reassessment of syllogistic reasoning in writings about the ethical life in ‘Logic and Lollardy’, Medium Ævum, 76 (2007), 251–67.

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centred on the comprehensibility of liturgy and prayer, and the channelling of subjective desire and affect into a series of formal, transparent, and rigorously rational disciplines. Thirdly, his ‘modernized’ creed de-emphasizes the supernatural. Revelation and contemplation by miracle or divine grace are accorded no special status against the rational illumination that can occur through open disputation. This essay suggests that Pecock’s extensive refutation of Lollardy (understood in narrow sectarian terms) is just one part, and possibly a minor part, of a coherent and determined attempt to re-imagine a Christian community founded on ideas of critical intellectualism and lay-clerical exchange. In fact, Pecock can be seen to transcend the merely polemical as he proposes what is perhaps the most comprehensive vision, certainly the most comprehensively articulated, of a unity of faith in fifteenth-century England. Recent scholarship, preoccupied with the confrontation between the English heresy of Lollardy and nominally orthodox responses, has tended to focus on the Repressor to the exclusion of Pecock’s other works.4 Here I will shift the focus somewhat by looking at the Reule of Crysten Religioun (hereafter Reule) to examine how Pecock seeks to participate productively in, and renew, central debates of his time concerning education, social obligation, and religious enthusiasm. More precisely, I will note that when Pecock articulates his vision of a fifteenth-century pastoral and pedagogical reform, he frames this within a topic familiar from patristic writing and much vernacular religious writing, namely that of the respective merits of action and contemplation, and the possibility of their combination in a mixed life. For Pecock, as for previous theologians producing literature of devotional guidance, the idea of a mixed life, or in Pecock’s terminology a ‘hool lijf’, becomes a particularly rich forum for imagining social involvement, as it examines the relationship between private conscience and public action in a very practical sense.5 Mixed life theology

4 Pecock’s other works in print are: Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by Morison; The Donet, ed. by Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS, O. S. 156 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1921); The Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, EETS, O.S. 164 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1924); and The Reule of Crysten Religioun, ed. by Greet. Considering that Pecock regarded his Reule of Crysten Religioun as the foundation of his œuvre and the clearest articulation of his theological system, it is ironic that this is the last of his texts to appear in print. 5

The term ‘hool lijf’ occurs in the fifth treatise of the Reule (p. 478). It should be noted that Pecock neither positions his teaching explicitly in relation to previous writing in English on the subject of the Christian modes of living, nor flags up the idea of the ‘hool lijf’ in his introduction. Rather than anticipate his instruction in the ‘hool lijf’ from the outset, he designs his Reule to persuade and instruct through its logically progressing argument and structuring of material, or what

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provides an attractive outlook, both as an optimistic and enabling theology, with its positive affirmation of lay spiritual aspiration, as well as for the opportunities it offers for the re-articulation of Christian responsibility and social obligation. Writing in the mid-fifteenth century, Pecock adds his distinctive voice at the end of a long tradition of debating the Christian modes of living in English culture and in the vernacular. In particular he invites comparison with Hilton’s idea of the mixed life, which broke new ground in showing how the life of secular clergy that combines an inward life of prayer with activity in the world can be productively extended to a newly literate and independent-minded laity. It is my aim here to show how the Reule, and the works supplementing it, constitute an extension of an Arundelian and Hiltonian reformed orthodoxy of the mixed life. But at the same time, Pecock proposes new disciplines for devotional practice, and a recodification of the moral imperatives and corporal works of mercy in the ‘hool lijf’ — the life which he presents as the full realisation of God’s moral law.6 The first part of this essay serves as a general reassessment of Pecock’s Reule, which in several ways is the key work of his œuvre, providing both the most comprehensive socio-linguistic analysis of fifteenth-century metropolitan England that we have, as well as the main articulation of his vision for pastoral and pedagogical reform. The second part examines the Reule as both a re-thinking of areas of catechetical and pastoral care, as well as a religious rule advocating the mixed, or ‘hool’, life as a legitimate devotional practice. By looking at the rationale for the ‘hool lijf’, I hope to give some idea of how Pecock develops previous pastoral models through his systematization of moral philosophy and through what is an elaborate attempt at pre-modern social theorizing. The final part considers the reform ideas pertinent to the religious orders that are part of Pecock’s manyfronted reform programme (or attempted reform programme). The clear priority of a social good, evident throughout Pecock’s works, leads him to extend the applicability of the ‘hool lijf’ to those in orders to convince them of the inherent value of parochial service and monastic outreach.

he terms ‘in a full conuenient process and ordre’ (p. 14). It thus requires advanced appreciation of the respective merits of action and contemplation before the reader is ready to be persuaded about the inherent value of the ‘hool lijf’. Pecock often emphasizes that he expects his readers, in a very concrete sense, to model their religious devotion on the basis of his teaching, and to reach increasingly sophisticated levels of religious and ethical awareness in a manner consistent with his unfolding argument. 6

A useful discussion of the context of mixed-life theology and the attempts by Arundel and his circle to circulate texts as counter to Lollardy and private devotions is Catto, ‘Shaping the Mixed Life’.

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Pecock’s Reule of Crysten Religioun The Reule of Crysten Religioun is believed to be Pecock’s earliest work, dating to 1443, the year of the death of Archbishop Henry Chichele, and around the time of his ordination as bishop of St Asaph.7 It is itself a remarkable, self-styled compendium of catechetical instruction, lay pastoral guidance, and scholastic systematized theology. We might regard the Reule as the foundational text for what is essentially Pecock’s revised curriculum of Christian knowledge, and it is here that we find the fullest articulation of Pecock’s pastoral theology. In this elaborate system of instruction, the discipline of discretio spirituum is redefined as the ability to discern valid from invalid arguments by the method of syllogistic logic, which is proposed as by no means a formalized academic discipline, but rather the innate capacity, infallible if used correctly, of all Christians to determine truths of theology and moral philosophy. It is also in the Reule that Pecock makes recourse to the mode of spiritual revelation, in the form of an extended and divinely authorised intellectual visio; an epiphanic narrative that serves as the foundational topos for Pecock’s catechism. Thus when approached by the long-exiled ladies of philosophy ‘ful comely and faire’, in what must be characterized as an eroticized inspirational encounter, the direct result is a process of textual procreation of which the first offspring is the Reule itself.8 This is a creative appropriation of a theme familiar from much visionary and contemplative writing, here applied to an entirely rational inspiration occurring within the ‘doom of reason’. And it is a self-conscious act of textual authorization that offers an allegorized account of the genesis, not just of a specific text, but of the whole philosophical and theological system laid out in the Reule and in Pecock’s subsequent works.9 It is the privileged duty of Pecock to provide the clearest and fullest articulation of this rational illumination, and he proposes his two central arrangements of systematized religious knowledge that form the bedrock of his Christian catechesis. The first, the Seven Matters of Religious Knowledge, instructs in what Pecock defines as the ‘contemplatijf lijf’. It is an elaborate medley of systematic theology, soteriology, sacramental theology, and metaphysics, and Pecock intends daily meditation on this arrangement (together with prayer and confession) to form the key pattern for private devotion. The other, the Four Tables of Moral Virtues, subsumes the Commandments and other moral teachings into a programme of 7

Pecock notes that he is writing in the year 1443 in The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 434.

8

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 31.

9

See also Mishtooni Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock: Clerical Imitatio in the Fifteenth Century’, Notes and Queries, 47 (2000), 172–76.

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ethical activity in the active life (‘actijf lijf’). It comprises virtuous acts towards God, oneself, and one’s neighbour, arranging these according to whether they serve as ends in themselves (‘eendal’), or as instrumental in eliciting other virtues (‘meenal’).10 These revised curricular arrangements are proposed, both as the definitive summa of theology and moral philosophy, as well as the cornerstone of a pastoral and catechetical endeavour that systematizes popular religious teaching for a broadly imagined audience spanning laity and clergy. All else in Pecock follows from this pastoral theological ambition set out in the Reule. Wendy Scase has provided us with insight into innovative models of book production and dissemination devised by Pecock and some of his London associates, all of whom believed in the educational imperative, patronized learning, and supported the access of lay people to theological works.11 Pecock’s suggestions for reform of monastic orders also follow from his pastoral project with its dual orientation of active and contemplative components (as I shall discuss in some detail below), and so too do his Christian apologetics and ecclesiology. In The Book of Faith, in all probability his latest work (1456) and one that appears to be more directly targeted at the English clergy, he presents his vision of a harmonization of faith made possible by promoting a stronger intellectual and doctrinal base in the Church’s pastoral agenda. It is in this work that we see his catechetical endeavours and emphasis on disputation across the lay-clerical divide pertaining most directly to issues of social control. The dissemination of inherently persuasive and exoteric teaching (operating on a principle of generality that will bring lay rationality into accord with learned clerical reason) is urgently needed, it is insisted, if the Church is to move beyond the prevailing, but ultimately self-defeating, orthodox practice of meeting error with punitive force. What follows from the Reule’s revisionist catechesis is, in other words, a rich reform ideology, intended to be acted out on many fronts. But nowhere does this ideology and educational imperative find better expression than in the strategy of ‘dialogizacioun’, i.e. the debate form, which is where we see Pecock at his most rhetorically innovative. The comprehensive articulation of the Seven Matters and Four Tables in the Reule is enacted and given added precision dialogically in the imagined debates that structure his other satellite works, Donet, Folewer to the Donet, Poore Mennis Myrrour, and Book of Faith. In other words, it is ‘dialogizacioun’, in which student and teacher, or father and son, engage in a 10

The somewhat thankless task of describing the intricacies of these arrangements is pursued in Brockwell, Bishop Reginald Pecock and the Lancastrian Church, pp. 57–93. 11

Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and Colop’s “Common-Profit” Books’.

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dialectical encounter of scholastic disputatio that becomes the main vehicle for propagating his system of instruction: it has an implicit performative and paratextual dimension, offering a model for disputation that Pecock would like to see emulated in public and domestic spheres. And it suggests ways in which the presentation of Pecock’s syllabus can be stratified according to intellectual capacity, with the dialogue in Donet providing the basic primer, Folewer written for those who will benefit from a development of the doctrines of moral and intellectual virtues, and Poor Mennis Myrrour containing a distillate for those less advanced in such study. In all of these works, textual dialogue becomes the test ground for many of the ideas of catechesis, pastoralia, education, and lay participation in ‘clergie’ initially set out in Reule. More than that, dialogue (understood as rational, discursive exchange and persuasion) is explored as a tool for managing religious nonconformism, for developing alternatives to the punitive response to heresy, for getting logical argument back on track after Wycliffite polemic, and, ultimately, for ensuring social stability. In this endeavour, Pecock experiments prolifically with a discourse of tolerance, hospitality, and patience: ‘Sone, þat it is mych and oft as þou hast now rehercid, y graunte wel. But, certis, it is not so alwey’;12 ‘Fadir, it were good to wite what evidence, and hou grete evidence, ye have forto so clepe and holde’;13 ‘Sone, y kunne þee þank for þi scharp arguing. Neuerþeles, õeue so good diligence to vndirstonde what y schal seie for answers to þine argumentis’.14 Typically, dialogue starts from a position of scepticism or variant interpretation, always on the basis of a sustained description of a given standpoint. There then follows the determination of concepts and syllogistic ratiocination, only, invariably, to see the two disputants arrive at mutually agreed superior interpretative positions. Throughout, the lay reader is imagined as the obedient ‘sone’ of Pecock’s dialogic works. In the course of disputation, he poses increasingly demanding and occasionally critical questions, but is brought gradually to an awareness of the full Christian moral law, of the particular value of meritorious action, and of the pre-eminence of the ‘hool lijf’ that integrates action with contemplation: ‘ffadir, y þanke yow for boþe yowre preciose techyng and for yowre holsom counselyng, and y hope forto conforme me þerto’.15

12

Pecock, Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 90.

13

Reginald Pecock’s Book of Faith, ed. by Morison, p. 163.

14

Pecock, Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 191.

15

Pecock, Folewer to the Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 170.

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The ‘Hool Lijf’ Pecock’s Reule makes its intervention into one of the central and most widely disseminated debates in late medieval English religious writing, that of the Christian modes of living, the active and contemplative lives, and the possibility of their integration in a mixed life. The impressive number of texts addressed to both lay and clergy preoccupied with this subject suggests that the rudiments of the active and contemplative lives were considered part of elementary doctrina, taught as part of the basic syllabus of religious instruction. In medieval English sources this particular theme proliferates. The enormous manual of pastoral theology, Oculus sacerdotis, by William of Pagula (c. 1320, extant in more than fifty manuscripts), takes the active and contemplative lives as part of its subject and as knowledge necessary to assist parochial clergy in their cura animarum. In vernacular texts, the lives and the possibility of their meddling are treated in myriad texts, some of which are: Rolle’s Form of Living, Dives and Pauper, Pore Caitif, The Cloud of Unknowing, and, centrally, Hilton’s Mixed Life. Moreover, the Middle English corpus of Bonaventuriana (texts adapted from the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi and the Stimulus amoris, of which the best known is Nicholas Love’s Mirror) in most instances consider the Christian lives, and do so often through interpolations and expansions to the Latin sources.16 Pecock’s engagement with the theme of the active and contemplative lives is distinct in two ways. Firstly, in his configuration of lay religious identity, he offers an extraordinary valorization of active, meritorious works. In fact, his is probably the most outspoken valorization of the active life that we find in Middle English texts of lay spiritual guidance, a feature that needs to be seen in the light of a general tendency in the Middle Ages to present the contemplative life as the more exalted religious life. Secondly, we see in the Reule a ‘modernized’ and conceptually refined rationale for the ideal Christian life that is an integration of active and contemplative components. Specifically, it offers the most sustained analysis we have of the mixed life, what Pecock terms ‘þe hool lijf’, and of the ethical commitments in the form of ‘outward werkis of vertu’ that ought to lie at the heart of it. As such, Pecock’s work invites comparison with Hilton writing half a century earlier, and indeed can be seen to develop and re-

16

F. J. Steele surveys the Middle English sources for the debate on the Christian lives, with a focus on thirty writings that treat specifically of the active life, in Towards a Spirituality for LayFolk: The Active Life in Middle English Religious Literature from the Thirteenth Century to the Fifteenth (Lewiston: Mellen, 1995). See also Denise N. Baker, ‘The Active and Contemplative Lives in Rolle, the Cloud-Author and Hilton’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition, England, Ireland, and Wales, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999), pp. 85–102.

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orientate previous teaching on the lives, but with his very own insistence on the active and practical dimensions of such teaching. It is a telling feature that, when Pecock looks to the active apostolate of Christ for an example of the ‘hool lijf’, he notes that Christ had to resort to prayer at night ‘bi cause þat in þe nyõt tymes was not oportunyte [f]or good and according leiser forto labore aboute þe peple as was in day tyme’.17 Characteristic of Pecock’s inherently practical teaching is that contemplation is accorded no special status; it is willed, accessible, not dependent on miracle or inspiration, but a rational discipline that can be learned through study of Pecock’s Seven Matters of Religious Knowledge. We are as far removed as can be from any ideal of contemplative elitism and withdrawal, as contemplation is perceived as being of little inherent virtue per se unless co-operating with the active life to issue forth in charitable, meritorious deeds. In what seems like a reversal of Hilton’s notion that contemplation is ‘a litil coole of fire in þi soule […] it is good þat þou putte þerto stikkes, þat aren good werkes of actif liyf’,18 Pecock presents contemplation as inferior but able to nourish the fire that is action: ‘þe contemplatijf lijf of þe first maner serueþ in lijk maner to his actijf lijf bi him to be brouõt forþ, as þe blowing […] seruen into þe fier kindeling’.19 This, of course, contradicts a longstanding tradition of seeing the contemplative life as a higher way to God, whether this life is actively pursued or held up as something to be admired, but not actively emulated. The Cloud of Unknowing, together with numerous other texts, offers little more than variations on a patristic theme by seeing Martha’s active life as necessary and good, while Mary, as the paradigm of holiness, has chosen the best life that partakes in contemplation and eternal life.20 Turning his attention to Luke 10. 38–42, Pecock provides his own gloss on the story of Mary and Martha. He does so in his characteristically sustained and idiosyncratic manner, and in a way that re-codifies inherited hierarchies of the modes of Christian living, particularly a longstanding commentary tradition, which used this narrative to inculcate the pre-eminence of the contemplative life over the active. The general thrust of his argument is unambiguous: the contemplative life ought to be made subservient to the active life as the discipline that ensures that meritorious

17

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 397.

18

Walter Hilton, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, ed. by S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, 92.15 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1986), p. 36. 19 20

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 478.

The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Privy Counselling, ed. by Phyllis Hodgson, EETS, O. S. 218 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1944), p. 53.

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work, precisely for it to be meritorious, is performed with the appropriate intention and governance. In Pecock’s explication, Mary exercised her work of detached contemplation with the ideal ‘pure entent’, while Martha was faced with the much more challenging task of reconciling her devotion with charitable action in the world, a challenge which she never completely resolves: ‘it is riõt probable þat sche hadde not at þat tyme þis seid pure and simple entent, but þat sche dide hir werkis alle or myche for worldly freendful love to þee and to þi disciples, al or ouer myche deel’.21 God’s rebuke of Martha is thus a highly specific one, addressing a specific intentionality and ‘gouernaunce’ within the active life (which falls short of being ‘verili morali vertuose and chariteful of God’) at a particular moment in time. It was never meant to determine the inherent merit of the active life per se. Rather than remaining stable indices of merit and levels of accomplishment, Mary and Martha become re-translated and rather dynamic signifiers, at least inasmuch as Martha has yet to form the right intent through contemplation so that her action is willed and chosen, not accidental. As her intention still remains to be reformed in contemplation, the deeds of Martha, at this stage, cannot be deemed fully meritorious. There is a bit of the renegade exegete in this approach, and Pecock is only too well aware that, in his handling of patristic auctoritas, his conclusions are ‘aõens þe doom of wise men and of seintis in her writingis — as of Gregory and of oþere’.22 While it appears to be the case that Pecock recycles relatively few patristic topoi in his writings, he often does so in a manner that, in the words of Mishtooni Bose, exposes ‘the limitations of a patristically grounded orthodoxy’,23 and that at a time when the leaders of a vigilant orthodoxy advocated particular dependence on the Latin Fathers. Just as often, Pecock can be seen to reinvigorate the polemical drive of patristic tradition by rethinking inherited readings and scrutinising the semantic range of inherited terms and topoi. It is this latter strategy that enables him to formulate and give renewed precision to the alternating dynamic between action and contemplation which is so central to his pastoral pedagogy.24

21

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 489–90.

22

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 467.

23

Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 84. The scarcity of patristic quotations in Pecock gives the impression, Bose suggests, that he may have considered them to have become ‘drained of their rhetorical energies by constant use in controversy, and have thus become the devalued currency of anti-heretical argumentation’ (p. 84). 24

I survey Pecock’s varied uses of the writings of Augustine in ‘Pecock’, in the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. by Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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But Pecock’s handling of Luke 10 is not mere idiosyncrasy or irreverent exegesis. He comes, in fact, very close to a Gregorian paradigm that places a higher state of action (the prerogative of prelate or pastor) above the vita contemplativa. A similar position is found, for instance, in The Book of Vices and Virtues and Nicholas Love’s Mirror, where ‘þe seconde part of actif life’ that proceeds from contemplation is defined as the preserve of ‘prelates & prechours & oþer þat hauen cure of soule’.25 This rather conservative and circumscribed view of the higher active, or mixed life, stands in some contrast to Hilton’s idea of the mixed life, in which Hilton does more than anyone before him to engage a rising urban middle class with a model that offers a broad continuation and reinforcement of patristic teaching on the lives, but within a more inclusive vision of who can be called to the spiritual life. His achievement is to propose a model in which a reform of will and affect is given outward expression in deeds performed for the spiritual and physical welfare of one’s neighbour — deeds which are themselves viewed as a mode of prayer to the mystical body of Christ. This pastoral outlook emphasises pastoral care and ethical concerns within spheres of religious piety and worldly practice, and in doing so offers a practical and inclusive theory for ‘how aman in al þat he doth mai shape him to be contemplatif’.26 Making a similar point and being characteristically unequivocal, Pecock insists that ‘werkis of vertu’ are ‘a real preier […] and þerwiþ al þyn honour and worship and preising and service is more brouõt forþ þan if he schulde lie in mental or in vocal preier and begging only’.27 Contemplation provides the right intent and ethical foundation for deeds and, with this in mind, Pecock can make the further forceful point that if one is unsure of one’s spiritual power — if one is unaccomplished in moral theology and contemplation — one had better avoid the life of service to men.28 The apex of the Christian life is the ‘hool lijf’, manifesting the productive complementarity between ‘moral outward deedis, namelich anentis neiõboris’ and the religious contemplation that is the pre-requisite thereof: Þe hool lijf maad of þe contemplatijf lijf and of his to him answering actijf lijf […] is moche better þan þe contemplatijf lijf is in it silf and bi hym silf wiþout þe setting to of his actijf lijf. And so forto occupie a while parfijt contemplatijf lijf and þanne bi strengþ of it forto

25

Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent, p. 118.

26

The quotation is from The Prickynge of Love, an adaptation of Stimulus amoris in all probability by Hilton, and showing a concern with mixed life spirituality. The Prickynge of Love, ed. by Harold Kane, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, 92.10, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983), p. 2. 27

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 410.

28

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 384–89.

278

Allan F. Westphall occupie parfitely actijf lijf anentis neiõboris, and from þens come aõen in an oþer while to contemplatijf lijf, and aftirward eftsoone come aõen into such actijf lijf, is better þan forto stabili and perpetually abide in contemplatijf lijf oonli, namely if abilte and oportunyte be had forto make such alternaciouns or chaungis.29

Pecock adds his voice at the end of a vernacular debate about the Christian modes of living. He writes some fifty years after Hilton, and, like him, defends the active/mixed life, providing a theory for balancing contemplative aspiration with an awareness of the moral imperative of active, social obligation. In his rich attempt at reform, he saw it as crucial to propagate and re-articulate a positive mixed-life theology in a manner that sharpened its lexicon and determined its constituent parts. Occasionally structured like a scholastic pro et contra (and there are plenty of dialogic qualities in the Reule), this work details the advancement through stages of contemplative and active lives towards perfect ‘hool lijf’, constantly classifying, subdividing, and assessing these. Pecock thus wished to assert himself as the ideologue of the ‘hool lijf’ in the era of Chichele and after, where, previously, in the time of Arundel, Hilton articulated a coherent rationale for the ‘medled lyf’. For Hilton, practising the mixed life takes place in a continuum of devotional exercises, such as participation in standard liturgy and sacraments, and a programme of basic reading and orison (‘I holde it most siker vnto þee for to seie þi mateyns, or ellis for to rede vpon þi sautir’).30 Pecock, by contrast, offers his work as a manual for ‘cristen mennes sufficient scolyng’ that posits very little outside his extensively interlocked and cross-referenced corpus of texts; his writing is driven forward by what Rita Copeland has termed a process of autoexegesis; methodically expanding the sum of truths discovered, endlessly expounding method, and reflecting on its own ruptured relation to past auctoritas.31 But the main difference between Pecock and an earlier pastoral literature of mixed life theology needs to be addressed. For Hilton, the mixed life remained the special preserve of a social minority and elite — that of a secular lord within a particular matrix of material and social power, who is involved in the active pastoral care of his dependents. Although his treatise on Mixed Life was one of several to find varied devotional utilities also among vowed religious, who evidently found its guidance relevant to monastic spirituality, the text is designed to resolve

29

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 478–79.

30

Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, ed. by Ogilvie-Thomson, p. 62.

31

Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, pp. 109–14.

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a conflict and a crisis of vocation in the life of a wealthy gentleman in his desire to realize his devotional aspiration.32 We notice in the development of mixed-life theology in England before Pecock a line of broadening application of the life that integrates contemplative and active elements. The mixed life as theorized in the Reule is not the prerogative of a specific professional state; rather, it generalizes to all Christians an ethical imperative towards action. Through the idea of the ‘hool lijf’, Pecock proposes an overarching rationale for the Christian life and for religious discipline. It is a modus vivendi viewed as the best and most comprehensive manifestation of his catechetical syllabus and, by implication, of God’s moral law. Furthermore, it is intended as the cornerstone of a reformed and strengthened Church, and for a revised Christian catechism that, if only nominally, guarantees transparency and social homogeneity. We may thus say that with Pecock, more so than with Hilton, we are closer to a novel concept and an alteration of the status of the topic itself. Mixed life theology itself contains a vision of a Christian community traversing boundaries of lay/clergy, monastic/secular, constituted around the study of moral theology, and educated in the gradual progress from illumination and argumentative practice, through prayer, good will, compunction, and moral reform, to the highest good of a ‘hool lijf’, at the heart of which is the performance of virtuous deeds ‘wiþ pure entent’. The idea of an ethical goal that directly affects relations with one’s neighbour thus lies at the heart of the exercise of the ‘doom of resoun’ and training in syllogistic method.

A Blueprint for Monastic Reform? Whereas Hilton’s Mixed Life returns to the cloister by accident and through the contingencies of late medieval manuscript circulation, where it was read by monks and nuns, Pecock envisages the utility of his catechetical discipline for an audience of vowed religious in very explicit terms. There can be little doubt that Pecock was full of reservations about late medieval monasticism and the monastic way of life, and he begins to outline in the Reule the parameters of a thoroughgoing reform of the religious orders, centred specifically on his notion of the ‘hool lijf’ with its impetus towards social obligation and corporal works of mercy. I suggest that we should think of Pecock’s defence of monasticism in the Repressor as separate from his preoccupation with the same in the Reule and in the context of his mixed-life theology. The defence in the Repressor of cloistered 32

Nicole Rice offers illuminating discussion of several texts offering pastoral guidance for the laity that also became instruments for contemplation in monastic communities in Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, pp. 136–48.

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religion forms part of an exercise of systematic refutation of Lollard doctrine, and is arguably, in the words of V. H. H. Green, ‘the least satisfactory of his answers’, arguing for instance that sinful monks would have committed even greater sin were they not in a religious house, and that they commit less evil than any soldier presently engaged in the war against France!33 The view voiced in the Reule that the religious orders are ripe for reform exemplifies the broader intended reach of Pecock’s writing, and underscores his priority of social utility in its suggestion that the rationale of the active ‘hool lijf’ is pertinent in the effort to integrate religious houses more directly in a vibrant parochial scene as providers of active ministry. If it is true that the monasteries to a particular degree in the late Middle Ages ‘were caught in a double bind between the reforming imperative of withdrawal, and the social imperative of integration’,34 then Pecock’s priorities for a solution are clear: intellectual education, and crucially the exposition of God’s moral law in the Reule with its social orientation, ought to serve as the much needed instrument in a programme of monastic reform, and as the corrective to an over-emphasis on prayer and meditation seen amongst ‘conuentual religiosis persoonys’. Here Pecock extends a reservation also found in Hilton’s Mixed Life, namely that his reader may pursue devotion too vehemently through ‘indiscrecion’, to the exclusion of ‘medeful werkes’. Hilton perceives potential conflict in the lay reader’s mixed life as arising from disharmonious relations between social obligation and spiritual meditation; what his treatise cautions against is pursuing the inclination to ‘kisse [Christ’s] mouþ bi deuocion and goosteli praier’ while stepping ‘upon his feet […] in as moche as þou wolt not tende to hem, for negligence of þi silf, whiche þou hast take þe cure of’.35 Similarly in Pecock, the multiplication of prayer in a manner that leads to withdrawal or neglect of one’s social obligation means to sin and to ‘failen bi indiscrecioun’.36 The use of ‘indiscrecioun’ here demonstrates shared concerns with Hilton, and a shared vocabulary, particularly in the effort to define an appropriate balance between active and contemplative disciplines. With particular appeal to the religious orders, Pecock stresses the importance of avoiding longer

33 V. H. H. Green, Bishop Reginald Pecock: A Study in Ecclesiastical History and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), p. 162. See also Pecock, Repressor, ed. by Babbington, pp. 516–17. 34

Benjamin Thompson, ‘Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England’, in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. by James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 165–212 (p. 190). 35

Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, ed. by Ogilvie-Thomson, p. 37.

36

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 395.

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prayer routines, instead recommending what he terms, in a memorable phrase, ‘schort smert fiery deuoute preiers whiche wolen be seid in iii or iiii or in fewe wordis accordaunt to oure entent for þe tyme’.37 It is for these reasons that we notice a particular admiration for those who go from a cloistered life of prayer to the ‘parfijt actijf lijf’ — a view fully consonant with his insistence that a Christian ought to progress from ‘illuminacioun’ (understood as predominantly rational, but with an affective component) towards moral reform; from logical contemplation towards the social integration of the ‘hool lijf’. As Pecock notes, the fact that many ‘monks and chanouns’ leave the cloister in order to serve the laity as ‘parsouns and vicaries and bisschopis’ should be taken as evidence that, having had a long time to reflect on Christian moral law in the ‘pryuy sure saaf world’ of the religious house, they arrive at the conclusion that ‘the actijf lijf with the contemplatijf lijf’ is the superior of all Christian modes of living. Although it is never stated directly, one suspects that Pecock’s criticism is directed chiefly at the devoted asceticism of observant, Carthusian, and Birgittine orders — surely a very minor proportion of the monastic population in England, but an influential and strongly profiled one. The Cistercian order, on the other hand, is held up as an example of vowed religious who live in accordance with the full spectrum of God’s moral law, being equally sensitive to active and contemplative disciplines.38 Although the three folio pages in the Reule that address the subject of religious orders can be said to constitute, at best, a very sketchy proposal for monastic reform, Pecock is unequivocal about the initiatives required for a necessary re-orientation in monastic practice. Firstly, his own syllabus sets out the trajectory from contemplation to action and the ‘hool lijf’ ‘in a ful conuenient process and ordre’, and ought thus to constitute a rule for vowed religious. With characteristically unswerving confidence, and in a manner that conveys an indirect critique of the reading material habitually used for daily observance in houses, Pecock recommends that ‘the redyng, leernyng, remembering and vsyng of tho bookis which God vouchith saaf me to write in the comoun peplis langage and in latyn should be unlakable and

37

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 397. The advice here recalls advice given in The Cloud of Unknowing to prefer short prayers ‘in ful fewe wordes; õe, & euer þe fewer þe betir. Õe, & õif it ben bot a lityl worde of o silable, me þink it betir þen of to, & more acordyng to þe werk of þe spiryte’ (The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. by Hodgson, p. 74). The application, however, could not be more different, with Pecock insisting that prayer ought to pose a minimum of hindrance to active works, while the Cloud-author views an increasing shortness of prayer as part of a gradual dismantling of linguistic and discursive awareness in the demanding discipline of solitary contemplation. 38

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, pp. 418–20.

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unleuable daily obseruance’.39 Secondly, Pecock advocates a return to an original monastic ideal of achieving a balance between active and contemplative disciplines. It seems here that active deeds, monastic outreach, and utility to society become the norm for evaluating the forms vowed religious life should take and the justification of its existence. It is clear that, in the practical pastoral teaching of the Reule, monasteries have a particular obligation to society at large as places of learning, literacy, and as providers of education. What is less clear is the type of secular extensions and parochial functions intended by Pecock, especially when we consider that, as Benjamin Thompson notes, in many ways in late medieval England ‘the barrier between the cloister and society had become almost entirely permeable’.40 But it seems safe to conclude that, in its attempted appeal to enclosed religious, the Reule strives to inculcate an ideal of proceeding from monastic contemplation to carrying out duties in the practical operation of the Church, as well as a deepened understanding of how one can be personally ascetic but still actively attend to the needs of others. Thus, the monastery, in its function as ‘a pety world as a scole to the grettir world’, ought to serve as a training ground for those who can later take up ‘þe state of a prelate and of a gouernour, which is moost hard and moost perilose of alle oþere’.41 The striking analogy used to convey this idea of the religious house is that of the astronomer’s ‘speer’ [sphere] that ‘makiþ al þing in þis litil counterfeet world be like and answer to þe þingis conteyned in þe greet world’:42 the purpose of the monastery should be to have the whole world — and, we may add, the ‘hool lijf’ — present in microcosm. In this way, the house is to provide a locus for contemplating God’s moral law towards self, neighbour, and God (as manifested in Pecock’s Four Tables), for rehearsing charitable action, and for training the will to perform this with the right intent, before attending to the cura animarum beyond the walls.

Conclusion It is Pecock’s holistic pastoral outlook and vision for the ‘hool lijf’ that forms the backbone of his critique of the monastic life and of programmes of monastic lectio. Its comprehensive teaching stands as a remarkable alternative to the devotional and

39

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 422.

40

Thompson, ‘Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England’, p. 186.

41

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 419.

42

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 419.

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meditative reading programmes disseminated through monastic channels, primarily Carthusian and Birgittine, with one key text, Love’s Mirror, travelling with the mandate of the archbishop of Canterbury. Evidently, this revised catechism is far removed from the voguish vernacular lexicon of Christocentric, affect-based meditative writing, and from a predominant late medieval ‘normative centring’ towards the salvific function of Christ’s Passion, imitatio Christi, true repentance, the realization of the compassion of Mary, and so on.43 As Jeremy Catto has observed, Pecock’s alternative remedy for orthodoxy ‘was probably less perceptive in the long run than the Carthusian’s reliance on spiritual literature’, but he notes, crucially, that ‘the difference should not be exaggerated’.44 Indeed, we need to see Pecock, not as unique in his pedagogy or as dismissing devotional affectivity, but as a late voice in a tradition of English pastoral theology that explores how the dominant vogue of devotional enthusiasm, inward prayer and desire may issue forth into necessary meritorious works. We may even say that Pecock, in his propagation of mixed-life theology, goes further than any before him by exploring and systematizing in detail how we may put affectivity to work. In his own distinct way, Pecock translates an emotive idiom, a language of ‘inward passiouns and affectis’, into the intended effects of his teaching and of the disputational literary culture he envisages: ‘þe practik or arguing which is tauõt here’ works for the ‘gendering of wel willing and of compunccioun and for gendering of passiounal loue and of desijr’.45 Other emotional configurations to be elicited through the experience of rational illumination include ‘sorewe’, ‘ioie’, ‘repentaunce’, ‘schame’, ‘fier of deuocioun’, ‘feruour’, ‘gladnesse’, ‘angir’, ‘drede’, and suggest that Pecock’s ‘modernized’ theology of the ‘hool lijf’, in its conception, was intended to match the spectrum of interiority and emotional response delineated, for instance, in Christocentric meditative material. We might thus say that Pecock reconfigures an emotive idiom by suggesting ways in which a method of syllogocentrism itself can engender his distinctive notion of a ‘contemplaciounis effect’. The important

43 The term ‘normative centring’ is Berndt Hamm’s from The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm, ed. and trans. by Robert J. Bast (Leiden: Brill, 2004). See especially chapter one: ‘Normative Centering in the 15th and 16th Centuries: Observations on Religiosity, Theology, and Iconology’, pp. 1–49. 44 45

Catto, ‘The King’s Government and the Fall of Pecock’, pp. 201–22 (p. 206).

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 372. The Donet is particularly interesting for its reconfiguration of affective rhetoric. The prologue describes the syllogocentric method as able to ‘knytte hem [his readers] and couple hem to God and to his wel willingis, as forto be a bilowe to blowe and puffe vp the fier of deuocioun in her soule, into banysching aweie the cool of vndeuocioun and of vncharite’ (p. 6).

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thing is that affectivity, and the experience of a ‘contemplaciounis effect’, are disciplined within the exercise of the ‘doom of resoun’. The danger is always abandoning the universal and the rationally verifiable in favour of subjective religious singularity and a non-visibility of meaning. Thus, turning to the subject of ‘dyuersitees in felingis and feiþis’, the reader is cautioned that ‘alle suche singuler feelingis in þe vndirstonding and movingis in þe affeccioun whiche ben not vniuersal in summe men of alle maner complexioun ben to be hold suspect and not liõtli to be folewid’.46 Considerations such as these conceivably drive Pecock to dispense largely with affective modes of empathy and projection centred on Christ in his humanity and the narrative of his Passion. For Hilton, these were indeed the focal points for his rationale of the mixed life: Christ’s body is glossed as ripe with social significance — imitatio Christi is to be pursued through charitable action and worldly governance, which themselves become a mode, or extension, of affective Christocentric meditation. Like Hilton, Pecock is concerned with shaping the appropriate intentionality and religious sensibility that underlie activity. But he proposes a more robustly rational system of co-operation between religious ‘affecciouns’ and the will to do well. It is important here that a substantial portion of the last (and incomplete) Fifth Treatise of the Reule proposes what we may term a phenomenology of meritorious action — ‘meritorie moral holynes or goodnes’ — for the ‘hool lijf’. It is beyond the scope of this exercise to engage with this topic in detail, but its gist is clear: contemplation, as an exercise of reason, both stirs and disciplines ‘affecciouns’; affectivity, as trained in contemplation and inherently reasonable, then moulds the will into a state of ‘inward welwilling’ in which it desires ‘deuoutly, ferseli, feruently or strongly and abidingli’ to perform charitable active deeds.47 The intricacies of this philosophical dimension of the ‘hool lijf’ extend the initiatives of English pastoral theology in the previous decades that similarly worked to articulate the relationship between religious desire and action. Even for an ardent rationalist such as Pecock, the instrumentality of religious enthusiasm is pivotal, as he aims to channel its energies within his very own bid for a fifteenthcentury religious reform.48

46

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 460.

47

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 498. The reciprocity of outward action and ‘þe movingis of þe wil which ben called hise affecciouns or passiouns’ is analysed in the Reule, pp. 481–86, 498–501. 48

I thank Ian Johnson who read an early draft of this paper and made many helpful suggestions.

V ERNACULAR A UTHORITY AND THE R HETORIC OF S CIENCES IN P ECOCK ’S T HE F OLEWER TO THE D ONET AND IN T HE C OURT OF S APIENCE* Tamás Karáth

T

homas Arundel’s Constitutions have been interpreted until recently as a watershed in fifteenth-century cultural politics. This view, however, had already been challenged before the Oxford conference ‘After Arundel’ of April 2009.1 One of the purposes of this conference was to reconsider cultural continuities before and after Arundel as well as the meaning of censorship imposed on vernacular composition. In this paper, I will juxtapose two approximately contemporary texts of the fifteenth century, the anonymous Court of Sapience and Reginald Pecock’s Folewer to the Donet, to show that the concept of ‘continuity’, the continuation of generic or rhetorical conventions, is complex and elusive. After 1409, vernacular compositions, rooted in inherited discursive traditions, could both affirm and destabilize their own authority by alluding to restraints on writing in English.

* I owe my thanks to Kantik Ghosh for his comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to Eva Schaten, who helped me to access some important sources. 1 Nicholas Watson initiated a rich debate on cultural paradigms in late medieval England in his study of censorship and cultural change in the fifteenth century: see Watson, ‘Censorship’. Fiona Somerset has responded to Watson’s seminal argument thus: ‘[The] reassessment of the relationship between censorship and use or advocacy of the vernacular in late medieval England suggests that the relationship, while close, is not as simple as it may appear. The choice between using or advocating the vernacular and keeping silent is not necessarily a choice whether to exclude oneself from discussion or to submit to a prior self-censorship. If we assume that it is, we limit our analysis’ (Somerset, ‘Professionalizing Translation’, pp. 145–57 (p. 153)).

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The discourse of the classification of sciences is fundamental to the organizing principles of Reginald Pecock’s Folewer to the Donet and of The Court of Sapience.2 After Arundel, this discourse seems to have become especially sensitive to issues of censorship, vernacular creation, and externally imposed limits on authority. I will argue that Pecock’s theorization of knowledge in the Folewer positions itself in the same rhetorical tradition which manifests itself in the allegorical poem. Moreover, both authors address problems underlying writing in the vernacular by means of the discourse of the classification of sciences: these include the suspect status of English, restraints on vernacular textual composition, and the authority to discuss and transmit theological subjects beyond the university. In spite of these similarities, the implications of this discourse are very different in the two works under consideration. Reading the Folewer in light of The Court of Sapience can elucidate Pecock’s much debated attitudes to vernacular religious instruction. At the same time, it also reveals that the Arundelian measures of the early fifteenth century could affect segments of religious writing in diverse and contradictory ways even within the framework of the same discursive tradition. Pecock’s Folewer is a sequel to his Donet. These texts provide the reader with an introduction to the Reule of Crysten Religioun. The order of composition of these three works, however, is uncertain. Numerous cross-references reveal that Pecock was simultaneously working on these writings. The Donet may have been finished between 1443 and 1449, while the Folewer was not concluded before 1453–54.3 The ‘follower’ to each Christian’s ‘Donatus’ imitates its antecedent in form and structure: both texts are dialogues between father and son, and are divided into two parts. But their approaches to their subject-matters are very different. Pecock conceives the Folewer as an elaboration on the Donet for more developed intellects. He establishes a hierarchy of audiences and contents in the preface to the Folewer, where he states that the Donet, though sufficient for simpler minds, does not satisfy the needs of readers with bigger intellectual capacities.4

2 For important discussions of the discourse of the classification of sciences, see Joseph Mariétan, Le Problème de la classification des sciences d’Aristote à St.-Thomas (Paris: Alcan, 1901); Jerome Taylor, ‘Introduction’ in The ‘Didascalicon’ of Hugh of Saint Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. from the Latin with an introduction and notes by Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 3–39 (pp. 3–7); James Weisheipl, ‘Classification of the Sciences in Medieval Thought’, Mediaeval Studies, 27 (1965), 54–90; and Ilsetraut Hadot, Arts libéraux et philosophie dans la pensée antique (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1984). 3

For difficulties in dating Pecock’s earlier works, see Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. xvi–xviii. 4

Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 2.

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The Folewer is an enlarged version of the Donet, which itself is a heavily reduced and simplified exposition of the seven matters of faith as propounded in the Reule of Crysten Religioun. The exposition of Pecock’s moral and religious instruction to the laity is presented in such a way that the three books complement one another. They not only offer clergie for the transmission of catechetical teaching, but also create a new frame for lay education. As Kirsty Campbell points out, Pecock’s role in fifteenth-century lay education is unique as the bishop not only wrote (or rather rephrased) books of religious instruction, but also ‘devis[ed] innovative plans for lay education’: he ‘envisioned the religious education of the lay members of the Christian community in ways that had never been imagined before’.5 Inspired by the need for an all-encompassing, but simple and transparent, scheme of the moral laws, Pecock recasts the elements of the traditional canon of lay religious instruction — as outlined in Archbishop Pecham’s Constitutions — into a new mould. Nevertheless, he breaks with the tradition of expounding separate lists of memoranda (the seven articles of faith, the Ten Commandments, the seven deeds of mercy, or the seven deadly sins), and rearranges all moral and religious instruction into four tables. The four tables are designed primarily to structure Pecock’s religious instruction and provide a new educational aid for lay people. The raison d’être of the fourfold division of moral imperatives is nowhere justified in Pecock’s books, the methodology of the transmission of religious instruction being taken to be as selfevident as Pecock’s ‘doom of reason’. (‘[A]lle moral dedis according to resoun and to feiþ, and þerfore alle moral vertues commaundid or counseilid bi resoun or feiþ, and alle comaundementis or counseilis of god ben conteyned in […] xxiij poyntis’.)6 The overall idea of the four tables is that all of God’s commandments can be classified into three categories: one’s duty towards God, towards oneself, and towards one’s neighbours. These categories list several duties, which — altogether twenty-three — constitute the ‘eendal’ virtues, i.e. the absolute aims of morality. The moral virtues have their corresponding ‘meenal’ virtues; these are the executive powers of the will through which the moral ends can be reached. As all intermediary virtues are inherently present in their respective ‘eendal’ virtues, further tables of virtues would be redundant. But Pecock argues that an appendix of the eight ‘meenal’ virtues, preceding the three tables of moral law, would further clarify his system.7 5

Kirsty Campbell, ‘Reginald Pecock and the Religious Education of the Laity in FifteenthCentury England’, Studies in Philology, 107 (2009), 48–73 (p. 50). 6 7

Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 22.

In Pecock’s system the eight ‘meenal’ virtues are: learning, praising, dispraising, praying, thanking, worshipping, ‘disworshipping’, and living ‘sacramentally’. The ‘eendal’ moral virtues

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What the Folewer adds to the Donet in its elaboration of Pecock’s scheme of moral instruction is the integration of intellectual ‘virtues’ into the moral code. Chapters 10–14 of the first part of the Folewer demonstrate the role of reason in consenting to the four tables and to a faith based on the moral imperatives of Pecock’s system.8 The context of Pecock’s theorizations of knowledge is, thus, not a separate treatise on epistemology or on the relationship between reason and faith, but an educational aid in which the author revises the canon of moral and religious instruction as well as his methods. The transformation of the discourse of the classification of sciences in Pecock’s argument is comparable to his reworking of the catechetical instructions into the four tables of moral laws. For the purposes of this essay, primarily this section of Pecock’s ample argument will be juxtaposed with the methods of classifying sciences in The Court of Sapience. The Court is an allegorical discovery of a ‘castle of mind’.9 The anonymous and undated poem survives in four manuscripts,10 and two early prints by Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde. Robert Spindler refutes the consensus of early scholarship that ascribed the poem to Lydgate.11 Several suggestions have been made about its date of composition, of which none is compelling. Ruth Harvey argues that a date

provide a behavioural and ethical code for Christians as regards their relationship with God, with themselves and with their fellow Christians. For the most concise summary of Pecock’s moral teaching of the four tables, see Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 27–67. 8

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 45–75.

9

I borrow this expression from Christiania Whitehead’s study of architectural allegories of the mind in late medieval religious writing, which also discusses The Court of Sapience: Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003). I also owe my thanks to her for her reflections on this paper at the conference. 10

Three manuscripts (London, British Library, MS Harley 2251; Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3. 21, and New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 256) date from the second half of the fifteenth century, while the fourth is a copy of Caxton’s print, made by John Stowe in 1558 (London, British Library, MS Additional 29729). The copy-text of the first modern edition of the Court was the version in the Trinity manuscript: The Court of Sapience, ed. by Robert Spindler, Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie, Heft 6 (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1927), p. 7. Spindler did not know about the Plimpton manuscript, first described by Karl Brunner, ‘Bisher unbekannte Schluszstrophen des Court of Sapience’, Anglia, 62 (1938), 258–62. The modern critical edition of the poem by E. Ruth Harvey is based on Caxton’s print (c. 1480–83), which is related to the Plimpton version, but contains fewer omissions. The Court of Sapience, ed. by E. Ruth Harvey, Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations, 2 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1984); all citations are from this edition. 11

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Spindler, p. 7.

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of 1471 or shortly after, as proposed by Spindler, is as reasonable as a date before 1456.12 Besides the uncertainties surrounding the circumstances of the Court’s composition, the most intriguing aspect of the poem is the impossibility of recovering one established version of the text. ‘No one of the sources [the Harley, Trinity, Plimpton manuscripts, and Caxton’s print] contains all of the poem we know, and even in its fullest surviving form the work is still plainly incomplete. On the other hand, each witness adds something different to the narrative text’.13 The account of the castle of Sapience reaches very different stages in the four major versions. The Harley text stops well before the end of Book I, in the middle of the story of God’s four daughters. The Trinity version finishes in the third court of the castle, that of Sapience and the seven liberal arts, with an incomplete tract on music, but before the concluding tract on astronomy. This version also lacks the visit to Lady Faith’s tower. Caxton and the Plimpton version extend the allegorical plot with the visit to the seven towers, where presumably the figures of the seven virtues have established their residence. However, after the visit to the first tower, Caxton appends an exposition of a Christian’s ABC with the basic items of catechetical learning, while Plimpton proceeds to the visit of the second tower in the nine ensuing stanzas, and concludes the allegorical journey with a stanza listing the most important matters of the poem. In none of the versions does the dreamer wake up. Indeed, the architecturally structured plot suggests a much more extended allegorical design than achieved by any of the surviving texts.14 The survival of the poem in four different versions gives rise to problems. If we insist on the uniqueness of each manuscript version, there is hardly any observation which would be adequate to all of them. This ultimately questions the idea that one poem may be identified as The Court of Sapience. On the other hand, if we create a patchwork version of the poem from all the early witnesses, none of our conclusions may be true of any of the surviving versions. Nevertheless, in spite of

12

For attempts at establishing the date of the Court’s composition, see: The Court of Sapience, ed. by Spindler, pp. 14–15; Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘The Court of Sapience and the Gude and Godlie Ballatis’, Neophilologus, 74 (1990), 608–11 (p. 609); James J. Murphy, ‘Caxton’s Two Choices: “Modern” and “Medieval” Rhetoric in Traversagni’s Nova Rhetorica and the Anonymous Court of Sapience’, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s., 3 (1972), 241–55 (p. 250); and The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xxii–xxiv. 13 14

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xiv.

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xxv–xxvi; also Brunner, ‘Bisher unbekannte Schluszstrophen’, pp. 258–59.

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the obvious discrepancies between the textual and authorial traditions underlying the different versions, there are patterns common to all of them. Central to all early witnesses of the poem (with the exception of the Harley fragment, which is interrupted too early to predict anything about its design) is the elaboration of the interior of the castle, i.e. the three courts of Science, Intellect, and Sapience. Even if the logic of the architectural allegory predicts the continuation of the vision of the court of Sapience in a much broader tableau of the seven virtues, none of the versions opens up the allegory to a more extended description of moral virtues. However, all versions are preoccupied with initiating the reader into an understanding of the nature of Sapience. The core of the allegory, in terms of plot, presents a quest which follows a common pattern of dream visions: fatigued by fruitless worldly meditations, the persona falls asleep, and sees in a dream a tableau of all sciences, arranged in a landscape with a Gothic castle in the centre. The way to the castle and the dreamer’s experiences in the court of Sapience cause him to reflect upon epistemology, starting with the examination of the physical world and reaching to an understanding of theology. In the most fully surviving version of the poem, a significantly longer section belongs to the allegorical realm of Sapience, which is left behind by the dreamer’s ascent to the realm of faith only in the last few stanzas.15 A second common feature of all versions is that a central element of the allegorical design is constituted by the versification of lists describing the subject matter and the representatives of all sciences. The poet avowedly considers his work as a compilation of sources that present ‘good mater’ for an encyclopaedic work of this sort.16 Scholars have reached contradictory conclusions about the indebtedness of the Court to earlier authorities.17 James Murphy and Alasdair MacDonald describe the work as a mosaic, and confirm that it seems to have stood 15

In Harvey’s edition, based on Caxton’s print, 315 stanzas out of 330 (not counting the ten additional stanzas to be found only in Plimpton) elaborate on the core narrative: the circumstances of the dream, the dreamer’s journey to the castle, and his discovery of the interior of the court. Lady Faith’s dwelling and the conclusion of the poem are described in the remaining 15 stanzas. 16

Book I, stanza 129, ll. 898–900: ‘And graunt me grace, or I of makyng cees, / To thy plesaunce somme mater that is good / For to compyle, to help me from the flode / Of fruteles worldly medytacyon, / And fynd a wey to my salvacyon’. 17

C. F. Bühler, The Sources of the ‘Court of Sapience’, Beiträge zur Englischen Philologie, Heft 23 (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1932); Mary Immaculate, ‘The Four Daughters of God in the Gesta Romanorum and The Court of Sapience’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 57 (1942), 951–65 (pp. 961–62 and 964); and The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xxvi–xxxviii.

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in the line of a long and unbroken tradition of conceptualizing human sciences.18 But the poem rearranges old material to serve unusual purposes: the long lists of the subject-matters and of the authoritative figures of each science structure the dreamer’s advancement from futile meditations to illumination. The discourse of the theorization of knowledge fused with the literary convention of allegorical dream poetry establishes a new context for an experiment sensitive to concerns regarding unfettered vernacular composition. Though Murphy claims that ‘The Court of Sapience could just as well have been written a hundred years earlier’,19 its concerns inherently bind it to post-Arundelian dilemmas.

Theorizations of Knowledge in Pecock’s Folewer and The Court of Sapience The theorizations of knowledge in Pecock’s Folewer and in the Court are similar both in the presentation of an eclectic subject matter and in structure. Both texts use the discursive tradition of the classification of sciences, but not with the primary aim of expounding the nature of knowledge. A second point of similarity is that the classifications play the same role in the larger argument, as they claim that instruction in faith must be preceded by learning about the intellectual virtues, which engender the moral ones. In his Folewer, Pecock proceeds from an exposition of ‘kunnyngal’ (intellectual) virtues to a classification of sciences. He proposes two models. In the first, he distinguishes five intellectual virtues: ‘[A]ftir oon maner of holding, which is allowable y-nouõ, vndir þe nombir of v, as me seemeþ, mowe be comprehended conuenyentli alle kunnyngal vertues. […] vndir Intellect, Speculatijf science, prudence, craft, and opynyoun’.20 ‘Intellect’ is a set of truths, self-evident to reason, which do not require further demonstration. If a truth is indirectly proved by another truth more open to reason, it is called ‘kunnyng’. ‘Kunnyng’ is further divided into ‘science’ and ‘opinion’ according to the degree of certainty, while each of these two bifurcates into practical and speculative categories. Pecock’s first system thus differs considerably from early medieval classifications of sciences that had established an authoritative tradition for later thought. He creates an open system which does not seek to label all the academically received 18

MacDonald, ‘The Court of Sapience’, p. 608, and Murphy, ‘Caxton’s Two Choices’, p. 248.

19

Murphy, ‘Caxton’s Two Choices’, p. 250.

20

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 48.

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fields of science. The classification derives from a distinction between knowledge evident to reason (axiomatic truths) and knowledge not self-evident, and therefore to be proved by reason. The non-axiomatic, therefore demonstrable, pieces of truth (‘kunnyng’) raise an epistemological problem: ‘How certain can we be with regard to a piece of knowledge? To what extent can we establish the certainty of a truth?’ Accordingly, the division of ‘kunnyng’ into science and opinion is determined by the criterion of certainty. Lastly, Pecock affirms that the scrutiny of knowable things, both certain and uncertain, can follow a theoretical or a practical path. This question of method therefore leads to the third major division in the classification: that of the ‘kunnyng’ branches into speculative and practical categories. Pecock’s system of intellectual virtues allows a great deal of flexibility in transferring items between categories. His classification is necessarily ‘dynamic’, as an ‘opinion’ can always become ‘science’, and a ‘kunnyng’ can emerge in time as a part of ‘intellect’. At the same time, the system is anxious to fulfil the scholastic criterion of the symmetry of divisions, as it advances from the higher categories to lower divisions through binary oppositions. In the end, Pecock is drawn into an automatic generation of categories, difficult to sustain, let alone to define precisely. Whether there is any sense in distinguishing ‘prudential’ and ‘craftial’ knowledge from ‘prudential’ and ‘craftial’ opinion must have preoccupied him as well, since he detaches the treatment of opinion from all other manifestations of knowledge (speculative science, prudence and craft) in the rest of his exposition.21 Pecock also elaborates on a second theoretical model, which draws on the tripartite classifications of philosophy into ‘physica’, ‘ethica / theologica’, and ‘logica’.22 In this system, ‘knowing and opinion’ are divided into three categories. The first comprises crafts whose truths and opinions are drawn from physical creation (‘þings makable’). The second category involves all truths and opinions which derive from the Aristotelian triad of practical sciences, i.e. ethics, economics, and politics (‘þings doable’). Finally, the third category is labelled speculative science, 21

Although, in Pecock’s treatment, the categories of ‘prudence’ and ‘craft’ are varieties of both knowledge and opinion, Pecock does not develop the second implication. He associates prudence and craft primarily with manifestations of science. This is confirmed by the fact that he creates a separate category for opinion in the list of ‘kunnyngal vertues’. See Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 48–49. 22

The classical tripartite division of speculative philosophy can be traced back to Boethius’s De Trinitate, which fuses Aristotelian and Platonic elements of the discourse of theorizing knowledge. Weisheipl identifies this line of discourse as the Stoic tradition, and considers Isidore of Seville, Alcuin of York, Rabanus Maurus, Scotus Eriugena, and Hugh of St Victor its major continuators; Weisheipl, ‘Classification of the Sciences’, pp. 60 and 63–66.

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and contains truths proved by the intellect. These three major categories of knowledge are subdivided into several fields of theoretical or practical activities. Crafts involve the professions, such as carpentry, tailoring, or masonry. Prudence is an elaboration of the Aristotelian triad of the practical sciences; it branches into five subdivisions: (1) the study of the laws of God (further divided into God’s law and positive law); (2) the study of the laws of clergy (canon law); (3) the study of the laws of princes (civil law); (4) merchandizing; and (5) economy / husbandry. Speculative science involves metaphysics, natural philosophy, medicine, and the quadrivium.23 This second classification is eclectic. We can detect a probable influence of Hugh of St Victor’s model as set out in his Didascalicon — with two major deviations from it. Hugh divides philosophy into four branches: theoretical, practical, mechanical, and logical.24 All of these, except for logic, can be equated to Pecock’s divisions. Pecock, however, entirely omits the trivium from his system. Furthermore, he transfers theology from its privileged status (the highest theoretical science) to prudence, which is labelled ‘practical sciences’ by Hugh.25 Both of these alterations reflect Pecock’s endeavour to reshape the academic canon, and to claim an authoritative role for himself in the field of the classification of sciences. Pecock’s modifications of the classification of sciences discourse may be profitably compared with The Court of Sapience. The Court incorporates the academic tradition of the classification of sciences into a non-academic genre. The poem elaborates on different concepts of the division of sciences in a way similar to Pecock’s, without prioritizing any of the models. The first vision of a systematic classification appears in stanzas 220–21 of Book II, with an ancient topos: Dame Theology is escorted by seven ladies, the allegorical figures of the liberal arts. All of them salute Dame Sapience, the queen of the court of all knowledge. This initial vision of a hierarchy of sciences is then enlarged to admit Dame Philosophy, who introduces new concepts of knowledge. Philosophy appears as a substitute for Sapience, since she comprises all knowledge (earthly and heavenly) — both certain and uncertain: Philosophye is, who lust to dyffyne, Knowlege of erthely and eke hevenly thyng,

23

See the full exposition of the classification in Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 49.

24

Hugh of St Victor, Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon de studio legendi: A Critical Text, ed. by Charles Henry Buttimer (Washington, DC : Catholic University Press of America, 1939), I. viii. 747B–C and I. xi. 749A–750D. 25

Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, ed. by Buttimer, I. viii. 747C. Cf. also Weisheipl, ‘Classification of the Sciences’, pp. 65–66.

294

Tamás Karáth Y-ioyned with the sad study and fyne Of governaunce honest, and good lyvyng; It is also the probable connyng Of worldly thyng and goodely thyng, ywys, As in as moche to man possyble is. (II, 223, 1555–61)

This model is an alternative scheme of the division of sciences. As in Pecock, this model establishes the basic division of knowledge according to the criterion of the degree of certainty. This concept also derives (certain) knowledge from (uncertain) suppositions. After the division of philosophy into ‘science’ and ‘opinion’, the Court-poet provides two further definitions and classifications of philosophy. In the first (II, 227, 1583–89), philosophy undergoes a tripartite division into ‘phisyca’ (natural philosophy), ‘ethyca’ (moral philosophy), and ‘logyca’ (rational philosophy). It comes only as a late addition to the scheme that philosophy is subordinated to divinity, since the three main branches of knowledge are subservient to scriptural studies. In what follows, the poet presents a third model for the division of philosophy, where the two main branches are labelled ‘inspectyve’ and ‘actual’ (II, 233, 1625–31). In this scheme, ‘dyvynal’ philosophy, which discerns invisible things, is integrated into the model as a subdivision of the speculative sciences. As opposed to Pecock’s classifications, the Court-poet’s different models of the theorization of knowledge are not compatible with each other, since each new tableau of sciences requires the reader to revise the poem’s earlier definitions. The plot advances by discarding one theoretical model of the classification of philosophy for the sake of another. The relationship of the last and most elaborate model to the earlier ones remains questionable. Finally, the Court-poet constructs his divisions from bottom to top, which is why the three main branches of science come to be classified under theology only as the last step in the classification. Pecock, in contrast, devises two complementary and reconcilable models, in which respect for tradition is subordinated to the author’s argumentative purposes. He thereby justifies not only his deliberate intervention in the inherited schemes of the classification of sciences, but also his pedagogic endeavours in the vernacular.

The Language Question Concerns relating to language underlie both authors’ endeavour. They are explicitly present in the allegorical poem. Less obvious in Pecock, the preoccupation with vernacular composition is voiced only vaguely in the first two chapters of the Folewer. At the end of Chapter 1, Pecock is concerned with the correct under-

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standing of the technical terms he uses to express valid logical inferences.26 In Chapter 2, he cautions that writing in the vernacular does not guarantee the understanding of difficult matter.27 The other side of the same argument appears in the preface to the Donet, where Pecock justifies the need for a three-tier scheme of instruction. Besides writing in Latin, he also intends to compose English works for two distinct audiences: one that overcomes difficulties of language and subject matter, and another one that cannot cope with more demanding subjects and the language appropriate to them.28 Consequently, the Donet and its sequel are different from each other in the brevity and simplicity of their explanations and in their style. Pecock’s overall attitude to vernacular textual creation has already received much attention from scholars discussing the charges of heresy brought against the bishop in the light of his decision to write in English.29 Much attention has also been devoted to the study of Pecock’s authorial self-empowerment through the vernacular and through creating his own modes of vernacular argumentation.30 A passage from the Folewer suggests another, less frequently studied, aspect of Pecock’s engagement with language. Chapter 6 of the first part concludes with the author’s personal admission of his inner need to write in the vernacular. In a confessional tone, he claims that if he did not write down his ideas, occurring to him on the spur of the moment, he would not be able to do it later. He associates inspiration with his own vernacular creativity, and suggests that English empowers him with creative energies and inspiration that would not be on hand when composing in Latin: [I]f y schulde abstene me here now fro writing herof in lay tunge, y schuld neuer write it, neiþir in lay tunge neiþir in latyn tunge […]; And if y schulde seie in my conscience before god: ‘þis now towchid is oon cause whi y delyuerid bi writyng in lay tunge many maters and treuþis as þei camen to mynde ouer what y entendid before forto delyuere in lay tunge, lest if y schulde haue ouer passed hem forto not haue written hem in þilk while, þei schulden

26

‘Also y proteste þat y take and schal take ech argument or mocioun maad, or to be maad, bi me in eny of my writyngis, englisch or latyn, as for argument or mocioun oonli, and not as for a proof vttirli’ (Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 6). 27

‘summe of þo bookis whiche ben to be maad in lay tunge, and to be delyuerid to lay men, be so hard þat þei be not liõtli and esili vndirstonde of þe wittiest lay men whiche schulen rede and studie and leerne þerinne; fforwhi þerbi summe and many lay men mowe be tamyd and repressed and chastised fro pride and fro presumpcioun’ (Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 6–8). 28

Pecock, The Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 2.

29

For a review of scholarship on the issue, see Hudson, PR, pp. 189–91 and 440–43.

30

Bose, ‘Reginald Pecock’s Vernacular Voice’; Bose, ‘Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century’; and Theresa Kemp, ‘The Lingua materna and the Conflict Over Religious Discourse’, Philological Quarterly, 78 (1999), 233–57.

296

Tamás Karáth neuyr haue be write of me; And leefir y hadde forto write suche maters and treuþis in lay tunge, vndir hope þat afterward þei schulen come into latyn tunge, þan forto putte hem into perel forto neuer be of me written’.31

Admittedly, Pecock hopes that his vernacular texts will be translated into Latin one day, but the order of composition cannot be reversed: were it not for his vernacular works, he would not be able to provide materials for translation. Thus, for Pecock, writing in English is not only a practical decision which serves his pedagogic aims and the needs of his audiences, but also a fundamental aspect of his creativity, without which these works could not have been written. The exposition of the four tables as well as of the intellectual virtues are the fruits of inspiration as well as of an analytical mind. Pecock’s attempt to exculpate himself from his seeming disrespect of Latin also explains his silence on the place of the trivium in his classification of sciences. Grammar, rhetoric, and logic are omitted from Pecock’s categories. They are, however, implicitly present in his theorization of knowledge. As we see in Chapter 6 of the Folewer, the discourse of the classification of sciences can only be presented in the vernacular, and Pecock’s vernacularity is bound to an experiment with several aspects of the trivium: for example, with the perceived rules of language, the careful choice of vocabulary and images, and the logical exposition of arguments. The fundamental concept of Pecock’s pedagogy is aligned with a pupil’s introduction to the basic arts. The title — Donet — suggests its equivalence, in the field of moral education, to an elementary school introduction to grammar. The second art of the trivium, rhetoric, is constantly invoked by the imitation of diverse rhetorical conventions. Third, grammar and rhetoric are subordinated to the demonstration of Pecock’s syllogistic methods as, ultimately, he writes to prove the universal validity of the doom of reason. The Court-poet’s use of the vernacular is also an inherent part of his textual creativity. The dream-framework enables the poet to conceive a language that can describe the realm of uncensored thoughts. By versifying different classifications of sciences, the poet also demonstrates the possibility of transposing an academic treatise not only into a non-academic medium, but also into the vernacular. But by disavowing the adequacy of English, the poet reveals a contradictory attitude to his own vernacular creation. He attributes only a secondary role to English. Two passages of the core narrative, one in the prohemium and another one concluding the description of stones in Book II, attest to the limited capacities of the vernacular. The prohemium survives only in Caxton’s print (and the versions 31

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, pp. 29–30.

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dependent on it), but Harvey argues that it was part of the original composition.32 The humility topos in stanzas 5 and 6 contains specific references to the poet’s awareness of the low prestige of his native English. The rhetoric of this passage is based on the conventional dichotomy of vulgar language and refined composition. But this polarization is developed into a contrast between rude composition in the vernacular, which the poet must use ‘of force’, and the ‘gay’ and ‘eloquent’ terms of aristocratic discourse, from which he distances himself.33 The stanza at the end of the description of stones (II, 158) is present in all early witnesses, except for the Harley fragment, which is interrupted before the end of Book I. In this passage the poet articulates the limitations of his ‘natyf langage’ that prevent him from naming the stones of the visionary landscape. This time, the use of the vernacular is problematic not because of its low status or its incompatibility with high eloquence, but because of its lack of terms to discuss the branches of natural sciences. In this cul-de-sac of composition, the poet enumerates the stones based on their Latin names. Although he indicates that it would not be impossible to invent (or find) the English equivalents of these words, he asks the reader not to blame him for his inappropriate vocabulary, as he disclaims invention for the sake of a ‘larger community’, the suggestion being that the Latin names of stones had become so common for English-speakers that the introduction of new terms would only disrupt the commonality of this language community. At the same time, the argument seems to evoke the paradox of Trevisa’s cantankerous clericus, who doubts if a greater number of people would understand the English translations of the Latin chronicles.34 But while Trevisa’s clericus ignores the capacities of an English

32

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xii.

33

‘I knowe my self moost naked in al artes, / My comune vulgar eke moost interupte, / And I conversaunte and borne in the partes / Where my natyf langage is moost corrupt, / And with most sondry tonges myxt and rupte, […] For to al makers here I me excuse / That I ne can delycately endyte; / Rude is the speche, of force which I must use: / Suche infortune my natyf byrth may wyte. / But, O ye lordes whiche have your delyte / In termes gay, and ben moost eloquent, / This book to yow no plesaunce may present’ (I. 5. 29–33 and I. 6. 36–42). 34

‘Þeus bokes of cronyks buþ ywryte yn Latyn, and Latyn ys yused and understonde a þys half Grees yn al þe nacions and londes of Europa; and comynlych Englysch ys noõt so wyde understonde, yused and yknowe, and þe Englysch translacion scholde no man understonde bote Englyschmen alone. Þanne how scholde þe mo men understonde þe cronyks þey a were translated out of Latyn, þat ys so wyde yused and yknowe, into Englysch, þat ys noõt yused and yknowe bote of Englyschmen alone?’ John Trevisa, ‘Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk’, in The Book of Middle English, ed. by John Anthony Burrow and Thorlac Turville-Petre, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 215–22 (p. 217).

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readership not trained in Latin, the Court-poet leaves the path of linguistic invention open exactly to this layer of his audience.35 The tension between vernacularity and its intrinsic limits is resolved with a return to Latin following two different authorial strategies as attested by the manuscripts and early prints. The change of expression is necessitated not so much by the inadequate vocabulary of English in certain fields, but rather by the acknowledged constraints on the poet’s creative power and freedom. The dreamer confesses that poetic and linguistic invention could counter the shortcomings of his diction and language; nevertheless, he avoids this strategy with a reference to the safety of Latin. The idea of safety is raised in stanza 158, where the poet associates it with the idea of a more secure understanding of the text. The argument is that Latin is based on the common linguistic practices of a larger community, as opposed to the alternative strategies of linguistic innovation whose solutions risk being idiosyncratic. The implications of this argument manifest themselves differently in the two groups of the early witnesses, representing two different textual traditions of the poem. Plimpton and Caxton conclude the dream vision and anticipate the tract on faith with a stanza which invokes certain external (and orthodox) constraints on vernacular composition that are not directly bound to questions of the adequacy of the vernacular. In these versions, the author abruptly ends his literary experiment with vernacular allegory under the pressure of the prohibition of extramural and vernacular discussion of theological matters: These articles, with other poyntes al, That longeth to the holy Trynyte, Dame Feyth herself gan telle in specyal, With al the secretes of the deyte Whiche in Englysshe ought not reherced be; Suche thyng as shold be private and occult I rede we leve, and take Quicumque vult. (II, 321, 2241–47)

At this point, the dreamer leaves his transitory refuge in Sapience’s court, and turns from the discussion of the sciences into a tract on faith. Simultaneously, he abandons the interior of the castle, and proceeds to visit the first tower. The image of the tower, appearing at structurally significant points of the work, marks a

35

‘And yf the seme that here be stones straunge / And thou in Englysshe can them better name, / Doo as the lyst theyr names for to chaunge, / So my langage and my book thou not blame, / For I suppose ther be fewe wordes lame, / For by the Latyn for the more suerte / I name theym al, and for more comunte’ (II. 158. 1100–06).

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change in the allegorical context. At this point, it initiates the reader into the sphere of faith. The residence of Dame Faith is a solemn and glorious tower. The elevation to new heights emphasizes the dynamic progress of the poem from the world towards heaven. However, the ascent to the region of faith means the end of the poetic endeavour to assign a meaningful purpose to the literary rehearsal of the classification of sciences. The poet admits to having reached the limits of expression, which the self-imposed boundaries of his own authority do not permit to transgress. He invokes the prohibition on discussing theological issues in the vernacular. The Latin conclusion of the macaronic stanza cited above underlines the gesture of reinstating Latin when the authority of English has proved to be inadequate. The Harley and Trinity texts do not reach this stage of the allegorical journey. However, in these two versions, Latin remains such an integral part of the authorial endeavour that the manuscript context never really allows the absolute priority of the vernacular over Latin. The Latin notes and the interlinear glosses, both Latin and English, which are extant only in these versions of the Court, constitute a new layer of the text of the poem that is missing from the two other main witnesses. Harvey suggests that, while the interlinear glosses of Trinity and Harley, ‘written over or beside certain words in the poem’, might be ‘the work of a studious reader of the poem rather than the author’, there is no reason to doubt that the notes are authorial.36 As a consequence of the extended Latin notes in Harley and Trinity, the two languages are interwoven in a very intricate way. The occasionally Latin (mostly English) summary notes — speech prefixes, implicits, and explicits — structure the plot and the dialogues. They also figure in Plimpton and Caxton. The second layer of notes in Harley and Trinity is represented by Latin and English interlinear glosses which elucidate, but occasionally also obscure, certain meanings in the poem. According to Harvey, they might witness an early reader’s work in the original copy-text of these two manuscripts.37 Finally, interspersed in the poem, especially in Book I, long Latin glosses interrupt the English stanzas and set out definitions and authorities. ‘[Trinity] includes the same Latin notes as in Harley, often writing them right across the page above the stanza they refer to’.38 The notes copy out longer passages from the sources on which the verses draw, and provide

36

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. xvi and xv.

37

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xvi.

38

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, p. xi.

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a larger and more explicit context for the issues engaged with in the poem. The Latin notes offer the reader alternative ways of understanding, as they also propose materials, not present in the stanzas, to be considered by the reader. The Latin glosses partly echo and nuance the contents of the English stanzas, but more often they add new textual elements, which creates a subtle contrast between the vernacular and the Latin layers of the composition. The notes indirectly reflect on the poem’s vernacular experiment and the dilemmas relating to poetic authority, embodied by the insertion of old authorities into the poet’s invention. The Latin note following Book I, stanzas 20–21 bears witness to the poet’s endeavour to connect the vernacular text to a Latin discourse of the theorization of knowledge: Differunt tamen sapiencia, intellectus et prudencia, quia sapiencia valet ad solius eterne veritatis contemplacionem et delectacionem, intellectus vel intelligencia ad creature vel creaturarum invisibilium speculacionem, sciencia ad rectam administracionem rerum temporalium et ad bonam inter malos conversacionem. Et qualiter intellectus, sciencia, et sapiencia, que sunt dona Spiritus Sancti, differunt ab intellectu, sciencia, et sapiencia que sunt naturaliter in anima, vide per doctores et per Januensem, in suo Catholicon in verbo sapiencia. (But wisdom, intellect, and prudence differ in that wisdom serves the contemplation of, and delight in, Eternal Truth alone; intellect or intelligence serves the contemplation of creation and invisible created beings; and science [or ‘prudence’] serves the right administering of temporal things and the proper mode of living amongst the evil. And for the way in which the intellect, science, and wisdom which are the gifts of the Holy Spirit differ from the intellect, science, and wisdom which are in the soul by nature, see in the doctors and in Balbus, Catholicon sv sapientia.)39

The long invocation of a passage from Balbus’s Catholicon disclaims the selfcontained nature of the English stanzas, and suggests to the reader that a full understanding of the poem must extend to material outside its English stanzas. Like the other Latin notes of the Trinity and Harley manuscripts, this note too outlines further possibilities of textual interpretation and invites the implied (scholarly) reader to continue a dialogue outside the poem. The parallel English passage of stanzas 22–23 experiments with the rhetorical possibilities of the same scientific discourse rendered as a monologue of Dame Sapience. This speech, however, does not treat the same questions as the Latin gloss: Unto all vertues we ben ladyes thre, Bothe in offyce and degree dyfferent. It is my parte to knowe dyvynyte;

39

The Court of Sapience, ed. by Harvey, pp. 85–86.

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My suster here hath knowlege dylygent Of creatures in heven and erthe content; And Dame Scyence of thynges temporal Hath knoulege pure; thus mayst thou know us al. Of us al thre I am the moost soverayne; And yf the lyst me descryve and dyffyne I am the trewe propre knowlege certayne Of erthely thyng, and eke of thyng dyvyne. (I, 22–23, 148–58)40

The Court-poet’s withdrawal from vernacular creation contrasts him with Pecock, who, until his public recantation in 1457, never gave up his basic conviction of the benefits of writing about serious matters in English to a lay audience. Pecock affirms the necessity of writing in English for the sake of his own audience as well as of his own creative needs. The Court-poet also acknowledges the value of English in poetic inspiration, but he is not as determined to insist on the vernacular when he encounters prohibitions or limits. Both authors voice the perceived or implied dangers of discussing their subject matters, especially when related to divinity or moral instruction, in the vernacular. But, even if the reflections on the questionable status of the vernacular only indirectly invoke the long-term effects of Arundel’s language policies, they suggest that a collective awareness of the possible dangers of vernacular composition lingered on into the middle of the fifteenth century and beyond. This awareness affected more than the authors’ attitudes to language; it also coerced them into reconsidering their own authority vis-à-vis various (licit and illicit) discursive traditions. In the process of situating themselves in relation to the discourse of the classification of sciences, both Pecock and the Court-poet not only shape their subject matter in markedly individual ways, but also reflect on their own discursive authority.

Authority Pecock and the Court-poet align themselves with the tradition of the classification of sciences in new literary contexts, and thereby ascribe new purposes and new meanings to the old discourse. As they rearrange their textual material, their works

40

There are two accompanying Latin marginal glosses in the Harley and Trinity manuscripts that summarize the concerns of these two stanzas: ‘Nota differenciam inter sapienciam, intellectum, et scienciam’ (Note the difference between wisdom, intellect, and science) beside line 147, preceding stanza 22, and ‘Nota quid est sapiencia’ (Note what wisdom is) beside lines 157–58 of stanza 23.

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ultimately raise questions about the limits of authority and of uncensored creativity. But while the Court-poet is less ambitious in justifying his own authorial position, Pecock uses the classifications as part of an argument to consolidate his own authority. For the Court-poet, the allegorical frame, in which he embeds his vision of sciences, is the structural foundation of his poem. For Pecock, the classification of sciences is an important pillar of his pedagogic methodology, by means of which he sets up premises for his ambitious theoretical attempt to encompass all intellectual activity and to define the work of the ‘doom of reason’. In the logic of the Folewer, therefore, the role of the classification of sciences discourse is not only to establish the premises for the ensuing arguments, but also to consolidate Pecock’s authority. This he does in two ways. First, he relies on a discursive tradition which is subordinated to his own self-authorization in much the same way as his imitation of Christine de Pizan is in the second prologue to the Reule of Crysten Religioun. As Mishtooni Bose has shown, Pecock consolidates his authority through imitating Christine de Pizan’s ‘transformation of the conventional metaphors for textual creation’.41 Bose points out that this rhetorical imitation becomes controversial due to the contradiction between the inherently authoritative status of the narrator as a ‘rising clerk’ and his reliance on a topos ‘of obvious value for the empowering of a female writer, but less obviously necessary for a clerk supposedly secure in the authority of his gender, his profession, and his avowed orthodoxy’.42 Bose’s illuminating discussion of the relationship between Pecock’s rhetorical imitation of de Pizan and the empowerment of the vernacular for his own purposes enables us to see a similar strategy in the Folewer: In the entre to Pecock’s Reule, therefore, it is possible to detect a reciprocal process: the troping of the quest for authority by a clerk about to embark on a similarly unprecedented project: the discussion of theology (as opposed to mystical experience) in the vernacular. This was an undertaking for which Pecock had few precedents among the orthodox, and rather more among heretical or otherwise controversial writers. […] Although it would be unwise to attribute a single purpose to this complex entre, it may also have provided a means for Pecock to articulate an acknowledgement of the fact that by using the vernacular to extend clerical authority into controversial literary territory, he was also courting certain kinds of vulnerability.43

Pecock’s second way of consolidating his own authority is apparent in both the entre to the Reule and in the classification of sciences in the Folewer: he relies on

41

Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock’, p. 175.

42

Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock’, p. 175.

43

Bose, ‘The Annunciation to Pecock’, p. 175.

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and transforms discursive conventions. In Pecock’s system, the process of sciences — to use the allegorical phrase of the Court — serves a purpose very different from that in the poem. Instead of disavowing the authority of the English language and of the English poet to reflect on sciences and faith, Pecock empowers himself and his own vernacular to engage in an alternative academic discourse whose ultimate aim is to create a new framework for the transmission of religious instruction, uncensored by academic or ecclesiastical authority. Moreover, Pecock carefully designs his classification of sciences and his overall discourse of the theorization of knowledge in a way that it internally establishes his authority. Only the power of syllogisms and formal logical operations can grant authority, and enable Pecock to attribute truth to his arguments. At the end of Chapter 1 of the Folewer, Pecock insists that first person statements, like ‘y proue’, ‘y schal proue’, ‘y schewe’, or ‘y schal shewe’, are not to be understood as authoritative declarations, but as handy synonyms for truths generated by syllogistic methods, i.e. conclusions proved from their premises.44

Conclusion Reginald Pecock’s Folewer to the Donet and the fifteenth-century Court of Sapience are two revealing instances of the continuation of a discursive tradition which reaches back long ‘before Arundel’. The discourse of the classification of sciences was subject to significant transformations in the fifteenth century, even though this discourse was only indirectly related to religious writing. Pecock and the Court-poet, as continuators of a pre-Arundelian textual convention, also recontextualized the traditional implications of the discourse. Their contribution to medieval theorizations of knowledge lies not so much in revising the content or the structure of the classification of sciences or in establishing radically different categories, but in applying the discursive tradition to comment on the nature of vernacular creation, on the authors’ perceptions of the limits of their own authority, and, indirectly, on the interrelationship between the cultural politics of the age and its literary output.

44

Pecock, The Folewer, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 6.

Part VI Literary Self-Consciousness and Literary History

‘T HIS HOLY TYME’: P RESENT S ENSE IN THE D IGBY L YRICS Helen Barr

T

he twenty-four short lyric poems in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102 are written in a timeless poetic temper. There are very few proper nouns, no dates, and no unambiguous references to events.1 And yet, as I shall argue, it is precisely this sparseness of specific temporality that defines their literary historical moment. The manuscript itself dates from the first two decades of the fifteenth century, and the dialect of the poems points to an early fifteenth century London provenance.2 Extrinsic evidence suggests a Benedictine author. There are extensive parallels between the Digby Lyrics and the macaronic sermons preserved in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 649.3 The author of these sermons was clearly a Benedictine monk. As their editor, Patrick Horner, argues, ‘while the name of this preacher remains uncertain, allusions within the sermons make clear his Benedictine affiliation and his university training at Oxford. References to historical events also suggest that most of the sermons were composed around the time of Henry V’s reign, many of them after the Lollard

1

There are twenty-five proper nouns; all are biblical with the exception of ‘Edward’ (Poem 13/113); ‘Engeland’ (13/27); ‘Englische’ (12/121), and ‘Flandres’ (12/85, 16/1/47/57/79). All references are to The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr. All further citations of the poems are from this edition. 2

See The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 1–2 for a description of the manuscript. Throughout the sequence, the poet uses a variety of dialect forms, and there is clear marking of south-west Midland features. This dialect diversity is characteristic of English used in London in the early fifteenth century. The linguistic provenance is discussed in more detail on pp. 67–73. 3

A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England, ed. by Horner.

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uprising of 1414 led by Sir John Oldcastle’.4 The sermon collection as a whole shows an orthodox preacher passionate to explain and defend Church doctrine on the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and penance. The preacher is also at pains to emphasize the divinely ordained role of the clergy in theological investigation and liturgical activities, and he devotes considerable attention to practical pastoral theology in his discussions of how confessors should treat penitents. Sinful priests are urged to reform, and there are vivid exhortations, including brief devotional lyrics, to show compassion with Christ’s suffering on the cross. Furthermore, the sermons call for a harmoniously functioning political body. There is sustained criticism of flattery, robbing the poor, oppressing the commons, and internal dissent. And there is overt support for the ‘heavenly soldier’ Henry V both against France, and against the Lollards. Every note that is sounded in the sermons (apart from overt denunciation of Lollardy), is sounded in the Digby Lyrics. There is also extensive, and distinctive, common use of figurative expression and proverbs.5 Some of the Bodley sermons are also found in another Oxford manuscript, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 706. An ‘ex libris’ on fol. 181v states that the manuscript belonged to John Paunteley, monk of St Peter’s in Gloucester, ‘sacre pagine professor’ at Oxford in 1410 and author of the funeral sermon in 1412 of Abbot Walter Froucester at St Peter’s.6 While the attribution of the macaronic Bodley sermons to Paunteley is suggestive rather than proven, all the evidence points to a Benedictine author who was familiar with national events, London based, but with roots in the south-west Midlands. Such a profile matches exactly the dialect patterning of the Digby Lyrics, and a Benedictine provenance is made more persuasive, not only because of the far-reaching overlap in the shared subjects of the sermons and lyrics, but also because there is one poem in the sequence, Poem 18, which concentrates on the proper conduct of monastic life. While Henry V is never named in the Digby Lyrics, the unequivocal support for a recently crowned king who is a vigorous defender of Holy Church; a military leader against France rather than a treaty broker, and the head of a flourishing body politic invested with hope, must surely point to a writing context of the early years of Henry’s reign. No other monarch matches the timescale, or the profile.7 If my arguments for date and provenance are correct, then the Digby Lyrics can be added 4

Patrick J. Horner, ‘“The King Taught us the Lesson”: Benedictine Support for Henry V’s Suppression of the Lollards’, Mediaeval Studies, 52 (1990), 190–220 (p. 191). 5

The parallels are listed in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 76–78.

6

See A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England, ed. by Horner, p. 5.

7

The date of the lyrics is discussed in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 6–18.

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to those works of Benedictine origin which formed part of an axis of literary allegiance to Henry V. Even before he became king, Henry had turned to Benedictine writers such as Lydgate for support, both religious and political. Lydgate tells in the Prologue to his Troy Book that Henry, ‘the worthy prynce of Walys’ ‘me comaunded the drery pitus fate/Of hem of Troye in englysche to translate’ (102–06).8 The envoy to the book, written with Henry now king, places Henry amongst the Nine Worthies and compares him with scriptural and classical heroes and rulers.9 Benedictine support for Henry’s kingship took a variety of forms: in occasional poems, Lydgate praised Henry V as ‘Goddis knyght’ and ‘Goddes chaumpyon’.10 Lydgate appears to have written translations of the ‘Eight Verses of St Bernard’ for the king’s use at Mass, and of ‘Benedic anima mea domino’ in the chapel at Windsor at the request of the dean while the king was at evensong.11 Thomas Elmham, a monk of St Augustine’s Canterbury, thought to be responsible for the Gesta Henrici Quinti, written in 1418, likens the new king Henry to the newly born Christ-child, not only anointed at his coronation, but an epiphanic defender of the church and the saviour of the kingdom.12 All of these Benedictine works show unequivocal support for Henry both as secular monarch and champion of the church against the seditious threat of the Lollards.13 Henry V is ‘Goddis champioun’ — defender of Holy Church.14 The political and religious positioning of the Digby Lyrics is no less staunchly Henrician, but with a crucial difference; namely, of literary texture. There are no mighty classical framings and parallels; the poems are insistently vernacular both in language and allusiveness. The grandiose literariness, characteristic of these other Benedictine works, is markedly absent from Digby. Not because the poet lacks 8

Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Bergen.

9

Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Bergen, p. 877, lines 36–49.

10

‘A Defence of Holy Church’, in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by MacCracken, pp. 30–35 (item no. 10, lines 26 and 69) 11

Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, ELS Monograph Series, 71 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 1997), p. 17. The information derives from a comment made by the bibliographer John Shirley. 12

Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. and trans. by Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 1–4. 13 14

See Horner, ‘“The King Taught us the Lesson”’.

These explicit statements of Henry’s duty and resolve in combating named enemies of Holy Church are also found in Thomas Hoccleve’s verse ‘O verray sustenour/And piler of our feith, and werreyour/Ageyn the heresies bittir galle’: Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, rev. edn by Mitchell and Doyle, V. 12–14; cf. Poem 4.

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literary invention and finesse, but because the poetic temper of the series does different literary and political work. The linguistic choices made by the Digby-poet project a vision of a kingdom which reproduces key elements of the desires, hopes, and fears widely written about in the early years of Henry V. But these linguistic choices are not self-consciously ‘poetic’. The literary texture of the Digby Lyrics is not one of gorgeous poetic apparel or singularly dizzying locutions: the familiar made strange.15 Rather, ‘familiarity’ is the key to the historical significance of their literariness. To historicize the Digby Lyrics through the long-standing critical practice of seeking out parallels and echoes in materials written alongside the work under scrutiny, that is, researching a text and its contexts,16 overlooks vital evidence. Analysis of the linguistic texture of early texts can also do important criticalhistorical work.17 The language of the Digby Lyrics is its context even if we need to access other late medieval materials to help infer the meaning of poetic lexis and grammar.18 The accumulation of lexical and grammatical elements of the lyrics which make up their ‘text-world’ encode historical and social context.19 The Digbypoet fashions a normative poetics based on what is ‘ordinary’ and well known through pertinent choices of ‘form’ words: aspects of lexis, grammar, and syntax.20 The key poetic elements here are not classical parallels or ornate figurativeness, but the ‘nuts and bolts’ of familiar expression: verb tense; the illocutionary force of sentences; deixis, and the interpersonality of address. 15

The concept of ‘ostranenie’ — ‘making strange’ underpins the essay by Victor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’, first published 1917, reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. by David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), pp. 15–32. 16

This approach to the Digby Lyrics is best exemplified by R . H. Robbins, ‘On Dating a Middle English Moral Poem’, Modern Language Notes, 70 (1955), 473–76 (p. 474). Robbins edited three of the poems (nos 3, 12, and 16) in his Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. by R. H. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 39–53. In his introduction, he notes how the turn to documentary record can ‘help towards precise dating even of general moralising pieces’ (p. xxiv). 17

A seminal article in this argument is David Lawton’s analysis of the poetic texture, especially voice, of early fifteenth-century poetry, ‘Dullness and the Fifteenth Century’, pp. 761–99. 18

My approach here is influenced by Keith Green, ‘Deixis and the Poetic Persona’, Language and Literature, 1 (1992), 121–34, esp. p. 124. 19

The term ‘text-world’ is taken from Paul Werth, ‘“World enough and time”: Deictic Space and the Interpretation of Prose’, in Twentieth-century Fiction: From Text to Context, ed. by P. Verdonk and J.-J. Weber (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 181–205 (p. 187). 20

The distinction between ‘full’ words such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and ‘form’ words —‘grammatical’ words — is discussed in Frank Palmer, Grammar, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 59–60.

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The text-world of the Digby Lyrics is predominantly created in present time.21 In some ways this is not perhaps surprising; the present tense is, after all, the dominant tense of the form: the lyric present.22 Even so, the overwhelming use of present time does have timely social edge. Here is a representative example from Poem 12: Eche a kyng haþ Goddis powere Of lyf and leme to saue and spille. He muste make God his partenere And do not his owen wille. For God resceyueþ eche pore mannys bille, And of here playnt God hereþ þe sowne, Sette õoure [domes] in euene skille: Counseile þe kyng to kepe þe crowne. (Poem 12/105–12)

This is a characteristic mixture of present indicatives and imperatives. The remarks are generic: seen by the prefactory ‘Eche a kyng’ (line 105). ‘Each’ (cf. line 109), is a keyword in these lyrics, suggestive not of the particular but of generality. The present tense of the opening two lines sets out a template for kingly duty which is followed by timeless imperatives addressed both to kings and to counsellors. As is characteristic of the verbal texture of these lyrics, injunctions are bolstered by biblical authority (lines 109–10 paraphrase Job 34. 28 ‘So that they caused the cry of the needy to come to him, and he heard the voice of the poor’) — again delivered in the present tense. Throughout the sequence, the poet works with a comparatively closed and limited lexicon which recycles key statements in the present tense. The last line of the stanza quoted forms a refrain for the whole poem: individual statements in the stanza can be paralleled elsewhere: Þe pore mannys erande God doþ spede. (Poem 4/175) Lawe õeueþ kyng lyf and leme, To hasty slauõt, and sodeyn fed. (Poem 13/17–18) Sette õoure domes in euene skille. (Poem 13/71)

21

I have counted manually the tense and mood of all the verbs in the sequence: over 50 per cent of the verbs in the lyrics are present indicative. Nearly 20 per cent are imperatives. Past and future tenses are present in much smaller proportions: less than 10 per cent for the future and nearly 12 per cent for the past. Subjunctive verbs, though used sparingly, have an important political and religious function, as I shall go on to argue. 22

As argued by George T. Wright, ‘The Lyric Present: Simple Present Verbs in English Poems’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 89 (1974), 563–79.

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The textual situation of this stanza is replicated throughout the sequence: there is a reiteration of present tense declarative statements; a present insistence on key terms and propositions: Eche man wot that hath wyt, These worldes goods beth not his; Alle is Godes: he oweth hit. (Poem 1/25–27) Man of his owen hath no thyng; Man is Goddis, and al God sent. God wole haue rekenyng Of ryht and wrong; how it is went. Man, not nys thyn; alle God lent. (Poem 1/33–37) Man of his own nouõten haue; Al is Goddis, and he it lent. (Poem 7/83–84) Þe puple, ne ryches, nys not õoures: Al is Goddis, and so be õe. (Poem 3/131–32) Eche dedly synne is a dedly knyf. (Poem 7/105) Eche dedly synne is a dedly knyf. (Poem 21/127) Man, synne not in ouerhope; Thou wynnest not Goddis mercie with fight. (Poem 1/129–30) Man synne not in ouerhope. Þu wynnest not Goddis mercie wiþ fiõt. (Poem 7/97–98) In ouerhope be not to bold, In synne for to haue mercy; Let not wanhope in þe be old. (Poem 20/201–03) For worldly wys is gostly nys. (Poem1/45) Þis worldly wysdom is gostly nys. (Poem 8/77) Folowe mesure in euene syse. (Poem 1/61) Set mesure in euene assise (Poem 3/13) Fle fro fooles and folwe wise. (Poem 1/167) Folowe fooles, and fle fro wyse. (Poem 6/28) Fle all folly and folwe þe wise. (Poem 22/72)

These are merely representative examples. Numerous individual lines within the poems are re-used, sometimes within the same poem, sometimes in much later poems in the sequence. Many of these repetitions are verbatim, or with small changes such as in the use of pronouns, grammatical form, or the ordering of the

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line. Overwhelmingly this reiteration takes the form of the present indicative or imperative. As such, it is unsurprising that one of the poet’s favourite kinds of utterance is proverbial or axiomatic:23 Defaute of wit makeþ long counsayle; For witteles wordes in ydel spoken. Þe more cost, þe lesse auayle. (Poem 3/89–91) The world is like a fals leman, Fayre semblaunt, and moche gyle. Wiþouten heire dyeþ no man. (Poem 3/121–23) Man, þynke þy lyf is but a wynde, When þat is blowen, þu art forõete. (Poem 9/29–30) All tymes nys not soþ to say. When al þe world is þurgh souõt, In his best tyme is worst to trest. Þis world is a fayre nouõt, A fals leman þat chaunge lest. (Poem 4/224–28) The herrere degre, þe more wys; Þe gretter worschip, þe noblere fame: Þe herrere degre, þe more nys; Þe gretter foly, þe more blame. After foly folweþ þe shame. (Poem 14/1–5) On a mowntayne a sete may not be hyd, Ne lordis werkis in no degre; A lordis werkis wiþ comouns is kyd: Þat he doþ most in preuete, Gouernour of kyngdom or cyte, After þey lyue, men deme so. For eche a werk God õeueþ a fe; Eche man be war er hym be wo. (Poem 14/17–24) Ouer cite or town hast gouernaunce, Loue al crafty folk yliche, Mayntene no party in distaunce, Sette mendis for trespas in euene balaunce, For a penyworth of harm tak not two, Rule wel mesure and sustenaunce. (Poem 14/34–39) To fliõe to hyõe treste not þy wyng. (Poem 14/47)

23

Analogues to these proverbial sayings are recorded in the annotation to my edition.

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The combination of present tense, declarative aphorism, and injunction creates a verbal texture of moral homeostasis. The poet’s lexical and grammatical choices build a present world that is also a timeless world of common sense and ethical behaviour, both political and spiritual. The text-world is one of portentous repeated action. The verse acquires a monumental character, articulating general conditions of life; the constitution of all things. There is a sense of permanence, of general validity. As George T. Wright observes, ‘the simple present is the present of truth’.24 This textual sense of permanent moral validity, general rather than singular, projects a poetic world onto present circumstances. The early years of Henry V’s reign offered the promise of stability: a political realm made whole after the divisions, factions, and unrest following the deposition of Richard II and the threats to the institutional church posed by the challenges of the Lollards. While the Digby-poet is not the only Benedictine writer to fashion a textual Henrician new dawn to herald the arrival of a king intent to heal the maimed and wayward limbs of the body politic, he is distinctive in marrying poetic style to political and spiritual matter with an ease that seems so common and unforced that it might be mistaken for what is natural. And this is, of course, the point. By writing so predominantly in the present tense, forging his poetic materials from the known, the tried and the tested, avoiding the singular and the distinctive, telling his audience what is already familiar, the poet delivers a version of the political world that has the appearance of having lasted for ever. There is no before and after: not Henry, not Arundel. The moral timelessness is habitual and proven, recognizable. And this recognition is vital; this ethical political body is not distant and strange; it is happening now, and the audience is all part of it. This is where the interpersonal address of the poems is so important. By giving the audience what they already know and by addressing them directly with the second pronoun through use of the imperative voice, the poet incorporates his audience into the ethical realm which his verse creates. The poet and the audience, levelled into present moral time, become political subjects of an ethical, spiritually guided, kingdom. There is no division; no individuality, rather a corporate voice acting now. The solidity, permanence, and stability of the present tense models exactly the political and spiritual values which the poet wishes on the early years of Henry V’s reign; not just for the king, but for each man; hence the repetition of ‘each’ throughout the sequence. The linguistic choices of the Digby-poet create a political and spiritual body made whole, with each and every member subsuming

24

Wright, ‘The Lyric Present’, p. 567.

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their individual part, their voice (and this includes the poet, of course), into timeless political stability. That may seem a large claim given that the present tense is the dominant tense of lyric poetry. And there is, after all, a very strong tradition of lyric wisdom poetry. Why should there be a particular, timely political edge to these lyrics?25 The answer is in the word ‘these’; a word which conveys ‘proximal deixis’. That is, it locates the speaker and reader in a spatio-temporal context that is here and now. It puts them at the centre of the text-world that is created between them. Deictic terms such as ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘this’ and ‘now’, place the speaker alongside, and in company with, those to whom the narrator speaks.26 Proximal deixis is a dominant strand of the poetic texture of the Digby Lyrics. This holy tyme make õow clene; Burnysche bryõt õoure soules blake! Fro õow to God, let þe prest be mene. (Poem 9/1–3) Glade in God þis solempne fest, Now Alleluya is vnloken! Þenkeþ how God, lest and mest, On oure enemys haþ vs wroken. (Poem 11/1–4) A day is mad of solempnyte: Of þis table first ordynaunce is worschipful tolde; In þis newe kynges table now knowe we Newe estren endeþ þe olde. (Poem 23/25–28) Glade in God, call hom õoure herte! In ioye and blisse, õoure merþe encres, And kepe Goddis lawe in querte. Þes holy tyme, lete sorwe ases. (Poem 12/1–4) A specyall tyme of heryeng here: Lyueliche quyk bred is put forþ þis day. (Poem 23/17–18)

25

Vincent Gillespie has argued that one of the key challenges for approaches that seek to explore the socio-literary practice of medieval poets is to ask how generic lyrics can be said to be ‘affiliated’ to a particular moment in history, ‘Moral and Penitential Lyrics’, pp. 68–95 (p. 90). Also crucial is the statement, ‘if moral poetry is not susceptible to contemporary events, it has effectively lost its purpose’ (pp. 91–92). One might contrast this remark to George Kane’s dismissal of the socalled politicality of complaint literature, preferring instead to see it as literature of moral instruction, ‘Some Fourteenth Century “Political” Poems’, in Medieval Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. by Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986), pp. 82–91. 26

See Green, ‘Deixis and the Poetic Persona’, pp. 129–30.

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Helen Barr To salue õoure sores now begynne, Þe holigost õoure grace gyõe. (Poem 7/109–10) To knowe õoure seluen now bygynne; To stryue wiþ God we may not wynne. (Poem 9/12–13) Now sumwhat Y haue õow sayd What is salue to õoure [sore]. (Poem 9/177–78) Let God now lengere wiþ õow rest; Now God and man is wel at on. (Poem 11/71–72) Siþ õe be syker, kepe õow so, Now God and õe are wel at on. (Poem 11/95–96) God õeue õow grace þis reme to õeme, To cherische þe goode and chastyse þe nys. And also serue God to queme, Þat õoure werkis preue õow wys. And in õow þe helpe it lys, Þe puple in Goddis lawe to hede. Do so now, õe wynne õow prys, And heuene blisse for õoure dede. Amen. (Poem 13/161–68) Now I lykne mannys brest [To] presthod in good degre. (Poem 15/25–26) Mannys rybbes Y likne now, Flesch and skyn in body hydes. (Poem 15/41–42) In þy lyue, besye þe now In goode werkis wysely wake, In loue [and] drede to me bow, And fle to me fro synnes blake. (Poem 19/85–88) In old lawe õe wyten how At estren þey eten a lamb al ded; Is ouer put in newe lawe now, At estre we eten quyk bred . (Poem 23/100–03)

The use of words such as ‘now’, ‘this’, ‘here’, and ‘we’ situate the poet and his audience in a present world in which they are all co-participants. In some of these examples, this present world is a world in which human action will be judged in future time by God, and this is a point to which I shall return. But in some key examples, especially in the conjunction of the use of the words ‘now’ and ‘holy time’, the world is clearly that of the start of Henry V’s reign. There is a minisequence of poems from 9–13, significantly at the heart of the series, which focuses on Lenten preparation before the time of Easter, Easter being a time of present

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incorporation in the receipt of the Eucharist and the celebration of the rising of Christ from the dead. As these examples show, the poet enjoins his audience to be part of this liturgical and spiritual present. This holy time, they must burnish bright their black souls and perform acts of penance, before, in Poem 11, being glad in God at this holy time of Easter, now that alleluia is ‘vnloken’ (2). This is a liturgical reference. During Lent, the alleluia was not sung at the Mass. Its return on Easter day signalled Christ’s resurrection. This liturgical and spiritual present is mapped onto a very timely present political moment: the hopes of resurrection and incorporation invested in ‘this new king’s table’ in Poem 23. While this poem is a paraphrase of a hymn by Aquinas, the ‘Lauda Sion’, which was part of the liturgy of the Eucharist, its presence in the sequence serves to establish parallels between the Easter joy of the resurrection of Christ and the new dawn of the reign of Henry V. This new king in Poem 23/27 could reference only Henry V whose coronation fell on 19 April, two weeks before Easter Day.27 This holy time in Poem 12 is again, clearly Easter; the refrain of this lyric is to defend the realm and to save the crown. The conjunction of Easter and concerns that the crown be kept whole clearly mark it out as a poem which celebrates the incorporation of a new political body under the head of Henry V. The poet’s injunctions to celebrate, to let sorrow cease, and to keep the law in this holy time, interpellates his readers as political and spiritual subjects in this new king’s reign, Exactly the same work is performed in Poem 23 with the reference to the special time of praise being here (line 17). Living bread is put forth this day. It is no accident that the poem finishes with the words: We resceyue oure housell, God o blisse. (Poem 23/128).

Quite literally, the poem comes to rest on a statement of present day incorporation into Christ’s body, the church on earth, over which, of course, Henry V presides as king. Neither the poet, nor the audience, are onlookers at this event; the poet’s linguistic choices make them participants.

27

The evidence is discussed more fully in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 15–18. I discuss the political significance of liturgical reference in the Digby Lyrics more fully in my ‘The Deafening Silence of Lollardy in The Digby Lyrics’, in Wycliffite Controversies, ed. by Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). As recent commentators have remarked, ‘to do justice to the historically complex realities of medieval liturgy, we need to begin viewing it as the cultural site for the most inclusive social and political as well as religious performance’ (C. Clifford Flannigan, Kathleen Ashley, and Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Liturgy as Social Performance: Expanding the Definitions’, in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. by Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2005), pp. 695–714 (p. 714)).

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So far, I have painted rather a rosy picture of the political and religious work that is performed by the lexical and grammatical texture of this sequence of poems; especially in the way that it models a wise and ethical kingdom, grounded in stability and permanence with Henry V at its head and all its participants speaking with one voice in present time. But while the sequence of poems is written predominantly in the present sense, it is not written wholly in the here and now. The projected stability and permanence of the poems is hedged in by fears from the past, and anxieties about what the future may, or may not, hold. Poem 16 is a catalogue of the follies of Flanders. It is titled ‘A remembraunce of Lij folyes’, and the poet holds up the example of the internal discord and social turmoil of this kingdom as a warning to the English: Flaundres was þe richest land and meriest to mynne, Now is it wrappid in wo and moche welþe raft. (Poem 16/57–58) Here enemys lawhen hem to skorne and seyn, for synne, Of here banere of grace God broken haþ þe shaft. (Poem 16/63–64) By þese poyntes Flaundres was lest, Now is it out of rule and of rest, Drede is here chef gayte, So eche man on hem bayte. (Poem 16/79–82)

Flanders was the richest land, but now it is wrapped in woe and has been deprived of much wealth. The conjunction of present deixis ‘now’ with the past tense ‘was’ creates a vignette of a realm gone wrong, a spectre of dissolution which the poet does not want visited on these present shores. Flanders is a kingdom that has been laughed to scorn.28 In keeping with the recycling of diction in these poems, however, these have been words which the poet has penned earlier: not about Flanders, but about this holy time of England, and what might happen in the future. These are the closing stanzas of Poem 12; the poem that begins in the holy time of Easter and the king’s new crown: A comons myõt sone be shent Wiþouten kyng or gouernour. And a kyng wiþoute rent Myõt liõtly trussen his tresour.

28

The poet’s treatment of John the Fearless, the duke of Burgundy, and inter-guild factionalism in Flanders is discussed in The Digby Poems, ed. by Barr, pp. 10–14. The poem is not the portrait of one bad ruler; it is part of a poetic political discourse, one which, as David Wallace has demonstrated, spoke ‘most eloquently of the anxieties and desires of its English authors’ (David Wallace, ‘In Flaundres’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 19 (1997), 63–91 (p. 64)).

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For comons mayntene lordis honour, Holy chirche, and religyoun: For comouns is þe fayrest flour Þat euere God sette on erþely crowne. God lete þis kyngdom neuere be lorn Among oure self in no distance; Oþer kyngdomes lauõhe vs not to skorn, And sey, for synne God send vengeance. God õeue vs space of repe[n]tance, Good lyf, and deuocioun. And God kepe in þy gouernance Oure comely kyng, and saue þe crowne. (Poem 12/137–52)

Lines 143–44 are characteristic of the poet’s axiomatic statements; here an optimistic timeless assertion of the value of the commons to the realm as a whole. But the statement has been prefaced by a series of conditionals: ‘myõt’. A commons might soon be destroyed without a king or a governour, and a king without income might easily pack up his treasure. The proverbial pithiness of line 140 here articulates the spectre of discordant bankruptcy; indeed a realm without a king. The final stanza moves into the subjunctive. May God not allow this kingdom to be lost ‘among oure self’. This deictic phrase in line 146 has been used earlier in the poem: Among oure self, God sende vs pes. Þerto, eche man be boun To letten fooles of here res; Stonde wiþ þe kyng, mayntene þe croun. (Poem 12/5–8) Õif we among oure self debate, Þan endeþ floure of chyualrie: Alle oþere londis þat doþ vs hate, Oure feblenes wole aspye. On euery syde, þey wole in hye; Þe stalworþe cast þe feble adoun, Õif þey wiþ myõt haue maystrye, Fro þe riõt heire wolde take þe crowne. (Poem 12/33–40) Among oure self, õif fiõt be raysed, Þan stroye we oure awen nest. Þat haþ victor wole be euel payed, So many good men ben lest. (Poem 12/129–32)

Even as the poet forges a present realm united in Easter joy, the recycling of diction associated with peace and harmony in the present tense becomes freighted with what might happen if disharmony and dissolution return. If there is internal dispute, then the flour of chivalry will end. Enemies will invade, and if they have

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the upper hand they will take the crown from the rightful heir. If fighting happen among ourselves then we destroy our own nest and whoever has the victory will be greatly displeased that so many good men have been lost. The crown hovers between the subjunctive of internal debate and the past tense of dead men who can never return. England’s recent past of deadly infighting haunts this present time with the fear that it may happen again. It is no accident that the holy time of Poem 12 ends with the uneasy rhymes of devotion and crown with ‘skorn’ and ‘lorn’ (146, 148). The scornful laughter directed at Flanders’s past follies may yet cackle at the newly crowned realm of England. The permeation of the present sense of the poems by what may yet await occurs not just in a political dimension but also in the spiritual. Line 149 of Poem 12 records the hope that God may give the realm space for repentance. Repentance is a key motif of these poems. The life of the political body is dependent upon the spiritual health of the soul. The space for repentance may be a present space but the consequences for the fate of the soul are played out in past, present and future time. The sequence does not offer comfortable reading: there are frequent reminders of the fragility of the world and of human existence. Here is a summary of some of the repeated warnings. The world is but a cherry fair, transitory, and a place where everyone, kings and poor, must face up to their mortality and give reckoning to God (Poem 3/146–52). One day man is alive, the next day dead (Poem 4/198). Your life is but as a wind, says the narrator in Poem 9; when it has blown its full, you will be forgotten. Therefore make your peace with God (25–32). Do not be too proud in your prosperity; you do not know how soon you will have less. Do not be too sure of your health; you do not know how soon you will fall into sickness. Death claims each man for his (Poem 5/49–54). Think you will die, and you do not know when. Your plight is precarious, therefore fear and tremble. God will come on Doomsday and judge everyone according to their works. The good run to the bliss of heaven; the wicked shall burn in Hell in endless torment. Death shall feed them (Poem 22/57–64). The terror of judgment is thumped home (Poem 7/18; 8/102, 10/189, 24/97–104). The future fate of the soul depends on what you have done since you were born (Poem 22/41). And there is no escape from God’s purview of all behaviour from that moment. Nothing can be hidden from God (Poem 1/95; 4/153–54); everything is numbered in God’s sight, even the least step (Poem 1/134). The audience is enjoined to make amends or else to suffer the consequences (Poem 9/5/115/135; 17/84/178; 19/28; 24/329/342). Repentance is urged in the most fervent tones (Poem 17/75/95; 19/52/74). The audience is admonished to give account to God for their misdeeds by reckoning up their sins before God does his own accounting on Doomsday (Poem 1/29/35; 3/152; 7/83; 9/92; 10/196/210;

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11/29/35/110; 21/148 and 24/231). The interpersonality of address; the imperatives in the here and now address an audience whose present world is but a transitory stage in the drama of salvation which knits up the past and the future into a potentially terrifying scenario of endless torment. For all the poet’s creation of a present political realm founded on stability and truth in which all are included, at the last Day, though many are called, few shall be chosen.29 The true eternal present of the sequence of the poems belongs not to humankind but to God: Ihesus herte was cleued so To lete out trewe loue to his frende. In that blisse God graunte vs go Þere trewe loue woneþ wiþouten ende. (Poem 17/197–200)

The endless present of the last line of Poem 17; eternal bliss where true love dwells forever is not the work of humankind; nor is there any human entitlement to the place where true love lives without end. Entrance to eternal bliss is made possible by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and conditional on God’s permission.30 This spiritual text-world is inseparable from the political text-world. The poet does not fashion a political community knit up in heady coronation triumphalism but forges a political realm and a contemporary Church grounded on principles of penance and repentance. The political subjects interpellated by the poet’s modes of address are human beings made conscious of the need for reform and spiritual cleansing. As such they are subjects created in alignment with the new king’s zeal in reforming the Church from within. The text world of the Digby Lyrics creates an early fifteenth century body-politic which is mindful of past sins and the need for their remedy. Only then can the body-politic stand on its own two feet, but then only with God’s grace.31 While the liturgy of Easter forms the centre of this 29

This verse from Matthew 22. 14 is explicitly quoted in the lyrics, ‘Fewe ben chosen, þouõ mony ben calt’, Poem 21/151. 30

The image of the herb ‘trewe-loue’ is also found in ‘Christ’s Testament’, in The Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, ed. by Carl Horstmann (vol. 1) and F. J. Furnivall (vol. 2), EETS, O. S. 98 and 117, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1892–1901), I, 645, lines 114–26, ‘And my loue-dedes haue in Mynde;/ffre to haue, and fre to holde,/wiþ al þe purtynaunce to wolde,/Myn heritage þat is so fre./ffor homage ne for feute/No more wol I aske of þe,/But a foure-leued gras õeld þou me:/O lef is soþfast schrifte,/Þe toþur is for synne herte-smerte,/Þe þridde is “I wol no more do so,”/Þe feorþe is “drede god euermo”; whon þeose four leues to-geder ben set,/A “trewe loue” men clepen hit’. 31

The inseparability of the political and the spiritual can be seen from the way that in Poem 15, the poet fuses a poem based on an enumeration of the parts of the body-politic with a body and soul debate.

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sequence of poems, at its end the poet turns to the Office of the Dead in his paraphrase of its readings, responses, and versicles. Lyric 24 closes with the need for each and every subject of the realm to reflect on their sins, to repent and to be mindful that on the Day of Judgement they will be called to account. These are the final two stanzas of the sequence, and they are the poet’s addition to the liturgy: At domesday no man shal be excusyd: Lord, ne lady, mayde ne knaue, For wykked counsel scholde be refusyd, And after good counsayle craue. After warke þat þay vsed, I shal hem deme or saue: Þe sauyd excusyd, þe dampnyd accusyd, As thay deseruyd echon haue. Ech touche and mouynge with hys honde, þe leste twynkelynge wyþ his eyõe, His wronge worke, sitte or stonde, Ryde or go, sitte or lyõe, Þouõ he spede noõt þere he dede fonde, Hys conscience wole hym bewrye; Benefice, auauncement, hous or londe, The leste bargayn þat he dede bye. (Poem 24/403–18)

The penultimate stanza of the sequence is scored by sound patterning: especially by the repeated sound ‘yd’ endings of past participles and participle adjectives, reinforced through rhyme position. The repetition is not mere ornamentation. As the list of actions (lines 411–18), states, each person will be judged on the basis of every action, however small, that they have performed in the past tense. The future destiny of the soul is dependent on the least bargain that a person did buy. In a finale which presses home the message that each person shall be judged according to what they have done, the ultimate future worth of accumulated deeds is emphasized by the insistent sounding of the past tense. The speaker here is God. The audience of the poem who will face his wrath are ‘thay’, or ‘he’, terrifyingly distant from God — potentially always so — by the worth of their past deeds. The text-world of these Digby Lyrics is politically and spiritually congruent. A present realm founded on permanence, truth, and ethical behaviour is created as part of a transitory world where God is the ultimate judge of deeds in time. It is a present realm created in the here and now in which all members of the audience are its incorporated subjects. But the celebration of a political realm incorporated in Easter joy at Christ’s resurrected body is inseparable

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from the soul-searching of the community united in the liturgy of the Office of the Dead. There is no hope of endless joy without the communal work of penance.32 The text-world of the Digby Lyrics is self-consciously literary by avoiding the stylistic features traditionally seen as the signs of literariness: the terms deployed, but sheepishly disclaimed, by Chaucer’s loquacious Eagle in The House of Fame: subtilite Of speche, or gret prolixite Of termes of philosophie, Of figures of poetrie, Or colours of rethorike.33

It is the eschewal of ‘peculiar language’,34 the absence of making strange, or defamiliarization, that marks out for the Digby poems an important place in literary history. But, as the history of the use of literary language shows so clearly, the turn to ‘common speech’: the ordinary and the known, is just as much a poetic choice and a literary style as the searching out of what is novel and strange. The selfconsciously familiar poetics of the Digby Lyrics are perhaps best encapsulated in the ringing injunction of the opening line of Poem 12: ‘call hom õoure herte!’

32

If John Paunteley were the author of the lyrics, then the concern for penance and correction may have had a personal significance; in 1411 there was a pardon issued ‘to John Paunteley, monk of the abbey of Gloucestre, for all felonies, trespasses and misprisions committed by him, except murder, common larceny and treason’, Cal. Pat. Rolls 1441–1446, 13 Henry IV, Part 1, p. 364 (29 December 1411, Westminster). 33 34

Chaucer, House of Fame, lines 854–59 in The Riverside Chaucer.

Derek Attridge writes a compelling account of the history of norm/deviation theories of literary language in Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London: Routledge, 2004).

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I

n tracking personalized devotions in manuscript margins, Colin Richmond found a rubric beneath a prayer-book miniature of the Mass of St Gregory: ‘To all them that before this image of pyte devoutly say five pater nosters and five aves and a credo pytously beholdyng these armes of christs passion are graunted 32755 years of pardon’. Pondering these specifications, Richmond articulates the challenge posed to investigators of late medieval piety: Precisely how, I asked myself, was this particular image used, if it was used at all? Did [the book’s owner] devoutly perform before it? If he did, how often did he? Did his confessor show it to him during confession? If he did, at what point? Did either, or both, of them add up the years?1

In the Oxford manuscript that preserves the poems and carols of John the Blind Audelay, a reference to this iconography occurs in the poet’s Saint Gregory’s Indulgence, but without an actual illustration of it: Apon a day Saynt Gregoré Song his mas at Rome, truly; Crist to him he con apere In the fegure of his autere; […]

1

Colin Richmond, ‘Margins and Marginality: English Devotion in the Later Middle Ages’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Nicholas Rogers (Stamford: Watkins, 1994), pp. 242–52 (pp. 243–44). The rubric appears in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gough Liturgical 7 (fol. 59v ), a prayer-book owned by George, Earl of Shrewsbury, around 1500.

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Audelay’s item agrees with Richmond’s discovery in its call for a worshipper to say five Paternosters and five Aves. Gregory’s indulgence is totalled at 14,000 years, with other bishops reportedly adding more, to a (garbled) total of ‘Twenty thousand and six days and thirty-six yere’. A note is scribbled in the left margin: ‘here within [p]or[tr]eyd a fygur’.3 To obtain the pardon, the reader evidently needed to say the given prayers before the well-known image of Gregory at the altar envisioning Christ’s body in the host. As Caroline Walker Bynum observes, ‘the indulgenced object is an image in which Gregory frames the devotional centre and mediates its power to us’. It is ‘an image of an image of a vision’, ‘a stimulus evoking absence as well as presence’, a prod to ‘see beyond’.4 As with so much else in Audelay’s book, a yearning to apprehend the unseen divine presence focuses the blind poet’s spirituality. Saint Gregory’s Indulgence is but one element of a unified set of texts at the heart of Audelay’s book, a sequence offered for the benefit of a devotional reader. To echo Richmond, for whom was this sequence intended? How was it to be used? Why did Audelay set it in his anthology? In what ways is it his own creation, in what ways borrowed? And does its Englishness matter? Discussions of vernacular theology have largely bypassed John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience (c. 1426; henceforth CC), a book that blends didacticism and devotion. Its contents establish it as an English religious compendium of mixed genre, including, for example, items of pastoral instruction, lyric verse, vision, prophecy, and truth-telling regarding ecclesiastical abuses. Some texts have received isolated attention, but Audelay’s broader purpose and plan have remained elusive.5 2

Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 91.

3

On fol. 12va (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 259). The scribal note may point to the drawing of the Vernicle (fol. 27va), the only image in the manuscript; an image of the Mass of St Gregory seems more likely, however. 4

Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Seeing and Seeing Beyond: The Mass of St Gregory in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 208–40 (pp. 216, 218). 5

John Audelay’s book is not listed among the works of ‘vernacular theology’ in Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 859–64. Studies of Audelay’s CC are scarce; they include Eric Stanley, ‘The True Counsel of Conscience or The Ladder of Heaven: In Defense of John Audelay’s Unlyrical Lyrics’, in Expedition nach der Wahrheit: Poems, Essays, and Papers in Honour of Theo Stemmler, ed. by Stefan Horlacher and Marion Islinger (Heidelberg: Winter, 1996), pp. 131–59; and Oliver Pickering, ‘The Make-Up of John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng: Essays on

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To the whole book Audelay assigns a spiritual goal of soulehele, as if in imitation of a much more ambitious codex, the Vernon manuscript, created some forty years earlier, also in the West Midlands.6 Many individual items in CC are, in fact, intricately sequenced acts of worship. They consist of indulgenced prayers designed to be practised in quasi-liturgical serial clusters according to Audelay’s guideposts. A string of ten items at the core of CC appears to be a comprehensive programme of vernacular worship by which a lay audience (mostly individual, but at times addressed as a congregation) is led to meditate on the Passion, prepare for the sacrament of the altar, and revere Christ’s ‘seen’ presence. This sequence at the centre of CC has not been previously recognized as an interconnected cluster of texts.7 It is devoted to venerating Christ’s body — specifically, to meditating on the Passion and avowing one’s faith in the miracle of the host. The Long Passion (as I call it here) appears on folios 8rb–16ra of the Audelay manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302), extending across nine of the twenty-two folios that hold CC.8 Unfortunately, what survives of CC represents Audelay’s purpose in only an incomplete form. The book has lost a large portion of its opening leaves (thirteen to nineteen) with four more gone between folios 7 and 8. In what remains, three items precede the Long Passion, all in a didactic mode: True Living, Marcolf and Solomon, and The Nine Remedies of

John the Blind Audelay, ed. by Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2009), pp. 112–37. Audelay’s title The Counsel of Conscience may be borrowed from Piers Plowman A.10.91 (William Langland, Piers Plowman: A Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and Z Versions, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Longman, 1995), p. 382; I am grateful to Prof. Schmidt for this suggestion). Vincent Gillespie finds an echo of the ‘Council of Constance’ in Audelay’s title (‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 401–20 (pp. 417–18)). On how Audelay denotes a spiritual process by giving successive titles to CC, see my ‘The Epistemology of Titles in Editing Whole-Manuscript Anthologies: The Lyric Sequence, in Particular’, Poetica, 71 (2009), 49–74 (p. 61). 6

Susanna Fein, ‘Example to the Soulehele: John Audelay, the Vernon Manuscript, and the Defense of Orthodoxy’, Chaucer Review, 46 (2011), 182–202. 7

Pickering, ‘The Make-Up of John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience’, pp. 120–28, notes the devotional texts but views Visiting the Sick as an interruption. Susan Powell, ‘John Audelay and John Mirk: Comparisons and Contrasts’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 86–111, characterizes these texts as ‘lay devotional reading, a focus easily explained by [Audelay’s] career in a noble household’ (p. 91). Helpful overviews of late medieval Passion piety are given by Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, and Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 8

Because of gaps in the manuscript, one cannot know for certain where CC begins. What remains names an endpoint on fol. 22vb . Scholars presently apply the title to all the leaves that come before this colophon.

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Virtue.9 The third of these, a Rolle-related work with a Latin original, has Christ himself utter dicta to Christians, which (via Audelay) he declares in English. The rest of CC continues without lacunae. After the Long Passion, four works conclude the book: Our Lord’s Epistle on Sunday, The Vision of Saint Paul, God’s Address to Sinful Man, and Audelay’s Epilogue. These are again didactic works, two of them channelling God’s voice (in English), as he issues laws and promises mercy to penitents. Our Lord’s Epistle has a Latin source, while God’s Address, a refrain poem, seems to be entirely Audelay’s creation. Epilogue, the last item in CC, delivers Audelay’s own urgent words of prophecy and warning. Audelay assigns to the final pair, God’s Address and Epilogue, a joint heading: ‘De misericordia Domini’ (The Lord’s Mercy). Thus, after The Vision of Saint Paul, which paints the tortures of hell, the poet closes his book of soulehele on notes of merciful healing and salvation. Audelay first addresses general humanity with words voiced as God’s own; then in Epilogue he removes the mask and addresses a reader directly, offering a self-portrait of considerable complexity. Audelay presents himself as author, guiding chaplain, blind prophet, penitent mirror, and sinner afflicted (and chosen) by God’s visitation.10

The Long Passion I chart below the works that Audelay clusters to create the Long Passion. Some items are sets of prayers. Most are designated a ‘remission’ (indulgence); asterisks indicate the items marked in this way. (1) *Seven Bleedings of Christ (English) (2) *Prayer on Christ’s Passion (English; a translation of O Deus qui voluisti) (3) *Psalter of the Passion (Latin with English instructions) Anima Christi O pendens dudum (to be recited with a rosary) O Deus qui voluisti (4) *Seven Words of Christ on the Cross (English)

9

The scribal numbering system indicates that nine items are lost before True Living, and three more between Marcolf and Nine Remedies. 10

See Robert J. Meyer-Lee, ‘The Vatic Penitent: John Audelay’s Self-Representation’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 54–85. Pickering, ‘The Make-Up of John Audelay’s Counsel of Conscience’, p. 125, examines the unified pattern of Audelay’s signings in these final texts.

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(5) The Levation of Christ’s Body (English/Latin with English instructions) Salutation to Christ’s Body (to be said in sight of the sacrament) *Prayer for Pardon Adoramus Te Christe, Ecce Agnus Dei, Laudes Deo (hymnal prayers) (6) *Virtues of the Mass (English) (7) For Remission of Sins (English with instructions) *Saint Gregory’s Indulgence (to be said in sight of the image) Prayer of General Confession Prayer for Forgiveness (8) Visiting the Sick and Consoling the Needy (English) (9) Blind Audelay’s English Passion (English/Latin with English instructions) The World’s Folly *Pope John’s Passion of Our Lord (10) *Seven Hours of the Cross (English with Latin hymnal tags)

In what follows I will explore the logic underlying Audelay’s creation of this set of texts: its probable audience, the programme it represents, and its intensity of focus upon faithfully seeing beyond.

Audelay’s Audience Identifying the original audience of CC is critical to reconstructing the book’s contemporary purpose, and this is especially true for the Long Passion, which was evidently created both for private devotion and for use during mass. What I wish to propose and explore here is an understanding of CC as an author-anthology made up of spiritual texts created in large part during Audelay’s tenure as chaplain in a noble household. When Audelay set about making the physical book that is now designated the Audelay manuscript, he was by his own account a man advanced in years, declining in health, failing in eyesight and hearing, and living a cloistered life in an Augustinian monastery. He had come to this situation after an active career as chaplain to Lord Richard Lestrange of Knockin. His later residence was Haughmond Abbey, a wellendowed religious house located barely fifteen miles (24 km) from Knockin, on the other, eastern, side of Shrewsbury — a house to which Lestrange had longstanding ancestral ties of patronage. When Audelay relocated there, he became the first

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priest commissioned to pray for the souls of the Lestranges in a newly endowed family chantry. As chantry priest, Audelay probably did not take monastic orders but remained in the ranks of secular clergy. There are arguably two sets of contemporary audience for Audelay’s book, one secular, the other cloistered, but those for whom the texts themselves were first created would seem to have been members of the lay nobility, the ‘lords’ and ‘sirs’ so often addressed in Audelay’s verse. A monastic audience is alluded to in the wellknown colophon that marks the end of CC: ‘Iste liber fuit compositus per Johannem Awdelay, capellanum, […] ad exemplum aliorum in monasterio de Haghmon’ (This book was composed by John Audelay, chaplain, […] to serve as a model for others in the monastery of Haughmond). The Augustinian canons of Haughmond were likely to be familiar with Audelay’s compositions. Certainly, the two scribes who carried out his plan of anthology knew the nature of the texts they were copying. They executed the poet’s programme with precise attention to detail — down to the underlining of instructional passages in red, the insertion of pointers for key passages, the drawing of a well-placed devotional image, and so on. Both were probably monks who served the blind Audelay to make the book he wanted, working under the chaplain’s direct supervision.11 The primary audience for whom Audelay first created the items found in the manuscript is most likely to have been, however, his long-term employer, Lord Richard Lestrange, 7th Baron Strange of Knockin. Additional recipients of his pastoral care may well have been Richard’s wife Joan and other family members, high-ranking associates, and familiars in the household. Perhaps among them were, more loosely defined, the body of retainers charged with the maintenance of Knockin, its appurtenances, and other household settings for Lestrange activity, such as London, where records show Lord and Lady Lestrange attending Easter services at St-Dunstan’s-in-the-East in 1417. Even though their behaviour was less than pious on that occasion, the legal documents tell us that a large cohort of servants came to church with them, which may have been the normal procedure.12 When Lestrange and his chaplain were in residence at Knockin, it is also possible that Audelay took opportunities to preach and officiate at the chapel adjoined to the castle.13 At any rate, we can assume that Audelay had in mind an aristocratic 11

Fein, ‘Introduction’, in Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 4–5.

12

Michael J. Bennett, ‘John Audelay: Life Records and Heaven’s Ladder’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 30–53 (pp. 33–37, 50 n. 29). The records name fifteen men in attendance with Lord and Lady Lestrange, among them three squires, two chaplains, and a clerk. 13

Knockin Church, now St Mary’s, was built between 1182 and 1195 by Ralph le Strange, at which time Knockin was removed from Kinnerly parish, and ‘the right of patronage’ (i.e., its tithes)

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lay audience for his works of pastoral care. Beyond that, some items suggest delivery in church, or performance in other corporate settings (such as carol singing in hall), indicating a chaplain who served, at times, a diverse audience of nobles, retainers, and general parishioners tied economically and culturally to the Baron’s manorial, parochial presence at the centre of their community.

Audelay as Versifier, Spiritual Guide, and Translator The Long Passion brings into focus many of the features that characterize Audelay as a Middle English religious poet. Most importantly, it allows scholars to observe a clerical writer at work in his study, and sometimes at his pulpit, composing lyrics, constructing devotions, preparing texts of pastoral care, and translating items deemed useful to a lay reader. If the Long Passion represents a programme created for a noble household by a personal chaplain, then it (along with other parts of the Audelay manuscript) allows us an insight into the conditions that lie behind the making of many medieval religious lyrics, the bulk of which are scattered across manuscripts without attribution. In Audelay’s Long Passion one may detect the chaplain’s earnest effort as a translator and transmitter of scriptural, hymnal, and prayer matter — often from Latin to English, occasionally from English to reworked English. If many Middle English poets served daily as priests to private patrons or parish congregations, then real-world responsibilities would have fired their creativity. Practical soul-saving impels Audelay’s verse. At the same time, many quirks are substantially Audelay’s own. One is a habitual attention to form: endings often match openings with marked symmetries of content, centre-points, decisive closures, and patternings by number. The poet experiments incessantly with metre, inventing a wide range of stanza types, signature metres, and metres reserved for particular genres. Most of all, he personalizes his verse in distinctive ways. Not only does he sign it frequently; it also conveys an idiom unmistakably Audelay’s own. Audelay inhabits his verse with a pressing authorial presence, often as a priest, but also, just as often, as a penitent who conflates his subject with himself. Self-referentiality is a habit. When Audelay uses metaphors of seeing — as he often does — they point two ways: they speak, as from a preacher,

given to Haughmond Abbey ‘for the souls of his [Ralph’s] Father and ancestors, and the health of himself and his successors’ (R. W. Eynton, Antiquities of Shropshire (London: John Russell Smith, 1860), p. 366). This arrangement was in effect during Audelay’s tenure as chaplain. In 1392 the living of Knockin Church was given to a Henry de Alderley, whose surname is a local variant of ‘Audelay’. The name of the rector in Audelay’s time is not recorded.

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of spiritual sight and true knowledge, while they allude as readily to the poet’s handicap and his proclaimed vatic gift. References to Paul may turn imperceptibly to Audelay’s identifying of himself with an apostle struck blind at his conversion.14 In the Long Passion one finds this reflex in operation in multiple references to the blind Longinus, and even in the poet’s interest in the gospel recorded by John the Evangelist, the ‘archetypal visionary and seer’.15 Audelay’s stylistic idiosyncrasies saturate his book. When one examines CC metrically, much emerges about what Audelay calls ‘my wyl and my wrytyng’.16 The chaplain frequently speaks to the reader in verse asides, typically couplets, that become paratexts of instruction.17 They guide a worshipper by explaining how to pray a prayer, or they explain the order of a quasi-liturgical prayer service, emphasizing its sequential nature. Instructional couplets may serve double-duty as incipit or explicit, naming the work or specifying the genre, as does the one introducing Audelay’s carols: ‘I pray yow, syrus, boothe moore and las, / Syng these caroles in Cristemas’. When signpost couplets identify a text as offering an indulgence, they may detail the item’s measurable spiritual reward. In the Long Passion the poet often brackets prayers with recipes for how they are to be uttered reverently, the instructions couched in imperatives: ‘Loke ye say this oresoun / Dewoutlé with devocion’. In addition to these priestly counsels, Audelay’s voice resides in another metre common to CC, his standard mode for didactic preaching: the thirteen-line stanza. In CC, seven works are composed this way, and Audelay almost always signs them, emphatically staking his claim. Their style is malleable and fluent, suggestive of oral delivery, with frequent phrasal repetitions and insistent reiterations of doctrine. A signature-stanza concludes most of them, each time tailored to a specific setting: Mervel ye noght of this makyng — Fore I me excuse, hit is not I.

14

See Bennett, ‘John Audelay’, p. 39; and Robert Easting, ‘“Choose yourselves whither to go”: John Audelay’s Vision of Saint Paul’, in My Wyl and My Wrytyng, ed. by Fein, pp. 170–90 (p. 185). 15

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, St John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 98. As Hamburger’s important book details, St John ‘insists on the centrality of sight to salvation’, and ‘the visibility of the invisible God’ (p. 18). These sight-based assertions would have drawn Audelay to the Evangelist, patron saint of Haughmond Abbey. 16 17

Audelay’s Conclusion, line 33 (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 224).

While most instructions in the Long Passion are in couplets, a few appear in six-line stanzas, the metre Audelay favours throughout this section, as illustrated in the way he converted his source for Virtues of the Mass from twelve-line stanzas to six-liners (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 256).

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Fore this of Godis oun wrytyng That he send doun fro heven on hye, Fore I couth never bot he foly. He hath me chastist for my levyng; I thonke my God, my Grace, treuly, Of his gracious vesetyng. Beware, serys, I you pray, Fore I mad this with good entent, Fore hit is Cristis comawndment; Prays for me that beth present — My name hit is the Blynd Awdlay. (Our Lord’s Epistle, ll. 196–208)

As this specimen shows, the signature-stanza starts off by deferring authorship to a higher authority (here, God) while claiming only ‘high folly’ for Audelay. The poet then extends a prayer of thanksgiving that he has been ‘visited’ with chastizing infirmities. In the final five lines (the wheel), Audelay shifts to a strong statement of authorship, ‘I mad this with good entent’, and asks the reader to pray for him by name, ‘Blynd Awdlay’. Most of CC (though only a small portion of the Long Passion) consists of poems in the discursive thirteen-line stanza. In these works Audelay demands that clergy preach the truth of Scripture to the laity, and he bluntly defends his exposure of ecclesiastical corruption. In Marcolf, for example, Audelay critiques greedy friars, proclaiming that those who know they are guilty will renounce him. Then he adds, ‘Fore to stond at a stake, bren ther Y wolde / Yif I say falslé at my wyttyng — / Blynd as Y am’ (lines 501–03). This startling statement reflects the political climate during which Audelay lived, but he probably did not write it in actual fear of indictment. It belongs with the fervent public stance Audelay takes as a blind prophet called to speak truth to sinners — churchmen and laymen alike.18 In another thirteen-line poem, Epilogue, Audelay explains how he was called via a dream: a man beckoned him, requiring him to preach truth, while flames consumed the world. The urgency of sacred mission permeates Audelay’s works, especially his thirteen-liners, as he stakes the courage of an outspoken orthodoxy against both erroneous Lollards (‘heretics and renegades’) and over-zealous Lollard-hunters: Fore thay cal trew Cristyn men Lollard, That kepyn Cristis comawndmentis nyght and day,

18

While most of Marcolf addresses an audience of monks, friars, and secular clergy, the poem’s conclusion (after line 780) is directed to the laity. Marcolf’s outspokenness against both churchmen and Lollards is examined by Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 340, 378–80. See also his ‘Saving Satire after Arundel’s Constitutions’.

334

Susanna Fein And don Godis wil in dede and worde. Agayns ham, I take Crist to wytnes; Here is non error ne Lollardré, Bot pistill and gospel, the Sauter, treuly; I take witnes of the treue clargy That han Godis lauys fore to redres. (ll. 253–60)19

Audelay speaks on behalf of ‘treue clargy’, urging them to follow their duty to save souls. According to Audelay, each ‘man’s soul’ needs to be taught its own personal responsibility for salvation. The right path lies only through Holy Church and its sacraments. God hears and absolves a person even if his confession is given to a corrupt priest or friar. Moreover, a Mass is efficacious to all believers even if a priest fails to say it attentively and sincerely. Audelay pointedly asks clergy to remember that their own souls hang in the balance. Any souls lost through negligence will be accounted against a priest’s salvation on Doomsday. Consequently, curates must preach courageously what they know to be true: The treuth to preche, men may be bold, Ore ellis, ye curatis, ye schul sore rew, […] Fore to curatis, sayth Saynt Gregory, Thai schul onswere treuly Fore mons soule specialy, At Domusday tofore Crystis face. (ll. 266–67, 270–73)

In asserting that no error exists in preaching Christ’s commandments — contained in ‘pistill and gospel, the Sauter, treuly’ — Audelay claims an orthodox space, sanctioned by Gregory, where churchmen are obliged to transmit biblical teachings to the laity. This claim allows insight into Audelay as a cleric who conveys religious doctrine. Audelay’s emphatic use of English and selective use of Latin suggest his stance on disseminating Scripture via the vernacular. In Marcolf, a poem in which nearly every stanza has a Latin heading, these tags construct a clerical commentary that laymen might not be expected to understand. Most such lines are biblical. Audelay seems not to feel a strong urge to translate them, though his exposition in the stanza often offers a paraphrase. Biblical Latin is thus treated with deference, its deployment set in motion by a professional chaplain who speaks broadly to others 19

My use of the term Lollard in this essay adheres to Audelay’s own usages, as reflected in passages such as this one. The poet applies the word to those whose beliefs depart from orthodoxy, but he also shows concern over the slippery nature of fallible humans using this term to label others. See Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 235, 242, 277; and Fein, ‘Example to the Soulehele’, pp. 193–202.

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in ecclesiastical orders. Scriptural authority proves that God’s dicta and natural laws (kynde) underwrite everything uttered by the rustic Marcolf in his spontaneous, impassioned bursts of truth-talking. But the fool speaks in English, delivering Audelay’s imperative (for layfolk to hear) that churchmen are duty-bound to do the work of Holy Church and save souls. The poem’s premise is that a preaching rustic speaks difficult truths to the power base — ‘Solomon’ — who should listen, send them forth, enact reforms. Eventually ‘Marcolf’ preaches directly to laymen — just about when Audelay drops the mask — delivering the critical message that salvation is each soul’s responsibility. Audelay’s English is thus deployed in ways that both reflect and deflect contemporary concerns about disseminating Scripture in the vernacular. God’s mission transcends human wrangling.

The Long Passion’s Frame: Guided Prayer In the Long Passion itself, similar signs of linguistic consciousness arise. A particularly intriguing title — Blind Audelay’s English Passion — emerges from an explicit: Amen, Jhesu, now I thee pray, Have mynd and mercé on Blynd Audlay, That mad in Englesche this Passion, Fore synful men to have mynd theron.

Audelay announces himself here as blind author, as translator, as conveyor of the vernacular, and as purveyor of a Passion (a biblical genre). This English Passion is, in the main, a précis of the Gospel of John, a Latin item found in horae and central to the Good Friday liturgy.20 Set near the end of the Long Passion, this Passion in English balances a Latin Passion set near the beginning: The Psalter of the Passion, which, despite its essentially Latinate nature, comes with a set of English instructions and a prefacing translation of its longest element. Likewise, the English Passion proclaims itself a translation from Latin. Both devotions are therefore openly bilingual while vernacularly user-friendly. Audelay provides a noble patron with straightforward recipes for reaping spiritual benefit. Symmetries and formal repetitions mark the Long Passion as a crafted programme. Along with the two Passions there are also three poems based on the holy sevens that structured medieval veneration of Christ’s suffering on the cross. One opens the sequence, another closes it, and the third comes right after the Latin 20

Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 237.

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Passion. Prayers based on these septenaries are frequent in books of hours, and their explication is common in English treatises.21 Here Audelay weaves them around the Passion meditations, making them keys for obtaining remission as privately performed devotions transport one to a vivid biblical tableau. Christ’s Seven Bleedings become remedies for the seven sins, matched to seven instruments of the Passion (the arma Christi).22 The user is to pray this prayer every day in worship of the Passion and Christ’s wounds, and he should also teach it to others. The content of Seven Words, which follows the Latin Passion, is also ordered strictly by mnemonic number. The seven words are matched to seven petitions, and they too offer remedies for the seven deadly sins. The user is told to follow this poem with recitation of seven Paternosters and seven Aves in order to activate the remission. In between these first two seven-poems is an exercise in two parts: first, an English verse prayer on Christ’s torture, again evoking the arma Christi, while foreshadowing O Deus voluisti, which it translates; second, Audelay’s Psalter of the Passion, a set of three Latin prayers to be said in order. They begin with the cleansing, fortifying Anima Christi, which holds a long history as an indulgence and was used during the Mass.23 The second prayer is brief: ‘O pendens dudum / In hara crucis nudum / Pro nostro scelere, / Jhesu, nostri miserere’ (O long hanging / On the altar of the cross naked / For our sin, / Jesus, have mercy on us). Audelay explains that his patron is to recite it as a ‘psalter’ with the aid of a rosary, substituting this miniature evocation of the Passion for prayers one might more commonly use: the Paternoster or the Ave.24 It seems meant for recitation before a crucifix, which may

21

William A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955; repr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Medieval Academy of America, 1980), pp. 189–262, esp. pp. 227–30; and C. A. Martin, ‘Middle English Manuals of Religious Instruction’, in C. A. Martin, ‘Middle English Manuals of Religious Instruction’, in So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediæval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, ed. by Michael Benskin and M. L. Samuels (Edinburgh: Benskin and Samuels, 1981), pp. 283–98. 22

In addition, Christ is addressed in fifteen Oes, and the reader of the poem is told to pray fifteen Paternosters and fifteen Aves to receive the indulgence. 23

The fifth line of this prayer hymn, ‘Passio Christi conforta me’, resurfaces later in the Long Passion in Pope John’s Passion; Audelay also uses it as a carol burden. See Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, p. 251. An elevation prayer, its history is tied to Pope John XXII (Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 157). 24

I have located this prayer also in an early fifteenth-century English book of hours: Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 72, fol. 51v. See M. R. James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Emmanuel College: A Descriptive Catalogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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be the necessary setting for the whole regimen. Upon completing the rosary prayer, the devotee should ‘say thi Crede’ and then recite the third, longest prayer, a frequent item in books of hours: ‘O Deus qui voluisti / Pro redemcionem mundi / A Judeis reprobare’ (O God, you who were willing / For the sake of the salvation of the world / To be condemned by the Jews), and so on.25 After rehearsing Christ’s painful tortures, this prayer concludes with a petition to be taken to heaven as was the thief crucified with Jesus. In providing this Passion to his patron, Audelay draws from the well of Latin prayer-books to compose what seems to be an original sequence. As an aid, he introduces it with an English verse translation of its longest element. A reader who has dutifully followed Audelay’s regimen will have already been taught the Gospelbased meaning of O Deus voluisti in the preceding Prayer on Christ’s Passion: ‘O God, the wyche thou woldust, Lorde, / Fore the redempcion of the worlde / Of Jewis to be reprevyd’, and so on. Audelay arms his patron with the necessary compassion, reverence, and linguistic comprehension to pray aright. The second Passion, Blind Audelay’s English Passion, comes late in the Long Passion sequence. It combines two items, World’s Folly and Pope John’s Passion, which are succeeded by a seven-poem. Verbal echoes often bind the parts together. The worshipper is to read Audelay’s Passion to learn ‘what Cryst sofyrd fore synful mon’, its meditative focus resting on ‘passive suffering by a loving victim’ — the understanding of the Passion typical of primers.26 The reforming rationale for reading a Passion is to evoke peté, the feeling that leads to contrition. All three works in this textual strand propound this idea. The theme of World’s Folly is ‘hou fayth and charyté away is gon’, how in this fickle world ‘Godis laus beth turnyd up-so-doun’. This interesting little poem, which names ‘Mede, that swet maydyn’ (a possible echo of Piers Plowman), and for which there is no known source, starts off as an advertised act of translation. The first stanza, in Latin, is followed by eleven others in the same metre but in English. The second stanza translates the first:

1904), pp. 66–67. Audelay elsewhere appeals to Jesus ‘hongyng on cros’, as if this prayer dwells as a totem in his mind; see the first lines of Seven Words and Prayer for Forgiveness (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 74, 93). 25

In horae and psalters, this prayer is commonly grouped with prayers to Christ. In MS Douce 302 its final lines are copied as prose, which gives the appearance of two separate prayers (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 73–74). The item is also recorded by Robert Thornton: see Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole and his Followers, ed. by Carl Horstmann, 2 vols (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895–96), I, 408. 26

Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 241.

338

Susanna Fein Multis diebus iam peractis, Nulla fides est in pactis. Videte. Mel in ore verbis lactis, Fel in corde, fraus in factis. Cavete. Moné days now agone Fayth ne covenant is ther non — Behold and se! In mouth is honé swet wordis uchon; In hert is galle, in dede, tresoun. Ware now be!

Audelay makes the clerical language legible — lifts the veil, so to speak — when he turns it to English. Vision is shown to be a powerful operation, leading to awareness, as the short lines stress: ‘Videte […] Cavete’, ‘Behold and se! […] Ware now be!’ In World’s Folly we learn, too, that priests often lack peté: ‘Fore al that clerkis now prechon, / Of holé Cristis Passion, / Is no peté’. According to Audelay’s instructions, World’s Folly serves as a ‘treu lessoun’ by which to meditatively prepare for Pope John’s Passion. The user is to read it before he proceeds to the versified Gospel of John attributed to Pope John XXII, who is said to have attached to it an indulgence for all who ‘sayd or herd hit with dewocion, / And on Cristis Passion had peté’. Pope John’s Passion alternates two lyrical refrains meant to nurse devotional sorrow: ‘Al hit was fore love of thee’ and ‘Apon his Passion to have peté’. It closes with veneration of the five wounds, prescribing five Paternosters, five Aves, and a Creed to gain the remission.27 Continuing to emphasize peté, the poem that follows, Seven Hours, calls for a reforming contrition to develop in readers: ‘Lord, […] / send sorou into our hert, […] / And let thi mercy be medysyn, our mendis for to make’. Composed in finely wrought metres, Pope John’s Passion and Seven Hours finalize Audelay’s Long Passion. The chaplain solidifies his stance as ‘treue clargy’ and vernacular poet, distinguishing himself from clerks who preach without peté. Seven Hours also advertises Audelay as a translator. Each stanza is headed by a line of the anonymous Latin hymn ‘Patris sapiencia’, a work known to pious readers because horae incorporated it into the Office of the Virgin, and from there it was adapted to vernacular primers. Under each hymnal verse, Audelay’s translation appears in the stanza’s first four lines, while narrative expansion or 27

The Seven Hours analogue in the Vernon manuscript is also labelled an indulgence from Pope John.

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pastoral exhortation fills out the remaining five lines.28 The presence in the Long Passion of several works englished from books of hours — Seven Hours, O Deus qui voluisti, and Pope John’s Passion — shows Audelay’s professional versifying to be aligned with goals expressed in such works as the Lay Folks’ Mass Book and the English Prymer.29 The purpose is vernacular instruction and pastoral care. Audelay’s particular aim is to deepen a patron’s private devotional frame of mind, spurring compassion and reverence for Christ’s body, its loving sacrifice made intensely present in images wrought in the worshipper’s own language.

The Long Passion’s Core: Sacrament Between the seven-poems and the two Passions, Audelay constructs a manual to be used ancillary to the Mass. It is a handbook of devotion and instruction, containing guides to worship (two sets of prayers) and sermons on the sacraments. The first sermon is Virtues of the Mass, a work borrowed and adapted by Audelay from an English source, in which he details the benefits of the sacrament of the altar. The second is Visiting the Sick, the only thirteen-line poem in the Long Passion. This sermon defends the orthodox tenet that salvation may occur only by means of Holy Church’s seven sacraments administered by a priest. They are the cleansing salves ‘fore everé sore’ (line 259), provided by God through the Passion: Thus in thi God thou cumford thee, And thenk apon his Passion — […] For in him is al consolacion, And may thee hele of thi sekenes. (ll. 248–49, 252–53).

As the doorway to redemption, the sacraments require respectful churchgoing and true faith: Then aske thi sacrements, pur charyté, And when thou ressayvst that sacrement, Beleve in hert, truly,

28

Alexandra Barratt, ‘The Prymer and its Influence on Fifteenth-Century English Passion Lyrics’, Medium Ævum, 44 (1975), 264–79 (pp. 272–76). See also Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 266–67. 29

The Lay Folks Mass Book or the Manner of Hearing Mass, ed. by Thomas Frederick Simmons, EETS, O. S. 71 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1879); Henry Littlehales, The Prymer or Prayer-Book of the Lay People in the Middle Ages (London: Longmans, Green, 1892); and The Prymer or Lay Folks’ Prayer Book, ed. by Henry Littlehales, EETS, O. S. 105, 109 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1895–97).

340

Susanna Fein That he is that Lord Omnipotent, And Crist is God Son, verament, […] Have this in mynde — foreget hit noght! And beware, uche Cristin mon, Fore heretekis and renegatis that uncriston be, That beleve not in that sacrement, treuly — […] Of hom is no redemcion! (ll. 286–91, 294–97, 299)

True faith separates saved souls from lost ‘heretics and renegades’. Audelay’s emphasis upon receiving the sacraments is what connects this item to its companions in the Long Passion. It follows his Prayer of General Confession and Prayer for Forgiveness with an opening formula for confession. Complementing Virtues of the Mass, it is a ‘Virtues of the Sacraments’. The Passions and seven-poems that create the flanks of the Long Passion express a devotional mode that seems designed for private worship. The devotee follows exercises led by a spiritual director present by means of the book; Audelay’s voice guides the user, but the chaplain need not have been physically nearby. The one who prays these regimens mentally recreates and witnesses the events of Christ’s Passion, transported to sacred time. In contrast, the texts at the core of the Long Passion suggest a public milieu: prayers prayed during a service of the mass in church or chapel, and didactic sermons delivered to a congregation, recorded here for private study. Both prayer series found in the centre of the Long Passion — Devotions at the Levation and For Remission of Sins — require visual foci that are integral to the sacrament of the altar: the Levation of the host and the Mass of St Gregory, respectively. A medieval reader, possibly someone who knew Audelay, has left a mark of use in Audelay’s book: a sleeved hand drawn in the margin, pointing to the Salutation’s climax, the moment of the host’s elevation.30 In Audelay’s Long Passion we may observe the professional employment of a poet ordained to preach sermons and officiate at mass. The chaplain opens with a series of prayers and remission-bearing meditations on seven that lead his patron to contemplate the Passion and prepare privately for the host’s elevation. Then that liturgical event is shown to occur on a visual plane, while the layman reads an English salutation to Christ’s body, a prayer summons of the divine presence meant for private use while a Latin mass is performed at the altar. After a prayer for pardon and three Latin hymns, which evoke the communal service in progress, Audelay provides his devout reader with the Virtues of the Mass, a verse sermon with an exemplum on how to comport oneself in church. The next item is to be uttered before an image of the Mass of St Gregory: a prayer of confession followed

30

Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 254, 337.

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by another that entreats God’s forgiveness. The penitent devotee appears to be still in church (or imagining himself there), enacting the liturgical elements that come after the holy Levation. Now appears another sermon, the lengthy, Audelay-signed poem that launches a defence of Holy Church and the seven sacraments. At this point Audelay is ready to close his multi-part sequence of orthodox devotion and sacrament, centred on venerating and spiritually ‘seeing’ Christ’s body. Two last items, his English Passion and Seven Hours, round-off the intense focus on Redeemer hanging on cross. An emerging theme of preparing for death threads through the final items, from the Anselmian Visiting the Sick to the consolation offered in the last lines of Seven Hours: Then joyful may ye be Agens the day that ye schul dye, To have grace and mercé, In heven foreever a place!31

John the Seer, Witness, Maker ‘John the Blind Audelay’ is how the poet typically signs himself. The blind chaplain invests his Long Passion with numerous instances of seeing and witnessing. Phrasal repetitions on the subject of believing in God’s presence — of seeing beyond — mark the texts of this sequence. Important instances are enacted by three men drawn from the gospel accounts. First is the centurion who declares ‘This is verey Godis Son’, a miraculous witnessing, which Audelay recounts in Pope John’s Passion and Seven Hours, and had earlier asserted in proclaiming, in Salutation and Virtues of the Mass, that the host is ‘God veray’. Second is Longinus, the blind man whose striking of the crucified Jesus with a spear caused him to see. Whenever Audelay speaks of this miracle, he does so with personal poignancy. The miracle literalizes the spiritual power of the Passion narrative by showing a blind one given new sight.32 Third, and most critically, is John the Evangelist, gospel author of Pope John’s Passion and primary witness to holy events: He that al this sorous se, He bers treu witnes hereon, That was keper to mayd Mary, The holé evangelyst, swete Saynt Jon.

31 32

On the movement in Passion piety toward dying well, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 242.

Longinus is named five times in the Long Passion (Audelay, Poems and Carols, ed. by Fein, pp. 249–50).

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St John deserves special regard as the patron saint of Haughmond Abbey. But there is something more than veneration here: references to the saint are coloured by Audelay’s complicated tendency to represent himself in everything he writes. In Blind Audelay’s English Passion the poet adroitly varies his habitual signing trope. He claims authorship in an explicit, at a point near the end of the Long Passion — a normal spot for an Audelay signature. His claim invokes not just epithet and surname ‘the Blind Audelay’; it also draws upon his Christian name ‘John’. The maker of Pope John’s Passion assumes a blurred identity, but in name he is steadfastly John. Initially, the work is said to have been made by the pope: Pope Jon the XXII at Avyon was. Ther, in the worchip of Cristis Passion, He made this gospel, be Godis grace, And gaf thereto a gret pardoun.

Pope John ‘made this gospel’ and did so for a pastoral cause, to grant the indulgence. The original author, however, is John the Evangelist, who stood beside Mary at the foot of the cross: ‘This is the Gospel of Jon truly — / To this passion take good entent!’ Likewise, St John made it for the good of souls: ‘He bers treu witnes hereon’ and ‘bedis you beleve this everechon’. Ultimately, though, the maker of Blind Audelay’s English Passion, is its translator in present time, who ‘mad in Englesche this Passion / Fore synful men to have mynd theron’. Three Johns across time have crafted this inspirational work, designing it to save souls. As vernacular author, Audelay merges himself with apostle and pope. John the Blind blends himself into the scene of Crucifixion, witnessing it through the seeing eyes of his namesake saint, conveying it as a good curate to a contemporary audience.33 For Audelay, it is as the apostle wrote: ‘There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, that all men might believe through him’ ( John 1. 6–8).

33

The writing of a wealthy patron into a space of devotion is not uncommon in the fifteenth century; the practice occurs in many manuscript illuminations made for nobility. A contemporary parallel to Audelay’s self-mergence with the Evangelist occurs in an initial A at the opening of St John’s Apocalypse in the Bedford Breviary; in it is drawn a portrait of John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford (Victor Leroquais, Les Bréviaires manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France, 5 vols (Paris: Macon, Protat, 1934), III, 303–04). Contemporary writers might also appropriate holy space, as when Margery Kempe imagines herself into the Virgin’s relationships to Christ, in effect displacing Mary; see Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp. 278–82.

L YDGATE’S R ETRACTION AND ‘HIS RESORTE TO HIS RELIGYOUN ’ W. H. E. Sweet

L

ydgate had recently been ordained priest at the abbey of Bury St Edmunds when Archbishop Arundel made an overnight stop there on return from his visitation of the Norwich and Ely dioceses in 1400. The record of his stay, preserved in London, British Library, MS Harley 1005 (fols 40–41), shows that the political sensitivities surrounding any implied recognition of the Archbishop as Visitor precluded an ostentatious reception.1 There was no procession; he was not received through the main gates; the bells were not rung. Nevertheless, the abbot arranged lavish entertainment and the monks were likely included in the festivities. This is the only known occasion when Lydgate was almost certainly in the company of Arundel, but Lydgate’s poetry is steeped in the religious milieu to which Arundel centrally contributed in early fifteenth-century England. Whether directly or indirectly, as a Benedictine monk and a Lancastrian poet, Lydgate felt the influence of Arundel’s Constitutions. This paper argues for a renewed recognition of Lydgate’s piety, identifying a certain poetic reluctance in the monk’s fulfilment of many of his secular and laureate commissions. Because Lydgate was at his most comfortable writing about religion, expressions of regret concerning his earlier pagan-classical output became increasingly explicit as his career progressed and come to constitute a retraction that is far more anxious and prolonged than Chaucer’s.

1

See the description by William Page, ‘Houses of Benedictine Monks: Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, in Victoria County History: Suffolk, II, ed. by William Page (London: Constable, 1907; repr. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1975), pp. 56–72.

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Lydgate was known to his contemporaries as much by his ‘monk of Bury’ sobriquet as he was by his name. In fact, in Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk. 5. 30 of the Troy Book, Lydgate is simply known as ‘the monk’. Yet despite ubiquitous evidence that fifteenth-century readers regarded his religious status as a central facet of his authorial persona, and despite Fiona Somerset’s solitary voice claiming Lydgate as ‘a poet whose “religious” and “secular” œuvres cry out for crosscomparison’, the critical view that there is a contradiction between Lydgate’s status as Lancastrian court poet and Benedictine monk at Bury St Edmunds has dominated.2 Walter Schirmer writes of Lydgate that ‘by inclination he was better suited to a secular than to an ecclesiastical career’; Christopher Cannon calls him ‘worldly in both habit of mind and writing practice’.3 Richard Firth Green and Derek Pearsall both speculate that Lydgate was appointed prior of Hatfield Broad Oak specifically to give him the freedom to write, away from the restrictions imposed on him at Bury St Edmunds.4 However, Lydgate’s considerable religious credentials undermine this polarization. Lydgate directly confronts the conflict of interest perceived by critics between his religious and secular obligations, in a distinct challenge to those who regard him as primarily a worldly poet rather than the devout ‘monk of Bury’. A panoramic view of Lydgate’s canon establishes the religious context that enabled and encouraged an earnest retraction of his secular works. His numerous religious poems are pious, conventional and practical in their plain intention to assist worship. Miri Rubin uses poems such as the ‘Exposition of the Pater Noster’ to cast Lydgate as a typical representative of fifteenth-century parochial teaching.5 The ‘Procession of Corpus Christi’ (1427–29) shows that Lydgate ‘was primarily

2

Fiona Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to mak affray”: Lydgate the “Poet-Propagandist” as Hagiographer’, in John Lydgate: Poetry, Culture, and Lancastrian England, ed. by Larry Scanlon and James Simpson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 258–78 (p. 258). 3 Schirmer, John Lydgate, p. 8. Christopher Cannon, ‘Monastic Productions’, in Christopher Cannon, ‘Monastic Productions’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 316–48 (p. 342). 4

Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 190. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, p. 25. 5

Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 103–04. The shorter religious poems cited in this paper, including the ‘Testament’, are in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS, E. S. 107 and O. S. 192, 2 parts (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1911–34).

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interested in helping the layfolk of his day with their faith and with their prayers’.6 It was this practical utility that merited two prints of the ‘Interpretation and Virtues of the Mass’, a guide for priest and layperson, by Wynkyn de Worde (1501, 1520). In these poems, Lydgate confirms a much deeper familiarity with the mechanics of preaching than might be expected from a fourteenth- or fifteenthcentury Benedictine.7 Recent work on the only known book containing Lydgate’s hand, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 233, shows his interest in its conservative twelfth-century sermons by Geoffrey Babion in addition to, or possibly even instead of, its slim pagan florilegium.8 Nicholas Heale goes further, arguing that two of Lydgate’s inscriptions in the book’s back flyleaf (‘Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum’ and ‘Et veniat super nos misericordia tua domine’) ‘point us towards a Marian devotion and an awareness of our need for the mercy of God’.9 Lydgate’s shorter poetry is steeped in piety and a thorough concern for the spiritual lives of his readers. Autobiography is scant in Lydgate’s œuvre, but that which exists promotes the seriousness with which he approached his monastic vocation. Lydgate’s only description of his physical appearance, in the Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, is a deliberate effort to emphasize his monastic status.10 Lydgate’s primary reason for being in Canterbury is pilgrimage — his ‘vowes to aquyte’ (72) — and he restates and maintains this proper monastic purpose throughout the Prologue. Lydgate consciously separates his persona from Chaucer’s Monk, featuring extremely specific details: Lydgate is lean (Prol., 102; cf. General Prologue, I.200), pale (Prol., 89; cf. I.205), wears a ‘thredbar’ hood (Prol., 90; cf. I.192–96), rides a slender horse (Prol., 102; cf. I.168) and his bridle has no bell (Prol., 85; cf. I.169–71 and

6

Nicholas Heale, ‘John Lydgate, Monk of Bury St Edmunds, as Spiritual Director’, in The Vocation of Service to God and Neighbour, ed. by Joan Greatrex (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 59–71 (p. 62). See also the orthodox interpretation in Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 232, and the heterodox interpretation by Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, pp. 131–52. 7

See Margaret Jennings, ‘Monks and the Artes praedicandi in the Time of Ranulph Higden’, Revue Bénédictine, 86 (1976), 119–28, and Patrick J. Horner, ‘Benedictines and Preaching in Fifteenth-Century England’, Revue Bénédictine, 99 (1989), 313–32. 8

See my forthcoming article with Mark Faulkner, ‘The Autograph Hand of John Lydgate and a Manuscript from Bury St Edmunds Abbey’; cf. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 36, and Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, p. 16. 9

Heale, ‘John Lydgate, Monk of Bury St Edmunds, as Spiritual Director’, p. 61.

10

References are to John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. by Robert R. Edwards, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2001).

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VII.2795).

Patterson and Bowers suggest that the Host’s approval of the monk’s appearance is Lydgate’s covert attack on Henry V’s efforts to reform the Benedictine order; efforts which were intimately felt in Bury St Edmunds.11 There is much evidence of Lydgate’s loyalty to the abbey: his translations of the list of royal charters of privilege, his fulfilment of the commissions of the Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund, which Fiona Somerset demonstrates to be an effort to defend the privileges and rights of the abbey at Bury, and of the Legend of St Austin at Compton and Miracles of St Edmund.12 William Curteys, Lydgate’s closest abbot at Bury, probably owned the substantial Lydgate collection, London, British Library, MS Harley 2255, perhaps a measure of institutional approval of Lydgate because of his faithful fulfilment of monastic duties. That Lydgate felt a conflict between his Christian obligations and his obligations to fulfil the poetic demands made of him by his patrons is communicated through his five-part ‘Testament of Dan John Lydgate’. In this late poem, Lydgate describes his life and religious calling in a selective manner that suggests the deliberate suppression of unpalatable material. The second and third parts of the poem describe the poet’s childhood misdemeanours, including a memorable account of his applestealing at the age of fifteen (lines 638–41). Lydgate is surely recalling Augustine’s pear-stealing in Book II of his Confessions, an audacious association that links him with orthodoxy and suits the confessional tone of the ‘Testament’.13 However, after Lydgate’s childhood epiphany, the poem jumps straight to Lydgate in old age: ‘Age is crope In, calleth me to my grave’ (l. 217). This apparent omission of the

11 Lee Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate’, in New Historical Literary Study, ed. by Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 69–107 (p. 95) and J. M. Bowers, ‘Controversy and Criticism: Lydgate’s Thebes and the Prologue to Beryn’, Chaucer Yearbook, 5 (1998), 91–115 (p. 94); cf. Horner, ‘“The King Taught us the Lesson”’. 12

The charters are in Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey, ed. by Thomas Arnold, Rolls Series, 96, 3 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode for H.M.S.O., 1890–96), III, 215–37. See Katie Lowe, ‘The Poetry of Privilege: Lydgate’s Cartae Versificatae’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 50 (2006), 134–48, and Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-Century England (London: British Library, 2004), pp. 59–61. On Ss Edmund and Fremund, see Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to mak affray”’, pp. 258–78. On St Austin and Edmund, see Lowe, ‘The Poetry of Privilege’, pp. 163–64. 13

Similarly, Ruth Nisse (who supplies further reasons to associate Lydgate with Augustine) argues that Lydgate associates himself with St Ignatius and St Edmund in the first part of the poem rather than with classical poets as he does in his epics: ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”: Lydgate and the Styles of Martyrdom’, in John Lydgate, ed. by Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 279–98 (pp. 289–91).

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entire period of his life between the ages of 15 and 70 consciously raises the question, as Ruth Nisse asks, ‘What is the status of Lydgate’s long and extremely prolific career as the pre-eminent court poet?’14 In fact, Lydgate himself answers this very question in the poem, since it features an indictment of the aureate Chaucerian-Lydgatean diction with which he had become associated. Part II contains almost no Christian imagery until the final few stanzas. Lydgate instead presents us with what appears to be one of his characteristically long-winded aureate prologues. This aureate scene blends parts of the Troy Book, Siege of Thebes, and Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe.15 It is no coincidence that the action of the poem has the same spring-time April setting as his Chaucerian, pagan histories: Ther leves splaye at Phebus vprysyng, Thamerous foules with motytes and carolles, Salue this sesoun euery mor[we]nyng, W han Aurora hir licour distyllyng […] (lines 284–87)

Troy Book ( III.9), Siege of Thebes (Prol.1), Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe (3)

Tyme whan tyme maketh his resorte In geryshe Marche toward the Ariete […] (lines 294–95)

Siege of Thebes (Prol.1)

This tyme of ver Flora doth hir cure […] (line 332)

Siege of Thebes (Prol. 13), Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe (1)

Troy Book ( III.1), Siege of Thebes (Prol.9)

This aureate description has become so much a part of Lydgate’s poetic vocabulary (and there are countless other examples besides those listed above) that it is at first glance hard to tell whether he intends an allusion to Chaucer or to himself. Lydgate has honed his imitation of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Proem to Book II of Troilus and Criseyde and Book of the Duchess over his career.16 There are references to Chaucerian texts too (lines 325–26 refers to ‘Zepherus with his blastes sote’), but there is a strong case to be made that by the time of the ‘Testament’, this diction provoked overwhelmingly Lydgatean rather than Chaucerian associations

14

Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”’, p. 292.

15

Lydgate’s Troy Book, ed. by Bergen. Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe, in Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, ed. by Dana M. Symons, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2004). 16

See Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”’, p. 291, on this Chaucerian ‘sexy style’.

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in readers.17 Lydgate is being self-reflexive here, drawing attention to his own style, as we should expect from a poem claiming to be his ‘Testament’. However, having established this Lydgatean locus amoenus, Lydgate promptly shatters it. He situates himself in the idyll, but removes its typically restorative qualities and regrets his presence there: And for my part, I can remembre weell Whan I was gladdest in that fresshe sesoun, Lyke brotel glasse, not stable nor like stell, Fer out of harre, wilde of condicioun, Ful geryssh, and voyde of all resoun, Lyk a phane, ay turnyng to and fro, Or like an orloge whan the peys is goo. Youe to onthryfte and dissolucioun, Stode onbrydeled of all gouernaunce […] (ll. 395–403)

This association of the Lydgatean aureate scene with the folly of youth is befitting, since its Chaucerian diction occurs most frequently in his earliest poems, the Temple of Glass, the Complaynt, and the Troy Book. Lydgate describes himself as out of control: he suggests an awareness that such scenes serve no useful purpose. Lydgate intends to abandon the pagan and classical projects that were predominantly a product of his younger commissions in order to focus on explicitly religious verse. As part of this abandonment he describes himself in youth as ‘Lyk a phane, ay turnyng to and fro’, a phrase he uses to describe fickleness in the pagan protagonists of the Troy Book (I.3507–09). By the law of Lydgate’s epics, people are out of control and subject to Fortune in this way only when they are not accessing Christian values. As Lydgate explains in the Troy Book: For þer is nouther prince, lord, nor kyng, Be example of Troye, like as õe may se, Þat in þis lif may haue ful surete. Þerfore, to hym þat starf vppon þe rood, Suffringe deth for our alder goode, Lyfte vp õoure hertis & thinke on him among. (V .3576–81)

Much of the tragedy in the Troy Book and Siege of Thebes occurs because the pagan Trojans and Thebans have no means of turning to a Christian God to cope with the oscillations of Fortune. In Book II of the Troy Book, for instance, Lydgate

17

See Lois Ebin, ‘The Theme of Poetry in Dunbar’s “Goldyn Targe”’, Chaucer Review, 7 (1972), 147–59, on Lydgate’s aureate vocabulary.

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expresses bemusement at the translation of Guido delle Colonne’s digression on the perils of idolatry (II.5925–59): he argues that it can serve no purpose in the pagan universe of his protagonists. Scott-Morgan Straker and James Simpson both find that the Christian and Lancastrian commendation at the end of the Troy Book is too little too late.18 In the ‘Testament’, Lydgate tackles this directly. Whereas he was forced by fidelity to his sources to avoid Christian lessons in his epic translations, he can turn, in the ‘Testament’, from the locus amoenus to Christ in full willingness: Whiche remembryng, be meke confessyoun, Now with my potent to fynde allegeaunce, Of olde surfetes, contrite with repentaunce, To the Iesu, I make my passage, Rehersyng trespaces don in my tender age. (ll. 404–08)

Having damaged the aureate idyll beyond repair, Lydgate makes the turn to Christ required to control the instability that it inspired in him, speaking of ‘repentaunce’ and ‘confessyoun’. Lydgate has shown the religious, didactic inadequacy of the epic poetry with which this diction is associated. He describes the instability of the world in the same terms as in the Siege of Thebes: The world vnstable, now ebbe, nowe is flood, Eche thyng concludyng on mutabilite, Geyn whos daungeres I holde this counsel gode, To prei for mercy to Iesu on oure kne. (‘Testament’, 205–08) And our lif her, who tak hed therto, Is but an exile and a pilgrymage, Ful of torment and of bitter rage, Lich a see rennyng to and fro, Swyng an ebbe whan the flood is do. (Siege of Thebes, III, 3418–22)

Whereas the pagan Thebans were unable to access this lesson, Lydgate shows that, in his awareness of the vacuity of the aureate idyll and thus the futility of nonreligious poetry, he himself did finally access it. Only Christian beliefs and the religious texts that accompany them can cope with earthly mutability. In its rejection of his aureate diction and associated epic values, this expression of regret constitutes a retraction.

18

James Simpson, ‘The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 397–423 (p. 418). Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Rivalry and Reciprocity in Lydgate’s Troy Book’, New Medieval Literatures, 3 (1999), 119–47 (p. 147).

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That the epic language with which Lydgate has forged his career is largely inadequate to convey Christian ideas is a motif of the ‘Testament’: Ther is no speche nor language can remembre, Lettre, sillable, nor word that may expresse, Though into tunges were turned euery member Of man, to telle the excellent noblesse, Of blessed Iesu […] (ll. 57–61)

Lydgate signals an awareness of the limitations of this language and its ability to convey religious lessons. The poetic language used to describe the aureate idyll failed to serve a higher purpose and this is now contrasted with religious writing. The frequent textual references in the first part of the ‘Testament’ are wholly religious. Besides the repeated invocation of the ‘name of Iesu’ (line 113 et passim), he describes the writing engraved in St Ignatius’s heart, refers to ‘Poules pysteles’ (74) and depicts the ‘T’ with which repentants are marked. This textuality culminates in the two acrostics spelling ‘JESVS’ (169–84). Lydgate’s childhood epiphany is itself highly textual: he sees a crucifix ‘With this “vide”, wrete there besyde’ (745). The poem itself is grandly called a ‘trites’ (238) or ‘testament’ (212, 239). The cumulative effect of this is to figure the word of God as the competitive rival of Lydgatean aureate, epic diction. Lydgate’s epiphany was occasioned not by courtly or epic poetry, but by the word of God. Late in life, Lydgate is repenting, arguing that the only texts worth reading are religious texts. As if in answer to the critics who regard Lydgate as primarily a courtly poet, Lydgate himself refuses to square the aureate language of courtly poetry with his Christian convictions. He thus ends the ‘Testament’ with Christ speaking down to him from the cross; the word of God has replaced courtly verse.19 This is put to apt use in the Clopton Chapel of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Long Melford, on the cornice scrolls of which are painted thirty-two stanzas from the ‘Testament’, still legible today.20 The lines above the altar are taken from the final part of the poem, in which Christ speaks to Lydgate from the cross. Similarly, in London, British Library, MS Arundel 285, Part V of the poem has been anonymized and extracted from the poem.21 Thus Lydgate has been 19

See Nisse, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”‘, p. 293, on the disappearance of the first person in this part of the poem. 20

See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 86–90. 21

Devotional Poems in Verse and Prose from MS. Arundel 285 and MS. Harleian 6919, ed. by J. A. W. Bennett, Scottish Text Society, 3rd ser., 23 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1955).

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successful in asking that his religious poetry and devotion to God supersede his epics, which cannot be instructive in the same way. Besides the ‘Testament’, there are three other texts in which Lydgate explicitly draws attention to his old age and which can therefore confidently be dated to his later years. They support the thesis of a retraction. These poems are ‘On De Profundis’, ‘An Exposition of the Pater Noster’ and the ‘Prayer in Old Age’. All are patently religious, devout poems, the first of which was obediently written by Lydgate for William Curteys to hang on the wall of the church, and the second of which Rubin describes as ‘typical of the current vernacular pastoral manuals’.22 Lydgate does seem to have withdrawn into poetic religious conformity on this evidence. The third of these poems, the ‘Prayer in Old Age’, is worth quoting at length, because Lydgate fills in some of the years so conspicuously absent in the ‘Testament’: The myspende tyme of all my mydle yeris, When lust with fors was fresh yn that sesoun, My froward fals foren desires, Wyth many old diuerse transgressioun, Fer fro vertu, contrarye to resoun, — O lord, late pite thy rygore qveme Or that Iugement do execucioun; Blyssid Iesu! do mercy or thou deme. Duryng that age I coude not aduertyse, Of necligens in my memoriall, By providens to see this straunge gyse, Alle wordely fresshnesse by processe shall appalle; And how fortune amonge hir chaunges alle When folk lest wenyth, her servauntis cast doun; Then is no mene, but to clepe and calle To mercy and grace and Cristes passioun. (ll. 9–24)

Lydgate regrets not emphasizing religion in his ‘mydle yeris’ as the antidote to Fortune, recalling the discussion in the ‘Testament’ of ‘myspent tyme’ (248). He uses the same vocabulary of mutability that characterizes his epics. Just as he did at the end of the Troy Book and Siege of Thebes, Lydgate turns to God as a defence against Fortune. However, whereas the pagan protagonists of these epics are excluded from the Christian lesson and therefore suffer through Fortune, Lydgate instead uses his faith as a defence. This Boethian resolution is predominantly absent from his epics. The alliteration in lines 10–11 of the ‘Prayer in Old Age’ encourages poetic 22

Rubin, Corpus Christi, p. 100.

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connotations, suggesting that he regards his epic, courtly poetry, as in Chaucer’s Retraction, as one of those ‘transgressiouns’ mentioned in the first stanza. The poem is a strong confession of ‘necligens’ in not seeing or emphasizing the importance of God when he was writing his earlier works, confirming the implications of the ‘Testament’. The religious turn requisite in this poetic retraction is in abundant evidence not only in the ‘Testament’ but also in contemporary accounts of Lydgate. John Shirley’s rubric for Lydgate’s ‘Every thing to his Semblable’ in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 59, a manuscript compiled in the late 1440s and thus near the end of Lydgate’s life, reads: ‘made by Lydegate affter his resorte to his religyoun’.23 Whether or not Shirley had independent evidence of Lydgate’s ‘resorte’, the rubric shows a contemporary awareness of a retraction.24 ‘Every thing to his Semblable’, which cannot accurately be dated, advises man to ‘drawe to God, to whome he was semblable’ (line 176) rather than ‘Chase eorþely thinges of nature corumpable’ (174). This is consistent with the religious turn described in the ‘Testament’. Shirley’s rubric can be taken as evidence of a contemporary awareness of Lydgate’s retraction and religious turn. This fits with what we know of Lydgate’s return to Bury from Hatfield Broad Oak: the wording of the dimissio releasing him in 1434 gives the impression that Lydgate asked to return to Bury in order ‘as you say, to receive the benefit of a better life’.25 This does indeed give the impression that Lydgate was anxious to return to Bury and its more closely guarded religious environment. One objection that might be raised to this model of a retraction in old age is that the ‘Testament’ is not thought to be the last thing that Lydgate wrote. The Secrees of Old Philisoffres has long been held to be Lydgate’s last poem because it was unfinished at the time of his death, requiring completion by Benedict Burgh.26 23

On this manuscript, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley, pp. 145–69, especially p. 161.

24

Boffey and Edwards note ‘some grounds for concern about Shirley’s reliability as attributor’, but critical opinion is in fact divided on Shirley’s closeness to Lydgate, as Connolly, John Shirley, attests. Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘“Chaucer’s Chronicle,” John Shirley, and the Canon of Chaucer’s Shorter Poems’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 20 (1998), 201–18 (p. 208). 25

Green, Poets and Princepleasers, p. 190. Cf. Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Biobibliography, p. 25, who argues that Lydgate sought to stay in Hatfield Broad Oak ‘because the presumably more relaxed regime left him more leisure to write’. The dimissio is edited by Pearsall in John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, pp. 12–13. 26

References are to Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres: A Version of the ‘Secreta secretorum’, ed. by Robert Steele, EETS, E. S. 66 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1894).

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This translation, whilst moral in focus, is profoundly secular. If the ‘Testament’ and the other poems describing his mid-life indiscretions are really in the nature of a retraction, it would certainly be peculiar if Lydgate subsequently composed the Secrees. It is time for critics to question this received chronology. For the detail of Lydgate’s death in the middle of writing the Secrees, we rely on a rubric telling us that ‘here deyed this translator and nobil poete: and the yonge folowere gan his prologe’ (1491.0). If this rubric is true, then Lydgate died at an extremely opportune moment: at the exact moment, in fact, that the poem discusses death. Steele’s note lamely reads: ‘this line is one of those coincidences which look like design’, but he elsewhere admits that Lydgate’s contribution to the Secrees is ‘little more than the fragments of a translation, begun at various points, and brought together afterwards’, a view with which Pearsall agrees.27 The intriguing circumstances surrounding Lydgate’s composition and abandonment of the Secrees are beyond the scope of this paper, but there is evidently no reason to assume that death was the reason that Lydgate failed to complete it. A frustrated, deliberate abandonment of the poem, whilst speculative and in need of further research, would be consistent with the retraction proposed here. It is, furthermore, in keeping with what we know of Lydgate’s attitude to the material he was forced to translate for the Fall of Princes, as discussed below. In Shirley’s words, then, Lydgate underwent a ‘resorte’ to his religion, distancing himself to some extent from his epic poetry in his final years. So far, this retraction has, like Chaucer’s, been placed at the end of Lydgate’s life. There is, however, a credible case that the retraction can be taken further back; a case that Lydgate was never entirely comfortable with his commissions; a case that the retraction and pose as unwilling scribe of pagan history is a fundamental part of Lydgatean poetics. This topic is broached in the conclusion to this paper. A number of Lydgate’s shorter poems specifically criticize the type of epic writing through which Lydgate had made his name. His ‘Gloriosa dicta sunt de te’ (also known as the ‘Balade of Oure Ladye’) is a pertinent example of Lydgate rejecting the matter of Troy and Rome in favour of the Virgin Mary: Auctours whylome gaf a prys to Troye Laude and honnour and comendacyoun In Remembraunce of þeyre olde Ioye Þat whylome was wel vsed in þat tovne, And eeke of Roome for domynacyoun,

27

Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres, ed. by Steele, p. 109 and p. xv. Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 297.

354

W. H. E. Sweet Cytees þat tyme of mooste souereyntee; But al þeyre booste may nowe be layde adowne, So glorious thinges beo sayde and song of þee. (ll. 25–32)

This stanza is Lydgate’s original addition to what is otherwise a largely accurate translation of Psalm 87 and Revelation 21. 19. The poem is especially fruitful for analysis because, unusually for Lydgate’s short texts, there is some evidence of its date of composition. Shirley’s rubric in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 3. 20 records that the poem was written ‘at þins[t]aunce of þe Busschop of Excestre’ (fol. 1). This is undoubtedly Lydgate’s long-standing acquaintance Edmund Lacy, who became bishop of Exeter in 1420. Elsewhere in the same manuscript (in the rubric for ‘Benedic anima mea domino’, p. 165), Shirley refers to Lacy as Dean of Windsor, suggesting that Shirley (or his exemplars) were able to differentiate the circumstances and date of composition. Lydgate therefore certainly wrote the lines quoted after 1420; which is to say after he had finished the Troy Book. There is no useful terminus ante quem since Lacy remained bishop of Exeter until past Lydgate’s death. In effect, Lydgate criticizes purveyors of the very subject with which he made his name: Troy. Lydgate’s only surviving prose work, the Serpent of Division, deals with Rome, another of the subjects dismissed in the ‘Gloriosa’. This short poem amounts to a rejection of the applicability of Troy and Rome to Christian themes, and because of the date, it might even be termed a retraction of his Troy Book or Serpent of Division. Lydgate is suggesting that Troy is not a suitable vehicle for Christian didacticism any more than it was for Lancastrian propaganda: he is implicitly retracting his classical poetry. This rejection of the matter of antiquity occurs in several of Lydgate’s shorter poems, which are more difficult to date than the ‘Gloriosa’. In successive poems, Lydgate rejects various genres and pagan subject matters. His ‘Ballade at the Reverence of Our Lady, Qwene of Mercy’, for instance, opens: A thowsand storiis kowde I mo reherse Off olde poetis, touchynge this matere, How that Cupide the hertis gan to perse Off his seruauntis, setting tham affere; Lo, here the fin of the errour and the weere! Lo, here of loue the guerdoun and greuaunce That euyr with woo his seruauntis doth avaunce! Wherfore I wil now pleynly my stile redresse, Of on to speke at need that will not faile […] (ll. 1–9)

This is an explicit echo of Troilus and Criseyde (V.1849–55), in which Chaucer suddenly (and notoriously) addresses the paganism of his protagonists at the end

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of the poem. Whereas Chaucer, it has almost universally been felt by critics, intends some sort of irony in this sudden attack on paganism, Lydgate takes Chaucer’s conclusion seriously. He starts where Troilus and Criseyde ends, turning from the pagans to Christ.28 Lydgate’s lines amount to a rejection of the amatory style. It is thus remarkable that his poem was later printed amongst the pagan works of Thynne’s Chaucer. Similarly, in ‘Misericordias domini in eternum cantabo’, Lydgate writes not of the ‘Canticulis of Conquest’ (line 33) or ‘Laureat tryumphes’ (37) or the ‘Bildyng of Ylioun in many stoory told’ (58), into which categories most of Lydgate’s pagan, classical, secular, laureate and occasional poems might be put, ‘But of Iesu’ (63). Lydgate condemns the representatives of pagan history, even Dares, who had escaped censure in the Troy Book (Prol. 310). Although he does not explicitly indict his own poetry, this reference to Troy cannot help but implicate his own texts. He terms pagan history ‘feynyng’ (78), to be contrasted with his own poetry ‘of Iesu’ (passim). There is no occupatio in these dismissals: the pagans are invoked specifically to emphasize the truth in the religious matters to which the poems immediately turn. In these shorter texts, Lydgate again and again articulates a rejection of the matter of Troy in favour of Christian piety. Finally, there is some evidence that this motif of regret and retraction is visible even in the epic poems themselves; that Lydgate was never really comfortable writing his pagan histories. He voices a weariness at completing the Troy Book: For almost wery, feint & weike I-now Be þe bestes & oxes of my plow, Þe longe day ageyn þe hil to wende. But almost now at þe londes ende Of Troye boke […] (V .2927–31)

This expression of relief at nearing the end of his translation immediately precedes the Christian turn in the text; Lydgate is happy to be able to turn away from this relentless pagan tragedy that cannot convey any Christian redemption. This can be contrasted with, for instance, Gavin Douglas’s use of the same topos in the Eneados, in which the poet’s sense of the ethical and stylistic importance of the text enables him to overcome his exhaustion: ‘thocht I wery was, me list not tyre,/Full laith to leif our wark swa in the myre’ (VII, Prol., 155–56).29 There is no such assurance in Lydgate’s translation. Lydgate’s own weariness fits with the change of attitude towards his task evident in the latter stages of the Troy Book and with his 28 29

Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 269.

Gavin Douglas, Virgil’s Aeneid Translated into Scottish Verse by Gavin Douglas, ed. by David Coldwell, Scottish Text Society, 3rd ser., 25, 27, 28, 30 (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1957–64).

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frustrations in the Fall of Princes (discussed below). We might speculate, in view of this, that the extraordinarily slow speed at which the Troy Book was written (around ten lines a day for eight years) is a reflection of an author who would prefer to be writing other things. He was at least distracted by his other Henrician commission, the straightforwardly pious Life of Our Lady. The Siege of Thebes, too, might be seen as an anxious text in its attitude to Lydgate’s own pagan histories. It has been persuasively argued by critics including James Simpson, Scott-Morgan Straker, and Robert Edwards that Lydgate intends his narrator in the Siege of Thebes to fail in order to favour the predestination-based explanation of the tragedy over the moral one.30 Yet Lydgate explicitly identifies himself, by name, as the poem’s narrator. Thus, if Lydgate intends the narrator to fail, then he is to some extent drawing attention to his own failure. This textually self-conscious companion to the Canterbury Tales, which was written without a patron around a year after finishing the Troy Book, should be seen in part as a commentary on Lydgate’s commissioned texts, as the monk expresses dissatisfaction at classical history and secular poetry. The Fall of Princes is Lydgate’s most extended articulation of frustration at translating largely pagan material at the behest of a patron. Its probable composition in the late 1430s places it in the same period as his other texts of ‘resorte’ in old age, particularly the ‘Testament’. Lydgate is forced to pander to Duke Humfrey’s demands in undertaking this translation of Laurent de Premierfait (see especially II.141–61).31 As Daniel Wakelin shows, the Fall of Princes is one of many texts that Duke Humfrey commissioned to ‘flaunt his erudition’.32 It seems likely that he specified the text for translation rather than that Lydgate suggested it. The most telling instance of Duke Humfrey’s intervention in Lydgate’s work is the forced insertion of a passage, despite Lydgate’s reservations (II.978), from Coluccio Salutati’s Declamatio into the part of the text dealing with Lucrece: ‘my lord bad I sholde abide,/By good auys at leiser to translate/The doolful processe off hir pitous fate’

30

James Simpson, ‘“Dysemol daies and fatal houres”: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale’, in The Long Fifteenth Century, ed. by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 15–33. Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes’, Review of English Studies, n.s., 52 (2001), 1–21. Robert R. Edwards, ‘Translating Thebes: Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Stow’s Chaucer’, English Literary History, 70 (2003), 319–41. 31

References are to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. by Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS, E. S. 121–24 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1923–27). 32

Wakelin, Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, p. 32.

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(II.1006–08). Pearsall explains that Lydgate ‘wearily obliged’ by inserting texts belonging to Duke Humfrey into the Fall of Princes, ‘not seeing anything particularly gratifying in it, but glad to humour his patron’.33 Lydgate certainly emphasizes his servility: A, how it is an hertli reioishyng To serue a prynce that list to aduertise Off their seruantis the feithful iust menyng And list considre to guerdone ther seruise. (III.78–81)

There was no need for Lydgate to include these lines in the text at this juncture. His decision to do so is occasioned by a desire to warn readers that he is writing under orders. By comparison, Lydgate’s additions to Guido delle Colonne’s text in the Troy Book are never attributed to Henry V’s intervention. In different circumstances, Lydgate’s involvement of Duke Humfrey in the Fall of Princes might be interpreted as a topos of the commissioned author, but the persistence with which this message of reluctance is communicated throughout Lydgate’s commissioned œuvre is surely beginning to look more deliberate. The Fall of Princes, like the Troy Book, was a monumental undertaking for Lydgate and one in direct conflict with a ‘resorte to religyoun’ that discouraged precisely these types of largely pagan histories. The enormity of the task would have been painfully exacerbated if he was forced to complete the commission by Duke Humfrey (possibly out of financial hardship, as described in his ‘Letter to Gloucester’). The Fall of Princes should be interpreted with due regard for the circumstances of its composition: a poet writing a text most likely specified by his patron. Throughout, Lydgate exhibits an explicitly ‘inert response to the materials’ given to him by Duke Humfrey.34 As Nigel Mortimer notes, ‘Lydgate’s exhortations to princes to regulate their moral behaviour frequently clash with his pathosarousing laments on the inconstancy of Fortune and the ephemerality of human power’.35 These contradictions and expressions of pessimism at the text’s lessons corroborate a poetics of retraction. Perhaps we should take Lydgate’s Retraction even further back, then, to before the Fall of Princes; to 1420, to the end of the Troy Book and to the self-reflexive Siege of Thebes. There is some evidence that 33

Pearsall, John Lydgate, p. 245. Also Seth Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 38. 34 35

Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371–1449): A Bio-bibliography, p. 33.

Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’: Narrative Tragedy in its Literary and Political Contexts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 60, accompanied with numerous examples of these contradictions throughout the text.

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Lydgate was loath to complete such pessimistic, pagan commissions in the first place; that Lydgate was something of a reluctant laureate because he felt a conflict of interest with his religious obligations.36 The recognition of Lydgate’s retraction and of his discomfort with the very subjects that secured his fame has profound implications for delineations of Lydgatean poetics and of fifteenth-century laureate poetics in general. As is well known, Lydgate’s commissions ranged from the evangelically religious and Christian to the uncompromisingly secular and pagan. The charge frequently levelled against him is thus that he was terminally inconsistent and contradictory. Reviews of Nigel Mortimer’s and Maura Nolan’s recent monographs on Lydgate, for instance, observe that he remains ‘a slippery entity’, eluding any ‘grand narrative of his voluminous output’.37 The struggle for Lydgatean critics has been to find a paradigm that takes account of all of the strands of Lydgate’s poetry and poetics. Whilst an awareness of Lydgate’s efforts at retraction does not wholly solve the problem of his alleged inconsistency, it does — in its introduction of the idea that Lydgate was self-aware and self-critical — indicate in strong terms that Lydgate was himself conscious of the contradictions that he had introduced in his earlier poetry. This is a challenge to the arguments of Lee Patterson, Alan Ambrisco, and Paul Strohm that Lydgate was not a poet in control of his material; that his efforts to provide Lancastrian legitimation texts failed because the political situation was ‘a recipe for inevitable cognitive/aesthetic breakdown’.38 If Lydgate was aware of the bind in which his patrons placed him, as his Retraction suggests, then this assumption of political naivety and poetic ineptitude must be revisited. This concurs with the commendable reassessments of fifteenth-century laureate poetics

36

This agrees at least in principle with Seth Lerer’s account of Lydgate’s attitude to laureateship, in which Lydgate contrasts the golden age of Dante and Petrarch with his own ‘debased environment’ in which ‘the business of writing becomes writing about business’ (Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, pp. 37–39). Implicit in Lerer’s account is the same notion of conscious poetic compromise voiced more explicitly here. 37

Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’; Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture; and Anthony Bale, ‘Twenty-First-Century Lydgate’, Modern Philology, 105 (2008), 698–704 (p. 701). See also Nicholas Perkins’s review of Nolan in Notes and Queries, 251 (2006), 554–55 (p. 554). 38

Patterson, ‘Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England’; Alan S. Ambrisco and Paul Strohm, ‘Succession and Sovereignty in Lydgate’s Prologue to the Troy Book’, Chaucer Review, 30 (1995–96), 40–57; Paul Strohm, ‘Hoccleve, Lydgate and the Lancastrian Court’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. by David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 640–61 (p. 659).

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in the Lydgatean criticism of James Simpson, Scott-Morgan Straker, and Robert Meyer-Lee.39 A thorough redefinition of Lydgatean poetics would require a much fuller survey of Lydgate’s œuvre than is possible in this paper. However, the evidence provided here of Lydgate’s poetic conscience does contribute to the ongoing rehabilitation of Lydgate as a poet whose poetics emerged entirely by design. There is, in conclusion, substantial poetic evidence to support Shirley’s claim that Lydgate underwent a ‘resorte to his religyoun’. In Lydgate’s autobiographical poems, the ‘Testament’ and ‘Prayer in Old Age’, he alludes repeatedly to his regret at the activities of his ‘mydle yeris’. Whilst he never explicitly specifies his own poetry, it is a reasonable assumption that this refers primarily to his poetic activities. His short religious poems directly reject the matter of antiquity in favour of Christian piety, implying a rejection of Lydgate’s own secular and laureate poems. There is a poetics of reluctance running through the epic poems themselves, as Lydgate vents frustration at fulfilling such pagan commissions. The holistic view of Lydgate’s œuvre encouraged in this paper indicates that Lydgate was fully aware of his twin duties as monk and court poet. The composition of pagan histories appears to have been a prerequisite for laureation, but one that Lydgate eventually revolted against. The circumspection with which he treats the types of text with which he originally made his name does constitute, in a much more consistent if less explicit way than Chaucer, a poetic retraction.

39

Besides articles already cited, see particularly: James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 34–67; Scott-Morgan Straker, ‘Propaganda, Intentionality, and the Lancastrian Lydgate’ in John Lydgate, ed. by Scanlon and Simpson, pp. 98–128; and Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt.

Part VII The Codex as an Instrument of Reform

D EVOTIONAL C OSMOPOLITANISM IN F IFTEENTH -C ENTURY E NGLAND Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry

I

n reflecting upon the discussion of Arundel’s Constitutions and its supposed effects at the Oxford conference from which this volume proceeds, and in scholarship of fifteenth-century religious writing more generally, the present authors were reminded of remarks made by the late cultural historian Michel de Certeau, in an incomparable account of the politics of reading: Inclined to believe that its own cultural models are necessary for the people in order to educate their minds and elevate their hearts, the elite […] always assumes that the public is moulded by the products imposed on it. To assume that is to misunderstand the act of ‘consumption’. This misunderstanding assumes that ‘assimilating’ necessarily means ‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs, and not ‘making something similar’ to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating and reappropriating it. Between these two possible meanings, a choice must be made, and first of all on the basis of a story whose horizon has to be outlined.1

The following essay will attempt to trace some of the lineaments of that story. It will assess a number of fifteenth-century devotional compilations which demonstrate the vitality of religious debate in the years and decades after Arundel. The books we discuss elide completely the fixities of that pervasive — and all too persuasive — sectarian historiographical binary of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘heterodoxy’ which has come to define pre-Reformation English religious history. In turn, they evade the efforts of fifteenth-century ecclesiastical authorities for whom their ‘own cultural models are necessary for the people in order to educate their minds and elevate their

1

Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 166.

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hearts’. In other words, these compilations challenge our conceptualizations of how fifteenth-century religious readers and compilers confront the theological issues of their day and they chastise the scholarly tendency to fix ‘mainstream’, ‘conservative’, or ‘radical’ religious thought. For the present authors, their experience of growing up in a sectarian society has provided an invaluable frame of comparison with fifteenth-century devotional controversies. Contrary to the assumption that religious and political sectarianism is predicated on a public rhetoric of oppositional cultural identification to which individuals must pledge allegiance, the practice of everyday life in such societies involves citizenry in regular acts of improvisation, adaptation, evasion, and creativity, as different social situations, their participants and audiences, require strategic self-reinvention, sometimes denying, sometimes affirming membership of one or another camp or tribe, and yet always evading all-out occupation of one political place or another. This is not to deny that for groups of fifteenth-century individuals, the attachment to Wycliffite or clerically orthodox positions did not carry the weight of conviction. But conviction is a state of mind: identifying oneself as ‘Wycliffite’ or ‘orthodox’ brings about no ontological transformation. Scholarship too regularly assumes that taking a position in the devotional controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries effects a material change from one thing — say, Catholic — to another — Lollard, or, later, Protestant, as if ‘Catholic’, ‘Lollard’, or ‘Protestant’ had some sort of qualia immune to mutability. To do so is to succumb to the seductions of martyrology, in which identity is ossified for eternity. But religious and political affiliations were and are subject to the provisionality of circumstance. As the authors recall, real people occupied oppositional positions in sectarian Northern Ireland and acted from those positions to destroy their perceived enemies, with an inexcusable cost in lives. Paradoxically, both ‘republican’ and ‘loyalist’ factions did so by drawing on precisely the same discursive field. A shared discursive field is also in operation for those individuals and groups in fifteenth-century England for whom the ‘threat’ of a tyrannical church or poisonous heresy was absolutely real: thus the counter-reprimands concerning the true Church and real heretics. However, for others, such discourses and the actions they sponsor have to be negotiated tactically. Our suggestion is that fifteenth-century devotional compilations remind us that one’s political and cultural place is never fixed, even if a momentary attachment is inscribed in an act, a declaration — or a book. In the midst of religious controversies, one may occupy a place, but, says de Certeau, places ‘are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in

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reverse, remaining in an enigmatic state […] a place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions’.2 The assumption that the fifteenth century witnesses the contraction of religious speculation made famous by Nicholas Watson’s Speculum essay of 19953 is simply not supported by the material evidence. Instead, it testifies to an altogether different and arguably more significant flowering: that of an appetite for books, their production, circulation, ownership, and reproduction. The fifteenth century is, in fact, the true age of ‘vernacular theology’. As we shall argue, fifteenth-century religious writing, at least as manifested in devotional compilations,4 sponsors what we will term ‘devotional cosmopolitanism’: a radical openness to the suggestions of antithetical theologies which produces among readers a form of ‘hospitable reading’ in which difference is tolerated, re-thought, adapted and appropriated in the interests of re-imagining Christian community in England.

I The books we will discuss here might seem to contradict any simple understandings of ‘hospitable reading’, and have been deliberately chosen because their contents (and the reception of those contents) might be construed as repudiating a notion of devotio-literary openness. Our first book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 789 (hereafter B), contains evidence of censorship, and it is possible to map its expurgations onto a bifurcated divide between ‘orthodox’ and ‘Lollard’, although, we would argue, it would be wrong to do. Even so, there would appear to be nothing particularly ‘hospitable’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ about censorship, wherein readings are rejected, in fact, are sometimes utterly voided because a reader has found text that he or she finds objectionable, or perhaps even dangerous. Censorship, the neutralizing of certain readings, or indeed, the rewriting of passages that dealt with contentious points of theology, is something Havens describes in ‘grey area’ texts, with Lollards apparently adapting devotional literature to reflect their 2

De Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, pp. 108, 117.

3

Watson, ‘Censorship’.

4

Devotional compilations may have been among the ‘best sellers’ of the fifteenth-century book trade, a possibility hinted at by their survival in large quantities (eighty-six in Robert Raymo’s survey of ‘Miscellaneous Manuals’) in spite of the fact that such books often occupy the lower end of the vernacular manuscript record; see A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, ed. by Albert E. Hartung, 11 vols (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1967–2005), VII (1986), 2495–99.

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distinct beliefs and non-Lollards removing and adapting texts so that ‘their orthodoxy is in no doubt’.5 Here we pause to discuss a related censored book which retains the stark glaring voids and the scratched querying notes that preceded the scraping of text from parchment. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 938 is a large compendium of often reformist texts (though not, by any means, definitively Wycliffite texts) which was carefully audited by a contemporary reader who disagreed with a number of perspectives in the book, noting offending passages by penning ‘quere’ in the margin, and very occasionally scraping particularly problematic lines from the book. Such expurgations are usually accompanied by the marginal note ‘quere ipsa materia’. It is generally the most extreme positions that we associate with Lollardy that are marked — for instance, the refutation of priestly celibacy and instructions for prelates to marry, or the articulation that bishops and priesthood should be replaced by ‘trewe prechours’ of the gospels; several attacks on the friars have also come to the notice of the auditor. Interestingly, the auditor also scrapes out a wholly orthodox passage describing the second part of Holy Church as comprising the souls in purgatory, apparently demonstrating an objection sometimes attributed to Lollards in the fifteenth century.6 Such residual scars suggest an ideological clash, which inevitably draws the liberal scholar into imagining a binary encounter between reactionary reader and heterodox text that precipitated an act of violence against the book. And yet, in pruning only small gobbets of disagreeable readings from the volume whilst retaining so much that remains radical, censorship might actually establish the reformist interests of the reader to a much greater degree than it gives evidence of his or her sectarian difference from the book’s original compiler. In signalling a number of readings that are suspect or voiding text completely, the censor, a meticulously careful reader of the book, simultaneously accommodates the vast majority of the book within his political purview. Such activities might even hint at hybrid variations in Lollard belief, just as such compilations may also reveal myriad blends of radical and neutral interests that were held independently of Lollardy. Such readers ‘poach’ — they meld texts to their own beliefs, rather than being passive recipients of ideology.7 It is thus possible for a compiler or reader of devotional miscellanies to accommodate texts emerging from theologico-political poles: for someone to identify with vehement 5 For these examples of textual adaptation according to non-Lollard or Lollard belief see Havens, ‘Shading the Grey Area’, pp. 337–52 (pp. 344–51, citation from p. 351). 6

For discussion of Lollard responses to Purgatory see Hudson, PR, pp. 309–10.

7

See De Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, p. 116.

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clerical criticism, to believe in the necessity of biblical translation, or even to support the withdrawing of tithes from unfit curates, but simultaneously to believe in the spiritual efficacy of confession to an ordained priest and the corporeal presence of Christ in the eucharistic host. It is also possible that readers might sympathize with certain radical theologies, but not with the hectoring sectarian exploitation of such beliefs by some authors of pastoral literature. We believe the messy inter-penetration of reformist and Wycliffite texts with normative religious literature contrasts powerfully both with scholarly conceptions of Lollardy and with accounts of its suppression. B is a devotional miscellany probably dating to the first half of the fifteenth century. The twenty and some texts are written into the book with little sense of economy, leading Thomas Arnold to speculate that the book was made ‘for some person of rank’.8 The leaves are sized approximately 215 x 150 mm, and the mere eighteen lines of large, beautifully written textura formata script are penned in a text frame that occupies only 130 x 83 mm of each side. A. I. Doyle described the script as fit ‘for some ecclesiastical purpose’9 and the handwriting and commodious dimensions of the eighteen lines of text to each leaf perhaps suggest a scribe practised in penning high-quality liturgical books for the professional religious, although it is not necessarily the case that B was itself produced within, or for, a religious house. There is a fascinating blend of vernacular and Latin contents that signals, typically for such collections, a book intended to service a number of functions, from facilitating basic catechesis in texts such as the ‘ABC on the Passion’, couched as a work for ‘children to scole’,10 to works demanding more sophisticated readers, such as the Speculum peccatoris and Bernardine tracts in Latin.11 The book opens with one of a number of Middle English translations of the short pseudo-Bonaventuran treatment of the Last Supper and Passion, 8

Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, III (1971), xiii.

9

Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English’, II, 36–37, n. 20. The book was in the hands of lay readers by the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century judging by the writing at its rear. 10

IMEV 1483; closely related to IMEV 1523, in London, British Library, MS Harley 3594, and Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18. 7. 21 (fols 152r–156r (fol. 152r)); introductory section from Harley 3594 in Reliquiae antiquae: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, Illustrating Chiefly Early English Literature and the English Language, ed. by Thomas Wright and J. O. Halliwell (London: Pickering, 1841–43), pp. 62–63. 11

The Latin items, which break the run of quire signatures in the book, may have been something of an afterthought, added by the scribe to a complete, or largely complete, vernacular book.

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Meditationes de Passione Christi.12 This ‘terse southern version’13 of pseudoBonaventure structures its account of the events of the Passion into a series of meditations for the canonical hours. Allan Westphall has found that these meditations are characterized by an ‘economy of expression’, omitting ‘what is not strictly necessary to the core narrative of Christ’s Passion’.14 Although the text does follow the Latin Meditationes in enjoining the reader to engage in affective consideration of Christ’s suffering, encouraging the reader to ‘bisily biholde wiþ þe iõen of his soule , þe mysteries þt þer ben don’, and thus imaginatively to witness scriptural events, in this the translator is also economical, shortening and sometimes omitting entirely episodes in the original Latin version’s extended affective focus on the pain of Christ and Mary. Representative of a conservative brand of affective piety, it is interesting that B’s version of the Middle English Passion has apparently received a subtle alteration in respect of its discussion of (that litmus test topic) the Eucharist, which suggests it might have been tinkered with by a Wycliffite, or at least, by someone who had at least some vague appreciation of Wycliffite theology on the topic. The line in all versions of the text other than B carries a reading somewhat like that in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 669/646, a copy made by the incumbent of St Bartholomew’s Hospital at Smithfield, John Cok:15

12

Jason Reakes, building on the research of Elizabeth Salter, identified ten manuscripts containing copies of this translation; see ‘The Middle English Prose Translation of the Meditaciones de Passione Christi and its Links with Manuscripts of Love’s Mirror’, Notes and Queries, 27 (1980), 199–202; there is one further example of the text unidentified by Reakes and Salter in Princeton, University Library, MS Taylor 11. 13

See Nicholas Love’s ‘Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ’, ed. by Elizabeth Salter, Analecta Cartusiana, 10 (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974), esp. pp. 55–118 (p. 103); although the Princeton copy mentioned above (perhaps the earliest example of the text) is from the far north-western reaches of the West Riding of Yorkshire, the Middle English Meditationes appears largely to have circulated in the south-east of England, and particularly in the metropolitan area; dialectal evidence, however, suggests that MS B might have been produced in the West Midlands. 14

Westphall’s profile of the text, alongside codicological descriptions of relevant manuscripts, is published online as part of the AHRC-funded Geographies of Orthodoxy project at . 15

The manuscript, containing several Rollean texts and a C-version excerpt of Piers Plowman, might have been made from late in the first quarter of the fifteenth century onwards; annotation indicates that Cok must have made the book available to his bibliophilic friend, John Shirley.

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Ffor him forsoþe þat we receyue in þe glorious sacrament . þat same it is þat wondirfully toke flesch & blood of þe mayde marie , & for þe of her was born . & suffrid deþ . & ros from deþe to lyue. & he styõe into heuen & sette hym on þe faderis ryõt side.16

Here, in a thoroughly conventional account of the eucharistic host, the fleshliness of the living Christ is emphasized in relating the orthodox interpretation of the eucharistic miracle. The reading in B is much the same, but differs in that a potentially modificatory term has been added to the discussion of the sacrament: ‘For him forsoþe þat we receyuen in þe glorious sacrament goostly , is þilke same þat wonderfulli took fleisch and blood in þe mayde Marye’.17 The unique addition of ‘goostly’ in B opens a hermeneutic space in which both orthodox and Wycliffite interpretation of the sacrament become entirely possible, where Christ can be both spiritually and corporeally present in the host, or where the word ‘goostly’ serves to alter entirely the meaning of the sentence — the Christ received in the host is received spiritually (and, by implication, not bodily). This change to the Middle English Meditationes is so subtle that it might even have evaded the attention of the compiler of B, and certainly, the discussion of the sacrament in the book’s subsequent item is less equivocal, although it should be recorded that the words here presented in bold were initially skipped by the scribe, and only subsequently copied by him into the margins of the leaf at some subsequent stage: ‘þe worshipful sacrament of the auter . cristis fleisch & his blood in liknesse of breed & of wyn, as hol as he took hit of þe blesside maiden’.18 The fact that the phrase ‘as hol as he took it’ makes no sense without mention of Christ’s fleshliness means that the subsequently added words were original to the text. These words were omitted at the first time of writing, and, though it is impossible to be entirely sure if this is due to an honest scribal error or a deliberate excision, it is difficult to see why eye-skip should have occurred. It is certainly a coincidence worth noting that in the two instances in which the sacrament is mentioned, the phraseology in each case is initially deployed in a manner that obfuscates the theology of the Eucharist, and specifically, the corporeal presence of Christ in the host.

16

Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College Library, MS 669/646, fol. 11; in quotations from manuscript sources the punctus elevatus has been replaced with a comma. 17

MS B, fol. 7r ; the text of the Meditationes de Passione Christi is edited as part of a parallel-text edition with a unique translation of the Meditationes in Joseph B. Jenks, ‘A Critical Edition of Meditations on the Passion: Michigan State University Manuscript No. 1’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State University, 1956). 18

MS B, fol. 60 r , from ‘Sixe þinges to knowe bi god almiõti’, an exposition of the fourteen points of truth, the Ten Commandments, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Works of Mercy, the Seven Virtues, and the Seven Deadly Sins that survives uniquely in this manuscript.

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If the pseudo-Bonaventuran translation in B was so subtly touched by a Lollard, or someone at least interested in opening up the reading to allow for a Wycliffite interpretation, it raises interesting questions about the devotional habits of Wycliffites, and those who picked up on their theology. Despite the inherent conservatism of the Middle English Meditationes, it nevertheless remains a meditative text in the pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition, and as such it is a text that relies on imagining scenes beyond those recounted in the gospels in order to garner spiritual benefit. A strict sense of biblical inviolability is obviously at odds with such modes of piety, rooted as they are in a salvific structure in which spiritual development takes place through the devotee’s emotive response to re-imagining details of Christ’s sacrifice and Mary’s maternal pain that have no foundation in the New Testament. Such extra-biblical meditative devotion, even of the conservative kind related in the Middle English Meditationes, is far removed from how we typically imagine Wycliffite religiosity, where adherents are depicted in inquisitorial records engaging in scriptural reading as their primary means of spiritual advancement. If the text was altered according to Wycliffite theology it leads to the possibility that Wycliffites partook in spiritual practices beyond those with which they have been chiefly connected through inquisitorial texts, and indeed, through scholarship’s sense of the writings circulated within, or deemed to have been associated with, Wycliffite networks. The Middle English Meditationes is one of a number of texts in B that centre on Christ’s Passion, although Christ’s suffering becomes the nexus for a variety of differing pious applications in the volume, including the penitential ‘Seven Sheddings of Christ’s Blood’, the catechetical ‘ABC on the Passion’, and the invocationary prayers focusing on Christ’s holy name and Bede’s prayer on the last seven words spoken by Christ from the Cross. In the latter third of the volume these Christological texts are interwoven with literature dealing with preparation for death and final judgement, paralleling a common (and clearly artful) tendency in devotional manuals to reflect on eschatology in their final gatherings.19 Perhaps the

19

From fol. 123r onwards the book includes a ‘Craft of Dying’ text based on chapter five of Suso’s Horologium sapientae; see Peter Sydney Jolliffe, A Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings of Spiritual Guidance, Subsidia Mediaevalia, 2 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), L. 8 (c) (p. 125), fols 123r–139v ; Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God (a text that advises the reader on how to pray for divine grace against reflections, among other things, on the suffering of Christ), Jolliffe, Check-List, M. 15 (p. 129), fols 139v –146r; a unique address by Christ to the damned (discussed above), fols 146 v–147r; a unique verse address written as prose, to the living from a corpse, see IMEV 2255, Jolliffe, Check-List, F. 16 (p. 83), fols 149r–150r; a text on visiting the sick and preparing them spiritually for death, Jolliffe, Check-List, L. 7 (p. 215), fols 15 v–160r; a

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most extraordinary text in this section is a unique work that blends eschatology with reflection on the Passion. In it, the crucified Christ speaks directly to an audience of the damned on Judgement Day, displaying his wounds to the hellbound, and castigating his listeners for choosing sin in spite of his pain on their behalf: ‘I suffride deeþ, þat þu schuldis haue heritage of lijf […] where is þe prijs of mi blood[?]’.20 There is a chilling aspect to the text, in which contemporary readers and hearers are invited to imagine they are Christ’s addressees, attending to his ‘dreedful sentence’ as he banishes them to hell. As discussed in a recent article by Anna Lewis, who builds on work by Hudson and Peikola, Wycliffites were absorbed with eschatological issues, but there are no hints of the characteristic registers of Lollard apocalypticism here, in which we might expect the faithful to be pitted against a papal antichrist.21 Again, in this final third of the manuscript there are a number of texts that seem incommensurate with traditional conceptions of Lollardy: texts such as the Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, inclusive of ‘a lengthy prayer of petition, which asks for the reader’s salvation’ standing in clear opposition to Wycliffite accounts of salvation theology.22 B has its place within the historiographical treatment of Wycliffism primarily because of the inclusion of three texts in a section of the manuscript devoted to pastoralia, those sorts of texts that range from basic catechetical texts that do scarcely more than provide a list of dogmatic tenets, to complex explorations of their theological and doctrinal implications. Several of the items in B have previously been argued to have emanated from Wycliffite polemicists, or even from the pen of Wyclif himself.23 The commentaries on the Pater Noster and Ave Maria are a pairing extant in several manuscripts, including some which contain strongly Wycliffite elements. The version of the Pater Noster commentary in British Library, MS Harley 2385 is extended in comparison with that in B, perhaps tellingly, near the conclusion, with a diatribe against ‘those who “pursuwe” preachers

number of the texts from this section of the book are edited in John C. Hirsh, ‘Prayer and Meditation in Late Mediaeval England: MS Bodley 789’, Medium Ævum, 48 (1979), 55–66. 20

MS B, fol. 147r.

21

See Anna Lewis, ‘Exegesis of the End: Limitations of Lollard Apocalypticism as Revealed in a Commentary on Matthew 24’, Literature and Theology, 23 (2009), 357–87. 22 23

See Hirsh, ‘Prayer and Meditation in Late Mediaeval England’, p. 58.

The attribution to Wyclif originates in Bale, repeated in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold.

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of the Gospel’.24 The text as it occurs in B however, is politically neutral; Kellogg and Talbert characterized it as lacking ‘a single expressly Wyclifite idea’.25 The Pater Noster is one of those texts that gives evidence of the universality of aspects of Wycliffite textual culture. In Harley 2385, the Ave Maria commentary (along with the Pater Noster) is actually attributed to Wyclif in an ascription by the scribe.26 This short commentary on the Marian prayer incorporates a stinging attack on the papally derived version of the Ave with two extra words not found in the gospels (Gabriel saying the name ‘Marie’ in his Annunciation address, and Elizabeth naming Jesus in her blessing of Mary), and a concomitant negative appraisal of the papal indulgence granted to those who say the extended version of the prayer.27 Interestingly, whilst the criticisms remain in the B Ave, there appears to have been an attempt, in Peikola’s words, to ‘soften the heterodox sentiments of the tract’.28 The concern that ‘men shulden not […] adde unto godis word’29 is retained; however, the invective on papal indulgences has become unclear through some clumsy editing.30 Nevertheless, what remains of the discussion in B is still a strident defence of the integrity of the gospels: [A]nd þe pope may õive pardoun bi addinge of þes two wordis . maye he adde oþere mo . and wiþdrawe . as him likiþ . and so turne godis lawe in to lawe of anticrist.31

In fact, it might be argued that the changes made to the text in B were less concerned with softening ‘heterodoxy’, but aimed instead to soften the hectoring

24

Ernest W. Talbert and S. Harrison Thomson, ‘Wyclyf and His Followers’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ed. by Hartung, II (1970), 354–80, 402–03, 517–33 and 547–50 (p. 363). 25

A. L. Kellogg and Ernest W. Talbert, “The Wycliffite Pater Noster and Ten Commandments, with Special Reference to English MSS. 85 and 90 in the John Rylands Library’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 42 (1959–60), 345–77. 26 Matti Peikola dates Harley 2385 to c. 1400: ‘“And After All, Myn Aue-Marie Almost To The Ende”: Pierce the Ploughman’s Crede and Lollard Expositions of the Ave Maria’, English Studies, 81 (2000), 273–92 (p. 280); see also Anne Hudson, ‘A New Look at the Lay Folks’ Catechism’, Viator, 16 (1985), 243–58. 27

Peikola discusses this indulgence, ‘“And After All, Myn Aue-Marie Almost To The Ende”’, pp. 287–92. It includes a Middle English version of the indulgence attacked in this Ave commentary. 28

Peikola, ‘“And After All, Myn Aue-Marie Almost To The Ende”’, p. 280.

29

MS B, fol. 104r, in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, III, 112.

30

Peikola, ‘“And After All, Myn Aue-Marie Almost To The Ende”’, p. 280.

31

MS B, fol. 104r, in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, III, 112.

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anti-papal tone of the original work — something the editor largely achieves, whilst retaining the reformist interests of the original text. The Wycliffite influence continues in B’s survey of pastoralia in at least one of the two items immediately following the Ave, a Creed, which defines Holy Church according to Wycliffite theology, ‘þt is oonli þe noumbre þat schal be saued’ and a ‘Form of Confession’ that, whilst conventional enough, might in the context of the material attending it, be understood as fulfilling the Lollard belief in the efficacy of confession directly offered to God without priestly intercession. The final items in the section, a commentary on the Ten Commandments (a uniquely surviving version of widely copied and vigorously adapted decalogue commentary) followed by an abridged English translation of Deuteronomy,32 again are likely to have come to the compiler via Wycliffite transmission networks (indeed, it is possible that this entire section of pastoralia came to the compiler as a unit in a single exemplar). The treatise on the Commandments asserts a number of radical positions, including Wyclif’s perspective on dominion: he þat stondiþ in grace is verrey lord of þingis . And who euere failiþ bi defaute of grace , he failiþ riõt title of þing þat he occupieþ.33

The text consistently responds to a Church imagined to be beset by crisis, attending particularly to the shortcomings of the secular priesthood. The commentary on the ninth Commandment has been censored, with 22 lines of script scraped from folios 119v –120r. The excised text contained fierce criticism of the begging of mendicants and an extended diatribe against the appropriation of secular churches by religious houses, leading the author to damn those who ‘coueitiþ amys þe rentis and þe housis of seculer men’ as heretics, and those who authorize such appropriation, including the pope, identified as ‘principal’ heretics.34 Judith 32

Arnold comments that this version ‘does not agree with either of the Wycliffite versions, but is nearer to the earlier one than the later’, Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, III, 90, n. a; the biblical translation serves an admonitory function in relation to the commentary. 33 34

MS B, fol. 117v , in Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, III, 93.

See Judith Anne Jefferson, ‘An Edition of the Ten Commandments Commentary in BL Harley 2398 and the Related Version in Trinity College Dublin 2456, York Minster XVI.L.12 and Harvard English 738, together with Discussion of Related Commentaries’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Bristol, 1995), pp. clxi–clxxii for discussion of this version of the commentary; the missing text was probably similar to that in Dublin, Trinity College, MS 245, see p. 146, lines 1–146, esp. line 16. Another example of careful removal of text is found earlier in the book, when a section of text has been scraped out before the Pater Noster. From the few surviving words it seems that this text was an introductory piece that is elsewhere found with another, less neutral Pater Noster commentary, characterized by a vigorous defence of gospel translation; Select

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Jefferson, who collated variations among these Decalogue commentaries, mistakenly believed that the scribe of B had left this section blank, in anticipation of obtaining a less controversial discussion of the commandment. Jefferson’s explanations for the motivation behind expurgating the passage, nevertheless, remain germane: Whether the [B] scribe was himself a friar is, of course, impossible to determine, but whether he was or not, he seems […] to represent a stage in the development of Lollard ideas when, despite the fact Lollardy had become strongly anti-fraternal, those who sided with the friars were still willing to promulgate Lollard views on dominion […] and on the failings of the regular clergy.35

The obliteration of text may not have been down to the scribe, but Jefferson’s discussion rightly hints at the politically hybridized identities that the act of censorship here implies. The censorship was enacted by someone who knew the book and this text intimately, and who removed a reading that was somehow ideologically offensive. Perhaps, as Jefferson reasons, it was the anti-mendicantism that provoked the suppression of the passage, or perhaps it was the more vicious criticism of expansionist religious houses, but whatever the reason, the censor’s erasure of this passage serves to do something surprising: it attests to the toleration of the often radical pastoral and theological positions articulated elsewhere in the book. Paradoxically, the act of censorship here hints at a careful reader’s forbearance of textual positions (manifested throughout the volume) that in a binaristic history of religio-literary culture might only be viewed as antithetical. B is among many religious compilations of the fifteenth century which resist explanation according to a bifurcated understanding of religious culture. The book’s mixture of Wycliffite literature with texts that are irreconcilable with a strict sense of Wycliffite reading practices, as well as the responses of the scribe/compiler and readers to theologico-political issues, demonstrate the pluralistic nature of religious reading in the period. We contend that it is through chronicling the messy tissues of texts that fill devotional manuals produced in fifteenth-century England that we may begin the process of overturning the unsatisfactory strategies of categorization that obfuscate attempts to provide more nuanced reflections upon both textual culture and religious practice.

English Works of John Wyclif, ed. by Arnold, III, 98–99 (ending ‘after þe werkes’). The first half of this text would have been written on the last leaf of a now missing quire, which it seems was also deliberately removed. 35

Jefferson, ‘An Edition of the Ten Commandments Commentary’, p. clxx.

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II The scribal activities recorded in B give evidence of an adaptive tolerance we characterize as a form of hospitality. The stakes of such hospitality are explored, we argue, in a unique sermon recorded in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud 23 (hereafter L). L is another devotional compilation of twenty-seven items in three booklets. Early in the codex, the compiler has collected a number of pastoral works relating to Christian catechesis, which give way to texts with homiletic or meditative applications later in the volume. The book was likely produced in the first quarter to half of the fifteenth century and contemporary script at the rear of the volume locates it in London, and possibly in the possession of a cleric or civil servant.36 The sermon, commencing on folio 61v , is titled in the manuscript ‘Vos estis ciues sanctorum’ (hereafter ‘Vos’) and is an elaborate meditation on Paul’s Second Letter to the Ephesians. The sermon has as its themes the Ten Commandments, the five conditions of charity, and the four conditions of Love, which are explored by means of an allegory derived from Ephesians and Ecclesiastes 9. 14–16, but also informed by Augustine’s De civitate Dei and, perhaps, the closing passus of Piers Plowman. Indeed, Ecclesiastes sets the scene for the sermon’s apocalyptic diagnosis of contemporary society. Crucially, however, it is the Pauline text — ‘you are fellow citizens with the saints’37 — which provides the dominant theme and redemptive antetheme of the sermon. ‘Vos’ illustrates powerfully the extent to which scholarly discussion attaches itself to the postulated ideological affiliations of texts, rather than working through the ambiguities and imprecisions of fifteenth-century homiletic rhetoric. The temptation to read the sermon’s meditation on the ‘poor man’ of Ecclesiastes as a contemporary ‘pore man’ of Christ — a Lollard or Wycliffite, in other words — is seductive; but it quickly becomes clear, in concert with standard exegeses of Ecclesiastes, that the poor man is Christ, and that the city is besieged by the devil: ‘þis grete kyng is the þe fend of helle’.38 But that is not to say that, like their scholarly contemporaries, readers with Wycliffite opinions could not find resonances in this image. It is precisely our point

36

The manuscript is discussed by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, ‘“Citizens of Saints”: Creating Christian Community in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 23’, in Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations, ed. by Nicole Rice (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 37

Ephesians 2. 19. The historicity of Paul’s authorship of Ephesians is a source of debate amongst biblical scholars. 38

MS L, fol. 61v.

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that such rhetoric can, in Anne Middleton’s characterization, ‘become a property of public discourse in several incommensurable ways at once’.39 But there is little in the sermon which supports its description as Lollard.40 Nowhere is there any engagement with explicitly Wycliffite theologies. The meditation on the Ten Commandments, as we have seen, a favourite topic of Lollard and Wycliffite preachers,41 is here treated uncontroversially; where a ‘heterodox’ preacher may have used the first commandment to complain about idolatry, the author of ‘Vos’ warns Christians to worship God alone, albeit with a pious sense of God’s presence in all of creation. In his commentary on the second commandment, the author warns of the moral and scriptural dissimulation caused by cursing — hardly unique to Wycliffite critique. Where ‘þe fewe dwellers in this cite’ are described as ‘the lityl chosyn noumbre þat schal come þo blisse’,42 it would be a gross misreading to assume that the sermon refers to the predestinate elect of Wyclif’s theology (itself a variation on Augustine). As subsequent lines make clear, the ‘lityl chosyn noumbre’ refers to faithful Christians in toto, as opposed to ‘þe multitude of þe hethyn, of iewis, of saracenys, and of fals Cristen men’.43 In its vision of a city of saints destroyed by corruption and rebuilt by citizens in receipt of Christ’s grace, the sermon is attempting to reconceptualize a fragmented Christianity, to reconstruct it in a ‘fynial vnite’. The author contrasts David’s selfcharacterization as a ‘straunger and a pilgrym’44 with Paul: But Poule prouiþ his skile be þe grace of oure lord ihesu crist be þe fredam of his Gospel . & be þe vertu of þe gostly gendrer betwex crist and his chirche . wher þoruõ õe ben mad cristen men and wymmen. ¶ Certis after þis õ[e] be neiþer straungeris ne gestis . but õe ben citesynys.45

39

See Anne Middleton, ‘Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman’, in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honor of Morton W. Bloomfield, ed. by Larry D. Benson and Siegfried Wenzel (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1982), pp. 91–122 (p. 122). 40

The sermon will appear in Wycliffite Spirituality, ed. by J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Stephen E. Lahey, and Fiona Somerset (New York: Paulist Press, forthcoming); we reject the assertion that it is a Lollard text. 41

Hudson, PR, pp. 4–5, 484–86.

42

MS L, fol. 61v.

43

MS L, fol. 61v.

44

MS L, fol. 62v.

45

MS L, fol. 62v.

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For the author of ‘Vos’, Christ reconstitutes the besieged city of the Old Law, of Ecclesiastes, by compensating for Adam’s sin — a point we will return to when we consider the sermon’s perspective on contemporary religious controversies. Another revered target of ‘radical’ theology — glossing — is attacked throughout the sermon, but the preacher’s ire is directed at interpretative distortion on the part of mendicants. The friars are of specific interest in the sermon but, again, their threat to the city of saints is framed conventionally and would not be out of place in official criticism of mendicant laxity. The sacramental system is defended throughout; in the commentary on the sixth commandment, the sermon declares that the ‘Meyr’ of its allegorical city: chargiþ weddid men to kepe þe chastite of wedlok þat sithen þei brynge forþ children & trette þere bodyes be vertu of þis sacrament . þe which is to oþer wtouten þis s sacrament deedly synne […] þerfor þe brekyng of þis sacrament is blaspheme aõen God.46

Repeatedly, the sermon fingers the clerical abnegation of pastoral responsibilities, arguing that ‘þe wallis of þis cite be prestis’.47 The ninth commandment sponsors a reflection on the virtues of the seven sacraments and clerical duty to ensure their administration to the laity. The role of priests in the maintenance of Christian community is repeatedly emphasized: ffor crist seiþ õe prestis haue receyuid þese sacramentis frely . frely mynistre õe hem aõen to the þrofiõt of þe peple . for þei ben medicine aõens þese seuene dedly synnys . stablynge þe resonable creature in seuene õiftis of þe holy gost.48

Throughout, vernacular translation of scriptural passages is subsidiary to the Latin passages themselves; indeed, vernacular translation is undertaken for explicitly pastoral purposes, with the Latin text treated as definitively authoritative. The contemplative life is rejected — fol. 65r: priests should ‘not close hemself in o place as pyggys in a parrok’ — in favour of pastoral engagement. St Cecilia, that paragon of orthodox devotion for Nicholas Love, among others, is invoked approvingly, and while the sermon prioritizes scripture, it nowhere explicitly denies the value of extra-biblical citation, referencing St James, Bernard and St Augustine as auctors. ‘Vos’ imaginatively situates fifteenth-century Christian community in the time of Ecclesiastes. The contemporary city is besieged: ‘Here was sumtyme a gloriouse cite. How it is now mad a den of wilde bestis’; ‘so oure Christendom is defoilid

46

MS L, fol. 64r–v.

47

MS L, fol. 66v.

48

MS L, fol. 65v.

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whanne it is medlid with errour and hereyse’.49 In perhaps its most controversial moment, the sermon declares that so disorientated is the contemporary Church that it misnames loyal advocates of reform: ‘now vertuous lyf is dyspisid . and synful lyf is preysid, for he þat hatiþ synne is clepid a Lollar. And he þat mysdoiþ is clepid a pleyn lyuar’.50 The scholar seeking Lollardy finds her suspicions confirmed; this reformist text can only be Lollard. The interpretative logic at work is exposed, to devastating effect, by Carlo Ginzburg: ‘the historian reads into [documents] what he has already learned by other means, or what he believes he knows, and wants to “demonstrate”’.51 But might not the designation of ‘Lollar’ just as readily address the official church’s tendency to lash out — legally, legislatively — at reformist ideas which come from outside the centres of episcopal power? In other words, the sermon recognizes the extent to which the term ‘lollard’ remains open to episcopal redeployment, its signified sufficiently slippery to enable its use to capture those reformist targets disruptive of official ecclesiastical discourse. At this crucial point, the sermon pivots on the utopian possibility of rebuilding the city of saints: Now moste we lerne to belde aõen þis cite. And among þese cetesynis to make a fynial vnite. In Cristis tyme þer was a stryf among cristis disciplis . but crist pesid hem. And tawõt a lessoun how his chirche shulde be reconsilid wtouten ende.52

This, surely, is the sermon’s critical moment. The contemporary Christian community is figured as Christ’s apostles divided among themselves. The reconciliation demanded by Christ is explained by Paul, in a rhetoric patterned on the rebuilding of the city of God: ‘Now therefore you are no more strangers and foreigners; but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God, Built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone’.53 The author of ‘Vos’ recognizes in Paul’s epistle the means by which to reconcile reformist disagreement in fifteenth-century English devotional culture. There is a radical openness in the sermon, in spite of its apocalypticism. In passages reminiscent of Wimbledon’s sermon, the final unity imagined by the author will be achieved when secular and clerical culture resume their ordained

49

MS L, fol. 67v.

50

MS L, fols 67v –68r.

51 Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. by John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 35. 52

MS L, fol. 68r.

53

Ephesians 2. 14–22.

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positions within the body politic. We are not dealing with dilemmas of dominion or disendowment here; rather, the author seems to recommend the careful and reflective evaluation of theological opinion, as long as it is rooted in pastoral responsibility and the Gospel. What the case-studies we have explored illustrate is a post-Arundelian appetite for reflection on religious ideas. These books seem in fact to index the variety of theological and catechetical interests of fifteenth-century readers, capturing a debate on the present and future constitution of the clergy and its pastoral and political responsibilities which culminates in ‘Vos’. They evidence what we are calling — not without caution — devotional cosmopolitanism. We do not intend cosmopolitanism as it is conceived by a politically anxious middle class today: as a pat solution to problems of multiculturalism. The notion of cosmopolitanism is ancient; but it also has a distinctly Christian heritage, which issues — we think not coincidentally — in Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians.54 Cosmopolitanism is the ethic of hospitality by another name (and has its roots, too, in the Parable of the Samaritan). Paul here imagines the redemption of cultural and religious difference under the sign of Christ’s death and resurrection: an act of compensation which accommodates the Other to the Same. The scribal and readerly interventions in the manuscripts we have discussed are designed precisely to accommodate theological difference to particular religious positions. According to Richard Kearney, a risk of cosmopolitan thinking is that it suspends ‘all criteria of ethical discrimination’. To be effective, it ‘needs to be supplemented […] with a hermeneutics of practical wisdom which might help us better discern between justice and injustice’.55 We argue that the scribes and annotators of the manuscripts we have discussed are working out and deploying precisely such a ‘hermeneutics of practical wisdom’. ‘Vos’ is ‘cosmopolitan’ to the extent that it welcomes, and offers to host, encounters with the supposedly heterodox, that which is ‘clepid a Lollar’, in the interest of engaging all Christians in a redeemed community, a community to come.56 The hospitality envisaged by the sermon adjudicates in a debate regarding ecclesiastical

54

Augustine’s De civitate Dei is also crucial; see ‘Christian Cosmopolitanism’, in J. S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 92–108. 55

Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 72. Kearney’s account of a ‘hermeneutics of practical wisdom’ is derived from Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 56

Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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authority and pastoral responsibility. It rejects a punitive treatment of religious dissent, instead imagining a milieu in which dissent is reconciled with the church.

III The attempt to recruit the texts and manuscripts we have discussed to one or another camp of fifteenth-century theological controversy is to forget de Certeau’s caution regarding the self-interested creativity of cultural consumers. But that selfinterest is enabled by a willingness to engage with the other, to appropriate and rework in the interest of buttressing theological views which can no longer be usefully taxonomized as ‘heterodox’ or ‘orthodox’. In his response to the conference from which these chapters proceed, Nicholas Watson admitted tacitly the necessity of de-historicizing devotional culture when he argued that it is impossible to read fifteenth-century writing without recourse to the English Reformation of the sixteenth. But of course, it is not impossible: rather, it is the task of the historian of fifteenth-century religion not to reinforce the supposed homogeneity of religious identities, but to disentangle their complexity and richness, their mutually necessitating tropes and internal contradictions. At the After Arundel conference, Nicholas Watson rightly suggested that scholarship of fifteenth-century culture is subject to a terminological crisis. In this essay, we have offered a model for thinking about the subtleties we have attempted to measure in devotional compilations. Our model embraces anachronism and thus resists succumbing to fifteenth-century ideological formations; as such, it functions as a provocation to the standard vocabularies deployed in assessment of these materials. However, we also firmly believe that, in attempting to forge new accounts of Christian community which move beyond the determinations of sectarian rhetoric, individual Christians marshalled religious materials with a hospitality not usually recognized in modern scholarship.

C ANONS AND C ATECHISMS: T HE A USTIN C ANONS OF S OUTH -E AST E NGLAND AND S ACERDOS PAROCHIALIS Niamh Pattwell

T

he contribution of the Augustinian (or Austin) canons to the literature of medieval England has not gone unacknowledged. Helen Spencer, for example, in English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, notes the group of regular clergy who are ‘deservedly attracting growing attention for their part in teaching and preaching’.1 The Northern Homily Cycle may well have been written by an Austin canon and it has long been established that John Mirk, author of the widely read Festial and Instructions for Parish Priests, was an Austin canon of Lilleshall in Shropshire.2 Ralph Hanna argues that the Austin canons may have made a more significant contribution to the literary output of medieval England than has been previously thought and suggests that their ‘localism’ and ‘low budget’ issues may have contributed to their reputation as ‘less intellectually talented’ than other religious orders such as the Benedictines or Carthusians. Despite these obstacles, however, the Austin canons ‘express an educational interest belying

1 2

Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 61.

Thomas Heffernan, ‘The Authorship of the Northern Homily Cycle: The Liturgical Affiliations of the Sunday Gospel Pericopes as a Test’, Traditio, 41 (1985), 285–309. John Mirk’s ‘Festial’, ed. by Sue Powell, EETS, O. S. 334 and 335, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2009–10). John Mirk’s ‘Instructions for Parish Priests’ Edited from Cotton Claudius A II, ed. by Gillis Kristensson, Lund Studies in English, 49 (Lund: Gleerup, 1974).

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many modern critiques’.3 Hanna calls for a reconsideration of the contribution of the Austin canons to the vernacular literature of late medieval England: ‘I here join a developing, but still very nascent, group of voices urging a reassessment of the religious orders and vernacular composition by assembling evidence for the large vernacular literary involvement of that order with the most houses in England, the Augustinian or black canons’.4 It is the aim of this paper to offer some further evidence of the circulation and distribution of books among the Austin canons in the south of England (particularly in the counties of Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, south of London, and Essex immediately to its east). Our focus is on the period after Archbishop Arundel (1397–1414), and in particular the vernacular pastoral manual Sacerdos parochialis. The Austin canons were heavily involved in the cura animarum: ‘They were an anomalous group in that, although bound to the observance of the Augustinian Rule, they might, with episcopal permission, have cure of souls, especially in those parish churches which had been appropriated by their priories (although priories had the option to hire a secular priest to serve these churches)’.5 It is no surprise, then, to learn that most of their material is religious, devotional, or theological in nature. Piers Plowman is, therefore, an interesting addition by Simon Horobin to the repertoire of texts and manuscripts linked to the religious order.6 Writing specifically about Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson Poetry 137, Horobin identifies the scribe of that manuscript as a Thomas Tholyte, a canon of Chichester, West Sussex who was ordained in September 1410 by Robert Rede, bishop of Chichester and sponsored by the Austin canons of Hardham.7 It is this Thomas Tholyte, and another cleric named Richard Rauf who was sponsored by the Austin canons of Shulbrede Priory, who provide the link to a group of manuscripts under discussion in this paper, those of the pastoral manual Sacerdos parochialis. Raymo, in his contribution to the Manual of Middle English Writings, describes Sacerdos parochialis as a short catechetical piece which would be of use to the less-

3

Ralph Hanna, ‘Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature’, in The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie, and Ralph Hanna (London: British Library, 2000), pp. 27–42 (p. 29). 4

Hanna, ‘Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature’, p. 27.

5

Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 62.

6

Simon Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137 and the Copying and Circulation of Piers Plowman’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 19 (2005), 3–26. 7

Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137’, p. 8.

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educated cleric in the fulfilment of his pastoral duties.8 The manual opens with the usual Pechamite rubric in Latin, stating that the parish priest ought to instruct his parishioners in the tenets of the faith at least four times in the year.9 It is followed by the tract on the Pater Noster, then the Ave Maria, Credo, Ten Commandments, Two Great Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Works of Mercy, Seven Principal Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments. Most manuscripts also include a set of excommunications while others included a set of bidding prayers.10 The material has much in common with other pastoral manuals of the period. It is didactic and perfunctory, composed of a series of tracts in which each line of the key prayers or the doctrines of faith is given in Latin, translated, and explained briefly in the vernacular. As we might expect from the opening rubric, the extant manuscripts indicate that the manual seems to have been largely in the possession of the clergy during the first half of the fifteenth century. More surprising, however, is the relatively local nature of the distribution pattern of these manuscripts. Most of the manuscripts of Sacerdos parochialis can be located, through codicological, linguistic, or textual evidence, either in, or south-east of, London, while several of them demonstrate some kind of connection with the Austin canons of that area. Sacerdos parochialis occurs in nine manuscripts (listed in the appendix), not the fourteen listed by Raymo.11 Three of the manuscripts can be linked to the Austin 8 R . Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ed. by Hartung, VII (1986), 2272–73, 2494–95. 9

For the 1281 statutes of Archbishop John Pecham, which formed the basis of so many vernacular manuals in the late fourteenth century and beyond, see Councils and Synods: with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, ed. by F. M. Powicke and C. R. Cheney, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), II, 900–01. 10

Niamh Pattwell, ‘Sacerdos Parochialis, Edited from British Library, Burney 356 & Exornatorium Curatorum, Edited from Cambridge, Corpus Christi Sp.335.2’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Trinity College Dublin, 2004). 11

We can discount Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson A. 381, fols 112r–114v which is a version of Richard Lvynham’s tract on the seven deadly sins known as A litel tretys on the seven deadly sins, ed. by J. P. W. M. van Zutphen (Roma: Institutum Carmelitum, 1956). We can also discount Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 554, fols 88v–89 r which contains a tract on the sins of the heart, mouth, and deeds. Both of these tracts are found as interpolations in other Sacerdos parochialis manuscripts (Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 285 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 913), but are not part of the original Sacerdos parochialis text. Two further manuscripts listed in Peter Brown, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist V : Additional Collection 10001–14000, British Library London (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988) should be discounted: London, British Library, MS Royal 8 F. vii., fol. 41v and Oxford, University College, MS 28, fol. 48r are similar to Sacerdos parochialis in their overall framework, but not in content.

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canons on the firm basis of inscription and provenance. They are: Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69; Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 285; London, British Library, MS Additional 10053. Those manuscripts of Sacerdos parochialis with linguistic profiles connecting them or their scribes to the Sussex/Surrey area are: London, British Library, MS Burney 356; Oxford, Trinity College, MS 7; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 110. London, British Library, MS Additional 10036 can also be linked to the Austin canons, although somewhat tenuously, on the basis of the material found in that manuscript. Through a combined study of the dialects, provenance, and contents of the manuscripts, it is possible to argue, therefore, for a network of readers of Sacerdos parochialis linked by and to the Austin canons of south-east England. This is of particular interest if we consider that the source material for Sacerdos parochialis is William Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis, which is also the source of another Austin canon pastoral manual, namely John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests.12 It seems then that the Austin canons were committed to a programme of spiritual reform which involved the production of simple pastoral manuals in the vernacular for those involved in the transmission of the faith to the laity. As indicated earlier, this essay is confined to the study of the southern tradition, that of Sacerdos parochialis. It hopes to demonstrate that the origins, distribution, and survival of an early fifteenthcentury pastoral manual is largely dependent on a community which may have emerged in or around the Chichester area, and that its members belonged to or were affiliated with the Austin canons. Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69 is one of the manuscripts which carries a complete version of Sacerdos parochialis. It is also the manuscript identified by Simon Horobin as a bequest to Thomas Tholyte by a John Corby, rector of Broadwater in Sussex, in 1415: ‘John Corby’s bequest of books includes a copy of the Bonaventuran Dieta salutis, vernacular treatises on various theological topics and a copy of the Prick of Conscience; it has a secure fifteenth-century Sussex provenance, which suggests its identification as the book referred to in Corby’s

London, British Library, MS Royal 1 A. x contains an extract on the seven deadly sins of Sacerdos parochialis appended to a Wycliffite Bible. Finally, Durham, University Library, MS Cosin V. iv. 2 is not strictly Sacerdos parochialis, but is a translation of De Burgh’s Pupilla oculi which is also a translation of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis. MS Cosin V. iv. 2 has been linked to a Carmelite anchorite in Norwich. 12

See note 2 above. On William Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis see Leonard E. Boyle, ‘The Oculus Sacerdotis and some Other Works of William Pagula’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Series, 5 (1955), 81–100.

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bequest’.13 Sacerdos parochialis is one of the theological treatises which come between the Dieta salutis and the Prick of Conscience and which the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval England localizes to south-west Sussex (Linguistic Profile 5710).14 The manuscript carries an erased inscription recording the gift of the manuscript by John Haynes to the parish church of Shermansbury, while below it, in a fifteenth-century hand, appears the inscription: ‘Sussex/Thomas’.15 Horobin points out that a Thomas Tullit was installed in a West Sussex parish in 1430 and, therefore, was most likely the recipient of the bequest. Thomas Tholyte/Tullit seems to have owned both a copy of Piers Plowman (MS Rawlinson Poetry 137) and this manuscript, which contains the Prick of Conscience and Sacerdos parochialis. This is not unusual; Horobin points to similar overlaps in relation to Mirk material. An A-version of the Piers Plowman poem (London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 687) contains one of only two copies of a prose confession. The second copy of the confession is found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 60 which also contains a copy of Mirk’s Festial and Instructions for Parish Priests. It is fair to conclude then, as Horobin does, that the readers of orthodox catechetical material and of religious poetry advocating reform were not necessarily mutually exclusive groups. The Austin canons were not adverse to the spirit of reform expressed in literature such as Piers Plowman or the Prick of Conscience.16 Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69 corroborates the trend visible in the studies of Hanna and Horobin, that the Austin canons were interested in longer works of vernacular religious writing. Three other Sacerdos parochialis manuscripts share this feature: MS Additional 10036 contains a version of the Siege of Jerusalem, MS Additional 10053 contains a number of longer prose works including Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and Pembroke College, MS 285 contains the vernacular Speculum Christiani.17

13

Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137’, p. 9.

14

A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval England, ed. by Angus McIntosh, Michael Samuels, and Michael Benskin, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1986), I, 66 (henceforth LALME). ‘Linguistic Profile’ will hereafter be abbreviated to ‘LP’. See also Robert E. Lewis and Angus McIntosh, A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of ‘The Pricke of Conscience’ (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1982), p. 44. 15

Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137’, p. 9.

16

Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137’, pp. 22–24.

17

Speculum Christiani, ed. by Holmstedt. Walter Hilton, Scale of Perfection, ed. by Thomas H. Bestul (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000).

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Although the Speculum Christiani is usually linked to the Carthusians, Doyle notes that the sequence of St Sitha included in Pembroke College, MS 285 indicates a link between that manuscript and the Augustinian priory in Osyth, Essex.18 A more persuasive link, however, is provided by the signature on fol. 48v of Pembroke College MS 285 where the names ‘Raffe’ and ‘Richarde’ appear at the end of Speculum Christiani. This is most likely the same Richard Rauf, ‘Ricardus Rauf. P.L’., whose name appears beneath the name of the scribe ‘Thomas Tilot’ in Oxford, University College, MS 142.19 Ricardus Raff was ordained by Cardinal Beaufort in 1409 in Winchester cathedral and sponsored by the Shulbrede Priory of Austin canons, located on the Sussex/Surrey border in the diocese of Chichester.20 The appointment of Tholyte to West Thorney, which is also located on the Sussex/Surrey border, strengthens the possibility that both Richard Raff and Thomas Tholyte were connected and possibly shared books. Pembroke College, MS 285 is written in the same early fifteenth-century anglicana hand throughout and, unlike many of the other Sacerdos parochialis manuscripts, shows care and planning. It is difficult to know if the name indicates ownership or scribal activity but, either way, Pembroke College, MS 285 can be identified as a manuscript once in the possession of Richard Rauf or Raffe who seems to have been an associate of Thomas Tholyte, the scribe sponsored by the Austin canons and also ordained in Chichester. The inclusion in Pembroke College, MS 285 of a unique sermon for the feast of St Nicholas might be a reference to the parish of St Nicholas Lavant which was under the care of Shulbrede Priory from the mid-fourteenth century. Pembroke College, MS 285 can be linked to Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69 by virtue of Thomas Tholyte and Richard Rauf, the prevalence of longer vernacular religious writings and, of course, Sacerdos parochialis. Pembroke College, MS 285 also shows some considerable textual overlap with another of the Sacerdos parochialis manuscripts with strong Austin canon links, namely MS Additional 10053. The manuscript seems to have remained in the possession of the Austin canons up to the dissolution of Llanthony Priory from whence it passed to the antiquary John Theyr and from him to his son Charles Theyer; it

18

The name Raffe Mainarde which occurs on fol. 69r and in a brief note on fol. 72v at the end of Sacerdos parochialis stating that ‘Raffe Mainarde oeth this boke’, suggests another link to the Maynard family of the Essex area. Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English’, II, 11. 19

Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137’, p. 15.

20

Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137’, p. 8.

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now exists in discrete manuscripts.21 The original manuscript contained a number of fairly sophisticated religious texts in the vernacular of particular interest to a religious community, such as Edmund Rich’s Speculum ecclesie and Duodecim abusiones claustralium. An inscription on fol. 83r calls for prayers for a Canon John Perry of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, confirming a London and Austin canon provenance for this manuscript. The sharing of particular textual features is another indicator that Pembroke College, MS 285 and MS Additional 10053 may have belonged to members of the same network. Both are without the original Pater Noster. MS Additional 10053 replaces the Pater Noster, in the usual place at the beginning of the text, with a version similar to that found in London, Lambeth Palace, MS 408’s version of the Lay Folks’ Catechism.22 Pembroke College, MS 285 appends its replacement Pater Noster to the section on the sacraments at the end of the text. A further link between these two manuscripts is suggested by the presence of Richard Lavynham’s tract Every Christian Man and Woman in Pembroke College, MS 285 in lieu of the original tract on the Seven Deadly Sins.23 In MS Additional 10053, a copy of Every Christian Man and Woman precedes Sacerdos parochialis suggesting that Lavynham’s tract may have been a feature of the exemplar. MS Additional 10053 and Pembroke College, MS 285 often share textual variants against other manuscripts. For example, in the section on the Ten Commandments, ‘reading metals’ is the most common variant of the sin of ‘fortune telling’ which is forbidden under the First Commandment. Pembroke College, MS 285 and MS Additional 10053 cite the sin as ‘reading dreams’; Pembroke uses the word ‘metings’ where MS Additional 10053 uses the word ‘dremes’.24 Again, in the section on the benefits of the eucharist, they share the variant ‘chirchward’ where 21

London, British Library, MS Additional 10052; San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Hm 112; BL, MS Additional 10053. Much of this information is available at [accessed 26 July 2010]. 22 See Raymo [33], ‘A Standard Exposition of the Pater Noster’ for a brief description of this treatise. He notes that the text has been described as Lollard, but that ‘there is no internal evidence to support the attribution’. (Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, p. 2279.) Anne Hudson also makes mention of this Pater Noster. She believes that the compiler of the Lambeth manuscript incorporated the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and commentary into the Lay Folks’ Catechism from three unrelated, but pre-existing tracts. Hudson, ‘A New Look at the Lay Folks’ Catechism’, p. 251. For a list of other manuscripts see Raymo, ‘Works of Religious and Philosophical Instruction’, p. 2508. 23

See note 11 above for details of edition.

24

MS Additional 10053, fol. 105v and Pembroke College, MS 285, fol. 52r.

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all other manuscripts use ‘thederward’.25 Where Pembroke College, MS 285 and MS Additional 10053 differ, Pembroke College, MS 285 is more likely to agree with the variants of the other manuscripts. For example, under the eighth commandment MS Additional 10053 expands the list of forbidden offences to include a note on false witness for the purposes of marriage: Þou shalt bere no fals witnes openly ne prively tofore eny iuge of holi chirche nameliche in cause of matrimone or to promote or furþer vnskylfully eny man or woman ne to fore eny iuge of lawe of lond where thorow thy neyõghbores shulde be deseryte other lese his katel, oþer be ded. In this hest also is forbode al maner lesyng and sclaundereful talis that may greue eny man.26

Pembroke College, MS 285 follows the common textual tradition and does not specify false witness for the purposes of marriage, includes ‘backbiting’ and is more specific about the harm that may arise from bearing false witness : Non dices falsum testimonium. Þe .viij. heste is of god, þe fifte of þe secunde table þat longeþ to þine euencristene, bere þou no falswytnesse. In þis heste is forbode all false lesynges, bakbytynges, alle fals accusynges, and namelyche apeyryng of manis los and his good name wher-þorogh he is put to purgacion or hate on worldlyche harmes, for in þat cas þei been a-cursed.27

Pembroke College, MS 285 and MS Additional 10053, like the Plowman manuscripts discussed by Horobin, share a willingness to include material beyond the strict bounds of orthodoxy. It would be difficult to describe the material as ‘heterodox’, yet in Pembroke College, MS 285 there are some elements in the fourth petition of the Pater Noster which echo aspects of sermons on Corpus Christi found in Gloria Cigman’s edition of Lollard sermons.28 It discusses the ‘brede actuel’ and the ‘brede spirituel’, in stark contrast to the eucharistic bread lauded in the usual ‘Meeds of the Eucharist’ passage found in Sacerdos parochialis, where the material and spiritual benefits discussed emphasize the sacramental nature of the eucharist and the role of the priest in creating it.29 It is important to 25

MS Additional 10053, fol. 112v and Pembroke College, MS 285, fol. 56v .

26

MS Additional 10053, fol. 107v .

27

Pembroke College, MS 285, fol. 53r. This is the version found in MS Burney 356, fol. 45v: ‘Þe.viij. preceptio. Non dices falsum testimonium. Þou shal no fals wytnesse bere. In þys hest ys forbode alle falswytnesynge, bacbytynge and namelyche alle apeyrynge of mannys loos falslyche, wher-fore he ys y-put to to hys þrallage oþer haþ any oþer wordlyche harme. For on þys cas hy beþ a-cursyd’. 28

Lollard Sermons, ed. by Gloria Cigman, EETS, O. S. 294 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1989). 29

On the meeds of the eucharist see Rubin, Corpus Christi, pp. 341–42.

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acknowledge, however, that the remainder of the material in both manuscripts is anything but Lollard and, therefore, it is difficult to ascertain how conscious the compilers of these two manuscripts were of the potentially unorthodox nature of the material. Perhaps the word ‘tolerant’ suggested by others in relation to the Austin canons best describes the spirit of adaptation to the original Sacerdos parochialis text evident in Pembroke College, MS 285 and MS Additional 10053. This is the angle argued by Elisa Narin Van Court who claims that the spirit of ‘toleration’ is another indicator of a relationship between the Austin canons and the Siege of Jerusalem. Citing from Gerard of Wales, she proposes an ‘Augustinian tradition’ marked by ‘humane moderation of its role and ideology’: ‘Gerard of Wales, writing of the Augustinians in the twelfth century, claims they “are more content than others with a middling and modest position; […] though placed in the world, they live uncontaminated by it; not known as litigious or quarrelsome, they fear public scandal too much to be tempted to luxury or lust”’.30 Specifically, in relation to Siege of Jerusalem, she suggests that the Jews are portrayed in a more ‘sympathetic’ light than usual: ‘The Siege poet’s representation of Jewish woe and sorrow is uncompromised by the slightest suggestion that their hardship is either deserved or justified: there is no subtextual sneer to mar this straightforward and emotional account of the Jews’ reaction to the death of their priests’.31 Ralph Hanna has argued also that the Siege of Jerusalem can be linked to the Austin canons.32 In light of this suggestion, and of Van Court’s observations, it is of interest to note that a fourth manuscript of Sacerdos parochialis, London, British Library, Additional MS 10036, contains a couplet version of the Siege of Jerusalem. Like the other Austin canon manuscripts in the Sacerdos parochialis tradition, it is composed of a series of vernacular treatises: The Battle of Jerusalem (fols 2r–61v ), The Assumption of the Virgin (fols 62r–80v ), The Vision of Saint Paul (fols 81r–85r), The Three Arrows of Doomsday (fols 85r–91v ) as well as Sacerdos parochialis (fols 91v –96v). Moreover, the manuscript is copied in a fifteenth-century anglicana hand throughout, suggesting an orderly and intentional compilation, rather than the ad hoc production of many clerical miscellanies. MS Additional 10036, however, differs from the other manuscripts discussed heretofore; dialectical analysis links it to Warwickshire (LP 4063), and not to south-east England. That 30

Elisa Narin Van Court, ‘“The Siege of Jerusalem” and Augustinian Historians: Writing about Jews in Fourteenth-Century England’, Chaucer Review, 29 (1995), 227–48 (pp. 241–42). 31 32

Van Court, ‘“The Siege of Jerusalem” and Augustinian Historians’, p. 238.

Ralph Hanna, ‘Contextualizing the Siege of Jerusalem’, Yearbook of Langland Studies, 6 (1992), 109–21.

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said, the predominance of longer works and the bespoke nature of the manuscript is suggestive of a copyist at work in a religious house with access to a library. Coupled with the use of the vernacular, this would further corroborate the possibility that MS Additional 10036 is also affiliated to the Austin canons. While the remaining Sacerdos parochialis manuscripts do not share the feature of longer vernacular works of theology, three can be linked to the Sussex area and two specifically to Chichester. London, British Library, MS Burney 356 is composed predominantly of Latin material, but the dialect of the single vernacular work, Sacerdos parochialis, has been located in the Chichester, Sussex area (LP 5670). Oxford, Trinity College, MS 7 contains a mix of Anglo-Norman and Latin works, but the vernacular Sacerdos parochialis displays a number of dialectical features which would suggest that the manuscript has links to the south of England.33 Furthermore, it contains a list of manorial rolls on fol. 43v for the Winchester area as well as a Life of St Ethelred (fols 12r–16r) and prayers to be said near Winchester, all of which suggest a southern provenance. MS Bodley 110 has been located in Surrey (LP 5651) but the name of one of its owners indicates that he may have originated in Chichester and from there translated to London. According to a note on fol. 1r, the manuscript was purchased from a London stationer, J. Pye, on 10 August 1463 by the rector of a parish in Cliffe-at-Hoo, Kent. It is not clear how much of this manuscript was actually purchased from Pye but, according to a note on fol. 182v, the manuscript (whole or in part) was at some stage bequeathed by a parish priest (Cleve) in Clyve, Kent to his successor (Camyl). Cleve was a king’s clerk and had a degree in canon and civil laws. The first record of him appears in 1447 and he is dead by 1470. He was originally a canon of Chichester and, therefore, may have brought a copy of Sacerdos parochialis with him when he moved to Kent where he bequeathed the larger composite manuscript to Camyl. MS Bodley 110 is one of those manuscripts that seems to have come together in various stages and it is unlikely that the whole manuscript was purchased from Pye.34 MS Bodley 110 usually agrees with Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69, but occasionally shares distinct readings with

33 34

There are, for example, distinct southern English forms such as ‘fong’ for ‘take’ and ‘ich’ for ‘I’.

The catalogue suggests that it was originally two separate manuscripts: Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and the Meditations on the Passion Ascribed to St Bonaventure forming the first part, with the second part beginning on fol. 36r with the Speculum Ecclesie. A further pattern is discernible in the primarily Latin material found in the manuscript up to fol. 128r; the latter part (fols 129r–182r) is largely written in the vernacular. Moreover, the latter part of the manuscript is more ‘piecemeal’ and lacks the catchwords found at the beginning of each quire in the first 128 folios.

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Pembroke College, MS 285. This is of interest when one considers the fact that MS Bodley 110 is located to the Sussex/Surrey border, which is the location of Shulbrede Priory which sponsored the ordination of the Richard Rauf named in Pembroke College, MS 285. Arguably, Tholyte and Rauf may have met and conferred on the production of Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69 and University College, MS 142 while residing in this area.35 It is highly likely, therefore, that MS Bodley 110 or its owner may have had some affiliation with the two men. To summarize thus far, five of the manuscripts of Sacerdos parochialis are collections of longer works written in the vernacular with all but one of this group produced in the Sussex/Surrey area. The other group comprises those manuscripts largely composed of Latin works which are more pragmatic than theological. These manuscripts contain material inclined to give direction on best practice for liturgies or to provide a list of prayers to be said at various parts of the liturgy rather than provide material for reflection. Two manuscripts which fall into this category overlap with the previous group of manuscripts in that they too show signs of originating in the south-east, namely MS Burney 356 and Oxford, Trinity College, MS 7. One other manuscript, which has not been discussed so far, can also be included in the category of manuscripts more practical than theological: London, British Library, MS Harley 4172. The scribal dialect of parts of the manuscript has been located in the north of England (LP 496), but marriage banns on fol. 107v suggest that this manuscript also has links to the London area.36 The final manuscript of Sacerdos parochialis is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 913. It forms part of a large collection of antiquarian treatises and, therefore, does not provide much by way of insight into the reception and distribution of Sacerdos parochialis. Based on the manuscript evidence, it is possible to conclude that Sacerdos parochialis originated and circulated in the south of England, perhaps in the diocese of Chichester. It may have been published as an obligatory catechism for the clergy of the diocese of Chichester, some of whom happened to be Austin canons or secular clergy affiliated to the Austin canons. As a pastoral manual, it seems to have enjoyed particular regard by the Austin canons. Like Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, Sacerdos parochialis is essentially an abbreviated

35

Horobin suggests that Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 35, which shares some distinct textual variants with Oxford, University College, MS 142, may also have links with Rauf and Tholyte (Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Rawlinson Poetry 137’, p. 19). 36

LALME, I, 113. The marriage banns on fol. 107v are addressed to the parishes of Clifton and Southam of the diocese of London and to the parishes of Clifton and Haunton.

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translation of Oculus sacerdotis, indicating that the Oculus sacerdotis enjoyed a certain status among the Austin canons who distilled the larger Latin work into a more user-friendly vernacular manual for the lesser-educated clergy. Two distinct traditions emerge: Sacerdos parochialis in the south and Mirk’s Instructions in the midlands and north. We know that an abbreviated version of the Oculus sacerdotis was published by the Cambridge Chancellor John de Burgh, which circulated as Pupilla oculi and may have been a key text in the training of university-educated Austin canons in the late fourteenth century.37 The prevalence of both Instructions and Sacerdos parochialis in the vernacular, throughout the fifteenth century, indicates that pastoral education of the laity, in whatever means necessary, was still a priority for the Austin canons. It also illustrates the local nature of book distribution in the late Middle Ages, where the diffusion of material was often dependent on the presence of a network of readers and scribes, however formal or informal. In such an environment, the possibility of controlling material, no matter how intently the authorities pursued a campaign of censorship, was difficult. This is a point made by Katherine Kerby Fulton in her Books under Suspicion: ‘The truth is that effective “censorship,” as we understand it, was ultimately impossible, indeed, in any absolute sense an impractical task in the age before print. Manuscript culture, as it has come to be called, was not much amenable even to authorial control, let alone authoritarian control’.38 The congregational nature of the Austin canons offered both a means of circulating material and a form of protection for those interested in obtaining or dispersing more extensive vernacular theological writings during the postArundelian period. The manuscript evidence indicates that the Austin canons were committed to the cura animarum and were not opposed to using the vernacular for the purpose of instructing the laity in the key tenets of the faith.

37

An independent version of the first part of Pagula’s Dextera pars, which includes a section on the Seven Sacraments, seems to have circulated independently; see, for example, London, British Library, MS Royal 11 B. x (fols 173r–180v ). This may have been the source for the text in Durham, MS Cosin V. iv. 2 which Raymo describes as Sacerdos parochialis, but is not. 38

Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, p. 17.

CANONS AND CATECHISMS

Appendix Manuscripts of Sacerdos parochialis Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69, fols 25r–34r Pembroke College, Cambridge, MS 285, fols 51r–72r Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 110, fols 155r–167v Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D. 913, fols 10r–19r Oxford, Trinity College, MS 7, fols 165v –176r London, British Library, MS Harley 4172, fols 1r–15v London, British Library, MS Additional 10036, fols 91v –96r London, British Library, MS Additional 10053, fols 100r–115r London, British Library, MS Burney 356, fols 39v –55v

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‘Þ AT ÞINE OPUN DEDIS BE A TREWE BOOK ’: R EADING AROUND A RUNDEL’S C ONSTITUTIONS Amanda Moss

N

icholas Watson’s influential article on ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England’ did much to focus attention on the ways in which Archbishop Arundel’s 1409 Constitutions may have influenced attitudes to the production of fifteenth-century vernacular religious writing, arguing that they created an atmosphere of self-censorship, characterized by ‘imitation, caution and respect for fourteenth-century auctores’ in which original theological writing withered.1 More recently, scholars have questioned some of the assumptions around both the immediate and longer-term impact of the Constitutions, and it is clear that, despite the legislation, religious translations, and controversial materials in English continued to be written and copied in the years following 1409.2 This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of fifteenth-century practices, arguing that whilst fourteenth-century texts were undoubtedly recycled in fifteenth-century devotional anthologies, nevertheless, scribes and compilers showed notable creativity in the ways that they adapted materials to address the contemporary concerns of a new generation of readers. The combination of texts in one such fifteenth-century pious collection, London, Westminster School, MS 3 (henceforth Westminster 3), offers an insight into this 1 2

Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 823–31.

Scholars such as Michael Sargent, Ralph Hanna, and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton have pointed to the apparent failures of the legislation. See Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, ed. by Michael G. Sargent, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005), pp. xix–xx; Hanna, ‘English Biblical Texts’, p. 152; Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, p. 260. See also Nicholas Watson, ‘Cultural Changes’, English Language Notes, 44 (special issue: Literary History and the Religious Turn) (2006), 127–40.

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activity, providing what might be regarded as a microcosm of wider fifteenthcentury practices during the first half of the century.3 The evidence provided by Westminster 3 suggests that far from cautiously sticking to a narrow range of topics, those involved in the production of fifteenth-century devotional anthologies felt able to address a broad range of social and spiritual concerns. The contents of this and other similar anthologies demonstrates how scribes were adapting existing texts, presenting them in new and unique combinations, excising or interpolating material during the copying process, as well as using them as the basis for new compositions. These activities sometimes suggest new or alternative readings of the material, or create new discourses, suited to different contexts and addressing different types of reader. Compiled in the first half of the fifteenth century, Westminster 3 comprises seven booklets containing eighteen main items written in English.4 The texts range from anonymous commentaries on the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, and Ten Commandments, to an English translation of St Edmund of Abingdon’s Mirror of Holy Church and two works by Richard Rolle, representing a mixture of orthodox, reformist, and Lollard items.5 The texts were copied by three scribes,

3 For descriptions of Westminster 3 and discussion of its contents see variously Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, ed. by Neil R. Ker and others, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–2002), I (1969), 422–24; Þe Pater Noster of Richard Ermyte: A Late Middle English Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, Edited from Westminster School MS 3, ed. by Florent Gérard Antoine Marie Aarts (Nijmegen: Janssen, 1967); Ralph Hanna, ‘The Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3’, Studies in Bibliography, 41 (1988), 197–218 (repr. in Ralph Hanna, Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and their Texts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 35–47); Amanda Moss, ‘A Merchant’s Tale: A London Fifteenth-Century Household Miscellany’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 156–69; Amanda Moss, ‘Reading London, Westminster School MS 3: A Manuscript and its Audiences’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 2009), and Amanda Moss, ‘Context and Construction: The Nature of Vernacular Piety in a FifteenthCentury Devotional Anthology’, in Vernacularity in England and Wales c. 1300–1550, ed. by Elisabeth Salter and Helen Wicker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 41–64. 4

The majority of the items in the anthology were copied by Scribe One, whose hand has been described as a ‘regular early to mid-fifteenth-century court hand’ by Phyllis Hodgson, while A. I. Doyle suggested that scribe may have been working as early as 1400 and H. E. Allen dated the manuscript to c. 1420. See Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English’, II, 26; Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for his Biography (New York: Heath, 1927), p. 358; Deonise Hid Diuinite, ed. by Hodgson, p. xvi. 5

I use the term ‘Lollard’ here as an expedient shorthand when referring to texts containing views that have been associated with Lollardy. In doing so, I recognize the limitations of this

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many by Scribe One, including the more controversial anonymous items in the collection, whilst Scribes Two and Three copied the orthodox materials associated with St Edmund of Abingdon and Richard Rolle that are found in the final booklets of the manuscript. A number of the texts copied by Scribe One are ambiguous and lend themselves to flexible interpretation, influenced by subtleties of language, and might have been perceived differently by different readers, according to their pre-existing devotional affiliations. For example, Matti Piekola has argued convincingly that a short psalm commentary copied by this scribe is a Lollard item, pointing out that the discussion it contains on suffering tribulations urges readers not to abandon the truth of their beliefs in the face of bodily persecution or death.6 Yet the text does not appear to contain any overtly heterodox statements and the author is never explicit about who is being persecuted or what true belief entails, leaving the reader to put their own interpretation on the text. Furthermore, references to those who are ‘in persecucioun for truþe of Goddis lawe or good lijf’ and assertions that ‘all þat wil pytously lyue schullen suffre persecucioun’ might have appealed to other pious readers, such as the author of the commentary on the Ave Marie in Westminster 3, who complains that the truly devout are being driven out of lords’ courts and marginalized by young fools. Interestingly, the author of the Ave Marie commentary shows an awareness of beliefs associated with Lollardy,

approach, and the value of arguments put forward by scholars such as Andrew Cole for a reevaluation of our use of this complex term. Whilst it is beyond the scope of this paper to review the Westminster 3 texts in the light of Cole’s suggestion that ‘lollardy’ may have come to represent a ‘lay-oriented version of virtuous poverty and Christian discipleship’, this is a helpful concept to consider in relation to the materials in the collection. See Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, pp. 46–47. I use the term ‘reformist’ to refer to material that appears to push the boundaries of orthodoxy and/or re-imagine lay religiosity, drawing on Nicholas Watson’s use of the term with reference to Book to a Mother, ed. by McCarthy; to Westminster 3, item one, Þe Pater Noster of Richard Ermyte, ed. by Aarts; as well as Nicole Rice’s characterization of reformist texts as those that appear ‘to accommodate new forms of lay spiritual authority within the boundaries of ecclesiastical hierarchy’. See Nicholas Watson, ‘Ancrene Wisse, Religious Reform and the Late Middle Ages’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Yoko Wada (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), pp. 199–204; Nicholas Watson, ‘Fashioning the Puritan Gentry-Woman: Devotion and Dissent in Book to a Mother’, in Medieval Women: Text and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), pp. 168–84 (p. 171, n. 13); Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, p. xi. 6

See Jolliffe, Check-List, J. 8 (p. 118). For a transcription of this item, see Hanna, ‘The Origins and Production of Westminster School M S. 3’, pp. 213–14. For a discussion of its Lollard affiliations, see Piekola, Congregation of the Elect, pp. 173–74.

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rejecting Lollard criticism of additions to the scriptural text of the Ave Marie, but remaining non-committal about criticism of the accumulation of papal pardons.7

Richness and Diversity of Material A number of the texts in Westminster 3 focus on the intersection between the spiritual and the social, encouraging readers to live out their beliefs in their everyday lives. This is achieved by combining religious guidance with conduct advice: for example, much of the commentary on the Ave Maria is taken up with conduct advice for the gentry, including the need to set a good example to others and to be merciful to tenants, as well as appropriate dress and behaviour for gentlewomen. An item for ‘lordis and housbondemen’ focuses on the duty of the head of the household to provide spiritual guidance to those under his care, combining this with material on the importance of enforcing strict discipline amongst children and others in the household. Another text, ‘A Tretis of Weddid Men & Wymmen & of Her Children Also’ (henceforth ‘Of weddid men’), combines instruction on marital relations with guidance on the upbringing and religious education of children, and a commentary on the Ten Commandments includes advice on appropriate behaviour when attending church. These texts often take spiritual instruction as their starting point but weave in conduct advice. As I have discussed elsewhere, many of the texts copied by Scribe One emphasize the importance of living strictly according to the Ten Commandments and setting a good example to others, both within the household and the wider community, in order to bring others to the ‘good lyf’.8 The strict moral and religious principles promoted in these materials at times reflect an austere piety that could be described as ‘puritanical’, such as when the author of the commentary on the Ave Marie expresses disapproval of gentlewomen engaging in dancing and laments that devout men with ‘sad mynde on cristis pouerte penaunce & deeþ’ are no longer welcome in lords’ courts.9 7

Westminster 3, fol. 68r. See also Peikola, ‘“And After All, Myn Aue-Marie”’, pp. 278–88.

8

For a discussion of the nature of the piety and spiritual concerns present in Westminster 3, see Moss, ‘Reading London, Westminster School MS 3’ and Moss ‘Context and Construction’. 9

See Moss, ‘Reading London, Westminster School MS 3’, p. 98. My use of the term ‘puritanical’ here draws on Nicholas Watson’s description of the priest who wrote the fourteenthcentury work, Book to a Mother, as ‘fiercely puritanical’. (Watson points out, however, that the author of Book to a Mother suggests that only a life of ‘radical holiness’, which goes beyond obedience to the Ten Commandments, is acceptable and this is more austere than anything

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The prologue to another item copied by Scribe One, an apparently Lollard treatise, known as A Schort Reule of Lyf, instructs all readers — identified as priests, lords, and labourers — to be ‘redy to perfourme werkis of mersy, and to õyue good ensaumple of hooly lyf, boþe in word & dede to alle men aboute’.10 This basic message about right living, or leading the ‘good lyf’, might have appealed to readers from across the devotional spectrum, yet their understanding of what the ‘good lyf’ entailed must surely have varied. In her valuable discussion of the six extant versions of A Schort Reule of Lyf, Mary Raschko analyzes ‘the degree to which scribes adapted the text to fit Lollard and non-Lollard interests’.11 In the case of Westminster 3, Raschko argues that the contents of the compilation as a whole are ambiguous but ‘do not attest to an interest in Lollard ideology’, although she notes that the scribe retained controversial passages in the text and did not censor ‘potential indications of heterodox belief’, suggesting that this demonstrates the Westminster 3 scribe’s ‘lack of concern over the text’s potential affiliations with Lollardy’, and that the text was valued primarily for its instructional content.12 This is one plausible reading of the evidence, particularly since we know that individual scribes might copy both orthodox and heterodox texts during their career, as Alan Fletcher demonstrated of one of the scribes who worked on Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 74.13 Raschko’s argument also fits with the concept of ‘hospitable reading’ put forward by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry in their discussion of a series of devotional anthologies (including Westminster 3), produced in London in the first half of the fifteenth century, which mix ‘supposedly Wycliffite texts’ with ‘undoubtedly reformist’ and ‘unequivocally

suggested in the Westminster 3 materials.) See Watson, ‘Fashioning the Puritan Gentry-Woman’, p. 169 and p. 180. It is also worth noting that Watson has suggested that Westminster 3, item one, Þe Pater Noster of Richard Ermyte, may be part of a group of writings associated with ‘a puritanizing tendency in late fourteenth-century vernacular theology’. See Watson, ‘Ancrene Wisse’, p. 221. 10

Westminster 3, fol. 133r, lines 7–10. For a detailed analysis and recent edition of this text see Mary Raschko, ‘Common Ground for Contrasting Ideologies: The Texts and Contexts of A Schort Reule of Lif’, Viator, 40 (2009), 387–410. See also Moss, ‘Reading London, Westminster School MS 3’, pp. 198–214. 11

Raschko, ‘Common Ground for Contrasting Ideologies’, p. 395.

12

Raschko, ‘Common Ground for Contrasting Ideologies’, pp. 399–407.

13

Alan J. Fletcher, ‘A Hive of Industry or a Hornets’ Nest? MS Sidney Sussex 74 and its Scribes’, in Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. by Alastair J. Minnis (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), pp. 131–55.

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orthodox’ materials, and which they suggest reveal ‘a tolerance among scribes, and it would seem, their audiences, to mixed devotional perspectives’.14 Yet the evidence offered by Westminster 3 is perhaps less clear cut than Raschko allows when she argues for the scribe’s ‘lack of concern’ about the text’s potential Lollard affiliations. First, many of the anonymous materials copied by Scribe One appear influenced by Lollard or reformist thought and a broad coherence across a number of the texts copied by this scribe suggests that textual affiliation, as well as instructional content, may have influenced the selection of materials.15 Second, Scribe One copied (and possibly composed) the unique Lollard psalm commentary found in Westminster 3 booklet two, as well as copying ‘Of weddid men’, which asserts that priests should be allowed to marry — a view generally associated with Lollardy.16 Jill Havens has also pointed out that this scribe’s copy of the ‘orthodox’ commentary on the Ten Commandments in Westminster 3 is one of only three copies to contain a reference to ‘seynt Richard Armachan’, recalling ‘the unique canonization of FitzRalph by the Lollards’.17 Moreover, Mary Theresa Brady has pointed to Scribe One’s potential Lollardy, noting that two items copied by this scribe contain interpolations that may be Lollard, including a strongly worded complaint about papal indulgences and, in the Mirrour of Chastite, assertions that the Gospel can be interpreted by readers without recourse to a priest.18 My own investigation into Westminster 3 has revealed a further lengthy interpolated passage in the Mirrour of Chastite, which asserts that both ‘lewed’ and ‘lered’ have a duty to teach ‘goddis lawe’ and that if pope, prelate, or parson tries to prevent such teaching, he is acting as Lucifer’s 14

Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, ‘“Hospitable Reading” and Clerical Reform in Fifteenth Century London’ (2009) online at: [accessed 22 November 2010]. 15

Moss, ‘Context and Construction’, pp. 44–64.

16

Henry Hargreaves compared this aspect of the treatise with Wyclif’s sermon on Luke 1, where he referred to the marriage of priests, see Henry Hargreaves, ‘Sir John Oldcastle and Wycliffite Views on Clerical Marriage’, Medium Ævum, 42 (1973), 141–46 (pp. 144–45). Anne Hudson and Claire Cross have also noted the apparent approval of some Lollards of the marriage of priests, see Hudson, PR, p. 357; Claire Cross, ‘“Great Reasoners in Scripture”: The Activities of Women Lollards 1380–1530’, in Medieval Women, ed. by Derek Baker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), pp. 359–80 (p. 364). 17 18

Havens, ‘Shading the Grey Area’, pp. 344–45.

For a discussion of the possible Lollardy of Scribe One, see Brady, ‘Lollard Interpolations and Omissions’, pp. 201–02.

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accomplice.19 This may also suggest Lollard sympathies, although the interpolated passage focuses on the right to teach, rather than preach, so does not necessarily contradict the orthodox advice dispensed in the guide for priests, Speculum Christiani, which Nicole Rice notes ‘distinguishes carefully between preaching as an official act and teaching as a work of mercy’.20 It should also be noted that these interpolations occur in two frequently copied tracts derived from the Pore Caitif, and therefore may originate from an unidentified exemplar. So while this is not conclusive, the combination of evidence in the materials copied by Scribe One nevertheless opens up the possibility that the Westminster 3 scribe deliberately chose to retain the controversial language in A Schort Reule of Lyf and that the scribe and/or compiler embraced its ideological leanings. Another text in Westminster 3, the item for ‘lordis and housbondemen’, which opens with the incipit: How lordis and housbondemen schulden teche goddis comaundementis & þe gospel to her suggettis & answere for hem to god on domesday provides what appears to be an example of a scribe adapting material to address contemporary spiritual concerns.21 This item appears to draw on the first part of þe charge of þe heestis, the epilogue to the tract on the Ten Commandments in the Pore Caitif, which Mary Theresa Brady has suggested was compiled somewhere between 1395 and 1402.22 The author of ‘lordis and husbondemen’ appears to use this orthodox text as a springboard for a new composition, interpolating material on the importance of strict household discipline and subsequently diverging completely from the Pore Caitif tract to deal with the duty of those in positions of responsibility to provide religious instruction to those for whom they are responsible, using the example of biblical rulers who preached and taught ‘goddis word’ to their subjects. The manuscripts containing this item appear to date from the early fifteenth century, suggesting that the Pore Caitif compilation may have circulated rapidly and that within a relatively short period of time some of its material was adapted to form the basis for this new text, although this remains speculative as the argument rests on the dating of the both the Pore Caitif and the manuscripts in which ‘lordis

19

Moss, ‘Reading London, Westminster School MS 3’, pp. 142–43 and 241–43. See also Moss, ‘Context and Construction’, pp. 44–45. 20

Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, p. 108.

21

Westminster 3, fols 117v–119v. See Jolliffe, Check-List, I. i (p. 104); in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ed. by Hartung, VII (1986), 132. 22

For the date of composition of the Pore Caitif, see Mary Theresa Brady, ‘Lollard Sources of “The Pore Caitif”’, Traditio, 44 (1988), 388–418 (p. 389).

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and husbondemen’ occurs.23 The occurrence of ‘lordis and husbondemen’ in manuscripts associated with the beginning of the fifteenth century suggests that this item may have been composed either prior to or around the time of the introduction of the Constitutions. The section of the text which urges the religious instruction of the people describes how ‘þe noble kyng Josyas prechide þe lawe of god openly’ and, referring to the psalms, the author asserts that ‘þe lord god almyõty chees Dauid kyng forto fede his piiple, & he fedde hem, in innocence of his herte’.24 This may reflect ongoing debate about the spiritual instruction of the laity or may have been intended as an early riposte to the 1409 legislation. Here we run up against the problem of uncertain dating, which is common to much of the evidence provided by Westminster 3, due to the anonymity of many of the texts. It is also worth bearing in mind that readers’ perceptions of the controversial nature of such material must have changed over the course of time, so that its content may have been regarded as more or less radical at different periods as the fifteenth century progressed. The examples discussed so far indicate how, by making both subtle and more pointed interventions in vernacular devotional texts, scribes were not only adapting existing items to suit different contexts, but also appear to have been going further, using existing items as the basis to create new texts that would raise issues of concern and create new dialogues with readers. A different type of material found in Westminster 3 is represented by the second of two commentaries on the Ten Commandments found in the manuscript. Presented as the sole text in booklet five, Hanna has noted how this item uses lengthy biblical translation and paraphrase to illustrate the prohibitions of the Decalogue, connecting individual morality with salvation history.25 Its inclusion in the Westminster 3 anthology may partly relate to its value in instructing readers on how they might be redeemed through right living, by following the Ten Commandments. A comparison of the different versions of this text helps to illuminate scribal activity and its interpretation. The commentary occurs in two other manuscripts, Oxford, Bodleian Library,

23

Two further manuscripts contain the full text of ‘lordis and housbondemen’: Cambridge, University Library, MS Hh. 1. 3 and Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS 93. See Clarence Anthony Martin, ‘Edinburgh University Library Manuscript 93: An Annotated Edition of Selected Devotional Treatises with a Survey of Parallel Versions’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Edinburgh, 1977). In addition, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 938 appears to contain a fragment of the text, see Moss ‘Context and Construction’, p. 57 (n. 60). 24

Westminster 3, fol. 119r, lines 17–18 and fol. 119v , lines 4–7.

25

Hanna, ‘The Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3’, pp. 202–04.

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MS Laud Misc. 656 and Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B. 14. 54. The earliest, MS Laud Misc. 656, is a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century manuscript copied in a north Oxfordshire dialect.26 This manuscript comprises two booklets: the first containing The Siege of Jerusalem and a copy of the C-text of Piers Plowman, and the second containing a short tract on the Creed, the exposition of the Ten Commandments, plus some biblical sententiae, mainly taken from the Wisdom books.27 The other copy of the commentary is in Trinity College MS B. 14. 54, a fifteenth-century manuscript copied by the Carthusian monk and prolific scribe, Stephen Dodesham. Two quires of the Trinity College codex are palimpsest of another manuscript copied by Dodesham, detailing indulgences attached to Syon Abbey obtained during the 1420s and which ‘could have been copied by c. 1430, or any time subsequently’.28 The manuscript contains an exposition of the Creed, paired with the Ten Commandments commentary, followed by a treatise on The Sixteen Conditions of Christ’s Charity, plus two items on ‘The v bodily wittes’ and ‘The v gostly wittes’.29 Comparison of the three versions of this commentary again suggests how scribes seem to have been adapting material so that it might be read differently in different contexts and it serves as a reminder of the dangers of trying to categorize an item according to narrow boundaries of orthodoxy or heterodoxy. In particular, Trinity College MS B. 14. 54 contains a lengthy section under the exposition of the 26

Michael L. Samuels, ‘Langland’s Dialect’, Medium Ævum, 54 (1985), 232–47 (p. 239).

27

For descriptions and information on ownership, see H. O. Coxe, Bodleian Library: Laudian Manuscripts, Quarto Catalogues, 2, 1st edn repr. and revd (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1973), col. 477; The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman: Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, ed. by Walter W. Skeat, EETS, O. S. 54 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society,1873), pp. xxiv-xxx; Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Middle English Romances, ed. by Gisela Guddat-Figge (München: Fink, 1976), pp. 287–88; S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XVI: Manuscripts in the Laudian Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), pp. 77–78; Piers Plowman: The C Version, ed. by Russell and Kane, p. 4; The Siege of Jerusalem, ed. by Ralph Hanna and David Lawton, EETS, O. S. 320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 2003), pp. xiii–xiv; Hanna, ‘The Origins and Production of Westminster School MS. 3’, p. 211; A. I. Doyle, ‘The Manuscripts’, in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. by David Lawton (Cambridge: Brewer, 1982), pp. 88–100 (p. 93 and note). 28

A. I. Doyle, ‘Stephen Dodesham of Witham and Sheen’, in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers. Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes, ed. by Pamela R . Robinson and Rivkah Zim (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), pp. 94–115 (p. 106). Doyle suggests that Trinity College MS B. 14. 54 was probably made for a lay person. 29

See the description of this manuscript in Mooney, The Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XI.

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first commandment criticizing the inappropriate worship of crosses and crucifixes, much of which is lacking in the other two versions, as well as some short passages in common with MS Laud Misc. 656 that are not present in Westminster 3. The discussion on the appropriate use of images in the Trinity version begins with a citation of Exodus 25. 18–20 and leads into a discussion about the symbolism and worship of the cherubim: But þes aungels were not sette þere forto be worshiped, neiþer y offrid to, neiþer praued to; but by hem; forto haue mynde on god þat is in heuene, & on his aungels that ben there wiþ him, and þerfore þese aungels names were clepid cherubyns.30

This is followed by a description of how God came to the aid of Ezekiel in battle, citing Vulgate IV Kings 19. 35 (i.e. II Kings in modern versions of the Bible, such as the King James) and Isaiah 37. 36, repeating that God’s angels should not be worshipped or prayed to, but can be called upon for help and that they serve as a reminder of God’s power. Following this, the commentary in the Trinity manuscript defends the presence of crucifixes and other images in church, but repeats the criticism of image-worship: and þus herby me semeþ wel, þat cristen men, may make and haue crucifixes in þe chirche for to bringe men in mynde of þe passioun of oure lorde ihesu crist þat diede for vs atte Jerusalm on þe mounte of Caluery, but the crosse shulde not be made forto be worshiped, neiþer praied to, neiþer offrid to, but oonly forto bringe men in mynde of þe passioun þat crist suffred for hem, and in þis manere me þinketh þat a man might graue or portraie to him all þe passioun of crist forto bringe men to mynde, but not forto worshipe no manere of ymagerie, ne pray þerto for helpe, ne offre þerto; but in mynde of þe passioun of crist, and forto bileue in crist; and to serue him the better.31

This passage appears to be a product of the heated debate in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on the correct use of images, including criticism of misguided image-worship.32 The question of the worship specifically due to crosses and crucifixes was particularly controversial. The church authorities promoted the view that latria was due to images of the cross and crucifix, but Lollards and reformers feared that people were in danger of ‘worshipping the sign instead of the signified’.33 The passage above is interesting because it appears close 30

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54, fols 21r–22v .

31

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54, fols 24v –26r.

32

See W. R. Jones, ‘Lollards and Images’, pp. 29–30; Margaret Aston, ‘Lollards and the Cross’, in Lollards and their Influence in Late Medieval England, ed. by Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), pp. 99–113. 33

Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 141–44.

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to the view expressed by Wyclif in his treatise, De mandatis divinis, that the use of images was legitimate, as long as they were used to stimulate religious affections and were not worshipped, described by W. R. Jones as a ‘critical but tolerant approach to images’ that was ‘in agreement with other reformers of the medieval church’.34 It can also be compared to Hilton’s treatise In Defence of Images, which argues that images help the laity recall Christ’s passion and cites evidence from the Old Testament, including the cherubim and God’s instructions to Moses.35 In the Trinity version, the text goes on to relate the story of the false worship of the brazen serpent, drawing on Numbers 21. 5–9 and IV Kings 18. 4–5.36 This is followed by a further assertion that images of the Passion must not be ‘worshiped, neiþer praied to, ne offrid to’.37 It is worth comparing this approach to the opening of the discussion of the use of images in the ‘bonus tractatus de decem mandatis’, described by Margaret Aston, where the author cites ‘the authorities that Bede had cited, including Moses making the brazen serpent’ and where the making of images is not forbidden, but their worship is criticized.38 Whilst G. R. Owst believed the ‘bonus tractatus’ to be orthodox, Aston argues that the text may have been produced by a Wycliffite author who wanted to refute some of the more radical Lollard views on images.39 She demonstrates how the author of the ‘bonus tractatus’ draws on commentators that include both Wyclif and the fourteenth-century Dominican, Robert Holcot, who ‘had sailed very close to the wind’ in discussing the question of images, suggesting that the tract only really strays into heretical territory when the author denounces the worship of ‘shadows of wood and stone’

34

Jones, ‘Lollards and Images’, pp. 29–30. For a discussion of Wyclif’s views in comparison to those of later Lollards see also Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 135–92. 35

G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 137–39. 36

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54, fol. 29 r. These passages in the manuscript were evidently regarded as significant, since a note in Latin at the top of the page directs readers to Wisdom 11. 16, which refers to the same story. It is worth noting that there are a number of marginal notations in Latin throughout the exposition, and the word ‘nota’ also occurs, for example, on fol. 31v next to a passage in the exposition of the first commandment, which states that ‘god saith, that it is þe grettist synne for to worshipe eny ymagerie mad wiþ mannes hondes’. (Note that IV Kings in the Vulgate is II Kings in modern versions of the Bible, such as the King James Version.) 37

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54, fols 29v –30v .

38

Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 153–54.

39

A lengthy extract from this tract, taken from London, British Library, MS Harley 2398, is reproduced in Owst, Literature and Pulpit, pp. 141–43.

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and ‘dead images’, which she sees as hallmarks of Lollard language.40 There is no such language or condemnation in the Trinity manuscript’s version of this Decalogue commentary, neither is there any plea for plain, undecorated crucifixes or the criticism of richly adorned images, often associated with Lollardy. This again suggests that the Trinity text may represent a reformist stance, and it is possible that this section of the commentary was intended to counter Lollard arguments, since it pointedly asserts that ‘cristen men may make and haue crucifixes in þe chirche’ and that ‘a man might graue or portraie to him all þe passioun of crist’, as long as the imagery is used as a devotional aid in the contemplation of the Passion and is not worshipped in its own right. The passages discussed above are interesting because they allow us to see the Westminster 3 copy of the text in a different light and it is worth noting that towards the end of the exposition of the first commandment, both Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54 and MS Laud Misc. 656 contain a further short passage prohibiting image-worship that is absent in Westminster 3: And siþ þat þe lettre saith, þat it is errour & deceite to worshipe eny creature þat euere god made; me semeþ it is muche more errour & deceite to worshipe eny image þat a man makith.41

Taken in isolation, this observation sounds like a Lollard objection to the veneration of images, but read within the context of the additional passages found in the Trinity version of the text, it seems more likely that the comment reflects a reformist stance and was intended to reinforce earlier warnings against worshipping images in their own right. Further research may reveal whether the detailed discussion of image-worship in the Trinity copy was interpolated, or whether these passages were omitted in the other versions of the text, perhaps because of their potentially controversial nature. Without the subtleties of the unique passages in the Trinity manuscript, however, the Westminster 3 commentary retains numerous scriptural passages repeatedly citing the prohibition, alongside some authorial criticism of the worship of devotional images, without further explanation. This potentially leaves the reader freer to put their own interpretation on the material. Some other aspects of the commentary are also open to interpretation, such as the exposition of the eighth commandment, which includes much criticism of false priests and prophets, warning rulers not to be deceived by them, and encouraging

40 41

Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 152–56.

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54, fol. 38r–v. See also Bodleian, MS Laud Misc. 656, fol. 119r–v.

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readers to stay true to their beliefs with the reassurance that God will punish liars.42 This might have appealed to orthodox readers concerned about the threat of Lollardy or, conversely, to Lollard readers seeking reform of the Church. It is also worth noting one aspect of the Trinity manuscript that seems to reflect the influence of its scribe Stephen Dodesham. At the end of the exposition of the first commandment, the Trinity version contains what appears to be an assertion that the scribe has copied this part of his exemplar text in full: This þat ye han herde is þe shewing of þe grounde, & of þe skile, & of þe resoun of þe menyng, & of þe declaracioun of þe first comaundement of god, & þe first it is forsoþe of þe first table, and þus here in þis wise it endiþ withoute eny more.43

Similar assertions occur throughout the version made by Dodesham, at the end of the exposition of each commandment. The same wording — ‘in þis wise it endiþ withoute eny more’ — occurs in a rather more nervous disclaimer at the end of the preceding tract copied by Dodesham in the Trinity manuscript, an exposition of the Creed, of which Doyle notes that ‘some passages suggest a Lollard antecedent or interpolation’.44 The statement at the end of the Creed tract betrays an underlying anxiety about the text’s orthodoxy: and of þe menyng and somdel of the declaration of þe xij articles of oure crede that is oure bileue and in þis wise thus it endiþ withouten eny more natheless if eny man can finde in this crede eny errour or heresie and ground him in holy writte I wol mekely reuoke it and lerne to bileue better.45

Whether this disclaimer was added by Dodesham or was copied by him from another exemplar remains uncertain, although as the wording partly echoes that found in his copy of the Ten Commandments commentary, it suggests that both may have been added by the Carthusian scribe. The discussion so far has focused on readings of the anonymous texts in Westminster 3, copied by Scribe One, and it is worth briefly considering how this sits alongside one of the orthodox items in the manuscript that is associated with a known author, St Edmund of Abingdon’s Mirror of Holy Church (also known as

42

For a detailed discussion of the Westminster 3 version of this commentary, see Moss, ‘Reading London, Westminster School MS 3’, pp. 246–68. 43

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54, fol. 39v .

44

Doyle, ‘Stephen Dodesham’, p. 106.

45

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 54, fol. 17v .

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The Mirror of St Edmund).46 This item, copied by Scribe Two, is based on the early thirteenth-century Latin work Speculum religiosorum or Speculum ecclesie, and it now survives in some eighty manuscripts, including translations in both AngloNorman and English.47 The treatise provides summaries of the basic elements of Christian belief and offers guidance on the contemplation of God in three manners: in creatures, in scripture and in God himself. It offers a summary of much of the catechetical teaching in preceding texts in Westminster 3, as well as filling in some gaps, such as providing a description of the Creed, which is lacking in the opening sequence of texts in the anthology. In the Mirror of Holy Church, an interpolation in the section on the Creed, which is found in Westminster 3, as well as in copies in London, British Library, MS Additional 10053 and in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 416, urges the laity not to question Church teaching, instructing that ‘þis poynt suffiseþ to þe lewed peple. to vndurstonde & bileue as holy cherche bileueþ’.48 This assertion of church authority underlines the orthodoxy of the text. Yet the placing of this item towards the end of the anthology also creates new ways of reading some passages in the treatise, which might have appealed to an audience with Lollard sympathies.49

46

See A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ed. by Hartung, IX (1993), 72; Index of Printed Middle English Prose, ed. by R. E. Lewis, N. F. Blake and A. S. G. Edwards (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 800. 47

For a discussion of the contents and relationship of the different versions see Claire Rosemary Goymer, ‘A Parallel Text Edition of the Middle English Prose Version(s) of the Mirror of St Edmund Based on the Known Complete MSS’ (unpublished MA dissertation, University of London, 1962). Goymer discusses the version in Westminster 3 on pp. xliii–ci. See also Helen P. Forshaw, ‘The Speculum Ecclesie of St Edmund of Abingdon: A Critical Study of the Text’ (unpublished MA dissertation, University of London, 1965); Helen P. Forshaw, ‘New Light on the Speculum Ecclesie of St Edmund of Abingdon’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 46 (1971), 7–33; Helen P. Forshaw, ‘St Edmund’s Speculum: A Classic of Victorine Spirituality’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 47 (1972), 7–40; Edmund of Abingdon: Speculum religiosorum and Speculum ecclesie, ed. by Helen P. Forshaw (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Mirour de seinte eglyse (St Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum Ecclesiae), ed. by Alan D. Wilshere (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1982), pp. iv–vii; Alexandra Barratt, ‘Spiritual Writings and Religious Instruction’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, II: 1100–1400, ed. by Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 340–66 (pp. 341–49). 48 49

Westminster 3, fol. 190v , lines 7–9.

Hanna argues that the Westminster 3 scribes worked as a team, although the work of Scribe One might also be regarded as fairly self-contained. See Hanna, ‘The Origins and Production of

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One example of this occurs in the second chapter of the treatise, which instructs readers to follow God’s will to the death, urging ‘þenke at the þe bigynnyng õif it be goddis wille or not õif it is his wille: do it wiþ al þi power, & elles do it not, to suffre deeþ þerfore’.50 Whilst the statement may be orthodox at source, it might also have appealed to Lollard readers under threat of persecution and its message supports an earlier text in Westminster 3, the Lollard commentary on Vulgate Psalm 26, which calls on readers to stand up for ‘Goddis lawe’ and urges ‘be euery man trewe to þe deeþ’. Another example of the ways in which the placing of Mirror of Holy Church towards the end of the compilation creates new ways of reading the text occurs in chapter fifteen of the treatise, where a discussion of the merits of poverty contrasts greedy ‘false men of religioun’ with ‘þe holy men of cristis religioun þat ben verrely pore’.51 The language of the English translation corresponds closely to the AngloNorman, which complains of ‘les cheytifs mendianz du secle e la fauce gent en religion’ (the beggar/mendicant wretches of our age and the false religious) and which praises those who are ‘verrayment povres’ (truly poor).52 Such criticisms are comparable to complaints about avaricious friars by Chaucer and Langland, which were part of a wider body of antifraternal literature associated with fourteenthcentury tensions between the begging friars, the regular orders, and the secular clergy.53 In the context of Westminster 3, the opposition between false religious and ‘þe holy men of cristis religioun þat ben verrely pore’ might have found favour with early fifteenth-century readers who supported orthodox reform of the Church, of the kind propounded by Robert Hallum, bishop of Salisbury in the early fifteenth century, and others connected to Oxford, or with Lollard readers interested in promoting a Christ-like model of virtuous poverty and humility.54

Westminster School MS. 3’, p. 205 and Moss, ‘Reading London, Westminster School MS 3’, pp. 19–21. 50

Westminster 3, fol. 182r, lines 20–23.

51

Westminster 3, fols 192v , line 13–193r, line 2.

52

Mirour de seinte eglyse, ed. by Wilshere, p. 44. The English translation is my own.

53

For a discussion of anticlerical and antifraternal literature, see, for example, Wendy Scase, ‘Piers Plowman’ and the New Anti-Clericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 54

For a discussion of competing groups seeking to influence the direction of lay piety, including university-educated individuals connected to Oxford and Robert Hallum, bishop of Salisbury, see Jeremy Catto, ‘Religious Change Under Henry V’, pp. 97–115. For Lollard enthusiasm for virtuous poverty, see Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, pp. 46–47.

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A third example is found in a later chapter, during the section of the treatise on the contemplation of God in holy Scripture, where readers are encouraged to discuss what they have learnt from the text with learned ‘clerkes’ and to use it to teach the ignorant so that they can amend their lives: þou hast mater: to speke to clerkes be þei neuere so goode & to lewide: be þei neuere so boistouse […] for þou hast ynowõ wher of to speke & hou þou schalt gouerne þi lijf & oþre mennes amende.55

Within the context of the Westminster 3 anthology, this passage might have appealed not only to orthodox readers keen to engage in right living, but also to those with Lollard sympathies seeking to challenge Church authority. More generally, the instruction also reinforces the message in many of the preceding texts in Westminster 3 which urge readers to lead the ‘good lyf’ and to seek to bring others to the same way of living.

Conclusion The texts in Westminster 3 address a broad range of spiritual and social concerns, many of which guide readers on how to put their beliefs into practice in their everyday lives. Looking across the full range of materials gathered in the anthology, there is little that overtly contradicts orthodox theology, and many of the texts might have provided a useful complement to the teaching available to the laity through the Church.56 Nevertheless, there does appear to be an attempt to steer readers on particular aspects of devotion; encouraging them to lead by example and to adopt a model of the ‘good lyf’ that includes proactively teaching their beliefs to others founded on the commandment to love one’s neighbour. At times, this pious collection appears to coincide with or to promote Lollard beliefs, due to the incorporation of some materials associated with Lollardy and to the series of interpolations into orthodox items copied by Scribe One that support what might be regarded as a Lollard point of view. This suggests that textual affiliation, as well as instructional content, may have played a role in shaping the collection. Yet, as I have argued elsewhere, the nature of the mixture of orthodox, reformist, and Lollard material in the manuscript opens up the possibility that it might have

55

Westminster 3, fol. 196r, lines 7–14.

56

I am grateful to Clive Burgess for suggesting this possibility to me.

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appealed to audiences across the devotional spectrum.57 Most importantly, Westminster 3 attests to a lively culture of vernacular theology in the early fifteenth century, in which scribes and compilers were not constrained by the copying of fourteenth-century texts, but instead used them as a springboard from which to extract new meanings or to highlight issues of continuing concern of relevance to a new generation of readers.

57

Moss, ‘Context and Construction’, pp. 45–47 and 63–64.

Part VIII Translation

G ENDER, C ONFESSION , AND A UTHORITY: O XFORD , B ODLEIAN L IBRARY, MS D OUCE 114 IN THE F IFTEENTH C ENTURY Jennifer N. Brown

M

argery Kempe’s Book provides an idea of what kinds of texts were disseminated to pious laity and the ways in which a member of the merchant class, especially one who is not herself literate, may have incorporated their messages into her quotidian life.1 Margery’s utterances and opinions are evidence that sometimes there was confusion between what constituted an orthodox position and what was heretical in early fifteenth-century England, where Church officials were trying to determine the extent of what was perceived as a threat in the form of Lollardy’s challenges to the Church and its hierarchy;2 Margery is several times accused of being a Lollard and then found innocent of these accusations when she can prove her strict adherence to orthodox theology.3

1

Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley.

2

I am using the term ‘Lollard’ here loosely, much in the way it was used in the late Middle Ages by the laity, as a kind of catch-all term for anything that seems unorthodox, dangerous, or deliberately adversarial to the Church hierarchy. For the purposes of this essay, I am particularly interested in Lollard views of clerical authority acting as an intermediary between the laity and God (such as in the act of penance), stemming from Wycliffite writings. As Nicole Rice has written: ‘In extending his evangelical vision to lay practice, [Wyclif] begins to imply a breakdown between the categories of clerical and lay status, a dissolution that would become more extreme in the theories of his followers and in vernacular Lollardy’ (Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, p. 5). 3

The first accusation comes very early in her Book where she recounts a visit to Canterbury where she is accused of being a ‘fals lollare’ and two men approach her asking, ‘“Damsel, art thow non erteyke or ne no loller?” And sche seyd, “no, serys, I am neythyr eretyke ne loller”’ (Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, p. 42). Although ‘heretic’ and ‘Lollard’ are not exactly equated here,

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These two elements of Margery’s life and Book — her comprehension of circulating devotional texts and her apparently questionable orthodoxy — indicate a broader problem within English culture in the first half of the fifteenth century: that many of these texts themselves were open to attacks as to their orthodoxy. Among the influential devotional texts we know Margery read (or had read to her) is the life of Marie d’Oignies (c. 1170–1213), one of the saints’ lives contained in the mid-fifteenth-century Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114 (hereafter Douce 114). Translated from Latin in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, this collection of lives of women saints seems at first glance to be treading on somewhat dangerous ground in terms of its approach to female spiritual independence and mysticism. Despite its widespread popularity on the European mainland, the idea of the female mystic was not readily embraced in late-medieval England. Each woman’s life in Douce 114 describes an extreme form of piety which manifests itself in physically suspect ways, such as stigmata in the case of Elizabeth of Spalbeek or gruesome self-mutilation in that of Christina mirabilis. The piety is also theologically suspicious: for example, Christina hears what seems to be a sacramental confession, and Marie d’Oignies appears to preach on scriptural interpretation. The beguine lives, especially, demonstrate the narrow ground between heterodox and orthodox practice and belief. In this essay I first situate Douce 114 in the general discussion of ‘vernacular theology’ and consider what its provenance and transmission might say about its audience. Then I turn to the lives themselves and examine how their questionable spiritual practices are inextricable from an orthodox depiction of confession and clerical obedience, creating both a tension and a resolution for the medieval reader. While originally written in part to combat the Cathar heresies of the thirteenth century, and also to promote the relatively new practice of confession among the laity, the later English translator of the vitae may have seen in the texts an orthodoxy that, to some readers, would have provided a counterbalance to some of the Lollard anxieties of early fifteenth-century England. This orthodoxy emphasized submission to the clergy and the Church hierarchy through the discipline and supervision of frequent and full confession. Douce 114 contains three Middle English translations of Latin vitae of beguines of the Liège diocese in the following order: Elizabeth of Spalbeek, written by Philip of Clairvaux; Christina mirabilis, written by Thomas of Cantimpré; and Marie

it is clear that they are more or less the same in the minds of the accusers. Similar accusations recur throughout the Book.

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d’Oignies, written by Jacques de Vitry;4 in addition, the manuscript includes a translation of Stephen Maconi’s short life of Catherine of Siena and a Middle English version of Henry Suso’s Horologium sapientiae.5 The manuscript preserves the only extant English vernacular versions of all four of these lives, but they also had some circulation in Latin in England. The codex itself is interesting beyond its vernacularity and subject matter. While there has been a lot of fascinating and important work recently undertaken on vernacular devotional literature of the fifteenth century, especially concerning the debate as to whether or not Archbishop Arundel successfully thwarted its production and dissemination, Douce 114 has been largely ignored because it is a translation and a hagiographic collection.6 Its lack of ‘originality’ and the general popularity and seeming orthodoxy of its genre have rendered it a nonstarter for critics whose predominant interest is in literature that challenges the status quo of medieval Church hierarchy or openly participates in the heretical positions of Lollardy and Wycliffite sympathies of the early to mid-fifteenth century. However, this dismissal has been misguided. Douce 114, particularly for its beguine lives, deserves a closer look precisely because of the genre and translated status of its texts, and the ways in which the collection challenges traditional conceptions of translated hagiography. As with many medieval manuscripts, it is difficult to assess circulation where evidence is lacking. Although there are thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Latin versions of the vitae of Elizabeth of Spalbeek and Marie d’Oignies found in several English libraries, they are not the same as those found in the fifteenth-century codex, Oxford, St John’s College, MS 182 (hereafter St John’s, 182), which correlates very closely to Douce 114, and also contains the sole version of Christina mirabilis’s Latin life in England. Both St John’s 182 and Douce 114 were 4

The three lives are edited in Three Women of Liège: A Critical Edition of and Commentary on the Middle English Lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie d’Oignies, ed. by Jennifer N. Brown (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008). 5

For more on Suso, see Roger Lovatt, ‘Henry Suso and the Medieval Mystical Tradition’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1982, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1982), pp. 47–62. 6

See especially Literary History and the Religious Turn, a special issue ed. by Bruce Holsinger of English Language Notes, 44 (2006), 77–137, containing short essays by several scholars; Steven Justice, ‘General Words: Response to Elizabeth Shirmer’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 377–94; Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion; Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’.

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eventually housed at Carthusian monasteries, Witham and Beauvale respectively, but most likely did not originate within them.7 The translation of the beguine lives is clearly a copy of an already-translated text, so at least one other vernacular version of it existed.8 But there is little evidence that the beguine lives were wellknown in medieval England, despite a pronounced popularity in the Low Countries. Indeed, the lifestyle of the beguines — women who lived in communities, imitating a religious life, but without taking formal vows or submitting to official Church oversight — never made it across the channel either.9 The closest English examples of the ‘semi-religious’ state of the beguines are the somewhat more extreme practice of anchoresses — such as Julian of Norwich, or, again, the exceptional example of Margery Kempe. The fact that the lives were translated at all points to some, if limited, interest in the continental mystics and their literature in England — a genre that flourished in the Low Countries and Germany. Translation, of course, is much more than simply changing words from one language to another, even in the case of Douce 114 which more or less closely follows the original Latin vitae. Scholars have discussed the many implications of translating from the Latin into the vernacular, a process that involves notions of mediation, accessibility, and instruction.10 And indeed, translating a text allowed the medieval translator/author, as Michelle R. Warren has stated, ‘an opportunity to redefine audiences, social relations, historical inheritance, and ethnic identities’.11 Only recently has the debate on vernacular theology really turned to encompass translated texts, and scholars have argued that

7

For a more thorough treatment of the provenance of Douce 114 see Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, pp. 9–22. 8

The English translation of Suso’s Horologium sapientiae circulated as a Treatyse of the Sevene Poyntes of Trewe Love and Everlastynge Wisdom and survived in various versions in fourteen manuscripts, both in complete and excerpted versions. 9

For the most comprehensive look at the beguines, see Walter Simons, Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200–1565 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 10

See The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others; especially ‘The Notion of Vernacular Theory’, pp. 314–30. 11

Michelle R . Warren, ‘Translation’, in Middle English, ed. by Paul Strohm, Oxford Twentyfirst Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 51–67 (p. 52).

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these are just as crucial to understanding the landscape of medieval devotional life, both lay and clerical, as are original compositions in the vernacular.12 Saints’ lives may have not held the same kind of dangerous connotations other theological texts did in the vernacular. In some ways, classical saints’ lives had more in common generally with medieval romance than they did with medieval theology. The narrative story of the saint’s holy life is usually placed in the foreground and theological or doctrinal concerns are secondary. In this way, the texts had value both as a devotional and an entertaining read. Vincent Gillespie further explains their utility: ‘Celebrations of the lives of saints provided a rich seam of preaching material and of safely edifying reading material for increasingly voracious vernacular readers and listeners, clerical and lay’.13 Gillespie goes on to suggest that Douce 114 is an important representative of this genre in that it: provides a fascinating series of vernacular exemplars for a new kind of intense and expressive spirituality. Such lives become both models for emulation for aspirant contemplatives and also cautionary tales of the need for clerical guidance. This dualism is perhaps one of the reasons for making these materials available in the vernacular: their carefully orthodox, if often racily mystical, lives are acted out within the context of the nurturing and validating ethos of the institutional Church.14

Therein lies the paradox of its texts: Douce 114 embraces the individual’s personal and even visionary relationship to God while simultaneously encouraging a dependence on and reverence for the Church hierarchy. On the one hand its vernacularity can impart this lesson to the readers who may already be embracing a kind of mystical spirituality; but on the other hand, it potentially opens the text up to readers who may not be able properly to discern both of these messages. The question of lay access to devotional texts is central to the debate concerning vernacular theology. As noted above, however, we simply cannot know who had access to Douce 114 or to many others of the vernacular texts so widely studied today, such as Julian of Norwich’s Revelations and Margery Kempe’s Book. The textual tradition and possible readings of Douce 114 well represent typical ambiguities about why a text might first be translated with an intent to disseminate it and then seemingly be kept inside a monastery. Although it was translated and provided with an explicit indicating that it had an intended audience of both male and female lay readers, the codex itself seems to have never left the charterhouse. 12 See especially Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’, pp. 402–07; and Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 15–17. 13

Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, p. 254.

14

Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, p. 256.

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In the opening sentences of Elizabeth’s vita in Douce 114, the anonymous translator — or ‘compilour’ — responsible for the four Middle English works gathered there offers an explanatory note about the problems inherent in ‘turn[ing] a text from one language into another’.15 The scribe writes that the English translation is necessary so that ‘deuoute soulles that are not leeryd in latyn tunge’ may understand the text.16 The apology at the end of Stephen of Siena’s letter regarding Catherine of Siena’s canonization similarly offers several clues as to the text’s intended audience and the reason for its translation, but does not answer all of the questions about Douce 114 or the texts it presents. Like Margery’s devotional practice, a text in and of itself is not heretical or orthodox, but the circumstances in which it was translated, disseminated, owned, or used could label it so. As John Arnold has written with reference to the charge of heresy levelled against Margery Kempe, ‘not only is heresy in the eye of the beholder, but the charge of heresy is always linked to a particular historical moment, and depends upon the historical context […] for its sustainability or otherwise’.17 The fact of a text’s vernacularity is not enough to demonstrate its appeal or dissemination to lay audiences, but it does gesture towards a broader audience than the most learned of clergy whose facility and ease with Latin would have made a translation unnecessary. Vernacularity may not have necessarily signalled a lay readership, but it opened up the possibility of one, and with it brought the opportunity for a lay reader to (mis)read theology, eschew the authority of the clergy, and — most dangerously — lapse into an actual or perceived heresy. The writer of Douce 114, or at least of its exemplar, seeks forgiveness of ‘alle men and wymmen that in happe redith or herith this Englyshe’, indicating a possible mixed audience.18 Initially, it is not clear whether this is an audience of religious or lay people, but the author’s next sentence seems to identify this first group as the laity when he begs that ‘lettird men and clerkes, if they endeyne to see thes bokes, that they wol be fauorabil’.19 The separation of lettered men and clerks from the earlier address to ‘all men and women’ shows that he primarily envisions a lay audience, with a clerical one as a secondary — almost incidental — readership. 15

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 27.

16

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 27.

17

John H. Arnold, ‘Margery’s Trials: Heresy, Lollardy and Dissent’, in A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 75–93 (p. 75). 18

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 17.

19

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 17.

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It is in some ways a familiar prologue to readers of fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury devotional literature, one that seems to recognize the audience as both changing and expanding from a monastic one. Aside from this spare internal evidence, Margery Kempe’s Book provides the only firm external evidence that the lives of Douce 114 had much circulation in England outside of a monastic readership, and then only the most famous of the lives — that of Marie d’Oignies.20 Still, even this sparse evidence is telling, as Marie’s vita plays a crucial role in Margery’s experience. Initially, it is Margery’s priest who takes the lesson from Marie’s life; after reading it, he becomes more compassionate and understanding of Margery’s tears, as the life describes Marie’s tears and her own priest’s understanding of them: And yet owr Lord drow hym [Margery’s priest] agen in schort tyme, blissed mote he ben, that he lovyd hir mor and trustyd mor to hir wepyng and hir crying than evyr he dede beforn, for aftyrward he red of a woman clepyd Maria de Oegines and of hir maner of levyng, of the wondirful swetnesse that sche had in the word of God heryng, of the wondirful compassyon that sche had in hys Passyon thynkyng, and of the plentyuows teerys that sche wept, the whech made hir so febyl and so weyke that sche myth not endur to beheldyn the crosse, ne heryn owr Lordys Passyon rehersyd, so sche was resolvyd into terys of pyté and compassyon.21

But the priest’s reading of Marie’s life is not conveyed to Margery merely as a summary. Instead, it is clear that the text is read to her, carefully and fully, so that she too can absorb Marie’s lessons. While the Book mentions the chapter titles of Marie’s vita in Latin, it is certainly possible that the version to which the priest had access was in the vernacular. Even if it was not, it was a version of the vita that was intended to be disseminated through pastoral means: Of the plentyuows grace of hir teerys he tretyth specyaly in the boke beforn wretyn the eighteenth capitulo that begynnyth, ‘Bonus es, domine, sperantibus in te’, and also in the nineteenth capitulo wher he tellyth how sche, at the request of a preyste that he schulde not be turbelyd ne distrawt in hys messe wyth hir wepyng and hir sobbyng, went owt at the chirche dor, wyth a lowde voys crying that sche myth not restreyn hir therfro.22

20

In 1533 English readers would again be introduced to Marie d’Oignies through John Fewterer’s Myrroure or Glasse of Christes Passion (Short Title Catalogue number (hereafter STC) 14533), a translation of Ulrich Pinder’s Speculum passionis domini nostri Jesu Christi, where she is briefly mentioned. Pinder’s text comes via Nürnberg, however, not through an English tradition. Many thanks to Catherine Grisé for calling my attention to this citation. 21

Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, p. 149.

22

Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Staley, p. 149.

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One of the most troubling aspects of Margery’s piety, to both her contemporaries and her modern critics alike, is her excessive tears. Margery certainly understands Marie as a model of devotion, but — as often is the case with Margery — she does not comprehend the whole lesson. She uses Marie to explain her tears and as a chastisement against the clergy who do not believe that her expressions of devotion are authentic. The priest also uses Marie as a way to authorize the Book itself; her life serves as a kind of auctoritas. It seems that Margery almost certainly did not know the lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeek or Christina mirabilis, whose piety is more demonstrative and extreme than that of Marie; if she had, she very likely would have incorporated some of those practices into her own, or at least discussed them. Marie’s life is significant beyond its resonances with Margery’s own. Like Margery’s Book, Marie’s vita was written during a time of heretical threat, yet underscores doctrinal orthodoxy despite its subject’s unorthodox approach to piety. For example, a main reason Cathar belief was considered dangerous was that it asserted the invalidity of the clergy and its inability to represent God on earth.23 The vita of Marie d’Oignies was dedicated to Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, one of the most powerful and active combatants against the Cathars, and the vita’s subtle subtext is constantly reinforcing clerical power, even while acknowledging that Marie’s spiritual state is often superior to that of the priests around her. The practice of sacramental confession becomes a focal point for combating Cathar beliefs for two reasons: it underscores the need for and importance of the clergy in lay devotional practice, and it allows the confessor to examine for unorthodox beliefs.24 Further, confession becomes a central point for the thirteenth-century hagiographers for another reason. As Dyan Elliot explains, ‘auricular confession did not come easily to western Europe. When annual confession was made mandatory at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (Lateran IV), Christendom required considerable coaching — parish priests and the laity alike’.25 To this end, the vitae 23

See Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (Harlow: Longman, 2000). 24

As John Arnold explains, ‘The council of Toulouse had demanded that every man over the age of fourteen and every woman over the age of twelve should swear an oath to abjure all heresy, to serve the Catholic faith, to persecute heretics, and “to manifest good faith”. This oath was to be renewed every other year, and failure to do so made one suspect of heresy; the same suspicion arose if one was delinquent in appearing triannually at confession’ ( John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 37). 25

Dyan Elliot, ‘Women and Confession: From Empowerment to Pathology’, in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. by Mary C. Erler and Maryanne

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of Marie and her counterparts in Douce 114 effectively ‘coach’ by providing specifics as to the frequency and content of confessions undertaken by their holy female protagonists, and the women’s emotional reactions to confession, as well as the reactions of the supporting casts of priests, nuns, and miraculously saved sinners. This emphasis on confession would have been equally useful in early fifteenth-century England as it conveniently upheld a sacrament under attack from Wyclif and his followers, a sacrament that provided clergy with a crucial, recurring ability to monitor and control the laity. Stephen Penn explains that, were Wyclif’s views on penance accepted, ‘the priesthood would have been destined to lose one of its subtlest means of empowerment: private, or auricular confession’.26 It was important both doctrinally and institutionally to keep confession in place, and the lives that so emphasized its practice may have functioned as a useful tool in the textual battle surrounding orthodoxy and Lollardy in late medieval England. The order of the three beguine lives in Douce 114 does not appear to be arbitrary. There are important progressions from Elizabeth to Marie that the compiler apparently had in mind. Elizabeth is the least-known woman written by the least-known hagiographer, while Christina and Thomas of Cantimpré are more prominent. Finally, Marie is the most known and recognized, as is her hagiographer, Jacques de Vitry. The audience thus progresses from a description of an unknown woman’s piety to a relatively famous representation of devotion, but the thread of how that piety is expressed is consistent throughout. A reader who may not understand the nature and depth of Elizabeth’s devotion or who may consider it dubious will be confronted with a more familiar name in Christina, and finally the exemplary and widely known Marie d’Oignies. In addition, we move from behaviour that may be the most suspect to that which is the most orthodox, a progression that perhaps serves increasingly to address Lollard objections to both the practice of confession and to lay reliance on the clergy. Elizabeth’s reception of the stigmata was suspicious to her thirteenthcentury readers and observers, and indeed Jesse Njus has recently demonstrated that the vita really begins as a probatio to judge the veracity of Elizabeth’s claims.27

Kowaleski (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 31–51 (p. 34). For more on the Lateran Council of 1215 and its effect on confession and laity, see John H. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London: Hodder, 2003), pp. 169–78. 26

Stephen Penn, ‘Wyclif and the Sacraments’, in A Companion to John Wyclif, ed. by Ian Christopher Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 241–91 (p. 283). 27

Jesse Njus, ‘The Politics of Mysticism: Elisabeth of Spalbeek in Context’, Church History, 77 (2008), 285–317.

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Christina’s extreme behaviour is — even within the confines of the vita — suspicious, and her friends constantly debate whether her visions and actions are divinely or demonically inspired. Finally, although Marie d’Oignies is the figurehead for the beguine movement which undergoes its own scrutiny for the heresy of the free spirit, among other suspicions, her authorization by Jacques de Vitry — then bishop of Acre — through his writing of her complex vita, and her official beatification, firmly reinforce her orthodoxy. In all three lives, confession to, and more generalized dependence on, the clergy is a central theme. Emphasis on submission to prescribed clerical supervision attempts to tether the otherwise dangerously radical stories in the vitae. Elizabeth, who for most of the text is described as acting out Jesus’s Passion and all the parts therein, is most often voiceless — portrayed as struck dumb, catatonic, or firmly in her persona as Christ. However, at the end of the life, Philip feels the need to give some more information about Elizabeth besides these activities and also recounts a few of her miracles. This contextualizes her more firmly through a structure of orthodox behaviour. Among his observations, he tells us: Also hit is to witte that she is neuere housilde or she haue shreuene hir byfore Masse, the whiche schrifte semith rathere of louvynge than of blamynge, as the forseyde abbot hir confessour tolde me.28

This is followed by the usual topos that she constantly confesses her sin of not loving God as perfectly as she should. Elizabeth, who up until this point had been described as nearly out of her conscious mind and in a state of transcendent worship, is given a rationality here that she has nowhere else in the text: she confesses before every Mass. Later, when Philip recounts a few of Elizabeth’s miracles that fall outside of her predominant fame as performing the Passion, he focuses again on confession, while also underscoring the importance of the clergy. Elizabeth recognizes in a local man, acting as a servant to the visiting abbot Philip, the need both to confess his sins and to join an order as a lay brother: Than forthwith sche sayde, ‘Goo shryue yow of youre synnes and doth penauns and I schalle praye yow with good wille or elles I wolde not entermete me thereof, for I schulde trauel in veyne’. And when sche hadde byholden hem bisely, sche callid specially to hir oon of hem that was yongest, a feyre yonge man, sympel and wel witted, and made oon that knewe booth her langage seye vnto hym that as sone as hee myghte, he shulde make hym a lewde frere of Clareualle or of anothere hous of oure ordir where hee myghte fynde a place of his conuersyone. And that she counseyled hym on allwise. And this same yonge

28

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 45.

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man byhighte gladly to do after hir counseyle, and so it was don. […] And therfore sche desyred that the staat of that yonge man were strengthed with remedy of religyone and felawschyp of religyous men.29

Elizabeth’s prophetic and visionary abilities are highlighted throughout the vita, but here the message is twofold, in Elizabeth’s ability both to recognize an unconfessed man and to direct him towards a calling he did not know he had — for a religious life at Clairvaux. Later, after he finds his place in the monastery, Elizabeth sees the young man again. This time she tells him that she can see that he is not fully shriven and that he must confess himself fully. These episodes stand out in the vita for two reasons. The first is that Philip, Elizabeth’s hagiographer, is present (by contrast, for most of the miracles he recounts — other than her daily devotions — he is not a witness, just a recorder of others’ recollections), and comes to know the young man in question as he joins Philip’s own house at Clairvaux. The second is that there are very few miracles attributed to Elizabeth at all other than her acting out Christ’s passion and receiving the stigmata. This is in stark contrast to the other lives where the women are responsible for miraculous events throughout, including healing and prophecy. At the end of Elizabeth’s vita, Philip adds a few miracles that he witnessed, but this is the only one recounted at such length and in such detail. Although beginning as a probatio, arising out of suspicion, Elizabeth’s vita serves its English audience well, reinforcing both the importance of clergy and confession in a good Christian’s life. Christina mirabilis, whose vita consists of a series of miraculous tortures she inflicts on herself and withstands, becomes another kind of lesson in confession. Her pains are those that souls suffer in purgatory, and Thomas glosses Christina’s entire life as a lesson in being clean of conscience before death to avoid the worst of them. However, one episode treads the line between heresy and orthodoxy, and it is clear that her hagiographer Thomas of Cantimpré carefully constructs the text in order to abolish any suspicion. When the Earl of Looz lies on his deathbed, he calls the holy woman to him: This same Eril Lowys, whanne he laye in his deed bed, garte calle Cristyne to hym and preyed hir mekely that she wolde abyde with hym, and she grauntid. Then hee goodly commaunded alle that were with hym to go oute of the chaumbyr and withhelde Cristyn in the chaumbyr. Then, forthwith, the Erille dressed hym vp with the strengthe, knelynge byfore Cristyns feet, rehercyd to hir with ful many terys alle his synnes that hee hadde doon fro the eleuenthe yeere of his age vnto that daye. And that not for indulgens — the whiche

29

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 46.

426

Jennifer N. Brown sche hadde no powere to gyf — but thatte she shulde be the more stired thereby to praye for hym.30

Thomas’s last sentence here assures his readers that Christina is not absolving the earl of his sins, because she ‘had no power’ to do so, but the fact that he needs to write this reassurance at all shows the ambiguity of the episodes to its participants and its readers. Here, as often in medieval exegesis, conversion and confession are closely linked to one another, and the exercise of drawing fine theological distinctions might not wholly succeed. Christina’s vita repeatedly presents its holy protagonist rebelling against society and ignoring the advice of those around her. She is constantly escaping to the ‘wilderness’, and tries to live ‘like a bird’ in high places, such as trees and towers. Her friends, on more than one occasion, tie her up and leave her in the forest, purportedly to save her from herself. But Thomas is resolute in bringing Christina back into a realm of orthodox beliefs and behaviours even though there is nothing conventional about the woman or her spiritual practices. Lest there be any confusion about how Christina viewed the Church, Thomas explains to his readers that ‘She worschepyd the clergye — and namely prestis — with a wonder manere for the houge loue of Cryste, thagh neuertheles she on contrary wyse suffred many wronges of hem’.31 This may very well serve as a warning to anyone who feels that wrongs suffered at the hands of a priest are reason enough to turn away from the Church as a whole. The three beguine lives end with that of Marie d’Oignies, who serves as a model for how and why to confess, as well as for her dependence on and relationship to the clergy, particularly her dependence on her confessor and hagiographer Jacques de Vitry. Andrew Cole has rightly pointed out that Marie is the best analogue and model for Margery Kempe, who names Marie’s vita as one of her influences, with a distinct difference being that Marie was ‘never mistaken for a heretic’.32 Indeed, the text consistently underscores her orthodoxy, and an entire chapter of her vita entitled ‘of her shryfte’ focuses exclusively on her confessional practice. Marie is so scrupulous with her confession that Jacques describes her confessors laughing at the kinds of sins she believes she has committed and must confess: And if happely hit semyd to hir that she hadde trespassed any litil venial synne, she shewyd hir to a preste with so grete sorow of herte, with so mykel schame, and with so longe

30

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 75.

31

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 74.

32

Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, p. 165.

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contricyone, that othere while for grete angwyshe of herte she was const[r]eyned to crye loude in maner of a woman trauelynge of childe — ye, thof she so eshewed fro smal and veniels that otherewhile she myghte not fynde in hir herte, in fiftene dayes, vnordynate thoghte! And, for gode myndes knowe gilte there where no gilte is, often she knelyd atte prestys feet and, accusynge hirselfe, confessyd hir with terys of sum thinge; in the whiche vnnethis wee myghte absteyne fro laghter, [at] sum childely woordes that she sorowed fore, the whiche, as she mynned, she spake in veyne in hir youthe.33

For Jacques, Marie’s virtue is in her overscrupulous confession, her desire to confess every possible sin that she commits. Linked closely with the monastery at Oignies, Marie has many confessors (although Jacques is her primary spiritual advisor), and this passage also demonstrates Marie’s dependence on and respect for many of the priests there, as several seem to be implicated in laughing at her childish words. Ultimately, Jacques uses Marie’s excessive confession as a lesson to himself and the other priests, but obviously to his readers as well: ‘She, punyshynge hirselfe often, dredyd there where was nouther drede ne doute. And in this allone wee, sekynge solas to oure slouth, otherewhile reprehendid hir that she shrof hir of siche smale thinges oftener thanne wee wolde’.34 Jacques models the ways in which Marie’s life serves as a lesson about the importance of confession, as he believes it should be for his readers, and also offers a kind of symbiosis between the penitent and the confessor. He does not emphasize his hierarchical position above Marie, but equally does not discount his role. While the collection of saints’ lives in Douce 114 does not seem to fit smoothly in the landscape of other contemporary vernacular devotional texts, it clearly served a purpose. In all three lives the importance of confession is subtly reinforced and emphasized throughout the narratives. For each, it is not the sole focus, but there is no question it is a crucial subtext. Indeed, the final words in each vita in some way bring the reader back to the importance of either confession or clerical guidance, and the ways in which the life of each woman should guide the reader. Philip writes of Elizabeth: In rodynes of hire reuelacyouns and spiritual lyfe she figurith the sendynge of the Holy Goost. And of the sacramente of the auter, and of confessyon, and then of desyres of alle mennes saluacyone and of sorowe of vnkyndenes and dampnacyone of mankynde that atte is writen aboue declarith openly inowgh, that thou man arte vnexusabil if so quik

33

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 95.

34

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 96.

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Jennifer N. Brown arguments and open reproues stir the not to strengthe of feith, to desyre of charyte and deuocyone.35

Although the vita focuses on Elizabeth’s Passion meditation, Philip has listed ‘the sacramente of the auter’ and ‘confessyon’ among her most significant qualities in his final summary. Men should be stirred by her example to the same level of faith, a faith that necessarily includes clerical dependency. Jacques de Vitry ends his text with post-mortem miracles attributed to his subject, but the last of these are both miracles witnessed by the monastic brethren at Oignies where Marie lived her last days. There is no question where her loyalties lie; even after death, Marie is attending to the same clergy she cared for in life. As Marie’s life ends the collection of beguine vitae, its final image lingers in the readers’ minds, and with it the implication of a kind of interdependance — the holy women and the clergy dependent on one another through life and after death. But it is Thomas of Cantimpré’s coda to Christina mirabilis’s life which best brings together the disparate themes and uses of these translated vitae. Although the mystical ‘bride of Christ’ motif which is so predominant in continental visionary women’s literature never fully gains the same popularity in England, these texts allow for a middle ground which emphasizes the mystical along with the orthodox. Thomas says as much when he ends Christina’s life by alluding to the parable of the wise and foolish virgins: Wakith, therfore, for yee knowith neithere the oure ne the daye whan youre Lorde ready ilkan oure? That taughte she with many woordes, with weymentynges, with tellynge of any othere heere byfore or comynge after vnto the worshyp and louvynge of Cryste, that, with the Fadir and the Holy Goost, lyueth and reignith God withouten ende.36

The parable (Matthew 25. 1–13) is an image used repeatedly by all three hagiographers to describe their protagonists as awaiting their bridegroom Christ, yet Thomas simultaneously reminds his readers of the parable’s implications — one must always be prepared for one’s death. Christina’s example of living as everready for death, confessed and constantly penitent, is ultimately the lesson both of this vita and of the others in Douce 114.

35

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, p. 50.

36

Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown, pp. 83–84.

D RESSING UP A ‘GALAUNT ’: T RADITIONAL P IETY AND F ASHIONABLE P OLITICS IN P ETER IDLEY ’S ‘TRANSLACIONS’ OF M ANNYNG AND L YDGATE Matthew Giancarlo

I

n the history of fifteenth-century writing, Peter Idley (c. 1439–1473/74) has been on the canonical margins since his Instructions to his Son was edited and published to extant completeness in 1935. The Instructions was probably composed sometime between 1440 and 1455, and it has the distinction of being one of the first poems showing the influence of John Lydgate (1377–1449). Idley was a man of some station, an Oxfordshire bureaucrat and Lancastrian official who apparently aspired to literary accomplishment.1 Part One of the Instructions (as it has been editorially titled and divided) is an adaptation of the works of Albertanus of Brescia into a hybrid Fürstenspiegel ostensibly addressed to his son. Part Two is a similarly innovative re-working of Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s Handlyng Synne (c. 1303) combined with roughly 434 lines taken from Lydgate’s Fall of Princes (1438/39) in varying degrees of directness.2 The manuscripts of the Instructions have

1

Peter Idley’s ‘Instructions to his Son’, ed. by Charlotte D’Evelyn (Boston: Heath, 1935). Parenthentical citations are from this edition, and for later unedited sections of the poem, from Matthew Sullivan, ‘More Poetry by Peter Idley’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 97 (1996), 29–55, and from London, British Library, MS Additional 57335 where Sullivan’s incomplete transcription leaves off without reproducing the last 783 lines. All citations tentatively follow D’Evelyn’s sectioning and line-number arrangements. 2

Parenthetical citations of Mannyng and Lydgate are from Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, ed. by Idelle Sullens (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983); Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. by Bergen.

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been largely localized to the Oxfordshire–Berkshire region near where Idley was the bailiff of the Honour of Wallingford for many years. Since its scholarly publication three new manuscripts have come to light — the most recent in 2006 — bringing the total number of independent witnesses to ten. One manuscript, London, British Library, MS Additional 57335, contains over one thousand lines of previously unattested poetry, bringing the fragmentary text of Part Two very close to its presumed completion.3 Given this enlarged textual presence, the time seems right for a renewed investigation into the scope of Idley’s work and the patterns of interest it reveals. Indeed the number of its manuscripts now makes the Instructions one of the bestattested vernacular poetical works of the fifteenth century. It is inherently interesting for its unique combination of materials that are both older (Mannyng) and current (Lydgate); secular and political (the works of Albertanus, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes) as well as ecclesial and pastoral (Handlyng Synne); and — my particular focus here — for its patterns of excision and dilation that bring unique emphases to particular subjects. A full re-assessment of Idley must await a new edition, which is now in preparation. Notwithstanding, a close look at Part Two of the Instructions, which will be my focus here, reveals how Idley reflects his social, religious, and political environment. He was translating earnestly but curiously on the eve of the Wars of the Roses (pre-1455) and in an environment of remarkable fluidity in the way laity and clerisy approached the task of religious instruction. In this regard, the critical work of Nicholas Watson and others on vernacular theology has provided an excellent framework for understanding how and why a layman like Idley would have engaged in his genre- and class-crossing literary enterprise.4 And while we may agree that ‘Idley’s vision of The Fall of Princes is an uncomplicated one’, drawing from it as he does for sentential passages, his use of Lydgate is nonetheless revealing, and in fact his translation and confection is more complex than has been previously

3

New manuscripts discovered since D’Evelyn’s 1935 edition include Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet d. 45, acquired in 1940, a badly mutilated copy of Part Two; London, British Library, MS Additional 57335, acquired in 1971, a copy of Parts One and Two with approximately 1700 lines of new poetry; Columbia, MO, University of Missouri, Ellis Library, Fragmenta Manuscripta, leaf no. 177, a small piece of the previously known Pepys MS, identified in 1973; and New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fa.50, acquired in 2006, an excellent copy of Part One and the first 355 lines of Part Two. 4

Watson, ‘Censorship’.

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acknowledged.5 As I want to suggest preliminarily here, central to Idley’s idiosyncratic work is a pattern of ‘dressing up’ his revision of Handlyng Synne with the aid of Lydgate by making particular anxieties more visible and some troublesome subjects more palatable. This artful conflation, out of which the Instructions was woven, indicates how the long shadow of the Lambeth Constitutions of 1409 could still reach across both pastoral and poetical texts decades later, and in unexpected ways. To undertake a revision of Handlyng Synne was perhaps both a fashionable and safe manoeuvre, as the number of its surviving fifteenth-century manuscripts suggest that Mannyng’s pastoral guide found an interested audience at about the time Idley decided to adapt it into Lydgatean rhyme-royal stanzas.6 It was a text squarely in the long orthodox tradition of Pecham’s Syllabus (expounding on the Ten Commandments, Seven Deadly Sins, Sacrilege, Seven Sacraments, and Twelve Points of Shrift) that developed into an expanded catechetical corpus by the fifteenth century.7 Further, it fits into the pattern of secular authors encroaching on clerical texts for edification and entertainment of a spiritual nature. Mannyng’s collection of exempla is itself a kind of miscellany, and Idley’s version keeps manuscript company with other texts both secular (Vegetius, Chaucer, Hoccleve) and devotional (Capgrave’s Life of St Katherine, hymns to the Virgin). In scope and demeanour it is not far from Robert Thornton’s contemporaneous collection of devotional texts and other religious collections.8 Nor is it at all surprising to find Lydgate in this mix, as especially his Life of Our Lady and devotional lyrics were popular alongside both secular romances and clerical guidebooks. On the whole it would be fair to say that Idley’s work fits in this culture of mixed lay-clerical devotional discourse that sometimes had to negotiate a fraught social divide — hints of which, we will see, are evident in the Instructions — as it also reflects the

5

A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Influence of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes c. 1440–1559: A Survey’, Mediaeval Studies, 39 (1977), 424–39 (p. 435). 6

Handlyng Synne, ed. by Sullens, pp. xviii–xxxiii.

7

As Eamon Duffy notes, ‘a common and extremely rich religious culture for the laity and secular clergy had emerged, by the fifteenth century, which far exceeded the modest expectations of Pecham and the thirteenth-century bishops who devised the catechetical strategies of the medieval English church’ (The Stripping of the Altars, p. 63). 8

For Thornton and other fifteenth-century examples see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, pp. 53–63, 68–77; Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, pp. 133–52; and Thomas Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) for the broader European context.

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limited horizons of theological discourse that were allowable in the 1440s and 1450s. Indeed it would be a stretch to call him a ‘vernacular theologian’ strictly speaking, as theology is one thing Idley’s religious text seems determined to avoid. But in this context of religious conservatism, Part Two of the Instructions actually achieves an innovative and in some ways challenging compilation. While generally Idley adheres relatively closely to Mannyng’s text — and the variability of Handlyng Synne’s witnesses also suggest that it was malleable, appropriately so for a penitential guidebook — moments of contemporary resonance are not hard to find. In the Fourth Commandment, for example, ‘Honour your mother and father’, Idley adds a mildly anxious stanza about managing one’s filial and royal loyalties, even to the point of betraying one’s parents for treason: If it be ayenst God or the kyng, thow shalt not obeye But be true to god and also to thy kyng; If thow kenne the contrarie thow shalt hem bewreye And not kepe it cloos for ony maner thyng; If þou can by ony meane from folie hem bryng, As a sone to thy fadre, do thy true diligence, Euer obseruyng all fadirly obeysaunce. (2A.1084–90)

As D’Evelyn suggested, it is not hard to read here the hints of a growing concern about reconciling national and personal commitments, in a catechetical context that did not usually frame matters in such an overtly political way.9 Idley’s choice of a Lydgatean text for wide-scale interpolation is itself telling in this regard. He draws primarily from the Fall of Princes, a text of the political de casibus tradition in which Lydgate (and before him Laurence Premierfait) had already innovated by conflating it with the separate ‘advices’ and Fürstenspiegel tradition, to create something of ‘a generic hybrid’.10 By further weaving this combination with an older English pastoral manual, Idley creates a hybridized text of political comment and religious didacticism out of two ‘safe’ exemplars of potentially troublesome fields of discourse. In fact, Idley’s anxieties about social order are most consistently manifested in the way apparent disorder shows itself publicly: in fashion and clothing, and this with a strongly gendered valence. Famously, the fifteenth century was a period of both wild sartorial excess and occasionally strident condemnation.11 In Handlyng 9

Idley’s ‘Instructions to his Son’, ed. by D’Evelyn, pp. 50–51.

10 11

Strohm, Politique, pp. 87–104 (p. 98).

On late medieval clothing and culture, in addition to the specific studies and texts cited below, see Margaret Scott, Medieval Dress and Fashion (London: British Library, 2007),

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Synne Mannyng has scattered comments on inappropriate dress, but nothing like Idley’s recurrent treatments of it. In Part Two of the Instructions, the earliest example of this anxiety comes in a substantial addition to the treatment of the Second Commandment (‘keep the Sabbath holy’), about bad behaviour on Sundays (gambling, tavern-haunting, singing lays). Idley adds a comment on the classes of women’s clothing: Now I-wys it were well doon to knowe The difference betwene a damysell and a mayde, ffor al be ylike when they stonde on a rowe. But y woll telle yow what experiens said, And in what wise they be entired and arraied: Maidens were calles of silk and of threde And dameselles kercheiffes aboue pynned on þeir hede. (2A.1035–41)

For Idley’s late-Victorian editors, passages such as this were notable for the light they supposedly shed on contemporary personal mores and styles, for better or worse.12 As revealing as that is, we can also note the broader socio-political overtones. The problem with the fashions is not so much (or only) what people wear as it is the loss of easy class distinction, the sumptuary difference between a ‘damsel’ and a ‘maid’. Slightly further on in the Sixth Commandment on adultery, a similar antifeminist moment prompts the first extensive borrowings from Lydgate. These come in an embedded envoy-style lyric about how women abuse their ‘crooked instruments’ in violation of their marriage vows: In suche foule lust is hir most delite And to make hir freisshe with newe atires; She spareth for no cost to geve men appetite,

pp. 123–69; Mary G. Houston, Medieval Costume in England and France: The 13th, 14th, and 15th Centuries (London: Black, 1939; repr. New York: Dover, 1996), pp. 139–218; Herbert Norris, Medieval Costume and Fashion (London: Dent, 1924; repr. Mineola: Dover, 1999), pp. 347–468; Françoise Piponnier, Costume et vie sociale: La cour d’Anjou XIV e– XV e siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1970); E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Susan Crane, The Performance of the Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 12

Compare the extracts from Part One (and Furnivall’s dismissive comments) in Queene Elizabethes Achademy (by Sir Humphrey Gilbert): A Booke of Precedence, The Ordering of a Funerall, &c., ed. by F. J. Furnivall and others, EETS, E. S. 8 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1859), pp. xxiii, 109–10; also the much more sympathetic assessment of Émile Jules François Arnould, Le Manuel des péchés: Étude de littérature religieuse anglo-normande (Paris: Droz, 1940), pp. 335–55.

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This is the first salvo in a longer passage taken from the latter part of Fall of Princes Book I, ‘A chapitle of Bochas discryuyng þe malis of wommen’ (I.184), with Idley adding his own refrain to several stanzas of antifeminist cliché, as well as a Lydgatean disclaimer that of course, not all women act or dress this way (Instructions, 2A.2043–56). The source in Fall of Princes is the sort of passage that led William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, to compose his little anti-Lydgate-anti-women rejoinder; we also might hear a distant echo of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s ‘sely instrument’ as well as Lydgate’s mocking reproof of women’s horned head-dresses.13 Both Adultery and later Lechery are particular focus-points for Idley’s translation of Lydgate into Mannyng, together accounting for well over half the lines borrowed. Feminine lust and mis-dress are a social problem of instability and variability. This is particularly clear in the story of ‘The Adulterous Wife and the Dragon’, Mannyng’s ninth exemplum. An adulterous woman who seemed virtuous in life is found in her grave to have been completely split in half, with a dragon resting in the middle of her riven body. The dragon has been terrorizing the local community, a thinly veiled representation of the social danger presented by individual sexual instability. An angel explains to an inquiring hermit that since she gave away half her body in life, her body in death is sundered in two. Idley greatly expands upon the moral of the exemplum as exposing the dangers of instability and ‘worldly chaungis’ (2A.2021), and interestingly he imports a stanza from Lydgate, changing an admonition for princes into a sentential statement of sin and grace: ‘Who folweth vertu shal long perseuere, Be it in Riches or in wilfull pouerte; Light of trouthe his cliernes kepeth euer Ayenst the sawtes of all aduersitee; Vertue is cause of welthe and long prosperite;

13 Compare Suffolk, ‘In Praise of Margaret the Queen’, in Secular Lyrics of the 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. by Robbins, pp. 186–89 (the poem is also printed as ‘How þe louer ys sett to serue the floure’, by Henry Noble MacCracken, ‘An English Friend of Charles of Orléans’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 26 (1911), 142–82 (pp. 168–71)); Lydgate, ‘Horns Away’ / ‘Here gynneth a Dyte of Womenhis Hornys’, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by MacCracken, II (1934), 662–65. On the use of the Fall of Princes as a source for antifeminist verse see Edwards, ‘The Influence of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes’, pp. 431–33.

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And whenne synne doith vertu vndirmyne The light of grace woll no lengger shyne’. (2A.2022–28)

The first five lines of the stanza are materially the same in both texts, but the last two differ meaningfully from Lydgate’s focus: ‘And whan pryncis from vertu doun declyne, / Ther fame is shroudid vndir the cliptik lyne’ (Fall of Princes, II.41–42 (full stanza 36–42)). Nigel Mortimer has noted this passage as characteristic of a shift in Idley’s use of Lydgate from ‘a recognition of Fortune’ to ‘a grim ethic of blame and just deserts’.14 But there are, we will see, some qualifications to that. Here he takes a Lydgate passage originally about the virtues of princes, puts it in an angel’s mouth, and makes it a sentential admonition about women’s chastity. These passages about feminine instability and adultery exemplify one focus of social and political anxiety. Theft is another. But with Idley they come to look a lot alike. Toward the opening of the section on the Seventh Commandment (‘Do not steal’), another addition neatly summarizes Idley’s broader complaints: More open Robberie was neuer in a Reawme Than is nowadaies without ony correcioun; Hors and neete and all the hoole teme, In eche mannes cofre they take an Inspeccioun — It availleth not writyng nother proteccioun, ffor it is now the most comen crafte. Praieth God in short tyme þat it may be lafte! It hath be said before in olde langwage That when theift is called a good purchase And openly vsed in youthe and age, And lecherie also is called a comen solase, And manne-slaughter is hadde without ony grace, Than shall the londe of Brutes Albion Turne fro welthe vnto confusion. (2A.2239–52)

Again we can see in the first stanza the clear hints of contemporary anxiety about the state of the law in the realm. The ‘olde langwage’ in the second stanza, and the warning about ‘Brutes Albion’, was a commonly repeated prophecy attributed to Chaucer (alternately to ‘Merlin’) from an early date.15 To Mannyng’s workmanlike 14 15

Nigel Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, p. 250.

Idley’s ‘Instructions to his Son’, ed. by D’Evelyn, p. 230, n. 2246. The ‘prophecy’ appears in seventeen manuscripts: see R . H. Robbins, ‘Chaucerian Apocrypha’, in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, ed. by Hartung, IV (1973), 1069–70. Idley here substitutes this familiar prophecy for another shorter one in Mannyng’s Handlyng Synne just before the eleventh exemplum, the ‘Tale of the Abbott’ (lines 2077–80). Given the vigour and controversy surrounding contemporary

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typology of the sin of theft, Idley adds his own strident condemnations of lordly purveying and extortion, at one point calling it ‘Tirannye and oppressioun’ (2A.2620). Here again he is provoked to plunder Lydgate, but with interesting changes to his representations of ‘virtue’ and ‘Fortune’. We can compare Lydgate’s advice to princes, concerned with glory and memory — Vertu conserueth pryncis in ther glorie And confermeth ther dominaciouns; And vicis put ther price out off memorie, For ther trespacis and ther transgressiouns. And in alle such sodeyn mutaciouns, Thei can no refut nor no bet socour; But ageyn Fortune to maken ther clamour. (Lydgate, Fall of Princes, II.64–70)

— to Idley’s ostensibly less regal and more critical version: Vertu kepith men in welthe and prosperite And conserueth hym suerly to dwelle in glorie, And vices casten hym downe into aduersitee — This may ye rede in many a storie. Therfore I counceill haue this in memorie And witeth not fortune youre myschevous falle, But youre myslievyng which is cause of all. (Idley, Instructions 2A.2638–44)

This stanza is a good example of Idley’s freer style of adaptation in contrast to his more direct borrowings. Where Lydgate notes that unvirtuous princes will clamour against Fortune for their falls, Idley clarifies his source to say that sinners should not blame Fortune but ‘myslievyng’ — bad life and bad belief. In the next stanza in Idley, Lydgate’s further admonition to princes is similarly changed to both a counsel for good living and a meta-poetical comment on the good examples available through ‘noble poetis and wyse clerkis oolde’: Semblabli, off riht I dar reherse, Offte reedyng on bookis fructuous The hertis sholde off prudent pryncis perse, Synke in ther mynde & make hem vertuous

‘prophecies’ it is notable that Idley could scarcely have chosen a more anodyne example of the genre: see Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 1–31; Lesley A. Coote, ‘Prophecy, Genealogy, and History in Medieval English Political Discourse’, in Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in LateMedieval Britain and France, ed. by Raluca Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp. 27–44.

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T’eschewe all thynge that is vicious: For what auaileth th’exaumples that thei reede, To ther reedyng yiff contraire be the deede? (Lydgate, Fall of Princes, II.113–19)

It appears that Idley shakes off prudent princes in favour of noble poets and wise clerks, and ‘us’: This noble poetis and wyse clerkis oolde Made many good writyngis and bokis fructuous Of oure good lieuyng, willyng that we sholde Kepe hem in mynde to make vs vertuous, And to eschew all thyng that is contrarious. But what availleth examples that we rede, If we doo the contrarie in all oure deede? (Idley, Instructions, 2A.2645–51)

This is the only passage in the Instructions that remotely hints at Idley’s source, but even here he does not name Lydgate directly. We can note again how Lydgate’s text acts as a springboard for a more generalized hortatory stance. Accordingly, as he did with the sin of adultery, he translates his anxiety into contemporary terms of Fortune-talk with Lydgate’s help, and he broadens the exhortation to ‘all ye that haue rule and soueraignte [...] cherisshe youre subiectis, doith non extorcion’ (2A.2421, 2424). Princely admonitions become warnings for ‘us’ while still retaining a clearly aristocratic focus. From these examples we can get a sense of the pattern Idley follows in importing Lydgate to do work with (or on) his base-text Mannyng. Throughout Part Two of the Instructions we find a vacillation between generalized spiritual guidance — in the style of Mannyng and other pastoral authors — and a more focused set of noble counsels and socially specific complaints. Indeed even accounting for Idley’s judicious de-princifying of the Fall of Princes, the reorientation offered by Lydgate actually has the effect of making Mannyng’s text more aristocratic, not less, reflecting one of the common characteristics of (re)vernacularization that Watson has identified in fifteenth-century devotional and catechetical texts, ‘the notion that the lay audience for vernacular theology should rather be the aristocracy than society as a whole’.16 In the adaptation of the Ninth Commandment (‘Do not covet your neighbour’s goods’), the prohibition is given a specific point in the directive ‘to oure soueraigne kyng’ not ‘to take of his subiectis ayenst theire likyng’ (2A.2921–22). And these and other anxieties come to a focal point again, in the

16

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 857.

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last commandment (Tenth Commandment, ‘Do not covet your neighbour’s wife’), in Idley’s oddly reversed warning against women’s desires to flirt with a ‘galaunt’: But when a woman list t’abide and hire, As somme do that be gentill and meeke, When a galaunt woll rowne in hir eere And suffre hym to kysse both chynne and cheke, Hym nedith no lenger on hir to seeke […] She shall haue ynow that woll chepe hir ware And to dresse hir into a croked frame. (2A.2981–85, 2990–91)

Rather than restating the admonition for men to avoid chasing married women — and completely removing Mannyng’s more balanced acknowledgement that infidelity can occur at the instigation of both sexes (Handlyng Synne, 2923–90) — Idley instead deploys the commandment as an example of ‘mysgovernaunce’ (2A.2996) where women’s fashionable desires and ‘croked’ behaviour lead to social unrest. It is at this point (as the text moves out of the Ten Commandments and into the Seven Deadly Sins) that Idley’s anxieties become a veritable cathexis about fashionable clothing and the behaviour of ‘galaunts’. Disposing quickly of the prideful example of Lucifer, Idley quickly takes his aim at the modern manifestations of pride, gallant men with fashionably long hair and scandalously short gowns: Go firthir, than, to the shap of hir clothis: They be cutted on the buttok euen aboue the rompe. Euery good man truly suche shappe lothes; It maketh hym a body short as a stompe, And if they shull croke, knele, othir crompe, To the middes of the backe the gowne woll not reche: Wolde Ihesu they were than without hoose or breche! (2B.43–49)

As D’Evelyn noted and, more recently, as Andrea Denny-Brown has analyzed them, these complaints about dress are themselves traditional and stereotypical, and they have a long, colourful history.17 Other contemporary verse highlights the same fashions and failings, and their insistence in Idley’s adaptation gives them a distinctly raised profile where they have none in Mannyng. The mid-fifteenth

17 Idley’s ‘Instructions to his Son’, ed. by D’Evelyn, p. 55 and accompanying textual notes, referring also to Owst’s survey of sermon literature, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England; Andrea Denny-Brown, ‘Fashioning Change: Wearing Fortune’s Garments in Medieval England’, Philological Quarterly, 87 (2008), 9–32, and forthcoming work on this topic. See also the overview of condemnations of excessive dress provided by The Vision of Edmund Leversedge, ed. by W. F. Nijenhuis (Nijmegen: Centrum voor middeleeuwse studies, Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1991), pp. 40–48.

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century was a period of particular sartorial anxiety with frequent complaints against both churchmen and laity, popular songs, and satires about fashionable dress, and, eventually, sumptuary legislation in 1463.18 The figure of the ‘galunt’ looms large in this satirical tradition, probably motivating Lydgate to write his own mocking ‘Treatise of a Galaunt’ that circulated well into the sixteenth century.19 So here too, Idley responds to contemporary literary fashion, also driven in part by Lydgate; and quasi-devotional texts such as the vision of William Straunton (c. 1406–09) and the vision of Edmund Leversedge (c. 1465) reflect the surprisingly long-lived topos of the devilish ‘galaunt’ as a didactic exemplar of sin.20 Nor are Idley’s au courant additions simply prudishness in the face of male vanity. He repeats the traditional and characteristically ‘English’ anxieties about social order, estates’ identity, and the ability to maintain the proper distinctions of degree when they are muddied by excessive ornament: A man shall not now kenne a knave from a knyght, ffor al be like in clothyng and array, In fresshe doublettes of silk strecchyng vp right, And few pens in her purs, y trowe, to pay; No fors of the getyng, so the garment be gay; This maketh them to ken the craft of a theif And to blot the paupers of London in euery leif. (2B.50–56)

Even about the court and king he comments: And specially to begynne aboute the kyng, Not oonly to speke of arraie as in clothyng

18

For an overview of sumptuary laws and the testamentary evidence from wills that, in fact, such laws appear to have been violated relatively rarely, see Kristen M. Burkholder, ‘Threads Bared: Dress and Textiles in Late Medieval English Wills’, in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, 1 (2005), 133–53. 19

For context, see especially Wendy Scase, ‘“Proud Gallants and Popeholy Priests”: The Context and Function of a Fifteenth-Century Satirical Poem’, Medium Ævum, 63 (1994), 275–86; and Julia Boffey, ‘“The Treatise of a Galaunt” in Manuscript and Print’, The Library, 6th ser., 15 (1993), 175–86. 20 ‘The Vision of William Straunton’ in St Patrick’s Purgatory, ed. by Robert Easting, EETS, O. S. 298 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1991), pp. 78–172 (especially at pp. 86 and 88); The Vision of Edmund Leversedge, ed. by Nijenhuis, pp. 83–99, especially at p. 86, where the devils torturing Leversedge are described as ‘galantes’ with ‘schort gownes and dowblettes, closse hosyn, longe heere upon here browes, pykes on þer shoon of a foot in lengh and more, hygh bonettes as I myselfe sumetyme usid’; and pp. 90–91, where the description is repeated and Leversedge is admonished by his ‘blessid laidy’ to leave such fashions.

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And again, the complaints are brought together in anxiety about the coherence of social order and clear degrees: Eche man to kenne hymsilf and his better, A page a grome, a grome a yoman by right, As the A. B. C. is made in ordre by lettyr, A yoman, a squyer, and a squyer, a knyght, And so to the highest and grettest of might; And as they be in ordre set of degree, Right so shal her clothyng and arraie be. (2B.64–70)

This, too, was a topic crossing laity and clergy. As Andrew Galloway has noted, complaints about varietas vestitum were characteristic of the monastic chronicle tradition in which the English penchant for variability in appearance and dress becomes, ironically, a consistent and nationally identifying trait.21 Certainly the similarity of these complaints indicates that Idley was familiar with the trope and possibly also with the chronicles themselves. As we might expect, Lydgate is again pressed into service with a sentential encomium of ‘the noble vertu of true obedience’ (2B.92; cf. 2B.78–103 and ff.). And here too Idley adds his own comment on the threat of a ‘translacion’ in shifting fortunes and changing fashions: Therfore whenne thow art grettist in honour And most may doo vndre maistershyppe and dominacion, Then bere the evenest with thy neighboure: Thow wotest not how sone ther wil be a translacion; […] (2B.148–51)

Once more it is not just personal fault or sin but the broader threat of social upheaval — and ‘maistershyppe and dominacion’ — that motivates anxiety about galaunt-ish misbehaviour and ‘dis-guise’, now expanded to cover youths and wayward apprentices: Allso in pride to swere orrible grete othis, As it is now the vse among galauntis; And as I said tofore in disguysyng of clothis, Not oonly in men, but also in yong fauntis; Comenlie in youthe mysgouernaunce they hauntis, And proude sires, a galaunt is as moche for to sey, As fro his maister at neede fast renne away. (2B.169–75)

21

Andrew Galloway, ‘Latin England’, in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. by Kathy Lavezzo, Medieval Cultures, 37 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), pp. 41–95 (pp. 45–73).

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The following story of the ‘Tale of the Clerk with the Gay Coat’ (Mannyng’s twentieth exemplum) is augmented as a long condemnation of a ‘galaunt’ (lines 178, 190, 198, 201) who is literally undressed by Dame Fortune because of his inordinate desire for a fine coat (188). As revised the exemplum is not too far from the stories of Leversedge and Straunton, both threatened with visions of eternal damnation in part because of their love of finery and foppery. And again, twice, Idley repeats his wish that ‘an ordre wold be hadde / Among euery degree and iche estate / To kenne a tapister fro a lady, a lorde fro a ladde’ (2B.372–74); ‘It is now harde to discerne and knowe / A tapester, a Cookesse, or an hostellers wyffe / ffro a gentilwoman, if they stonde in a rowe’ (2B.267–69). Overall, with Lydgate’s help, Idley forges a striking social emphasis on class, dress, and gender distinctions where such matters were largely peripheral in the Handlyng Synne. He does so with the uniquely Lydgatean diction of the ‘winds of (political) fortune’ blowing across a text of traditional catechesis, itself standing for a desired but lost social order, and judiciously trimmed for contemporary fashions. This dynamic is similarly evident in what gets left out of the Instructions. As D’Evelyn noted, there are frequent excisions of exempla, particularly toward the end of the work, and the newly recovered lines at the end of Part Two show even more extensive reduction.22 But it is not simply a matter of large-scale removals so much as a pattern of shifting emphases and reorientation; a re-dressing, as it were. The sin of envy provides a particularly appropriate spot for further additions from Lydgate as well as an opportunity for Idley to add his own original reflections on envious Fortune (line 606): But to princis which climbe soo hye on lofte A soden falle is most contrarious, And here fallyng is to them the more vnsofte That they before tyme were so mighti and glorious. What is to felicite more sorowfull and odious Than whan man is sette most welthfull in his stalle And by fals envie is made sodenlie to falle. (2B.610–16)

Rather than softening a traditional appeal to the power of Fortune, here Idley strengthens it. This stanza (and the one before) is almost more Lydgatean than Lydgate himself, following close on another set of direct borrowings about the precipitous fall of Adam and Eve (2B.582–86, 594–96, 602; cf. Fall of Princes,

22

Idley’s ‘Instructions to his Son’, ed. by D’Evelyn, p. 46; the concluding sections unique to British Library, MS Additional 57335 remove or summarize most of the exempla, although many of the excisions, as Sullivan notes, appear to be scribal (Sullivan, ‘More Poetry by Peter Idley’, p. 30).

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I.631–35, 650, 658). Further on, he removes Mannyng’s identification of envy as a

particularly ‘English’ sin and replaces it with the note that envy is the ‘cause of discension, strife, and debate [...] he hath distroied in this lande many a state’ (2B.807, 809; cf. Handlyng Synne, 4147–62). An apparent wariness about speaking too directly seems to motivate his concluding retreat into the familiar trope of dullness: Thus I make rudely an ende of my ryme, But and I were bore vp as fysshe is with fynne Of connyng of cliergye to reproue this cryme, Y wold sey more largeli, but my witte is thynne; Therfore to anothir I woll spede me to begyne. I beseche God preserue oure kyng both Eue and morowe, And al fals traitours I pray Ihesu yeve hem sorowe! (2B.862–68)

Envious ‘traitours’ are condemned, but he is not going to name names. Instead he makes a satirical sidelong plea to the ‘cunning of clergy’ to take up the labour of reproof while bemoaning his own ‘thin wit’, hinting again at the estates-crossing task he is engaged in as a layman adapting a clerical text. This contrast of lay versus clerical positioning also lurks behind other circumspect excisions. In the following section on ‘Sloth’, Idley completely removes Mannyng’s abundant condemnations of jousts, tournaments, plays, and other noble entertainments (along with two associated exempla), substituting two weak stanzas of broadly pious exhortation to avoid sin (2B.1191–1203). In this regard the most heavily altered section (perhaps predictably) is the sixth Deadly Sin, ‘Greed/Couetise’. It is a good example of how Idley can use Lydgatean Fortunetalk to cover up what he is cutting out. Where Mannyng has a battery of very specific condemnations of aristocratic abuses — the exploitation of property, regratery, evil counseling, false purchase, disinheritance, simony, and usury — Idley removes all of it, as well as Mannyng’s distinction between ‘covetousness’ and ‘avarice’ (Handlyng Synne, 5327–5444). He substitutes seven stanzas (2B.1562–1610) of modified Lydgate taken from the front of the Fall of Princes to which he actually adds further reference to Fortune: Remembre, ye folk that be witty and wyse, That this world is but a thorowfare full of woo [...] ffor thoughe youre hedis be lift vpon lofte As hye as the sonne shynyng in his spere, As somme people thynke in her hertis full ofte That here renowne stretchith aboue the sterris cliere — Cometh the stroke of fortune and goith hem full neere And putteth her Ioye in a soden falle, To shewe by remembraunce how they be mortall. (2B.1562–63, 1569–75; cf. Lydgate Fall of Princes, I.793–805)

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Rather than repeat Mannyng’s condemnations of lordly greed, the Lydgatean trope of the ‘stroke of fortune’ falls and covers them up like a cloak. Later he also adds warnings against ‘fortune which is transitory’ (2B.1612) and a long passage against evil executors. We can compare this pattern of substitution to similar passages in ‘Gluttony’. Idley does not exclude Mannyng’s condemnation of tight-fisted nobles or the exhortation to give alms and food to the poor (2B.2318–45). But herein lies the difference. When it is a matter of largesse or noblesse oblige, as with almsgiving and food-sharing (or avoiding royal exactions in purveiance), Idley has no problem repeating Mannyng. But when it is a condemnation of upper-class acquisition or of noble wealth per se, he does. An earlier passage in Mannyng condemning the desire for noble distinction is completely excised (Handlyng Synne, 3409–40). And in the story of Dives and Lazarus (Mannyng’s thirty-seventh exemplum) he completely omits Mannyng’s powerful condemnation of the noble and legal classes as a gang of robbers: For ful comunly shalt þou fynde Ofte ryche men vnkynde. Lord, how shul þese robburs fare Þat þe pore peple pelyn ful bare? Erles, knyghtes, and barouns, And ouþer lordynges of tounes, Iustyses, shereues, and baylyues, Þat þe lawes al to ryues, And þe pore men al to pyle, To ryche men do þey but as þey wyle, Þys ryche man, as þe gospel seys, Was but to o man vncurteys, And hadde so moche peyne þarfore; On hem wyl falle moche more Þat many pore men pyle & bete For god no synne wyl þey nat lete […] (Handlyng Synne, 6789–6804)

As we might expect in a revision aimed at the aristocracy and written by a layman — and like other moments of clerical condemnation of secular folly — Mannyng’s harsh judgment is not repeated. For Idley, apparently this is immodest and needs to be covered up. So the metaphor is perhaps a bit forced, but not inappropriate. Like a prude throwing his coat over a ‘galaunt’ in short pants, Idley is trying to hide some embarrassing exposures in his source. A piously recast Lydgate is that coat. And in performing this textual coverage, as we can see, Idley makes some interesting selfrevelations of his own, even as he occasionally bleaches the didactic and homiletic

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power of his primary source. The seventh Deadly Sin, ‘Lecherie’, provokes large and consistent borrowing from Lydgate as well as some polite softening of Handlyng Synne. Mannyng inventories fornication, adultery, ‘spouse-breech’, incest, incontinent religious, rape, and prostitution. Idley mentions them after a large passage of ten stanzas from Lydgate containing some innocuous small exempla (Sampson and Delila; Solomon; Darius) about the problems of unlawful sex (2B.2535–2604). He also borrows two passages about the violence of rape (and repeats some of these stanzas later) and, toward the end, skilfully weaves together another ten stanzas from Lydgate with an encomium to ‘Ladye Reason’: This Ladye Reason sethin longe ago Gaue vnto man witte and eke discretion, And enfourmed hym by hir souereigne lore also Betwene vice and vertue a greate diuision: How be it he had lybertie and fre eleccioun; Yit vnto vertue he should naturally obey, And all vices at large vtterly to werrey. (2B.2954–60; cf. Fall of Princes, III.1352–58)

In a passage also reminiscient of Lydgate’s Reson and Sensuallyte, knowledge and the discretion of ‘Reason’ serve as a Lydgatean antidote to Lechery. Idley changes much of Mannyng’s coverage of sexual sin and excludes almost all of the exempla. Chastity of the religious, lechery in youth, kissing, touching, disturbing the clergy, lechery of the eye, sorcery, foul speech, bragging of old lechery, buying sexual favours, abortion, compulsion, false betrothal: all are mentioned perfunctorily. He summarily adds a pious but bland biblical exemplum from the Book of Tobit about Thobias and his devotion to God’s forgiveness (2B.3003–23). These cuts carry the stamp of social and sexual embarrassment. After Lechery there are no further borrowings from Lydgate, but similar patterns of alteration are still evident. In the section on Sacrilege, Mannyng roundly condemns nobles who make their pompous tombs inside churches, arguing that such a distinction rightly belongs only to bishops and clergy (Handlyng Synne, 8665–8789). Idley removes this as well; obviously it was a losing position by the fifteenth century. At the end of his rendering of the famous story of the Dancers of Kolbeck (Mannyng’s fortyninth exemplum), Idley does not miss the chance once again to condemn galaunts and the women who love them: And specially þeis women, as I dare sey, Haue besy talkyng of huswyffrye; Gangle as a goose and Iangyll as a Iey, And how þeir husbandes be ful of Ielosye. Sum set þeir myndes galantes to asspye, Beholdyng þe schort garmentes round all abouõt And how þe stuffyng off þe codpece beres ouõt. (2C.414–20)

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This return to the galaunt is not self-evidently à propos here in a taxonomy of sacrilege. Idley works his way around to it through an expanded discussion of ill manners in church with little hint in Mannyng, but that has some satirical analogues in contemporary verse and Lydgatean antifeminism.23 Short garments and stuffed codpieces aside, there is a broad congruence between these fashionable changes and Idley’s most interesting large alteration late in the work, which is another cover-up of sorts. From the last section of Handlyng Synne including the Seven Sacraments and the ‘Twelve Points’ and ‘Twelve Graces of Confession’, the section on the Sacraments becomes the most radically reduced part of Idley’s text as a whole. Notably the treatment of the third sacrament, the ‘Sacrament of the Altar’ (the eucharist), is characterized by both reduction and expansion. All five of Mannyng’s supporting exempla are excised (exempla 54–59) as are most of the exempla for the sacraments. But he adds four original stanzas in a block (2C.708–35), exhorting the reader to be ‘stedfaste in the faithe’ (2C.706) and to abandon ‘reason’ when it comes to belief in transubstantiation: Leve thine own reason and bowe to thie faith. For faith hath no merite if reason be gide: For reason is blynde, as holy writt saieth. Trust to thie faith, let reason go beside. For faith is sure and longest will abide: For God blessith hym yat beleveth the crede, And saw not with eyes and beleveth the dede. Therfore beleve truly, with whole entent, As hartilie as thowe can in worde and thoght, On the most holy and blessed sacrament. And remembre that reason ne blynde the noght […] Beleve this stedfastly and make no doubte. Lett faithe be thie guyde and clere lode sterre. To dispute thie beleve neuer be aboute. Worke not by reason, he will make the erre: […] (2C.708–18, 722–25)

There is nothing even remotely like this in Mannyng, who offers miracle stories and who certainly exhorts faith in the sacrament but who does not counsel the abandonment of reason. Rather than repeat Mannyng’s miracles, Idley advises his readers simply to believe and not be misled by ‘blynde’ reason. This is an odd argument coming from a poet who scarcely 800 lines earlier had plundered Lydgate

23

Compare the lyric ‘On Chattering in Church’, in Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. by Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 277 for similar sentiment.

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specifically for an encomium to the divine power and good guidance of Lady Reason. Rather, what it echoes most directly is the kind of anti-theological call for unquestioning faith that was one feature of the anti-lollard reactions decades earlier and that still partly determined the scope of vernacular religious writing, especially with the laity.24 We can compare it to Hoccleve’s remonstrance against Oldcastle from 1415 in its belligerent and class-conscious anti-rationality — Lete holy chirch medle of the doctryne Of Crystes lawes & of his byleeue, And lete alle othir folke ther-to enclyne, And of our feith noon argumentes meeue. For if we mighte our feith by reson preeue, We sholde no meryt of our feith haue. But now a dayes a Baillif or Reeue Or man of craft wole in it dote or raue.25

Hoccleve’s (male) laity — and in the next stanza, ‘some wommen eeke’ — are, like Idley’s audience, simply to bear faith, not question with reason. The mild irony is, of course, that it was precisely a ‘Baillif’, Peter Idley, who later repeated these exact sentiments in the very act of lay presumption that Hoccleve condemns, treading on clerical textual territory. We might also suspect that the shadow of Reginald Pecock’s condemnation in 1457 falls over the text at this point, especially if we were better able to locate when, precisely, this part of the Instructions was written. And we can note that at this point in Idley’s text, interestingly, Reason is now not a ‘Ladye’ but a ‘he’ — ‘he will make the erre’ (2C.725) — perhaps even a galaunt ‘he’, one ‘rowning in the ear’ of his impressionable listeners. The context for invoking ‘Reason’ at this point (sacramental theology) is different from what it was in the treatment of Lechery (sexual ethics). Nonetheless this shift, and a few other additions about penance and priesthood, suggests that like sex, theft, and class, the sacraments are touchy subjects for Idley. We may have less of this part of the sacramental syllabus not only because of scribal excisions but because Mannyng’s treatment of it was, as elsewhere, both more and less than Idley felt was appropriate. Accordingly he revises over — or again, politely covers up — a sensitive back-side of Mannyng’s textual anatomy. This is unsurprising and perhaps the best indirect evidence that the restrictions begun in the first decade of the fifteenth century

24 25

See Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 848–49.

Thomas Hoccleve, ‘Address to Sir John Oldcastle’, in Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, rev. by Mitchell and Doyle, pp. 12–13. Watson notes this passage from Hoccleve, ‘Censorship’, pp. 848–49.

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had indeed made their long-term impact felt more through self-censorship than though direct suppression of texts, even for the reception of vernacular works such as Handlyng Synne with fairly wide circulation and an orthodox pedigree.26 And for Idley in particular it is also fitting that, when judiciously translating Mannyng’s exposition of confession in the ‘Twelve Graces of Shrift’, his praise of the sacrament assumes a Lydgatean pose of both high-flown aureatism and dullness: O shrifte, thowe haste a marvelouse myghte Over thie maker and his sainctes all! […] O what shall I saie? I cannot thie stile endite! Thie trenoble renomy, it is above imperiall! Thie moste myghtie power I am to simple to write. Thowe arte lorde and master above the spirites infernall. God is at thie hand when thowe liste hyme calle. What shall I saie? My witte I cannott suffice: Whan the soule is dede thowe makest hire arise.27

Surrounded by cuts and shifts in the treatment of confession, this original stanza stands out almost as a signpost for the cognizant reader: safe spiritual discourse is to be had here, neither too stylishly galaunt nor too theologically challenging. More than anything, Lydgate’s poetic métier provided a definitive stylistic vantage and a safely secularized piety for its gentry audience, as the monk of Bury’s secular compendium became the source of tidy clothing for the bailiff of Wallingford’s catechetical handbook. In this regard, then, Idley’s newly expanded text now offers more evidence, as well as a more extensively circulated text, showing how delicately and creatively these problematic boundaries could be negotiated between texts and periods, and authors and audiences, in the middle of the fifteenth century.

26

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 831.

27

British Library, MS Additional 57335, fol. 95v , stanzas 3–4.

R ICHARD M ETHLEY AND THE T RANSLATION OF V ERNACULAR R ELIGIOUS W RITING INTO L ATIN Laura Saetveit Miles

W

hen we think about religious writing in fifteenth-century England, our focus as modern scholars has rightly been the debates surrounding translation from Latin into Middle English. For this essay I would like to swim upstream, as it were, and consider some of the motives behind translation from a vernacular into Latin, and the case of one particularly interesting translator. Although medieval Latin had become a vernacular of its own compared to Classical Latin, taking on regional flavours, it was unquestionably the lingua franca of Europe in the Middle Ages; to be litteratus meant to be literate in Latin. Latin could function as the major ‘vehicular language’ which enabled literary and historical texts to move from vernacular to vernacular.1 For example, The Seven Sages of Rome, a medieval collection of stories about wise counsellors and wicked women, was translated in the early fourteenth century from the original French into the influential Historia septem sapientum, from which almost all the European versions were to derive — it immigrated into German, Italian, Greek, English, Swedish, Polish, and, yes, back into French.2 Latin could preserve vernacular works from ‘the ravages wrought by time’: in the seventeenth century, Sir Francis Kynaston 1

In linguistics, a vehicular language (langue véhiculaire) is ‘used in communication between members of societies whose own languages are different’; see P. H. Matthews, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 200. Cf. lingua franca, ‘any language used for communication between groups who have no other language in common’ (p. 209). 2

Hans R. Runte, ‘From the Vernacular to Latin and Back: The Case of The Seven Sages of Rome’, in Medieval Translators and Their Craft, ed. by Jeannette Beer (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1989), pp. 93–133 (p. 94).

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translated Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde into Latin because he was worried for the poem’s survival, as Chaucerian English was already difficult for his contemporaries to read.3 As Chaucer himself admits, ‘Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge / With-inne a thousand yeer’.4 Kynaston also hoped his Latin translation would make Chaucer’s genius accessible to foreigners who could not read English.5 Desire for an international audience surely drove much of vernacular–Latin translations throughout the medieval period and beyond. ‘Latyn is iused and understode a this half Grece in alle the naciouns and londes of Europa’, insists the Cleric in John Trevisa’s Dialogue between the Lord and the Clerk on Translation; ‘Latyn, that is so wide iused and iknowe’ should be preferred over ‘Englisshe that is nought iused and iknowe but of Englisshe men al oon’.6 A text brought into Latin not only gained a potential readership without geographical borders (bounded only by education), but also gained the prestige and authority associated with the language of the educated. Latin, of course, reigned as the language of the Holy Roman Church: it was the language of theology, in all its rhetorical definition and profundity; the language of scripture, proper to the Word of God; the language of sanctity, necessary for canonization; and the language of inquisition, precise enough to kill.7 With the rise of the European vernaculars, this hegemony began to weaken, and the slipping stability of the Latin language often came to parallel slips in orthodoxy. The dramatically shifting value of the English vernacular from the early fourteenth century to the late fifteenth century, defined by the Oxford translation debates of 1401 to 1407 and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, makes the translation of insular religious writing into Latin just as problematic as its translation into English. There is a handful of instances in which medieval English readers felt compelled to Latinize Middle English religious works. Sermons delivered in the vernacular

3

Richard Beadle, ‘A Virtuoso’s Troilus’, in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. by R. Morse and B. Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 213–33 (p. 213). 4

Troilus and Criseyde, II, ll. 22–23.

5

As stated in his preface to the Amoren Troili et Creseidae, 1635; quoted by Beadle, ‘A Virtuoso’s Troilus’, p. 219. 6 7

Excerpted in The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, p. 132.

Jeannette Beer offers a comprehensive discussion of vernacular–Latin translation in ‘Medieval Translations: Latin and the Vernacular Languages’, in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. by F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington DC : Catholic University of America Press, 1996), pp. 728–32 (p. 731).

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were often recorded in Latin, either by the preacher himself or a listener.8 The survival in Bohemia of Latin versions of several originally English Wycliffite texts, such as William Thorpe’s Testimony, demonstrates the necessity of translation for an international readership as well as the ‘amazing mobility of scholars throughout the late medieval period’.9 Around 1400, Carmelite Thomas Fishlake translated Hilton’s Scale of Perfection into Latin, enabling it to make the leap across the Channel and reach a continental audience. Fourteen manuscripts of the Scala perfectionis survive, and at least three copies reached Europe through monastic networks of manuscript exchange.10 As S. S. Hussey, an editor of the Scale, writes, ‘Fishlake is conferring on The Scale of Perfection the ultimate medieval accolade: early translation into Latin’.11 About five decades after Fishlake’s Latin Scala, an anonymous translator brought the Cloud of Unknowing into Latin. Nubes ignorandi survives in only one mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 856, which reveals little about the translator, scribe, provenance, or readership.12 What I would like to explore here, however, are the late fifteenth-century Latin translations of the Cloud of Unknowing and of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of

8

See, for example, Siegfried Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England, p. 172. 9 See Anne Hudson, ‘From Oxford to Prague: The Writings of John Wyclif and his English Followers in Bohemia’, Slavonic and East European Review, 75 (1997), 642–57 (pp. 645, 654); reprinted in Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings. 10

Two copies of the Scala now held in Uppsala, Sweden, were once read at the Birgittine house at Vadstena, and at least one of those was acquired from Syon Abbey in England. Another Latin manuscript was copied in a Carthusian house at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon in France. In England, two manuscripts explicitly show Carthusian provenance. S. S. Hussey, ‘Latin and English in the Scale of Perfection’, Mediaeval Studies, 35 (1973), 456–76 (p. 457). 11 12

Hussey, ‘Latin and English in the Scale of Perfection’, p. 476.

MS Bodley 856 is edited by J. P. H. Clark, The Latin Versions of the Cloud of Unknowing, Analecta Cartusiana, 119, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1989), I. We do not possess the vernacular version from which it was translated, although it does follow closely the Middle English Cloud in London, British Library, MS Harley 959 (ed. by Clark, The Latin Versions, II). See J. P. H. Clark, ‘Editing the Latin Versions of the Cloud of Unknowing — A Progress Report’, in Die Ausbreitung kartäusischen Lebens und Geistes im Mittelalter, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 63 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1991), pp. 191–211. While I was preparing this article for publication, Clark issued the final volume in his series of editions (The Latin Versions, III): Richard Methley: Divina Caligo Ignorancie: A Latin Glossed Version of the Cloud of Unknowing, Analecta Cartusiana, 119: 3 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 2009).

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Simple Souls by the Carthusian monk Richard Methley, and how his motives for translation might complicate our understanding of this ‘ultimate medieval accolade’. Compared to the earlier anonymous translator of the Latin Cloud in MS Bodley 856, things are less murky with Richard Methley of Mount Grace Charterhouse, whose translations of the Cloud and Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls survive in a single manuscript, Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 221. This manuscript was copied by William Darker, a Carthusian scribe at Sheen, and carefully read by several others; it may have also made its way to Syon.13 Both texts are accompanied by translator’s prologues and extensive glosses to many chapters. We know a fair amount, relatively speaking, about Methley: he was born around 1451, did not go to university, became a Carthusian monk around the age of 25, was vicar of Mount Grace, and died in 1528.14 He was a prolific writer. His surviving works include three autobiographical Latin treatises documenting his own visionary experiences, as well as an acephalous treatise on the discernment of spirits. These texts are available in modern editions published by James Hogg and Michael Sargent respectively.15 An edition by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh of Methley’s Latin Cloud and Mirror has been at press since the 1960s, and survives only in uncorrected proofs; its future publication will enable further much-needed study.16

13

The original leather binding on Pembroke College, MS 221 bears a distinctive ‘tb’ monogram tooled into the leather within a grid pattern, possibly linking the book to Syon Abbey librarian Thomas Betson. 14

Methley’s various autobiographical writings yield these facts, and his obituary for May 1528 can be found in the Carthusian General Chapter carta. ‘The Cloud of Unknowing and The Mirror of Simple Souls in the Latin Glossed Translations by Richard Methley of Mount Grace Charterhouse’, ed. by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà (Roma, unpublished: proofs prepared but never brought to press), pp. 9–10. My thanks to Michael Sargent for providing me with a copy of Colledge’s and Walsh’s edition manuscript. 15 As edited by James Hogg in Kartäusermystik und -mystiker: dritter internationaler Kongress über die Kartäusergeschichte und -spiritualität, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana 55, 5 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981): ‘A Mystical Diary: The Refectorium Salutis of Richard Methley of Mount Grace Charterhouse’, I, 208–38; ‘The Scola Amoris Languidi of Richard Methley of Mount Grace Charterhouse transcribed from Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.2.56’, II, 138–65; ‘The Dormitorium Dilecti of Richard Methley of Mount Grace Charterhouse transcribed from Cambridge, Trinity College MS 0.2.56’, V , pp. 79–103; and ‘The Self-Verification of Visionary Phenomena: Richard Methley’s Experimentatum Veritatis’, ed. by Michael Sargent, II, 121–37. 16

At this point it would be helpful to distinguish Methley’s Latin translation of Porete’s Mirror from the continental Latin translation of the Mirror found whole or partially in five manuscripts and edited by Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen, Margaratae Porete: Speculum simplicium

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As Methley explains in a note preserved at the end of the Cloud, he completed his translation in 1491 for God and for his fellow monk Thurston Watson, ‘o frater mi Thurstine’ (fol. 39r). Thurston Watson was at Mount Grace before he was transferred to Hull where he died in 1505. Why did Watson desire a Latin Cloud? Methley offers no clues. Was the translation project Methley’s idea entirely? And why did Methley continue on to translate Porete’s Mirror, apparently unsolicited? From Methley’s prologues, we learn only that he generally regarded the texts as worth reading, for both man’s sake and God’s. Perhaps Methley hoped for the same results the Latin Scale enjoyed: transmission to mainland Europe by means of the Latin-speaking network of charterhouses or other monastic foundations which would offer an appropriate audience for these sophisticated mystical works. Yet again, like the earlier anonymous translation of the Cloud, only one manuscript exists, and there is no proof it left England. Perhaps Methley or Watson thought the two works deserved to be promoted to the ranks of Pseudo-Dionysius, Hugh of Balma, and Bonaventure, to be read with the same meticulousness those authors received, and subjected to the ‘rigorous theological analysis’ facilitated by translation into Latin, and transmission to continental Carthusians.17 Latin remained the linguistic ‘gold standard’ in matters of advanced theology — as both sides of the Oxford translation debate agreed.18 In the determinatio about translation written c. 1400–1407 and attributed to William Palmer, English is described as a barbarous tongue, with its ‘small vocabulary, its lexigraphical oddities, tendency toward monosyllable, and lack of inflection, which make it grammatically and rhetorically animarum, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 69 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986). It is this continental Latin translation (and Verdeyen’s edition) which Colledge discusses in his article ‘The Latin Mirror of Simple Souls: Margaret of Porete’s “ultimate accolade”?’, in Langland, the Mystics, and the Medieval English Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S. S. Hussey, ed. by Helen Philips (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 177–83; there Colledge rejects the editors’ assumption that the full-length Latin translation would have been made for the purposes of the Inquisition’s trial of Porete, and suggests (without further elaboration) that ‘the existence of this Latin translation testifies rather to the vitality of Margaret’s book, and shows that even after it had been condemned, twice, other clerics — for the Latin translator was surely such — could be convinced that it was a work of edification’ (p. 183). Further work is needed comparing the texts and contexts of the two Latin translations. 17

Vincent Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic: Mystical Texts in the Library of Syon Abbey and the Spirituality of the Syon Brethren’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, VI, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 241–68 (p. 244); see also James Hogg, ‘The Latin Cloud’ in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, III: Dartington Hall 1984, ed. by Marian Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1984), pp. 104–15 (p. 110). 18

Gillespie, ‘Religious Writing’, p. 236.

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inadequate as a vehicle for truth’.19 Conversely, Richard Ullerston’s determinatio of c. 1401 reveals his support for the vernacular at least for the Bible, and concludes with nine propositions in favour of translation.20 For that matter, in the case of monks such as the Carthusians, with such a ‘high standard of Latinity’,21 Latin was their vernacular — they might have spent more years of their life communicating and thinking in Latin than in their ‘mother tongue’. English Carthusians regarded themselves as part of a cohesive family of charterhouses scattered across Europe, united as much by their compulsory silence as by their frequent Latin communications. Though all these possible motives for translation might be involved, I would like to focus on four complicating factors which make Methley’s case much more revealing than the cases of the Scale and the anonymous Cloud. First, there is the issue of the Cloud and vernacularity. What are the ramifications of Latinization for the Cloud’s intended audience and its so-called ‘vernacular theology’? Second, there is the questionable orthodoxy of Porete’s Mirror. How does Methley’s Latin translation acknowledge and negotiate this potentially (or actually) heretical text? Third, there is Methley’s Carthusian environment to consider. In what ways do these Latin translations fit into a specifically Carthusian monastic textual tradition? Fourth and finally, there is the striking combination of Methley’s own visionary experience and his connection to the Book of Margery Kempe, as well as his authorship of a Middle English devotional work for a lay reader. Does Methley use Latin to distance the Cloud and the Mirror from a broadly vernacular brand of lay and/or female spirituality? These large questions deserve a more extended study than this short paper can offer, but for the present purposes I hope to raise some starting points for debate. With reference to Methley’s own words, I suggest that he represents a distinctive voice in the translation controversies dominating England’s spiritual consciousness — that his work delineates a theologically progressive but otherwise conservative monastic reading community concerned with disentangling the vernacular from ‘vernacular theology’, cloistering advanced mystical experience, and protecting sophisticated mystical texts from both lay practitioners and clerical authorities.

19

As Nicholas Watson summarizes in ‘Censorship’, pp. 842–43.

20

See Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, pp. 86–111.

21

The Chastising of God’s Children, ed. by Joyce Bazire and Edmund Colledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), p. 59.

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Methley’s Divina caligo ignoranciae The preface by the original author of the Cloud of Unknowing limits the intended audience to those who are true followers of Christ in the ‘souereinnest pointe of contemplatife leuing’.22 Nicholas Watson observes that, as the Cloud-author aims to ‘exclude all but a few from opening his book, then treating even them with suspicion, this writer would seem to belong to the conservative faction which, by the 1390s, was arguing (against both the Wycliffites and moderates) that the clergy’s function was to enshrine and protect the truths of the faith’.23 In other words, English does not always signal an ‘equal reading opportunity’. When Methley translates the Cloud into Latin, out of a vernacular at least linguistically accessible to all, he seems to be supporting the Cloud-author’s elitism, even pushing it further by rendering the text in a language inaccessible to many lay readers. However, this is also where Methley departs from the author of the Cloud. While for the Cloudauthor, the vernacular seems the preferred medium for shedding all the baggage of learning and scientia which blocks the soul’s union with God, for turning off the analytic mind in favour of the affectus, for Methley, Latin worked perfectly for mystical purposes. It worked for him and his readers just as it had worked for Pseudo-Dionysius, for Bonaventure, for the Victorines, for Bernard. Apparently Methley saw nothing inherently ‘vernacular’ about the Cloud’s theology that would not succeed in Latin. In fact, we could interpret Methley’s choice of Latin as serving another purpose as well: it could help to keep the text out of the reach of those unworthy readers the Cloud-author warns away, and thus out of the reach of most lay and female readers. Watson is correct to ‘enlist the Cloud-author among those who worked to constitute a sense of vernacular intellectual community in late medieval England in the face of what was probably always a degree of opposition’.24 Over a hundred years later, Methley, it seems, could be considered part of that opposition. Whatever ‘vernacular intellectual community’ there was in 1491 — at least, interested in sophisticated mystical texts such as the Cloud — Methley seems to have been composing these translations for a different community, a Latinate community, and I would argue, almost certainly a Latinate monastic community. Methley, it must be pointed out, never says exactly so much himself. With the opening sentence of his prologue to the Cloud he does, however, very roughly sketch his reasons and intended audience for the translation: 22

The Cloud of Unknowing and Related Treatises on Contemplative Prayer, ed. by Hodgson, p. 1.

23

Watson, ‘The Middle English Mystics’, p. 553.

24

Watson, ‘The Middle English Mystics’, p. 554. My italics.

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Laura Saetveit Miles Qvoniam ignorantibus non solum sophistriam et logicam sed et ethicam et phisicam, quin immo sed et theoricam et practicam, purissime non dicam speculatiue sed superintellectualis et superspeculatiue25 scienciam defacatissime et vnificatissime et viuificatissime vnicionis et vnionis inter deum et viatorum animas, difficillime maxime modernis diebus refrigescente caritate, non dicam solum multorum sed pre nimietate malorum fere omnium christianorum, difficillime, inquam, intelliguntur libri contemplatiuorum supersplendidioribus theorijs theodoctorum, institi vt potui et tandem inueni secundum ocium a ceteris scilicet vacare necessarijs, et transferre de anglico in latinum, et vbi necesse fuerit explanare pro capciosis et opiniosis in fine capitulorum quorumdam que quidem difficilia videntur ad intelligendum, transferre autem librum cui nomen caligo. (fol. 1va)26 (Because the books of contemplatives, taught by God in most super-splendid knowledge [theoriis], are understood with much difficulty by those who are ignorant not only of sophistry and logic, but of ethics and physics, and indeed, also of theory and praxis, and even more [ignorant] of the purest knowledge [scienciam] of the (I hesitate to say ‘speculative’) but superintellectual and superspeculative [knowledge] of the most refined, most unifying and most vivifying unifying and union between God and the souls of pilgrims — with much difficulty, I say, especially in modern times with the cooling charity of many (in fact, of almost all Christians, since there are so many evil ones) — [because of all this] I have tried, and succeeded, insofar as I was able, and as often as I found leisure to be free from other necessary duties, both to translate from English to Latin and, where it is necessary, to explain for the argumentative and opinionated at the end of each chapter whatever seems difficult to understand — indeed, to translate the book whose name is the Cloud.)

The sheer length and impenetrability of such a beginning stands like a barrier at the entrance to the text, like a locked gate in the charterhouse wall — an apt form for content that reaffirms its ‘greatest difficulty’, and its elitism, three times over. In framing the sentence with ignorantibus and caligo Methley elegantly alludes to the title of the text, Caligo ignoranciae, and in doing so he also re-emphasizes the ignorance of those ignorantes who struggle with libri contemplatiuorum: ‘turn back now’ if your reading ability fails you here, the sign seems to say. Clearly, however, any ignorantes who make it past this initial rhetorical bluster are not so ignorant at all; in fact, not only must they have mastered the regular sciences of logic, ethics, physics, etc., they must also be fluent in the language and terminology of apophatic

25 26

The adjectives superintellectualis and superspeculative modify an implied sciencie.

All quotations of Methley’s Latin Cloud and Mirror are cited by folio number from the Colledge and Walsh unpublished edition of Pembroke College, MS 221; with gratitude to Marcus Elder for his assistance, all translations are my own, as well as any errors. My translation of this passage in particular benefited greatly from the collaborative efforts of Michael Sargent, Kantik Ghosh, and Alastair Minnis, with Richard Beadle generously checking the transcription against the manuscript.

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mysticism, of superspeculatiue scienciae, such as that developed by PseudoDionysius, Thomas Gallus, Hugh of Balma, Richard of St Victor, Bonaventure, and others.27 The qualified reader, at this opening moment, must be able to differentiate ‘bad’ ignorance (i.e. lack of experience with advanced philosophy and theology) from ‘good’ ignorance (i.e. the via negativa, the abandonment of burdensome knowledge which keeps the soul from God, according to the Cloud’s theology). This is only the first difficulty: the second, the general decline of Christian charity, has already dramatically thinned the ranks of qualified readers. The final difficulty rests within the text itself, which is difficult to understand without a hermeneutical apparatus. Through this series of exclusionary rhetorical moves — and yet stopping short of specifying his audience further — Methley’s explanation by default points reflexively back to his confreres as his intended audience.

Methley’s Speculum simplicium animarum The question of audience takes on added meaning when we consider Methley’s translation of Porete’s Mirror. Methley’s source was the Middle English version translated from the French by the mysterious M. N., known only by the initials that he used to mark off glosses. As far as we know, neither Methley nor M. N., nor anyone in England, knew anything about the true identity of the author of the Mirror: they were not aware it was written by a woman, much less the condemned heretic Marguerite Porete.28 However, both M. N. and Methley clearly considered

27

On this tradition, see Alastair J. Minnis, ‘Affection and Imagination in “The Cloud of Unknowing” and Hilton’s “Scale of Perfection”’, Traditio, 39 (1983), 323–66 (pp. 324–36). 28

An excellent introduction to Porete and the story of her book and inquisition can be found in Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. and intro. by Ellen L. Babinsky, preface by Robert E. Lerner (New York: Paulist, 1993), pp. 5–26. For a broader history of the heresy of the Free Spirit with which Porete was associated, see Robert Lerner’s The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 73–75 cover the English reception. M. N.’s Middle English version is edited by Marilyn Doiron, “‘The Mirror of Simple Souls”: A Middle English Translation’, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 5 (1968), 241–355. In the same volume, see also Edmund Colledge and Romana Guarnieri, ‘The Glosses by “M.N.” and Richard Methley to “The Mirror of Simple Souls”’, Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà, 5 (1968), 357–82. For further discussion, see Michael G. Sargent, “‘Le Mirouer des simples ames” and the English Mystical Tradition’, Abendländische Mystik im Mittelalter: Symposion Kloster Engelberg 1984, ed. by Kurt Ruh (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), pp. 443–65; Sargent, ‘Marguerite Porete’, in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition, c. 1100–1500, ed. by Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 291–309; and Edmund

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the Mirror a problematic text — one needing to be glossed, though nevertheless one worthy of reading. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton has recently argued, manuscript evidence suggests that M. N.’s vernacular version of the Mirror was considered an appropriate text for female contemplatives, even with its history of controversy.29 And despite the text’s nebulous association with the heresy of the Free Spirit, Kerby-Fulton proposes that M. N.’s translation and glosses seem to have been ‘produced for an audience of stratified abilities — with the most fascinating meanings left to be made by those with the sophistication to do so’.30 What, then, are the consequences of translation into Latin? I would suggest that Methley, working several decades later, reacts against vernacular accessibility and produces a Latin version of the Mirror not for a stratified audience at all, but for a severely restricted audience. Instead of opening itself to an audience of stratified abilities, these Latin translations selfselect the top stratum and become distanced from the bulk of lay readers, female lay readers, and female contemplative readers — in large part, those readers targeted by the Constitutions. In effect, Methley ‘cloisters’ the text in the more tolerant climate of the monastic world, where, this text seems to demonstrate, Arundel’s Constitutions had remarkably little impact. As Watson, Kerby-Fulton, and others have suggested, throughout the decades after 1409 many religious houses seemed to go on reading and copying as before, ignorant of or simply ignoring any restrictions on the speech and writing of the ecclesial and scholastic spheres.31 Methley’s rather bold promotion of Porete’s Mirror supports this conclusion. This is not to say that heretical texts might be safely ‘hidden’ in Latin, as certainly Latin could be radical and heretical, and radical language of any sort was the concern of the Constitutions.32 Rather, radical Latin might be safely sequestered within a monastery where access and supervision could be tightly controlled by its own authorities.

Colledge, ‘Liberty of the Spirit: The Mirror of Simple Souls’, in Theology of Renewal: Proceedings of the Congress on the Theology of the Renewal of the Church; Centenary of Canada, 1867–1967. Vol. 2: Renewal of Religious Structures, ed. by L. K. Shook (Montréal: Herder & Herder, 1968), pp. 100–17. 29

Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, p. 262.

30

Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, p. 291.

31

Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 276–78, 281, 295–96; Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 831, 834. 32

See Fiona Somerset, ‘Expanding the Langlandian Canon: Radical Latin and the Stylistics of Reform’, The Yearbook of Langland Studies, 17 (2003), 73–92 (pp. 77–79).

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Through his hermeneutic apparatus for the texts, Methley reveals his awareness of the dangers of the heresy of the Free Spirit and his concern for potential critics of both the Cloud and the Mirror in several ways, one of which I shall touch on here.33 In the prologue to the Cloud, Methley warns against the heresy of the Begards, also known as the heresy of the Free Spirit, by name. He defines the term vnificacio as the union of the soul and God: Est autem vnicio actiue ex parte dei, passiue ex parte anime, in purissima coniunccione vt possibile est viatori. Vnio autem est illorum duorum copulacio quorum vtrumque manet in sua substancia. Et hoc contra heresim Begardorum. (fol. 1vb ) (But this uniting is active on the part of God, passive on the part of the soul, in the purest conjunction possible for the pilgrim. Moreover, this union is the joining of those two, each of which remains in its own substance. And this is against the heresy of the Begards.)

Methley’s point is that in this type of uniting in life (as opposed to the union of death) there is not a substantial co-inherence of the soul in God, a view which he assigns to the heresy. By placing this clarification at the beginning of the pair of texts, just before the orthodox Cloud, Methley acknowledges and diffuses the question of heresy while distancing its mention from the more problematic Mirror. Methley also negotiates with his readers by adding glosses throughout both texts, a practice shared with his original Latin compositions. As we have seen him explain at the beginning of his prologue to the Cloud, he will translate the work, ‘et vbi necesse fuerit explanare pro capciosis et opiniosis in fine capitulorum quorumdam que quidem difficilia videntur ad intelligendum’ (and, where it is necessary, to explain for the argumentative and opinionated at the end of each chapter whatever seems difficult to understand’) (fol. 1va). By adding glosses, Methley fully absorbs this vernacular text into the Latin tradition of rhetoric and hermeneutics, lending the Cloud the cultural privilege he no doubt felt had been unjustly denied it because of its vernacularity.34 These capsiosi et opiniosi are now forced to engage with the true orthodoxy of the text, and can no longer be misled by a vulgar linguistic medium. Methley likewise provides a set of glosses for the Mirror, though in doing so he discards the glosses already in his source-text, the Middle English glosses by M. N. Methley’s rejection of these vernacular glosses perhaps reveals his own concern that

33

Kerby-Fulton offers a somewhat controversial consideration of the larger question of insular awareness of the Free Spirit heresy and its relationship to the Mirror in England, Books under Suspicion, pp. 250–61. 34

As understood according to the terms set out by Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages, p. 3.

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M. N.’s version left the Mirror too open, too accessible to naïve, easily misled readers, and perhaps also suggests a disdain for a vernacular misappropriation of a Latin hermeneutical discourse. This rejection is slightly different from but related to the general failure of vernacular glosses in late medieval England, with both translatio studii and translatio auctoritas tainted by the Lollards — as Alastair Minnis explains: In an atmosphere of ‘gret drede and persecucion’ wherein just about any Middle English text, however innocuous its use of theological and philosophical doctrine, could be cited as evidence of heterodoxy (particularly in the cases of the socially weak and vulnerable), with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities colluding to maintain a clear division between the roles of dominus and clericus, dives and pauper, any attempt to develop an English commentary-tradition was doomed to failure.35

M. N.’s vernacular glosses, a valiant attempt to initiate or enter an English commentary-tradition, were purposefully jettisoned in Methley’s Latin recuperation of the Mirror. By distancing his Latin version from any mark of its previous vernacular incarnation, Methley ensures a fresh start for what he knows is a borderline heterodox text. At the same time, he seems to collude with those censoring secular and ecclesiastical authorities he otherwise resists, as his acts of translation disallow access by uneducated laity — those who would be most susceptible to the heresy of the Begards.

The Cloistered Text Further proof that Methley was not writing for a stratified audience but for one single stratum — enclosed male contemplatives — derives from the exclusively Carthusian milieu in which Methley saw himself working. Several instances in the translations insist that these are somehow distinctly Carthusian texts, meant for Carthusian readers, who, as Methley might argue, should either be Latin-literate or not reading these texts at all. In his first gloss on the first chapter of the Cloud, Methley explains what the author means by the quatuor gradus of Christian life. Hoc loco attende, lector, quod communis status est laycorum, specialis clericorum vel religiosorum, singularis solitariorum scilicet heremitarum, anachoritarum vel precipue Cartusiensium. Vnde videtur quod cuidam Carthusiensi hic liber compositus fuit, quia

35

Alastair J. Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 35.

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scilicet non solent moderni de approbata religione exire ad heremum vt antiquitus, sed ad Cartusienses. (fol. 4va) (Attend to this place, reader, that ‘common’ is the status of the laity, ‘special’ of clerics or the religious, ‘singular’ of solitaries such as hermits, anchorites or principally Carthusians. From whence it seems that this book was composed for some certain Carthusian, because modern men are not accustomed to move from an approved religious order to the desert as in ancient times, but to the Carthusians.)

Not only does Methley conclude that the Cloud was originally composed for a Carthusian reader, this kind of comment seems relevant only to a thoroughly Carthusian readership — or, conversely, the comment assures a Carthusian readership of the relevance of this text. Of course, Methley ostensibly translated the Cloud for the Carthusian Thurston Watson, but this kind of comment suggests that even Methley’s conception of a wider readership did not extend beyond the charterhouse walls (whether in England or continental Europe). Then there is the scribe’s Latin inscription on the page before Methley’s Mirror: ‘Iste liber aliter intitulatur Russhbroke, quie fuit prior de ordine Cartusiansi et hunc libellum primo composuit’ (This book is called Ruusbroec, who was a prior of the Carthusian order and first composed this little book) (fol. 41r). The tradition of a misattribution of the Mirror of Simple Souls to Jan van Ruusbroec, the Flemish mystic and Augustinian canon, and his further misidentification as a Carthusian, might have helped to validate Carthusian interest in this problematic text, at least in its Latin form.36 It is also possible that Methley considered the Mirror’s English translator, M. N., to have been Carthusian. At the very end of the Mirror Methley closes with a prayer, which is introduced with this statement: ‘Oracio vel translatoris primi vel nunc secundi Cartusiensis’ (The prayer of the first, or now of the second, Carthusian translator) (fol. 99r). Colledge and Walsh interpret this to mean that Methley was referring to Ruusbroec.37 But Methley did not necessarily know about the attribution to Ruusbroec, even if the scribe did. Also, the scribe’s attribution

36

For a more in-depth discussion of the attribution to Ruusbroec see Marleen Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse: A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790, The Medieval Translator, 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 165–69; Michael G. Sargent, ‘The Annihilation of Marguerite Porete’, Viator, 28 (1997), 253–79 (p. 262); and Michael G. Sargent, ‘Medieval and Modern Readership of Marguerite Porete’s Mirouer des simples âmes: The Old French and English Traditions’, forthcoming. 37

Colledge and Walsh, ‘The Cloud of Unknowing and The Mirror of Simple Souls’, unpublished edition, p. 321, footnote to line 20.

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to Ruusbroec implies that Ruusbroec would be considered an auctor, as the originator of the text (‘hunc libellum primo composuit’), not a translator, and it seems unlikely that Methley would think Ruusbroec (thought to be from the Parisian Charterhouse of Vauvert) would have translated from French into English. Thus, this first ‘Carthusian translator’ is more likely to refer to M. N., who identifies himself as the translator of a French original of the Mirror. Methley’s reference to this first ‘Carthusian translator’ might be the only biographical hint we have regarding M. N.’s identity. One might think that Methley would have been in a position to know if M. N. were of his order — although, of course, the Carthusians were wrong about Ruusbroec. M. N.’s identity must remain conjectural because it cannot be proven solely through the possible, though probable, conclusion that Methley’s reference to a preceding Carthusian translator refers to M. N. himself.38 However Methley envisioned his readership, the manuscript evidence suggests that the text had only a limited monastic audience. Pembroke College, MS 221 is a thoroughly Carthusian product: containing only Methley’s Latin Cloud and Mirror, it was copied out by the skilled Carthusian scribe William Darker of Sheen, and commented on by several readers who display the kind of close attention to textual accuracy which defined Carthusian readership throughout the Middle Ages.39 In addition, English charterhouses are to be thanked for the careful preservation of many Latin and vernacular spiritual works which survive today, often in only one copy. As Vincent Gillespie has noted, the English Carthusians were particularly concerned with collecting the ipsissima verba, ‘the raw data of psychic phenomena’ such as the Shewings of Julian of Norwich, the Book of Margery Kempe, and the texts of Edmund Leversedge, a layman whose vernacular visionary text was allegedly translated into Latin by a Carthusian monk in the 1450s.40 Porete’s Mirror would also add a formidable voice to the exceptional library of apophatic mystical texts which seem to have been a Carthusian specialty: the Cloud of Unknowing, the Pseudo-Dionysian Mystica theologia, and Hugh of Balma’s Viae sion lugent, among others, are all preserved almost exclusively in charterhouse collections.41

38 For speculation on the identity of M. N., see Robert E. Lerner, ‘New Light on The Mirror of Simple Souls’, Speculum, 85 (2010), 91–116 (pp. 103–07). 39

On the editing of Pembroke College, MS 221, see Colledge and Walsh, ‘The Cloud of Unknowing and The Mirror of Simple Souls’, unpublished edition, pp. 23–33. 40 41

Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic’, p. 244.

For more on Carthusian manuscripts of these texts, see Michael G. Sargent, ‘The Transmission by the English Carthusians of some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), 225–40.

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Preaching not with their mouths but with their hands, the Carthusians occasionally demonstrate attention to lay spiritual needs through their provision and transmission of texts appropriate for lay readers: most famously, Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Christ, with its official approval by Arundel.42 Another prime example of this cura pastoralis is Methley’s sole surviving vernacular text, To Hew Hermyte: A Pistle of Solitary Life Nowadayes, which he wrote for the sake of a local hermit.43 In this text Methley makes it clear that this hermit, Hugh, has a very crude knowledge of Latin — not even knowing the Psalms — and encourages him to read ‘holy englysh bookes’. It is very likely, as it has been suggested, that these English books were provided by the monks of Mount Grace.44 Clearly the Carthusian interest in spiritual and devotional texts overlapped with an interest in offering counsel to those outside the cloister, though it has been aptly noted that in selecting works for a lay audience the monks took care ‘to modify or adapt the text for devotional, as opposed to contemplative purposes’.45 This brings us to a crucial, if problematic, intersection between Margery Kempe and Methley. Methley was a practising mystic, documenting his experiences in three Latin treatises, Dormitorium dilecti, Schola amoris languidi, and Refectorium salutis.46 In them Methley explains how he received striking visions and raptures at unexpected times: while saying mass, during the night office, even while reading in the

42

See Vincent Gillespie, ‘Cura Pastoralis in Deserto’, in De cella in seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), pp. 161–81. 43

Richard Methley, to Hew Heremyte: A Pystyl of Solytary Life Nowadayes, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 31 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1977), pp. 91–119. 44

Kelly Parsons, ‘The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and his Lay Audience’, in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo (Victoria: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2001), pp. 143–63 (p. 146). 45

Denise L. Despres, ‘Ecstatic Reading and Missionary Mysticism’, in Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed. by Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: Brewer, 1996), pp. 141–60 (p. 148). 46

Dating from 1484, 1485, 1487, respectively; all are preserved only in Trinity College, Cambridge, MSS 0.2.56, and show no sign of transmission outside the charterhouse. For a facsimile reproduction of this manuscript, see Mount Grace Charterhouse and Late Medieval English Spirituality, ed. by James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 64, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1978), II: The Trinity College Cambridge MS.0.2.56.

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refectory. As a monk of an order known for its austerity, he does not seem to fit in with the usually lay, usually female, usually vernacular examples of ‘sensory devotion’ such as Margery Kempe — yet this is exactly where he is placed by one reader of her Book. The single surviving copy of Margery Kempe’s Book, London, British Library, MS Additional 61823, features marginalia by several different readers, but one of them, using a distinctive red ink, refers to Methley at three points where Margery’s visions provoke some of her most physical and shocking displays. In Chapter 13: hir hert mygth lestyn þat it was not consumyd wyth ardowr of lofe*, whych was kyndelyd wyth þe holy dalyawns of owyr Lord *R. Medlay v. was wont so to say. (fol. 14b, p. 29)47

In Chapter 24: & sche had hem so ofteyn-tymes þat þei madyn hir ryth weyke* in hir bodyly myghtys, & namely yf sche herd of owr Lordys Passyon. *so father RM & father Norton & of Wakenes of the passyon. (fol. 33b, p. 68)48

And in Chapter 73: Whan sche beheld* þis sygth in hir sowle, sche fel down in þe feld a-mong þe pepil. Sche cryid, sche roryd, sche wept as þow sche xulde a brostyn þer-with. * father M. was wont so to doo. (fol. 85a, p. 174)

The annotator’s references to Methley and Norton suggest that the annotator, too, was a monk at Mount Grace Charterhouse or at least closely familiar with them.49 Not only do his red-ink annotations help to validate Margery’s visionary experiences by connecting them directly to the authority of the monastery; conversely, they also testify to a Carthusian willingness to parallel their members’ experiences of extreme ecstatic devotion with those of a laywoman. Whether or not the evidence implies that the Book of Margery Kempe was prepared for a lay or female lay readership, as Kelly Parsons has controversially argued,50 these references to Methley

47

The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Sanford Brown Meech, EETS, O. S. 202 (London: Humphrey Milford for the Early English Text Society, 1940). Citations are by folio number from the manuscript and page number from Meech. 48

John Norton was prior of Mount Grace Charterhouse at the same time that Methley was vicar, until Norton’s death in 1521–22; several of his visionary texts survive, and have yet to receive much scholarly attention. See W. N. M. Beckett, ‘Norton, John (d. 1521/2)’, ODNB. 49

Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 209. Lochrie’s discussion of Methley and Margery Kempe, in her chapter entitled ‘The Disembodied Text’, remains one of the most insightful. 50

See Parsons, ‘The Red Ink Annotator’, pp. 155–63.

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and Norton do not attempt to promote the brand of advanced apophatic mystical contemplation which texts such as the Cloud and the Mirror espouse. What Methley’s vernacular letter To Hew Hermyte strongly suggests, when compared to Methley’s Latin translations, is that in 1491 Methley regarded the divide between Latin and the vernacular as effective a divide between monastic and lay readers as the thick stone walls of the charterhouse. By shifting the difficult Cloud of Unknowing and the Mirror of Simple Souls into Latin, out of the reach of most lay readers, Methley was, perhaps, expressing a kind of pastoral concern not unlike that expressed by Arundel’s Constitutions — keep confusing, easily misread, and possibly dangerous texts out of the reach of easily imperiled souls. Where Methley departs from those so-called ‘draconian’ decrees is his approval — his endorsement — of sensitive, adventurous works of vernacular theology once they have been defused, Latinized, and limited to appropriately supervised readers, readers whose spiritual aptitude matches their linguistic aptitude. Behind Methley’s choice of language can be discerned a desire for closely supervised reading, and closely scrutinizing reading, within a monastic setting. Siding with Arundel on the general issue of lay access does not necessarily mean siding with him on all issues of theological writing. What does this one monk’s theological daring, and his rejection of the vernacular, mean for our understanding of late fifteenth-century spiritual and textual communities? For one, it is a reminder of the plurality of these communities: we cannot assume the same approach to texts by any one social stratum, any one order, any one house. Likewise, the climate of tolerance evolved over time, and 1491 was more than a lifetime after 1409: Methley’s father or grandfather would have witnessed the ‘age of Wyclif’. Methley may not represent anything more than his own personal views on literary access and mystical experience; his Latin Cloud of Unknowing and Mirror of Simple Souls may have been the result of an isolated effort to disentangle the ‘vernacular’ from ‘vernacular theology’, to Latinize products of a vernacular culture, and to sneak it past overly suspicious authorities. Yet he does force us to ask: what happens to vernacular theology when it is no longer in the vernacular? What is gained by writing vernacular theology in Latin? We must also remember that Methley was participating in a conversation with his readers, his critics, and his texts. In reality the English Carthusians were no hermits on a remote mountaintop. They were voices in dialogue with other charterhouses, other orders, lay readers, and secular leaders. Indeed, the monastic world listened and responded to the laity’s need for spiritual texts which would survive the censorship of the Constitutions. But perhaps it was this increasing permeability — a blurring of the line between cloister and parish — that drove Methley to use

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Latin as a ‘barrier language’ rather than a vehicular language for these mystical texts. Perhaps it was the extreme shows of devotion and claims of visionary gifts by everyday people which drove Methley to reclaim the mystical tradition for the Latinate, for professional (that is, professed) contemplatives — in his eyes, the rightful heirs of Pseudo-Dionysius and Hugh of Balma. Perhaps Methley’s translations reveal that monastic readers would go to great lengths to circumvent the problem of the over-accessible vernacular. Perhaps all this must remain speculative until further study of this monk’s fascinating œuvre.

Part IX Acting Holy

S AINTS’ L IVES AND THE L ITERARY AFTER A RUNDEL Catherine Sanok

I

n his field-shaping essay, Nicholas Watson notes that saints’ lives are the single genre in which fifteenth-century poets regularly name themselves.1 This phenomenon, presented under the aegis of Thomas Arundel’s 1409 Constitutions, may seem at first a consequence of the genre’s categorical orthodoxy, which makes it an exception to the general rule of anxiety and covert authorship after Arundel. If recent doubts about the reach and efficacy of the Constitutions make this less clear, they also provide an opportunity to account, as we have not yet done, for the peculiar fact highlighted by Watson’s observation: that saints’ lives were an important vehicle for some of the most ambitious poets and ambitious poetics in this period.2 This is surely how we should understand hagiographical poets’ selfnaming: as Robert Meyer-Lee has shown, the inscription of the poet’s identity is a signal feature of ‘laureate’ writing and a function of emerging ideas of literature’s special status.3 The association of verse legends with named poets is indeed closely related to a range of stylistic, formal, and thematic devices that make an implicit claim for their literary nature, including their aureate poetics, frequent citation of Chaucer, and formal division into books, often bracketed by prologues and prayers. The very length of some fifteenth-century verse legends is an index of their ambition, as is their independence from legendaries or other para-liturgical or

1

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 833.

2

On the limited effect of the Constitutions, see Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 397–401. 3

Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt.

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pastoral manuscript contexts.4 The short, workaday legends of the fourteenth century, even Chaucer’s St Cecilia, give little indication that the genre would soon be transformed into such a self-consciously literary one, as it is in Lydgate’s legends, especially his St Edmund and Fremund and St Alban and Amphibalus, Osbern Bokenham’s Legends of Holy Women, John Capgrave’s Life of St Katherine, Henry Bradshaw’s St Werburge of Chester, and Edmund Hatfield’s Lyf of St Ursula, among others.5 The literary stylistics of this genre is related to the idea of literature that it develops: the literary as a separate arena of cultural endeavour and an imaginative space defined by its remove from the social world. Aureate style identifies a text as literary precisely because it constitutes and signifies this remove on the level of language.6 Saints’ lives may become a favourite vehicle for literary display because the genre offers a parallel thematic concern: the opposition between the realm inhabited by the saint and the secular world which shadows it. In fact, recent scholarly use of the term ‘jurisdiction’ to define the purview of medieval textual culture finds a contemporary warrant in the legal metaphors that saints’ lives often use to structure this opposition.7 Osbern Bokenham’s ‘Life of St Margaret’, for example, elaborates the difference between the jurisdiction of the pagan judge who persecutes the saint and the divine law to which she is subject. Dismissing the 4 On the ‘separately circulating verse saint’s life’ as a ‘new form’ of Middle English poetry, see A. S. G. Edwards, ‘John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund and Fremund: Politics, Hagiography and Literature’, in St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, ed. by Anthony Bale (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 133–44 (p. 141). Cf. Anthony Bale and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Introduction’, in John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund, ed. by Bale and Edwards, p. 17. 5

To these can be added anonymous legends that exhibit analogous literary ambition, such as the long verse legends of Edith of Wilton and Etheldreda of Ely in London, British Library, MS Cotton Faustina B. iii, and the Lyfe of St Radegunde ascribed to Henry Bradshaw: S. Editha, sive Chronicon vilodunense, ed. by Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1883); ‘Vita S. Etheldredae Eliensis’, in Altenglische Legenden, neue Folge, ed. by Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1881), pp. 282–307; and The Lyfe of Saynt Radegunde, ed. by F. Brittain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926). 6

My understanding of aureate style and Lydgate’s conception of the literary has been significantly advanced by Robert Meyer-Lee’s study of the Life of Our Lady in his important essay, ‘The Emergence of the Literary in John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 109 (2010), 322–48. I am very grateful to the author for sharing this work in manuscript with me. 7

Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 1–2; Christopher Cannon, Middle English Literature: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), pp. 151–52.

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significance of the trial that she undergoes on earth, Margaret warns the assembled masses of the ‘last assyse’ and ‘hard iugement’ which await them, and she offers to ‘counsel’ them in advance of this heavenly trial (lines 599, 602, 611).8 Margaret herself already has access to this alternative court, as the formal complaint she makes to God concerning her persecutor suggests: ‘On hym I pleyne that hurt am Y’ (683), words that index the heavenly jurisdiction that will ultimately determine her fate.9 The saint, a figure for an alternative spiritual realm, becomes a figure for the alternative arena of literature itself in fifteenth-century literary hagiography, especially as the source of aureate poetics. Bokenham, who opens his prologue with an elaborate account of his own literary deficiencies, prays to Margaret to grant ‘thy singular grace, lady / My wyt and my penne so to enlumyne/ Wyth kunnyng and eloquence that suffycyently / Thy legende begunne I may termyne’ (333–36).10 Bokenham’s predecessor, John Lydgate, makes a more visceral association between Margaret’s martyrdom and her status as muse in his version of the legend: the poet asks Margaret to shed ‘aureate lycoure’ into his pen (58–59), in pointed anticipation of the description of her blood that ‘Lyke a quyck’ [spring] she shed, ‘Til of hir body, the lycour was al spent’ (234).11 The saint provides access to exalted language illuminated with aureate ‘licour’ that doubles, in an aesthetic register, her own opposition to, and distance from, the jurisdiction of secular authority. It thus identifies the poetry too, as a phenomenon of this alternative realm. What may be most striking about the social world in a legend such as this is the lack of differentiation between religion and politics: Margaret’s persecutor Olibrius is a secular prefect, but the substance of his charge against her is a violation of religious orthodoxy. As a crucial forum for aesthetic display in the fifteenth century, aureate hagiography suggests that one provocation for the emerging conception of the literary, as defined by its remove from the social world, was the

8

Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. by Serjeantson. All references are to this edition. 9

For a reading of this trope in the specific context of the politics of Bokenham’s legendary, see Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical, pp. 61–66. 10

Lois Ebin shows that terms such as ‘enlumyn’ and ‘aureate’ articulate Lydgate’s poetics: ‘Poetics and Style in Late Medieval Literature’, in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages, ed. by Lois Ebin (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1984), pp. 263–93 (pp. 268–69). 11

John Lydgate, ‘The Legend of St Margaret’ in The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. by MacCracken, I (1911), 173–92.

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increasing co-ordination of ecclesiastical and royal politics.12 As the jurisdictions of church and state coalesce ever more fully at the beginning of the fifteenth century, a number of writers seem to have felt the need to establish an alternative to this claustrophobic structure of national community. While the co-ordination of church and state cannot be reduced to the name Thomas Arundel, it can be meaningfully associated with it. Political and religious community had, of course, long overlapped in important ways, an overlap that was at times embodied, for example, by a man serving at once as Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor, as Arundel did in 1396, 1399, and 1407–10. But Arundel’s special visibility in the establishment of the Lancastrian regime made this co-ordination yet more fundamental to the representation of English community.13 Perhaps the most significant effect of the Lambeth Constitutions themselves was not censorship of religious writing but the practical and symbolic definition of an arena where ecclesiastical and royal jurisdiction intersected in a newly isomorphic community of church and state.14 This vision of English community, given new discursive authority by the Constitutions, goes back at least as far as Arundel’s sermon on the deposition of Richard II.15 Arundel’s important role in supporting Bolingbroke is too well known to require extensive rehearsal here, as is the long-standing historiographic assessment of Arundel as ‘the leading figure of the new reign’.16 He lent crucial authority to Henry’s claim to the throne, both in the parliamentary context in

12

I hasten to add that I do not claim that it was the only such provocation. The self-conscious interest in the literary and efforts to define a vernacular literary tradition in fifteenth-century England have been the subject of a great deal of important recent work, including John Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt; Nolan, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture; and Jennifer Summit, Lost Property (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 13

This point has been well established by, among others, Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne. 14

Jeremy Catto suggests that the 1414 statute on Lollardy marks the decisive moment when religion was ‘established and enforced by public authority’, in contrast to the separate jurisdictions of church and state before 1400; Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, p. 97. 15

For an important recent reconsideration of this text, see Jenni Nuttall, The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 16

Richard G. Davies, ‘Thomas Arundel as Archbishop of Canterbury, 1396–1414’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 14 (1973), 9–21 (p. 14).

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which it was formally made and, especially, in the ritual of crowning.17 As R. L. Storey has argued, Arundel’s support from the pulpit was instrumental in neutralizing the anxieties of English subjects, schooled in the belief that rebellion was a sin meriting excommunication, by insisting that the usurpation had a divine mandate.18 The relationship between the archbishop and the king served their mutual interests well from early in the reign: Storey suggests, for example, that the convocation over which Arundel presided in 1401 that granted the king a sizable levy was more or less a quid pro quo for Parliament’s reception of a request for measures against unlicensed preaching and support for the execution of William Sawtre.19 In aggregate, the co-ordination of ecclesiastical and royal interests in Arundelian England had not only practical political consequences (for both Arundel and Henry IV), but a broader conceptual one, in a newly emphatic understanding of English polity as coterminous with English religious community.20 We can take as a key symbol of their coincidence the holy oil of Thomas Becket, which had belonged to Richard II, with which Arundel anointed Henry IV at his coronation.21 Becket’s martyrdom registered the impossibility of reconciling the claims of ecclesiastical and royal jurisdiction; it marked two fundamentally different forms of community, religious and political, that co-existed but were not fully coterminous in late medieval England. Arundel’s use of Richard’s own oil of St Thomas of Canterbury was not only a means by which he transferred sacral authority from one king to another, nor only a confirmation of the political authority of his own ecclesiastical position; it was also a resignification of English community as at once a religious and political community.

17

On which, see R . L. Storey, ‘Episcopal King-Makers in the Fifteenth Century’, in Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Richard Barrie Dobson (Gloucester: Sutton, 1984), pp. 82–98 (p. 83). 18

Storey, ‘Episcopal King-Makers’, p. 89.

19

Storey, ‘Episcopal King-Makers’, p. 91.

20

On earlier representations of the difference between these forms of community in vernacular hagiography, see Catherine Sanok, ‘Forms of Community in the South English Legendary’, in Rethinking the South English Legendary, ed. by Heather Blurton and Jocelyn WoganBrowne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming). For an extended account of the differences between ecclesiastical and secular political jurisdiction, see Robert N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), esp. chap. 4, ‘Two laws, one kingdom’ (pp. 140–90). 21

Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, p. 138, n. 126.

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This notion of community was, of course, mortally dangerous to some English subjects accused of heresy, but it also posed a threat, in ways less violent and so less visible to modern criticism, to other communities, including those most directly responsible for the emerging idea of literature discussed above: powerful abbeys and the monastic writers who served them. They were threatened by the concomitant diminution of their own political power and by the growing interest, fostered especially by politically powerful archbishops, in monastic reform. Richard Davies suggests that Arundel took special interest in his visitations of religious houses, which he performed himself;22 and powerful abbeys were concerned to ensure that other incidental visits did not encroach on their institutional privilege and authority. When Arundel visited Bury St Edmunds in 1400, as John Ganim recounts, the monks carefully staged his entrance into their precints in order to neutralize any suggestion that he came in an official supervisory capacity.23 More broadly, Arundel fostered a reform agenda at the Council of Pisa and a generation of reform-minded ecclesiasts who brought those ideas forward to Konstanz and Basel. These movements, in turn, influenced Henry V’s own interest in monastic reform, which took official form in his 1421 inquiry into the Benedictine order. The articles proposed in response to the congregation asserted that “many abuses and excesses” were to be found in the order and called for a return to piety and simplicity, directed in the first instance at the abbots of the great houses.24 These concerns, then, can be associated with Arundel, but they outlive him and gain momentum across the fifteenth century.25 In response to this threat, Benedictine abbots insist on the historic privileges that exempted their houses from ecclesiastical and political jurisdiction. This concern with monastic exemption, as John Ganim has recently shown, finds a literary analogue in what he calls a ‘poetics of exemption’ in John Lydgate’s Life of

22

Davies, ‘Thomas Arundel as Archbishop’, p. 14.

23

John Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption’, in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Lisa Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 165–84 (p. 169). 24

A. R. Myers, English Historical Documents, 1327–1485 (London: Routledge, 1969; repr. 1996), p. 784 (item 470). For the full text, see William A. Pantin, Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks, 1215–1540, Camden Society, 3rd ser., 45, 47, and 54, 3 vols (London: Royal Historical Society, 1931–37), XLVII (1933), 110–15. 25

On the increasingly political training and experience of fifteenth-century bishops, see Catto, ‘Religious Change under Henry V’, pp. 102–03.

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Sts Edmund and Fremund.26 In order to understand the specific historical pressures that contribute to the fifteenth-century idea of literature’s remove from the social world, I take up Ganim’s suggestion that this poem can be read ‘in the context of a defence of monastic privilege and exemption’ in the next section of the essay.27 Edmund and Fremund, often read through its address to Henry VI, not only provides the young king with a model of saintly kingship, but also cautions him about political and ecclesiastical incursions into the jurisdiction of Bury St Edmunds.28 Concern about the co-ordination of church and state is not limited to the specific institutional investments of monasteries and their poets, however. In the Life of Sts Alban and Amphibalus, Lydgate extends the promise of exemption to all of ‘Brutus Albion’. In the figure of this conspicuously literary polity, Alban and Amphibalus locates England in the special realm of literature, removed from the contingencies of the secular order. In turn, ‘Brutus Albion’, as its doubled name suggests, differentiates political and religious community through separate (literary) genealogies, against the fact of their integration in fifteenth-century England. To recognize Lydgate’s ‘poetics of exemption’ and, more broadly, the tradition of aureate saints’ lives which he established as responses to the co-ordination of religion and royal authority, we need to remember the calls for reform and other challenges that the Benedictine order faced in this period.29 The order remained 26 Ganim argues that Lydgate imports the monastic idea of exemption to civic literature as well, as a way to represent at once ‘a claim for historical autonomy’ and ‘a special relationship to power’ (‘Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption’, p. 170). 27

Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption’, p. 167.

28

Readings of Edmund and Fremund that focus on its royal addressee include Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to mak affray”’; and Karen A. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 116–37. See also Jennifer L. Sisk, ‘Lydgate’s Problematic Commission: A Legend of St Edmund for Henry VI’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 109 (2010), 349–75, which appeared as this essay was submitted for publication. 29

It is important to acknowledge that the political stature of the Benedictine order itself conflated religious and political authority. On the secular role many abbots performed as feudal lord and justice, for example, see Kevin L. Shirley, The Secular Jurisdiction of Monasteries in AngloNorman and Angevin England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004). Julian Luxford notes that Benedictines, alone of all monastic orders, served as lords spiritual in Parliament: The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–1540 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), p. 118; Luxford provides a very useful overview of the ideological and material challenges facing the Benedictine order, pp. 115–50. On the threat that the Carthusian order, in particular, posed to the value of Benedictine cultural production, see also Meyer-Lee, ‘The Emergence of the Literary’, pp. 338–39.

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the wealthiest and most powerful in England, but this priority was challenged, in social and cultural terms, by the rising prominence of new orders. And it was challenged in material terms by repeated proposal of bills of disendowment, in 1404, 1410, and 1415. Julian Luxford suggests that arguments for disendowment were an important framework for Henry V’s criticism of the order, in particular his concern with Benedictine wealth and display.30 At home and in the international context of general councils, Benedictine privileges were a target of reform. The privilege of wearing episcopal regalia and a corresponding independence from episcopal jurisdiction — privileges enjoyed by the abbots of Bury St Edmunds and St Albans since the twelfth century31 — were a particular concern. The reform measures formulated at Oxford for the Council of Pisa recommended revoking the privilege of the mitre, and the English delegation put this proposal on the agenda at Konstanz as early as September 1414.32 It was adopted in the Decretales reformationis and included in the English Concordat.33 Also considered were proposals to revoke all exemptions dating from the Schism and to require mandatory consent of all affected parties for future ones.34 If these reforms, which found a strong advocate in Henry Chichele, were intended to curtail papal power, they also threatened to limit monastic privilege.35 Nigel Mortimer has recently shown that this threat hit close to home for Lydgate. Bury St Edmund had long enjoyed important privileges, including independence from the bishop’s jurisdiction, and the abbot held episcopal power, including the right to wear the mitre, as Abbot Curteys did to meet Henry VI in

30

Luxford, The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, p. 138. Henry’s interest may also be seen as a repercussion of discussions at Konstanz about the excessive wealth of regular orders, on which see Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, p. 158. 31

Jocelin de Brakelonde, ‘Cronica’, in Memorials of St Edmund’s Abbey, ed. by Arnold, I (1890), 230; Michelle Still, The Abbot and the Rule: Religious Life at St Albans, 1290–1349 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 8, 22–23. 32

Stump, Reforms, p. 158. Stump suggests the role of Thomas Spofford, Abbot of St Marywithout-the-walls, York, in advocating this reform at the Benedictine chapter meeting held in conjunction with the council, p. 155. As the motivating force behind the English delegation to Pisa, and mentor to Spofford and Chichele, leading members of the English delegation to Konstanz, Arundel can be broadly associated with the conciliar efforts to reign in papal authority through monastic reform. On Arundel’s role, see Harriss, Shaping the Nation, p. 318. 33

Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, p. 148.

34

Stump, The Reforms of the Council of Constance, pp. 148–49.

35

On Chichele’s role, see Jacob, Archbishop Henry Chichele, p. 35.

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1433.36 He held such power not without contest, however, as in the early 1430s when William Alnwick, bishop of Norwich, assigned an archdeacon to review clerical tax status within the abbey precints. Curteys’s tenacious and devious attempts to elude the archdeacon Clement Denston culminated in prosecution of him on false grounds. Both Curtyes and Abbot Whethamstede — Lydgate’s patron for the Life of St Alban and Amphibalus — were busily working against the reform agenda brought to the Council of Basel. Mortimer cites a 1435 letter from Whethamstede to Curteys, in which the former worried specifically about abridgement of monastic privilege, and he notes Curteys’s own plans to travel to the Council of Basel to make the case for exemptions.37 Lydgate’s Life of St Edmund and Fremund, written in the early years of the Council of Basel, takes up the abbey’s defence. The carefully ordered miracles of Book 3 are overwhelmingly concerned with the privileges long associated with the abbey’s territories.38 In the first, the tyrannical Sweyn seeks tribute from the land he has usurped, sparing neither territories ‘Confermed off seyntes ffredam nor ffranchise’ (2954).39 He specifically demands tribute from East Anglian communities that ‘Cleymed franchise off Edmund ther patron’ (2963). The saint appears to his chaplain Ayllewyn and instructs him to insist that their freedom from such levies was ‘stablysshed off antiquyte’ (3029). In case the lesson is lost on the young Henry VI, Lydgate makes it plain: ‘Neuer tirant durste putten assay / Off seynt Edmund to breke the franchise, / But he were punysshed withoute long delay’ (3159–61). Edmund protects legal privileges as well as financial ones, as the next miracle demonstrates: a sheriff, Leoffstan, tries to seize a woman who has taken sanctuary at Edmund’s tomb. She cries out to the saint, ‘Keep and conserue thy iurediccion / Fro this tirant’ (3193–94), and when he persists in holding court 36

The following paragraph relies throughout on Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, pp. 135–44. 37

Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, pp. 132–33, n. 100.

38

Lydgate has selected and reordered miracles recounted in his primary source, the Vita et passio cum miraculis sancti Edmundi in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 240: the text is available in Nova legenda Anglie, ed. by Carl Horstmann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), pp. 575–647. Bale and Edwards identify Lydgate’s sources for the miracles, John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund, ed. by Bale and Edwards, pp. 20–24, 169–72. On the order of the miracles, see James Miller, Jr, ‘Lydgate the Hagiographer as a Literary Artist’, in The Learned and the Lewed, ed. by Larry Benson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 279–90 (p. 280). 39

All quotations of Edmund and Fremund are from John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund, ed. by Bale and Edwards.

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there, a fiend possesses him and he dies. Even the following miracle, in which a bishop hastily punishes eight thieves who conspire to strip Edmund’s shrine of its rich decoration, is a lesson against usurping the abbey’s own authority in such matters: the bishop repents his rash judgment, which shows his ignorance of Christian mercy, for the rest of his life. The punishment of the impious Osgothus in the fourth miracle coincides with Edward the Confessor’s visit to the abbey ‘Tencresse ther franchise and ther liberte’ (3329); at the king’s request, the abbot prays and Osgothus’s wits are restored.40 Most striking is the miracle with which this series concludes, of a bishop who tries fraudulently to seize Edmund’s relics for St Paul’s but finds that the body cannot be moved. As it is carried, once again by the faithful Ayllewyn, back to Bury, all those who are ill are ‘maad hool’ (3426). It even repairs bridges that are broken so that the martyr might return to his rightful place, where he ‘lith hool now in his shryne’ (3451). The miracles, together and singly, address with clear topicality political and ecclesiastical challenges to the abbey’s privileges. An even more local relationship can be discerned between the poem and Bishop Alnwick’s attempts in 1430 to pursue inquiries into heresy within the abbey’s territory.41 In defence of his own jurisdiction over such matters, Curteys appealed to Whethamstede, the papal deputy, who confirmed the abbey’s exemption from episcopal oversight. Alnwick persisted, however, in bringing charges against Robert Bert, a chaplain, belying Curteys’s claim to autonomous jurisdiction. The Life of Sts Edmund and Fremund reveals continuing anxiety that the abbey’s historical privileges will be undermined by the new legal protocols for rooting out heresy: hence Lydgate’s insistence that Edmund himself was a scourge of heretics: ‘Lollardis that tyme fond in him no confort. / To holi chirche he was so strong a wal. / Hated fals doctryn in especial’ (934–36).42 Concern about the abbey’s own jurisdiction, in the context of national policy against heresy and international reform movements, registers in Lydgate’s protestations of the abbey’s privileges and

40

Somerset notes that this miracle was not traditionally linked to Edward’s visit and donation (Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to mak affray”’, p. 265), citing James Miller, Jr, ‘John Lydgate’s Saint Edmund and Saint Fremund: An Annotated Edition’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1967), p. 347. 41 42

For these events, see Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, pp. 145–47, on which I rely.

‘Lollardis’ doubles the generic term ‘heretikes’ (line 933) here, but it resonates with the close association of the term with contemporary Wycliffite challenges to the church (against which Edmund serves as a ‘strong wall’) and heterodoxy (‘false doctrine’). Somerset calls this passage the ‘poem’s most blatant presentism’ (Somerset, ‘“Hard is with seyntis for to mak affray”’, p. 267).

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his promotion of the saint who secures them through his exemplary behaviour and vigilant enforcement of orthodoxy.43 Edmund’s monkish piety, then, must be understood not only as a paradigm for the kingship of Henry VI, still too young to rule in his own name, but also as a defence of the place of Bury St Edmunds in national community. The Life of Sts Edmund and Fremund relocates ideal kingship within — even as — monastic community: Edmund is a model for Henry VI as king and as guarantor of the abbey’s exemptions; in turn, the abbey models for the king a body politic that does not depend on genealogy (as a martyr, Edmund sacralizes the discontinuity of monarchical lineage) or martial prowess (Edmund, too, is no Henry V). With Edmund and Fremund, Lydgate invents the literary saints’ life. He does this in response to specific institutional exigencies, as the miracles in Book 3 suggest in promoting the exemptions of his monastery at a moment when its jurisdiction was threatened. The poem’s literary aspiration relates intimately to this central theme: aureation itself figures the monastery’s remove from the secular order. We see this in the first stanza in which Lygate draws attention to the topic of style: the poet calls on Edmund to fill his pen with ‘Thyn heuenly dewh of grace’ (122) and continues by imagining the poem as an arena defined by the saint’s authority: And blissid martir my stile do so dresse Vndir thi wengis of proteccion That I nat erre in my translacion. (124–26)

Just as the miracles insist on Edmund’s special jurisdiction over the monastery, which frees it from episcopal and political oversight, so the prologue makes Lydgate’s aureate language a sign that the poem inhabits a special arena, also secured by the saint’s body. Indeed, the wings of ‘protection’ that here ensure freedom from literary error appear later as a defence against secular encroachments on the franchise of the abbey’s lands: when Edmund appears to Ayllewyn and instructs him to challenge King Sweyn, he proclaims that ‘Ther ffranchise is to stonde in auantage [...] Vnder the wynges off my proteccion’ (3022, 3024).44

43

Cf. the attribution of a versified account of the abbey’s privileges, the ‘Cartae Versificatae’, to Lydgate: see Ganim, ‘Lydgate, Location, and the Poetics of Exemption’, p. 170, and Mortimer, John Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’, p. 149. 44

Lydgate’s presentation of his style in Edmund and Fremund has received important recent attention from Ruth Nissé, who understands it as an effect of the poem’s ‘ideologically incoherent’ praise for Henry VI, and Alexandra Gillespie, who argues for its affiliation with poem’s devotional claims: Alexandra Gillespie, ‘The Later Lives of St Edmund: John Lydgate to John Stowe’, in

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But this extension of the concept of exemption to literature as such also points to a more general desire for an alternative to the secular order, one not fully accounted for by the institutional reading I have offered so far. Aureate style — characterized above all by its Latinate vocabulary — references that context, not least as a citation of the linguistic remove that characterized regular life. But it also makes this remove available to the legend’s audience, which included communities within and without the walls of Bury St Edmunds.45 It is, moreover, augmented by Lydgate’s conspicuous Chaucerian reference, which provides a second and specifically literary genealogy for the poem’s remove from secular jurisdiction. Presented as a part of a Chaucerian tradition, Edmund and Fremund makes a claim to an extratemporal literary order. This idea is itself a Chaucerian inheritance, borrowed explicitly from the end of the Troilus, where Chaucer bids his ‘litel bok’ to ‘kis the steppes where as thow seest pace / Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace’ (V, 1791–92). Classical poetry occupies an eternal present, its kinetic energy not even arrested by a kiss of homage. Lydgate recalls these lines at the end of Edmund and Fremund: ‘Go litel book. Be ferfful, quaak for drede’ begins the envoy (3572). The aureate vocabulary and Chaucerian genealogy of Lydgate’s poem — features that may seem antithetical to a modern critic — make related claims for poetry’s exemption from the saeculum. While Edmund and Fremund develops the idea of literature’s remove from the secular order in concert with its defence of the historic privileges enjoyed by Bury St Edmunds, the Life of Sts Alban and Amphibalus extends the idea of exemption to England itself. Lydgate here makes the monastery the paradigm on which he (re)founds English community, or rather its literary counterpart, Brutus Albion. Imagining Albion through the paradigm of the monastery, Lydgate removes it from secular jurisdiction. At the same time, Alban and Amphibalus — in its conspicuous Chaucerianism and the implicit address of its vernacular aureation — suggests that poetry not only imagines a realm separate from secular jurisdiction, but itself constitutes that realm for English audiences. Lydgate’s imagining of English community as analogous to the monastery is developed through an elaborate revision of the idea of translatio imperii, rewritten as the re-invention of English identity. The first of the poem’s three books defines the Roman Empire as an ideal political community. Albion, weakened by ‘fals

St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, ed. by Anthony Bale (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 163–85; and Nissé, ‘“Was it not Routhe to Se?”’. 45

On the poem’s audience, see John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss Edmund & Fremund, ed. by Bale and Edwards, pp. 17–18, and Alexandra Gillespie, ‘The Later Lives of St Edmund’, p. 176.

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divisioun’ (126), much like that plaguing England during the minority of Henry VI, is conquered by Julius Caesar. Rome’s success as an empire is, in turn, attributed to its ‘prudent pollicie’ of centralization (181).46 The empire is successful because it suppresses local identity and action, most prominently by making chivalry an imperial practice: to become a knight one must go to Rome. Lydgate’s representation of Roman knighthood sounds suspiciously like monastic discipline: the knights are sworn to chastity, religious observance, and obedience. They promise to ‘withdrawe ther hond from lucre and couetise, / Speciali t’eschewyn ydilnesse’ (379–80), to ‘hold vp trowth, suffre non outrage, / Cherissh poraill, do no violence’ (388–89), and to ‘withdrow ther hond fro guerdoun and from meede’ (402). As a token of their ‘clennesse’ (448) — that is, the chastity and discipline of their bodies — they undergo a ritual shaving and bath when they are received into the order of knighthood, echoing rites of baptism and monastic tonsure. Readers have found the long description of imperial knighthood, and especially the repeated insistence on knightly chastity, digressive, even bizarre: chivalry is, generally speaking, represented as an erotic, as much as a military, endeavour in Middle English narrative culture. But it is crucial to a typological connection that the legend develops between imperial chivalry and monastic practice, a connection that becomes more explicit after Amphibal, and then Alban, convert to Christianity, which Lydgate identifies as the ‘knyhthood of willful poverte’ (865). Imperial chivalry — as an idealized moral practice — at once prepares Alban for Christian conversion and is superseded by it. Christianity is, in turn, the forum for re-inventing English identity and, ultimately, English community. Even with the ritual shaving, bathing, and tonsuring meant to transform them into imperial knights, the British princes and nobles remain identifiable to Pope Zepherynus. In their evident gentility, they make ‘the blood knowe of Briteyn’ (301) and inspire the pope to convert them. Christianity secures a native identity otherwise lost in the homogenizing protocols of imperial chivalry. This identity remains in excess of the familiar paradigm of translatio imperii that traces cultural authority from Troy to Britain: the spiritual triumph of Alban’s martyrdom is a ‘gretter conquest than was the siege of Troie’ (2.351); the people of Verolamium grieve more deeply at the martyrdom of their kinsmen than the Trojans lamented their own (3.463–69); Alban’s martyred body is more valuable to Albion than the Palladium in Troy (3.1374). Like Brutus, the eponymous founder of Britain in this Trojan paradigm, Alban — who is given a 46

John Lydgate, Saint Alban and Saint Amphibalus, ed. by George Reinecke (New York: Garland, 1985). All further citations given parenthetically by line number.

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Trojan genealogy by Lydgate — gives his name to the nation. But Alban, as its protomartyr, (re)founds Albion as a specifically religious community.47 We might understand this thematic in terms of royal politics: this poem, written ten years after Henry VI was crowned at Westminster, but before he began visibly to rule in his own name, locates the continuity and authority of English community in its religious history rather than regnal genealogy.48 In identifying England as ‘Brutus Albion’, as a community founded and named by Alban, if still powerfully dependent on the antecedent of Brutus, the poem secures the nation’s integrity through the stable figure of the protomartyr, in the face of the instability of a political order embodied by a king still only on the cusp of adulthood after a long minority. From this perspective, the poem resonates with a strategy that we can identify as central to the Arundelian–Lancastrian model of political authority — the shoring up of political rule via the authority of the church — and its practical consequence in the co-ordination of ecclesiastical and royal jurisdiction outlined above. But the Troy allusions suggest a countervailing impulse as well, as translatio imperii is superseded by its Christian counterpart. This typological structure distinguishes political from religious community, differentiating the secular authority that passes from Troy to England in the figure of Brutus from the religious authority established by Alban. This implicit rebuke of the Lancastrian conflation of these two forms of community coincides, moreover, with the identification of Albion with the paradigm of the monastery. We might note generally that the native Christianity that Alban embodies is strikingly independent from ecclesiastical or political authority. While the pope first recognizes native British identity and converts Amphibal, he plays a muted role in the legend, with no direct interaction with Alban himself, who is not converted until he returns to his native land. Neither Alban nor Amphibal refers to the pope’s authority thereafter.49 This is in sharp contrast to the constant communication between Roman authorities and the colonial judges and officials who persecute Alban. Alban is imprisoned for six months after this trial, for example, while they await instructions from the emperor: they are terrified to punish his favourite without explicit permission. Alban’s own independence is like that enjoyed by exempt 47

‘Prothomartir’ is first attested in Lydgate’s Edmund and Fremund according to the MED.

48

On the efforts to present Henry VI acting as sovereign in 1439, see John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 140–41. 49

The single exception is a brief account of the role played by the abbey of St Albans during the Pelagian heresy.

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monasteries, such as St Albans, and indeed the insistent representation of Alban’s knighthood as a quasi-monastic practice — as the secular type of the ‘knighthood’ of willful poverty — identifies the community to which he gives his name with a monastic paradigm as well. Although Lydgate does not narrate the founding of the abbey of St Albans until much later in the poem, ‘the heldest abbey in Brutis Albioun’ (3.1540), named, like the nation, after the saint, already figures as a metonym for it. Alban’s monkish discipline is, after all, imitated most obviously by the monks who reside in the monastery dedicated to him. Their role in figuring ‘Brutus Albion’ is importantly underwritten by the way that the monastery centres this community as the repository of Alban’s sacred body. The legend is set primarily in Rome and Verolamium, the empire and the colonial city, not the nation. Aside from the name ‘Brutus Albion’, the only representations of the nation as such derive from Alban’s martyred body. On the night he dies, a column of light ascends from his body, illuminating ‘alle four parties’ of ‘Breteyn’ (2.2010): in this miracle, Alban’s martyred body makes the boundaries of the nation literally visible. It is made still more unified in Lydgate’s vivid image of Brutus Albion embalmed with Alban’s blood: Be glad and mery, this title is riche and good, Lond of Breteyn, callid Brutus Albioun, Which art enbawmyd with the purpil blood Off blissid Albon, prynce of that regioun. (3.1366–69)

The metaphorical body of Brutus Albion, already an effect of its reciprocal identity with Alban, provides an image of coherent space, like the shaft of light, while the saint’s embalming blood preserves it across time. In this paradoxical image of an embalmed yet living nation, the substance that points to Alban’s own place outside history guarantees the continuing life of the community. At the same time that Alban’s body figures national community in this highly metaphorical way, it also finds a local habitation at St Albans, ‘where thou art shryned’ (3.1543), as the poet reminds the saint. In modelling the nation on the monastery, the legend locates it beyond political and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but not beyond the jurisdiction of poetry. Alban’s embalming blood is a close analogue to the ‘aureate licour’ that Margaret and Edmund offer Lydgate, and we can read his prayer to the saint to ‘cast doun thi liht t’enlumyne my langage’ (96) with reference to Alban’s miraculous illumination of Albion itself. Moreover, the poem both remains subject to Chaucer and is liberated by him from the constraints of its historical moment. The formal qualities of Alban and Amphibalus, from its invocation of the saint as a kind of

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muse to replace Clio and the other classical figures on whom the monkish poet cannot call (1–28), to its division into books, corroborate the poem’s dense allusions to Troy in pointing to Troilus and Criseyde and to Chaucer as the ultimate authority for Lydgate’s legend.50 As in Edmund and Fremund, but much more pervasive than the incidental allusions there, the Chaucerianism of Alban and Amphibalus identifies it as part of an extra-temporal literary tradition. Lydgate does not just imagine Albion as a rebuke to the co-ordination of ecclesiastical and political community in Lancastrian England; he offers it as a literary figure, which as such provides an alternative to this secular order. This idea of the literary, defined by its remove from the exigencies of history, persists beyond the fifteenth century, of course, if largely unrecognized as a medieval formulation. The afterlife of Alban and Amphibalus may be instructive here. It was printed in 1534 by John Hertford at the request of Abbot Robert Catton of St Albans. There are small revisions to the poem, including a new address to Henry VIII, his queen Anne, and their infant daughter. Catton, we may suppose, hoped that Lydgate’s representation of Brutus Albion as a religious community would appeal to the king, newly the supreme head of the English church, and ensure his support of the abbey that housed the body of the saint who gives his name to that community in Lydgate’s elaborate conceit. That is, the 1534 edition, far from offering an alternative to the co-ordination of church and state, offers an endorsement of it. This was not, as it happened, enough to ensure St Albans’ exemption from the Dissolution four years later. But it may well explain the poem’s appeal to later poets, such as William Browne, who rewrites the legend in Britannia’s Pastorals. In Browne’s Spenserian national allegory, Altheia, the personification of Protestant England, recounts the story of the nymph Verolam’s petition to Time to preserve the memory of Alban’s martyrdom by diverting the river that might otherwise wash away his blood.51 Time agrees, and the ground is indelibly stained. Browne’s myth, an extension of Lydgate’s metaphor of the land embalmed with Alban’s blood, embraces the role of the saint’s body in defining the

50 51

However mediated by Lydgate’s own Troy Book.

William Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals (London: Norton, 1613–16; facs. repr.: Menston: Scolar, 1969), pp. 71–73. Browne owned London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 699, a collection of Lydgate’s poetry that includes Alban and Amphibalus: Lydgate, Saint Alban and Saint Amphibalus, ed. by Reinecke, p. xii. The personification of Verolamium as the nymph Verolam is an important part of the poem’s strategy: it at once encodes Alban’s association with a particular location and displaces it into the realm of the figurative so that the story’s geographical reference can be generalized as Britannia.

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nation. But where the monastery, custodian of the saint’s body, mediates the relationship between Alban and Albion in Lydgate’s legend, in Britannia’s Pastorals Alban’s blood soaks the very soil of Britannia. It literally grounds England as both a religious and political community. Browne’s revision of Lydgate’s legend elides at once the monastery and the resistance to the co-ordination of ecclesiastical and political power it represented. If the legacy of Lydgate’s idea of literature is abbreviated by the Reformation, indeed perhaps because of this fact, it may have lasting significance in the challenge it can pose to the familiar cultural history that identifies the notion of ‘literature’ as a special arena of cultural endeavour as an effect of ‘secularization’. Literature often serves as an index of the teleological process by which medieval religion is superseded by early modern secularity. The didactic or functional role of literature in a religious age, so the argument goes, is stripped away, leaving behind a numinous quality or abstracted categories of value, the residue of its earlier transcendent significance.52 This argument is generally made in early modern studies on the grounds of the inexorable march of history or as the specific consequence of humanist engagement with classical learning as a non-Christian, non-monotheistic inheritance. But the emphasis in our own field on the censorship of religious literature in the fifteenthcentury has perhaps corroborated this thesis, if only implicitly. Rethinking the argument for the devastating effect of Arundel’s Constitutions on literary culture makes possible a reconsideration of the secularization thesis, especially as it imagines the aesthetic as a phenomenon that emerges through the loss or rejection of an earlier religious sensibility. I have argued that the aesthetic ambitions of fifteenth-century hagiography, in abundant evidence not only in Lydgate’s legends, but also in that of Bokenham,

52

So Gordon Teskey identifies the ‘most important’ feature of early modern literary innovation as ‘the appearance, in an increasingly secular modern world, of the phenomenon of literature (more broadly, of art) as a cultural category in its own right’: Teskey, ‘Renaissance Theory and Criticism’, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994; rev. and repr. 2005), online edition: [accessed 1 August 2010]. Christopher Cannon makes a similar argument that the late Middle Ages saw the emergence of the category of literature when its defining qualities, specifically ethics, affect, and value, are no longer ‘absorbed to larger doctrinal ends’ (Cannon, Middle English Literature, p. 152). In the specific context of Lydgate’s poetry, Lois Ebin argues that a newly ‘secularized view of the poet’s role’ allows for the development of a self-conscious poetics in the fifteenth century: Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. xiii.

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Bradshaw, Capgrave, Hatfield, and others, seek to differentiate literature from the secular order itself. The literary, from the perspective of this tradition, is not the by-product of the secular, but precisely that which is imagined as its alternative. Rather than an effect of ‘secularization’, I have suggested, the idea of the literary we find in fifteenth-century saints’ lives responds to the increasing sponsorship of religion by the state. Whatever we may think of the literary quality per se of fifteenth-century aureate hagiography, it made crucial contributions to an emerging definition of ‘literature’, especially the idea of literature as defined by its remove from the social world, not through an inevitable erosion of religious intent that allows certain representational imperatives and techniques a new aesthetic freedom, but as a studied response to more local historical pressures. Meyer-Lee proposes that the fifteenth-century idea of literature, as encoded in its aureate stylistics, persists in Sidney’s ‘golden world’ of poetry.53 It is no little irony that this definition of literature, as it is theorized more fully in the sixteenth century, will be misrecognized as a sign of the progressive ‘secularization’ of a culture that in fact witnessed a co-ordination of church and state much more thorough than even Arundel could imagine.

53

Meyer-Lee, ‘The Emergence of the Literary’, p. 348.

H AGIOGRAPHY AFTER A RUNDEL: E XPOUNDING THE T RINITY Karen A. Winstead

J

ust over a decade after the promulgation of Arundel’s Constitutions, a new trend in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives was beginning to take shape, a trend that vigorously promoted an informed and intellectualized Christianity.1 This hagiography celebrated teachers, preachers, and missionaries. In many cases, authors did not simply praise the saints for being diligent educators; they recounted, sometimes at length, what they taught, even tackling arcane points of doctrine and, in effect, turning their saints’ lives into vehicles of theological instruction. Here I will discuss one doctrine that is treated at length in several theologically ambitious saints’ lives of the mid-fifteenth century: the Trinity. Though the same, thoroughly orthodox, Trinitarian doctrine recurs in lives of this period, hagiographers differ in how they present that doctrine, in how much of it they present, and in how accessible to human understanding they consider the Trinity to be. These diverse treatments show that a culture of inquiry and exploration was finding expression in the vernacular only a generation after the promulgation of what Nicholas Watson famously called ‘one of the most draconian pieces of censorship in English history’.2 The theological instruction carried on in saints’ lives can easily be taken as evidence of the failure of the Constitutions to have a lasting impact on English religious literature; however, I will suggest that it also, paradoxically and perversely, suggests an unanticipated, long-range influence.

1

I have discussed this trend as it relates to the writings of one of its key authors, John Capgrave, in John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century. On the reformist impulses within fifteenth-century hagiography, see Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 383–457. 2

Watson, ‘Censorship’, p. 826.

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The Trinity: ‘ouer hiõe, ouer reverend and hard’? The Trinity was a cornerstone of medieval Christianity, and its greatest mystery. In late medieval England, churches and guilds were named for the three-personned God. Images sought to convey the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Sermons and meditations stirred the faithful to devotion. Yet few vernacular writers undertook to explain the Trinity in any detail beyond its simple articulation in Archbishop Thoresby’s catechism, which, to quote its English translation, states that ‘Iesu crist goddes son of heuen is sothefastly god euen til his fadir’, that ‘the hali gast that samenly comes of bothe the fadir and the son, is sothefastly god, and euen til tham bothe’, that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are ‘bot thre se[r]e persons and noght bot a god’, and finally that ‘the trinite Fadir and sone and haligast, thre persons and a god, is maker of heuen and of erthe and of all thinges’.3 Much pastoral literature of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries diverts attention from Trinitarian doctrine to devotion. The anonymous author of Speculum sacerdotale refers only in passing to the nature of the Trinity in his sermon on its feast: ‘Sires, in syche a day õe schul haue the solempnite of the Holy Trinity, scilicet, fader and sone and Holy Gost, þe whiche Holy Trinite is oo God’, he says, before passing on to the wonders wrought by that ‘oo God, almyõtty and euerlastynge’ and wrapping up with an explanation of why it is important to honour the Trinity.4 John Mirk’s much longer sermon on the feast day has more to say about the nature of the Trinity — but not much more. Mirk, too, devotes more attention to why the Trinity should be honoured than to what is being honoured. Following the common practice of explaining the Trinity by analogy, he compares Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all manifestations of one God, to water, ice, and snow, all manifestations of water. But even as he enjoins his audience to believe in ‘þre persons in on godhed’ he warns that to ‘study how þis may be, hit is but a foly; for monnys wyt may neuer comprehend hit’.5 He concludes with an exemplum of how a ‘gret maystyr of diuinyte’ learns the futility of attempting to understand ‘why God wold be leuot on God in þre persons’.

3

The Lay Folks’ Catechism, ed. by Thomas Frederick Simmons and Henry Edward Nolloth, EETS, O. S. 118 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1901), p. 24; the corresponding Latin text is given at the bottom of the page. 4

Speculum sacerdotale, ed. by Edward H. Weatherly, EETS, O. S. 200 (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1936), p. 161. 5

Mirk’s Festial, ed. by Theodor Erbe, EETS, E. S. 96 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1905), p. 167.

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The reticence of vernacular authors is hardly surprising, for the Trinity was high-stakes theology, even for ‘gret maystyrs of diuinyte’. Augustine warns that ‘in no other subject is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious’, though he also avers that in no other subject is ‘the discovery of truth more profitable’.6 Quoting Augustine, Peter Lombard writes that ‘this highest and most excellent of topics is to be approached with modesty and fear’.7 Even more cautious, Jacobus de Voragine, archbishop of Genoa, asserts in his Latin sermons on the saints, ‘No subject is more elevated, or more fraught with danger than to speak of the most profound mystery of the Trinity’.8 He concludes, ‘Let us, therefore, speak of open and lowly subjects, and leave lofty concerns to wise men’. Langland’s Anima would have agreed. In Passus XV (B-version) of Piers Plowman, she inveighs against the ‘freres and fele other maistres that to the lewed men prechen’ who, more eager to dazzle the faithful with their erudition than actually to teach anything, ‘moeven materes unmesurables to tellen of the Trinité’ (XV. 71–72).9 Their efforts are worse than useless, in that they risk raising more doubts than they settle. Instead of preaching matters best left to theologians, these friars and masters ought to teach the Ten Commandments or the Seven Deadly Sins. As if to confirm this stance, Passus XVII finds Will baffled after Faith’s confusing disquisition on the Trinity, unable to reconcile the apparent contradiction between Faith’s admonition to believe in a triune God and Hope’s exhortation ‘to byleve and lovye in o Lorde almyghty’, which makes no mention of the Trinity. Yet Langland goes on to demonstrate that the Trinity, properly expounded, can be accessible to ‘lewed peple’. Through extended analogies comparing the Trinity first to a fist and then to a candle flame, the Samaritan of Passus XVII demonstrates the unity of the three persons and further shows that believing in the Trinity has everything to do with Hope’s message of loving God and one’s neighbour (XVII. 133–253).10

6

De Trinitate, I. 3. 5: ‘On the Trinity’, in Augustine of Hippo, Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. by Whitney Oates, 2 vols (New York: Random House, 1947), II, 670. 7 See Book I of Peter Lombard’s The Sentences, Book 1: The Mystery of the Trinity, trans. by Giulio Silano, Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 42 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2007), p. 12. 8

Quoted in Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, p. 124.

9

William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. by A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Dent, 1995). 10

On this point, see James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (London: Longman, 1990), pp. 200–02.

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Langland’s object of providing an explanation of the Trinity that was comprehensible to the faithful was taken up by Reginald Pecock over a generation later, in what, to my knowledge, is the most extended treatment of the doctrine in Middle English. In his Reule of Crysten Religioun, composed c. 1443, Pecock took issue with those who claimed that the Trinity was too lofty a topic for the laity: ‘þese trouþis and her profis ben esily aweeldeable of ech competently wittid lay man if he wolde take bisynes þerto’.11 In fact, they are no more complicated than so many of the business matters that lay people deal with routinely ‘in plees of dette and of trespace, in rekenyngis to be maad of receivers and rente gaderers in þe account of an audit’, and so forth (p. 94). The risk of falling into error, he argues, is minimal for those who are willing to be guided and corrected by the bona fide representatives of Holy Church (p. 96). The error is in preventing ‘a man fro profitable labouris in redyng, in heryng, in studiyng, resonyng, enquering, encerching, wherbi he may be edified and edifie oþere and preise god, þe deuoutlier drede god and wondre of god, þe more loue god and serue’ (p. 97). Religious understanding makes for better Christians. Pecock’s exposition on the Trinity is wholly consistent with his career-long promotion of a reasoned Christianity. He avers that although the existence of God as a Trinity is something that can be known only through revelation, once revealed, there is much about the nature of the Trinity that can be deduced ‘bi discurse and liõt of natural resoun’ (p. 76). In his ensuing discussion he first documents the revelation of the Trinity in Scripture, then expounds the essentials of the doctrine as ‘schewid bi resoun and bi feiþ’ (p. 85). He is careful to differentiate between the Son’s being ‘gendrid’ by the Father and the Holy Ghost’s being ‘spirid’ from the Father and Son (p. 81), while emphasizing that the same substance is communicated by the Father to both Son and Holy Spirit (pp. 76–80): one substance, one God. The begetting and proceeding that produced the Trinity occur out of time, he emphasizes: it had no beginning and will persist throughout eternity (pp. 82–84). Pecock’s approach to the Trinity differs most markedly from that of most other Middle English authors, including Langland, in his reliance on reason rather than analogy to convey his points. Indeed, his entire exposition contains not a single analogy. Though bold in its extended and intricate coverage of the doctrine, Pecock’s discussion is nonetheless laced with anxiety about those who ‘juge þat þis doctryne is ouer hiõe, ouer reverend and hard forto be lerned and kunnen of þe comoun peple in her moderis langage’ (p. 85), those who believe that there ‘is no nede þat þe lay peple haue so myche and so hiõe and sutil knowing of god in trynyte of 11

Pecock, The Reule, ed. by Greet, p. 93. Page references to this edition will hereafter be cited directly in the text.

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persoonys’ (p. 88). Demonstrating that he has been selective in which points of doctrine to treat, he alludes to ‘more and hardir doctrynes and oþere consideraciouns vpon þe godhede’ that are expounded in Peter Lombard’s Sentences; then, in an odd move, he summarizes some of those ‘consideraciouns’ in Latin (pp. 86, 88–89).12 He allows that his entire discussion of the Trinity could be cut, but he hopes that will not be deemed necessary (p. 85). After all, he protests, the Trinity, unlike, say, the eucharist, is not a topic that lay people are prone to speculate about (p. 94). Pecock’s anxieties may help to explain why some of the most detailed explanations of the Trinity occur in hagiography, a genre which stresses its ancient (and irreproachably orthodox) sources and in which excursions into theology are to some degree camouflaged by narrative. I will now turn to the three most complex treatments of the Trinity in Middle English hagiography, which occur in texts roughly contemporaneous with Pecock’s Reule: Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria and two lives of Saint Barbara, one in verse by Osbern Bokenham and the other in prose by an anonymous hagiographer.

Capgrave’s Katherine: ‘The Holy Trinité she provyde […] be kynde’ The Trinity figures prominently in the Life of Saint Katherine composed c. 1445 by John Capgrave, an Austin friar of King’s Lynn. A Cambridge-educated doctor of divinity, Capgrave authored numerous Latin commentaries, and his theological training informs his vernacular saints’ lives.13 A theological orientation is particularly evident in his life of Katherine, who manifests her renowned learning in debate against fifty pagan philosophers. Yet even as Capgrave enhanced the theological content of Katherine’s life, he humanized his heroine, making it far easier for his targeted audience ‘of man, mayde, and of wyffe’ to identify with her — to feel with her, and, most audaciously, to think and to learn with her.14

12 Mishtooni Bose comments on Pecock’s turn to Latin in discussing the Trinity in ‘Reginald Pecock’s Vernacular Voice’, pp. 217–36. 13

On Capgrave’s life and œuvre, see Edmund Colledge, ‘John Capgrave’s Literary Vocation’, Analecta Augustiniana, 40 (1977), 187–95; Jane Fredeman, ‘The Life of John Capgrave, O.E.S.A. (1393–1464)’, Augustiniana, 29 (1979), 197–237; Peter J. Lucas, From Author to Audience: John Capgrave and Medieval Publication (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1997), pp. 7–18; M. C. Seymour, John Capgrave (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996); and Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century, pp. 1–17. 14

Capgrave, The Life of Saint Katherine, ed. by Winstead, prologue, line 66. Subsequent line and book references and quotations are to this edition.

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Theological discussion had formed part of Katherine’s debate with the philosophers since the earliest fully developed version of her legend in the eleventh century;15 however, that discussion had revolved around Christ’s dual nature rather than the Trinity per se. While retaining — indeed amplifying — the discussion of the dual nature, Capgrave made the Trinity the theological centre of his life. When, after Katherine’s mystical marriage to Christ, the Saviour gives the hermit Adrian the task of instructing her in the essentials of faith, he first mentions the Incarnation, but he emphasizes the Trinity: thu schall hir teche Of Myn incarnacyon the manere speche; Teche hir the feyth eke of the Trinité, The Fadyr, the Sone, and the Holy Gost; Teche hir of the Godhede the unyté. (3. 1322–26)

When, later in the narrative, the fifty philosophers declare themselves ready to learn about Christianity, Katherine begins by telling them about the Trinity (4. 1667–80). Adrian’s instruction to Katherine is vigorously conveyed in the simple and direct language that readers might encounter in pastoral writings of the day. However, he relies on iteration rather than analogy to make his point. Each time he elaborates on God’s ‘kynde’ he repeats, in different terms, the key point that God is ‘on in substauns and in nature’ though he is ‘thre eke in persones’ (3. 1390–93): ‘pluralyté of persones is no prejudyse / Onto the unyté of Godhed’ (3. 1399–1400); ‘dystynctyoun in persones, in nature unité’ (3. 1408). What is more, Capgrave tackles intricacies and nuances that prior Middle English writers (Pecock excepted) tended to gloss over — for example, the distinction between the begetting of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit. Though power ‘longyth’ to the Father, wisdom to the Son, and goodness to the Ghost, Capgrave emphasizes that the Holy Ghost and the Son have no less might than the Father, the Father and Son no less goodness than the Ghost, and so forth. In her debate with the philosophers, Katherine must defend the doctrines she learned from Adrian — Christ’s dual nature, unity in plurality, ‘filiacion’ versus ‘procession’, and so on — against learned and sceptical critics. The experience of her mystical marriage had left Katherine herself more than willing to accept the tenets of Christianity on faith alone, but the philosophers pose tough questions: 15

For an edition of this Latin life that circulated in England, see ‘Passio S. Katerine’, in Seinte Katerine, ed. by S. R . T. O. d’Ardenne and E. J. Dobson, EETS, S. S. 7 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Book Society, 1981), pp. 132–203.

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how can Christ have created the universe if he was born in Bethlehem no more than three centuries ago? If Father, Son, and Ghost are one, how can the Son alone become flesh? What is more, the philosophers demand logical proof. They exhort her to eschew ‘crafty circumlocucion’ (4. 1887) and to ‘teche’ her ‘thingis’ by ‘naturall resones’, explaining that it is ‘harde’ to ‘constreyn a mannes wil / To trow a thing whech he cannot prove’ (4. 1779–80). Though Katherine initially responds by protesting that some things cannot be proved but must simply be believed, by the end of the debate she has ‘provyde’ the Trinity ‘be kynde’ (4. 2302) and forced the chief philosopher to admit that ‘he coud fro the resones no wey fynde’ (4. 2303). Capgrave’s treatment of the Trinity is the most unusual I have encountered in vernacular hagiography because Capgrave explains not merely the doctrine of the Trinity but its motivation. Katherine tells the philosophers: Oure auctoures sey that if Godd had be Oonly o persone than schuld not His holy blys Be comounde to other so parfytly as it is, For creature non myght receyve no swech: Therfore He ordeyned be His eterne counsayle That thre persones in myght and nature lych In oo Godhed, to us ful gret mervayle, Schuld be consederyd to mannys grete avayle; And ech of other His substauns schuld thus take, Non lesse, non more; thus oure feyth we make. (4. 1671–80)

Capgrave’s object seems clear enough. He is extending to dogma the goal he pursued in his deeply affective account of Katherine’s conversion and mystical marriage to Christ, that of making God accessible to ordinary people. The Trinity exists because the Godhead — just like the debonair Son who woos Katherine — is reaching out those he created in his desire to be known by them.16 Yet presenting the Trinity in this fashion to a general audience ‘of man, mayde, and of wyffe’ was risky. Capgrave’s source for this passage appears to be the unimpeachably orthodox De fide et symbolo of Augustine: God the Father, on the other hand, who possessed both the will and the power to declare Himself with the utmost truth to minds designed to obtain knowledge of Him, with the purpose of thus declaring Himself begat this [Word] which He Himself is who did beget.17

16

An analogous combination of theology with affect may be seen in the ‘Vierges ouvrantes’ statues of the Virgin Mary that open on hinges to reveal the Trinity within her womb. Gail McMurray Gibson discusses these in her The Theater of Devotion, pp. 144–45, figure 6. 2. 17

De fide et symbolo, III. 4: Augustine of Hippo, On Faith and the Creed, trans. by S. D. Salmond (Edinburgh: Clark, 1892), p. 348.

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Nonetheless, Capgrave’s discussion risks raising thorny questions. It is worth noting that Peter Lombard found this passage from Augustine potentially problematic; in his Sentences, he takes pains to show that Augustine is not intimating that God begat himself.18 Though the issue of begetting does not arise in Capgrave’s discussion, his audience might well wonder, for example, how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could be both absolute and eternal essences, and a form of self-presentation ordained for man’s benefit. I have found no analogue to this discussion anywhere in Middle English, not even in Pecock’s œuvre. Here and elsewhere, Capgrave was willing to risk misunderstanding in order to convey a fuller, more substantial understanding of faith, counting on his ample discussions of the singularity and co-eternity of the three-personned God to keep his readers from falling into error.

Osbern Bokenham: ‘Resoun here faylyth’ Not all hagiographers were willing to take such risks. Capgrave’s fellow Augustinian friar, Osbern Bokenham, is an intriguing example of a hagiographer whose reluctance to tackle matters of doctrine was evidently overcome.19 About a year after Capgrave had completed Katherine, Bokenham undertook his own version of Katherine’s passion. Bokenham had read Capgrave’s Katherine. But his account, he declares in his prologue, will be nothing like Capgrave’s — and indeed it is not. Not only does he omit Katherine’s conversion and mystical marriage, claiming to know nothing of ‘alle þat’, but he also strips her debate with the philosophers of its theological meat.20 As Paul Price observes, Bokenham’s Katherine converts the philosophers with a simple statement of faith — a paraphrase of the Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed (but without the latter’s lines on the Trinity).21 Shortly after he completed ‘Katherine’, Bokenham composed a life of St Cecilia. As he did with his ‘Katherine’, Bokenham used the vita found in Jacobus de 18

The Mystery of the Trinity, Distinction 5, chap. 1. 5.

19

I discuss other facets of Bokenham’s apparent intellectual evolution in ‘Osbern Bokenham’s “englische boke”: Re-forming Holy Women’, in Form and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), pp. 67–87. 20

Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. by Serjeantson. All parenthetical line references to the legends of Katherine and Cecilia are from this edition. 21

Paul Price, ‘Trumping Chaucer: Bokenham’s Katherine’, Chaucer Review, 36 (2001), 158–83.

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Voragine’s widely circulated Legenda aurea as his source, but here he amplifies rather diminishes his source’s theological content. Jacobus has Cecilia startle a prospective convert, Tiburtius, by declaring, ‘All things that were made, the Son begotten of the Father has established in being, and all the things that are established, the Spirit who proceeds from the Father has enlivened’. Tiburtius protests: ‘Surely you assert that there is only one God! How then can you testify that there are three?’ Cecilia answers, following Augustine (De Trinitate, X. 12): ‘Just as in human knowledge there are three powers, namely, thought, memory, and understanding, so in the one divine being there can be three persons’.22 But she then moves on to the Incarnation and Passion — graphically describing Christ’s sufferings — and it is her affective presentation of the human Christ, not her theology lesson, that moves Tiburtius to conversion. There is no further discussion of the Trinity, or of any other doctrinal matter, in Jacobus’s vita. In Bokenham’s retelling, Cecilia’s passing allusion to the Trinity is elaborated into a concise summary of the doctrine, replete with jargon. Christ, she says, was born both ‘temporally / Of a mayde’ and ‘eternally’ ‘of hys fadyr’: to-forn al tyme, to whom egal He is & was & euere be shal; In whom, by whom, al thyng was wrouht, And wyth-oute whom was neuere maad noht; To whom wyth þe fadyr consubstancyal The holy gost ys & coeternal; And þow þei personelly dystynct be, Yet in substaunce but oon þei arn al thre, Vndeuydyd outward in her werkyng. (ll. 7801–11)

Tiburtius objects that ‘þis manere talkyng’ is ‘ageyn al resoun’, a ‘thyng’ to which his ‘wyt can not inclyne’ (7812–15). Undeterred, Cecilia promises to ‘preue’ ‘naturally’ and ‘by resoun’ that it is indeed possible for a single substance to have ‘powers condystynct thre’ (7822, 7824, 7827). Yet after rehearsing a couple of common analogies that ‘coniecturally / may be conseyuyd of the trynyte’ she retreats to the same line followed by Jacobus’s Cecilia, admitting that such analogies fail fully to convey ‘þe treuth’ (7836–37, 7840). ‘Resoun here faylyth, & oonly feyth / Preuaylyth’, she declares, urging Tiburtius to ‘forsake euydence’ and trust ‘doctryne of scryptur’ (7841, 7845–46). As in Jacobus’s telling, discussion of theology ceases; Cecilia launches into a vivid and moving account of Christ’s

22

Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. by William Granger Ryan, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), II, 320–21.

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suffering, concluding with the promise that if Tiburtius converts to Christianity he will be able to see angels. Tiburtius capitulates. In light of Bokenham’s refusal in ‘Katherine’ to treat matters of doctrine in any depth, it is easy to see in his ‘Cecilia’ a conservative message aimed at the likes of Capgrave, namely, that it is pointless to convey theological intricacies to hoi polloi. Yet Bokenham’s view is not so simple. Cecilia’s lesson, after all, is being relayed not only to the clueless Tiburtius but to Bokenham’s own readers.23 The gist of what Cecilia says is not much more elaborate than what Bokenham’s lay readers might have read in manuals such as Thoresby’s Catechism or heard from pastors like Mirk. What differs is the scholastic language she uses to convey her message. Terms such as consubstantial, con-distinction, and even co-eternal are not found in any other version of the Cecilia legend I know of, in Latin or the vernacular; nor do they commonly occur in the Latin reference works that pastors were likely to consult. Was Bokenham merely showing off, indulging in the very sort of tour de force that Langland’s Anima denounced, by bandying about terms that were more likely to baffle than to enlighten? Or was he seeking to create lay readers who would not be mystified by Anima’s supercilious ‘masters’ by introducing technical terminology in a context that makes its meaning obvious? His subsequent life of Barbara, most probably written in the next decade, suggests the latter; namely, that in ‘Cecilia’ Bokenham was moving away from the conservatism of ‘Katherine’ and demonstrating an interest in Christian education. As we will see, ‘Barbara’ is one of the most theologically sophisticated saints’ lives in Middle English, a work that is very much in the spirit of Capgrave’s ‘Katherine’ but marked by the propensity for scholastic terminology that characterizes ‘Cecilia’.

Two Approaches to Teaching the Trinity through St Barbara Barbara is the saint most closely associated with the Trinity. Indeed, her emblem, the tower, represents the Trinity: her martyrdom came about when she incurred her father’s anger by changing the two-window design of the tower he was constructing for her to a three-window design in honour of the Trinity. Though Barbara’s legend had always celebrated the Trinity, it did not necessarily expound it. An English

23

On Bokenham’s East Anglian audience, see Sheila Delaney, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth-Century England: The Work of Osbern Bokenham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Samuel Moore, ‘Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk, c. 1450’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, 27 (1912), 188–207 and 28 (1913), 79–105.

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account written in the early fifteenth century, based on a popular Latin vita, has only this to say, as Barbara is explaining to her father why she changed his plans: For thre wyndowes I have ordeynid so That the byssidful Trenite it schuld represent, In that on God schal ben worschepyd and no mo, Aboven alle creatures with hol entent, That also lythnyth alle erthly creature, That is comyn in this wordis here for to dwelle.24

During the mid-fifteenth century, Bokenham and an anonymous prose hagiographer each adapted the lengthy account of Barbara’s life composed in the Low Countries at the end of the fourteenth century and attributed to the Austin friar John of Wackerzele.25 In the tradition of devotio moderna, the vita is marked by its attention to the saint’s spiritual, emotional, and intellectual experiences. Its accounts of Barbara’s conversion and of her failed attempt to convert her father include lengthy disquisitions on the Trinity. It celebrates Barbara for attaining the four crowns of virgins, martyrs, doctors, and preachers. Mathilde van Dijk, who has studied the Latin and vernacular incarnations of Barbara’s legend in the Low Countries, observes some ambivalence on the part of translators about the theological and intellectual orientation of the Latin vita. Some vernacular versions, especially those intended for women and lay brothers, omitted much of the theologizing and

24

Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends, ed. and trans. by Karen A. Winstead (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 181, ll. 105–10. 25

See Baudouin de Gaiffier, ‘La Légende latine de Sainte Barbe par Jean de Wackerzeele’, Analecta Bollandiana, 77 (1959), 5–41; and Mathilde van Dijk, Een Rij van spiegels: De Heilige Barbara van Nicomedia als voorbeeld voor vrouwelijke religieuzen (Hilversum: Verloren, 2000) (see pp. 236–47 for an English summary of this study). Van Dijk discusses the English prose life in ‘Being Saint Barbara in England: Shifting Patterns of Holiness in the Later Middle Ages’, in Transforming Holiness: Representations of Holiness in English and American Literary Texts, ed. by Irene Visser and Helen Wilcox (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 1–19. Bokenham’s ‘Barbara’ is in the collection of saints’ lives composed by him that was found in 2005 in the library of the Faculty of Advocates in Abbotsford, Scotland. Simon Horobin is preparing an edition of this manuscript for the Early English Text Society. For more information about this collection, see the following articles by Horobin: Simon Horobin, ‘The Angle of Oblivioun: A Lost Medieval Manuscript Discovered in Walter Scott’s Collection’, The Times Literary Supplement, 11 November 2005, pp. 12–13; Simon Horobin, ‘A Manuscript Found in Abbotsford House and the Lost Legendary of Osbern Bokenham’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, 14 (2007), 132–64; and Simon Horobin, ‘Politics, Patronage, and Piety in the Work of Osbern Bokenham’, Speculum, 82 (2007), 32–49. In this last essay, Horobin argues that Bokenham’s audience surely extended beyond the East Anglian readers attested in the Arundel manuscript, London, British Library, MS Arundel 327.

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also dropped the reference to Barbara’s having obtained the crowns of preachers and doctors.26 Both Bokenham and the prose author retained the Trinitarian orientation of the vita, and they likewise retained its detailed description of Barbara’s thoughts and of her complex relationship with her father. In so doing they, like Capgrave, allowed readers not only to sympathize with but to identify with a scholarly lay woman and her ways of thinking. Nonetheless, the two Middle English versions express somewhat differing theologies, which affect their presentations of the Trinity. The prose life, following the emphasis of the Latin original, presents Barbara as a conduit of God’s grace who is stirred by the Holy Spirit to reject the pagan pantheon and to reason that there is a single God.27 Her inquiries into the nature of the divine, the author emphasizes, are divinely inspired: ‘by the special light of grace geven to her of God sche founde by her owen wytte and natural reason howe yt was oone to be veray God in hymselfe’.28 Bokenham, on the other hand, presents Barbara as an intellectually enterprising pagan who, evidently prompted by natural reason alone, becomes convinced of the existence of a single god through a vigorous process of syllogizing. Indeed, Bokenham devotes hundreds of lines to her ‘musings’, ‘reasonings’, and ‘syllogizings’, and he consistently omits references to the Holy Ghost or God’s grace as the source of her inquiries. Both Barbaras learn about the Trinity through the teachings of the Church Father Origen. However, the prose account condenses and simplifies Origen’s presentation of the doctrine in the vita, while Bokenham elaborates and complicates it. For example, where the prose author writes, ‘These .iij. lyke as they be oo God in substaunce, right so in persones they be verely .iij.’ (p. 398), Bokenham writes: But yit although these persones thre Ben condistincte asundir in the trinyte Eche from othir by personal nocion Yet eche is that othir by substanciall unyon.29

26

Van Dijk, Een Rij van spiegels, p. 244.

27

Van Dijk discusses the prose life’s presentation of Barbara as a conduit for God’s power and an embodiment of his will in ‘Being Saint Barbara in England’, pp. 12–17. 28

An edition of the Middle English prose version can be found in Supplementary Lives in Some Manuscripts of the ‘Gilte Legende’, ed. by Hamer and Russell, p. 388. The Latin, similarly, presents Barbara’s reasoning as divinely inspired: ‘luce tamen divini spiritus’ (London, British Library, MS Harley 3043, fol. 107v). 29

Edinburgh, Advocates Library, MS Abbotsford, fol. 7v . All subsequent references to this manuscript are given parenthetically, by folio number.

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Similarly, the Middle English prose life renders ‘pater igitur in filio et filius in patre, spiritus vero sanctus a patre et filio’ as ‘alwey hole togedyr the son in the fader, the fader in the son, the holy goste in bothe two, whose charite and communyon knytteth alle .iij. in oon and togedyr dothe theym combyne’ (p. 398); the hagiographer’s elaboration works to demystify the terse original by linking its abstruse theology to concepts of charity and community that would have resonated with ordinary readers. Bokenham, by contrast, takes the opportunity to teach his audience some clerical jargon: The fadir is in the sonne and in the fadir is he The holy goost in her either by a propirte Clepid of clerkis circumincessioun. (fol. 7v )

Again, where the English prose life asserts the coeternity of the Trinity in simple terms: ‘noon before another by any processe of tyme’ (p. 398), Bokenham dresses the point in theological terminology: And yit noon dooth othir in tyme precede For eche of hem to othir is coetern So that two hem can no man discern First ner last so that coequal Is eche to othir consubstancial Of tyme withoute ony prioryte. (fol. 7v)

This terminology, with the exception of ‘co-eternal’, was Bokenham’s addition to his Latin source. Bokenham and the author of the prose life also differ in their presentation of Barbara’s attempt to explain the Trinity to her father. In both versions, Barbara uses the three-windowed tower as an analogy for the three-personned God. The substance of the saint’s teachings is the same; what differs is the packaging. The prose writer again conveys theological points concisely, using simple syntax and mostly familiar language. His Barbara starts with a simple definition of the Godhead as ‘that thynge whiche hathe made alle that ever ys of nought, both visible and vnvisible’ (p. 413). The Godhead, she goes on to say, consists of three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. She then explains how the Deity can be both ‘departable in persones’ and yet ‘oone in godhede, vndevided, vnseparable and vndepartable’: ‘Thof the fader be fader by hymselfe in that he is fader, yit he may never be withowt the son nor withowte the holi goost in that he is God’; the same holds for the Son and Holy Ghost. In contrast to the prose version’s simple declarative sentences, the disquisition of Bokenham’s Barbara is a syntactical jungle in which key points are packed into

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subordinate clauses, fitting the synopsis of the doctrine into one convoluted sentence: Thou shalt leere that thou nevir knew yit That is to seyn how marveilously is puyt The sovereyn godhede in the nombre of thre Which al thyng hath wrought the holy trinite Distincte in thre persones and of myghtis moste The fadir and the sone and the holigoste In whom althogh ther be personal variaunce Yet al thre essentially arn but oon substaunce Indivisibly divisible And divisibly indivisible For though the fadir as fadir divisible be From the sone and the spirite yit as god is he Indivisible from hem and in liche wise Of the sone and the holigoste men must devise For notwithstandyng personal distinction Bilevid must nedis substancial unyon Which by the toure and the wyndowes thre By a maner of liknesse may seyen be. (fol. 9v )

Bokenham’s Barbara uses the tower as an analogy for the Trinity, but she also points to the analogy’s limitations: The similitude egally doth not procede For in the high and souereyn trinite Personal distinction excludith not ydentite Of substaunce ner substantial ydentificacion Forbarrith in no wise personal seperacion So that the fadir the sone and the holi goste in fer Thre ben in oon and in ineffable manere. (fol. 10r)

The writer of the prose life, by contrast, only explains in simple and direct language how the three-windowed tower is like the Trinity, ‘oo veray God aloone, fader, son and holi goste, distincte in persones and not in godhede’ (p. 414). Bokenham differs from his English contemporary not only in how he relays the doctrine of the Trinity but in what he relays. In relaying Origen’s teachings, the prose author skips the Latin’s discussion of begetting and proceeding. After explaining the unity of three distinct persons in one God, Origen warns Barbara that the Trinity is a mystery that must be accepted on faith because it cannot be fully understood: Its ‘habitudis or relacion, natures, processe and generacion [...] passyth mannes wytte clerely to speke or ever so high to clymbe’ (p. 399). Bokenham, by contrast, shows no such reticence. On the subject of generation, he

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follows the Latin vita in writing, ‘the fadir of hym self is oonly iwys / The sone of the fadir by generacion is / The holigoste of hem bothe doth procede’ (fol. 7v). He then moves on to ‘habitude’, ‘relacion’, and ‘nature’. Knowledge appears to be a guiding principle for Bokenham, as it was for Capgrave. Where the Origen of the prose life says that anyone who fails to believe in the Trinity ‘schal never be saved nor never come to the presence of God’ (p. 399), Bokenham’s Origen says that those who do not believe ‘may nat to the knoulech of god atteyn’ (fol. 7v ). Bokenham’s ‘Barbara’ uses narrative to convey much the same message that Reginald Pecock does in his Reule of Crysten Religioun, namely, that although the existence of the Trinity cannot be deduced through reason, once revealed, it can be comprehended through reason.

Beyond Arundel The theologically oriented saints’ lives of the mid-fifteenth century point to a contingent within the clergy eager to reverse the ‘pedagogy of infantilization’ associated with Arundel.30 These lives teach both basic theology and model approaches to teaching it. Through hagiography, writers were examining (and sometimes, as in the case of Bokenham, re-examining) complex issues, such as the capacity of reason to comprehend the divine. They were experimenting with ways to bring together affective and intellectual modes of piety. Though it might seem surprising that the Trinity — that loftiest and most ‘dangerous’ of mysteries — should occur so frequently as a topic of discussion, it also makes perfect sense that writers should focus on a central tenet of Christianity, especially one that was not being disputed by the heterodox. Their strategy appears, indeed, to have been similar to Pecock’s, who, as James Simpson has argued, deliberately chose to expatiate on ‘topics that were not sources of contention between the orthodox and Lollards’.31 In the spirit of Augustine, these hagiographers, like Pecock, realized that study of the Trinity has great rewards as well as great risks, and they were willing to take risks in order to spread the rewards beyond an elite class of theologians.

30 31

Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent, p. 123.

James Simpson, ‘Reginald Pecock and John Fortescue’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004), pp. 271–87 (p. 274).

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Their work is further evidence that the fifteenth century was, as Kathryn Kerby-Fulton put it, ‘an age of failed censorship’.32 But I wonder to what extent the appreciation and promotion of Christian intellectualism was propelled by the very spirit of repression that we associate with the Constitutions. Though they wrote in a more tolerant environment, hagiographers such as Bokenham and Capgrave grew to intellectual maturity in the shadow of the Constitutions, educated in universities that were grappling with the issues they raised about the dissemination of religious thought. These authors must also have realized that, though intellectual repression might be out of fashion, it was not out of the question — as Pecock found. It is no coincidence that the most extensive theological discussions occur in martyr legends that pit Christian intellectualism against the censorship and violence of a persecuting society. It is also, I suspect, no coincidence that the most deeply theological lives are lives of women, rather than of Church Fathers. Intellectually ambitious women had long been the emblems of a rebellious laity prone to speculation and error — the products and purveyors of heresy. In constructing Barbaras, Katherines, and Cecilias who can purvey a cogent and orthodox theology, hagiographers of the generation after Arundel were saying, in the strongest terms, that it was time to move on.

32

Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, p. 16.

P ROLIFERATION AND P URIFICATION : T HE U SE OF B OOKS FOR N UNS AFTER A RUNDEL C. Annette Grisé

F

ifteenth-century vernacular spiritual writings ‘after Arundel’ solidified a canon comprising fourteenth-century English mystics and works associated with them, translations of patristic and monastic Latin treatises, instructions for living a pious life from a variety of sources, and the lives and works of saints.1 Within the context of the increased production and circulation of vernacular devotional manuscripts, the excerpting and compiling of sources in compilations and miscellanies, and the coalescing of an established tradition of devotional texts in Middle English, vernacular spiritual writings became increasingly concerned with advising their readers about appropriate reading practices and the use of books for devotional purposes. Whereas, in the fourteenth century, comments about reading were sometimes confined to short chapters and paragraphs that urged the reading of saints’ lives, in the fifteenth century these discussions expand to provide lengthier instructions on devotional reading in the home, cell, church, and refectory; and guidance on appropriate reading strategies, book selection, and proper book handling. Instructions on how to read and pray developed as a

1

‘One of the unintended consequences of Arundel’s decrees may have been a new impetus to the translation into English of older texts with an impeccably orthodox pedigree or an unimpeachable authorial reputation, and Syon was probably a leading centre in the production of such texts. It had the library resources, the connections with lay and ecclesiastical opinion-formers, qualified and intelligent members, access to scribal, textual, and translatorial resources at Sheen, and the status and brand name to guarantee it as a centre of orthodox spirituality and devotion’: Roger Ellis, ‘Religious Writing’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, ed. by Roger Ellis, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), I, 273.

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significant intervention in devotional practices, so that elaborating the use of books in such practices helped to regulate vernacular reading and devotion. The nuns of Syon Abbey were a steady audience and support for fifteenthcentury vernacular instructions for religious women. In the first decades of Syon’s history the female community asked for translations of major works associated with their order and rule (for example, breviaries, The Rewyll of Seynt Saueoure, and The Myroure of Oure Ladye), as well as related spiritual treatises, such as The Orcherd of Syon, the translation of the revelations of Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden’s near-contemporary.2 These texts provided the major works necessary for the community to understand their purpose and identity. At the same time, they explained the major paradigms of reading practices appropriate for the female community — another important form of identity-formation in this period. As the fifteenth century progressed, the post-Arundelian process of canon-formation fixed the bounds of acceptable materials and ideas for vernacular spiritual writings, with communities such as Syon supplementing the canon (within the determined limits) and disseminating texts by copying, borrowing, compiling, and excerpting treatises. It is in this period that nuns of Syon read instructional texts such as The Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God (Fervor amoris) (early fifteenth century), The Devout Treatyse of the Tree and XII. Frutes (mid-fifteenth century), Disce mori (fifteenth century), and Formula noviciorum (a translation of David of Augsburg’s De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione) (early fifteenth century),3 texts that were circulating among late medieval English monasteries and 2

Arthur Jeffries Collins, The Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey: From the MS with English Rubrics F. 4. 11 at Magdelene College, Cambridge (Worcester: Stanbrook Abbey, 1969); The ‘Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure’ and Other Middle English Brigittine Legislative Texts, ed. by James Hogg, Salzburger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 6, 4 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1978–80); The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by Blunt; and The Orcherd of Syon, ed. by Hodgson and Liegey. 3

On these texts see Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, ed. by Margaret Connolly, EETS, O. S. 303 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1993); A Devout Treatyse Called ‘The Tree and the XII. Frutes of the Holy Goost’, ed. by Johannes J. Vaissier (Groningen: Wolters, 1960); Peter Sydney Jolliffe, ‘Middle English Translations of the De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione’, Mediaeval Studies, 36 (1974), 259–77; Michael G. Sargent, ‘Bonaventura English: A Survey of the Middle English Prose Translations of Early Franciscan Literature’, in Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache, ed. by Erwin A. Stürzl, Johannes Pfaffl, and James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 106, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983–84), II (1984), 145–76. Other fifteenth-century devotional texts popular with Syon nuns include The Chastysing of Goddes Chyldern, The Tretyse of Love, and, in the 1530s, Whytford’s Pype of Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection. Hilton’s Scale of

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households. These treatises also provided information on reading as a devotional practice, although these discussions are usually found in the broader treatments of the four-fold lectio divina or three-fold lectio domini.4 By the end of the fifteenth century and up to the Reformation, there was another outcrop of treatises on the religious life written originally for the female community and then printed in London with the names of the Syon brotherauthors attached to them: for example, William Bonde’s Pylgrymage of Perfeccioun, Thomas Betson’s Ryght Profytable Treatyse, and Whytford’s many works including The Pype or Tonne of Lyfe of Perfection and Werke for Housholders.5 The authors emphasized their skills of editorializing their learning, drawing on biblical, patristic, and contemporary spiritual resources to produce syntheses of materials and ideas appropriate for a female religious audience (and usually also a devout lay population). It is in this period that we find an explosion of metaphors used in summaries and expositions of reading. Moreover, the role of the book in devotional practices increased in importance after the introduction of printed books into England. My essay will follow roughly a three-stage chronology as sketched above in the brief overview of the vernacular textual practices at Syon Abbey. In the early history of Syon, treatises such as The Myroure of Oure Ladye established the centrality of reading practices to the nuns’ spiritual identity; as it was summarized in the midfifteenth-century Devout Treatyse of the Tree and XII. Frutes, ‘If thou hast meate and drynke and clothyng, and a boke to loke upon, it is inough to the’.6 The mid-

Perfection, and the Treatise on the Mixed Life (often treated as the third and final book of the Scale), were still widely available and read during this time. See work by Mary Erler, including her Women, Reading, and Piety, and by Rebecca Krug: Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 4

See Gillespie’s indispensable treatment of lectio divina and lectio domini, and Cré’s recent consideration of the topic in the last chapter of her monograph: Vincent Gillespie, ‘Lukynge in haly bukes: Lectio in some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies’, in Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache, ed. by Erwin A. Stürzl, Johannes Pfaffl, James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana, 106, 2 vols (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983–84), II (1984), 1–27; Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse, pp. 251–98. 5

Thomas Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse ([Westminster]: Wynkyn de Worde, 1500), STC 1978; William Bonde, Pylgrymage of Perfeccyon (London: Richard Pynson, 1526; Westminster: De Worde, 1531), STC 3277 and 3288 respectively; Richard Whytford, Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection (London: Robert Redman, 1532), STC 25421; Whytford, A Werke for Housholders (Westminster: Wynkyn de Worde, 1530), STC 25421.8–25425.5; and John Fewterer, The Myrrour or Glasse of Christes Passion (London: Robert Redman, 1534), STC 14553. 6

The Tree and the XII. Frutes of the Holy Goost, ed. by Vaissier, fols C.iiii.b–D.i.a.

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fifteenth century developed the concept of the prayer of the clean heart, connecting the purification of body and soul with reaching God through prayer as the highest form of devotion. In the third quarter of the fifteenth century, with the introduction of printed books and the arrival of the influential Syon librarian Thomas Betson (d. 1516), vernacular textual practices take centre stage again. His exhortation to ‘Lerne to kepe your bokes clene’, is found in two extant sources: a letter in a latefifteenth-century miscellany which extracts some of Betson’s ideas, and The Ryght Profytable Treatyse, printed c. 1500. The vernacular treatises of religious instruction read at Syon linked physical with spiritual cleanness in their considerations of nuns’ spiritual labours, connecting textual practices (including reading, praying, and performing the office) with physical and spiritual purity. These texts merged the Augustinian concept of the clean heart with proper reading and study practices in the earlier period, with appropriately simplified devotional practices in the middle period, and later still with the care of books, expanding the cluster of purity metaphors into a complex conceit that aligns body, soul, practice, and text. There were two main biblical sources for patristic discussions of the clean heart or pure heart. The primary source for the pure soul and the clean heart was Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, notably Matthew’s sixth Beatitude ‘beati mundo corde quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt’ (Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God).7 Psalm 23. 4–5 from the Vulgate also describes the ‘mundo corde’: ‘innocens manibus et mundo corde qui non exaltavit frustra animam suam et non iuravit dolose accipiet benedictionem a Domino et iustitiam a Deo salutari suo’ (The innocent in hands, and clean of heart, who hath not taken his soul in vain, nor sworn deceitfully to his neighbour. He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and mercy from God his Saviour).8 Augustine’s ideas about the distinction between the inner and outer eye were influential, as was the concept of turning inward away from earthly and fleshly concerns. Augustine argues that the inner eye has spiritual sight but this eye can see only if the heart is pure. Spiritual purity leads to spiritual vision and knowledge: ‘Understanding corresponds to the pure in heart, the eye being as it were purged, by which that may be beheld which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, and what has not entered into the heart of man: and of them it is here said, Blessed are the pure in heart’.9 The vision of God is described as the height of 7

Matthew 5. 8 (Douay-Rheims Bible version).

8

Vulgate, Psalm 23. 4–5 (Psalm 24 in Douay-Rheims).

9

Augustine of Hippo, On the Sermon on the Mount, chap. 4.11. He follows by saying ‘To the pure in heart is given the power of seeing God, as to those bearing about with them a pure eye for

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religious perfection and was promoted in medieval representations of the spiritual life. Achieving the vision of God required a turning inward away from the corporeal world toward spiritual purification. Augustine offers the following in his commentary on Jerome: ‘This perfection is, to be sure, wrought in us by endeavour, by labour, by prayer, by effectual importunity therein that we may be brought to the perfection in which we may be able to look upon God with a pure heart, by His grace through our Lord Jesus Christ’.10 The cloistered heart remaining active as it works against the outward threats to its purity effectively associates itself with other forms of bodily and spiritual cleanness. Augustinian ideas about the clean heart echo throughout fifteenth-century spiritual treatises.11 Texts from Syon Abbey were no exception, especially in their interest in the devotional practices leading to religious perfection. Scholars have pointed to The Myroure of Oure Ladye and The Orcherd of Syon for their attention to the reading practices of the female religious audience.12 The Myroure’s entire project is advising the reader on performing the Birgittine office more correctly and devoutly, while the Orcherd’s prologues allegorize reading practices for nuns. The prologues to The Myroure clarify the relationship between performing the office and achieving spiritual growth, using the biblical and medieval allegory of the mirror to figure the results of performing the office properly.13 The text takes great care in identifying the nuns both bodily and spiritually, as they are sisters to the

discerning eternal things: Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (chap. 4.12); cited from Augustine of Hippo, Sermon on the Mount, Harmony of the Gospels, Homilies on the Gospels, ed. by Philip Schaff, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 1st ser., 6 (New York: Christian Literature, 1887; repr. Edinburgh: Clark, 1992), p. 7. 10 Augustine of Hippo, Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. by Phillip Schaff, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd ser., 5 (New York: Christian Literature, 1887), p. 149. 11

Jennifer Bryan summarizes Augustine’s influence in late medieval England: Bryan, Looking Inward, chap. 1, esp. p. 66. 12

See, for example, Ann Hutchison, ‘Devotional Reading in the Monastery and in the Late Medieval Household’, in De cella in seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: Brewer, 1989), 215–28; and her ‘W hat the Nuns Read: Literary Evidence from the English Bridgettine House, Syon Abbey’, Mediaeval Studies, 57 (1995), 205–22. 13

On the topic of the medieval mirror, see Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imaging in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Bryan uses The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by Blunt, as a case study; see also Bryan, Looking Inward, chap. 2, pp. 75–104.

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writer, brides of Christ, daughters of the Virgin, and ‘specyall chosen maydens’, then uses the Augustinian inner eye to help describe the motif of the mirror as it is to be used by the readers: lyfte up the eyen of youre soulles towarde youre souerayne lady, and often & bysely loke and study in this her myrroure, and not lyghtely but contynually, not hastyng to rede moche atones, but labouryng to knowe what you rede that ye may se and vnderstonde her holy seruice and how ye may serue her therwyth to her most plesaunce that lyke as it goyth dayly throughe your mouthes so let yt synke & sauoure contynually in youre hartes.14

This is one of many discussions of the spiritual benefits of properly performing the office, tied here especially to the effects of reading for comprehension. The chief spiritual labour for female religious was performing their office: a communal performative act for God. Fifteenth-century commentaries on the office sought to ensure the purity of intent and a devout performance from the nuns, rather than a lacklustre, rote memorization. Although this may reveal much about the desire for control of the female religious mind and will through commanding her physical actions, it also bears witness to a renewed interest in improving levels of Latin comprehension for nuns. Comprehension improves performance, thereby leading the individual and the community closer to their spiritual goals. The physical description of ruminatio as simultaneously passing through the mouth and sinking into the heart connects the action of speaking the words with the conversion effect on the heart, expressed in sensual terms. The connection between reading the Myroure and performing the office is made through a cluster of biblical and patristic metaphors representing spiritual sight and understanding. This may remind us of The Orcherd of Syon’s allegorical alleyways, where the reader may ‘taste of sich fruyt and herbis reasonably aftir õoure affeccioun, & what õou likeþ best, afterward chewe it wel & ete þreof for heelþe of õoure soule’.15 Again, the practice of reading is described in terms of physical and spiritual sustenance. The proliferation of treatments of ruminatio and of the use of complex metaphors to describe the practices of reading, prayer, and meditation for female religious readers was an important development in the first half of the fifteenth century.16 The early figures of reading often allegorize reading and study in terms of nourishment, and handiwork: connecting the literary duties of the nuns with their other daily activities such as eating in the refectory, working with needles, or walking in the

14

The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by Blunt, p. 4.

15

The Orcherd of Syon, ed. by Hodgson and Liegey, p. 1.

16

The classic work on the topic is still Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God.

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orchards. These figures continue to be used in nuns’ vernacular spiritual treatises up to the Reformation, for example to advocate physical and spiritual work as a prescription against idleness, where reading is among the approved activities, or to identify that reading leads to spiritual improvement, helping the reader or hearer achieve spiritual perfection. Study, prayer, and reading — as individual correlatives to the communal performance of the office — are key activities of fifteenth-century female religious and much is written in their texts about these daily duties performed by nuns. The important role of study to the Birgittines is reinforced in The Myroure of Oure Ladye in a discussion of Christ’s revelation to Birgitta on the importance of study: For inwarde gostly study techeth to pray, and contynuaunce of this study causeth to pray deuoutly. & deuoute prayer bryngeth gostly strenghte and comforte in the soulle wherby yt is lyfte vp and restyth, and delyteth in loue & praysynge of god. [...] And therfore thys gostly study to kepe the harte, ys youre chyefe laboure, thys ys youre moste charge and gretest bonde, this maketh the soule to be vertuous. and this causeth all the outwarde beryng to be relygyous.17

After the body has been cleansed, study and prayer are presented as the activities most effective in cultivating piety. Treatises for female religious continually emphasized that the physiological effects and spiritual benefits of reading, study, and prayer were never far removed from each other.18 The textual history of the earlier period of Syon supports this point, creating the identity of the Syon nun as studious, devout, and hardworking in her spiritual labours for the benefit of others. The mid-fifteenth-century tradition disseminated the ideas established in the earlier part of the century, as vernacular spiritual treatises circulated among monasteries and pious households. In the treatises of this period we find a particular emphasis on the clean soul and the related notion of the prayer of the clean heart. The Middle English extract known as ‘Clennesse of Sowle’, found in several manuscripts and taken from Catherine of Siena’s Dialogo, provides a philosophical discussion of spiritual purity. Its appearance in London, British Library, MS Arundel 197, for which Domenico Pezzini has argued a Birgittine provenance,

17 18

The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by Blunt, p. 64.

In his Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection Whytford includes a full discussion of the various levels of study and literacy for male and female religious, referring also to the lay sisters and brothers as well as to pious laity. He even offers provisions for studious nuns to learn Latin. Richard Whytford, The Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection, ed. by James Hogg, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 89, 5 vols in 6 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1979–89), IV , 415–16.

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reinforces the thematic unity of cleanness found in the entire manuscript.19 The brief treatise outlines the conflicts encountered by Catherine (the unnamed soul) between her desires for interior contemplation and union with Christ and the earthly matters that pressed upon her, here made universal for all simple souls desiring to become closer to God. This excerpt identifies the other men and servants who can distract the soul from contemplating God and achieving purity of intent, exhorting the soul to keep focussed on divine concerns and continue her solitary focus on her interiority. In ‘Clennesse of Sowle’ the ‘sely sowle’ receives divine instruction in three things that lead to ‘clennes of þi sowle’. The second point takes up the bulk of the fifteen lines of the treatise, elaborating how to apply the practice of the annihilation of the will to one’s daily living. The third point follows on gently to instruct the soul on not being a gossip or backbiter: ‘deme alle weiis my seruauntis wyrkys not aftur þi felynge. but aftur my dome’ (fol. 10 r). However, it is the first point that is of most relevance to the current topic, for the introductory section of the treatise deals with the desire to turn inward to God by performing spiritual practices and good deeds (common in this tradition, as we have seen). Again we have the Augustinian eye of soul invoked for the frame of reference for spiritual interiorization: ‘The freste thynge is / þat thow put thyne entent hole in me. and in al þi wirkys / make me þe ende. / and þat þu besy þe al weys to haue me by fore þe ye of þi sowle’ (fol. 10r). This short treatise is not able to delineate the details of how to achieve cleanness of soul, but rather encourages the reader with general advice for a mixed audience. Viewed in the context of the entire manuscript’s interest in cleanness, however, we may find that the short piece is relevant in holding the anthology’s key ideas together.20 Thus the anthology may function to provide a more comprehensive treatment of cleanness that we find lacking in the ‘Clennesse of Sowle’ excerpt. Most vernacular spiritual writings of this period agree that prayer and reading with a clean heart can only take place after purification and purging of body and soul (although in some cases they are used as a means to further purification). Mid-

19

Domenico Pezzini, ‘How and Why a Translation May Be Revised: The Case of British Library, MS Arundel 197’, in The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages, ed. by Rosalynn Voaden and others, The Medieval Translator, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 113–26. See also Connolly’s work on the manuscript, for instance Margaret Connolly, ‘Public Revisions or Private Responses? The Oddities of Arundel 197, with special reference to Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God’, British Library Journal, 20 (1994), 55–64. 20

More research on this topic is necessary to determine the place of the ‘Clennesse’ extract in the manuscript.

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fifteenth-century spiritual texts also provided a larger discussion of purity of body and soul through the concept of the prayer of the clean heart. For example, a treatise found in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C. 285 ‘Against Boasting and Pride’ (c. 1475) argues that it is only with the clean heart that one can experience clean prayer: Þe werke of a parfite seruaund of god es þis: þat he may offer a clene praier to god, hauand na thyng blameworhthi, ne nane vnclennes, in his conscience. Þan may he pray frely, as our lord sais in þe gospell: ¶ ‘When õe stand for to pray, fforgifes your brether all þat þat þai haf done agaynes õou; ffor if õe forgif it nogth, youre fader in heeuene wile nogth forgyfe õou’. ¶ Ande þarfor, if we with a clene hert may stand be-fore our lorde, & fre made be grace fra alle vice & passiouns of þe saule befor neuende, þan at arst may we see god, als mykele as it es possible for to se hym here: ffor ‘clene of hert sal se god’; ¶ and þan whene we pray, we sal sete þe egth of our saule in hym & se hym þat es vnseable, nogth with bodely egth, bot in thogth; nogth with lukyng of fleschly egth, bot be þe vnderstandenge of þe saule illumyned thurgh grace.21

Citing Matthew 18. 35 and 5. 8, this treatise links the soul’s purification to the inward turning we have seen in other treatises. What is newer to the vernacular spiritual tradition is the prayer of the clean heart: here ‘a clene praier to god’ at the beginning of the passage unfolds as requiring a ‘clene hert’ to achieve the spiritual illumination of inner sight: ‘þe vnderstandenge of þe saule illumyned thurgh grace’. The clean heart requires not only spiritual labours but also is the prerequisite to the communion with the divine in the prayer of the clean heart. Cleanness of soul and the prayer of the clean heart are still relevant in the 1520s, according to William Bonde’s Pylgrymage of Perfection, printed in 1526. This lengthy summa on the religious life is divided into three books which are subdivided into a hebdomadal structure, all leading to the final book’s discussion of perfection and its rewards: the topic of the seventh and final day of Book III which is framed by an explication of the beatitudes. The comprehensiveness of the text allows for a larger discussion of the clean heart, where it is tied to the conventional Augustinian division of outer and inner eye in which heavenly sight is achieved only through internal purity.22 The Pylgrymage treats the prayer of the clean heart in detail in this discussion of religious perfection in the final book. Bonde’s text distinguishes between the clean heart and the profiting heart, or the

21 22

Yorkshire Writers, ed. by Horstmann, I, 123.

William Bonde, Pylgrymage of Perfeccyon, STC 3277, Bk 3 Day 7, Chap. 4, fols CC.lxxxii.b–CC.lxxxiii.a. This and following quotations are taken from the 1526 edition by Richard Pynson.

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practices of the contemplative life and the mixed life, conceding that the profiting heart has value in the broader pious community: For as saint Bernard sayth, and we haue rehersed Þe same before. Nat onely they be called perfite, that hath optayned the hye degre of holynesse & perfection, but also, they may be called perfyte, Þat applieth all their study and labour for to optayne the heyth of perfection, though they haue many lettes agaynste their holy purpose and entent for the tyme.23

This compendium for contemplatives includes provisions for the pious laity — indeed the text displays some anxiety about secular readership in its prologues — although its main focus remains the religious life: And for as moche as we haue touched the prayer of the clene hert, for the whiche, all must labour that commeth to religion, for though all can nat attayne therto. yet (after saynt Thomas) euery religious person ought to entende that perfection, for in the clennesse of hert standeth the end of our iourney, as it shall appere herafter. And among all thynges, prayer is most necessary for be it that the gostly exercise of any pilgrime be neuer so hye, yet in all thynges, prayer is necessary.24

This text summarizes the religious life as a journey toward cleanness of heart. Religious perfection is achieved by means of spiritual labour, as we have seen in other treatises, but here prayer is privileged as the primary labour, whereas in the Myroure it was performing the office and studying. I want to suggest that the prayer of the clean heart was tied to changing formulations of religious living (and reading) after Arundel, for discussions of cleanness of soul and the prayer of the clean heart gained currency at a time when the vernacular spiritual literary tradition sought to replace discussions of the cultivation of charismatic mysticism promoted by writers such as Rolle as well as heretical beliefs promoted by the Wycliffite controversy before Arundel. Fifteenth-century manuscripts and treatises often made room for a two-tiered model of spiritual interiorization and pious living that accounted for pious lay readers as well as enclosed ones. In this process, higher forms of contemplation were discouraged for the audience since the turn inward to God was figured as a purity of intent and thought (reinforced by devotional activities) rather than as mystical union with God. The spiritual labour of prayer therefore became the foundation for the clean heart, and this topic took on significance as the fifteenth century progressed, as I have argued. To this point I have included examples from later Syon works which followed the conventions of earlier texts in their figurations of reading, cleanness of soul,

23

Bonde, Pylgrymage of Perfeccyon, fols C.lxviii.b–lxix.a.

24

Bonde, Pylgrymage of Perfeccyon, fols C.lxviii.b–lxix.a.

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and the prayer of the clean heart. Other topics used throughout the long fifteenth century but not explored in the present essay include figuring reading as a cure for idleness and depicting lectio domini as part of nuns’ handiwork. The preReformation period however does not simply reiterate the circumstances of the mid-fifteenth century. Rather, when we move into the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries we must account for the changes brought about by Syon’s participation in printed book culture: as buyers of continental and English products, suppliers of source materials, and imagined and actual readers. Not only did the Syon brothers actively collect continental and humanist printed books starting in the 1470s, but the English print market reproduced significant portions of the fifteenth-century devotional tradition for the vernacular female religious audience once Caxton introduced the printing press in England, and especially after Wynkyn de Worde took up his place. Moreover, later Syon producers put into print the vernacular spiritual treatises originally written for the Syon nuns (and sometimes written for, but almost always shared with, the pious laity affiliated with Syon), thus introducing their writings to a broader English audience. The vernacular printed books associated with Syon allowed for multiple ideas about physical and spiritual purity and their connections to textual practices. They reproduced and also augmented earlier ideas while also introducing new ways to describe these concepts and the connections among them. The Syon print tradition described numerous figures of reading and (re)produced models of reading that spanned a century of Syon writings — not replacing earlier figures but placing them beside the other, newer configurations. For the rest of the essay I will examine two striking aspects of this later period: the proliferation of models of purity of soul and devotions (a subject to which I will return in the concluding section of the paper), and a new interest in the care for books of vernacular spiritual writings which connects previous interests in nuns’ reading practices with the circumstances of the new book trade.25 This section will attempt to connect the exhortation to ‘clense your herte’ with Thomas Betson’s recommendation to ‘lerne to kepe your bokes clene’. The latter phrase occurs twice in extant manuscripts and books: once in Thomas Betson’s Ryght Profytable Treatyse and in an anonymous letter transcribed in Durham, University Library, MS Cosin V. v. 16, fol. 118v .26 The Durham letter was written 25

For material concerns see Mary C. Erler, ‘Syon Abbey’s Care for Books: Its Sacristan’s Account Rolls 1506/7–1535/6’, Scriptorium, 39 (1985), 293–307. 26

On this manuscript see A. I. Doyle, ‘A Letter Written by Thomas Betson, Brother of Syon Abbey’, in The Medieval Book and a Modern Collector: Essays in Honour of Toshiyuki Takamiya,

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to a female religious community and includes a variety of short instructions on one folio written into a manuscript containing mostly Latin extracts from continental female mystics, the whole likely transcribed by William Darker. In the letter we see reading as a form of busyness: Thou women of religioun used contynuelly devoute preier and contemplacioun, wasshe and grete abstynence, with other vertues afor rehersid: never unoccupied as in redyng, studying, writyng, siwyng, wasshynge, delfyng or herbys settyng or sowyng with other, little seen or never seen out of her place.

Apart from reading, studying and writing, the other occupations for nuns include two references to washing as well as practising ‘grete abstynence’. The attention paid to bodily cleansing reveals the importance placed on physical purification, while the focus on devotional activities (including textual ones) suggests a similar process of spiritual labour leading to purification. Diverse occupations are prescribed, and the role of reading and prayer is to help cleanse and purify the readers. The conclusion to the letter includes another reference to reading and books: Wherfor susturs awake and take god hede to thies writynges that be ordeyned for you and oftymes rede hem and kepe hem clene and hole and when tyme shall require, repayre hem as a chefe tresoure for youre sowlys and se in eny wyse ye do theraftur.

Part of their reading practices or busyness now extends to repairing books and maintaining their cleanness and intactness. Just as the doors of the heart are to be closed to worldly things, so books are to be kept clean and whole.27 In books, as in bodies, the physical contains the spiritual and thus must be treated carefully and reverently. Eric Jager effectively describes the history of the metaphorical book of the heart, an influential concept for medieval monastic readers and writers. Twelfth-century scholasticism developed many of the ideas used in Middle English spiritual writings on the topic,28 although it is not until the mid- to late fifteenth century that we see English writers enhancing the range of metaphors associated with books and the heart.

ed. by T. Matsuda, R . A. Linenthal, and J. Scahill (Tokyo: Brewer; and Tokyo: Yushodo, 2004), pp. 255–67; and Vincent Gillespie, ‘Syon and the English Market for Continental Printed Books: The Incunable Phase’, Religion and Literature, 37 (2005), 27–49. 27

The prologue to The Pylgrymage of Perfeccyon also includes a reference to the compilation as a treasure: ‘a singular iewel to bere in my bosom’ (fol. A.ii.a). 28

Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 49.

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Betson’s writings demonstrate the most sophisticated handling of the metaphors that I have found so far, especially in his clustering of associations of books, bodies, and hearts. In the concluding chapter of the Ryght Profytable Treatyse there is a list of brief summaries for ideal conduct of female religious.29 This section begins with a discussion of sobriety and abstinence, continues with a treatment of devotions, and finishes with a few prayers, the explicit, and the exhortation to ‘Lerne to kepe your bokes clene &c’.30 Thus, the reader moves from the conventional Augustinian formulation of stripping away outward, worldly things, and cultivating the clean heart with appropriate practices, to a new formulation of preserving one’s cleanness of heart by maintaining the purity and integrity of one’s books. Betson begins by encouraging physical abstinence through fasting, as thereby ‘cometh grete vertue & grace’; he then extends this to include sobriety of conduct in the refectory, chiefly ensuring that the reader listen to the reading and ‘take hede to Þe lecture’.31 Ruminatory reading is again emphasized through the association of physical abstinence with sincere refectory reading and listening. The next section moves to devotions after mealtimes: And knocke pryuely your brestes & that yf ye may with fallynge or teeres / after your meles reherce your lectures or some notabilytees of sermons or other holy thynges Þat ye haue herde or seen afore. And whan ye praye be sory for the Ignoraunce of the people & theyr synnes / & mynde the soules that ye be specyally bounde to praye for with all other crysten soules.32

The range of spiritual labours expressed here is limited to practising the book of memory and simple devotions: notably tears and prayer.33 This passage echoes the Myroure’s emphasis on the daily textual activities of the nuns in the recitation of refectory reading or sermons. The next summary marks the transition from performing lower forms of spiritual labours to seeking higher forms of contemplation. Here the reader is entreated to

29

Thomas Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, STC 1978, fols C.iiii.b–v.a.; all citations here and hereafter taken from the 1500 edition by Wynkyn de Worde. 30

Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, fol. C.v.a.

31

Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, fol. C.iiii.b.

32

Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, fol. C.iiii.b.

33

On this topic see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; rev. and repr. 2008).

516

C. Annette Grisé clense your herte from all worldly thynges. And be as ye were deed amonge them & as ye were buryed in your sepulcre the whiche betokeneth your monastery / to the tyme ye aryse & appere afore your spouse to haue your rewarde of his glory.34

The enclosure-as-death motif is combined with the heart-as-cloister metaphor in the injunction to cleanse the heart. The next section moves from the cloister–sepulchre–heart to the allegorical garden of contemplation: Whan ye shal go to your garden & seen the herber & grene trees smellynge Þe floures & fruytes with theyr swetnesse / meruaylle the grete power of god in his creatures & thenne labour & engendre in your mynde or talkynge of deuocion & lyfte vp your herte to heuen & thynke verely Þat the maker of them that is your spouse in heuen is vnspekable fayre / swete / delectable / and gloryous. But bewar touche there nothynge to a vayne vse or nycete of the worlde.35

The sensual reference to her garden prepares the reader for Augustinian meditation, where she is invited to ‘lyfte vp your herte to heuen’. In this section Christ can also be consumed, for he is ‘vnspekable fayre / swete/ delectable/ and gloryous’. Although the Book of Christ is not explicitly used, this well-known metaphor can expand the textual associations here to include the sweet and delectable rumination of Christ in meditation. The chapter continues with the reader returning to her daily office and the practice of discretion in speech, prayer, and contemplation: After complyne kepe your tonge & take you to prayer & contemplacion. And call to your mynde such heuenly thynges that ye haue herde or redde afore.36

These instructions parallel the earlier practices undertaken after the midday meal. In this case, however, because the reader has already passed into the state of the clean heart she is able to progress to prayer and contemplation. Note that the elaboration of contemplation in the third clause is limited here to the memory of ‘heuenly [textual] thynges’ suggesting that she has been successful in lifting her heart to God. The reader is directed to some Birgittine prayers, then back to earth in order to follow God’s law and the golden rule as a preface to the explicit in which Betson names himself author of the treatise. The treatise closes with clean books: ‘Lerne to kepe your bokes clene &c’.37 The use of ‘&c’ suggests this admonishment would have been known to his audience. As we have seen in his

34

Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, fol. C.iiii.b.

35

Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, fol. C.iiii.b.

36

Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, fols C.iiii.b–v.a.

37

Betson, A Ryght Profitable Treatyse, fol. C.v.a.

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letter, Betson promoted the idea and practice of clean books, not surprising given his position as librarian. The chapter follows roughly a chronological order in the recitation of the female religious reader’s daily occupations, while at the same time providing a model of retreat into contemplation in the middle of the chapter and day, and a return to the world of the monastery by the end of the chapter and day. The final admonition therefore provides a closing link between the practical, textual, and devotional activities of female religious through the associations of purity of body, heart, practice, and book. These purified readers (all safe and clean) using clean devotional books and practices, reach the ‘most hye perfection’ of prayer and contemplation — a form of seeing God with the inner eye. Betson’s writings expand the concept of cleanness in the figures of the pure heart and the spotless body to include the clean book, all of which emphasize activity and growth through the trope of purgation and purification. This configuration works with a number of associations. For example, just as bodies are kept clean through abstinence and washing, the soul is made clean by achieving perfection in one’s devotions (as physical, spiritual and textual practices). Just as maidens gain a crown in heaven for preserving their virginity, so books are treasures that must be maintained. The references to cleanness suggest that female religious readers are expected to keep their bodies, souls, and books clean through their devotional practices. The conventional connection between body and soul facilitates this trope: as we have seen, performing devotions assiduously in mind and heart, with the help of the physical body (in singing, speaking, or moving), brings about perfection of the soul. Aligning books to this paradigm is brilliant: books are a resource (figured as a treasure in some instances) that can increase the effectiveness of one’s performance of devotions. They inform the mind and fill the heart. They can provide instructions for how to use one’s physical body, and they can advise the reader in how to achieve perfection of the soul. Blurring categories of purification — physical, spiritual, textual — neatly wraps up the performative, affective, and narrative attributes of devotional practices into a neat package of which Arundel would have approved. As devotional literary production increased in the fifteenth century, so discussions of reading proliferated. The figures of reading used in the texts produced and read at Syon Abbey illustrate the richness of repetition and variation found in fifteenth-century devotional literature. The strength of the tradition lay in such richness of repetition, accumulation, ornamentation, glossing, adaptation, and compilation. If we think of vernacular religious readers finding meaning in the ritual repetition of devotions, then perhaps formulaic renderings are not a problem, especially if they are continually revisited through re-reading. In this way

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the innovation lies in allowing multiple standpoints to layer and accumulate to create the richness of devotional experience. The examples discussed in this essay point to the ways in which the fifteenth-century devotional model of plenitude valorized not only the cumulative repetition of devotional practices but also the multiplication of representations of devotional ideas in the canon. Thus the proliferation of both articulations and activities opened up a space for multiple and new devotional materials, texts, and ideas after Arundel. Vincent Gillespie’s work on the new learning at Syon has established that the Syon brothers brought with them a high proportion of scholastic and humanist books when they entered the monastery after the introduction of the printed book. Many of these came via the continental book trade and linked the brothers to continental movements and the importation of the new learning into England.38 The pre-Reformation humanists’ emphasis on scholasticism paralleled the Syon brothers’ interest in this topic. Furthermore, the growing participation of Syon authors in the vernacular spiritual tradition followed their humanist circle’s interests in education and reform, providing instruction for female religious and pious lay readers (full of scriptural and patristic references) just as Colet and Erasmus did for schoolboys. Moreover, there are stylistic links between the Syon projects and those of their humanist contemporaries. Around 1499 Erasmus, who was known at Syon through his translations in their library and his associations with other English humanists connected to Syon, began work on his rhetorical treatise De copia, which would become the foundational rhetorical text for sixteenth-century poets and playwrights.39 Erasmus’s extended treatment of copia — copiousness, plenitude, or abundance of rhetorical style and ornament — is a fine example of the new learning heralded by the early humanists, an interest shared by many of those who frequented Syon as well as those who lived there. I would like briefly to take Erasmus’s treatise within its original preReformation context and see if we can compare its central concept to the proliferation of devotional treatises in the fifteenth century, a proliferation which

38

See for example Vincent Gillespie, ‘Syon and the New Learning’, in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. by James G. Clark (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 75–95; and his ‘Syon and the English Market for Continental Printed Books’, pp. 1–23. 39

De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, the first authorized printing of which was in 1512 with a letter of dedication to Colet. Erasmus, ‘Copia: On the Foundations of the Abundant Style’ / De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, in Desiderius Erasmus, De copia / De rationae studii, ed. by Craig R . Thompson, The Collected Works of Erasmus, 24 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).

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was intensified in the print tradition, especially for Syon works. Erasmus’s treatise introduces its topic with this affirmation: ‘non est aliud vel admirabilius vel magnificentius quam oratio, diuite quadam sententiarum verborumque copia aurei fluminis instar exuberans’ (Nothing is more admirable or more splendid than an oration with a rich copiousness of thoughts and words overflowing in a golden stream).40 From this essay’s examination of cleanness of both heart and book we can propose that Syon texts illustrated copia verborum in practice: they introduced a delightful variety of expressions about the functions and practices of reading in numerous treatises. The focus for this proliferation is variety, or copia verborum: abundance of expression, not abundance of ideas (copia rerum). In turn, the emphasis was not on providing new ideas but offering variety and many perspectives on traditional, orthodox topics. Instructional treatises proliferated as they made available orthodox syntheses of monastic learning and a growing collection of prayers and meditations in manuscript. Reading and devotional practices could themselves be a form of copia, then. Cumulative repetition suggests the richness to be found in reading and in devotions. These could achieve several ends: repetition in order to go from spiritual aridity to charity and even grace through practice; to go from spiritual uncleanness to spiritual purification; from spiritual dividedness to union. Plenitude and proliferation thus align with purification in the everyday practices that bring readers closer to God.

40

Cited in Jack Lynch, ‘The Relicks of Learning: Sterne among the Renaissance Encyclopedia’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 13 (2000), 1–17 (p. 6).

Part X From Script to Print

A FTER A RUNDEL BUT BEFORE L UTHER: T HE F IRST H ALF-C ENTURY OF P RINT Susan Powell

L

et us imagine ourselves in a fictional bookshop of 1526. The bookshop is fictional because it resembles a modern Blackwell’s rather than a sixteenthcentury stationer’s. It has no manuscripts, only printed books; it has no foreign imports, only books printed in England. In some ways it resembles a modern (but tiny) British Library, because every single imprint is there from the previous fifty years since Caxton introduced print in 1476.1 I want us to look at the shelves labelled ‘theology and religion’: what these books are will comprise the first part of this paper. Why they are what they are will be a consideration throughout, but specifically in the second part of the paper, when I look at some examples of the conduits of religious texts to the printers. I want to keep in mind the terms of Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409, because what I am interested in is not just what the stationers’ religious lists were like after half a century of print, but whether what they were like was the result of Arundel’s Constitutions (which remained in force until 1529).2 One might expect them to be. The inevitable rise of English as the medium of print, with the associated rise

1

For what an actual bookshop might contain (much Latin and many imports), see A Halfcentury of Notes on the Day-Book of John Dorne, Bookseller in Oxford, AD 1520, ed. by Falconer Madan, Oxford Historical Society, Collectanea, 1 (Cambridge: [F. Madan], 1885), pp. 71–177. 2

It was effectively replaced by the ‘Proclamacion for resysting […] heresyes’ (printed by Pynson, STC 7772), which transferred censorship to the Privy Council and contained ‘perhaps the first list of prohibited books to appear in England’ according to Pamela Neville-Sington in ‘Press, Politics and Religion’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, III: 1400–1557, ed. by Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; hereafter CHBB), pp. 576–610 (p. 588 and n. 75).

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of literacy, brought fewer advantages than disadvantages to a Church which depended on a culture formally demarcated by Latin/English, knowledge/ignorance, authority/subordination. While print allowed the faster and more accurate dissemination of a uniform and orthodox voice, it also allowed a faster dissemination of multiple voices and/or heresy than did manuscripts. Moreover, while Lutheranism was perhaps a new and external heresy not to reach England officially till 1520,3 the old English heresy was still in place, particularly in the capital and its environs. The printed word was much easier to police than manuscripts (which were always subject to the random, or deliberate, intrusion of error). Moreover, there were so few printers, especially at the start, that policing would have been an easy matter. It was certainly attempted by several European states within twenty years of the introduction of print,4 and by England after Luther. What about before Luther?

The 1526 Bookshelves Most of the material on these 1526 bookshelves is in English (although by and large not originally in English). The bulk of the small Latin market in England consisted of run-of-the-mill religious productions — indulgences, Books of Hours, offices for particular feasts, missals, and suchlike. Schoolbooks were also steadily produced, but the printers dependent on Latin, such as Theodoric Rood at Oxford, did not last long (1481–84), despite having a ready market, it seems, in the university and in Magdalen College School.5 In general the Latin market was monopolized by the continental presses, which had started earlier. Vincent Gillespie has been able to identify 468 printed editions in the remarkable library of the Birgittine brothers at Syon, comprising prints from c. 1467 to 1526 — of these only four are from English presses.6 The majority of the library holdings were

3

Whether Lutheranism was a continuation of Lollardy has long been a matter for debate. Required reading is Hudson, PR. I use ‘Lollard(y)’ throughout this paper as a convenient term for views that were, or might be considered to be, heretical but were not necessarily linked directly to Wyclif either in fact or by their adherents. 4

John B. Gleason, ‘The Earliest Evidence for Ecclesiastical Censorship of Printed Books in England’, The Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982), 135–41 (pp. 136–37). 5

On Oxford printers, including Rood, see Catalogue of Books Printed in the XVth Century now in the British Library: B[ritish] M[useum] C[atalogues] Part XI: England, ed. by Lotte Hellinga (Houten: Hes & de Graaf, 2007; hereafter BMC XI), pp. 13–15. 6

Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie, SS1 400 (1481), 761 (1516), 763 (1516), 1355 (1483).

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in Latin,7 and it must be borne in mind that, whatever the English presses were producing, the clergy had access to a much less narrow range of religious readingmatter than the laity.8 This narrow range of reading for the laity may not be attributable only to their ignorance of Latin. It is likely that it was affected too by the restrictions introduced by Arundel in 1409, one of which (‘Periculosa quoque res est’) decreed that translations of the Bible had to be approved by the bishop or, in some cases, the provincial council.9 There are as yet no translations of the Bible on my bookshelves. Another canon of Arundel (‘Quia insuper nova via’) introduced a procedure for dealing with the circulation in schools and the universities of books by Wyclif or since Wyclif.10 These were to be examined by the universities (later, this became the role of the church provinces), and passed on to the stationers to copy, check, and sell, with a master copy in the university chest. There is no solid evidence that any new Lollard works were produced after 1450, although old works were certainly circulating.11 Lollard books did not see print in England until later, and then not, at first, without opposition. Of overtly Wycliffite works, The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman vnto Christe (duplicitously dated to around 1300) was printed in Antwerp c. 1531 (STC 20036),12 and Wyklyffes Wycket (which Anne Hudson suspects may be post-1450 in composition)13 was not printed until 1546, pretending to be a foreign, not London, print (STC 25590).14 In England, the prologue to the Wycliffite Bible came out in 1540 (STC 25587.5).15 But in 1526 Lollards would not find reading matter on my bookshelves.16

7 For English books, see Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie, SS1.*117, 120, 429, 617c (perhaps), 653b, 750g, h, j, 755d, e, 757b, c, 819i, 830, 831, 889b, 892a, 1324, 1325; SS2 33d, 40, 48, 102, 125, 127a, d, e, 145d, 147. I am indebted to Vincent Gillespie for this list. For the distinction between SS1 and SS2, see pp. l–li. 8 See Margaret Lane Ford, ‘Importation of Printed Books into England and Scotland’, in CHBB, pp. 179–201. 9

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 314–19; p. 317 (Constitution 7).

10

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 317 (Constitution 6).

11

Hudson, PR, p. 18. On the free circulation of Wyclif’s works after 1409, see Hudson, ‘Wyclif Texts in Fifteenth-Century London’, chap. XV , pp. 14–18. 12

In this paper, only first editions and their STC references will normally be cited.

13

Hudson, PR, p. 18.

14

Hudson, PR, p. 11.

15

Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 11–12.

16

They would not find Lollard reading matter, but for a convincing argument that the reading matter of both orthodox and heterodox layfolk was much the same (as well as for other insights

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Except, perhaps, for Dives and Pauper. This had been a suspect volume in Bishop Alnwick’s investigations in East Anglia in 1430. Anne Hudson has shown how even-handed it is in its open debate and that it was at around the same time owned by the impeccably orthodox Abbot Whethamstede of St Albans.17 However, even-handedness was less a virtue then than now, and it may be odd that it was printed by Pynson in 1493, and again by de Worde in 1496 (STC 19212–13). For once it is known who brought it to Pynson — a merchant called John Russhe. The details are known only because Russhe failed to honour his agreement to pay half the cost of printing, and after his death Pynson took his heirs to court.18 A merchant provenance is not surprising,19 but what is perhaps surprising is that it was printed at all. The reason must be that there was little (if any) even informal policing of printed works in the first decades of print, with printers free to print anything brought to them, especially if there was a financial agreement attached or a prospect of future business. Even in the 1520s and 1530s most printers (though not all) were eclectic in the religious opinions their works promoted.20 If scriptural translation and Lollard texts are not to be found on my bookshelves,21 what can be found? The bulk of the religious output from English presses in the first fifty years of print consisted of devotional works; saints’ lives and sermons ran these a poor second.

relevant to this paper), see Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Heresy, Orthodoxy and Vernacular Religion’, Past and Present, 186 (2005), 47–80. I am grateful to Fiona Somerset for alerting me to this article after I had delivered my paper at Oxford. 17

Hudson, PR, pp. 417–21.

18

Hellinga, BMC XI, p. 272.

19

See further below. The character of Dives is in many ways a merchant, just as the character of Pauper is the friar-author. 20

Jan T. Rhodes, ‘Private Devotion in England on the Eve of the Reformation’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Durham, 1974): ‘English printers of the 1530s do not, on the whole, seem to have restricted their religious publications to one particular shade of religious opinion’ (p. 6). Copland and de Worde were conservative in their publications, however, while Berthelet was humanist. 21

The argument from absence is an interesting one, which I cannot explore here. For example, Thomas Wimbledon’s estates sermon, ‘Redde racionem villicacionis tue’ was delivered in 1387–88 but not printed until 1540(?) (STC 25823.3). See Alexandra Walsham, ‘Inventing the Lollard Past: The Afterlife of a Medieval Sermon in Early Modern England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 58 (2007), 628–55.

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Devotional Works ‘Devotional’ is a blanket term for works which focus on the spiritual life.22 These were generally not new works, even when they circulated in manuscript in the fifteenth century. Their ultimate origin was in male enclosed communities in and beyond England, whence they were translated from Latin into French or English for enclosed female communities. Their circulation developed through the aristocratic and upper bourgeois lay contacts of the female houses. Printing made them accessible as ways of living to a much wider audience, so that the modes of thought in the female enclosed communities of the fifteenth century became a model for both women and men in the active life.23 The most highly developed type of this genre is, in fact, an English work, Walter Hilton’s Scala Perfeccionis, well over a century old when printed by de Worde in 1494 (STC 14042) but even today extant in sixty-one manuscripts.24 The Vita mixta (Medyled Lyfe), added to some prints of the Scala (STC 14042–45), demonstrated the opportunities for spiritual commitment even in the active life.25 Amongst the larger texts of this type are The Pilgrimage of the Soul printed by Caxton in 1483 (STC 6473), and, by de Worde, The Chastising of God’s Children, in 1492–93 (STC 5065), the Scala Perfeccionis in 1494 (STC 14042), The Myroure of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, also in 1494 (STC 3261), and The Abbey of the Holy Ghost in 1497 (STC 13609). ‘Devotional’ includes arts of death (of which Caxton printed a few at the end of his career, such as The Art and Craft of Dying (STC 789) and Ars moriendi (STC 786)) and, more commonly, arts of life, works like the Book of Good Manners and the Royal Book, both translated from French by Caxton in the mid-1480s (STC

22 See Rhodes, ‘Private Devotion in England’, who identifies three categories of ‘devotion’ with numerous subsections. 23

David N. Bell, ‘Monastic Libraries: 1400–1557’, in CHBB, pp. 229–54: ‘It was the nuns, not the monks, who seem to have been interested in acquiring fifteenth-century books, and it was the nuns, not the monks (again, with the possible exception of the Carthusians), who stood at the forefront of the English vernacular devotional movement’ (p. 253). The Carthusians acquired, translated, and copied books for female enclosed and lay consumption. 24

Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition, Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland, 1992), p. lxiii. See too Sargent’s interesting article, ‘What do the Numbers Mean?’ 25

Vita mixta was also printed separately, as a second part to Pynson’s English version of Capgrave’s Nova legenda Anglie in 1516 (STC 4602) and by Robert Wyre in 1530(?) (STC 14041).

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21429, 15394), or, from the later period (1520), The Dyetary of Ghostly Helthe (STC 6833). Arts of life often provide, or consist of, short meditations or prayers, such as The Fifteen Oes, printed by Caxton in 1491 (STC 20195), the Meditations of Saint Bernard by de Worde in 1498–99 (STC 1917), and The Fruyte of Redempcion by de Worde in 1514 (STC 483.14). They provide guidance in organizing one’s life devotionally, often through daily meditations, such as The Mirroure of Golde for the Synfull Soule, printed by Pynson in 1506(?) (STC 6894.5) or The Myroure of the Blessed Life. Sometimes they extend into visualizing or ‘imaginizing’ the stages of Christ’s life, as in The Seven Sheddings of the Blood of Jesus Christ printed by de Worde in 1500 (STC 14546), where each of the seven bleedings of Christ (Circumcision to Passion) is presented in physical detail as a means of empathizing with Christ and his mother.26 Manuscript texts continued to be unearthed and printed into the 1500s, but the backlog from manuscript circulation is perhaps exhausted with the publication in 1506 and 1508 of two works ascribed to Richard Rolle, the Contemplacyons of the Drede and Loue of God (STC 21259) and the Remedy ayenst the Troubles of Temptacyons (STC 20875.5), both with long manuscript histories behind them and both printed by de Worde. From then on, although they continue to appear in second or later editions (The Myroure of the Blessed Life was printed nine times before 1530, although it had been written in the 1400s), the mop-up of popular works of the past was complete, but the demand not, it seems, satiated. New devotional works (albeit sometimes translations or adaptations) were still appearing in the 1520s and 1530s, such as William Bonde’s Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526, STC 3277) and Directory of Conscience (1527, STC 3274.5), Richard Whytford’s Pype, or Tonne, of the Lyfe of Perfection (1532, STC 25421), and John Fewterer’s Myrrour or Glasse of Christes Passion (1534, STC 14553).27 Indeed, Whytford, an entirely isolated author, was still producing collected editions of his works into the late 1530s. All these men were Birgittines and their increased

26

James Simpson has written well on this genre in ‘Moving Images’, chap. 8 of Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, pp. 383–457. 27

Again, Rhodes’s thesis offers valuable insights. It shows that ‘there were far more Catholic works of devotion, many of them written or printed for the first time [during] 1520–35, than has previously been recognized’, but that they ‘came to a sudden and decisive end in 1535, although the tradition lived on unofficially to be taken up by the English Recusants’ (p. 2). Her conclusion (pp. 626–44) discusses the external circumstances which led to the demise of the devotional genre, in which the death of de Worde in 1535 is a not insignificant factor.

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production of printed works at this period is indicative of their anxiety at this time, both for the Church and for themselves.28 Even though the devotional genre is broad, it is still notable that this is the dominant product of the first fifty years of print. There is some danger in using the term ‘vernacular theology’,29 but for the literate mass reading the cheap and available vernacular editions at this time, devotional and meditative works will have been their main exposure to ‘theology.’ It is perhaps inevitable that the type of material already in lay circulation through the mediation of the enclosed orders would find its way into print. It is perhaps fortuitous that this was the sort of reading that the Church would be keen to promote because of its tendency to encourage individual piety, introspection, and obedience, that is, social behaviour different from disputatious Lollard conventicles. Nevertheless, if not the secular clergy, the enclosed orders, or, more specifically, the Birgittines and Carthusians, may have had ‘some kind of co-ordinated programme of publication.’30

The Birgittines and Carthusians Probably all the texts mentioned so far can be connected with the Birgittines and/or Carthusians. They were the model upholders of the religious Establishment and from an early stage its proselytizers. Together in the fifteenth century they produced manuscripts and encouraged their dissemination, and certainly by the 1490s the Birgittines were involved in disseminating material through the printing presses; no other order was responsible for so many (one might say, almost any) printed books.31 Texts not freely accessible in England outside the Carthusian houses were 28 See Susan Powell, ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’, and Ann M. Hutchison, ‘Richard Whytford’s The Pype, or Tonne, of the Lyfe of Perfection: Pastoral Care, or Political Manifesto?’, in Saint Birgitta, Syon and Vadstena, ed. by Claes Gejrot, Sara Risberg, and Mia Åkestam, Konferenser, 73 (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien och antikvitets akademien, 2010), pp. 50–70, 89–103 respectively. 29

The danger consists in using a term which has received such wide currency through its use by Nicholas Watson to mean a sort of ‘cutting edge’ theology whose edges were severely blunted by Arundel’s Constitutions. See Watson, ‘Censorship’. 30

Jan T. Rhodes, ‘Syon Abbey and its Religious Publications in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 11–25 (p. 17). I would date the Birgittine publication programme from 1519 (Powell, ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’). 31

The words of Christopher de Hamel, Syon Abbey: The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns and their Peregrinations after the Reformation (London: Roxburghe Club, 1991), p. 101. On the Birgittines and print, see Powell, ‘Syon Abbey as a Centre for Text Production’, and n. 69 below.

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translated and later found their way into print — the Myroure of the Blessed Life (Caxton, 1484) is one of these, translated before 1409 from a work of the early fourteenth century by an Italian Franciscan; The Imytacyon and Folowynge the Blessed Lyfe of our Sauyour Cryste (Pynson, 1503, STC 23954.7) is another, translated first in the mid-fifteenth century and then in 1502 from the early fifteenth-century work of Thomas à Kempis, a Rhenish Austin canon; The Mirroure of Golde (Pynson, 1506?) is a third, put into English from a French translation of a work of perhaps the 1470s by the Carthusian Jacobus Gruitroede.32 It was the Carthusians’ access to continental works which complemented the Birgittines’ scholarship and duty to preach. After print was introduced on the European continent, the excellent Carthusian networks meant that the English Carthusians still had greater access to books than the other English orders, and the sources of The Myroure of the Blessed Life, The Imytacyon, and The Mirroure of Golde were from the 1460s and 1470s printed more than once by continental printers. In some cases, works may have been translated from such printed editions rather than from manuscripts.33 Caxton’s 1490 edition of The Myroure of the Blessed Life and the full Opera of Thomas à Kempis printed in Paris in 1523 have been recorded as owned by Syon sisters,34 while the brothers’ library had editions of the Meditationes vitae Christi (source of The Myroure of the Blessed Life) and the Speculum animae peccatricis (source of The Mirroure of Golde).35 Even the exiguous lists of

32

See Sargent, ‘The Transmission by the English Carthusians’. On the three works cited here, see Roger Lovatt, ‘The Imitation of Christ in Late Medieval England’; Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Sargent; Susan Powell, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’, The Library, 6th ser., 20 (1998), 197–240 (pp. 224–25). 33

Lady Margaret Beaufort used the 1493 Paris edition of the Imitatio and the 1484 Breton edition of the Speculum as the French-language sources for her two translations (Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Translations as Mirrors of Practical Piety’, in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625, ed. by Micheline White (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 185–203). 34

David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1995), pp. 190, 185. The abbess, Elizabeth Gibbs (1497–1518), owned the first English translation of the Imitatio (Bell, What Nuns Read, p. 186). 35

Three 1468 Augsburg editions of the Meditationes were in the brothers’ library (Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie, SS1 736, 740b, SS2.142) and one Paris edition, perhaps of 1490 (SS1 822), as well as a Leuven edition (1477–83) of the Speculum (SS1 1223c). They also had several manuscripts of the Imitatio (known in England as the Musica ecclesiastica) (SS1 759, 819a, 845891n).

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Carthusian books show that the London charterhouse owned the 1483 Venice edition of the Imitatio.36 The Birgittines and Carthusians were prominent members of the Establishment, in the unique position of not only being the regular equivalent of the secular clergy who led the Church but also the spiritual directors (actual or through their writings) of the rulers of state. They are crucial to an understanding of devotional texts as the major ‘religious’ product of the English presses in this period. They were foremost in promoting a type of wholly orthodox devotion appropriate for layfolk, not ‘dumbed down’ but with an excellent international pedigree. As Jeremy Catto has said of Syon’s religious output, it ‘was not written by theologians in any formal sense; [… the Birgittines] were circulating an alternative kind of religious literature with a broad popular appeal […] which remained independent of academic theology’.37 The Carthusian houses of Mount Grace and Sheen, together with the Birgittine house at Syon, may be seen as the response of Church and State to Lollardy, and their foundations set the seal to Arundel’s Constitutions.38 They became crucial to the mechanisms of Church and State, and crucial to the future of English religious printing. It is of some interest that the only two instances of works submitted for official approval occur in a Carthusian and a Birgittine work respectively, Nicholas Love’s Myroure of the Blessed Life and the Syon-authored Myroure of oure Lady, where they are perhaps less actual licences than endorsements of the Church/State line.39 If Oxford had let down the Establishment through its support of Wyclif, as Arundel makes plain that they had,40 it was effectively marginalized by the establishment of these wholly orthodox

36 Syon Abbey, ed. by Gillespie (although the Carthusian entries are by A. I. Doyle), C4 6a (in a list of books lent to Hinton). They also owned a manuscript of The Myroure of the Blessed Life (C2 4a, in a list of books lent to Hull). 37

Rearranged from three passages in Catto, ‘Theology after Wycliffism’, pp. 274–75.

38

Mount Grace was founded in 1410, Syon and Sheen in 1415.

39

The Myroure of the Blessed Life was submitted to Arundel c. 1410, as seventeen manuscripts (and the printed editions) attest (ed. by Sargent, pp. xlv–xlvi); The Myroure of Oure Lady (in the unique copy extant in two manuscripts, and in the printed edition, STC 17542) includes a passage affirming that permission has been obtained from the diocesan bishop (The Myroure of Oure Lady, ed. by Blunt, p. 71). See Hutchison, ‘Devotional Reading in the Monastery’, pp. 219–23. Only the Birgittine work indicates under which Constitution (7, see n. 9 above) it was submitted for approval: ‘And for as moche as yt is forboden vnder payne of cursynge, that no man shulde haue ne drawe eny texte of holy scrypture in to englysshe wythout lycense of the bysshop dyocesan’ (The Myroure of Oure Lady, ed. by Blunt, p. 71). 40

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 318, Constitution 11 (‘Finaliter, quia ipsa, quae de novo’). I quote from the first English translation: ‘how the nourishing University of Oxford, which was wont to

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houses, many of whose members, certainly in the case of the Birgittines, had spent their earlier careers in Cambridge (less often Oxford) or as secular clergy in and around London.41 Moreover, the location of Syon, just over the Thames from the king’s palace, and Sheen, just alongside it, meant that the Birgittines and Carthusians were in close contact with the king from their foundation, and from 1501 until his death Henry VII was consolidating this intellectual and spiritual powerhouse by building a house of Observant Friars as an extension of his Sheen palace.42 Moreover, the London Carthusians were already well established in Smithfield, and London could offer convenient printing presses.

Sermons and Saints’ Legends Occupying much less space on my 1526 bookshelves (although with two hefty volumes) are sermons and saints’ legends. It may seem surprising that these take second place in an assessment of religious print. Perhaps in this we may discern the

spread abroad like as a plenteous vine her fruitful branches to the honour of God and the manifold profit and defence of the Church, but now partly joined in to a wild vine bringeth forth sour grapes […] and our Province is infected with divers and unfruitful doctrines and is spotted with a new damnable name of Lollardy to no little slander of the same University [...] and also to the hurt of the Church of England which was wont to be defended by the virtuous doctrine of the same University’ (Lyndwood’s Provinciale: The Text of the Canons therein Contained, Reprinted from the Translation Made in 1534, ed. by J. V. Bullard and H. Chalmer Bell (London: Faith, 1929), pp. 129–30 [Book V, Titulus V, Chapter IV ]). Arundel’s anger was justified: between 1381 and 1413 it was Oxford men who were writing and revising Lollard texts (Hudson, PR, p. 119) and during the same period (and beyond) Wyclif’s works continued to circulate at the University (Anne Hudson, ‘The Survival of Wyclif’s Works in England and Bohemia’, in Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), chap. XVI, esp. pp. 1–29). 41 For the careers of Syon brothers we await The Syon Martiloge, British Library MS Add. 22285: A Critical Edition of Texts Relevant to its History, ed. by Claes Gejrot and Virginia R. Bainbridge, Henry Bradshaw Society (in progress). I am grateful to Virginia Bainbridge for preliminary access to her data. For the Carthusians, see Carol B. Rowntree, ‘Studies in Carthusian History in Later Medieval England with Special Reference to the Order’s Relations with Secular Society’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of York), Appendix VI. 42

He founded six Observant houses in 1499, and the Observant Friars might well have come to overtake the Birgittines and Carthusians. As it was, Katherine of Aragon’s deathbed request to be buried in an Observant house could not be fulfilled as none was left in England (noted in James P. Carley and Ann M. Hutchison, ‘1534–1550s: Culture and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. by Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 225–48).

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long arm of Arundel, who, in his constitution ‘Quod nullus secularis’, had introduced licensing measures designed to safeguard the public from potentially unorthodox preachers, and who had required even bona fide parish priests to preach, and preach simply, only those tenets in the canon ‘Ignorantia sacerdotum’ of his early thirteenth-century predecessor, John Pecham.43 Although these measures related to preaching, it is what was preached that was crucial, and it is perhaps not surprising that, at the start of printing, Caxton’s first major religious works were wholly orthodox staples of the Church with a long manuscript tradition behind them. It is perhaps more surprising that they were reprinted right up to the eve of the Reformation. One, the Festial of John Mirk (STC 17957), had been composed in England in the 1380s as a sermon cycle for preaching by minimally educated clergy. Its manuscript circulation was wide,44 but it was print which made it a best-seller. Perhaps the fact that the Festial was regularly issued in tandem with the Quattuor sermones is significant, since the latter covers the Pecham syllabus in four sermons and might be seen as a response to Arundel’s demand that priests should not just cover Pecham’s material but also preach it at the times Pecham required (‘quater in anno’).45 The second work had a European reputation, indeed, and was arguably the most important and influential work in medieval Christendom. This was the huge collection of (primarily) saints’ lives known as the Legenda aurea, by the thirteenth-century Italian Jacobus de Voragine, which Caxton translated as The Golden Legend (STC 24873). Caxton brought these two works out within five months of each other in 1483, and both went through over twenty editions in the next half-century. The third work, printed by de Worde in 1495, was the Vitae patrum (STC 14507), the lives of the desert fathers, which, like The Golden Legend, was a huge book.46 De Worde says in his colophon that Caxton finished it ‘the laste daye of his lyff,’ which means that he was single-handedly responsible for covering the sermon/legend market (that is, the preaching/reading market) so completely that almost nothing else was needed (or perhaps the word is ‘wanted’) throughout my period.

43 Wilkins, Concilia, III, 315–16, Constitution 1. On the Constitutions in relation to preaching, see Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, pp. 163–88. 44

It survives in twenty full and sixteen partial manuscripts, as well as in related contexts and four manuscripts of a substantial revision. See John Mirk’s ‘Festial’, ed. by Powell. 45

See Susan Powell, ‘Why Quattuor Sermones?’, in Texts and their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society, ed. by John Scattergood and Julia Boffey (Dublin: Four Courts, 1997), pp. 181–95. 46

Vitae patrum covers 356 and The Golden Legend 449 leaves in folio volumes.

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Apart from the Festial, there were no other vernacular sermon collections printed in England until Cranmer’s Books of Homilies in 1547. This did not restrict those members of the clergy who had access to large Latin collections such as the Dormi secure printed in Cologne c. 1477, but it did restrict those who only read English. In fact, English printers issued very few sermons at all during this period, unlike saints’ lives, which are a constant product. In 1516 Pynson’s printing of The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande (STC 4602) provided a legendary of British saints. Individual saints’ lives were also available in short, cheap booklets, from Caxton’s 1485 Lyf of Saynt Wenefryde (STC 25853) or de Worde’s Lyf of Saint Ierom (STC 14508)47 through the life of St Birgitta appended to the Kalendre, right up to the late date of 1548(?) for one of the three printed lives of Margaret (STC 17325–27).48

Conduits of Religious Print I have hinted that the restricted preaching market and the buoyant devotional market was not entirely the result of chance or even market forces. However, any evidence of control is hard to establish. Before the 1520s there are only two possible examples of licences to print, in colophons at the end of works of the early 1510s, William de Melton’s Latin Sermo exhortatorius (STC 17806), approved by John Colet, dean of St Paul’s, and Simon Appulby’s English Fruyte of Redempcion (STC 22557), approved by Richard Fitzjames, bishop of London. Neither is likely to be a survival of a more comprehensive system, nor even a ‘licence to print’ as such.49 Instead, it might be fruitful to consider who brought what to the printers and how far they might have influenced the market. We know little enough about this, since only Caxton was expansive on the matter, and even his expansiveness was partial. Nevertheless, there appear to be four main conduits: one has been

47 Dated 1499(?) in STC but re-dated 1493 by Lotte Hellinga, ‘Tradition and Renewal: Establishing the Chronology of Wynkyn de Worde’s Early Work’, in Incunabula and their Readers: Printing, Selling and Using Books in the Fifteenth Century, ed. by Kristian Jensen (London: British Library, 2003), pp. 13–30 (Appendix). 48

See Pickering, ‘Saints’ Lives’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. by Edwards, pp. 259–62. 49

I intend to argue this in print at a future date. On Melton’s ‘licence’, see Gleason, ‘The Earliest Evidence for Ecclesiastical Censorship’, pp. 137–41, and on Appulby’s, see Arthur W. Reed, ‘The Regulation of the Book Trade before the Proclamation of 1538’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 15 (1920 for 1917–19), 157–84 (pp. 159–60).

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adumbrated already, the regular clergy; the others are the merchant bourgeoisie of London, the secular clergy, and the aristocracy.50 Each has its own agenda, but there is frankly no evidence of a concerted agenda. It is not known who first brought the Festial to Caxton (nor the provenance of the very interesting second edition printed at Oxford in 1491 (STC 17958) which then formed the basis of future editions), but what is known is that the edition printed by Pynson in 1499 (STC 17966.5) had been brought him by a merchant, the same John Russhe mentioned earlier, who arranged for Pynson to print Dives and Pauper, the Festial, Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, and assorted service books. It was another merchant, William Pratt, who brought Caxton the French text for The Book of Good Manners (STC 15394) and perhaps too for De consolacione philosophie (STC 3199) and The Royal Book (STC 21429).51 Caxton, as a former Governor of the English Nation for the Merchant Adventurers’ Company and himself a mercer, had a useful network of such connections,52 one which de Worde presumably hoped to enhance by moving after his master’s death from Westminster to London. The evidence is at present limited, but it seems likely that merchants were responsible for more printing before the 1520s than is currently recognized. A casestudy which demonstrates the secular clergy’s involvement with print may suggest the influence of their merchant parishes. In the small collection of individual sermons on the bookshelves in 1526 is one by Savonarola printed by Pynson in 1509 (STC 21800). Recently (1505?) printed in Italian in Florence,53 it had been translated into Latin by Bartholomeus Gallus at the request of John Young, rector of All Hallows, Honey Lane, and Stephen Douce, master of Whittington College (1496–1509). It was not the first work of Savonarola printed in England, since a Latin commentary on Psalm 30 had been printed by de Worde in 1500(?) (STC

50

Observations on these conduits of print must necessarily be brief. Fuller examinations are promised in A Companion to the Early Printed Book in Britain, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Susan Powell (forthcoming). 51

Hellinga, BMC XI, p. 163.

52

See Anne F. Sutton, ‘Caxton was a Mercer’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1992 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. by Nicholas Rogers (Stamford: Watkins, 1994), pp. 118–48, and (for merchants’ books) her The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130–1578 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 161–72. 53

Alan Coates and others, A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), V , 2304 (S-096A).

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21798), soon after its publication in Milan c. 1499.54 That work has no indication of its publication circumstances, but one might suggest the same translator and patrons. The title-page of the English edition notes that Savonarola worked on the sermon ‘in vltimis diebus dum vite sue finem prestolaretur.’ Since that end was by judicial burning, it is clear that the Savonarola publications are both more topical and potentially more controversial than the material studied so far. As rector of All Hallows, Young would regularly have preached to the merchant inhabitants of the parish (a parish whose incumbents were graduates with, at least by the 1520s, a reputation for reform and even heresy).55 Whittington College was a college of five priests with a similarly fine reputation for preaching and scholarship.56 An earlier master had been Reginald Pecock (1431–44), who wrote most of his works there. Pecock was stimulated in his writing and preaching by living in such an environment and by preaching to and conversing with the mercers: ‘right great witted lay men being of great reputation’.57 The Savonarola sermon may be seen, not just as evidence of the involvement of the London clergy in what was printed during this period, but also as evidence of the demands, expectations, and intellectual energy of the merchant class to whom the London clergy preached. Indeed, as early as 1496 ‘certain English merchants’ (not otherwise identified) offered 200 gold ducats to have Savonarola’s series of forty-eight sermons on the Book of Amos translated into Latin.58 Would the next stage have been to have their priests preach them in English? The merchants were volatile and influential, and some, at least, of the London clergy were prepared to engage with them on their own terms. However, the senior clergy could not afford to do so, had they wanted to (Pecock’s failure was a severe warning). What evidence we have of their promotion of printed texts suggests traditionally pious intentions, such as those of Richard Fox, then bishop of Durham, who in 1499 brought The Contemplation of Sinners to de Worde (STC 5643) ‘in god desyrynge gretly all vertue to encreace and vyce to be exylyd.’59 Fox commissioned 54

Coates and others, A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century, V , 2299 (S-076).

55

Historical Gazetteer of London before the Great Fire, ed. by Derek J. Keene and Vanessa Harding (Cambridge : Chadwyck-Healey, 1987), pp. 3–9. 56

Victoria County History: London Including London within the Bars, Westminster, and Southwark, I, ed. by William Page (London: Constable, 1909), pp. 578–80. 57 From Pecock’s Book of Faith, cited in Sutton, The Mercery of London, p. 165. On Pecock, see Scase, Reginald Pecock. 58

John B. Gleason, John Colet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 57.

59

Hellinga, BMC XI, p. 223.

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The Contemplation (another work to offer a daily meditation) as the last in an unprecedented spate of vernacular sermon publication by de Worde (‘spate’ in this context means five single sermons). Presumably the preachers of these sermons were responsible for their printing (although one hesitates to be categorical, since, for example, Fisher’s second anti-Luther sermon was said to have been printed without its author’s knowledge, having been brought to de Worde by his chaplain).60 Sermo die Lune in Ebdomada Pasche (STC 11024) was a spital sermon by Richard Fitzjames, later bishop of London, but at this time treasurer of St Paul’s and chaplain to Henry VII.61 The other four were by John Alcock, bishop of Ely.62 Two were preached at St Paul’s — Sermo Iohannis Alcok episcopi Eliensis (STC 284) at Paul’s Cross in the city of London, and his sermon for the boy bishop, In die Innocencium sermo pro episcopo puerorum (STC 282), in St Paul’s itself.63 The issues they address (beyond the explication of text) are heresy, a defence of the authority and liberties of the Church, false counsellors of the king, the sacraments (especially the sacrament of the altar), and the uncontrolled London youth. Lotte Hellinga’s redatings place all three sermons around 1496, which suggests that they were issued (as a group by the same printer, de Worde) as an assertion of church authority at a time when the city was unsettled.64 Even the merchant elite had been provoked by the burnings in 1494 of the widow of a former mayor and her eighty-year-old mother, and there had been abjurations and book-burnings at Paul’s Cross in 1495–96.65 The suspicion of a concerted programme to raise the Church’s profile amongst the laity is perhaps confirmed by the fact that Mons perfeccionis, Alcock’s sermon to the Coventry Carthusians (STC 278), was also issued in 1496 (22 September).66 Another vernacular sermon, also delivered to an enclosed order and

60

Reed, ‘The Regulation of the Book Trade’, p. 166.

61

Hellinga, BMC XI, pp. 199–200. Spital sermons were an Easter series of four sermons preached publicly in London at St Mary’s Hospital without Bishopsgate and then again on Low Sunday at Paul’s Cross. 62

See Lotte Hellinga, Printing in England in the Fifteenth Century: E. Gordon Duff’s Bibliography with Supplementary Descriptions, Chronologies and a Census of Copies (London: Bibliographical Society/British Library, 2009), pp. 3–6 (nos 11–20). 63

For In die innocencium, see Hellinga, BMC XI, pp. 208–09, and for the most recent edition, see Ecclesiastical London, ed. by Mary C. Erler, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), Appendix 3 (pp. 234–47). 64

Hellinga, ‘Tradition and Renewal’, p. 29.

65

Thomson, The Later Lollards, pp. 156–57.

66

Hellinga, BMC XI, p. 210 (the second edition, STC 279).

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also adulatory of the enclosed life, appeared in 1497–98, Desponsacio virginis Christi (STC 286), a profession sermon for an unnamed convent in the diocese of Ely.67 (The sermon Gallicantus, delivered by Alcock to secular clergy at the synod at Barnwell, was printed by Pynson in 1498 (STC 277) and was less laudatory, but that was in Latin.) However, if these sermons were issued as propaganda, they are isolated examples. The printing in 1508 of sermons by another bishop, John Fisher of Rochester, was not for reasons of propaganda, and the sermons are very different. The impetus came from my final conduit, the aristocracy, a category with a vested interest in the status quo but one dominated in this period of print by a single person, Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, for whom de Worde printed in 1508–09 Fisher’s sermons on the penitential psalms, The Fruytfull Saynges of Dauyd (STC 10902), the funeral sermon for Henry VII, This Sermon Folowynge (STC 10900), and (perhaps) A Mornynge Remembraunce (STC 10891), the month’s mind sermon for Lady Margaret herself. She had been a remarkable contact for both Fisher and the Birgittines. Some of her commissions have been mentioned already, The Fifteen Oes and the Scala perfeccionis (and she was probably responsible for the addition of Hilton’s Vita mixta),68 as have her translations (the fourth book of The Imytacyon and The Mirroure of Golde). Her closest involvement with the Birgittines may be linked to the appointment in 1497 of Abbess Elizabeth Gibbs, who was active in acquiring reading matter for her nuns. At around the same time she had met Fisher, who by 1501 was her confessor and the leading figure in her household. By 1504 he was bishop of Rochester and lifeChancellor of Cambridge, and he was to remain her closest adviser until her death. It is to Fisher and Cambridge that is owed her more active role in the 1500s in commissioning, bulk-buying, and even translating devotional texts, as well as founding Christ’s College and furnishing its library, and planning the foundation of St John’s.69 Her death in 1509 dissolved a dream team — nothing more by

67

For the Desponsacio, see Veronica O’Mara, ‘Preaching to Nuns in Late Medieval England’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 93–119 (pp. 104–07). 68 69

Powell, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’, p. 216.

On Lady Margaret in relation to the printing trade and the Birgittines, see Powell, ‘Lady Margaret Beaufort and her Books’ and my ‘Syon Abbey and the Mother of King Henry VII: The Relationship of Lady Margaret Beaufort with the English Birgittines’, Birgittiana, 19 (2005), 211–24.

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Fisher was published in England until 1521 and nothing more can be firmly attached to Syon until 1519.

Luther In 1520 Pope Leo X issued his papal bull against Luther; the next year Luther was declared a heretic at Paul’s Cross, his works burnt, and a sermon preached by Fisher. Whereas the book-burning demonized the printed word (as it often had in the past), the subsequent printing of the sermon (in Latin in Cambridge and in English in London)70 valorized it. Luther was the catalyst for a very different era of English religious publication, vigorous, pluralist, and contested. In terms of the censorship of print, the facts are clear, as they are not before Luther. In 1526 the London printers were categorically warned to import nothing and print nothing without the approval of Wolsey (Lord Chancellor), Warham (archbishop of Canterbury) or Tunstall (bishop of London).71 The previous two years had seen a move towards this position, starting with Tunstall meeting the printers in 1524. In December 1525 de Worde was summoned for printing The Image of Loue with its chapter slighting images. In March 1526 Berthelet was summoned for printing four English works: A Deuoute Treatise vpon the Pater Noster (STC 10477); De immensa Dei misericordia (STC 10474); a schoolbook, The Sayenges of the Wyse Men;72 Fisher’s second Paul’s Cross sermon, preached just a month earlier (STC 10892). In September 1527 Robert Wyer admitted that he had been responsible for translating and printing Symbolum apostolorum (the Apostles’ Creed). The Image and Symbolum were both deemed heretical and did not pass scrutiny — the Image seems not to have been published with authority until 1532 (STC 21472), the Symbolum not till 1534 and then twice by a different printer, Redman (STC 10504, 10504a).73 All of these works except The Image and Fisher’s sermon were by Erasmus, and those promoting his works form an interesting group — A Deuoute Treatise had been translated into English by

70

STC 10898, 10894.

71

I am indebted to Reed, ‘The Regulation of the Book Trade’, for the following details. See too Pamela Neville-Sington, ‘Press, Politics and Religion’, in CHBB, pp. 576–607 and index sub ‘CONTROL of the press and booktrade’. 72 73

The Sayenges survives only in a 1527 edition (STC 10478.7).

The 1525 edition of The Image survives as STC 21471.5, but no earlier edition of the Symbolum is extant.

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Margaret Roper, Thomas More’s daughter; De immensa Dei misericordia had been translated for Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury; Symbolum apostolorum had been translated at the request of Thomas Boleyn, father of Anne.

Conclusion It was the controversy over Luther that prompted such interventions into the world of religious print (minor as these particular examples may be). Previously, there had been nothing of Erasmus printed in England but grammar books (STC 10450.2, 10450.6). There was nothing of Fisher between 1509 and 1521 (his first sermon against Luther). There was nothing of John Colet but his 1512 sermon to Convocation (in Latin; STC 5545) — it was to appear in English long after his death, in 1530 (STC 5550). There was nothing of Thomas More, except for various jeux d’esprit,74 until he became England’s apologist, at first in Latin in his work for the King’s Assertio septem sacramentorum (STC 13078) and his own Eruditissimi viri […]opus elegans (STC 18088.5, 18089),75 but then, in 1529, in English in A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More (STC 18084), written in response to Tyndale and Luther, and in The Supplycacyon of Soulys (STC 18092), in response to Simon Fish’s A Supplicacyon for the Beggers, ‘the most significant of the early printed complaints’ which succeeded city bill-posting.76 What is interesting to remember, however, is that More, as late as 1532, looked back to the time before Luther, when religious print in English (and so English lay reading) was dominated by those same devotional texts discussed earlier in this paper. At the end of his Preface to The Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere (STC 18079) he longed for a return to the golden age of The Myroure of the Blessed Life, The Imytacyon, and Scala perfeccionis: For surely the very best waye were neyther to rede thys [the present book against Tyndale] nor theyrs [the books of heretics], but rather the people vnlerned to occupye themselfe besyde theyr other busynesse in prayour, good medytacyon, and redynge of suche Englysshe

74

A Mery Gest (STC 18091) and Thomae Mori Epistola ad Germanum Brixium (STC 18088). 75

It is indicative of the dramatic changes in the 1520s (not least to English religious print) that More’s Latin works against Luther almost all came out first in English, not continental, presses. See further J. B. Trapp, ‘The Humanist Book’, in CHBB, pp. 285–315 (p. 309). 76

Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 151.

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bookes as moste may norysshe and encrease deuocyon. Of whyche kynde is Bonauenture of the Lyfe of Cryste, Gerson of the Folowynge of Cryste, and the deuoute contemplatyue booke of Scala Perfeccionis with such other lyke.

There was no chance of a return to the past. Already in 1526, at the end of half a century of print, Tyndale’s New Testament had been printed in Worms. It is not on the shelves of my 1526 bookshop but almost certainly under the counter.77

77

See Tyndale’s Testament, ed. by Paul Arblaster, Gergely Juhász, and Guido Latré (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), especially Andrew Hope, ‘On the Smuggling of Prohibited Books from Antwerp to England in the 1520s and 1530s’, pp. 35–38.

Part XI Closing Reflections and Responses

W YCLIF, A RUNDEL, AND THE L ONG F IFTEENTH C ENTURY * Kantik Ghosh

J

ohn Wyclif’s ideas were repeatedly proscribed from the late 1370s onwards in a substantial series of condemnations across Europe in centres of learning and ecclesiastical authority including London, Oxford, Rome, Paris, Leuven, Heidelberg, Vienna, Prague, and Konstanz. Some of the more important ones are as follows: papal bulls condemned eighteen propositions in 1377; the Blackfriars Council condemned twenty-four propositions in 1382; this list was then augmented by the German master Johannes Hübner in Prague in 1403 into a more substantial collection of forty-five errors and heresies, followed by a further condemnation in 1408.1 A different set of eighteen errors was extracted from Wyclif’s Trialogus at the order of Archbishop Thomas Arundel of Canterbury in 1395–96; these too were very substantially augmented around fifteen years later when a list of 267 erroneous, heretical, or otherwise suspect conclusions drawn from fourteen of Wyclif’s works was sent to the Archbishop, again at his order, by a committee of Oxford doctors in 1411.2 At the Council of Konstanz, both the Blackfriars–Prague list of forty-five and the Oxford list of 267 reappeared. The latter list, though it seems not to have been read out in its entirety at the Council, was nevertheless referred to and quarried more than once in the course of the Council’s deliberations * I am much indebted to David d’Avray for his lucid and generous exposition of matters logical and canon-legal. 1 For details, see František Šmahel, Die hussitische Revolution, trans. from the Czech by Thomas Krzenck, 3 vols (Hannover: Hahn, 2002), II, 796–97 (1403); II, 814–16 (1408). 2

Wilkins, Concilia, III, 339–49; see Hudson, ‘Notes of an Early Fifteenth-Century Research Assistant, and the Emergence of the 267 Articles against Wyclif’ (repr. as chap. 13 in her Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings).

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on heresy in May–July 1415. A further, shorter, list of fifty-eight was drawn up by the papal legate Berthold of Wildungen, of which fifty-four were drawn from the Oxford 267 (or 260, as it appears to have become at the Council), with four apparently new additions. The exhaustive list of 260 was condemned in toto, along with Blackfriars–Prague forty-five. The shorter list of fifty-eight was read out, at least in part, and seems to have been ascribed equally to Wyclif and to Jan Hus: the Acta state that ‘Bertholdus de Wildungen incoepit legere articulos formatos et dogmatizatos per Joannem Wyclif et Joannem Hus in hunc modum, quorum aliquos legit et residuos dicta sancta synodus habuit pro lectis’ (Berthold of Wildungen began to read the articles formed and taught by John Wyclif and Jan Hus in this way, of which he read some, with the rest left for the said holy synod to read)3 — and formed part of the final proceedings against Hus. These various lists are a mixed bag of ‘errors’, ‘heresies’, and ‘rash’ or ‘seditious’ statements4 relating primarily to Wyclif’s ecclesiology, sacramental theology and philosophy, with the Konstanz list of fifty-eight selecting judiciously from all three categories in the Oxford 267. It is important to note that the Konstanz 58 ranges very widely amongst Oxford 267, and, as Anne Hudson has pointed out, ‘all save one of the fourteen texts [by Wyclif] used in the original Oxford conclusions are still represented in this abbreviated form’.5 Konstanz 58 includes Wyclif’s conclusions relating to the eucharist (1–5); baptism (6); confirmation (7–8); confession (9–11); the priesthood (12–14); marriage (15–16); the papacy (17–24); dominion (25–31); private religions (32–37); a rather mixed sequence covering tithes, excommunication, clerical possession, civil law, etc. (38–46); and, in conclusion, various theses in philosophical theology including annihilation, extension and indivisibility, necessity and predestination (47–58; mostly extracted from what the Oxford 267 calls Wyclif’s De arte sophistica, which constitutes De logica, III in the Wyclif Society edition of his works).6 It is a suggestive selection, indicating that some considerable thought had been devoted to making a digest of

3

Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, ed. by J. D. Mansi, 31 vols (Florence: Zatta, 1759–93), XXVII (1784), col. 748, with the list following. The list is translated in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, pp. 421–26. 4

On the vocabulary of assessment of suspect academic propositions, see J. M. M. H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200–1400 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), chap. 1, pp. 1–39; and on the different inquisitorial vocabulary of assessment of suspects, see Arnold, Inquisition and Power, chap. 1, pp. 19–47. 5

Hudson, ‘Emergence of the 267 Articles’, pp. 694–95.

6

John Wyclif, Tractatus de logica, vol. III, ed. by Michael Dziewicki (London: Trübner, 1899).

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Wyclif’s controversial ideas, apparent not least in the philosophical section where theses articulating Wyclif’s atomist convictions are carefully included, such as n. 51: ‘linea aliqua mathematica continua componitur ex duobus, tribus, vel quatuor punctis immediatis, aut solum ex punctis simpliciter finitis; vel tempus est, fuit, vel erit compositum ex instantibus immediatis’ (Any continuous mathematical line is composed of two, three, or four contiguous points, or of only a simply finite number of points; and time is, was and will be composed of contiguous instants).7 As Emily Michael, building on the work of Norman Kretzmann, has shown, Wyclif’s atomism, eucharistic philosophy and his emphasis on logica scripture are intimately related; however, the point to be underlined here is that the Konstanz selection specifically offers for dogmatic condemnation, under pain of anathema, a philosophical proposition the connection of which to ‘heresy’ is not at first sight obvious or immediate.8 This and the other 57 theses, as well as the original list of 260, are condemned in perpetuity: quibus [ducentos et sexaginta] articulis sic examinatis fuit et est repertum, aliquos et plures ex ipsis fuisse et esse notorie haereticos, et dudum a sanctis patribus reprobatos, quosdam piarum aurium offensivos, nonnullos eorumdem temerarios et seditiosos. Propterea in nomine domini nostri Iesu Christi haec sancta synodus praedictos articulos, et eorum quemlibet hoc perpetuo decreto reprobat et condemnat: inhibens omnibus et singulis catholicis sub anathematis interminatione, ne de cetero dictos articulos aut ipsorum aliquem audeant praedicare, dogmatizare, offerre, vel tenere. (It was found that some, indeed many, of the [260] articles thus examined were and are notoriously heretical and have already been condemned by holy fathers, some are offensive to the ears of the devout and some are rash and seditious. This holy synod, therefore, in the name of our lord Jesus Christ, repudiates and condemns, by this perpetual decree, the aforesaid articles and each one of them in particular; and it forbids each and every catholic henceforth, under pain of anathema, to preach, teach, expound [/adduce] or hold the said articles or any one of them.)9

As Anthony Kenny has pointed out, this is quite an extraordinary condemnation:

7

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, p. 426.

8

Emily Michael, ‘John Wyclif’s Atomism’, in Atomism in Late Medieval Philosophy and Theology, ed. by Christophe Grellard and Aurélien Robert (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 183–220; Norman Kretzmann, ‘Continua, Indivisibles and Change in Wyclif’s Logic of Scripture’, in Wyclif in his Times, ed. by Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 31–65. 9

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, pp. 421–22.

548

Kantik Ghosh The condemnation of Wyclif, in the form it took, was outrageously unfair. Not that he was innocent of heresy, nor that a more careful judgement would have been unable to give a precise definition of the heresy. The point is that it was quite unjust to condemn, under a global anathema, propositions which many of the council fathers themselves regarded as falling far short of heresy. It was as if, after a strike in which there had occurred murders, bodily harm, assaults, obstructions and insulting behaviour, the DPP [Director of Public Prosecution] were to announce that anyone who had taken part in the strike would be prosecuted on a murder charge.10

I will return to this issue later. Among the errors relating to the sacraments in Konstanz 58 occur not only several points relating to the eucharist and confession, as one would expect, but also to the other sacraments, including baptism, confirmation, and marriage, drawn from Book IV of the Trialogus, ‘De signis’, where Wyclif discusses sacramental semiotics. Among the condemned articles is the following, n. 16: Haec verba: Accipiam te in uxorem, eligibiora sunt in contractu matrimoniali, quam ista: Ego te accipio in uxorem. Et quod contrahendo cum una per haec verba de futuro, et post cum alia, per haec verba de praesenti, non debent frustrari verba prima per verba secundaria de praesenti. (The words, I will take you as a wife, are more suitable for the marriage contract than I take you as a wife. And the first words ought not to be annulled by the second words about the present, when someone contracts with one wife in the words referring to the future and afterwards with another wife in those referring to the present.)11

This thesis, extracted from Wyclif’s discussion of the marriage vow and the specificities of its operation in Trialogus IV, is of interest for several reasons. The Trialogus passages are characteristically Wyclif’s in their fusion of a polemical critique of the Church’s right or ability to administer the sacraments or to legislate — in a way that would be in consonance with God’s law — with the logicolinguistic analysis of speech acts. The latter would have made perfect academic

10

Anthony Kenny, ‘The Accursed Memory: The Counter-Reformation Reputation of John Wyclif’, in Wyclif in his Times, ed. by Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 147–68 (p. 155). Note that Norman Tanner describes the Konstanz condemnation of Wyclif as ‘the longest personal critique of all the individuals censured in the twenty-one ecumenical and general councils of the Christian Church’: see his ‘Wyclif and Companions: Naming and Describing Dissenters in the Ecumenical and General Councils’, in Image, Text and Church, 1380–1600: Essays for Margaret Aston, ed. by Linda Clark, Maureen Jurkowski, and Colin Richmond, Papers in Mediaeval Studies, 20 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2009), pp. 131–41 (p. 131). 11

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, p. 423.

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sense in certain kinds of scholastic analytical discourses about sacramental language and its operation but assume a rather different kind of problematic meaning when deployed polemically in the context of a discussion of socio-religious observance and legislation. Indeed, this seamless interweaving of Sprachlogik and religious polemic may have prompted the compiler of an earlier version of the 267 conclusions in Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 99, described by Anne Hudson as a ‘research assistant’ to the committee of Oxford doctors, to remark ‘that some of Wyclif’s statements could be defended scholastically “quo ad verba”, but that, preached or taught openly or secretly, they could lead the hearers to error’.12 The Oxford committee of twelve who compiled the 267 conclusions themselves remarked, in their prefatory letter to Archbishop Arundel, that they had omitted from their final listing various conclusions ‘que […] male sonant et sapiunt sicut iste; quia tamen possent in sterili pugna verborum sustineri sophistice’ (which […] sound and savour as ill as these, but which are nevertheless capable of being defended sophistically in a sterile battle of words).13 Wyclif makes three main points in the relevant section of the Trialogus. First, he maintains that if the inner mental consent of both partners is present, along with the approval of God, no external sign is necessary; in such a case, the law of conscience and the consent of God suffice for those who live rightly. The words de praesenti can easily be a cloak for hypocrisy, deception, and concupiscence; what is of importance is the verbum mentis, not the verbum oris. Judges who therefore deem the validity or otherwise of a marriage ex nudis verbis are misguided and going against the law of God: judicant contra iudicium legis dei. Wyclif’s second point is that present tense speech-acts of this kind are always false, since the marriage is not complete by the time the man has said ‘I take you as a wife’, that is, the woman has also to take her vow. His third is that a performative utterance in the present tense cannot correspond to reality because one cannot say all the words at the same time, so that the whole sentence is never present at the same moment. Hence Wyclif’s endorsement of the future tense in the words of consent, in so far as words are at all required. A future consent passes the sprachlogisch test as a present utterance cannot, because with a future utterance it does not matter that all the words in the sentence cannot be said simultaneously. Since the signified is in the future, one can complete the sentence without falsifying it as one moves from word /a/ to word /b/ and word /a/ ceases to be present: ‘Cum ergo cum verbis de futuro sit consensus 12 13

Fol. 259vb ; see Hudson, ‘Emergence of the 267 Articles’, p. 690.

Snappe’s Formulary and Other Records, ed. by H. E. Salter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 129–30.

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compossibilis […] quomodo licet verba illa frustrare per verba sequentia de praesenti, quae non sunt tantae efficaciae?’ (Therefore, since consent is compatible with words in the future tense […], how can it be legitimate to render void those words by words following in the present tense, which are not of so much efficacy?) Wyclif further adds that sexual consummation as confirming marriage, or the custom of solemnization by the priest at the church door, are both further instances of sinful, false, and nugatory (non)-signs of what constitutes true marriage, the consent of souls.14 At this point, it is worth recalling briefly that Wyclif’s discussion of the sacrament of marriage goes directly against standard medieval legal consensus as the following passage from Gratian’s Decretum makes clear: duobus modis dicitur fides, pactionis et consensus. Si aliquis alicui mulieri fidem fecerit pactionis, non debet aliam ducere. Si aliam duxerit, penitentiam debet agere de fide mentita: maneat tamen cum illa, quam duxit. Non enim rescindi debet tantum sacramentum. Si autem fecerit fidem consensus, non licet aliam ducere. Si autem duxerit, dimittet eam, et adherebit priori. (II. causa 27. q. 2. c. 51)15 (Faith is expressed in two ways: by means of an agreement or contract, or through consent. If someone were to give [his] faith to some woman by means of an agreement / marriagecontract, he must not lead another [woman to the altar]. If he were to do so, he must do penance for giving his faith falsely; nevertheless, he should remain with her whom he led [to the altar]. Such a sacrament must not be annulled. But if he were to have given his faith through consent, he may not lead another [to the altar]. If he were to do so, he should dismiss her, and stay with the first [woman].)

Wyclif’s startling, and casual, overturning of a standard legal consensus is, in the Trialogus, premised on a particular kind of polemical discourse. As usual, he draws on substantial, diverse, and frequently very complex traditions of philosophical, in particular of logico-linguistic, thought. However, he does so, as is habitually the case with his later writings, in texts which fall outside the generic conventions of scholastic products, on an interface between rigorous philosophical investigation and wide-ranging reformist polemic and anticlerical propaganda. The sacrament of marriage was always a problematic one: as Irène Rosier-Catach has pointed out, discussions, both amongst jurists and amongst theologians, gave rise to a whole range of widely divergent interpretations of its mode of operation or efficacy.16 14 See Phronesis’s entire speech in Trialogus, ed. by G. Lechler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1869), pp. 322–24. 15

Corpus iuris canonici, ed. by A. Friedberg, 2 vols (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879–81), I, col. 1078.

16

Irène Rosier-Catach, La Parole efficace: signe, rituel, sacré (Paris: Seuil, 2004), pp. 324–39.

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What Wyclif does in the Trialogus is to make a selection of various opinions on intention vis-à-vis verbal enunciation, on the complexities introduced by having two participants, on the relative validities of de futuro and de praesenti contracts, on what and how performative utterances signify, and forge them into an allusive, compressed, almost wholly unannotated but polemically coherent critique of ecclesiastical authority and socio-legal practice. Opinions and conclusions, therefore, which make a particular kind of sense when proferred scholastice in the context of tightly constructed linguistic–legal–theological discussion, assume a rather different valence in the context of a polemical trialogue, where Phronesis’s authoritative rulings are emphatically not couched in an academic idiom of structured argument and sequential analysis. Williel Thomson praised the Trialogus as ‘by all odds the most readable!’17 of Wyclif’s later productions, an opinion recently endorsed by Stephen Lahey who describes the work as ‘refreshingly free of the apparatus of formal argument’, intended for the instruction of the educated laity.18 What the educated or not-so-educated laity would have made of the marriage discussion is quite another question. Wyclif himself seems to indicate that the trialogic form was chosen by him as a concession to a wider, presumably nonacademic readership: Cum locutio ad personam multis plus complacet quam locutio generalis, et mens multorum qui afficiuntur singularibus, ex tali locutione acuitur, videri posset multis utilis quidam Trialogus, ubi primo tanquam Alithia solidus philosophus loqueretur, secundo infidelis captiosus tanquam Pseustis objiceret, et tertio subtilis theologus et maturus Phronesis decideret veritatem.19 (Since ad personam speech pleases many people more than general speech, and the minds of many who are influenced and affected by particulars, are whetted and sharpened by such speech, it seems that a Trialogue could be useful to many people, where first, as it were, would speak Alithia, the sound philosopher; second, as it were, would object the deceptive infidel Pseustis; and third, the subtle and mature theologian Phronesis would decide the truth.)

There are similar suggestions in Wyclif’s comments on his intended audience in the late so-called ‘sermons’. Sermones rudes ad populum is how the prefatory note to the first group of sermons describes them, and Anne Hudson has clarified how, throughout the Sunday gospel set of sermons as well as the sanctorale, ‘there is a 17 Williel Thomson, The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf: An Annotated Catalog (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), p. 79. 18

Stephen Lahey, John Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 28, 52.

19

Wyclif, Trialogus, ed. by Lechler, p. 38.

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consciousness of a possible, if not sole, congregation whose theological competence might be limited and whose attention might have to be retained by explanation: dilatanda est materia sermonis secundum quod expedit populo audienti is a typical observation’. Nevertheless, these sermons cover topics, often at a high level of allusive complexity and sophistication, such as necessity, predestination, the identification of Christ with his members, the Trinity, the intellect and the affect, topics which, as Hudson dryly comments, ‘seem unlikely [...] to keep the sympathy of a Lutterworth congregation’.20 Wyclif’s later work — of which the Trialogus passage discussing the sacrament of marriage is typical — and the various papal, episcopal, academic, and conciliar responses to it, point towards what seems to be emerging on a pan-European basis in these late medieval decades as a peculiarly new problematic: the role played by ideas, analyses, and methods derived from a particular kind of scholastic endeavour, yet disanchored or liberated from their appropriate academic contexts, conventions, and assumptions, in an extramural sphere of religio-political conflict with direct and indirect social impact. English theology had by the first half of the fourteenth century already achieved international fame (or notoriety) as sensationally avantgarde in its use of daring new methods; and the subtilitates anglicanae were from mid-century onwards thought of as characteristic of the new theologia anglicana, and had a major impact on late medieval thought in continental Europe.21 Logic, the philosophy of language, mathematical physics, and theology came together in a particularly heady mixture (and we should note that both Oxford 267 and Konstanz 58 are careful in their listing of philosophical errors). Wyclif emerges

20

Anne Hudson, ‘Wyclif’s Latin Sermons: Questions of Form, Date and Audience’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, 68 (2001), 223–48 (pp. 233–34) (article repr. in Hudson, Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings, chap. VI). 21

This is a very large subject; see, for example, John E. Murdoch, ‘Subtilitates Anglicanae in Fourteenth-Century Paris: John of Mirecourt and Peter Ceffons’, in Machaut’s World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, ed. by M. P. Cosman and B. Chandler (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1978), pp. 51–86; English Logic in Italy in the 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. by Alfonso Maierù (Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1982); William Courtenay, ‘The Role of English Thought in the Transformation of University Education in the Late Middle Ages’, in Rebirth, Reform and Resilience: Universities in Transition 1300–1700, ed. by James M. Kittelson and Pamela J. Transue (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), pp. 103–62; John M. Fletcher, ‘Some Unusual Aspects of the English Medieval Universities and the Relation of this to Certain Materials used in the Faculty of Arts’, in Manuels, programmes de cours et techniques d’enseignement dans les universités médiévales, ed. by Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve: Université Catholique de Louvain, 1994), pp. 371–83.

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from within this late medieval English milieu, and habitually uses its tools and methods; indeed, they are fundamental to the way he thinks. But he simultaneously challenges their meaning, not only by critiquing them, but also by putting them to the service of an increasingly radical programme of reform (or should we say revolution?) in an extraordinary range of texts — from the relatively uncontentious early logical handbooks to generically unclassifiable polemical-philosophicaltheological treatises as well as the so-called ‘sermons’ deriving from the very last years of his life, when he was in exile from Oxford at Lutterworth. This massive textual output is of course inseparable from Wyclif’s identity as a ‘public intellectual’ — a phrase recently given currency in Anglophone scholarship by Daniel Hobbins in his work on Jean Gerson — defined as ‘the theologian as controversialist, concerned with issues of public morality, always ready to give his opinion on current popular topics and eager to reach a large audience […]. The idea of a public intellectual embraces the new cultural reality of the late medieval schoolman […]: his mastery of a set of important texts, his stature in the world beyond the university, his wide and varying interests, his many strategies for reaching a wide public and his apparent success in doing so’.22 Hobbins sees Gerson as the epitome of the public intellectual; however, much of what he identifies as characteristic of such an intellectual applies equally, and somewhat earlier, and far more problematically, to Wyclif. In the latter’s case, this identity was complicated and radicalized by his academic and not-so-academic followers, in England as well as in Bohemia, and their substantial and varied Latin and vernacular output, not just in the fields of biblical translation, commentary, and patristics, but also in philosophical theology, along with reformist polemic and other controversial writings. Vilém Herold’s and František Šmahel’s work over many decades has explored the various close interrelationships between Wyclif’s realist philosophy and that of the Bohemian reformers,23 and in any case, the contemporary perception of a direct line of descent from Wyclif to Hus to figures such as Jerome of Prague (Jeroným Pražský), Peter Payne, and others kept the heresiarch’s ideas 22

Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), pp. 147, 151. 23 See, for example, František Šmahel, ‘Wyclif’s Fortunes in Hussite Bohemia’, in his Die Präger Universität im Mittelalter: gesammelte Aufsätze / The Charles University in the Middle Ages: Selected Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 467–89; his Die hussitische Revolution, II, 788–832; Vilém Herold, ‘Zum Prager philosophischen Wyclifismus’, in Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. by František Šmahel and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (München: Oldenbourg, 1998), pp. 133–46; and his many papers on the subject in the various volumes of The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice (see below n. 38).

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very much in scandalous public view. Daniel Hobbins has proposed that England, in its association with logical subtlety, served as ‘a foil for Gerson in thinking about sound theology’ in his lifelong endeavour to postulate a new ideal of scholarship, both for the learned and the laity.24 Zénon Kaluza had earlier gone further in suggesting that what Gerson was combating were not the abuses of his colleagues or the errors of students, but a type of theology, a style of thought, ‘un style de penser’, represented by English theologians.25 Gerson was of course one of the foremost castigators of Wycliffite and Hussite ideas at Konstanz. One could develop Kaluza’s important insights further and suggest that what Gerson — and, we may add, Arundel, in the academic detail of the Constitutions — were combating was not only ‘un style de penser’ per se, but also, inseparably, the wider implications of such a style of thought when it found its most provocative expressions in a public, extramural domain. In England and Bohemia, Wyclif’s thought gave rise to an unprecedented body of textual output in the vernacular languages (as also in Latin) — from works which attempt to translate highly complex eucharistic semiotic theory and logic into English, at the learned end of the spectrum,26 to pieces with a colourful propagandist dimension such as Nicholas of Dresden’s Tabulae veteris et novi coloris at the other end27 — and thereby fundamentally reshaped the religio-intellectual landscapes of these cultures. Recent scholarship has underlined the complex negotiations of their public roles that both Hus and Jerome of Prague undertook in their different ways; in the case of Hus,

24

Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print, p. 13.

25

Zénon Kaluza, Les Querelles doctrinales à Paris: nominalistes et réalistes aux confins du XIV e et du XV e siècles (Bergamo: Lubrina, 1988), p. 45. 26

For example, the Wycliffite tract De oblacione iugis sacrificii, in The Works of a Lollard Preacher, ed. by Hudson, pp. 157–256; for discussion, see my ‘Wycliffite Affiliations: Some Intellectual-Historical Perspectives’, in Wycliffite Controversies, ed. by Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). 27

Howard Kaminsky has described the Tabulae as ‘the highest stage of the passage of Wyclifism into propaganda, so stark and simple that it could be embodied in pictures to be carried in street demonstrations’: A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 40. The Tabulae contrasted extensive citations from the decretals and the glosses on canon law (as representative of the corrupt Roman Church) with citations from the New Testament, the Fathers and some later authorities (as representative of the ecclesia primitiva); these were then supplemented with antithetical illustrations: for example, Christ carrying his cross versus the Pope riding his horse. See ‘Master Nicholas of Dresden, The Old Color and the New: Selected Works Contrasting the Primitive Church and the Roman Church’, ed. and trans. by Howard Kaminsky and others, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 55 (1965), 3–93.

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through what has been described as an effortless ability to move between theological-scholastic, canon-legal, exegetical-catechetic, and apocalyptic-prophetic discourses, as well as between apologetic, polemical and propagandist genres; in the case of Jerome, described recently by František Šmahel as a ‘non-conformist philosopher’, through a sustained effort to involve extramural social networks as pressure-groups in university debates in Prague as well as through a life-long polemical peregrinatio in defence of Wycliffite theses through various centres of learning (including Paris, Heidelberg, Vienna, Kraków and Lithuania).28 It could further be argued that this reshaping of the religio-intellectual landscape elicited institutional recognitions and responses which found a particularly resonant and bloody culmination in the multiple executions at the Council of Konstanz. Commenting on the judicial procedures at Konstanz, Jürgen Miethke has pointed out that: ‘Ein erster wichtiger Punkt, der das gesamte Verfahren in Konstanz auszeichnet, ist die Aufhebung des Unterschieds zwischen der Behandlung populären Irrglaubens und gelehrter Häresie, wie er im wesentlichen allgemein bis zur Mitte des 14. Jahrhunderts für die Behandlung theologischer Dispute gegolten hatte’.29 While one must not exaggerate the clarity of the distinction between popular heresy and advanced theological controversy dealing in the potentially heretical, it is worth recalling, as Thijssen has pointed out, that medieval theologians did attempt, with varying degrees of success, to make a ‘distinction between

28

Pavlína Rychterová, ‘Die Verbrennung von Johannes Hus als europäisches Ereignis: Öffentlichkeit und Öffentlichkeiten am Vorabend der hussitischen Revolution’, forthcoming in Politische Öffentlichkeit im Spätmittelalter, ed. by Martin Kintzinger and Bernd Schneidmüller (Ostfildern: Thorbecke); R . R. Betts, ‘Jerome of Prague’, in his Essays in Czech History (London: Athlone, 1969), pp. 195–235; the introduction to Magistri Hieronymi de Praga: Quaestiones, polemica, epistulae, ed. by František Šmahel and Gabriel Silagi, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 222 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), p. xx; for the impressive range of souces, biblical, patristic, and scholastic, drawn on by Jerome, see this edition, pp. 285–305. Jerome’s main Wycliffite sources are De ente praedicamentali, De materia et forma, De universalibus, De ydeis, Quaestiones logicae, and the Trialogus. 29

Jürgen Miethke, ‘Die Prozesse in Konstanz gegen Jan Hus und Hieronymus von Prag — ein Konflikt unter Kirechenreformern?’, in Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation, ed. by Šmahel and Müller-Luckner, pp. 147–67 (p. 165) (‘A first important point that distinguishes the entire proceedings at Konstanz is the abolition of the difference between the treatment of popular heresy and learned heresy, as it had obtained in essentials for the handling of theological debate until the middle of the fourteenth century’). Note that Betts had earlier described the 1410 Vienna proceedings against Jerome ‘as an example of an examination for heresy in a court which was a curious mixture of an archbishop’s consistory and a university court of discipline’, ‘Jerome of Prague’, p. 211.

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manifest and explicit heresies and so-called implicit heresies, that is, heresies that are still being discussed by biblical scholars’.30 Konstanz, however, seems to have witnessed a collapse of the (perhaps never fully codified but nevertheless in practice) received boundaries between academic censure and inquisitorial enquiry into heresy — particularly visible in the cases of Hus and Jerome — and this explains, according to Miethke, why Hus’s repeated attempts to explain and defend his condemned ideas through ‘eine Disputation in universitärem Stil’ met with failure: ‘für eine Verteidigung solcher Irrtumsreihen ließ der Rahmen des eingespurten Ketzerei-Verfolgungs-Verfahrens keinen Platz’.31 This also goes some way to addressing the point raised by Anthony Kenny that I referred to earlier: the multiple condemnation at Konstanz, under a global anathema, of Wycliffite propositions which were not all regarded by the assembled ecclesiastics themselves as heretical or even erroneous. What we are witnessing here, I propose, is a profoundly troubling and problematic collapse of certain important discursive distinctions and boundaries, so that the varied expressions of socio-religio-political dissidence become inextricably bound up with highly abstract analytic ‘elitist’ discourses in philosophical theology. This in turn results in the removal — or at the very least a blurring — of certain kinds of received procedural distinctions and boundaries, the always problematic domain of the academic censure of ‘false’ teaching being decisively incorporated into the domain of the prosecution of ‘heretics’. In his analysis of Parisian academic disputes and censures in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Thijssen points out ‘how the judges and defendants were involved in a complicated hermeneutical game’ vis-à-vis the intention behind a controversial statement and ‘prout sonant’ [as they sound] meanings;32 the Konstanz authorities, on the contrary, seem to have been determined in the case of Hus not to enter into these discursive labyrinths. They 30

Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, p. 110.

31

Miethke, ‘Die Prozesse in Konstanz’, p. 167 (‘for a defence of such a list of errors the framework of the conventional process of heresy prosecution left no room’). Hus’s apparently unshakeable belief that the Council would genuinely give him the opportunity publicly to defend his theses has attracted much attention from scholars. JiÍi KejÍ, in his analysis of Hus’s trial, ascribes this faith to his naivety: Die Causa Johannes Hus und das Prozess-recht der Kirche, trans. from the Czech by Walter Annuß (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 2005), passim; Rychterová instead sees this faith as symptomatic of Hus’s belief in the university-style disputation as a force for the building up of a public sphere of discussion. The council fathers, on the contrary, were more keen on forcing from Hus a recognition of the sovereignty of dogmatic and canon-legal interpretation, and with it an acknowledgement of a hierarchization of discourses: Rychterová, ‘Die Verbrennung von Johannes Hus’. 32

Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, pp. 30–31.

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nevertheless made the point very clearly in his condemnation that Hus had violated, and had done so many times, important discursive decorums: […] praesertim condemnationi scholasticae ipsorum articulorum Ioannis Wicleff factae pluries in universitate Pragensi cum suis complicibus in scholis et in praedicationibus publice resistendo, ac ipsum Ioannem Wicleff virum catholicum et doctorem evangelicum, in favorem eius doctrinae, coram multitudine cleri et populi declaravit: certos etiam articulos infrascriptos et plures alios, merito damnabiles, tamquam catholicos asseruit et publicavit, qui in libris ipsius Ioannis Huss et opusculis notorie continentur. ([…] especially by publicly resisting in the schools and in sermons, together with his accomplices, the condemnation in scholastic form of the said articles of John Wyclif which has been made many times at the University of Prague, and he has declared the said John Wyclif to be a catholic man and an evangelical doctor, thus supporting his teaching, before a multitude of clergy and people. He has asserted and published certain articles listed below and many others, which are condemned and which are, as is well known, contained in the books and pamphlets of the said John Hus.)33

The particular kind of discursive conflict inaugurated by Wyclif — on the contentious and explosive interface between academic philosophy and theology and their associated methodologies on the one hand, and reformist politics of various degrees of radicalism on the other — was thus further consolidated and extended by Hus and Jerome of Prague. Such conflict continued into the 1420s and 1430s in Bohemia, under the auspices of various intellectuals including, prominently, Peter Payne, and fundamentally informed negotiations at the Council of Basel (1431–49), where the ecclesiastical authorities had finally to accede to Bohemian demands to be allowed to defend their theses (with the extensive panoply of scholastic debate — careful scrutiny of authorities, large theological apparatus, exchange of speeches in writing, etc.) in full public session of the Council.34 Indeed, Payne’s career (as also Hus’s and Jerome’s, and in England, Pecock’s) was characterized by an abiding conviction that public philosophical debate and counter-debate in scholastic fashion could and should influence and shape extramural ethical and religio-political positions.35 It is worth

33

Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. by Tanner, p. 427 (italics mine).

34

Šmahel, Die hussitische Revolution, III, 1560–91; Ernest F. Jacob, ‘The Bohemians at the Council of Basel, 1433’, in Prague Essays, ed. by R . W. Seton-Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 81–123 (pp. 83–84); Jacob comments on the circulation of copies of Wyclif and Netter amongst the debaters, p. 92. 35

See William Robert Cook, ‘Peter Payne: Theologian and Diplomat of the Hussite Revolution’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1971); František Šmahel,

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noting in this context that the English delegation at the Council of Basel took considerable trouble to try to secure (unsuccessfully) Payne’s extradition to England on charges of heresy and treason, in parallel with their principal mission of assisting in the return of the Bohemians to the fold of the universal Church without any of the concessions that the Council was then engaged in negotiating.36 The fact that Wyclif’s ideas continued to play a foundational role in these negotiations, with yet another list of twenty-eight propositions gathered largely from his writings by Cardinal Cesarini being put to the Bohemians for their opinion at one point,37 along with the central role played by Peter Payne, must only have deepened English apprehensions of the abiding international visibility of England’s Oxonian heresiarch and his refractory celebrity progeny. Indeed, England continued to bid for Payne’s extradition till 1438–40 (though with what degree of seriousness is not entirely clear), an unsurprising persistence given England’s felt need to show her orthodoxy, and given the pan-European complex of fear, paranoia, suspicion, and violence, premised on what was seen as an unprecedented breakdown of discursive and authoritative boundaries, that coloured perceptions of the Bohemian scandal in the second quarter of the fifteenth century.38 Religious life in England in the decades ‘after Arundel’ therefore demands further nuanced study in light of these aspects of the complex and persistent legacy of Wyclif — national as well as international; intellectual as well as procedural/ institutional. In ‘purely’ intellectual terms, Oxford University, in a fashion of

‘Magister Peter Payne: Curriculum vitae eines englischen Nonkonformisten’, in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch–hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert: Akten der Tagung ÖtisheimSchönenberg, 2. bis 4. Oktober 2003, ed. by Albert de Lange and Kathrin Utz Tremp (UbstadtWeiher: Regionalkultur, 2006), pp. 241–60; see also his entry on Peter Payne in ODNB. 36

For details of the heavyweight English delegation and its interventions in Basel, see A. N. E. D. Schofield, ‘The First English Delegation to the Council of Basel’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 12 (1961), 167–96; his ‘An English Version of some Events in Bohemia during 1434’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 42 (1964), 312–31; and his ‘England and the Council of Basel’. Peter Partridge, an Oxonian formerly of Wycliffite sympathies, played a major role in the proceedings against Peter Payne in March and April 1433; see Jeremy Catto’s entry on Partridge in ODNB. 37 38

Jacob, ‘The Bohemians at the Council of Basel’, p. 86; Cook, ‘Peter Payne’, pp. 271–72.

For contemporary English responses to the Bohemian crisis (Netter, Gascoigne, Pecock) see Michael Van Dussen, ‘Bohemia in English Religious Controversy before the Henrician Reformation’, in The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice, Volume 7. Papers from the Sixth International Symposium, 2006, ed. by Zden k V. David and David R . Holeton (Prague: Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2009), pp. 42–60; also available online at: .

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which Arundel would no doubt have approved, seems not to have recovered its former pre-eminence; from being in the vanguard of European speculative thought — in terms of ideas, of methods, and of daring interdisciplinarity — its thinkers seem to have receded into a pusillanimous compilator-ish unoriginality, as Jeremy Catto suggests in this volume, preferring instead, as Vincent Gillespie and others explain, to focus their formidable energies in the pursuit of ‘orthodox reform’.39 The methodological debates and the growing conflict of different schools of thought that occupied centre-stage in the continental Wegestreit do not seem overtly to have crossed the Channel.40 Of course, Arundel’s own local efforts at censorship and his energetic interference in university affairs no doubt played a part in this apparent constriction of academic intellectuality,41 but it will not do

39

On the larger European context of late medieval reformist discourses, see Christopher M. Bellitto, ‘The Reform Context of the Great Western Schism’, in A Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378–1417), ed. by Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 303–31. 40

See in particular Maarten Hoenen, ‘Nominalismus als universitäre Spekulationskontrolle’, Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales, 73 (2006), 349–74; also his ‘Via antiqua and via moderna in the Fifteenth Century: Doctrinal, Institutional, and Church Political Factors in the Wegestreit’, in The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400–1700, ed. by Russell Friedman and Lauge Nielsen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), pp. 9–36. 41

Note here the odd case of Master Richard Fleming of Oxford who was accused in 1409 of maintaining a Wycliffite proposition in a scholastic disputation. ‘The matter was brought before the committee of twelve which had been appointed by the Convocation of Canterbury to keep an eye on “heretical pravity” in Oxford. According to Fleming’s version, six of the committee declared Fleming’s proposition to be false, one of the six adding that it was not absolutely false, but only if the terms were used in the common sense. According to the statement of the University authorities, which they put forward subsequently, no one condemned Fleming’s proposition absolutely, but they said it was false “ad communem sensum quem termini ut communiter pretendunt,” and that the committee only made the observation for the good of Fleming’ (Snappe’s Formulary, ed. by Salter, pp. 96–97). Fleming appealed to Congregation and the King against this judgement and the case continued, and seems finally to have been resolved amicably. Indeed, Fleming later sat on the committee drawing up the list of 267 errors from Wyclif’s works, and in 1430 founded Lincoln College, Oxford, whose anti-Wycliffite purpose is declared in the original statutes. However, a letter from Archbishop Arundel to the University prohibiting Fleming’s appeal survives; it seems to be a case where the normal process of academic censure gets complicated by an archiepiscopal intervention. Arundel’s letter is a curious specimen, full of inflated anger at and contempt for what he describes as Fleming’s puerile presumption: he is described as one of the ‘elingues pueri’ who have scarcely mastered the ‘puerilia rudimenta’ but who nevertheless do not fear publicly to assert and to hold and defend in schools the condemned conclusions (p. 121). The Archbishop proceeds to make the point that Fleming might not appeal to Congregation, only to

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to exaggerate that role in a time of various novel and significant internationalisms. Such internationalisms could be both enabling and disabling, sometimes simultaneously so. For instance, the very anxieties about the destabilizing implications of academic methodologies, especially those of an analytic and sceptical bent, when extended recklessly into the domain of the scriptural, the sacramental, and the ecclesiological, as evidenced flagrantly, to contemporary conservative perceptions, in the Wycliffite-Hussite debates and in the Bohemian debacle, may have fostered the efflorescence of alternative religio-literary creativities in England (poetry, hagiography, affectivity), as several papers in this volume suggest. To such anxieties, Reginald Pecock would not unreasonably have appeared as the ultimate negative exemplum, to be suppressed as comprehensively as possible, though one must bear in mind that oblique rationalist negotiations of theological cruces seem to have offered a way forward for some English writers (as brought out, for example, by Karen Winstead in her treatment of Capgrave and Bokenham, and by Tamás Karáth in relation to The Court of Sapience). In this context, we may recall Sheila Lindenbaum’s comments in this volume on the strategic relationship of the London rectors (other, that is, than Pecock) to academic discourse, and what she calls their ‘infantilizing’ intellectual programme which yet, viewed from another angle, may be seen to constitute a brave attempt at redefining theology in new ways, guiding it away from logic into grammatical and rhetorical directions, including those we have come to associate with Christian or ecclesiastical ‘humanism’. It is salutary to recall here James Simpson’s suggestion that it is time that we moved to a more synthetic view of the period, less invested in defining conflicting positions than in understanding how given positions are interconnected, a point also underlined implicitly by Alexander Russell, in his explication of the hesitant and conflicted engagement with conciliarism on the part of English churchmen, and by the many papers in this volume which draw our attention to the enigmatic evidence of late medieval manuscripts and their apparently promiscuous ‘hospitality’ — to borrow Ryan Perry’s and Stephen Kelly’s term — to texts espousing what to us may appear to be irreconcilable ideological positions. I have suggested elsewhere that the concerns of early to mid-fifteenth-century European thinkers who align themselves on opposite sides of doctrinal and other divides seem yet to coalesce in a fundamental anxiety about the (in)adequacy of

the Convocation of the province of Canterbury. The case evidently formed part of the series of confrontations between Oxford and the Archbishop over intellectual jurisdiction and authority, on which subject see Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford’, in HUO, II, 231–53.

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logico-linguistic discourses to deal with God — and of course there is no getting away from language in a religion of the Book.42 This point needs further nuancing. The era of the papal schism witnessed a massive expansion in the role of academia in international politics (accompanied by rapidly deepening international links, both formal and informal, between universities), with a concomitant boost to academics’ sense of their own professional prerogatives as public intellectuals, for all the reasons so clearly outlined in Robert Swanson’s classic study.43 This was equally an era when intellectual experimentation and speculative science and philosophy, especially with an innovative interdisciplinary edge, began increasingly to be part of larger extramural discourses of immediate topical or controversial import. In England, the latter part of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries are informed by this basic problematic, brought to a peculiarly intransigent acumination by Wyclif’s vast and idiosyncratic œuvre and given a radical international political dimension by his English and Bohemian followers. The wider repercussions of this process, already in the headlines in the 1370s and 1380s and continuing to be so well into the epoch of Basel more than half a century later, are as yet insufficiently understood. The present volume bears splendid witness to the richness and diversity of current scholarship into English cultural history in the immediate aftermath of the efforts of Wyclif’s arch-castigator, Archbishop Arundel, to return England in general and Oxford University in particular to their putative former purity in the faith; however, more remains to be done on the perhaps occasionally repressed but certainly never satisfactorily elided, possibly ‘traumatic’, legacy of England’s heresiarch.44 Such a legacy

42

Ghosh, ‘Wycliffite Affiliations’.

43

Swanson, Universities, Academics and the Great Schism; see also Angskar Frenken, ‘Gelehrte auf dem Konzil: Fallstudien zur Bedeutung und Wirksamkeit der Universitätsangehörigen auf dem Konstanzer Konzil’, in Die Konzilien von Pisa (1409), Konstanz (1414–1418), und Basel (1431–1449): Institution und Personen, ed. by Heribert Müller and Johannes Helmrath (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2007), pp. 107–47. 44

It may be worth noting here that Konstanz 58 was transmitted back to England in the papers of Bishop Thomas Polton; Blackfriars–Prague 45 had an illustrious afterlife as part of Pope Martin V’s bull of 1418, Inter cunctas pastoralis (which also included a list of thirty condemned Hussite propositions), addressed to all archbishops, bishops, and inquisitors of heretical depravity; and there is a further English list of sixty-one Wycliffite propositions, of uncertain date, included in the Junior Proctor’s book in the archives of Oxford University. On Inter cunctas pastoralis, see the discussion in Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘Lollard Inquisitions: Due and Undue Process’, in The Devil, Heresy and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, ed. by Alberto Ferreiro (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 279–303 (pp. 296–300), though his conclusions regarding the legality or otherwise of

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encompasses the domains of what has been traditionally known as the ‘history of ideas’ or the ‘history of philosophy’, as also the social and political history of institutional forms, legal-disciplinary procedures, and extramural religio-intellectual dissidence and observance.45 The posterity of Wyclif’s thought thus demands further interdisciplinary research in both philosophy and in social and institutional history.46 Even the basic contours of this legacy are yet to be charted, now that the old myths of the morning-star of the reformation, and suchlike, have had their day, and now that academic research has definitively moved beyond the confessional or indeed nationalist convictions of Wycliffite and Hussite scholars. The fragmentary analyses that we are beginning to have suggest, however, that much of interest lies ahead.

inquisitorial trials are debateable; on Polton and the list of 61, see Hudson, ‘Emergence of the 267 Articles’, pp. 693–95. 45

And also, of course, book history, to which subject Anne Hudson’s collected papers in Studies in the Transmission of Wyclif’s Writings constitute a ground-breaking contribution. 46

An intriguing subject, for example, is offered by the so-called quarrel over future contingents in Leuven in the 1460s, in which Wyclif’s necessitarian ideas, as encapsulated (simplistically) at Konstanz, once again played a role, and in which apparent philosophical arcana were shown once again to be of significant political and authoritative consequence: see Léon Baudry, La Querelle de futurs contingents: Louvain 1465–1475. Textes inédits (Paris: Vrin, 1950).

‘A CLERKE SCHULDE HAVE IT OF KINDE FOR TO KEPE COUNSELL ’ Nicholas Watson

I

n this concluding paper, I wish to present a little-known text, Hugh Legat’s In passione domini, a work that is at once supportive of a new model of fifteenthcentury English religiosity, whilst offering a prism for viewing the ‘orthodox reform’ explored by many papers in this collection. It shows Legat to be an author not only deeply concerned with proper preaching but indirectly deeply anxious over orthodoxy and its boundaries.

Hugh Legat’s Vernacular Sermon Among the four vernacular items found in a bulky early fifteenth-century codex, Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F.10 (hereafter MS F.10), mainly a collection of Latin sermons for monastic or university auditors, is a long address given on the fifth Sunday in Lent by the St Albans Benedictine, Hugh Legat, on the theme promissionem accipiant vocati (‘lete hem take the biheste that ben clepid’), from Hebrews 9. 15b.1 Legat, a resident at Gloucester College, Oxford for some years

1

The manuscript, which contains 167 sermons, many by English Benedictines, was compiled over a period of some decades: see Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England, pp. 151–58, which provides further bibliography. Legat’s sermon is edited in Three Middle English Sermons from the Worcester Chapter MS F.10, ed. by Dora M. Grisdale, Texts and Monographs, 5 (Kendal: Titus Wilson for the School of English Language in the University of Leeds, 1939), pp. 7–8. I have silently corrected the edition against manuscript images kindly made available to me by Dr David Morrison, Cathedral Archivist. I have also normalized thorn, yogh, and variations between u/v, u/w, i/j, and i/y, expanded ampersands, and from time to time amended obvious errors (in square brackets in text).

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after the turn of the century, was among the most learned of the humanist scholarmonks to participate in what James G. Clark has termed the St Albans ‘monastic renaissance’.2 Bachelor of theology, bibliophile, pedagogue, co-compiler of a respected epistolary formulary, and author of commentaries on Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae and Jean de Hauville’s Architrenius, he was sufficiently admired as a preacher to be asked to deliver a (lost) vernacular sermon at the close of the triennial meeting of the General Chapter of the English Benedictines in Northampton in July 1420 and to have this second English occasional piece, one of a relatively small number of individual vernacular sermons to survive from the period, set down with its title, Sermo Hugonis Legat in passione domini.3 Legat was far from being a major player in the religious politics of the early fifteenth century. Indeed, despite his reputation at Oxford, he was not even an important figure at St Albans. Rusticated to the dependent priory of Redbourn on the election of the brilliant young abbot, Thomas Wheathampstead, in 1420, the year of the Northampton sermon, he was sent to Tynemouth, far in the north, seven years later. Nonetheless, In passione domini is one of the more intriguing vernacular theological writings to survive from the twenty or so years after the promulgation of Arundel’s Constitutions, and it is around this little-studied work that my remarks about the topics treated in this volume revolve.4 Even more than its three vernacular colleagues in MS F.10, In passione domini is a bravura performance.5 Formally patterned as a ‘scholastic’ sermon, its thema divided into three principales each of which is subdivided into three membra, it

2

Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans. For Legat’s career, see pp. 226–34; he was likely born in the early 1380s. 3

For the 1420 Northampton sermon, see Pantin, Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters, II (1933), 97. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans, p. 233, further attributes to Legat a Latin sermon in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 706 (see Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England, p. 583, item 31). The title In passione domini derives, of course, from its liturgical occasion: the Fifth Sunday in Lent is Passion as well as Palm Sunday. 4

Since many sermons in MS F.10 reached Worcester by way of Oxford, In passione domini may date from between Legat’s inception as bachelor of theology c. 1412 and his return to St Albans c. 1420. The latest plausible date for the sermon is 1427. 5

The other Middle English sermons in MS F.10 form a cluster at fols 43 r –54 r (for the incomplete third sermon, see Wenzel, Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England, p. 609, item 15). The first two date from the papacy of Boniface IX (1389–1404): see Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 24, 53.

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draws on a remarkable range of learning and styles:6 from its introductory allegorization of God’s covenant with Abraham to its Boethian evocation of angels’ song, and the ‘daunsinge […] nauth onlich in diatessaron but also in diapente and eke in diapason’ of the blessed in heaven, which quotes from that abstruse authority, the Celestial Hierarchies of ‘the highe divin, Dionisius’.7 Now we listen, as the Father, in an impassioned speech to his Son ‘on the cros’, invokes a major vernacular soteriological topos by guaranteeing salvation to Abraham’s ‘eiris’ through the ‘chartier of thy passioun’ that is the skin of Christ, ‘writen’ like ink on parchment ‘wit the rede blod of thy body’. Now, we are treated to a scientific description of the primal creation, when God ‘made a mater, a lumpe, withoutun schap, withoutun any forme, wherein were conteineyd bothe heven and helle, erthe and eire and al this worlde’, before the wicked angels fell and humankind was created to take their place. Here, the preacher refers colloquially to Robin Hood’s bow and to that legendary horse, ‘blind Bayard’. There, he alludes learnedly to the ‘quidite’ of angelic bodies, which are so ‘simple in composiciun’ that they eternally ‘make […] mery melodye about God […] withoute any pipe or artery material (any physical windpipe or respiratory system)’.8 Most strikingly, and in common with all its vernacular manuscript colleagues, the sermon makes much use of classical allusions, showcasing Legat’s humanistic studies at Oxford.9 At the partition of the thema, an exemplum about how the

6

The divisions of the sermon are marked in the manuscript and noted in the sermon itself. This is not true of the other vernacular sermons in the manuscript. 7 Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, p. 16. The passage combines a Dionysian account of angelic form with terminology from Boethius’s De musica. The earliest examples of ‘diatessaron’, ‘diapente’ and ‘diapason’ in the Middle English Dictionary are all from John Trevisa, writing in the 1380s. According to the online Repertorium of Middle English Sermons, only one other Middle English sermon, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 96, fol. 67r, is yet known to cite Dionysius. See [accessed 25 April 2010]. 8

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 2, 4, 8, 16. On the formlessness of the primal creation, see Peter Lombard’s Sententiae, II.ii.1.5 (Bonaventura, Opera omnia, 10 vols (Rome: Ad Claras Aquas, 1882–1902), II (1885), pp. 52–54). On the ‘charter’ topos, see Emily Steiner, Documentary Culture and the Making of Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). The earliest recorded Middle English uses of ‘pipe’ and ‘artery’ in these senses are again by John Trevisa, writing during the 1380s. 9

Compare the first of these (Grisdale’s Second Sermon), which makes fun of its own classicizing tendencies, before quoting Valerius Maximus and Cicero: ‘I rede in haly write – I sey noght at I red in Ovidie, noither in Oras; vor, the laste time that I was her, ich was blamyd, of som men word, because that I began my sermon wit a poisy’ (p. 22). Grisdale’s Third Sermon cites

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‘greate Emperour Octoviani’ punished or rewarded his subjects according to their three contrasting responses to his laws co-ordinates the three membra that structure each of the sermon’s principales. Each principalis thus portrays an aspect of a different group of Christians: first, those who ‘withstonde Goddis soondis [sendings, messengers] and his lawes’; second, those who ‘meklich take’ them, and; third, those who ‘gladlich resseive’ them. Later, Legat quotes ‘the grete philosophre Plutarcus’ (on the palm tree), ‘the grete clerk Virgilius’ (on the pains of hell), and Fulgentius (‘de picturis deorum’), from whom he derives an account of Apollo (Christ), whose bow, harp, and laurel wreath again stand for the punishments and rewards meted out by the divine Octavian, Christ.10 Such authorities are seldom cited elsewhere in Middle English preaching, and the deliberate shimmer of modes and registers their presence creates can be as startling as the metaphysical conceits of Donne or Crashaw.11 At the climax of the second principalis, those who ‘gladlich resseive’ God’s ‘correctiuns’ ascend to heaven to find ‘God in his Godhed’ holding out a corona that has metamorphosed into a ‘chapelet of lory levis that evermore ben grene’, as it might in a baroque ceiling fresco. At the climax of the first principalis, Legat compares Christ’s desiring love for humankind to the desire the shepherd Coridon feels for ‘that schaplich chil Alexis’ in Virgil’s second Eclogue (‘Formosum pastor Coridon ardebat Alexin’), developing the analogy at such length that bucolic language is woven into the account of the passion itself: ‘Quakid evere Criste, oure Coridon, for the love of this Alexis [...] whanne he was nailud, hand and foot, o the cros […] Thus Crist tremelid for the love of Alexis: biholding his modur he wax also pale for his love’.12 Through haunting juxtapositions like these and through patterns of imagery, allusion, pun, and homophony, Legat weaves a rich verbal soundscape of almost symphonic scale and complexity. The bows of Apollo and Robin Hood at once recall each other and gesture towards those who, in their pride, refuse to ‘bowe and bende’ to God’s ‘correctiuns’, or those others who, like the palm tree, ‘noither

Avicenna, ‘Asterlodotus’ (author of Calchidion, a work on magic), the pseudo-Aristotelian Secreta secretorum, Lucan, and, again, Valerius Maximus. 10

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 21, 5, 9, 14, 11, 13.

11

According to the Repertorium of Middle English Sermons, this is the sole sermon in Middle English to cite Virgil or Plutarch; Fulgentius is elsewhere cited once. For the range of authorities cited in a set of contemporary sermons, see the index to A Macaronic Sermon Collection from Late Medieval England, ed. by Horner, pp. 538–44. 12

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 17, 11–12.

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bowith ner bendith for any maner of birdine [burden]’, refusing to allow the devil to ‘breke adoune the bowis’ of their ‘goode dedis’.13 The laurel and the upright palm, trees of victory, recall that other victory tree, the cross — just as all three trees subtly evoke the themes of kingship, conquest, and paradoxical humility associated with Passion or Palm Sunday, the day of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Simply to appreciate these verbal pyrotechnics, it seems, must be a sign of one’s salvation. Sumptuously presented to the astonished ears of Legat’s hearers, the affective response to Christ’s passion, enjoined on all who would receive the promised corona, and enacted in several passages across this hour-long hortatory entertainment, is even less easy than usual to distinguish from overwhelming aesthetic pleasure. *** Like its vernacular colleagues in MS F.10, In passione domini was likely delivered to an urban congregation of sophisticated taste, mainly, but not exclusively, lay, as a one-off, paid performance by a visiting preacher of known virtuosity.14 As a target audience of writers such as Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Christine de Pizan, the auditors of these sermons were increasingly exposed to the European fashion for neoclassicism and had a developing appreciation of the nuances of allusion and style. As at least a potential target audience, too, of works such as Walter Hilton’s On Mixed Life and the anonymous Fervor amoris, such auditors were also becoming used both to the devotional demands of affective spirituality — ‘Deid he nauth [not] on the cros […] al for thy love? Alas, unkinde wrech, what woldist thu more?’ — and to the idea that, even as laypeople, they should aspire

13 14

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 7, 10.

This on internal evidence, from which can be deduced both the lay composition of the addressees and the high rhetorical nature of the occasion. (See also n. 15 below.) Like the second sermon edited by Grisdale, in which the preacher alludes to ‘the laste time that I was her’ (see n. 9), In passione domini is clearly at some distance from the practical provision of pastoral care, as it seems to be from its liturgical occasion. On the topic of Benedictine pastoral preaching, see Patrick J. Horner, ‘Benedictines and Preaching the Pastoralia in Late Medieval England: A Preliminary Inquiry’, in Medieval Monastic Preaching, ed. by Carolyn Muessig (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 279–94; Siegfried Wenzel, ‘Monastic Preaching in the Age of Chaucer’, in The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures, 1989–2005, ed. by Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, and Nicholas Watson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2010), pp. 42–64 (originally published as an independent pamphlet in 1993); see p. 47 on payment for sermons.

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beyond a lowly spiritual state governed by ‘drede of peyne’ (timor servilis) to a desiring love of God (timor filialis), assimilating contemplative practices and spiritual ambitions into the ‘active’ life.15 Although he does issue basic exhortations, enjoining his auditors to confess their sins to their curate ‘ones e the yer at te leste wey’ — a curiously vague injunction to deliver a mere week before Easter — Legat does much to encourage this aspiration on the part of the laity.16 Paying only brief attention to his second category of Christians, those who ‘meklich take’ God’s laws out of fear of damnation, he encourages his hearers to associate themselves, so far as they can, with the third category of those who ‘gladlich resseive’ them, assuring them that thus they can attain, not only salvation, but (in a carefully calibrated promise) ‘the heiyest point of perfectiun that tou maste have [you can attain] in this world’. All they need to do is to love God and rejoice in his ‘soondis and is lawes’, his ‘costoms and his correctiuns’, joyfully receiving whatever he may send.17 The general tone of In passione domini is thus determinedly positive: the sermon is full of assurances of God’s overwhelming mercy, now that ‘al the rigoresenes and te rithwuesnes that God uside e the Olde Testament’ is ‘i-changed into mekenes and to mercy to us that ben under the Newe Testament’, and of expressions of confidence in its auditors.18 Only when Legat speaks of those Christians who ‘withstonde Goddus sondis’ does a less rosy, and rather more puzzling, picture of contemporary Christianity emerge. I quote, here, the sermon’s Primum membrum primi principalis on this topic in its entirety: I sey first that sume ther be that stou{t}lich [obstinately] withstonde Goddus sondis and his lawis; and tat makith [is caused by] pride.

15

On these works, see Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline, esp. pp. 81–97, 28–39.

16

The passage is important for establishing the sermon’s mixed address: ‘Here tho maist se that confessiun is a gret preparatif to forgivenes of thy sinnes. And terfor, as sone as thu art defowlid with any maner filthe of sinne, go to a priest, and with the trewe schrift of mouth wasch it clene away. Loke also that, ones e the yer at te leste wey, thu go to thy curat, thy sovereine that hath cure and keping of thy soule, and schewe to him fullich and clirlich al that evil that thu hast doon that yer, both in general and eke in special; and tanne doost thu as a trewe servant schulde. But loke thane, thu that art a curat or a sovereine or els bothe, o the tother side: whan tho hast i-herd al the liff of thy subjettes, make hem never the worse chere, love hem never the lesse’ (Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, p. 19). 17

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 10, 9, 19.

18

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, p. 15.

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Thou seist weel oftin timis that many man, yif God Almithty sende him a litul tribulatiun, a litul siknes, for his sinnes, anonrith [at once] he stoutlich and proudelich gruchith ayenus [grumbles at] God, and demith [judges] him in his herte unjust and unrithwus to ponesch him o thus wise; and so often timis fallith into blasfemye and afturward into dispit [contempt], thorw the pompe and te pride of his hie [high/arrogant] herte. These maner of men — that tus have lever [rather] breke and toberste than bowe and bende vor to resseive the correctiuns and to soondis of God — schul at to laste, wil they nil they, delfullich [sorrowfully] be driven downe with the dredful dart of everlasting deth. For God seith himself e [in] the Olde Testament, Deuter. 17, ‘Whosever wil nat for pride be obedient to myn ordinaunce and resseive my dette, he schal be ded’, he seith, ‘and damnid, be develis decre that he ches to be rulit by wil he livide e this worlde’. And trulich, it is litul wondur they [though] thow dispise and set at nauth the statutes and te correctiuns of thy soverens here on erth, that tus grevuslich gruchith ayenust to lawis and to ordenaunce of God! Was it never wirse, I watt dar wel say, for a sovereine to chastise his subjettes than it is rith now? And tat bothe e the spiritual side and eke the temperal? For let a man now do never so evel, be never so wrechid, never so unrithty of his livinge, we{l} yet he wil take no chastisinge, no correctiun, he is so obstinat and so stiburne. This maner of folk, be they never so miche schrewis, holt hemself so parfit, so wise and so gret with God that they take hede of non othur man. And tei [if they] faste a day or tweine, they wene [expect] with here fasting to fle up to hevene. And tey have an olde quaier [quire] with a fewe custumes or a few statutis, they teche and preich as boldlich as he that hath go to scole al his life time. And litul wondir is. For, after the comen sawe, ‘ther is non so bolde as is blind Bayard’! Summe, for leudnes and for unkiningnes [lack of skill], preche the previtise [secrets] that schuld not be rehersed in no congregaciun, but onlich in confessiun. For God is forbed that I schulde crye ate cros al that ever I schulde finde writen e my book. For yef I dude I schul make al the world wondur upon my body. And terfor a clerke schulde have it of kinde for to kepe counsell. But tis peple that tis prechith, thow they vound [found] a bole-fot [bull foot)]writen in hir book, trust it wel therto, they wolde tel it forth! And tat is for nothing ellus but wanting of wit and of discreciun. And terfor they schulde not preche to hure pareschon but onlich swiche thing as tey knowe skel upon [have expertise in]: as te Five Wittis, the Seven Dedly Sinnes, the Ten Comaundementis, and swich othur that longen to here estat for to preche of. Othur ther ben that, for a prevy [secret] pride in hir herte, wil take no scripture [sermon text] but tat hem luste for to take, for {Euclide} in his Geometrye, Ptolemee in his Astronomye, and swiche othur, that parauntur [peradventure] knewe never the leeste conclusiun writin in hir bookis. For many {man}, me seith, spekith of Robin Hood that schotte never in his bowe! Thus they damne and deme othur menis bokis, and all for [because] they drawe never the draugh [never drank the draught] of undurstonding in non of hem alle. This pride and tis obstinacye makis many man falle into heresye, for hit makith hem perverte the texte of Holy Writ and wirkin aftur hir owne wille. And terfor they wil not resseive the teching of

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Nicholas Watson Holy Chirch but despise the lawis of oure Lord God and Christes correctiuns set at rith nawth. Trowste tow that tese maner of men be clepid to resseive the bihest of the eritage of hevene? Nay, so God me help! Thei [Although] why so? Quia hec est gens que non audivit vocem domini Dei sui nec accepit disciplinam, Jer. 70: ‘For this {is} a people’, seith God Almithty be the proffit Jeromye, ‘that wolde not hure the vois of hire Lord God, no nor resseive his doctrine and his teching’.19

At a first reading attentive to the general impressions created by tone and vocabulary, it seems as if Legat’s antagonism here must be directed against the same set of familiar enemies that another of the vernacular sermons in MS F.10 describes as those ‘fals techers, as lollardes and swich other’ who are ‘takin vor Cristen men’ but are ‘infect with the stinkinge lepir of errours and erisies’.20 While it takes hundreds of words for him to name ‘heresye’ as the ultimate outcome of pride, he implies it from the start with his evocation of the obduracy (‘stoutlich’, ‘obstinat’, ‘stiburne’), rebelliousness (‘grucchith’, ‘demeth’), puritanism (‘breke and toberste’), contempt for authority (‘dispit’), pretension (‘parfit’), and brazenness (‘boldlich’) of those who ‘stoutlich withstonde Goddus sondis’. Worse, those who begin by ‘grucching’ against personal suffering soon emerge as something akin to a national threat, despising not only God’s ‘sondis’ but, more worryingly, his ‘lawis’, ‘ordinaunce’, and ‘statutes’ in a fashion the sermon loosely equates — gesturing back to its earlier equation of Christ and the emperor Octavian — with the contemporary problem of resistance to ‘soverens’. Legat’s rewriting of Deuteronomy 17. 12–13 follows the Glossa ordinaria in reading the verse as referring to divine, not human, punishment.21 Close at hand, however, lies an overtly political message with obvious potential relevance to ‘lollardes’ as many early fifteenth-century preachers and ecclesiasts imagined them: that meek or,

19

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 7–8, with the following emendations: stou{t}lich MS ‘stoulich’; we{l} MS ‘we’; {Euclide} not in MS; {man} MS ‘mani’; {is} not in MS. ‘Bole-fot’, written over an erasure in the manuscript, is probably the flower coltsfoot (Tissilaga farfara), with the implication that the ignorant priest cannot distinguish between text and ornamentation. 20

Three Middle English Sermons, ed. by Grisdale, pp. 40–41. For the complex and evolving use of the term ‘lollard’ during the period, see Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer. 21

Compare the translation in The Wycliffite Bible: ‘Who forsothe wexith prowd, not wil|ninge to obeishe to the maundement of the preest [Vulgate: sacerdos imperio], that that time serveth to the Lord thy God, and to the doom of the domisman, shal die that man’. The Glossa, followed by Legate, interprets sacerdos imperio to refer to ‘Christi que est sacerdos in aeternum secundum ordinem Melchisedech’.

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ideally, eager acceptance of ‘correctiun’ by one’s ‘soverens’ — ‘spiritual’ as well as ‘temperal’ — on the part of monks, clergy, and laity alike is the same as submission to God. Under the velvet surface of Legat’s sunny address to his auditors, so it might seem, lurks social anxiety, latent confrontation, even possible rebellion. As we shall see, there is much more to say about this reading. Yet if we suspend it for now to conduct a closer study of the explicit argument of the passage, we find something very different. Far from being concerned either to identify spiritual rebellion in his congregation or to emphasize the threat of Lollardy, Legat’s main focus here is on preaching itself, and less on its content that on its propriety: on the correct fit between preacher and subject matter. The second half of the passage identifies three groups of improper preacher. There are those who preach as ‘boldlich’ as university graduates on the basis of their ownership of the merest miscellany of instructions and information, containing ‘a fewe custumes or a few statutis’. There are those who preach ‘previtise’ that should be reserved for the confessional — perhaps difficult theological questions that should only be discussed with the laity to ease their private doubts — lacking the ‘discreciun’ to know when to ‘kepe counsell’. Finally, there are those who take their themae, not from scripture but from secular works which — despite the status of ‘{Euclide} in his Geometrye’ and ‘Ptolemee in his Astronomye’ as elementary quadrivial texts — they do not understand, perverting ‘the texte of Holy Writ’ as they ‘damne and deme othur menis bokis’ which, once again, they have not read. To the first two groups, explicitly identified with curates who have charge over ‘pareschons’, Legat prescribes a new preaching programme focused on the catechetical lists that alone lie within their ‘skel’. To the third, more mysterious group, identified only as ‘othur’ from the first two, whose feeble efforts at public displays of learning seem schoolboy burlesques of his own magisterial preaching style, he prescribes nothing, but invokes, as he perorates, the charge of heresy and the threat of damnation. There is much that is puzzling about Legat’s diatribe, which we will see may have been constructed to be obscure. I return to the interpretive problems it creates for us later. Suffice it for now to note that, for this superbly educated Benedictine preacher, clerical ignorance, indiscretion, and pretentiousness can be understood as the worst of sins, exempla of the disobedience to God that threatens national religious life: implicated, as they are, with resistance both to divine command and to ‘te statutes and te correctiuns’ of earthly ‘soverens’. Rather than lurking on the fringes of the Church as ‘lollardes’, figures of rebellion, those who ‘withstonde Goddus sondis and his lawis’ are standing, arrogant, and half-educated, in its pulpits. Rather than spreading sedition or expounding systematic false doctrine, these improper preachers, as they bring scandal to the office (‘make al the world

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wondur upon my body’) or commit technical errors in expounding scripture (‘perverte the texte of Holy Writ’), are guilty of solecism. The great sin that threatens the English church in the early fifteenth century, according to In passione domini, is clerical indecorum.

Orthodox Reform The essays collected here offer a remarkably coherent set of analyses of fifteenthcentury English religious writing in its institutional and cultural contexts during the century after the promulgation of Archbishop Thomas Arundel’s Constitutions, drafted in 1407 and published in 1409. This document was a broad legislative attack on Wycliffism and its causes which attempted fierce restrictions on a wide range of theological expression in Latin and English. As readers of this book must know by now, the legislation’s effects on the English church, and the gulf it has been claimed to have created between fifteenth-century religiosity and its, reputedly more adventurous, fourteenth-century predecessor, have dominated discussion of fifteenth-century religiosity, at least among literary scholars, for a decade. These essays at once energetically take up this discussion and set out to move beyond it, many by implicitly or explicitly promoting what is still a new model for fifteenth-century religious thought, outlined in Vincent Gillespie’s opening chapter: ‘orthodox reform’.22 With important exceptions to be described later, the main focus of the essays is on the first six decades of the period. These decades open, as Gillespie challengingly reminds us, not only with the Constitutions itself but with two beginnings: those of the thirty-year incumbency of Arundel’s reformist successor, Henry Chichele (archbishop from 1414 to 1443), and of the conciliar movement, which was initiated at Pisa in 1409 and reached its apogee at the Council of Konstanz in 1414–18. The impact on the English church of this pivotal international event is discussed here, not only by Gillespie, with reference to the reformist lexis of religious writing in the wake of the council, but by Jeremy Catto, who views the council as a catalyst of internationalization, and Alexander Russell, whose concern is with the caution of the English establishment, despite its

22

Although ‘reform’ was in the air, the term ‘orthodox reform’ was not in wide use at the conference on which this book is based. Catto gives the term’s genealogy (in this volume, n. 2). My extension of it to cover a range of issues from the period 1410–60 and later thus involves me in claiming that essays in this volume are promoting a term they do not use.

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enthusiastic support of the council, when it came to discussing the theological basis of conciliarism itself. By contrast to this spectacular opening, the close of the decades in which the book is centrally interested is subdued, marked chiefly by the deaths of the youngest three of the major vernacular writers born in the fourteenth century. Two of these were poets: the East Anglians, Osbern Bokenham (1393–c. 1467) and John Capgrave (1393–1464), both Augustinian friars. They are discussed by Karen Winstead, who explores their novel use of the saint’s life as a vehicle of theological, specifically Trinitarian, instruction. The third writer was the London rector, absentee bishop, and writer Reginald Pecock (c. 1395–1460). The project of understanding this provoking figure has gained momentum of late and is here given impetus by Allan Westphall, whose concern is with Pecock’s reinvention of the ‘mixed life’, and by Tamás Kárath, whose interest is in his classification of the sciences. As these birthdates and obits suggest, many of the essays thus work with materials produced within the course of a single lifetime, or of two average-length working careers. In view both of the case-study approach taken in most essays and of the wide range of materials they cover, this close focus on a narrower period than a generic fifteenth century is important, allowing essays on quite disparate topics to lend texture to one another. For example, David Lepine, James Willoughby, and Sheila Lindenbaum take up the theme of orthodox reform to explore a series of interconnected innovations: at that nerve-centre of the secular church, Salisbury Cathedral; in the transformation of chantry colleges into public libraries; and through the preaching of London’s cadre of university-educated rectors. These projects, all of them in different ways infrastructural, are of interest, not least, for the coherence of their concern with religious learning and, in the last two cases, for the evidence they provide of close collaboration between laymen and churchmen. Elsewhere in the book, such institutional developments find textual analogues, not only in the emphasis on pedagogy in the works of Capgrave, Bokenham, and Pecock, but also in two texts associated with the Augustinian canons. These are Sacerdos parochialis (from the first half of the fifteenth century), based on a century-old manual for parish priests, William of Pagula’s Oculus sacerdotis, whose links to Chichester are detailed by Niamh Pattwell; and The Counsel of Conscience (1426), discussed by Susanna Fein, an intricate poetic sequence of pastoralia and other texts written, in part, for clerical readers, in part for use in an aristocratic household by the Shropshire chantry priest, John Audelay. Such works are, in turn, in complex relationship with codices produced for urban lay readers, whose diverse

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contents are exemplified in Amanda Moss’s account of London, Westminster School, MS 3, and which Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, in an ambitious essay, consider as promoting a distinctive kind of ‘devotional cosmopolitanism’. Given wider range by Matthew Giancarlo’s study of a poetic pastoral text actually by a layman, the Oxfordshire gentleman Peter Idley’s Instructions to his Son, these essays on the broad topic of reform provide any number of entry points of different kinds and levels into normative fifteenth-century religious ideals and praxis. *** As befits a work of revisionist scholarship, whose central concern is with that necessarily hopeful phenomenon, reform, and its most important instrument, education, the underlying note of all the studies so far mentioned is optimistic. Their individual, as well as cumulative, emphasis tends to be the expansion, not contraction, of possibility they see as a hallmark of the period. Admittedly, to reencounter, in the context of these essays, the three translated vitae of thirteenthcentury beguines in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114, discussed by Jennifer Brown, with their uncontrolled weeping, self-punishment, and violent ritual re-enactment of Christ’s passion, is to be reminded that fifteenth-century religion was about more than institution-building and pastoral instruction, and that it supported modes of expression more disruptive than the new fashion for the ‘mixed life’ could accommodate. Yet the embrace of affective turbulence might also be seen as a sign of expanding possibilities. As the European reach of the Douce manuscript, which vernacularizes texts from the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy, also reminds us, the internationalism of fifteenth-century English religion was not only a product of the Council of Konstanz.23 Occasionally, however, the general air of optimism becomes clouded with a sense of difficulty. Helen Barr, for example, reads the Digby lyrics, written around 1413–14, as poems whose repetitive hortatory generality is as much an anxious reflection on the perils of the times as of the hopes accompanying Henry V’s enthronement. Again working with texts produced close in time to the Constitutions, David Lawton also finds a crisis of voice to be a distinguishing feature of many early fifteenth-century works. After a tour de horizon of the question of image veneration during and after the Wycliffite crisis, James Simpson concludes, from analysis of the unease over images in the writings of Hoccleve,

23

For a description, see the introduction to Three Women of Liège, ed. by Brown.

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Capgrave, Pecock, and others, that a major plank of religious orthodoxy was wearing worryingly thin. Even the Bury St Edmunds Benedictine, John Lydgate (1377–1449), appears here in unexpectedly anxious guise. Catherine Sanok sees him as a defender of monastic privilege against the threat of a powerful secular church emboldened by Wycliffite attacks on ‘private religion’; in an era of difficulty for monasteries, aureation protects the space of the transcendent represented by saints and the monasteries which house their relics. William Sweet sees Lydgate as troubled by his own secularization, finding evidence from throughout the monk’s career that he was always at odds with his role as public poet, a role we might see as also a product of the new vulnerability of traditional monasticism. In the context of this vulnerability, Lydgate’s ‘resorte to his religyoun’, after writing 150,000 lines of poetry, reminds us that the secular orientation of early fifteenth-century reform was costly, as reform necessarily is, not only for those who resist it — who, in Legat’s words, ‘withstonde Goddus sondis and his lawis’ — but for those whom reform threatens merely to bypass. Vigorous optimism at Salisbury or amongst elite secular clergy and their patrons in London might translate into a more complex mood at Bury, or at St Albans. *** The focus on the period 1410–60 is vastly productive, then, both in the new materials it brings to light and in the possibilities it holds for different confluences of those materials. It would be possible, for example, to form a cluster of essays organized, not around reform, but around theology. Other theological themes not discussed in this book might then apply for inclusion. Take salvation theology. Two fourteenth-century thinkers, William Langland and Julian of Norwich, understood their conviction that the vast majority of souls will gain entry into heaven as being in fierce tension both with penitential theology in general and with contemporary thinkers such as Walter Hilton and Wyclif in particular.24 By the early fifteenth century, however, as Legat’s In passione domini suggests, the need to assert the unity of Christian community was so strong that the damnation of

24

Nicholas Watson, ‘Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), 145–88; Derek Pearsall, ‘The Idea of Universal Salvation in Piers Plowman B and C’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39 (2009), 257–81.

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Christians was treated as exceptional, mentioned only in attacks on heretics and the sins of the clergy. Reform is always optimistic. But the orthodox reform of the fifteenth century may be unusual in its promotion of a specifically soteriological optimism. The reluctance to imagine the condemnation of any who die within the faith expressed by The Book of the Craft of Dying — with its claim that mercy is never more than a single act of contrition away, even for those whose unrepented sins are as many as ‘droppis of water in the see and gravell-stones in the stronde’ — seems to be a programmatic aspect of the theology of the period.25 After all, the Craft of Dying, which may date from the 1420s, situates itself explicitly within the reform movement stemming from the Council of Konstanz, by alluding to, and using, the great conciliarist Jean Gerson himself. A mere forty years after Julian heard the words ‘alle maner of thinge shalle be wel’ in 1373, their audacity was seemingly much diminished. *** In practice, of course, fifteenth-century soteriological optimism must have been tempered by the popularity of writings from more rigorist times, since this was, among other things, an era of wide reading, copying, translation, and adaptation, anything but cut off from its past. These longer trajectories are a theme in many essays yet to be mentioned, in which emphasis falls outside either the main period covered by the book or the historical narrative that gives focus to the idea of orthodox reform. On the latter front, Michael Sargent argues against historical narrative itself, doubting not only the effects that have been claimed for the Constitutions but any attempt to find causal explanations for historical transitions. In more particularist style, the need to bear continuities in mind in studying fifteenth-century religion is argued by Christopher Bradley, who compares works of vernacular theology written before and after the Constitutions to find a continuity of ‘emotional, intellectual, and literary involvement’ that challenges cruder maps of the period. Ian Johnson strongly agrees, arguing that an emphasis on the radicalism of late fourteenth-century vernacular theology should not divert

25

Book of the Craft of Dying, in Yorkshire Writers, ed. by Horstmann, II (1896), 409. See chapters 4–5 of Amy Appleford, ‘Learning to Die: Affectivity, Community, and Death in Late Medieval English Writing’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2004), pp. 160–256.

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attention away from the continuities that emerge when we study the strategies and textures common to ‘the theological vernacular’. Working with other materials, Kantik Ghosh and Andrew Cole also seek to link the fifteenth century with the fourteenth: the first by urging work on the legacy, ‘traumatic’ or otherwise, of Wyclif and the Wycliffite controversy on fifteenth-century English religiosity, before and after the Council of Basel in the 1430s and 1440s; the second by tracing a set of humanistic educational ideals in circulation in the middle decades of the century back to the circle of the late fourteenth-century bishop, William of Wykeham, and his foundations at Winchester and Oxford. Cole is aware that Wykehamist and Wycliffite thought are in lively conversation, but notes that fifteenth-century ‘episcopal humanism’ complicates categories such as ‘orthodox’ and ‘reformist’, not least because its priorities are not primarily theological, but centre on teaching professional skills, values, and virtues. In a parallel study, Daniel Wakelin nonetheless finds an unresolved relationship between the classical and the Christian in this mid-fifteenth-century humanist milieu, in which study of pagan antiquity, for all its value, is still a tendentious, at least self-reflexive, process. If Cole looks back to a period ‘before Arundel’, Wakelin looks forward to the humanism, too often understood as radically innovative, of Colet and More. Perhaps late medieval English humanism has remained so unremarked because it went at its own pace, moving around the Wycliffite crisis, using the Council of Konstanz as a book exchange, flourishing in part just because of its irrelevance to the turbulence of sacred history. In Cole’s and Wakelin’s essays, the centre of gravity shifts from the first half of the century to its third quarter. In the essays by Laura Saetveit Miles, C. Annette Grisé, and Susan Powell, we move forward into the sixteenth century. All three essays show the long interest in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts: whether this is expressed in their Latinization, as in Miles’s account of the translations from Middle English by the Carthusian intellectual, Richard Methley; through the emphasis on ‘plenitude and proliferation’ Grisé sees in the more-than-a-century of spiritual writing at Syon mapped in her essay; or in the early, unsystematic dissemination of many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century works in print, described by Powell. Many early fifteenth-century themes also reappear here: the early sixteenth century, too, is preoccupied by questions of access and propriety, of the ‘fit’ between a text and its proper audience. However, in their equal focus on new writing, including both Methley’s considerable output and the flood of works produced at Syon in the 1520s, this final group of essays also signals the need for much further work on the half-century following what this book represents as the

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central decades of orthodox reform. Haunted by its proximity to the Reformation, the little noticed pre-Lutheran religious literature of this period emerges from these studies as energized by positive concerns of its own, as deserving of study in its own right: grist, perhaps, for a future volume.

The New Fifteenth Century Until recently a book on this topic and scale would have been almost unimaginable. Not only were fifteenth-century writings grossly neglected, this neglect was a product of long-standing institutional occlusion, as the status accorded the periods on either side of the century drew attention away from its texts and even required them to be represented as lacking. At least from the perspective of literary and religious studies, both the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries are, historiographically speaking, ‘renaissances’, long understood in weightily symbolic terms as moments of origin, whether of the English language and literary canon or of humanism and the English church. Through much of the last century it was the fifteenth century’s ill chance, one an era so devoted to rumination on Fortuna might be expected to have relished, to play the role of a dark age to both these renaissances at once. In a lopsided but self-sustaining system of exchange, the dullness, didacticism, and dogged orthodoxy attributed to the period were thus used to cast into yet brighter light the brilliant scepticism of Ricardian England at its one end, Tudor England at its other. The period’s actually central role in the creation of the literary canon, ‘standard’ written English, humanism, the printing press, and even, perhaps, the idea of the ecclesia anglicana itself was either forgotten or rendered, somehow, incidental in the process. Only in the last decade — indeed, arguably, only since the publication of James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution in 2002 — has this situation changed, as literary scholarship has at last begun to take on the sense of consequence in its dealings with the period that disciplines such as political and book history had taken for granted.26 It is hardly surprising that, although it draws constantly on work carried out over decades, this book addresses its subject with a palpable excitement and sense of the new.

26

Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution. For a detailed narrative of the changes of the last few years, see David Matthews, ‘The Medieval Invasion of Early-Modern England’, New Medieval Literatures, 10 (2008), 233–44.

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In his attack on the search for meaning in history, Sargent declares himself against the periodizing historiography he associates both with Simpson’s book and with the article which acts as the foil for several essays here, including Sargent’s, my own ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’.27 But the energy of this collection is very much a product of such engagements with large historical patterns, and of the realization that the fifteenth century, that old buffer zone between the medieval and the early modern, has, by the very fact of its neglect, become a vital area of study. Fifteenth-century religion is not ‘about’ its place in the trajectories of religious history. Yet arguments over those trajectories have always had to invest in some interpretation of the fifteenth century, and stand to be challenged by new work on the period. The evident belief on the part of many contributors that something larger is at stake in giving this body of thought more respectful attention than it has received, even that this attention has an ethical dimension to it, seems to me right. The new model of the fifteenth century these essays help to bring into being has not finished working out its opposition to the ‘dark ages’ view of the period, which is still of sufficiently recent vintage to seem worth the antagonism. The model is also in specific reaction against the ways in which this view informs aspects of my article and the work influenced by it, which the new model takes to be too dominated by a concern with censorship, persecution, and the nervousness these are said to have produced in the vernacular and Latin writers of the period. The new model rejects the tendency to understand the ethos of the entire fifteenth century as emanating from the violent events of its first fifteen years, as it does the tendency to define fifteenth-century orthodoxy in terms of what it lacked — in terms, one might say, of its failure to be the late fourteenth century. In the process, the new model also opposes what it sees as excessive concern with dissenting religiosities, hinting that the interest in religious heterodoxy, especially by scholars of Wycliffism, has glamorized dissent and defined its opposite, orthodoxy, only in relation to mechanisms of repression. Against the preferences of a few contributors, the new model does agree with two theses of my article: the ‘cultural change’ thesis, that is, the argument that the character of English religious culture altered sharply in the early fifteenth century; and the ‘vernacular theology’ thesis, that is, the argument that the vernacular was a crucial, and coherent, category in religious politics as a whole, not only in its dealings with Wycliffism, the ‘English heresy’.28 These arguments survive the 27

Watson, ‘Censorship’. For reflections on the article’s scholarly context, see Watson, ‘Cultural Changes’. 28

See Hudson, ‘Lollardy: The English Heresy?’.

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growing consensus that the article’s understanding of censorship needs updating, and the tendency to treat the article as though it invented the ‘dark ages’ model of the fifteenth century, instead of seeking to investigate it.29 In the new model, however, it is the conciliar movement that seems set to replace the Constitutions as the prime agent of change. Whether or not the claims for Konstanz made in several essays come to be widely accepted, change has, in any case, clearly been redefined in these essays as renewal and taken on a specific set of characteristics and rhetorics, most of which can be categorized under the heading of ‘orthodox reform’. There is a new concern with clerical education, broadly enough based to include a diversity of phenomena: episcopal humanism and its contexts, including the new intellectual interests of universities; the resources poured into the provision of first-rate preaching, especially in London; and the increasingly widespread dissemination of books, including vernacular books. There is intense interest in Christian solidarity, one that perhaps responds as much to the Great Schism as to local problems with ‘lollardes’. This finds expression, not only in the clusters of reformist metaphors tracked by Gillespie, but in pervasive use of eucharistic language, with its simultaneous ability to represent the Christian community as one body awaiting eschatological transubstantiation and to exclude from that body precisely those whose understanding of the sacrament it uses as a litmus-test of heterodoxy. Perhaps, as suggested earlier, it also finds expression in a distinctively inclusive soteriology. Despite the vigorous copying of the fourteenth-century vernacular canon, there is also a striking turn towards the European continent: one that participates in a long tradition of internationalism, to be sure, but that introduces a wide range of new texts and topoi, including reformist topoi, unblemished by previous use in the debates and débacles of the late fourteenth century. The various forms of fifteenthcentury English humanism are also indebted to, and help to further, this turn, as does the new devotionalism given powerful royal endorsement at Syon and Sheen

29

For a thoughtful account of censorship in fifteenth-century England, see Fiona Somerset, ‘Censorship’, in The Production of Books in England 1350–1500, ed. by Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 239–58. For the assumption that my article invented (and so unequivocally supports) the ‘dark ages’ view of fifteenth-century religiosity, see, inter alia, Shannon Gayk, ‘“Among psalms to fynde a cleer sentence”: John Lydgate, Eleanor Hull, and the Art of Vernacular Exegesis’, New Medieval Literatures, 10 (2008), 162–89 (pp. 163–64), where the quotation from p. 836 of the article is tellingly out of context. Because the article’s claims about the fifteenth century are less novel or sweeping than is often thought, it is often in agreement with positions that claim to dissent from it: a case in point here is Kelly’s and Perry’s paper in this volume.

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and sufficiently widely disseminated that, by the end of the century, it could provide a solid livelihood for Caxton’s heir, Wynkyn de Worde. Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, Elisabeth of Hungary, and Mechthild of Hackeborn, not Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are the ‘approvid wimmen’ of the era.30 In the new fifteeenth century, the focus of interest in vernacular theological production has also shifted. Although vigorous copying of earlier works continues, the emphasis of new writing falls on specific genres and modes: hagiography, pastoralia, vitae Christi, compilation, preaching, and urban drama. This second shift is more or less the same as was described in my article, which also notes that translation and compilation are key fifteenth-century modes, hagiography and drama key genres, and whose carefully inclusive definition of ‘vernacular theology’ is often misrepresented.31 The great gain here, however, is that the shift can now be understood as a positive development: as the result of a process of emergence, not as a response to constraint. It is no longer necessary to argue that the ambition of individual works constitutes exceptions to the general rule. Fifteenth-century hagiography, a genre given considerable impetus by the new devotionalism, is thus now seen to take on specific characteristics — aureation, theological complexity, sometimes a surprising posture of embattlement — in response to specific social and institutional pressures. Pastoralia not only gets back to teaching a curriculum based on Pecham’s Syllabus, as the Constitutions decreed, but renews its interest in the principles underlying pastoral instruction. Sometimes it does this by arguing for the need to supplement catechesis with an experiential relationship with God sustained through private devotion — prayer, meditation, and the study of works in the vein of Love’s Mirror — that is, by promoting the ‘mixed life’. At other times, it acknowledges the limitations of the catechetical list: as in Pecock’s œuvre, in which catechesis is discarded in favour of more systematic structures, again in aid of a kind of mixed life. Compilations not only contain new

30

See Speculum devotorum in The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others,

I.12.174. 31

On translation and compilation, see Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 832–35. On vernacular theology: the article defines this term as ‘a catchall, which in principle could include any kind of writing, sermon, or play that communicates theological information to an audience’ (‘Censorship’, p. 823, n. 4). Although the article’s emphasis is ‘on the more intellectually challenging texts’ (ibid.), it does not use the term to delineate solely ‘a sort of “cutting edge” theology’, as Powell is far from alone in assuming (in this volume, n. 29). Johnson may be right in asserting that the phrase has contributed to a ‘politically excited and at times teleologizing binarism’ (in this volume, p. 75). However, the broadest definition of the term has always been vital to the project of constructing a unified field theory for vernacular religious writing. See Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Theology’.

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materials. They offer juxtapositions of existing ones that challenge our categorizations, especially our still too crude border zone between ‘orthodox’ and ‘heterodox’, as well as suggesting the engagement and mobility expected of lay readers. Sermons and urban drama constitute the two great oral religious media of the period and respond to the reformist call both for a renewal of preaching and for a careful stratification of theological subjects and modes of treatment according to speaker, audience, and occasion. In this new model, finally, the Constitutions and the wider theme of censorship play a more minor role than we have become used to, especially once Arundel’s confrontational style had been replaced by the subtler approach of his successor Chichele, in 1414. In Catto’s account, while Arundel was himself a harbinger of orthodox reform, the effect of his legislation seems almost negligible, even if its strictures on preaching irritated orthodox and heretic alike. By contrast, according to Gillespie, despite official repudiation, Wyclif’s diagnosis of the ecclesiastical crisis and embrace of the vernacular underwent a revival under Chichele, whose colleagues were anxious to distance themselves from aspects of Arundel’s legacy and aware of the need to respond to fourteenth-century radical reformist critique, even if they disapproved of its specific proposals. As Gillespie superbly sums up (in this volume, p. 21), ‘in the end, John Wyclif had more impact on the language and attitudes of the English church in the fifteenth century than his arch enemy Thomas Arundel’.

‘God is forbed that I schulde crye ate cros’ What I have called (without very much flattening) the ‘new model’ of fifteenthcentury English religiosity as presented here is rich, provocative, and necessary. It will generate much further work, ramifying as it goes. It will require much rethinking of work already done. It will, perhaps, complete the transformation of the rhetorical stance of scholarship on the period, obliging it to move beyond its posture, still pronounced, of defensiveness. Indeed, the new model represents orthodox reform as, on the whole, so determinedly eirenic that, except for those working on such subjects as heresy trials, it may become a challenge to find ways to use the language of opposition, so beloved of literary scholars, at all. In this last section I enter my caveats. These bring me back to Hugh Legat’s In passione domini, a work that is at once supportive of the new model and suggestive of the challenges it faces. In re-reading Legat’s diatribe against those who ‘withstonde’ Christ, the divine Octavian, I now reactivate my ‘suspended’ first interpretation of the passage, by taking seriously the strong impression the passage creates that

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Legat’s concern with the proud and with improper preaching is basically, if indirectly, a concern about orthodoxy. My caveats begin with the observation that we should bear in mind that, even if it is inconclusive, sporadic, and disorganized, at least in principle reform requires boundaries. However inclusive it may seek to be, its inside is organized, rhetorically, over and against an outside. On the inside, reform is renovation: that attractive mix of return to the purity of the past and clear-sighted recognition of the demands of the present. As reform moves outwards, however, it changes, becoming a force of centralization and normalization whose tools include compulsion and, finally, exclusion.32 Those whom reform cannot lure with love (timor filialis) it goads with fear (timor servilis); those who, nonetheless, ‘withstonde Goddus sondis and his lawis’, it hereticates. Yet the real relationship between a reform movement and these excluded ones, who had rather ‘toberste than bowe and bende vor to resseive the correctiuns and to soondis of God’, is more intimate than their stark opposition in reformist rhetoric suggests. As Legat is aware, these sinners, too, are preaching reform, and, whatever is made of their failings, their refusal to ‘bowe and bende’ to the arbiters of reform, their ‘soverens’, may be almost the sole substantive matter at issue. Among other things, this ensures that reformist rhetoric’s gestures of exclusion are fraught with a sense of recognition. The preachers Legat attacks most fiercely are those most like himself. Because the new model involves the revalorization of a moment of reform it is, at present, interested in the more attractive, ‘inside’, perspective: especially because the new model has grown up as a reaction against an older one it understands to have had the opposite interest. I agree that it is valuable to emphasize an understanding of fifteenth-century reform as inclusive, capable of sustaining criticism, disagreement, and competition from its various constituencies. Yet some of those whom reform could not accommodate and had, instead, to persecute are also part of the historical record and persist in their opposition to what Legat calls ‘the statutes and te correctiuns’ of their ‘soverens here on erth’, and to his identification of these with the ‘lawis and to ordenaunce of God’. If our account of fifteenthcentury orthodoxy is to be complete, they must remain in the picture too, reminding us not to confuse study of orthodox reform with its unthinking celebration. In The Lanterne of Light, a fervid work of pastoralia and ecclesiological analysis completed in 1409–14, orthodox reform is apparently seen wholly from the outside: as the assaults of the Antichrist on a true church placed under ever more 32

On ‘centralization and normalization’, see Hamm, The Reformation of Faith, ed, and trans. by Bast.

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intense pressure. The Antichrist’s weapons include ‘fals lucratif or winning lawis, as ben absolutiouns, indulgence, pardouns, privelegis, and alle othir hevenly tresour that is brought in to sale’, all targets of reformist critique in the fourteenth century. But now something new and terrifying has been added: the power to stifle critique itself, through ‘thise newe Constituciouns, by whos strengthe Anticrist enterditith [interdicts] chirchis, soumneth prechours, suspendith resceivours [incumbents] and priveth hem ther bennefice, cursith heerars and takith awey the goodis of hem that fortheren the precheing of a prest’. Yet worse, Antichrist’s church is now requiring its members to internalize a doctrine of obedience to ‘prelatis’ that makes submission itself into a test of orthodoxy, ‘whatever they comaunde […] in hiye and in lowe’: ‘Al this world crieth lowid; aftir this obedience / And sein, “Whatever thy soverein biddith; thou schalt obeye therto”’. In The Lanterne of Light, the Constitutions are no tool of reform; on the contrary, they are the very thing that appears to render reform finally impossible.33 Legat’s emollient first response to such blatant attempts to ‘crye ate cros al that ever I schulde finde writen e my book’ — that such language, coming from a ‘clerk’, is in the worst possible taste — both makes for good public relations and, strikingly, emphasizes the positive lesson of clerical decorum, even in this denunciatory context. For Legat, who takes care to seem imperturbably indifferent to eschatological anxiety, there is a dignity, an esprit de corps, about the clerical order that nothing should violate. As a monk engaged in lay preaching, Legat was in awkward relation to the secular emphases of the early fifteenth-century moment, as we have seen. Still, his strategy here, to emphasize hierarchy and clerical prerogative, but also to stress the inexhaustible range of language and of sacred and profane auctores which scholars such as himself can bring to bear in lay preaching, shows how invaluable he has made himself as a showpiece of the capacities of orthodox reform. Indeed, by denouncing the vices of the clergy in a sermon delivered before lay auditors, Legat is claiming a monastic (or, perhaps, scholastic) privilege, for, as The Lanterne of Light laments, this practice is directly outlawed in the Constitutions themselves. Just as Legat comes very close to preaching from Euclid and Plutarch, not scripture, even so does his attack on his fellow preachers comes close to ‘crying at the cross’ matters that would best be left undiscussed. Yet it is Legat’s startling second response — that the place of such preachers is with the company of the damned — that is structural to his sermon, and that corresponds more closely with how orthodox reform dealt, in practice, with The 33

The Lantern of Liõt, ed. by Swinburn, pp. 17, 86; Swinburn imitates the punctuation of her base manuscript, and I follow her in doing so.

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Lanterne of Light. I refer, of course, to the burning of the elderly London skinner, John Claydon, an excited owner and reader of the work, solely for contumaciously agreeing with its contents, in 1415: the year of the foundation of Syon Abbey, of the definitive condemnation of Wyclif’s teaching at Konstanz, and, as Kantik Ghosh reminds us, of another burning, also at Konstanz: the burning of Jan Hus. Claydon was condemned under a sweepingly broad interpretation of De heretico comburendo, after his arrest by the mayor, Thomas Falkener, and a brief examination by Chichele using evidence gathered by a panel of experts from Oxford.34 Despite its reputation as a hardline expression of second-generation Wycliffism and its eschatological intensity, The Lanterne of Light is not in any obvious doctrinal sense a heretical work. In order to bring down their verdict, its examiners were obliged to falsify its eucharistic theology, causing Claydon to be burned for agreeing to an understanding of the sacrament he may neither have heard of nor understood. While the work does identify the current crop of ‘soverens’ with the Antichrist, argues against the necessity of obedience to such sinners, and anticipates an imminent Last Judgment, it does all this in defence of its own pastoral responsibilities, using a phrase (‘lantern of light’) which Gillespie notes was also a term of art in the rhetoric of orthodox reform. The work explicitly avoids any suggestions of sedition. Albeit in radical fashion, much of it expounds catechesis. It does not dazzle its audience with references to auctores. Yet its lyrical, rhythmic style, designed for public performance and bearing comparison with that of the first two vernacular sermons in MS F 10, bespeaks an educated source not necessarily so very much further from the corridors of reformist power than the theologians who examined it, or from Legat. *** Claydon’s ferocious, uncanonical and, we must affirm, courageous death is far from offering us an easy slide into what Kelly and Perry call ‘the seductions of martyrology’ (in this volume, p. 364), not least because its haste and informality suggests that chance, personalities, and local politics all played a part, and that Claydon and his beloved book might, but for these, have stayed unburned. After all, according to

34

See The Register of Henry Chichele, ed. by Jacob, IV (1947), 132–38. My discussion draws on Nicholas Watson, ‘Vernacular Apocalyptic: On The Lanterne of Light’, Revista canaria de estudios ingleses, 47 (2003), 115–28. The panel included Thomas Palmer, author of a determinatio against Bible translation; see Watson, ‘Censorship’, pp. 842–43.

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Legat (‘Was it never wirse […] for a sovereine to chastise his subjettes than it is rith now?’), escape from punishment was the norm. That the work survives in two London manuscripts and was printed as early as 1535 argues that, one way or another, it successfully remained part of the theological fabric of the notoriously free-thinking capital: one among the mass of miscellanies, common profit books, and spiritual treatises owned by and copied for members of the city’s clergy, merchant oligarchy, and others.35 Yet the heretication of The Lanterne of Light, and the distant echo of the thought patterns that subtended that heretication in In passione domini, still complicate our thinking about orthodox reform. They do so in three ways, with which I end. First, they remind us that no amount of discussion of the impossibility of effective censorship in pre-modern societies or of the sporadic nature of the fifteenth-century church’s interest in such censorship can disguise the fact that orthodox reform had its limits, whether we evoke these in doctrinal language or in terms of Realpolitik. Nor can it alter the fact that these limits were occasionally patrolled in practice, just as, in Legat’s sermon and others, they were constantly being patrolled in principle, in gestures both of repudiation, condemning those who ‘withstonde’, and of inclusion, welcoming those who do not. Legat’s soteriological generosity is, from one perspective, all about these limits. This truth about orthodoxy remains, whatever view one takes of the coherence and strength of fifteenth-century heterodoxy. The expurgations and disapproving marginalia found in books discussed by Kelly and Perry may not fall into neat, doctrinal binaries, nor may they be consistent. But they show that boundaries mattered, in detail as well as in general, for lay readers as well as for clerics; indeed, they show that disagreements over boundaries made them matter more, pulling repudiation and the fear of heresy into the practice of everyday orthodoxy. If hospitality, the ability to think and move in a variety of theological modes and through a variety of views, is one aspect of the devotional life of the cosmopolis revealed by lay compilations, hostility is another. This is a society closely tuned to the knowledge that belief is dangerous, that what is claimed as truth can be error, that any book may contain tares mingled with its wheat. The continued circulation, surreptitious or otherwise, of works such as The Lanterne of Light will have exacerbated such an awareness.

35

The printed edition, by Robert Redman, is STC 15225. For a study, see Anne Hudson, ‘“No Newe Thyng”: The Printing of Medieval Texts in the Early Reformation Period’, in Middle English Studies Presented to Norman Davis, ed. by Douglas Gray and E. G. Stanley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 153–74; repr. in Hudson, Lollards and their Books, pp. 227–48.

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Second, the snapshot of early fifteenth-century religiosity which the trial and death of Claydon and the language of Legat’s sermon offer us imply that, however we weigh the respective impacts of Arundel’s Constitutions, the Council of Konstanz, or other signature events and pieces of legislation on the decades that followed, Chichele’s church began as an institution in a state of deep disturbance. Legat’s veiled equations between the political, the ecclesiastical, and the spiritual spheres show that The Lanterne of Light is not so far off in its accusation that submission to ‘soverens’ was advocated as an end in itself during this period. At the risk of rousing Nicholas Love’s scholarly honour guard, I add that the De sacramento, the final section of the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, argues in similar style that unquestioning acceptance of the church’s eucharistic theology is ‘mede to us’, irrespective of its truth.36 Such statements, which work commonplaces about the duties of obedience harder than vernacular preachers and teachers generally consider tactful, are strongly suggestive of the challenging circumstances that gave rise to them. They argue that Catto’s triumphalist and Gillespie’s optimistic narratives of the origins of orthodox reform should in no sense be taken to nullify the darker accounts of a society undergoing ‘some traumatic cultural change’ given by Lawton (in this volume, p. 137), Barr (in this volume), and others. Chichele’s church may have been more constructive than Arundel’s; it was just as anxious. Third and finally, as Legat’s sermon suggests, this anxiety did in certain ways mark the emergent styles and forms of address that characterize a good deal of fifteenth-century writing. The new model discourages talk of self-censorship, and recent scholarship on the Constitutions make this term seem too imprecise, as well as negative, to be appropriate.37 After all, Gillespie writes of a lexis of reform, vernacular and Latin, tightly woven and requiring insider expertise to follow closely. Barr shows how the Digby lyrics express an urgent hope, despite what she elsewhere calls the ‘deafening silence’ over Lollardy.38 Lawton finds fifteenth-century experiments with voice ‘more nuanced, complex and subtle than those of the Ricardian generation’ not despite, but because of, Arundel’s Constitutions (in this volume, p. 139). As we have seen, In passione domini, too, participates brilliantly in a

36

Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. by Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland, 1992), p. 228. Note that the analysis that precedes this passage, of the ‘two maneres’ in which ‘men dreden God’ and the two in which they defy him (through sin and through heresy) parallels the general structure of Legat’s sermon. 37 See for example, James, ‘Debating Heresy’; Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion. 38 Barr, ‘The Deafening Silence of Lollardy in The Digby Lyrics’.

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moment of stylistic innovation spurred by the determination to move beyond past controversies, to make firm the ground of a new ecclesiastical and political normal. For all its versatility, confidence, and rhetorical power, however, Legat’s sermon is still far more nearly about what it does not, or does not quite, say than about what it does. This is because it does not, in the end, directly say very much; compared to its luxuriance of style and allusion both the moral and spiritual demands it makes and its actual content are kept vague and generalized, gestured towards rather than spelled out explicitly. In the long passage I quoted in the first section, clear meanings are constantly suggested, only to dissolve before they can take clear form, leaving behind no more than, on the one hand, a self-serving account of the hierarchies of expertise that ought to govern the practice of preaching, on the other, a miasma of threat and fear that attaches to an inchoate sequence of forms of rebellion, presumption and dissent. I have written in recent pages as though the passage carries definite meanings and believe I have these about right. But the process of decipherment is one of listening for elision and innuendo, as terms and their synonyms cycle in and out of the rolling periods, carrying fragments of implication that never resolve. ‘Sondis’, ‘lawis’, ‘correctiuns’, ‘statutes’, ‘chastisinge’, for example, all mean not quite the same thing in the passage, although they often appear in parallel or in linked doublets as though interchangeable: ‘sondis ... lawis’; ‘correctiuns ... sondis’; ‘statutes ... correctiuns’; ‘chastisinge ... correctiun’; ‘lawis ... correctiuns’.39 This slippage allows Legat to move quietly between the trials life brings each Christian: subjection, pulpit propriety, and other, clearly related topics, even holding out an odd glimpse of that most resonant fourteenth-century phrase, ‘Goddus […] lawis’, while neither identifying the phrase with ‘Holy Writ’ nor allowing even a hair’s breadth to appear between it and the daily ‘chastisinge’ imposed by ‘soverens’, heavenly or earthly. If the intent, as I argued, is to promote submission to these ‘soverens’, the strategy is clearly to do this in the most inchoate way possible. I can only think this is partly because the sermon is at war, precisely, over spiritual sovereignty, as the decorous indirection of orthodox reform, its emphasis on keeping counsel, struggles with a shriller rival, identifiable for satirical purposes with uppity parish priests and half-educated academics: a rival whose note we hear

39

‘Statutis’ also appears with the quite specific ‘custumes’ (in the ‘quaier’ owned by presumptuous preachers); ‘ordinaunce’, ‘dette’ and ‘decre’ are outliers of the word-set. At the end of the passage we discover that the most often repeated word, ‘correctiun’, derives from disciplinam in Jeremiah 7, though Legat promptly glosses this word ‘doctrine and [...] teching’, equating the submission that brings salvation with attention to his sermon.

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in The Lanterne of Light. Preaching of privities and crying at the cross hence at once haunt the sermon and urge it to a countervailing rhetoric, whose own note is a muffled splendour, signifying victory and seeming to say both more and less than it does. This is only one sermon, one minor writer, one possible point of departure for further reflection. Yet here, at least, the voice of orthodox reform, that of a major mode of fifteenth-century vernacular theology hitting stride, is, among much else, a means for the suppression of other voices, and of its own anxiety. For all its aureate brilliance, it cannot quite stop remembering what it was created, at least in part, to forget.

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INDEX N OMINUM

The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, 527 ‘ABC on the Passion’, 367, 370 Abingdon, Henry, 19–20, 46–48 Sitis repleti fructu iustitiae, 46 ‘Ad mensam magnam sedisti’, 208 Ægidius Romanus (Giles of Rome), 247 ‘Against Boasting and Pride’, 511 Aiscough, Bishop William, 173, 175 Albertanus of Brescia, 429–30; see also Idley, Peter Alcock, Bishop John, 537 In die Innocencium sermo pro episcopo puerorum, 537 Gallicantus, 538 Mons perfeccionis, 537 Sermo Iohannis Alcok episcopi Eliensis, 537 Alnwick, Bishop William, 477–78, 526 Ambrose, 230, 243 De divinis officiis, 46 Anastasius II, Pope, 164 Ancrene Wisse, 194; see also Lichfield, William Anselm, Cur deus homo, 200, 208 De similitudinibus, 208 Appulby, Simon, The Fruyte of Redempcion, 528, 534; see also Worde, Wynkyn de Aquinas, Thomas, 107, 247 ‘Lauda Sion’, 317; see also Digby Lyrics Sentences Commentary, 211 Aristotle, 51, 229, 234; see also PseudoAristotle

Ars moriendi, 527; see also Caxton, William The Art and Craft of Dying, 527; see also Caxton, William Articuli concernantes reformationem universalis e cclesiae editi per un iv ersitatem Oxoniensem, 15, 167; see also Oxford, University of Arundel, Archbishop Thomas, xi–xiii, 42, 43–44, 50, 54, 55–56, 62, 78, 86, 95, 106–07, 111, 120–21, 126, 130–31, 134, 135, 138, 142, 150, 168, 172–73, 174, 178, 185, 188, 220, 249, 260, 278, 301, 343, 363, 417, 463, 465, 472–74, 501–02, 517, 531, 545, 549, 554, 558–61, 582, 587 Constitutions, xi–xiii, 13–14, 16, 17, 20–23, 30, 37, 44, 47, 64–65, 68–69, 83–84, 94, 98, 106, 120–21, 124, 134–39, 144, 147, 148, 150–51, 187–88, 193–94, 196, 199, 203, 262, 285, 343, 363, 395, 402, 431, 450, 458, 465, 470, 472, 485–86, 487, 502, 523–25, 531–33, 554, 564, 572, 574, 576, 580–82, 584, 587 The Assumption of the Virgin, 389 Athanasius, 230 Audelay, John the Blind, 33–38, 325–42, 573 Counsel of Conscience, 34, 36–37, 326–42, 573 Augustine of Canterbury, 15 Augustine of Hippo, 133–34, 146, 148, 161, 162, 181, 198–99, 229–31, 234, 237–43,

644 346, 376, 377, 489, 501, 506–07; see also Pseudo-Augustine Anti-Pelagian Writings, 507 Confessiones, 150, 346 De agone christiano, 208 De civitate Dei contra paganos, 99, 232, 234, 375 De disciplina christiana, 199, 208 De fide et symbolo, 493–94 De moribus ecclesiae, 243 De sermone domini in monte, 208 De trinitate, 489, 495 De vera religione, 238–39 Enarrationes in Psalmos, 145 Enchiridion ad Laurentium, 199–200, 208 On the Sermon on the Mount, 506 Questiones evangeliorum, 208 Babion, Geoffrey, 345 Bagley, Thomas, 189 Balbus, Johannes, Catholicon, 300 Basel, Council of, 25, 159, 164–65, 175, 474, 477, 557–58, 561, 577 The Battle of Jerusalem, 389 Baxter, Margery, 98 Beauchamp, Bishop Richard, 173 Beaufort, Cardinal Henry, 3, 48, 386 Beaufort, Lady Margaret, 147, 538 Becket, Archbishop Thomas, 7, 14–15, 245– 46, 473 Bedford, John, duke of, 49–53, 66 Bekynton, Thomas, 226, 230–32, 244, 247–58, 263 Berthold of Wildungen, 546 Betson, Thomas, Ryght Profytable Treatyse, 505–06, 513, 515–17 Bilney, Thomas, 142–43, 149 Birch, John, 220 Birgitta of Sweden, 17, 184, 504, 509, 534, 581 Revelationes, 24, 31, 86 Bisticci, Vespasiano da, 177 Blackfriars Council, 94, 136, 545 Blois, Bishop William de, 213 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 51–52, 247 De casibus virorum illustrium, 52

Index Nominum Boethius, 140–44 De consolatione philosophiae, 140–44, 535, 564; see also Chaucer, Boece; Walton, John De Musica, 140 Bokenham, Osbern, 485, 494–502, 560, 573 Legendys of Hooly Wummen, 110, 470 ‘Life of St Barbara’, 491, 497–501 ‘Life of St Cecilia’, 494–96 ‘Life of St Katherine’, 494–96 ‘Life of St Margaret’, 470–71 Bonaventure, 82–83, 453, 455, 457; see also Pseudo-Bonaventure Bonde, William, The Directory of Conscience, 528 The Pylgrimage of Perfection, 505, 511–12, 528 Bonus tractatus de decem mandatis, 405 The Book of Good Manners, 527, 535; see also Caxton, William The Book of Vices and Virtues, 277 The Book to a Mother, 83, 148–49, 150 Bourgchier, Thomas, 175 Bourges, Archbishop Henry of, 246 Bradshaw, Henry, 486 St Werburge of Chester, 470 Brampton, Thomas, Metrical Paraphrase of the Seven Penitential Psalms, 145–46 Briggham, Robert, 191, 207 Bristol Library, 210, 212–15; see also Carpenter, Bishop John Brokley, John, 193 Broun, Robert, 174 Brouns, Thomas, 175 Browne, William, Brittania’s Pastorals, 484–85 Bubwith, Nicholas, 25, 50 Burgh, Benedict, The Secrees of Old Philisoffres, 352–53; see also Lydgate, John Burgh, John de, 392; see also Pupilla oculi Bury St Edmunds (abbey), 343–44, 346, 352, 474–80, 575 Bylton, Peter, 191 Byngham, William, 193, 207 Cambridge, University of, 26–27, 44, 168, 204, 209, 531–32, 538–39

Index Nominum Capgrave, John, The Chronicle of England by John Capgrave, 3–4, 486, 498, 501–02, 560, 573, 574–75 De illustribus Henricis, 3 Life of St Katherine, 91–92, 103, 110, 431, 470, 491–96 Carpenter, Bishop John, 212–15, 218–21 Carpenter, John (common clerk), 212, 219, 221 Liber albus, 212 Catherine of Siena, 417, 420, 504, 581 Dialogo, 26 n. 58, 509–11; see also Orcherd of Syon Cato, 252, 257 Caunton, Richard, 247–48, 257 Caxton, William, 53, 288–89, 296–99, 513, 523, 527–28, 530, 533–35, 581 The Golden Legend, 533; see also Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea Cesarini, Cardinal Giuliano, 558 Chace, Thomas, 191, 207 Chandler, Bishop John, 173, 174–75 þe charge of þe heestis, 401 Charlemagne, 81–82 Charles V, King of France, 50–51 Chartier, Alain, 51 La belle dame sans merci, 52 The Chastising of God’s Children, 135, 138, 146, 527; see also Worde, Wynkyn de Chaucer, Geoffrey, 51, 139, 237, 247, 343, 345, 347, 359, 409, 431, 435, 469–70, 480, 483–84, 567 Boece, 80, 140; see also Boethius, Consolatio; Walton, John The Book of the Duchess, 347 The Canterbury Tales, 356 General Prologue, 246, 347 Pardoner’s Tale, 111, 141 Retraction, 343, 351–53 Second Nun’s Tale, 91–92 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 434 The House of Fame, 323 Legend of Good Women, 205 Troilus and Criseyde, 140, 142, 347, 354– 55, 449–50, 480, 484; see also Kynaston, Sir Francis

645 Chaundler, Thomas, 206, 207, 230–244, 250–58, 262–63 Allocutiones, 230–36, 242–44, 250–51 Collocutiones, 230–36, 242–44, 250–51 Libellus de laudibus duarum civitatum, 232 Liber apologeticus, 236 Chedworth, John, 175, 226 Chetham, Humphrey, 222 Chichele, Archbishop Henry, 11, 13–15, 16, 19, 21, 26, 32, 36, 42, 48–49, 55–56, 168, 173–74, 182–83, 185, 262, 263, 271, 278, 476, 572, 582, 585, 587 Chrysostom, 192, 230 Cicero, 51, 53, 226, 229, 232–35, 239, 241, 243, 252 De republica, 232 Claydon, John, 584–87 Clifford, Richard, 7, 8, 182–83 Clipstone, John, 211 The Cloud of Unknowing, 83, 101, 115–19, 274, 275, 281 n. 37, 451–52, 455–57, 462, 465; see also Methley, Richard, Divina caligo ignoranciae; Nubes ignorandi Cok, John, 368–69 Colet, John, 244, 518, 534, 540, 577 Colonne, Guido delle, Historia destructionis Troiae, 348–49, 357; see also Lydgate, John, Troy Book Colop, John, 27, 219 Coningsburgh, Edmund, 190–91, 207 The Contemplation of Sinners, 536–37; see also Worde, Wynkyn de The Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, 371, 504, 528, 567 The Conversion of St Paul, 149 Corby, John, 384–85 Corringham, Roger, 174 Cote, John, 192, 207 The Court of Sapience, 285–86, 288–94, 296– 303, 560 Coverdale, Miles, 60–61 Cranebroke, Henry, 227–28, 230 Cranmer, Thomas, 56 Books of Homilies, 534 Crome, Walter, 197–98, 207, 208

646 Cursor Mundi, 137 Curteys, William, 346, 351, 476–78 Cyrcetur, Thomas, 178, 179 d’Ailly, Pierre, 6, 8, 11, 25 Damlett, Hugh, 204 Dante, Commedia, 25, 50 Darker, William, 452, 462, 513–14 Daventre, John, 207 David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione, 504; see also Formula Noviciorum The Debate of the Body and Soul, 34 De collationibus beneficiorum pro natione Anglicana, 167–68 Deguileville, Guillaume de, Pèlerinage de Jesus Christ, 65 Pèlerinage de l’âme, 51, 65; see also Pilgrimage of the Soul Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, 51, 65, 103 De heretico comburendo, 83, 94, 136, 585 De immensa Dei misericordia, 539–40 Denston, Clement, 477 De oblacione iugis sacrificii, 554 n. 26 Dereham, Richard, 174 Deschamps, Eustache, 51 Desponsacio virginis Christi, 537–38 A Deuoute Treatise vpon the Pater Noster, 539 A Devout Treatyse of the Tree and XII. Frutes of the Holy Goost, 504–05 The Digby Lyrics, 33–35, 38, 307–23, 574, 587 Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchies, 565 Disce mori, 504 Dives and Pauper, 103–07, 127, 274, 526, 535 Dodesham, Stephen, 403, 407 Doget, John, 228–31, 238 Commentary on Phaedo, 228–29, 239, 242 Dormi Secure, 534 Douglas, Gavin, Eneados, 355 The Dyetary of Ghostly Helthe, 528 Dygon, John, 49, 201–03, 207 Dymmock, Roger, 103, 221 Eborall, Thomas, 192, 194, 207

Index Nominum Edmund of Abingdon, Duodecim abusiones claustralium, 387 Speculum ecclesie (Mirror of Holy Church), 387, 396–97, 407–10 Edward III, King, 250, 257 Edward IV, King, 251 Elmham, Thomas, Gesta Henrici Quinti, 3, 309 Liber metricus, 3 Elucidarium, 198, 200–01, 205, 208 English Prymer, 339 Erasmus, Desiderius, 47, 61, 149, 518–19, 539–40 De duplici copia verborum ac rerum, 518–19 Erghum, Bishop Ralph, 168–69, 170, 174 Everad, Robert, 171 Farley, John, 250 Fastolf, Sir John, 50, 53 Faux, Thomas, 191, 207 Felton, John, 204 Fervor amoris: see Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God Fewterer, John, Myrroure or Glasse of Christes Passion, 528 The Fifteen Oes, 528, 538; see also Caxton, William Fish, Simon, A Supplicacyon for the Beggers, 540 Fisher, John, 56, 147, 244, 538–40 The Fruytfull Saynges of Dauyd, 538 A Mornynge remembraunce, 538 This sermon folowynge, 538 Fishlake, Thomas, Scala Perfectionis, 451; see also Hilton, Walter, Scale of Perfection Fitzjames, Richard, 534 Sermo die Lune in Ebdomada Pasche, 537 Fitzralph, Richard, 6, 45–46 De questionibus Armenorum, 47 n. 10 Flemyng, Bishop Richard, 16, 18, 19, 20, 31, 37, 46, 48, 559 n. 41 The Floretum, 164 n. 37 Forest, Thomas, 171 Forester, John, 6–7 Formula Noviciorum, 504; see also David of Augsburg, De exterioris et interioris hominis compositione

Index Nominum Fox, Richard, 226, 536–37 Foxe, John, 56, 63, 137–38 Acts and Monuments, 18 n. 36 Fyfyan, David, 192, 207 Fyton, John, 175 Gallopes, Jean, 66 Gallus, Thomas, 456–57 Gascoigne, Thomas, 26, 27, 30–31, 46, 48–49, 155–57, 164–65, 189, 203, 207 Loci e Libro veritatum, 12 n. 21, 48–49 Gerson, Jean, 25, 47, 155–57, 160–64, 204, 553–54, 576 De auferibilitate sponsi ab ecclesia, 161–62 nn. 29–31 De potestate ecclesiastica, 155 nn. 1–2 Gigli, Silvestro de, 214 Giles of Rome: see Ægidius Romanus Glossa ordinaria, 570 Goldwell, Bishop James, 216–18 Gower, John, 251, 257, 567 Chronica tripertita, 247–50 Confessio Amantis, 33 Vox clamantis, 249 Grandisson, John, 169 Gratian of Chiusi, 10 Decretum, 246, 550 Gray, Bishop William, 191, 226 Greene, John, 191, 207 Gregory the Great, Pope, 181, 184 Liber regulae pastoralis, 246 Gretham, Robert de, Miroir, ou les Évangiles des Domnée, 137, 138 n. 18 Grocyn, William, 263 Grosseteste, Robert, 20, 23 Templum dei, 20 Gruitroede, Jacobus, Speculum animae peccatricis, 530 Guildhall Library, 210–12, 220–21 Hallum, Robert, 6, 7, 15–17, 50, 158–59, 167, 174–75, 182–84, 409 Harlow, John, 215 Hatfield, Edmund, Lyf of St Ursula, 470, 486 Haughmond Abbey, 329–30, 341–42; see also

647 Audelay, John Hauville, Jean de ( Johannes de Hauvilla), Architrenius, 254–57, 564 Hemming, John, 215 Henry III, King, 21 Henry IV, King, 5, 36, 180, 473 Henry V, King, 4–7, 9, 13, 14–15, 16, 21, 29, 36, 43, 50, 52, 54, 307–10, 314–18, 346, 357, 474, 476, 479, 574 Henry VI, King, 16, 213, 247, 251, 475–77, 479, 481–82 Heyworth, Bishop William, 183 Hildegard of Bingen, 85 Hilton, Walter, 28, 54, 59 n. 12, 61 n. 18, 104–05, 270, 275, 277–79, 284, 575 De adoracione ymaginum, 104–05, 405 Scala perfeccionis (Scale of Perfection), 61 n. 18, 385, 451, 527, 538, 540–41 Stimulus amoris (The Prickynge of Love), 179, 277 Vita mixta (Medyled Lyfe; Mixed Life), 83, 274, 278–84, 527, 538, 567 Historia septem sapientium, 449 Hoccleve, Thomas, 6, 33, 35, 38–42, 137, 141–44, 147, 247, 431, 574–75 ‘Ballade au tresnoble roy H. le quint’, 38–39 La Male Regle, 38 Regiment of Princes, 38, 141–44, 250 Remonstrance Against Oldcastle, 38, 96, 137, 143, 446, 567 Series, 35, 39–42, 144 Holes, Andrew, 175–77, 179, 263 Horace, 241 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 144 Hübner, Johannes, 545 Hugh of Balma, 453, 457, 466 Viae sion lugent, 462 Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, 293 Hull, Dame Eleanor, A Commentary on the Penitential Psalms, 146–47 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 52, 177–78, 230, 251, 356–57 Hus, Jan, 8–9, 546, 553–57, 585 Idley, Peter, Instructions to his Son, 429–47, 574 The Image of Loue, 539

648 The Imytacyon and Folowynge the Blessed Lyfe of our Sauyour Cryste, 530 Ive, William, 191–92, 207 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, 237, 489, 494–96, 533; see also Caxton, William Jacques de Vitry, Vita of Marie d’Oignies, 416–17, 421–28 Jakis, William, 171 James of Milan (Jacopo da Milano), Stimulus amoris, 138, 179, 274; see also Hilton, Walter, Stimulus amoris; Pseudo-Bonaventure, Stimulus amoris Jerome (Hieronymus), 146, 161,198–200, 230, 507 Epistle ad Paulinum, 198–200, 208 Vulgate Bible, 143 Jerome of Prague, 9, 553–57 Joachim of Fiore, 85 Joan of Navarre, 167 John of Stratford, Archbishop, 246–47 John of Wackerzele, vita of St Barbara, 497; see also Bokenham, Legendys; anon. Middle English prose ‘Life of St Barbara’ John XXIII, Pope, 158 Julian of Norwich, 59 n. 12, 83, 127, 133–35, 147, 149–50, 418, 575, 581 The Revelations of Divine Love, 121, 127, 419, 462 The Kalendre of the Newe Legende of Englande, 534 Kempe, Margery, 23, 31–33, 59 n. 12, 127, 133–34, 138, 149–50, 192, 199, 415–16, 418, 420, 426, 463–65, 581 The Book of Margery Kempe, 31–33, 133–34, 138, 149–50, 415–16, 419, 421–22, 454, 462–65 Kempis, Thomas à, Imitation of Christ, 101, 530 Opera, 530; see also Caxton, William The King of Beeme, 62 The Kingis Quhair, 141 Knighton, Henry, Knighton’s Chronicle, 93

Index Nominum Konstanz, Council of, 3–4, 6–20, 25, 28–29, 31–32, 36–41, 46–48, 50, 155, 157–59, 167, 175, 184, 474, 476, 545–46, 554–57, 572, 574, 576, 577, 580, 585, 587 Kymer, Gilbert, 175–78, 263 Kynaston, Sir Francis, Troilus and Criseyde (Latin translation), 449–50 Kyrkeby, William, 207 Lactantius, 230, 238, 243 Divinae institutiones, 234–36 Lacy, Edmund, 354 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 34, 35, 121, 140–41, 245, 254, 337, 375, 382, 385, 388, 403, 409, 489–90, 496, 575 The Lanterne of Liõt, 137, 149, 583–89 Latimer, Hugh, 56 Lavynham, Richard, Every Christian Man and Woman [A litel tretys on the seven deadly sins], 387 Lawerne, John, 45 Lay Folks’ Mass Book, 339 Legat, Hugh, Sermo Hugonis Legat in passione domini, 563–72, 575–76, 582–89 Leintwardine, Thomas, 220 Leo X, Pope, 539 The Lessons of the Dirige, 34 Lestrange, Lord Richard, 329–30; see also Audelay, John The Liber Albus, 212 Lichfield, William, 46, 204–05, 207, 219, 221 (?), Ancrene Wisse adaptation, 194–95, 205 Complaint of God to Sinful Man, 205 ‘Life of St Barbara’ (anon. Middle English prose), 496–501; see also Bokenham, Legendys; John of Wackerzele Life of St Ethelred, 390 Livy, 51 Ab urbe condita, 227 Lo He that Can be Cristes Clerc, 29 Lombard, Peter, Commentary on the Psalms, 146 Sentences, 47, 198, 489, 491, 494 Longchamps, Nigel de, Speculum stultorum, 261

Index Nominum The Longleat Sermons, 127 ‘lordis and husbondemen’, Treatise for, 398, 401–02 Loring, William, 174 Love, Nicholas, 59 n. 12, 63, 120, 140–41, 377 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, 63, 77–79, 86, 101–02, 106, 119–32, 140–41, 274, 277, 282–83, 463, 527–531, 581, 587 Luther, Martin, 55, 524, 539–40 Lydgate, John, 9–10, 15, 33, 38, 51–52, 53, 247, 288, 309, 343–59, 429–47, 567, 575 ‘Balade of Oure Ladye’ / ‘Gloriosa dicta sunt de te’, 353–54 ‘Ballade at the Reverence of Our Lady, Qwene of Mercy’, 354–55 ‘Ballade to King Henry VI Upon His Coronation’, 10 The Complaynt of a Lovers Lyfe, 347, 348 A Defence of Holy Church, 4, 29, 143, 309 ‘Every thing to his Semblable’, 352 ‘Exposition of the Pater Noster, An’, 344, 351 Fall of Princes, 52, 353, 355–57, 429–47, 535 ‘Interpretation and Virtues of the Mass’, 345 Legend of St Austin at Compton, 15, 346 ‘Letter to Gloucester’, 357 Life of our Lady, 356, 431 Lives of SS Edmund and Fremund, 15, 346, 470, 474–75, 477–80, 484 Miracles of St Edmund, 346 ‘Misericordias domini in eternum cantabo’, 355 ‘On De Profundis’, 351 Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 51, 65–66, 103, 107–111 ‘Prayer in Old Age’, 351–52, 359 ‘Procession of Corpus Christi’, 344–45 Reson and Sensuallyte, 444 The Serpent of Division, 354 The Siege of Thebes, 345–46, 347–49, 351, 356, 357–58 St Alban and Amphibalus, 470, 475, 477, 480–85

649 ‘Soteltes at the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI’, 9 The Temple of Glass, 348 ‘Testament of Dan John Lydgate’, 346–53, 356, 359 Troy Book, 33, 309, 344, 347–49, 351, 354, 355–57 and Benedict Burgh, The Secrees of Old Philisoffres, 352–53 The Lyf of Saint Ierom, 534 The Lyf of Saynt Wenefryde, 534 Lyfe of Soul, 149 Lyhert, Bishop Walter, 218–19, 221 Lyndwood, William, 175, 182, 183, 207 Provinciale, 26, 183 Maconi, Stephen, Vita of Catherine of Siena, 417 Maidenith, John, 174 Maidstone, Clement, 5 Maidstone, Richard, The Seven Penitential Psalms, 34, 141, 145–46 Mannyng, Robert, Handlyng Synne, 429–47 Martin V, Pope, 8, 18, 159, 561 n. 44 The Meditations of Saint Bernard, 528; see also Worde, Wynkyn de Melton, William de, Sermo Exhortatorius, 534 Methley, Richard, 449–66, 577–78 Divina caligo ignoranciae, 451–57, 459–62, 464–66; see also Cloud of Unknowing Dormitorium dilecti, 463–64 Refectorium salutis, 463–64 Schola amoris languidi, 463–64 Speculum simplicium animarum, 451–54, 457–60, 464–66; see also Porete, Marguerite, Mirror of Simple Souls To Hew Hermyte: A Pistle of Solitary Life Nowadayes, 463, 465 Milton, William, 183 Mirk, John, Festial, 381, 385, 488, 496, 533–35 Instructions for Parish Priests, 381, 384, 385, 391–92 The Mirror of Holy Church, 396–97, 407–10;

650 see also Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum ecclesie Mirrour of Chastite, 400–01 The Mirroure of Golde for the Synfull Soule, 528, 530; see also Pynson, Richard; Gruitroede, Jacobus Mitford, Richard, 174, 182 M. N., Mirror of Simple Souls, 457–62; see also Methley, Richard; Porete, Marguerite Montagu, Sir John, 169 Montagu, Thomas, 50, 168–76, 182, 184–85 More, Thomas, 55–56, 61, 539–41 Assertio septem sacramentorum, 540 The Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere, 540 A Dyaloge of syr Thomas More, 540 Eruditissimi viri … opus elegans, 540 A Mery Gest, 540 The Supplycacyon of Soulys, 540 Thomae Mori Epistola ad Germanum Brixium, 540 Morton, John, 226 Mount Grace (Carthusian Priory), 70 n. 46, 452–53, 463–64, 531 A Myrour to Lewde Men and Wymmen, 138–39 The Myroure of oure Lady, 125 n. 26, 504, 505, 507–09, 531 Mystica theologia, 462 Nerford, Margery, 192 Netter of Walden, Thomas, 63, 103, 159–64 Doctrinale Antiquitatum Fidei Ecclesiae Catholicae, 26, 45–47, 159–64 Neville, Bishop, 175 Nicholas of Dresden, Tabulae veteris et novi coloris, 554 Nicholas V, Pope, 156 Nicolas of Clamanges, 25 The Northern Homily Cycle, 381 Northlew, Simon, 183 Norwich Library, 216–19 Nubes ignorandi, 451; see also Cloud of Unknowing; Methley, Richard, Divina caligo ignoranciae

Index Nominum Of Feigned Contemplative Life, 181 Oldcastle, Sir John, 8, 29, 38, 43, 96, 137, 143, 184, 307–08, 446; see also Hoccleve, Thomas, Remonstrance Against Oldcastle ‘On chattering in Church’, 445 n. 23 Oppy, Robert, 207 The Orcherd of Syon, 26 n. 58, 504, 507–09; see also Syon, Birgittine House; Catherine of Siena The Order of Priesthood, 181 Origen, 498, 500–01; see also Pseudo-Origen Orléans, Charles, duc d’, 52 Osmund, 168, 170, 176, 180–81, 184 Ovid, 241 Oxford, University of, 14, 15, 16–21, 26–27, 30–31, 35–36, 44–49, 98, 140, 142, 157–58, 167–69, 175–76, 180, 185, 188–89, 195 n. 20, 204, 206, 209, 219–20, 230, 257–58, 409, 450, 453, 476, 531–32, 545, 553, 558–59, 561, 563–64, 577, 585 Palmer, William, 453–54 Parys, William, 110 The Passion of our Lord, 80–83, 87–88 Paunteley, John, 308, 323 n. 32 Pavia-Siena, Council of, 28, 159 Payne, Peter, 165, 553–54, 557–58 Pecham, Archbishop John, 20, 23, 69, 287, 431, 533, 581 Ignorantia sacerdotum, 23, 36–37, 533 Pecock, Reginald, 27–28, 36, 46–47, 135, 189–191, 195–97, 199, 203–06, 207, 215, 219–21, 227, 267–303, 446, 490–91, 492, 494, 501–02, 536, 557, 560, 573, 574–75, 581–82 The Book of Faith, 196 n. 23, 223 n. 35, 272 The Donet, 272–73, 286–88, 295–96 The Folewer to the Donet, 272–73, 285–88, 291–303 Poore Mennis Myrrour, 272–73 Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy, 103, 111–13, 267–68, 269, 279–80 The Reule of Crysten Religioun, 204 n. 37, 269–84, 286–87, 302, 490–91, 501

651

Index Nominum Peter of Riga, Aurora, 211 Petrarca, Francesco, De vita solitaria, 177; see also Secretum (Middle English translation) De remediis utriusque fortunae, 237–38 Phillip of Clairvaux, Vita of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, 416–25, 427–28 The Pilgrimage of the Soul, 140–41, 527; see also Deguileville, Pèlerinage de l’Âme; Caxton, William Pinder, Ulrich, Speculum Passionis Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, 421 n. 20; see also Fewterer, John, Myrroure or Glasse of Christes Passion Pisa, Council of, 14, 16–17, 25, 157, 159, 163–64, 167, 175, 474, 476, 572 Pisan, Christine de, 51, 302, 567 Epistre d’Othéa, 53; see also Scrope, Stephen, Epistle of Othea Plato, Phaedo, 228–29; see also Doget, John, Commentary on Phaedo Plutarch, 253, 566, 584 Pole, William de la, 50, 52, 434 The Pore Caitif, 119–23, 127–29, 274, 401–02 Polton, Bishop Thomas, 10–12, 14, 18, 175, 561 n. 44 Porete, Marguerite, Mirror of Simple Souls, 451–54, 457–60, 462; see also Methley, Richard; M. N. The Praier and Complaynte of the Ploweman vnto Christe, 525 Premierfait, Laurent de, 51–53, 247, 356, 432 Pricke of Conscience, 62, 384–85 Pseudo-Aristotle, Secreta secretorum, 249, 260, 261 Pseudo-Augustine, De conflictu viciorum atque virtutum, 208 De igne purgatorio, 208 Quaestiones veteris et novi testamenti, 198, 208 Tractatus de spiritu et anima, 208 Pseudo-Bonaventure, Meditationes de Passione Christi, 84, 86, 367–70 Meditationes vitae Christi, 120–21, 274, 529–30; see also Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ

The Stimulus amoris, 138, 179, 274; see also James of Milan, Stimulus amoris; Hilton, Walter, Stimulus amoris Pseudo-Dionysus, 453, 455, 457, 466 Mystica theologia, 462 Pseudo-Grosseteste, Dialogus inter corpus et animam, 208; see also Grosseteste, Robert Pseudo-Origen, sermon on Mary Magdalene, 199–200, 205, 208 Pupilla oculi, 208, 392; see Burgh, John de Pynchbeck, John, 192, 207 Pynson, Richard, 526, 528, 530, 534, 535, 538 Quattuor Sermones, 533 Ragenhull, Robert, 174–75, 178–79 Rauf, Richard, 382, 386, 391 Repingdon, Philip, 46, 216, 261 The Rewyll of Seynt Saueoure, 504 Richard II, King, 5, 248, 250, 314, 472–73 Richard of St Victor, 456–57 Ridley, Nicholas, 56 Rolle, Richard, 83, 328, 396–97, 512 (?), The Contemplacyons of the Drede and Loue of God, 528 Form of Living, 85–86, 274 Incendium amoris, 25 Psalter or Psalms of David and Certain Canticles, with a Translation and Exposition in English, 145 (?), The Remedy ayenst the Troubles of Temptacyons, 528 Rook, Robert, 193–94, 197, 199, 207, 208 Roos, Sir Richard, 50 La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, 52 The Royal Book, 527–28, 535; see also Caxton, William Russell, John, 226, 263 Russhe, John, 526, 535 Ruusbroec, Jan van, 461–62; see also Methley, Richard, Speculum simplicium animarum Sacerdos parochialis, 382–93, 573; see also William of Pagula, Oculus sacerdotis Salisbury Cathedral, 168–85, 573

652 Salutati, Coluccio, 50 Declamatio, 356–57 Sancta Maria Virgo (antiphon), 172 Sarum Manuale, 183–84 Sarum Use (liturgy), 168, 172, 176, 180–84 Savonarola, Girolamo, 535–36 Sawtre, William, 94–95, 473 The Sayenges of the Wyse Men, 539 Scarle, John, 190, 207 Schale, Geoffrey, 19 A Schort Reule of Lyf, 399–401 Scrope, Stephen, The Epistle of Othea, 53; see also Pisan, Christine de, Epistre d’Othéa The Dicts and Sayings of the Philosophers, 53 Secretum (anonymous Middle English translation of Francesco Petrarca’s work), 230, 236–44; see also Petrarca, Francesco Sellyng, William, 227–28, 230, 244 Seneca, 51, 201, 208, 252 ‘Seven Sheddings of Christ’s Blood’, 370, 528; see also Worde, Wynkyn de Sheen (Carthusian house), 4–6, 44, 49, 70 n. 46, 201, 452, 462, 531–32, 580–81 Shirley, John, 352–54, 359 The Siege of Jerusalem, 385, 389, 403 Sigismund, Emperor, 3–4, 6–10, 16, 38–39, 41, 184 The Sixteen Conditions of Christ’s Charity, 403 Skelton, John, A Replication against certain young heretics abjured of late, 142–44 The Speculum Christiani, 22–23, 30, 33, 385–86, 401 Speculum peccatoris, 367 Speculum sacerdotale, 488 Spofforth, Thomas, 25 Stow, John, A Survey of London, 210–11 St Patrick’s Purgatory, 439 n. 20 Suso, Henry, Horologium Sapientiae, 417; see also Treatyse of the Sevene Poyntes of Trewe Love and Everlastynge Wisdom Symbolum Apostolorum, 539–40 Syon (Birgittine House), 4–5, 25–29, 31, 35– 36, 44, 49, 70 n. 46, 194, 204, 403, 452, 503–19, 524, 530–32, 538–39, 577, 580–81, 585

Index Nominum Tholyte, Thomas, 382, 384–86, 391 Thomas of Cantimpré, Vita of Christina mirabilis, 416–17, 422–23, 425–28 Thoresby, Archbishop John, The Lay Folk’s Catechism, 138, 488, 496 Thorpe, William, The Testimony of William Thorpe, 97–98, 106–07, 134, 260–61, 451 The Three Arrows of Doomsday, 389 Treatyse of the Sevene Poyntes of Trewe Love and Everlastynge Wisdom, 418 n. 8; see also Suso, Henry Trent, Council of, 246–47 A Tretis of Weddid Men & Wymmen & of Her Children Also, 398, 400 Trevisa, John, Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk on Translation, 297–98, 450 Tripolitanus, Philip, 249, 260 Tunstall, Bishop Cuthbert, 539 The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, 93 Tyndale, William, 61, 540–41 New Testament, 55–56, 61, 541 Ullerston, Richard, 16–19, 21–22, 36, 45–47, 86, 157, 167–68, 175–76, 181–82, 184 Defensiorum dotacionis ecclesiae, 184 Determinatio, 454 Petitiones quoad reformationem ecclesiae militantis, 167 Urban III, Pope, 246 Usk, Adam, The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 3 Usk, Thomas, 140, 141 Virgil, 226, 236, 239, 241, 566 Aeneid, 238 Eclogues, 566 The Vision of Edmund Leversedge, 439, 441, 462 The Vision of Saint Paul, 389 The Vision of William Straunton, 439, 441 Vitae patrum, 31, 533 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, 108 ‘Vos estis ciues sanctorum’, 375 Walsingham, Thomas, Chronica maiora, 8–9 Waltham, Bishop John, 170, 172–75, 178, 182

653

Index Nominum Walton, John, The Consolation of Philosophy, 140; see also Boethius, Consolatio; Chaucer, Boece Warham, Archbishop William, 263, 539 Whethamstede, Abbot, 477–78, 526 Whittington College, London, 27, 220–21, 535–36 Whittington, Richard, 211–12 Whyte, Robert, 197–200, 207–08 Whytford, Richard, Pype, or Tonne, of the Lyfe of Perfection, 505, 528 Werke for Housholders, 505 William of Pagula, Oculus sacerdotis, 274, 384, 391–92, 573; see also Sacerdos parochialis Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 142, 539 Worcester Library, 212–15; see also Carpenter, Bishop John Worcester, William, 53 Boke of Noblesse, 53 Tullius of Friendship, 53 Tullius of Olde Age, 53 Worde, Wynkyn de, 288, 345, 513, 526–28, 533–39, 580–81 Worthington, Gilbert, 192, 207 Wyatt, Thomas, 144, 237 Wyche, Richard, 150, 199–200

Wyclif, John, xii, 5, 8, 14, 17, 19, 21, 22–23, 26, 33, 41–42, 43, 45, 46, 54, 55, 56, 66–67, 85, 94, 160–64, 169, 176, 180, 184, 204, 205, 227, 258–63, 267, 364–76, 405–06, 423, 525, 531–32, 545–62, 575, 577, 582, 585 (?), De Amore siue ad Quinque quaestiones (trans. The Five Questions), 85–86 De arte sophistica (De Logica III), 546 De mandatis divinis, 404–05 De officio regis, 259–60 De veritate sacrae scripturae, 47 n. 10 Sermones, 551–52 Trialogus, 545–52 Wycliffite Bible (and ‘Prologue’), 60, 65, 71–72, 125, 192, 525 Wykeham, Nicholas, 176 Wykeham, William, 232–33, 244, 250–51, 257–59, 261–63, 577 Wyklyffes Wycket, 525 Wysz, Petrus, Speculum aureum, 25 Wyville, Bishop, 168–69 Young, John, 535–36 Zurke, Herman, 178

INDEX OF MANUSCRIPTS

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 434: 136 n. 13 Cambridge, Emmanuel College, MS 72: 336 n. 24 Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 174/95: 205 n. 38 MS 669/646: 368–69 Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 221: 452, 462 MS 285: 383 n. 11, 384–93 MS 307: 33 Cambridge, Selwyn College, MS L. 108. 1: 136 n. 13 Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 74: 399 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS, 0.2.56: 463 n. 46 MS B. 14. 38: 84–88 MS B. 14. 39: 138, 146 MS B. 14. 54: 402–07 MS R . 3. 20: 354 MS R . 3. 21: 288–91 (288 n.10), 299–301 Cambridge, University Library, MS Dd. 12. 69: 384–86, 390–91, 393 MS Dd. 14. 39: 136 n. 13 MS Ee. I. 25: 197–206, 208 MS Hh. 1. 3: 402 n. 23 MS Kk. 5. 30: 344 MS Mm. 5. 37: 25 n. 53 Columbia, MO, University of Missouri, Ellis Library, Fragmenta Manuscripta, leaf no. 177: 430 n. 3

Dublin, Trinity College, MS 245: 373 n. 34 Durham, University Library, MS Cosin V. iv. 2: 383–84 n. 11 MS Cosin V. v. 16: 513–14 Edinburgh, Advocates’ Library, MS Abbotsford: 498 n. 29 Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, MS 93: 402 n. 23 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18. 7. 21: 367 n. 10 Eton, Eton College Records, 60/3/2, Register 1: 209–10 n. 2 Glasgow, Hunterian Museum, MS 520: 128 n. 33 London, British Library, MS Additional 10036: 384–85, 389–90, 393 MS Additional 10052: 387 n. 21 MS Additional 10053: 384–93, 408 MS Additional 10344: 228 n. 13, 229 n. 14, 229 n. 16, 236 n. 33, 242 n. 49 MS Additional 15673: 230 n. 20 MS Additional 22285: 49 n. 14 MS Additional 29729: 288–91 (288 n.10), 296–99 MS Additional 47675: 230 n. 20 MS Additional 57335: 429 n. 1, 430, 441 n. 22, 447 n. 27 MS Additional 60577: 237 n. 35, 238 n. 40, 242 n. 48 MS Additional 61823: 464 MS Arundel 197: 509–10

656 MS Arundel 285: 350 MS Arundel 327: 497 n. 25 MS Burney 356: 384, 390–91, 393 MS Cotton Cleopatra E. iii: 227 n. 8–9, 230 n. 20, 244 n. 54 MS Cotton Faustina B. iii: 470 n. 5 MS Cotton Nero E. v 25 n. 55 MS Cotton Tiberius A. VII:: 108 MS Cotton Titus A. xxiv: 231 n. 21 MS Cotton Vespasian B. xvi: 29 n. 66 MS Egerton 2629: 50 n. 15 MS Harley 32: 211 MS Harley 401: 164 n. 37–38 MS Harley 953: 128 n. 33 MS Harley 959: 451 n. 12 MS Harley 1005: 343 MS Harley 2251: 288–91 (288 n.10), 297, 299–301 MS Harley 2255: 346 MS Harley 2385: 371–72 MS Harley 2398: 405 n. 39 MS Harley 3043: 498 n. 28 MS Harley 3594: 367 n. 10 MS Harley 4172: 391, 393 MS Harley 4826: 51–52 n. 17 MS Harley 5436: 197–206, 208 MS Harley 6579: 61 n. 18 MS Lansdowne 699: 484 n. 51 MS Royal 1 A. x: 383–84 n. 11 MS Royal 5 C. iii: 191 n. 10, 204 n. 36 MS Royal 8 F. vii: 383 n. 11 MS Royal 10 B. ix: 227 n. 9, 228 n. 10, 230 n. 17 MS Royal 10 B. x: 191–92 n. 11 MS Royal 17 B. xlvii: 193 n. 16 London, Corporation of London Record Office, Letter-Book K: 211 n. 8 London, Guildhall Library, Commissary Court of London, Register 4 (Prowet), MS 9171/4: 221 n. 47 MS 3042: 211 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 211: 247–48 MS 408: 387 MS 450: 226 n. 4 MS 472: 28

Index of Manuscripts London Metropolitan Archives, Corporation of London, Letter Book L: 193 n. 15 Journals of the Common Council 6: 193 n. 15 Plea and Memoranda Rolls A59:193 n. 15 London, Society of Antiquaries, MS 687: 385 London, Westminster School, MS 3: 395–411, 573–74 Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, Register of Bishop Haimo Hethe, DRb Ar1/1: 217 n. 31 Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Eng. 77: 192 n. 12 New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fa.50: 430 n. 3 New York, Columbia University Library, MS Plimpton 256: 288–91 (288 n.10), 298–99 New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 648: 86–88 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Norwich Consistory Court will registers, Register Ryxe: 217 n. 29 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Dean and Chapter records, DCN 3/4: 217 n. 29 Oxford, All Souls College, MS 98: 249 Oxford, Balliol College, MS 220: 197–206, 208 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Additional A. 44: 254–55 MS Ashmole 59: 352 MS Auctarium F. 5. 23: 249 MS Bodley 67: 249 n. 13 MS Bodley 110: 384, 390–93 MS Bodley 181: 249 n. 13 MS Bodley 240: 477 n. 38 MS Bodley 416: 408 MS Bodley 495: 249 MS Bodley 496: 191–92 n. 11 MS Bodley 554: 383 n. 11 MS Bodley 649: 18, 29–30, 307–08 MS Bodley 692: 45 n. 5 MS Bodley 789: 365–80 MS Bodley 856: 451–52 MS Bodley 938: 366, 402 n. 23

Index of Manuscripts MS Digby 64: 254 n. 27 MS Digby 102: 33–35, 38, 307–23 MS Douce 60: 385 MS Douce 114: 416–28, 574 MS Douce 250: 136 n. 13 MS Douce 302: 327 MS Eng. Poet d. 45: 430 n. 3 MS Gough Liturgical 7: 325 n. 1 MS Hatton 96: 565 n. 7 MS Holkham misc. 40: 136 n. 13 MS Laud 23: 375–80 MS Laud misc. 233: 345 MS Laud misc. 570: 53 n. 20 MS Laud misc. 656: 402–04, 406 MS Laud misc. 706: 308, 564 n. 3 MS Lyell 20: 45 n. 6 MS Rawlinson A 387 B: 78 n. 10 MS Rawlinson C. 35: 391 n. 35 MS Rawlinson D. 913: 383 n. 11, 391, 393 MS Rawlinson Poetry 137: 382, 383 n. 11, 385 MS Selden Supra 41: 159 n. 19 Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS 183: 157–58 n. 12, 158 n. 15 Oxford, Jesus College, MS 29: 80 Oxford, Lincoln College, MS Lat. 117: 49 n. 13, 155 n. 3, 156 n. 4, 156 n. 8, 165 n. 43, 165 n. 45 MS Lat. 118: 49 n. 13, 155 n. 3, 156 n. 5, 157 n. 9 Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 99: 549 MS lat. 79: 202 n. 34

657 Oxford, New College, MS 288: 231 n. 21, 233 n. 28, 234 n. 30, 235 n. 32, 250–58 Oxford, St John’s College, MS 182: 417–18 Oxford, Trinity College, MS 7: 384, 390–91, 393 Oxford, University College, MS 142: 386, 391 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fonds anglais 41: 128 n. 33 MS fonds fr. 22912, 100 Princeton, University Library, MS Taylor 11: 368 n. 12 S a ffro n Wa ld e n , To w n C o u n c il, D/B2/CHR11/13: 209 n. 2 San Marino, Huntington Library, MS Hm 112: 387 n. 21 Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Downside Abbey, MS 26542: 128 n. 33 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Vindobonensis Palatinus 4133: 22 n. 49 Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F.10: 563–72 Worcester, Worcestershire Record Office, Register of Bishop John Carpenter, I: 214 n. 19 Register of Bishop Silvestro de Gigli: 214 n. 19

M EDIEVAL C HURCH S TUDIES

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Megan Cassidy-Welch, Monastic Spaces and their Meanings: Thirteenth-Century English Cistercian Monasteries (2001) Elizabeth Freeman, Narratives of a New Order: Cistercian Historical Writing in England, 1150–1220 (2002) The Study of the Bible in the Carolingian Era, ed. by Celia Chazelle and Burton Van Name Edwards (2003) Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude: Essays on Cistercians, Art, and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson, ed. by Terryl N. Kinder (2004) The Voice of Silence: Women’s Literacy in a Men’s Church, ed. by Thérèse de Hemptinne and María Eugenia Góngora (2004) Emilia Jamroziak, Rievaulx Abbey and its Social Context, 1132–1300: Memory, Loyalty, and Networks (2005)

Saints, Scholars, and Politicians: Gender as a Tool in Medieval Studies, ed. by Mathilde van Dijk and Renée Nip (2005) Text and Controversy from Wyclif to Bale: Essays in Honour of Anne Hudson, ed. by Helen Barr and Ann M. Hutchison (2005) Alison I. Beach, Manuscripts and Monastic Culture: Reform and Renewal in Twelfth-Century Germany (2007) Lena Roos, ‘God Wants It!’ The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and its Jewish and Christian Background (2007) Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert (2007) James J. Boyce, Carmelite Liturgy and Spiritual Identity: The Choir Books of Kraków (2009) Studies in Carthusian Monasticism in the Late Middle Ages, ed. by Julian M. Luxford (2009) Kriston R . Rennie, Law and Practice in the Age of Reform: The Legatine Work of Hugh of Die (1073–1106) (2010) Gunilla Iversen, Laus angelica: Poetry in the Medieval Mass, ed. by Jane Flynn, trans. by William Flynn (2010) Kevin J. Alban, The Teaching and Impact of the ‘Doctrinale’ of Thomas Netter of Walden c.1374–1430) (2011)

In Preparation The Regular Canons in the Medieval British Isles, ed. by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber Wycliffite Controversies, ed. by Mishtooni Bose and J. Patrick Hornbeck II Frederico Botana, The Seven Works of Mercy in Italian Medieval Art (c. 1050–c. 1400) N. I. Tsougarakis, The Latin Medieval Religious Orders in Greece, 1204–1500