Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England 0813218853, 9780813218854

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. The English Lives of Mary
2. John of Garland, Gram/Marian
3. The Musical Mother Tongue in Anglo-Latin Poetry for Meditation
4. Chaucer and Dame School
5. Mary's Mild Voice in the Middle English Lyrics
6. Margery Kempe and the Virgin Birth of Her Book
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Scribit Mater

Scribit Mater Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England

Georgiana Donavin

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D. C.

Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Donavin, Georgiana. Scribit Mater : Mary and the language arts in the literature of medieval England / Georgiana Donavin.   p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8132-1885-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint—In literature.  2. Christian literature, English (Middle)—History and criticism.  3. English literature— Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism.  4. Latin literature, Medieval and modern—England—History and criticism. 5. Communication in literature.  6. Rhetoric, Medieval.  7. Language arts—England—History—To 1500.  8. Mary, Blessed Virgin, Saint— Symbolism. I. Title. PR275.M34D66 2012 820.9'351—dc23 2011022272

This book is dedicated to the memory of Reta Louise Patnott, wise and loving grandmother.

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii

Introduction

1

One. The English Lives of Mary

27

Two. John of Garland, Gram/marian

75

Three. The Musical Mother Tongue in AngloLatin Poetry for Meditation

115

Four. Chaucer and Dame School

163

Five. Mary’s Mild Voice in the Middle English Lyrics

220

Six. Margery Kempe and the Virgin Birth of Her Book

250

Conclusion

287

Selected Bibliography

297

Index

311

Illustrations

1. The young Virgin Mary learning to read from St. Anne

6

Bodleian Library, MS Lat. liturg. F.2, fol. 104v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

2. Annunciation

7

Bodleian Library, MS Gough liturg. 3, fol. 14v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

3. The Seat of Wisdom, or Virgin and Child enthroned

8

British Library, Lansdowne 383, fol. 165v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

4. The Virgin enthroned, surrounded by figures of the liberal arts

9

The Royal Portal of the west façade at Chartres Cathedral. Photograph by Hartill Art Associates. Reproduced by permission of Hartill Art Associates.

5. The liberal arts surrounding the Virgin enthroned

10

The Royal Portal of the west façade at Chartres Cathedral. Photograph by Hartill Art Associates. Reproduced by permission of Hartill Art Associates.

6. Marian wheel of verse

109

John of Garland, Parisiana Poetria. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press.

ix

x  illustrations 7. Capitals “G”, “H”, and “I” from Geoffrey Chaucer, An ABC

175

Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 638, fol. 205r. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

8. Decorated “B” of the David Cycle

187

British Library, MS Harley 2871, fol. 13r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

9. King David ringing bells

188

British Library, MS Harley 2871, fol. 120r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

10. Annunciation depicted in a capital “D” British Library, MS Harley 2871, fol. 209r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

189

Acknowledgments

I began to think about this project in the early 1990s during graduate school, and therefore owe thanks to innumerable teachers, friends, and colleagues who have listened to my ideas with interest; they would expand the list of these acknowledgments beyond bounds. At the University of Oregon, Martha Bayless’s course in Medieval Latin provided a foundation for this project. During periods of research, library staffs that offered efficient and kind support included those in the manuscript rooms of the British Library, Cambridge University Library, St. John’s College Library, Cambridge, and the Bodleian Library. The staff at my own Giovale Library at Westminster College graciously allowed unlimited interlibrary lending. Not only the staff, but also the many students at Westminster who studied Marian literature with me are to be thanked. I owe special gratitude to those students who have been my research assistants: Amanda Finlayson, who compiled secondary scholarship in an early phase; Timothy Asay, whose enthusiasm and original work on medieval sermons gave me courage to begin this book anew in 2003; Kirsten Gwin, who participated in creating bibliographies and proofreading—and everything in between—during her three and a half years in my office; Jordan Loveridge, who helped to prepare this manuscript for its final compilation; and Meghan Hekker, who checked the accuracy of quotations and citations with patience born of her enduring love for medieval English literature and history; and finally, Amy Firestone, who along with Hekker, worked on the index. Bright young

  xi

xii  acknowledgments people are the treasury of any college, but Westminster provided monetary funding as well, in the form of a six-month leave to work on this book and successive summer grants from the Gore Endowment that supported travel to Britain and time to compose various chapters. Along the way to completing Scribit Mater, I presented several conference papers on Marian topics in medieval English literature at the Medieval Association of the Pacific. I also presented papers at the International Congress in Kalamazoo, the New Chaucer Society, and others, but I want to recognize my Medieval Association of the Pacific colleagues particularly for providing an intellectual home and the responses that proceed from real care for a fellow scholar’s accuracy and success. Two conference papers became published articles, and I thank Brepols for allowing me to revise and republish “The Light of the Virgin Muse in John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady” as part of chapter 1, and Taylor & Francis for allowing me to revise and republish “Alphabets and Rosary Beads in Chaucer’s An ABC” as part of chapter 4. I owe a special debt to the readers who evaluated the original manuscript of Scribit Mater. Both Donna Spivey Ellington and Karen Saupe provided detailed insights into a reader’s experiences and suggested revisions that have significantly improved this book. Also, Rachel Fulton and Harry Ansgar Kelly kindly advised me on translating from Latin, and Maria Dobozy offered expert commentary on chapter 5. Any remaining errors are my own responsibility. Scribit Mater is made attractive through the design by Kachergis Book Design, the staff of the Catholic University of America Press, the copy editor, Ellen Coughlin, the permission of various libraries to use images from illuminated manuscripts, the expert photography of Hartill Art Associates, and the talents of Ellen Wiener, whose East Window painting graces the cover. My deepest personal gratitude goes to my son, Kirkwood Paul Donavin, who shared the sacrifices that finally brought this book to completion, and to my husband, Robert King, who offered unf lagging support. Finally, I offer eternal thanks to the Virgin herself, by whose grace Marian matter flowed through this blunt instrument.

Abbreviations



BL British Library

BMK The Book of Margery Kempe CCCM Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis CMEL Thomas G. Duncan, ed., A Companion to the Middle English Lyric EETS Early English Text Society MED Middle English Dictionary MEML Karen Saupe, ed., Middle English Marian Lyrics

PL Patrologia Latina

xiii

Scribit Mater

Introduction

n studies on medieval representations of the Virgin Mary, the epithet often takes precedence. Asserted in the Roman Catholic West then and now, the perpetual virginity of Christ’s mother preoccupies the exegesis of medieval fathers, the preaching of domestic reformers, the visions of monastic worshippers, and more recently, the scholarship of medieval historians and literary critics. In postmodern writing about Mary in the Middle Ages, “virginity” has functioned as a sign of the church’s sexual repression or its unachievable constructs of femininity. R. Howard Bloch, for instance, traces the idealizing of Mary’s virginity through the aesthetics of medieval romance and finds the church’s shadow of misogyny cast over this popular genre.1 Over the past twenty years, however, feminist scholars have recuperated positive significations for medieval virginity and the power inhering in the Virgin Mary as the utmost icon of sexual purity.2 They have defined the 1. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). One can still find reflections of this sort of analysis focusing on how medieval constructions of virginity—and the Virgin as the primary example—reflect a culture of misogyny, although this line of thinking is not as prevalent as it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Mary F. Thurlkill’s Chosen among Women: Mary and Fatima in Medieval Christianity and Sh’ite Islam (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), for instance, compares the two eponymous figures in order to show how diverse patriarchal societies objectified the divine feminine in the process of instantiating doctrines and traditions. 2. The following list of resources is not completely inclusive, but offers a sense of the diversity of approaches and subject matters that allow for an investigation of the strength

1

2  Introduction meanings of “virginity” as it pertains to various phases of medieval physiological understanding and associated these definitions with sanctity, exemplary discipline, and authority.3 This book focuses on the intellectual powers that, according to scripture and legend, Mary was able to cultivate because of her commitment to virginity, and particularly on her linguistic skills as they are characterized and appropriated in the literature of medieval England. Although it is true that the Virgin Birth was and is a cornerstone of the Catholic Church that reflects Christ’s sinlessness and Mary’s divine pregnancy, an excessive focus on the Mother’s chastity as a sign of superlative obedience has impeded a full appreciation of the strength inhering in medieval representations of virginity and figurations of Mary. Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 13–30; Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, reprinted 2002); Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001); Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Maud Burnett McInerney, Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003); Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Catherine Oakes, Ora pro nobis: The Virgin as Intercessor in Medieval Art and Devotion (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3. For scholarship defining “medieval virginity,” see the following: Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih, eds., Medieval Virginities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Anne-Marie Helvétius, “Virgo et virago: réf lexions sur le pouvoir du voile consacré d’après les sources hagiographiques de la Gaule de nord,” in Femmes et pouvoirs de femmes à Byzance et on Occident VIe–VIIe siècle, ed. Stéphane Lebecq, Alain Dierkens, Régine Le Jan, and Jean Marie Sansterre, 189–204 (Villenneuve d’Ascq: Centre de recherché sur l’histoire de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3, 1999); Kathleen Coyne Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2000), 141; Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie, eds., Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Associated University Presses, 1999); Felice Lifshitz, “Priestly Women, Virginal Men: Litanies and their Discontents,” in Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, ed. Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz, 87–96 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Jo Ann McNamara, A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington Park Press, 1983), 108–9, 123; Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).



Introduction 3

inhering in medieval instantiations of the Virgin Mother. As Donna Spivey Ellington has argued, the “Virgin of the late Middle Ages was rather different from the quiet, passive Virgin who will emerge in Catholic preaching after the Council at Trent,” and as with so many things in historical scholarship, we have sometimes mistakenly read the medieval Virgin Mary through an early modern lens.4 Mary’s reign over scriptural exegesis and devotional expression has been too long underplayed in analyses confusing virginity and subordination with vacuity. Adored in the Middle Ages as a holy mother, figure for wisdom, and advocate at the throne of God, the Virgin Mary occupied positions requiring superior intellection, especially as concerns language and its rhetorical uses. With an emphasis on the literature of medieval England, this book investigates constructions of Mary as a Lady Rhetorica, magistra for language studies, muse for poetry, and exemplar of perfected speech in a fallen world.5 The story of the Virgin’s life, studied in scripture, amplified in apocrypha, and embellished in saints’ lives, emphasizes Mary’s thoughtfulness, intelligent study, and verbal acumen.6 Miri Rubin has recently tracked the variety of European arts that sprang from a few accounts in the gospels to position the Virgin as a central figure in medieval culture.7 The Gospel of Luke in particular proves the Virgin’s piety and humility through her verbal responses. When the angel Gabriel declares the Lord’s plan to her at the Annunciation, the Virgin accepts the Christ child into her womb with perfect humility, declaring herself God’s handmaid (1:26–38). Visiting her aged cousin Elizabeth, who was also miraculously pregnant, Mary chants the Magnificat and in so doing imitates the psalms that praise God’s might and seek his protection. Mary’s chanting and concomitant invocation of her musical inheritance from the line of David begin a long tradition linking the Virgin to poetry and song. In Luke’s version of Mary’s story, after Jesus’ birth and the visitation by the shepherds, Mary substitutes for the absent magi, as she 4. Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul, 143. 5. In her doctoral dissertation “With a Worde, of the Mayden Spoke: Medieval Marian Poetics” (Stanford University, 1993), Mary Katherine McDevitt similarly argues the Virgin’s influence over medieval poetics, but places more emphasis on vernacular traditions. 6. English quotations of the Bible will be taken from the Revised Standard Version. 7. Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).

4  Introduct ion “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (2:19). Continuing to represent Mary as a wise, tuneful, and articulate woman, apocryphal texts embellished on the few details available about Mary, even in the Gospel of Luke. In the Protevangelium of James and the later Gospel according to the Pseudo Matthew, Mary’s early life mirrors that of a cloistered novice, as she has been dedicated to the temple by her parents, committed to perpetual virginity, and immersed in holy texts, hymns, and prayers.8 From the High Middle Ages through the late part of that era, Mary’s story was embellished by visionaries, miracle tales, and saints’ lives. The most famous of the saint’s lives, Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, compiled and written during the thirteenth century, places particular emphasis on the extended holy family, including Mary’s parents, Joachim and Anna, and her half-sisters by Anna’s previous marriages. Jacobus’s inventions concerning Mary’s early life and family give the impression of exceptionally pious, charitable, and wise relationships. The characterization from Luke of Mary’s superiority in thought and speech was therefore spread by more romanticized narratives of the young girl’s development and kinship. No matter how familiar Mary’s early life might have looked to medieval people whose families took religion seriously and sent children to convents, the Virgin’s great wisdom represented a high achievement that only a few could imitate. Many books of hours, such as the fifteenth-century example featured in figure 1, include an illustration of Mary as an exceptionally studious child learning to read from St. Anne. Most probably the work of Herman Scheere, who is responsible for the other images in the same manuscript, figure 1 emphasizes the transference of knowledge from an admired mother to an eager daughter, as the two hold a book between them. Pamela Sheingorn has documented the importance of the veneration of St. Anne and depictions of the studious young Virgin in spreading a belief in Mary’s sagacity.9 Sometime during the thirteenth century, Annunciation art began to emphasize Mary’s intellectual accomplishments by substituting the Virgin’s spinning for her reading of the Book of Wisdom as the angel arrived to announce great 8. M. R. James, ed. and trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926). 9. Pamela Sheingorn, “The Wise Mother: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” in Erler and Kowaleski, eds., Gendering the Master Narrative, 105–34.



Introduction 5

wonders. By the fifteenth-century composition of figure 2, most Annunciation art emphasized the Virgin’s textuality; in this manuscript image from a late English Book of Hours, Gabriel’s message derives from a scroll, and Mary’s book stands prominently open. The Virgin’s connection to the scriptural figure of Wisdom is extremely important for building a foundation in religious imagination of her study, understanding, and good judgment: not only is the Virgin the Seat of Wisdom, as seen in even early English pictorial arts with the Christ child on her lap, but she herself evinces sagacity. In figure 3 from the Shaftesbury Psalter of the early twelfth century, the Abbess of Shaftesbury is seen adoring the double manifestation of Wisdom in the Virgin and Child enthroned. As Barbara Newman notes, various personifications of Wisdom, such as Hagia Sophia in the East and Sapientia and Philosophia in the West, derive from Proverbs, Sirach, and Ecclesiastes, all included in the Vulgate.10 While Jesus stands for Wisdom in the Trinity, Mary increasingly shared this divine attribute with her son, as passages from Proverbs, Sirach, and Ecclesiastes were included in Marian masses. To understand how a conflation of Maria and Sophia might contribute to a vision of the Mother as queen of language skills, one might begin at Chartres Cathedral with the picture of the regal Virgin surrounded by the handmaidens of the liberal arts, including Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic, as well as the figure often aligned with these maidens in elementary education and mature poetry, Music (figures 4 and 5).11 Just as Marian masses present the Mother as integral to the fulfillment of scriptural wisdom, so the south tympanum of the Royal Portal in the west façade at Chartres places Mary under an archway depicting higher learning. In the right side of the Royal Portal, Mary reigns over all disciplines of education and invites students to enter into her care at the famous school at Chartres. In this book, I will concentrate on Mary’s influence over the three liberal arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) with particular emphases on grammatica and rhetorica, and on ways in which musica (song) furthers their aims. During the English Middle Ages, Mary was imagined to be present as a teacher, muse, and orator at many levels of liberal arts instruction. 10. Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 190–91. 11. Ibid., 205.

Figure 1. The young Virgin Mary learning to read from St. Anne. Bodleian Library, MS Lat. liturg. F.2, fol. 104v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

6

Figure 2. Annunciation. Bodleian Library, MS Gough liturg.3, fol. 14v. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

7

Figure 3. The Seat of Wisdom, or Virgin and child enthroned. British Library, Lansdowne 383, fol. 165v. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

8



Introduction 9

Figure 4. The Virgin enthroned, surrounded by figures of the liberal arts. The Royal Portal of the west façade at Chartres Cathedral. Photograph by Hartill Art Associates. Reproduced by permission of Hartill Art Associates.

Just as St. Augustine’s De doctrina christiana reconstituted the teachings of classical rhetoric to serve the aims of Catholic exegesis and preaching, so Mary came to represent the purity of the classical language curriculum in Christian schools.12 Even though Quintilian’s Institutes was unavailable to most in the medieval West, its recommendations for a tiered language curriculum beginning with grammar (language learning and literary appreciation), graduating to rhetoric (composition, speech, and methods of discourse), and culminating in logic (dialectic and debate) came into medieval instruction through the traditions of ancient practice and influenced tutoring in noble households, monastic training, secular schools, and mendicant studia.13 In medieval 12. St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, ed. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 13. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., Loeb Classical

10  Introduct ion

Figure 5. The liberal arts surrounding the Virgin enthroned. The Royal Portal of the west façade at Chartres Cathedral. Photograph by Hartill Art Associates. Reproduced by permission of Hartill Art Associates.

schooling, the tiered curriculum was often recursive, since the foundational studies of grammar and rhetoric offered a base for all levels of language learning. In early grammar instruction, for instance, the student might gain control of the elements of Latin, at an intermediate point achieve competency in understanding literature, and in maturity culminate in sophisticated literary interpretations and productions. In this way, more advanced grammatical instruction might accompany more difficult tutorials in rhetoric and logic. As we shall see, Mary was invoked at every stage of language learning, during each era of the English Middle Ages. In Anglo-Saxon monastic schools, primary teaching in Latin grammar provided the first formal instruction that children received after Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920; reprinted 1980). For an extended discussion of the kinds of education offered to children of different classes and destined for several professions, see Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London: Routledge, 1992), 162–253.



Introduction 11

learning their ABCs and Latin phonetics from simple prayers and popular Marian hymns. From age seven and beyond, children learned to read, write, and correct Latin passages, as well as to interpret biblical and secular literature.14 As Martin Irvine points out, gaining entry to Latin literacy was a holy ritual, not only because Latin was the language of the church, but also because Hebrew, Greek, and Latin were the languages in which the Bible was written.15 Young pupils who had recently left their mothers to become oblates said “Ave Maria” during their elementary Latin instruction and experienced an extension of maternal teachings, an entrance into the language arts concerning the Holy Mother. For Anglo-Saxon children, whose Germanic tongue did not offer the number of Latin derivatives found in romance languages, Latin was truly a foreign language, its employment demarcating a boundary between domestic and academic pursuits, and the Virgin Mary, subject of many orisons, hymns, and responses learned during early grammar instruction, offered a bridge between family lives, where simple Latin prayers might have been taught, and monastic spaces negotiated in Latin. As a kind mother offering a transition into monastic schooling, the Virgin Mary may be compared to Lady Grammar, who was sometimes depicted as a nursing mother. According to Gary P. Cestaro, with the nurturing figure of Grammar in mind, early developments in literacy leading to literary appreciation were akin to “maternal liquid giving way to bits of bread.”16 Once young students could digest the rudiments of Latin language and begin to understand, translate, and compose its literatures, they were ready to progress to rhetoric. In the Middle Ages, as now, the word “rhetoric” had many meanings. In their magisterial study and compi14. The age of seven is often mentioned as the normative age for beginning grammar instruction, but especially in late medieval England, people of a variety of ages may have been attending a grammar school at any one time. Older children apprenticed to tradesmen who required greater literacy or even adults improving their reading skills for the priesthood might be found in later medieval grammar schools. See Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling 1340–1548: Learning, Literacy and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 64–68. 15. Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350– 1100, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 19 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 14. 16. Gary P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 23.

12  Introduct ion lation of medieval grammar and rhetoric texts, Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter define “rhetoric” as “an architectonic system [that] looks at large structures, at the composition as a whole from conceptual plan to its realization in the orator’s delivery of the speech, and at the effects of discourse on the audience.”17 For early medieval authors such as the Venerable Bede, who had monastic training in the rhetorical texts of Cicero, Boethius, and Augustine, “rhetoric” implied the creation, evaluation, and appropriation of texts—and especially an analysis of the effects of figurative language. To some degree, the curricula of grammar and rhetoric overlapped, since both disciplines relied on the comprehension of the parts and methods of discourse. Copeland and Sluiter explain that grammar and rhetoric shared, for instance, an interest in figures of speech, the former inveighing against barbarisms and the latter evaluating the effects of style.18 In general, however, if students progressed beyond elementary and intermediate grammar to more advanced rhetorical studies, they would become participants in Latin scholarship and writing. Bede produced important commentaries and educational tracts, and among his famous volumes is the De Schematibus et Tropis, a treatise on the figures of speech in the Bible.19 With the twelfth-century inception of the universities, learning in the liberal arts leapt abroad from the monasteries, but the same tiered curriculum held. In cathedral schools and private tutoring, children learned their Latin grammar so that they might show basic proficiencies for their life’s work. From the High Middle Ages onward, after gaining control of the Latin in Donatus and the Disticha Catonis and after reading fables, satires, and Theodolus’s elementary history, students progressed to the poetry of Ovid and Virgil for more advanced grammar and preparation for their own textual inventions.20 If they entered university in their midto late teens, boys would undergo higher training in the liberal arts while 17. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, General Introduction, Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475, ed. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 32. 18. Ibid., 28–38. 19. The Venerable Bede, De Schematibus et Tropis, in Rhetores Latini Minores, ed. Carl Halm (Leipzig: Teubner, 1863). 20. Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79.



Introduction 13

proving understanding of logic in debate, the skill which would earn them a degree. Chapter 2 discusses the Virgin Mary’s importance to two textbooks that these boys might have used. If they entered the church or received legal training at the inns of court, debate would focus on church doctrine or law, while rhetoric courses would emphasize the writing of sermons or legal documents. Regardless of their profession, authors who had access to advanced rhetorical training and wrote poetry in adulthood continued to acknowledge the Virgin Mary’s reign over the processes of composition and to laud her as their muse. During the late Middle Ages, rhetorical studies began to be classified into three separate arts that trained students in poetry, preaching, or letter writing: the artes poetriae, praedicandi, and dictaminis. As we shall see in later chapters, in the medieval English literary imagination, Mary held enormous sway over the first of these arts and therefore the production of poetry. Mary was headmistress of the trivium, a supreme figure for linguistic skill, not only because she manifested divine Wisdom, but also for practical reasons. In an era before the mass production of textbooks, the most convenient and ubiquitous texts for primary language instruction were church service books, and when children began to read, they first said Mary’s name. Chapter 4 will expand on the medieval history of basic Marian instruction in language and show its implications for Chaucer’s poetry. According to Daniele Alexandre-Bidon, medieval alphabet books employed the “Ave Maria” in a variety of simple language exercises.21 The most prevalent alphabet book was the primer, which often included the Little Office of the Virgin Mary, a collection of psalms, prayers, and meditations on the Mother, and finished with “amen.” The Little Office was developed during the Carolingian period and extant in England from the tenth century onward.22 Children in monastic and cathedral schools would have undergone primary language training with examples from the easier Marian prayers and hymns in the Little Office, while later medieval students in private tutoring had access to the same exemplars in Books of Hours. Learning the alphabet and then 21. Daniele Alexandre-Bidon, “La lettre volée: apprendre à lire à l’enfant au moyen âge,” Annales Economies Sociétés Civilisations 44 (1989): 955. 22. For a history of the Little Office, see Rebecca A. Baltzer, “The Little Office of the Virgin and Mary’s Role at Paris,” in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography, Written in Honor of Professor Ruth Steiner, ed. Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer, 464–84 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

14  Introduction phonetically applying it to the Little Office, a young pupil could not escape associating the ABCs and elementary Latin instruction with the Virgin Mary.23 A phonetic application of the Latin alphabet to the Little Office often meant articulating correctly while singing or chanting. Many elementary students in the Middle Ages learned Latin with their beginning choir instruction, and many Marian authors treated in Scribit Mater compare their compositions to song. A. F. Leach surveyed the variety of churchsponsored medieval English elementary schools—“song schools”—that taught basic Latin and choir skills, although his work has been qualified.24 “Song school” was not synonymous with “reading school,” as Jo Ann Moran Cruz notes, and Katherine Zieman has recently argued that the image of Chaucer’s little clergeon in the Prioress’s Tale, learning a little Latin while he prepares to take his place in the choir, is more fiction than reality for some medieval learners.25 Nevertheless, as Zieman herself remarks, the “parallel between song and grammar was manifested above all in England,” whose churches often offered both music and literacy training.26 It is true, as Zieman demonstrates, that medieval choirs were inhabited by singers of a variety of ages and reading abilities and that the establishment of choir schools responded more to the demands of special masses than to the requirements for community literacy. Even so, whether receiving private tutoring from a Book of Hours or taking up choral duties in a Mary chapel, medieval learners performed Marian songs while acquiring a Marian literacy in Latin. Not all progressed from the choir to advanced grammatical training or learned grammar while in the choir. It is clear, however, from the many comparisons in the following pages between textual authorship and singing that as the medieval language curriculum followed the classical order established by Quintilian, many authors believed that music and song provided a foundation for and an expression of Marian trivium studies. 23. Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), 62. 24. A. F. Leach, The Schools of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1915; reprinted, 1969). 25. Cruz, The Growth of English Schooling, 54; Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 1–5, 181–98. 26. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 15. In this quotation Zieman acknowledges that, although Leach overgeneralized about the consistency and prevalence of medieval links between choir and grammar instruction, such links did seem to prevail in England up to the thirteenth century.



Introduction 15

If these authors studied advanced music theory, they perceived the Virgin’s body to be a counterpart to the music of the spheres. A concept advanced by Pythagoras and promulgated by Plato in the Timaeus, the music of the spheres is composed of numerical proportions in the cosmos that constitute musical ratios.27 St. Augustine declared these proportions the formal cause of all beauty and connected balanced weights and measures to reason and harmony.28 Developing this line of thought further in his De institutione musica, Boethius identified three kinds of music—cosmic, human, and instrumental—and argued that the human body and soul reflect the measured elements of the cosmos.29 To many medieval English authors, the Virgin Mary evinces the best example of proper, musical proportions. Chaste, balancing reason with emotion, and tuned to God’s purposes, Mary herself is harmonic and invites singing. If children of the late Middle Ages learned to read and possibly sing, they had more opportunities than their counterparts in the AngloSaxon period or High Middle Ages to begin composing from textbook models. During the early thirteenth century, a number of new textbooks aimed at teaching the theory and practice of intermediate level poetics appeared; among them was the ubiquitous Poetria nova by the Englishman Geoffrey of Vinsauf.30 In her recent study of the teaching of the Poetria nova, Marjorie Curry Woods underscores the salaciousness of many of these artes poetriae, meant to hold the attention of teenage boys.31 In chapter 2 we shall see how John of Garland’s pedagogical poems substitute exercises employing descriptions of the Virgin Mary for the otherwise popular exercises imitating descriptiones of women’s beautiful bodies. Working against the other artes that objectified women, Garland 27. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit .edu/Plato/timaeus.html. August 20, 2010. 28. St. Augustine develops this idea from Ws 11:21. See his De ordine, II. 15, 42 (PL 32, cols. 977–1020) and also his De musica, VI. 13, 38 (PL 32, cols. 1081–1194). 29. Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, De institutione musica, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867). 30. Edmond Faral, ed., Les arts poétique du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris: Edouard Champion, 1923), 197–262; Margaret F. Nims, trans., The Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1967; reprinted 2007). It is interesting that in providing models for students to practice literary writing, the new artes poetriae show that although traditionally the province of rhetoric, composition studies were increasingly conducted in grammar classes. 31. Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 60–63.

16  Introduct ion insists that Mary is both author and content of effective rhetoric. To employ descriptiones of the Virgin is, for Garland, to fill one’s writing with holy inventions and to invoke the Mother’s aid in moral compositions. Extended descriptions of the Virgin’s body occur not only in Garland’s textbooks for the university students in Paris and Toulouse, but also in northern English meditative poetry on the Virgin Mary that we will investigate in chapter 3. There we will see that Walter of Wim-borne and John of Howden adapted intermediate-level composition exercises in amplifying depictions of the Virgin’s body and spirit. While the Virgin Mary may not be prevalent in intermediary and advanced textbooks and does not figure in any medieval English logic textbooks, as far as I am aware, many poets completed their educations at university or elsewhere still preoccupied with the Mother’s reign over every level of the language arts. As Rita Copeland remarks in Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages, the medieval pedagogical order, founded upon ancient texts, supported by Roman Catholic service books, and propagated by medieval masters, “represents a kind of institutional orthodoxy that is distinct from theological rules, although it can at times complement and support, and at other times intersect with, religious orthodoxies.”32 In this way, common pedagogical practice often reasserted accepted tenets of Mariology; for instance, early grammar instruction taught traditional prayers to the Mother that define her roles in salvation. Copeland’s main interest is in the disruption of pedagogical methods and consequently of doctrine: as she demonstrates, Lollard communities in late medieval England employed unusual teaching methods, such as open discussion, to communicate heterodoxy. In some ways, the positioning of Mary in language teaching during the Middle Ages also pushes the boundaries of acceptable scholarship and orthodoxy. While according to Newman, Mary carries into the Middle Ages the academic functions of classical goddesses, such as Philosophia, she has the potential to countermand the ultimate social and political goals of classical pedagogy in the trivium. In his narrative of how the dependent babe in maternal quarters might progress to become a public rhetorician, Quintilian arrives at a rhetorical telos in a masculine sphere. Yet the representation of Mary in the upper levels of medieval language teaching, for instance in John of Garland’s textbooks, insists on the continued guidance of the 32. Copeland, Pedagogy, 6.



Introduction 17

Mother, or feminine divine, in language learning. Also, while the Marian services used to teach early Latin skills were sanctioned by the church, the expressions that they gave rise to sometimes challenge the official theological roles of Mary. Chaucer’s claim in An ABC that Mary is an “Almighty and al merciable quene” is just one example of a poetic extension of Mary’s position in the divine hierarchy. As Copeland has excavated the relationship between grammatical and philosophical curricula from the ancient period through the Middle Ages, she shows that often the “literal reading” is associated with childhood.33 As a linguistic inspiration from a child’s first entrance into school to the composition of mature works, Mary stands for both the literal and the allegorical, the simple ABCs and sophisticated exegesis about the Song of Songs. Therefore as an icon for language, she bears the weight of pedagogical traditions for all levels, but by functioning as the single term for both a basic and a figural reading, she disrupts the notion of academic progress. However deeply liberal arts studies have been pursued, one is led back to the Mother—an intellectual circularity with which Chaucer grapples in the tales of his Prioress and Second Nun. Because the Mother’s inf luence disrupts the linearity of the language curriculum and because she does not appear in a number of pedagogical textbooks or in standard definitions of “grammar” or “rhetoric,” her major place in medieval educational systems has gone unnoticed. For decades, scholars of the medieval trivium have rightly spent their energies in locating and examining medieval textbooks, researching medieval schools, defining terms from those textbooks according to medieval usage, and analyzing medieval imaginative literature that makes reference to the textbooks, schools, and terms. This book owes a great debt to the many medievalists listed in the notes and bibliography who have laid the groundwork for our thinking about medieval language arts and the institutions that taught them. Scribit Mater seeks to explain, in contrast, how, where, and why a steeping in Marian language at the beginning of medieval grammar instruction resulted in representations of the Virgin as a purified grammar, an acclaimed rhetorician, an inspired muse, and a mentor for writers. In developing representations of Mary’s linguistic perfection, Scribit Mater rests on the understanding that medieval academic preparation, 33. Copeland, Pedagogy, 55–98.

18  Introduction including theory and practice in the trivium, teaching texts, and contemporaneous linguistic debates, informs the writings of medieval English authors on the Virgin Mary. Some of the writings discussed have a direct relationship to medieval academe, while others show a widespread cultural absorption of the figuration of Mary as queen of the language arts. After a chapter on Marian wisdom literature, chapters 2, 3, and 4 deal directly with how poems lauding the Virgin were employed in academic settings. John of Garland (chapter 2) and Walter of Wimborne (chapter 3) produced Marian texts specifically for classroom instruction in the liberal arts, while Geoffrey Chaucer (chapter 4) composed a prayer to the Virgin in order to teach English vocabulary skills at court, and he also depicted Mary’s influence on the trivium in the Prioress’s and Second Nun’s tales. Demonstrating medieval associations between Marian language learning and music, all three authors declared their Marian works that characterize academe “songs.” Other writers treated in this book wrote “songs” that neither invoked nor had employment in classroom settings, but were nevertheless meant to advance a representation of the Virgin Mother gifted in speech—a representation whose basis is in medieval language pedagogies venerating the Queen of the Liberal Arts and offering her service books as foundations for Latin. When a meditative poet such as the thirteenth-century author John of Howden or the later laureate John Lydgate invokes Mary as his muse, he reveals an education in the trivium teaching that Mary had great verbal power to convey. Unlike these male authors who were privileged to have a more formal Marian education, the final author discussed in this book, Margery Kempe, had clearly internalized the belief that Mary, Mother of the Word, held sway over the composition of it. Although Kempe’s imitation and adulation of the Virgin’s verbal prowess emphasized a physical birthing of the Word over an academic transmission of it, Kempe participates in a long-standing medieval English conversation about the influence of the Virgin Mother over language skills. Since in all of these authors and texts the Virgin herself provides an icon for excellence in the language arts, much of the writing studied here has a self-reflexive quality—poems whose narrators entreat the Virgin to oversee the telling of her own story, and instructional texts whose Marian narratives are meant to teach others how to write Marian narratives. This Marian self-reflexivity can have a centripetal effect, reduplicating the impression



Introduction 19

that, regardless of different positions adopted toward medieval language education, the narrator must return to the Virgin as the source of wisdom, matter, and rhetorical beauty. Stories about the Virgin’s scholarship, masses equating her with Wisdom, songs ventriloquizing her mellifluous words, pedagogies centering on her language skills, and artistic renderings of her spiritual power can be found across the medieval Catholic world. Many admirable books detail the Virgin’s position in doctrine, liturgy, and cultural praxis of the medieval West.34 Nevertheless, Mary’s place in the religious and educational imagination of medieval people varied according to century, geography, education, gender, and many other circumstances. Before the Carolingian renaissance of Martianus Capella’s work, for instance, John of Garland’s representation of the Virgin Mary as Philology, a figuration that will be discussed in chapter 2, would have been highly unlikely. Respecting such variegation, this book will not offer a totalized Virgin for the medieval West, but instead focus on the English Middle Ages and a series of writers who, as has already been suggested, represent contingencies of place, time, erudition, and gender. Just as the Virgin wears different learned and capable masks according to the contexts for her representation, so those who adore and write about her occupy divergent attitudes and positions toward Marian influences on literature and the trivium. For contemporary scholarship, one of the most important differences in manifestations of the Virgin concerns gendered approaches. According to Simone Roisin’s investigations into gendered perspectives on the Virgin, male authors were more likely than women to narrate visions of Mary, while Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell in their computerized study of 864 saints demonstrate a tendency in women’s devotions away from the Virgin and toward the Eucharist.35 To some degree Scribit Ma34. A comprehensive list is not possible here, but standards of Marian scholarship include the following: Hilda C. Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion, 2 vols. (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963–65); Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Random House, 1976); Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Fulton, from Judgment to Passion. 35. Simone Roisin, “L’efflorescence cistercienne et le courant féminin de piété au XIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique 39 (1943): 342–78; Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); see especially the chapter entitled “Men and Women,” 220–38.

20  Introduct ion ter bears out this gender binary, since the English authors discussed in chapters 1 through 5 are predominantly educated men who entreat the Virgin in terms of transcendent beloved, mother, and teacher. However, as Felicity Riddy has led us to see, differences in masculine and feminine readings of the Virgin must not be so broadly brushed; we must look, instead, for the kinds of texts that appealed to different reading communities and analyze the reasons for their appeal. Marian miracle stories such as those of the Vernon manuscript, for instance, were especially important to medieval English women’s reading communities that also valued the life of St. Cecilia, a fact that indicates an interest in chaste marriages allowing for lives of scholarship, devotion, and preaching.36 Therefore, while some of the educated nuns who read the Vernon manuscript were not compelled by visions of Mary inspiring scholarship from above, they were intrigued by contexts that holy women forged on earth for textual production and transmission. Scribit Mater will portray the faces of Mary admired and emulated by medieval women, fictional (Chaucer’s Prioress and Second Nun) and real (Margery Kempe). In some instances these faces, such as the tender mother’s, are venerated by English authors as distant in time, place, and learning as John of Howden, the anonymous composers of Middle English lyrics, and Margery Kempe. In other instances, male and female authors identify with Mary’s body and the writing it “reproduces” in contrasting ways: whereas Walter of Wimborne, a thirteenth-century Franciscan friar, equates Mary’s body with a holy grammar, Margery Kempe credits her pious outcries to what she has learned about the Mother’s corporal sufferings. Scribit Mater inquires into medieval English women’s ways of imitating the Virgin’s wisdom and compelling voice, methods that also throw light on class and education level as windows to the Virgin. Through this diversity of approaches to the sapient Virgin, Scribit Mater illustrates the variety of ways in which Mary acted as a divine principle of grammar, Lady Rhetorica, or icon of perfected expression for an extended canon of medieval English literature. In many ways it is artificial to separate an English Mary from her manifestations across the Continent: her worship in England was subject to the same papal 36. Felicity Riddy, “‘Women Talking about the Things of God’: A Late Medieval SubCulture,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, 2nd ed., ed. Carol M. Meale, 104–27 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).



Introduction 21

influence felt elsewhere; her theologians and preachers migrated, often from Paris to Oxford and Cambridge; and her authors traveled to places outside England’s borders, where they were molded by other writers. One of the “English” authors featured here—John of Garland—left England permanently to teach Marian grammar on French soil. Nevertheless, there are distinct advantages to limiting this book to English boundaries, the first and most important of which is the unusually longstanding medieval English tradition of Marian piety from the De virginitate of Aldhelm through the venerable textual production of Marian literature in Henry V’s Syon Abbey.37 As Mary Clayton has documented so carefully and Miri Rubin has recently reminded us, the Virgin Mary was a strong focus of the liturgy and personal piety in Anglo-Saxon England.38 From as early as the eighth century Mary is carved in stone, and until the Norman Conquest she is detailed in ivory, illuminated in manuscripts, extolled in sermons, and invoked in well-wrought prayers. We can see in Old English poetry such as the Advent Lyrics the link between Mary and compelling language that will carry through until the reformation. By the fifteenth century, Eamon Duffy notes, “Englishmen were encouraged to think of their country as . . . ‘Mary’s Dowry,’ a notion propagated, for example, by the custodians of the shrine at Walsingham.”39 Scribit Mater argues that a large portion of the Virgin’s dowry was invested in trivium studies and Marian literature. While indicating the diversity displayed in representing England’s queen of language arts, Scribit Mater demonstrates that some associations between the Virgin and language skills remain intact through the centuries of medieval English history and also resonate across the Continent. The most important widespread belief associated with Mary’s language gifts is her status as Mother of the Word. The Gospel of John opens (“In the beginning was the Word”) with the Word’s power in ordering creation and its incarnation in Jesus Christ. That Mary is the Theotokos, or the one who bears the Word, associates her with creative speech acts. Luke’s account of the Annunciation compares Mary’s con37. Aldhelmi Malmesbiriensis Prosa de Virginitate cum Glosa Latina atque Anglosaxonica, ed. Scottus Gwara (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001). 38. Rubin, Mother of God, 105–12. 39. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 256.

22  Introduction tainment of the Word with the ark’s enclosure of the tablets of the law in that both Mary and the ark are overshadowed by the Lord.40 Mary not only protects, but also delivers to humanity the one who fulfills all holy dictates and is herself a chief means of that fulfillment. Long after the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431) underscored Christ’s humanity and Mary’s contribution to salvation by declaring the Virgin the Mother of God whose flesh clothed the godhead, new converts to Christianity throughout the Roman Empire marveled at the power in God’s speech and the Virgin’s ability to convey it to the world. Among the Saxons, Rachel Fulton writes, the magic inherent in runes paled against the Christian God’s ability to command and transform the universe.41 English medieval literature from the Anglo-Saxon period forward strongly affirms Mary’s participation in such divine linguistic transformation. Besides a focus on Mary as Mother of the Word and the interlocking pedagogies for language and music that reproduced holy expressions of her blessedness, a constant motif in this book is the process of meditation which guides the author and reader in discovering Marian meanings for the Word. The meditative tradition begins in monastic practices of lectio divina and finds a larger community of adherents during the thirteenth century, a development to be outlined in chapter 3. As the English Middle Ages progress, a wider audience sought time for personal meditations and empathy like the Virgin Mary’s for Christ’s Passion. Scribit Mater reveals the intersections between meditation and education, often a place where an important image fuels thought and memory. Mary Carruthers has taught us that medieval visuals, whether constructed in material or textual arts, provide mnemonic tools and unlock a hoard of knowledge remembered, and so it is the case that Marian images offer methods for learning and processing skills in the trivium that often include meditation.42 Before engaging in a specific analysis of the Virgin Mary’s association with language arts, this book, in chapter 1, will survey a variety of medieval English liturgical, courtly, and dramatic literature that presents Mary as a wise woman. The purpose of this chapter is to devel40. Ex 40:34. 41. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 41–53. 42. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Introduction 23 op a foundation for beliefs about Mary’s intellectual powers so that the ensuing chapters can support links between the Virgin and all levels of language instruction and production. Chapter 1, “The English Lives of Mary,” mines the Anglo-Saxon Advent Lyrics, John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, the Bridgettine Myroure of Oure Ladye, the N-Town Mary Play, and John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady for various manifestations of Mary as Sapientia and finds that medieval English literature often focuses on the Mother’s learning when telling the story of her life. In order to show that the Virgin’s wisdom both rests on and encourages studies in the liberal arts, chapter 2 looks at the writings of a university master, John of Garland. “John of Garland: Gram/marian” illustrates how this professor of grammar at Paris and Toulouse deployed an allegorical narrative in the style of Martianus Capella to showcase the Virgin as an embodiment of the seven arts, with a special affiliation to Lady Rhetoric. Like the various lives of Mary discussed in chapter 1, Garland’s Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie covers apocryphal and legendary material about the Virgin, but does so in order to teach matter from each of the arts. Also like much of the wisdom literature in chapter 1 that includes singing—the sung responses of the Advent Lyrics or the Virgin child’s chanting in the N-Town play—the Epithalamium employs the music of a wedding song as a medium for representing the learned Virgin. In the Parisiana Poetria, an innovative textbook on the composition of poetry and prose that relies on musical instruction to discuss meters, Garland again locates the Virgin at the center of instruction by employing numerous models of Marian verse. Chapter 3, “The Musical Mother Tongue in Anglo-Latin Poetry for Meditation,” explores the confluences of pedagogy, lyrical poetry, and meditation represented in the northern English verse of Walter of Wimborne, John of Howden, and finally Richard Rolle. Because Wimborne was a schoolmaster and probably wrote the Ave Virgo Mater Christi in order to teach basic principles of the trivium, his poetry demonstrates clearly how expressions from school texts, which themselves relied on devotionals, found their way into verses written expressly for devotional purposes. All three of these authors declare their Marian works “songs” and offer musical verse as a method for inspiring meditation. Wimborne’s Marie Carmina is an extended meditation upon the life of Jesus through the perception of the Virgin, and his contemporary John of

24  Introduct ion Howden also wrote a meditation on Christ’s Passion in the Philomena. Howden offers contemplative verse in a romantic vein that gazes upon the Virgin and reproduces the Virgin’s gaze. Both Wimborne and Howden declare their dependency on the Virgin Mother for the inspiration, language, content, and structure of their poems. Chapter 3 suggests that the aesthetics of Wimborne’s and Howden’s praise to the Virgin manifest themselves in the fourteenth-century verse of another, more famous northern meditator on Mary, Richard Rolle. Chapter 4, “Chaucer and Dame School,” turns from Latin poems for the classroom or the chapel to Chaucer’s vernacular verse for courts and educated peers. In his Marian poems An ABC, The Prioress’s Tale, and The Second Nun’s Tale, Chaucer makes reference to the dame schools that sometimes existed in fourteenth-century nunneries in order to teach basic language skills to little boys and girls. In An ABC the Virgin herself is the “dame” and language tutor, while in the two stories from the Canterbury Tales a prioress and a nun are the products and representatives of dame schools. Read together, An ABC and the Prioress’s and Second Nun’s tales depict a hierarchy of Marian studies and the Virgin’s intervention at every level of language learning. In An ABC, Chaucer creates a prayer to the Virgin that can be used by foreigners for basic English vocabulary building; in The Prioress’s Tale, he develops a narrative set in a song school, the next scene in language instruction beyond the ABCs; in The Second Nun’s Tale he portrays in St. Cecilia and her Canterbury pilgrim devotee the culmination of Marian approaches to the trivium. Chapter 5 diverges from the focus in chapters 2 through 4 on single authors and their Marian works to discuss a broad range of Marian Middle English lyrics, many of them anonymous. While John of Garland, Walter of Wimborne, John of Howden, and Geoffrey Chaucer all portray the Virgin as muse of tuneful expressions they are privileged to inscribe, the Middle English lyrics do not overtly link Mary to textual pedagogies or practices. The lyrics may have been written by well-educated translators or authors and employed to teach elementary reading and song, but instead of an academic model of literate expression, these poems privilege Mary’s perfected speech. “Mary’s Mild Voice in the Middle English Lyrics” notes that genre and content conform, since many of the lyrics were written for the sort of oral recitation or singing that Mary’s verbal superiority exemplifies. In the majority of

Introduction 25 the lyrics, the Virgin’s quality that the hearer is asked to emulate is her mildness—mildness of both demeanor and expression—and her obedience is a centerpiece of the message. It is therefore in the lyrics that this book veers closest to representing the more passive Virgin who is the object of early modern devotions, but this is still a Virgin who speaks compellingly and forthrightly about her experiences as the Mother of God. Chapter 5 notes that the Middle English lyrics were accessible to and sometimes sung by all levels of medieval English society and in this way show a widespread veneration of Mary’s verbal and musical skill. Chapter 6, “Margery Kempe and the Virgin Birth of Her Book,” remains within the contexts of popular, oral, lay, and vernacular piety. Although Kempe learned neither reading nor writing, she showed awareness throughout the dictation of her life story that Mary is a catalyst for holy expression. Read to by clerical supporters, Kempe internalized the legends of Mary as well as other saintly women and took their motherhood as encouragement that she, too—wife and mother— could live a chaste and contemplative life. Since Mary and other Marian saints such as Bridget of Sweden produced physical manifestations of the Word in bodies gestating holiness (Bridget, for instance, undergoing a mystical pregnancy), Kempe sought to refashion her own identity as a mother: she “labored” with the gift of tears and gave birth to her Book. In both structure and content, each part of The Book of Margery Kempe—Liber 1, 2, and the closing prayer—represent different stages of divine motherhood. Throughout each part, Kempe shows her body to be wracked with the physical labor of bearing out what Christ commanded of her—a complete rehearsal of her conversion and visions. I am tempted to compare to that the labor pains of preparing this book. Scribit Mater began as a concept many years ago during a course in Medieval Latin at the University of Oregon. Then, in the 1990s, at the height of the popularity of deconstruction and French psychoanalytic theory in literature, it was compelling to think about Mary in Derridean or Kristevan terms. If Mary’s body was a temple for the Word and if she taught humanity holy expressions, then she provided the middle term between divine and human language and not only deconstructed that binary opposition, but also overturned the signal hierarchy of creature under creation. Just as I chose rhetoric over postmodern theory as a secondary doctoral field, however, I have in the time intervening since

26  Introduct ion graduate school sought theoretical perspectives actually taught during the English Middle Ages to explain the Virgin’s ascendancy in the medieval language curriculum. Therefore, while Scribit Mater still represents the Virgin as a powerful linguistic intermediary and occasionally as a force for a radical literature that realigns spiritual and social roles, it employs rhetorical theory and history rather than deconstruction to develop meanings concerning Mary’s textual and verbal mediations. Besides privileging medieval over postmodern language theories, Scribit Mater, in insisting on the Virgin’s influence over advanced medieval language studies in both Latin and the vernacular, argues against the portrayal of Mary in Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” a Mary whose milk and tears offered pre-linguistic expression to the pious who would learn the Father’s Latin eventually in monasteries or cathedral schools.43 On becoming an assistant professor and embarking on research for Scribit Mater, I perceived that the medieval representations of Mary seemed less and less to fit the paradigm of Kristeva’s abject mother but discovered quickly that I knew much more about John Gower, on whom I had written my dissertation and first book, and too little about Marian texts and counterarguments to scholarly denigration of medieval constructs of virginity. By the turn of the century, however, many of those negative attitudes toward medieval virginities had cleared away, and the theoretical moment had passed. Certainly, formalisms, feminisms, rhetorical, and reception theories inform arguments in Scribit Mater, though I have worked toward elucidating the widespread influence of medieval Marian language studies, rather than calling attention to the theories themselves. Though understanding the Virgin’s place in the Middle Ages is more than one life’s work, I hope that Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England will open a window into Mary’s medieval “courses” on the trivium and her inspiration of a wide variety of medieval English literature. 43. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234–64.

One 

The English Lives of Mary

n the course of this book, I will show how throughout medieval English literature, the Virgin Mary is associated with academic and native arts of speech. By investigating the various English renditions of Mary’s life story, this chapter seeks to provide a general context for the following chapters’ presentations of her linguistic roles. All of the texts discussed in this chapter amplify the biblical narratives of the Virgin’s experience and show the diverse ways in which Mary was cast as a lady of learning. Although a large number of English works extend the treatment of Mary in the Bible, I have chosen here a sampling of contemplative, dramatic, and narrative resources that make the Virgin and her wisdom their primary focus. These resources, as far as possible, will be treated in chronological order, acknowledging that some works are English translations of earlier Latin texts and others occur in late manuscripts that no doubt provide evidence of prior traditions. Through this rough chronology, as we pass from Anglo-Saxon poetry to late medieval writings more dependent upon continental models of Marian meditation, we can see a shift from a focus on single events in the Virgin’s life to comprehensive treatments of the Virgin’s biography and reiterations therein of her superior knowledge and its impact on salvation history. Each text considered in this chapter highlights Mary’s knowledge in a distinct way, by characterizing the Virgin as teacher or

 27

28  The English Lives of Mary pupil, by underscoring her somatic or emotional experiences, by comparing her learning to Eucharistic food, or by spotlighting proofs of her wisdom with aureate diction. In Anglo-Saxon lyrics, the mystery plays, contemplative texts, and late medieval narrative poems, the Virgin appears studious, intelligent, and articulate, all qualities that she needs in order to figure as a muse, mistress of grammar, lady rhetoric, or oral performer in the literature analyzed later in this book. The writings under discussion in this chapter are the Anglo-Saxon Advent Lyrics, John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, the Bridgettine Myroure of Oure Ladye, the N-Town Mary Play, and John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. These works written in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries rely on a host of apocryphal and meditative texts in order to flesh out a more complete biography of Mary’s life. These resources include the Protevangelium of James, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and the Evangelium de nativitate Mariae, as well as more popular versions of these apocrypha such as the Old English Martyrology and Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea; the resources for the texts covered in this chapter also include meditations on the lives of the holy family such as the Meditationes vitae Christi and Nicholas Love’s Middle English adaptation, the Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ.1 This variety of resources offered Gower, Lydgate, and other, anonymous authors covered here a number of entryways into the subject of the Virgin’s life and wisdom. In the Advent Lyrics, a regal Mary is the teacher of humanity, figured by Joseph; in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, a refined Virgin expresses her knowledge of providence in her joys and sorrows; in the Bridgettine Myroure of Oure Ladye, Mary’s wisdom provides salvific food to the nuns of Syon Abbey; in the N-Town Mary Play, the young Virgin is a model of studiousness for all; and finally, in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, her sagacity shines brightly in scenes for meditation, and she herself is the poet’s muse. Taken together, these English lives of Mary illustrate the divergent audiences—ecclesiastical and lay, courtly and popular—that took Mary to 1. G. Herzfield, ed., An Old English Martyrology, EETS o.s. 116 (London: Trübner, 1901); M. R. James, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924); Th. Graesse, ed., Legenda Aurea, 3rd ed. (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1969); M. StallingsTaney, Iohannes de Caulibus Meditaciones vite Christi, olim S. Bonauenturo attributae, CCCM 153 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997); Nicholas Love, Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ: A Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686, ed. Michael Sargent (New York: Garland, 1992).



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be the mother of wisdom. Once we understand how widespread and diversified belief in Mary’s wisdom was during the English Middle Ages, her figuration as the Queen of the Liberal Arts in John of Garland’s textbooks, the meditative poems of the English north, and Chaucer, as well as her characterization as mother of spoken and written discourse in the Middle English lyrics and Margery Kempe, will appear much more credible and representative of the age.

Advent Lyric VII Our first life story of the Virgin Mary in English, the Advent Lyrics, or as these poems are alternatively called, Christ I, comes from the late Anglo-Saxon world. Although most of Scribit Mater evaluates cultural contexts and texts from the late English Middle Ages, it is important to note, as the introduction discussed briefly, that the later period inherited strong traditions of Marian piety from the Anglo-Saxons. According to Mary Clayton, Anglo-Saxon devotion to the Virgin developed these traditions not only in the liturgy, but also in material and verbal arts.2 As an example of verbal art sprung from liturgical singing, the Old English Advent Lyrics, or Christ I, is a series of twelve reflections upon antiphons sung during the Advent season.3 Unfortunately, the context for the contemplation or performance of the Advent Lyrics is unknown, but possibilities range from private devotion to enjoyment in a monastic refectory. Especially Advent Lyric VII bears upon an event in the Virgin Mary’s life while emphasizing the Mother’s wisdom. The twelve Advent Lyrics are included in the Exeter Book, a late-tenthcentury compilation, and occur in a series of poems about Christ: Christ II and Christ III follow in the manuscript. Christ II bears Cynewulf’s signature, but the other two works are anonymous and generally agreed to be by different authors. “In Christ I,” George Hardin Brown remarks of the work we shall focus on here, “it is marvelous, even miraculous, 2. Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 3. Christ I of The Exeter Book, ed. George Philip Krapp and Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie, The Anglo Saxon Poetic Records 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 1–15. I have consulted the following translations of the advent lyrics in Christ I: J. J. Campbell, The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959); Elaine Treharne, “Advent Lyric VII,” in Old and Middle English c. 890–1400: An Anthology, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 49–53. The translations I offer, however, will be my own, unless otherwise noted.

30  The English Lives of Mary how extraordinarily apt the Old English poetic lines are in expressing some of the most difficult and paradoxical Judaeo-Christian religious tenets.”4 Brown’s emphasis is on the suitability of the Anglo-Saxon poet’s prosody for the revelation of mysteries. This chapter will reveal how often Mary delivers these instructive lines throughout the twelve lyrics and specifically how in Advent Lyric VII both her life and her speech manifest Christian teaching. As poems about the Advent season, the lyrics highlight the mystery of the Incarnation (and the Second Coming) and the human responses of wonder, dread, and joy. Mary’s position in the Advent Lyrics is the key to understanding the paradox of Emmanuel—or to accepting the limitations of humankind’s mental grasp. As Mary sometimes reminds her interlocutors in these lyrics of their intellectual limitations, her own superiority of mind is made clear. Mary is central to Advent Lyric II, IV, VII, and IX and is mentioned throughout the twelve poems as the vehicle for Christ’s coming to earth. Although the unity of Christ I has been disputed, and it is possible to regard each Advent Lyric as an autonomous poem, one crosscurrent is the way in which all of the poems treat the mystery of God’s coming and some seek understanding of this mystery through Mary’s participation in it.5 Several scholars regard the presentation of the Virgin Mary as a thread weaving the poems; for instance, R. B. Burlin sees a movement from the questions asked of Mary in Lyric IV to the answers Mary supplies to Joseph in VII and finally to the culmination of Mary’s wise comments in IX.6 Jane Chance regards the evolving presentation of Mary’s role from maiden to bride of Christ as part of the binding for all of the lyrics. Chance points out that the earlier lyrics prepare the way for Mary’s characterization as a teacher of providence’s progress in Lyr4. George Hardin Brown, “Old English Verse as a Medium for Christian Theology,” in Modes of Interpretation in Old English Literature, ed. Phyllis Rugg Brown, Georgia Ronan Crampton, and Fred C. Robinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 15. 5. Campbell, for instance, presents the Advent Lyrics in his edition as separate units. See also J. J. Campbell, “Structural Patterns in the Old English Advent Lyrics,” English Literary History 23 (1956): 239–55. On the other hand, Stanley B. Greenfield in A Critical History of Old English Literature [(New York: New York University Press, 1965), 124–28] argues that the poems are tonally and thematically unified. Jane Chance sees Mary’s role as hero as a binding force for the twelve poems. See Jane Chance, Woman as Hero in Old English Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 13–30. 6. R. B. Burlin, The Old English Advent: A Typological Commentary, Yale Studies in English 168 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1968).



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ic VII.7 Lyric II introduces her as the “faemne geong” (young woman), who by remaining pure delivered “dryhtnes geryne” (the Lord’s secret).8 In IV she responds to the inhabitants of Jerusalem who inquire into the paradox of the Virgin Birth that she herself, “dauides dyrre maegan” (David’s dear offspring), is the sign that God has given humankind to recognize.9 While Lyric II and IV, and later Lyric IX, which celebrates the bride as the prophesied gateway for God’s passing into the city of humanity, all emphasize Mary’s intimacy with the Lord’s intentions and her sagacity in translating them for earthly comprehension, it is Lyric VII that presents the Virgin as an instructor in divine things. There she explains to Joseph the meaning of the Annunciation, Virgin Birth, and Incarnation. This poem portrays Mary as a wise woman, while it develops a scene from Matthew 1:20 in which Joseph doubts her fidelity. Advent Lyric VII is a reflection upon an antiphon from Alcuin’s De laude Dei, in which Joseph is interrogated about his belief in the Virgin Birth: “O Joseph, how did you believe that which before you feared? Well? He whom Gabriel announced would be the Christ to come is born of her by the Holy Spirit.”10 Lyric VII is unusual among the twelve poems because its elaboration of the antiphon consists entirely of a dialogue between Mary and Joseph, while a community of praying petitioners is the governing narrator in the other lyrics. The dialogic structure and dramatic presentation allow us to see a unique representation of a scene from Mary’s early life in Anglo-Saxon literature, but we must tease this representation out of scholarly debate over the poem. The attribution of speeches within the dialogue of Lyric VII is the subject of much argument, representing differences in what Old English scholars would consider appropriate words for either Mary or Joseph. The most popular reading of the poem, based on its presentation in the editions of Krapp and Dobbie and of Campbell, divides the dialogue into five speeches.11 According to this structure, Mary opens the poem with a lament that Joseph is intent on leaving her, and Joseph responds that he 7. Chance, Woman as Hero, 19. 8. Advent Lyric II, 35b, 42b. 9. Advent Lyric VII, 96a–b. 10. Thomas D. Hill, “A Liturgical Source for Christ I, 164–213 (Advent Lyric VII),” Notes and Queries 217 (1972): 84–89. 11. Prior to the editions employed for this chapter, both Thorpe and Cook also edited popular editions with Advent Lyric VII divided into five speeches. See Codex Exoniensis, ed.

32  The English Lives of Mary endures terrible grief over dishonor suffered for Mary’s sake. Mary then wonders why Joseph sorrows so, since she has found no fault in him. Joseph explains that he bears too many insults over Mary’s mysterious pregnancy and the depressing alternatives open to him of either seeing his betrothed stoned for adultery or pretending that the child is his and accepting the scorn due to a liar. In the final speech, Mary clears Joseph’s doubts with a revelation of the Annunciation and the promise of the Virgin Birth and Incarnation to come. In an alternative assignation of speeches in the dialogue, a group of critics often called the “unifiers” propose that Lyric VII offers three speeches, rather than the five defended by the “fragmenters.”12 In the tripartite interpretation of the poem, Mary begins by bewailing Joseph’s intention to leave her and the calumnious speeches of others that she has heard through him. Joseph explains that the sorrow he suffers over her mysterious pregnancy has caused him to bring these troubles to her and to contemplate the terrible alternatives ahead: her stoning or his enduring position as a perjured man. Mary then delivers the final speech on whose attribution both critical camps agree. The “fragmenters” have argued that the tripartite structure presents Mary in unlikely despair and confusion at the beginning of the poem, but my reading of her character in Advent Lyric VII will nevertheless follow the “unification” principle for the following reasons. First, the manuscript offers no punctuation or prompt that would indicate five different speeches. Lyric VII offers only three speech markers: two phrases with the apostrophe “eala” (O) and a transitional sentence explaining that Mary is about to speak. The poem opens “Eala Joseph min” (O my Joseph), clearly indicating Mary as the first speaker, and at lines 175b–176a Joseph cries out “eala faemne geong / mægđ maria” (O young woman, maiden Mary). Before the final speech, the following introduction occurs: “þa seo faemne onwrah / ryht-geryno B. Thorpe (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1842), and The Christ of Cynewulf, ed. Albert S. Cook (New York: Librarian Press, 1900). 12. The three-speech reading was proposed by P. J. Cosijn in “Anglosaxonica IV,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 23 (1898): 109–30, and supported by Robert B. Burlin and C. G. Harlow in “The Old English Advent VII and the ‘Doubting of Mary’ Tradition,” Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985): 101–17. On the assignation of speeches see also Neil Isaacs, “Who Says What in Advent Lyric VII (Christ II. 164–213),” Papers in Language and Literature 2 (1966): 162–66; John Miles Foley, “A Structural Approach to the Speech Boundaries in ‘Advent Lyric VII,’” Neophilologus 59 (1975): 114–18; Earl R. Anderson, “The Speech Boundaries in Advent Lyric VII,” Neophilologus 63 (1979): 611–18.



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and þus reordade” (then the woman revealed the true mystery and thus replied).13 These introductions clearly set boundaries for different speakers in a way that is consonant with the rest of the Advent Lyrics, which all use “eala” to denote a change in speaker. Second, in regard to the inappropriateness of Mary’s consternation at the beginning, her emotional outpouring is no less suitable than that at the Pietà. Similar to later depictions of Mary at the foot of the cross, the Virgin acknowledges both her position in the divine scheme and the pain of her human situation. Sorting out the speakers and their speeches is necessary for a close reading of Advent Lyric VII and its portrayal of the Virgin’s sagacious conduct. Allowing for three speeches in the poem, we hear in Mary’s introductory words a conversation in medias res that demands a defense of her family’s glory and a reminder of prophecy. Joseph has obviously just reported to her the insults he has heard about her pregnancy and has announced his intention to leave her. She bewails this news, but not before addressing Joseph as “Jacobes bearn / mæg dauides mæran cyninges” (son of Jacob, kin of David, the famous king), calling attention to the great lineage from which both she and her betrothed are derived and intimating the inappropriateness of any stigma against them.14 Theirs is the line from which the Messiah shall be born, so their issue should be beyond reproach. For Mary’s opening lament about Joseph’s impending abandonment, editors have ended the line with a question mark to indicate Mary’s disbelief in Joseph’s wavering: “nu þu freode scealt faeste gedælan / alætan lufan mine” (now you must from affection strictly part, leave my love?).15 As John C. Pope points out, Mary’s syntax suggests a statement rather than a question, but he agrees with others who would underscore the Virgin’s doubt about her betrothed’s abandonment.16 Pope’s solution, then, is to suggest a scribal error there—“nu” accidentally written in for “na,” the latter indicating Mary’s emphatic commandment against Joseph’s departure. While Pope’s solution would add moral authority to the Virgin’s characterization, Mary does assume a mantle of spiritual power in gentler ways, first by the reminder of au13. Advent Lyric VII, 195b–96a-b. 14. Ibid., 164b–165b. 15. Ibid., 166a–167a. 16. John C. Pope, “Mary to Joseph, Christ I, 164–67a: A Probable Scribal Error, nu for na,” Speculum 6.4 (1985): 903–9. This article provides a helpful survey of editorial practices for Mary’s first sentence and explains the scholarly controversy surrounding it.

34  The English Lives of Mary gust lineage and second by noting that her retractors speak blasphemy. Although Mary is “deope gedrefed” (deeply troubled) by the aspersions cast on her pregnancy which she has just heard from Joseph’s report, she nevertheless recognizes that her accusers are wrong and “sprecađ hosp” (speak blasphemy).17 Without the interpolation of different punctuation or word choice into the Exeter Book’s presentation, we can see that the Virgin of Advent Lyric VII has confidence in her spiritual status and in surviving human injustice through the strength of her faith: “God eaþe mæg / gehælan hygesorge heortan minre / afrefran feasceaftne” (God might easily heal the anxiety of my heart, comfort this poor one).18 Mary sheds tears, but holds hope that God will make all well between her and Joseph, her and the larger community. Joseph’s thoughtless reply highlights the contrasting superiority of Mary’s carefully chosen words. He mistakes her sorrow over his leavetaking and the community’s misjudgment for an expression of guilt: “þu þa word spricest / swa þu sylfa sie synna gehwylcre / firena gefylled” (you speak those words as if you yourself were full of all sins and crimes).19 However, like Mary, who takes offense at the harsh words spoken against her, Joseph blanches at the suggestion that Mary has done any wrong or that he might accuse her himself. He declares to Mary, “ne ic culpan in þe / incan ænigne æfre onfunde” (I found neither fault nor any suspicion in you).20 Although he cannot imagine that Mary has sinned in lust, he believes that he must leave because he cannot explain how the “fæmne clæne” (pure woman) whom he took from the temple became pregnant, nor can he bear the alternatives presented to him by law, his beloved’s stoning or his enduring disgrace.21 At this point in the poem, Mary alleviates Joseph’s anxiety in the same way that she hopes God will relieve hers—by making manifest the divine plan. As Chance remarks, Joseph becomes Mary’s “pupil,” while the Virgin instructs him in the Annunciation, Virgin Birth, and Incarnation.22 According to Chance, in his speech, “Joseph remains faithful to the Law and the Letter. Mary saves him from this pernicious literalism—in anticipation of the later salvation of man performed by Christ—by revealing the truth. . . . Mary here becomes a spiritual mes17. Advent Lyric VII, 168a, 170b. 19. Ibid., 179b–181a. 21. Ibid., 187b.

18. Ibid., 173b–175a. 20. Ibid., 177b–178b. 22. Chance, Woman as Hero, 25.



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senger instructing fallen man.”23 Mary begins her instruction by swearing that she conceived the Christ child without sexual relations. Instead, Gabriel came to her and announced that the “swegles gast / leoman onlyhte” (the spirit of heaven would illuminate [her] with a ray of light).24 As the “beorhtne Sunu” (bright Son) alights, Mary becomes God’s spotless dwelling place.25 She declares to Joseph, “nu ic his tempel eam” (now I am his temple), and in this way, she reconnects with the architectural motifs in Psalm 118/119:22–23 alluded to in Lyric I, where Jesus is called the wall-stone that was once rejected in the building.26 After relating to Joseph the details of the Annunciation and providing an apt metaphor for her chaste conception, Mary advises him to shake off his sorrow and consider the glory of the Incarnation, when “mærum Meotudes Sunu” (the mighty Son of the Creator) will reign and Joseph will be called “faeder.”27 Converting Joseph’s grief to gladness, Mary substitutes for the angel who in Matthew 1:20 advises Joseph not to abandon Mary, who indeed bears the Son of God. A spokesperson for providence in Lyric VII, Mary comforts Joseph by providing the same information that she withholds when asked by the community of worshippers about the Virgin Birth in Lyric IV. In IV, the narrators beg Mary to “arece us þæt geryne þaet þe of roderum cwom / hu þu eacnunge æfre onfenge / bearnes þurh gebyrde and þone gebedscipe / æfter mon-wisan mod ne cuđes” (show us that secret that came to you from heaven, how you grew through conceiving a child and yet do not know bed-practices by the ways of man).28 In response, Mary reproves her inquirers, telling them that “monnum nis / cuđ geryne” (the mystery is not revealed to men).29 They must be content to regard her and contemplate her teaching that Christ shows himself in herself, to the glory of women, in a reversal of Eve’s sin. In contrast to Mary’s austerity and distance in Lyric IV, Lyric VII betrays her experience and her feelings. In VII, Joseph represents the same ignorant humanity as the corporate narrator of Lyric IV, but he is better satisfied in his quest for divine knowledge, partly because of the practical need to include him in the plans for the holy family and partly because, even with his com23. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 205b. 27. Ibid., 210a, 211b. 29. Ibid., 94b–95a.

24. Advent Lyric VII, 203b–204a. 26. Ibid., 206b. 28. Advent Lyric IV, 74a–77b.

36  The English Lives of Mary munity’s accusations, he trusts implicitly in Mary’s innocence and is the more miserable that he cannot prove it. In Christ I, Mary’s teachings come to fruition by Lyric IX, when the narrator is able to tell the complete story of her Annunciation and recognize the Virgin as part of the system of divine architectural metaphors, as the holy gate of God prophesied by Isaiah.30 In Lyric IX, Mary takes her place as the “þristhycgende” (brave-thinking) woman whose noble thoughts lead to the offering of her chastity to the bridegroom.31 How widely a depiction of a bold and wise Virgin may have been known in Anglo-Saxon England is difficult to determine from Advent Lyric VII, a unique poem whose context is uncertain. Rosemary Woolf posited that Christ I may have been read in a monastic refectory during Advent, and Mary Clayton, arguing that no evidence exists for vernacular literature in the Anglo-Saxon liturgy, suggests that the poem was written for private devotions.32 Since this poem of indeterminable date exists in a single manuscript, we can only infer from the other heroic depictions of biblical women in Anglo-Saxon poetry that a Mary strong in divine knowledge and authority would have had wide appeal.33 We can regard Lyric VII as a precursor to the Middle English lyrics (discussed in chapter 5) which would later develop single events in Mary’s life. Unlike the mild Virgin of the late medieval English lyrics, however, the Anglo-Saxon Mary of Lyric VII speaks with the command and understanding of a queen. With its dramatic dialogue, Lyric VII also foreshadows the scripts of Marian mystery plays, one of which will be considered later in this chapter.

John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme In moving from the Advent Lyrics to John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, we note different literary manifestations of Mary’s wisdom.34 While Mary teaches openly in the Advent poems—and we will see her explicit instruction again in later medieval literature from England—in Gower’s 30. Advent Lyric IX, 7–14. 31. Ibid., 288b. 32. Rosemary Woolf, review of Campbell’s edition of the Advent Lyrics, Medium Aevum 29 (1960): 129; Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, 181. 33. The poem Judith in the Nowell Codex provides an example of a biblical woman of both mental and physical prowess. See Mark Griffith, ed., Judith (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). 34. G. C. Macaulay, ed., The Complete Works of John Gower, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899). Vol. 1 contains the French works. I will use the translation of William Burton



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Mirour the emphasis is on her teaching by example. Specifically, Gower encourages his courtly readers to emulate Mary’s emotional reactions to events in the life of Christ and implies that pious feelings such as Mary’s are the conduit to divine understanding. Composed between 1360 and 1377, the Mirour de l’Omme reflects the predominance of French and Anglo-Norman literature in Edward III’s court, especially through a characterization of Mary that imitates many of the topoi of fin amour.35 In Gower’s Mirour Mary is a beautiful lady of much discretion and noble sentiment, who is to be set above all others. Written some four hundred years after the inscription of the Advent Lyrics in the Exeter Book, the Mirour de l’Omme is the first of several major Marian works of the late English Middle Ages to be considered in this chapter. All of these, including Gower’s French opus, the Bridgettine Myroure of Oure Ladye, the Mary Play from N-Town, and Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, are indebted to continental models of the intervening centuries for their presentations of the Virgin’s wisdom. The Mirour de l’Omme especially recalls thirteenth-century continental works of Marian piety: the pseudo-Bonaventurian Meditationes vitae Christi and St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs. From the Meditationes Gower took an amplified narrative of a Virgin with her eyes ever trained upon God. The Meditationes models appropriate responses to Jesus through the conduct of Mary, and as we shall see, Gower focuses particularly on Mary’s emotional responses and their reflection of her superior knowledge. From St. Bernard’s sermons Gower took the characterization of Mary as a refined lady with a holy passion; in the Mirour de l’Omme the Virgin is a noble and pure counteragent to all that is sordid and determined to overthrow God’s court. Because of the influence of continental models emphasizing Mary’s gentility and sensitivity, Gower’s Mirour depicts a kind and feeling Virgin, glimpsed only briefly among portraits of an otherwise regal mother in Advent Lyric VII. The Mirour is a grand psychomachia of the vices and virtues, the contemporary triumph of the vices over the estates, and the hope for repriWilson, John Gower: Mirour de l’Omme (The Mirror of Mankind) (East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1992). 35. While R. F. Yeager argues for the possibility of an early beginning to the Mirour’s composition, Macaulay fixes Gower’s dates for writing between 1376 and 1379. See Robert F. Yeager, “John Gower’s French,” in A Companion to Gower, ed. Siân Echard (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 142; also G. C. Macaulay, Introduction, xliii.

38  The English Lives of Mary sal depicted in the life of the Virgin Mary.36 Just when the use of “mirror” as a metaphorical title reached its apex in fourteenth-century England, Gower’s Mirour supplies a “reflection of humankind” from the personal, social, and spiritual perspectives: it reflects the individual’s struggle with sin, the social consequences of collective evil, and the Virgin as vehicle for salvation.37 The Latin title supplied for this poem at Gower’s tomb—the Speculum Meditantis (the mirror of one meditating)—repeats the mirror imagery and explains what the reader is to do before it: meditate, eschew the works of sin, and emulate the Virgin Mary. When considering the life of the Virgin in the poem’s final section, Gower offers her emotional responses to divine events as attitudes for imitation, and he links Mary’s strong feelings to her divine knowledge. Spanning the original creation of the vices and virtues and their relative power in medieval society, the scope of the Mirour is “very ambitious,” according to Gower’s editor, G. C. Macaulay.38 By personifying figures of good and evil and explaining how they were born, Gower provides an original recasting of Genesis, and as Anna Torti points out, such allegorical characters suit the purposes of a “mirror” by enacting concepts that appear to humans less clearly in real life.39 “Seeing through a glass darkly” is, of course, St. Paul’s neoplatonic estimation of human perception, and any literary mirror is meant to correct such misprision with “the unspotted mirror of God’s majesty.”40 Herbert Grabes’s account of the psychomachic mirror is particularly germane to Gower’s purposes in the Mirour de l’Omme: Not only are virtues and vices, wisdom and folly considered to be themselves mirrors; they also appear in the mirror—and not just in the mirror of the human personality as a whole, but also in the mirror of human deeds and human fortune. . . . Personal experience, the events of history and occasionally even 36. The structure of the Mirour breaks down in the following way: a discussion of vices and virtues, lines 37–18420; triumph of the vices over the estates, lines 18421–27360; and hope for reprisal, lines 27361–29945. George Lyman Kittredge first described the three parts of the Mirour in “Gower,” The Nation 71 (1900): 254. 37. Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 28. 38. Macaulay, Introduction, xlvi. 39. Anna Torti, The Glass of Form: Mirroring Structures from Chaucer to Skelton (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991), 2. 40. 1 Cor 13:12; Ws 7:26.



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mythology were viewed—within the framework of a human self-awareness which was universal and typifying rather than individualistic, class-bound rather than situationally oriented—as a great thesaurus of warning examples. The warning example is designated a mirror because it exposes in the beholder his own potential for corruption . . . ; anyone using such a mirror can alter his own behaviour.41

Through his allegorical narrative personifying virtues and vices, Gower presents a generalized construct of the battle ongoing in each human soul. He goes beyond the “universal and typifying,” however, in culminating the narrative with the life of the Virgin Mary. He offers not only warning examples through mythological figures, but also an imitable example of discernment and conduct in the Virgin Mary. In her position as a human being whose divine intuitions allow her to counteract evils in allegorical figures, Gower’s Mary presents a specific and singular model of rectitude in the literary mirror. In the Mirour, Gower presents warning examples in his myth of origins for Sin and Death, a major source for Milton’s later figuration of evil, and a response to those warnings in the Virgin Mary.42 In the Mirour de l’Omme, the feminine figures of Sin and the Virgin stand in binary positions of vice and virtue, and Mary’s life is a particular and human counterpoint to the experiences of Sin. Gower claims that while the Devil gave birth to a daughter and “indoctrinated” Sin in “most treacherous guile,” a bishop teaches Mary “good learning for God’s pleasure.”43 In contrast to Mary’s temple vow of perpetual chastity, Sin gives birth to Death and the seven mortal vices. While Mary flourishes in a chaste, spiritual relationship with God, Sin commits double incest, first with the Devil to produce Death and next with Death to produce the vices. Gower tells Mary’s story at the end of the Mirour in order to offer an antidote to Sin, and in so doing, he switches from allegory to biblical history, altering the purview of the mirror. While on the one hand the Mirour presents an allegory that clarifies Sin for myopic human eyes, on the other hand it offers an amplified biblical history that character41. Grabes, The Mutable Glass, 92–93. 42. See the comparison of the grand scope of Mirour to Paradise Lost in Yeager, “John Gower’s French,” 140. 43. Gower, Mirour, lines: 212–13: “la gardoit et doctrinoit / De sa plus tricherouse guile”; lines 27668–69: “Et par doulçour et bonne apprise / Au dieu plaisir la vait gardant.”

40  The English Lives of Mary izes Mary’s imitable feelings in closer detail. Moving from figural to literal, the poet implies the dangerous obscurity of Sin in comparison to the sweet availability of the Virgin; the former lurks in shadows while the latter lives in the light of truth. Because the Mirour’s narrator is one whom Sin has overcome, he is too abject to pray to the Trinity, but will instead petition God’s mother and tell of her life “in the French tongue for the information of the lay folk and as a reminder to the clerics.”44 Relating Mary’s life, the narrator conveys a biography that we shall see repeated in other works, such as the N-Town Mary Play and Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, but unlike the other texts treated later in this chapter, the Mirour de l’Omme offers a continuous, extended narrative from Mary’s Nativity to her Assumption. Furthermore, unlike the N-Town play or Lydgate’s Life, the Mirour does not highlight Mary’s education or intellectual prowess, but instead her emotional responses to the fruition of divine events. In the tradition of affective piety, Gower’s Mary illustrates that attention to pure feelings of love toward God leads to discernment of things holy and premonitions of divine things to come. Throughout Mary’s life, as told in the Mirour, the Virgin swings from joy to sorrow— reflecting her fifteen joys and sorrows—as she grows in comprehension of God’s plan. Gower’s emphasis in the Mirour de l’Omme on the appropriateness of Mary’s feelings toward the life of Christ imitates that in the Meditationes vitae Christi, translated by Nicholas Love in the Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ. Like Love’s Myrrour, Gower’s poem is meant to elicit identification with and pious feelings toward the lives of the holy family. Gower’s concentration on the life of the Virgin, however, rather than on the Passion as the central font of holy human sentiment, provides an original perspective and adds significantly to medieval English wisdom literature on Mary. That Mary has opened her heart to God and therefore increased her spiritual understanding is apparent in the Mirour from her seventh year when, installed in the temple, she left her bed at dawn and “with great pleasure she gave herself freely to prayer to God.”45 After nones, she spent her time in contemplation: “This was her conversation, this was 44. Ibid., lines 27477–80: “Par quoy en langue de romance / J’en fray la declaracioun / As lays pour enformacioun, / Et a les clercs pour remembrance.” 45. Gower, Mirour, lines 27701–2: “Et lors tantost par grant delit / Au dieu prier s’abandonna.”



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her recreation, this was her joy and her sweetness.”46 When she desired to “think more intensely on God,” she fasted.47 Mary’s faithful heart and intense devotion are rewarded by God’s merciful comfort when she and Joseph were ashamed of marrying and by God’s increasing favor.48 The narrator comments upon the spiritual generation of Mary’s “covenable” and “honurable” (proper and honorable) regard for the Lord, and he indicates that Mary’s openness to God’s love produced a mutuality of feeling and intimacy, an intimacy that will prove itself in Mary’s familiarity with God’s plans: Good love enclosed in a good heart becomes greater day by day, for those who love well do not forget. For this reason I conclude that good love will never be displaced by anything in this life; indeed, I think it will always increase and multiply. This I would like to say of Mary, that she had a heart set upon God on high, and God also, for His part, cherished her more and more; neither was deceived.49

In the lines above, the growth of Mary’s feelings for and relationship with God becomes the center of her life and the source of spiritual fecundity and a wellspring of truth. The narrator seeks to imitate the fervor of Mary’s feelings, and just as the Virgin’s love for God brought her knowledge of holy things, the narrator hopes that his own devotion toward Mary will bring him a working knowledge of her life. Looking to Mary as his muse, the narrator begs the Virgin: “My Lady, I beseech you, place within my heart the sense needed to be able to recount your praise.”50 As in the Virgin’s life and her association with God, all “sense” must proceed from the heart. 46. Ibid., lines 27709–20: “Apres la Nonne chascun jour / Au temple u q’elle ert au sojour / Se mist en contemplacioun: / Au dieu, vers qui tout son amour / Ot attourné, fist sa clamour / Par droite humiliacioun, Ore ert en meditacioun, / Et ore en supplicacioun / Requist la grace au creatour; C’estoit sa converscioun, / C’estoit sa recreacioun, / C’estoit sa joye et sa doulçour.” 47. Ibid., lines 27721–23: “Viande nulle volt gouster / Tiels jours y ot, pour plus penser / En dieu.” 48. Ibid., lines 27829–34. 49. Ibid., lines 27877–78; ibid., lines 27865–76: “Bon amour deinz bon cuer reclus / Du jour en jour croist plus et plus, / Car qui bien ayme point n’oublie; / Par ceste reson suy conclus / Qe bon amour ja n’ert exclus/ Par nulle chose en ceste vie, / Ainz croist toutdis et multeplie: / Ce vuill je dire de Marie, / Q’ot son cuer mys a dieu la sus, / Et dieus auci de sa partie / De plus en plus la tint cherie; / Ne l’un ne l’autre estoit deçuz.” 50. Ibid., lines 27911–12: “Mettetz le sens dedeinz mon cuer, / Dont ta loenge conter sace.”

42  The English Lives of Mary Once the narrator is possessed of worshipful emotion, he has the power to relate Mary’s first joys in the Annunciation, Visitation, and Nativity. The Annunciation took place on a day when Mary’s heart was especially set upon divine love and when she was alone, whereas at the Visitation, she had the opportunity to share her joy and recognition of God’s hand in holy childbearing.51 Her happiness that both she and Elizabeth participate in the coming of the Messiah was a physical experience, the bodily pleasure of pregnancy a catalyst for the contemplation of mysteries: Such news [of Elizabeth’s pregnancy] renewed your joys, Lady, and afterwards you experienced great joy when you felt under your robe the lively infant in your womb, who was rejoicing inside you. But when the thought came to you that it was He from whom all began—male and female—then it is no marvel if you, Lady, are glad, for you are God’s mother and His Virgin.52

The feelings of mutual love and intimacy between Mary and God now blossom in the double merriment of mother and infant during the divine pregnancy. Both during the Visitation and at the Nativity, Mary’s happiness in motherhood leads to her contemplation of the paradoxes of creation—that Mary is creature and mother to the Creator.53 The joyful event of giving birth leads to Mary’s acknowledgment of God’s power, even from inside a humble stable.54 With the attendance of the shepherds and the Magi, Gower begins to clarify how Mary’s feelings of pious exhilaration are linked to the fulfillment of God’s plans, which she had foreknown.55 Likewise, at the Circumcision, Simeon’s words heralding the babe as the Messiah fill her with gladness because they confirm what she had already heard through Gabriel’s prophecy.56 With a nod to her scriptural understanding, the narrator reveals that Mary’s joy at the Circumcision is properly at Jesus’ culmination and transcendence of the old law, which she imitated by going through the Purification, even though the Virgin Birth was pure.57 51. Ibid., 27913–21. 52. Ibid., lines 28021–32: “Itiele chose q’ert novelle / Tes Joyes, dame, renovelle; / Mais puis apres grant Joye avetz, / Qant tu sentis soubz ta cotelle / Le vif enfant en ta boëlle, / Qui s’esbanoie a tes costées: / Mais qant ce vient en tes pensées, / Qe c’est il par qui commencez / Tous sont, le madle et la femelle, / Lors si tu, dame, soies leez / Nuls se doit estre esmerveillez, / Q’es mere dieu et sa pucelle.” 53. Ibid., lines 28093–104. 54. Ibid., lines 28057–59. 55. Ibid., lines 28141–76. 56. Ibid., lines 28195–212. 57. Ibid., lines 28177–88; ibid., lines 28225–36.



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In other events surrounding Jesus’ infancy, the Mirour reveals Mary’s joy in the realization of the prophecies and acknowledgments that her son is King of Kings. Once in Egypt and safe from Herod, Mary thrilled to miracles, such as the fall of idols from all of the temples, that provided evidence of Jesus’ divinity. Mary’s joy is specifically in the astonishment of the unbelievers, at the way in which they could not deny her son’s godhead.58 When a tree bows down to its Maker, the narrator comments: O Virgin and Mother of God, what a great marvel it was to you when such a strange creature knew its God in this way; whereby your glory more greatly appears through your dear Son, who is God above. For then you knew that by right He was Lord of nature and could change anything completely around. This is something that reassured you, so that, my Lady, grounds for your joy came with every hour.59

Through the actions of shepherds, the Magi, unbelievers, and even this tree, Gower accentuates Our Lady’s sense of what is due to herself and her son, to the glory and honor they merit. Understanding her place in salvation history, Mary beams over these signs of recognition. This is a characterization of the Virgin as a noble lady, somewhere in between the great Queen of Heaven in many of the Advent Lyrics and the humble pupil-Mary of the Mary Play. In the Mirour de l’Omme, Mary’s joy in divine power appropriately countermands Sin’s lust for control. Although Mary will have other causes for joy throughout Jesus’ lifetime, especially during the period of ministry and miracles establishing him as the Son of God, her sorrows begin with losing the twelve-yearold Jesus in the temple.60 Although Jesus was demonstrating his godly wisdom to the teachers—the sort of illustration of divinity that would ordinarily bring her joy—Mary panics because she has lost sight of God’s intentions, as well as of the boy himself.61 She is happy only in physical, mental, and emotional reunion with her son.62 58. Ibid., lines 282852–96. 59. Ibid., lines 28309–20: “O tu virgine et la dieu miere, / Qe ce t’estoit mervaille fiere, / Qant si foreine creature / Conoist son dieu en la maniere; /Dont ta loenge plus appiere / Par ton chier fils, q’est dieu dessure: / Car lors scies tu, de sa droiture / Q’il estoit sire de nature / Et puet tourner l’avant derere, / C’est une chose que t’assure; / Sique ma dame en chascune hure / Te vient du Joye la matiere.” 60. Ibid., lines 28417–572; ibid., lines 28352–56. 61. Ibid., lines 28369–80. 62. Ibid., lines 28381–86.

44  The English Lives of Mary The Passion revisits Mary’s sorrow in impending separation from her son; at the cross, however, Mary suffers not from lack of understanding, but from awareness beyond any other observer’s. As the narrator comments, “It pertained to your duty, Lady, to have sorrow and sadness more than any other person born on earth. For you truly know, Lady, that which no one else can know, that He is the Son from the Trinity through His divinity, and that from you He incarnated Himself.”63 First, Gower tells the entire story of the Passion and Resurrection from Jesus’ point of view, then continues in a parallel narrative to describe Mary’s compassion.64 During Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, she sorrows because she lacks power to help her son or to convey the message of his glory to the people. She could find no advocate for him with Pilate or help when he was pierced in the side.65 Just as the physical satisfaction of pregnancy had brought her ecstasy before, now the vicarious pain she endures at his punishments brings her grief. Jesus’ suffering is recorded in her mind and on her countenance; according to the narrator, “No one should be surprised if you then changed color, for each blow of the scourge wounded you, my Lady, in your thought, because of your great love.”66 Whereas in Jesus’ youth, knowledge of his greatness in the present and future gave the Virgin joy, at the cross Mary’s knowledge of the past—of his birth—causes her sorrow. Mary faints often; seeing Jesus’ painful suffering is too much for her.67 When Jesus dies and Mary is in the depths of her sorrow because of exile from her beloved, he sends angels to comfort her and her joy is renewed in the knowledge that on the third day she will see him again.68 The narrator, in imitation of the Meditationes vitae Christi, speculates that Jesus must have appeared first, by right, to his mother and partner in providence, rather than to Mary Magdalene or the disciples.69 Once the Resurrection is made known, Our Lady delights in seeing 63. Ibid., lines 29077–84: “Ce partient, dame, a ton devoir / Pour dolour et tristesce avoir / Plus que nulle autre en terre née; / Car tu scies, dame, bien du voir / Ce que nul autre puet savoir, / Endroit de sa divinité / Q’il est fils de la trinité / Et qu’il de toy s’est encharné.” 64. Ibid., lines 28609–908; ibid., lines 28909–29160. 65. Ibid., lines 28933–45. 66. Ibid., lines 28965–69: “Nuls ne s’en doit esmervailler / Si lors tte change la colour, / Car chascun cop de l’escourger / Te fiert, ma dame, en ton penser / Solonc l’estat du fin amour.” 67. Ibid., lines 28970–29076. 68. Ibid., lines 29149–60. 69. Ibid., lines 29173–79.



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the apostles “perfected in the true faith without disbelief,” and once Jesus ascends into heaven, she remains somewhat reluctantly behind as the beacon of faith and truth for the others.70 Only she understood the import of events. As the narrator notes her anticipation of the Pentecost, he once again connects her emotional register to the greater divine knowledge that she gained from her son: “O Lady, you who know all of the facts, you did not have a feigned joy, but rather it was certain and blessed.”71 Mary remained on earth “until the freedom of the omnipotent Spirit, by His holy coming, gave by His good teaching a clear understanding to the others.”72 Mary was until her Assumption a teacher comparable to the Holy Spirit. Before her final days on earth, Mary felt hope and comfort in the knowledge sent down by the angel that she should die a painless death within three days.73 Jesus returned after the Virgin’s death to place Mary’s soul back into her body and the two depart for heaven.74 Gower’s Mirour de L’Omme presents a life of Mary that ref lects fourteenth-century trends in affective piety and ideals of noble womanhood. Through Mary’s fine feelings, organized by her experiences of the festal joys and sorrows, the reader sees the appropriate responses of a faithful Christian to the life of Christ. In Gower’s poem, meditating upon the Virgin’s experiences provides a cure for sin; in fact the historical figure of the Virgin and the allegorical representation of Sin provide two alternative sides in the “mirror,” the latter side showing the horrors of evil that any Christian should avoid. Avoiding sin by internalizing the Virgin’s joys and sorrows leads to a Marian understanding of God’s revelations. That Gower links divine reason to pious emotion in the figure of the Virgin shows the extent to which his Mirour strove to represent an integrated, redeemable humanity.

70. Ibid., lines 29213–14: “les apostres sont parfit / Du droite foy sanz mescreance.” 71. Ibid., lines 29293–95: “O dame, q’en scies tout le fait, / Tu n’as pas joye contrefait, / Ainz fuis certain et beneuré.” 72. Ibid., lines 29821–29: “Sicomme le livre nous devise, / La droite foy de sainte eglise / Fuist en ta mere soulement / Apres ta mort reposte et mise, / Jusques atant que la franchise / De l’espirit omnipotent / Par son tressaint avienement / Donnoit le clier entendement / As autres par sa bonne aprise.” 73. Ibid., lines 29627–28. 74. Ibid., lines 29701–49.

46  The English Lives of Mary The Myroure of Oure Ladye In The Myroure of Oure Ladye, a Middle English translation and explication of the Latin services for Bridgettine nuns, Mary is a mirror to a monastic, rather than a courtly, audience.75 While Gower reflects Mary’s pious emotional responses in his mirror, the Bridgettine services magnify the association between the Virgin’s wisdom and Eucharistic food. Of uncertain authorship, The Myroure was composed for the nuns at Syon Abbey, founded by Henry V, and was probably completed about 1420, near the time of their enclosure.76 With royal blessing and support, vernacular theological treatises such as The Myroure, written specifically for the Syon sisters, escaped Archbishop Arundel’s censures and perhaps provided royally sanctioned models for English religious writings.77 As a translation of a central liturgical text for the nuns’ edification, The Myroure is just one reflection of the emphasis on learning in the Bridgettine order, since according to Ann Hutchison, the sisters were expected to imitate Mary in not only chastity, but also wisdom.78 The Myroure of Oure Lady is divided into three parts: 1) a treatise on the genesis of and proper comportment in Bridgettine services; 2) a treatment of the hours of worship, with particular emphasis on the Marian lessons for matins, or the Sermo Angelicus, delivered to St. Bridget in a vision; and 3) an explanation of the order’s masses.79 The second 75. John Henry Blount, ed., The Myroure of Oure Ladye, EETS e.s. 19 (London: Trubner, 1873). In quotations from this edition, I have modernized the punctuation. The first reference to the Virgin Mary as a mirror probably derives from the Council of Ephesus, which invoked Mary as a mirror, and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin repeats this invocation. See Grabes, 79. 76. A. J. Collins, The Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey (Worcester: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1969). Collins proposes Thomas Fishbourne, first confessor-general to the Bridgettines, or his contemporary, priest-brother Simon Wynter, as likely candidates. See the summary of scholarship on The Myroure’s author by Ann M. Hutchinson in “What Nuns Read: Literary Evidence from the English Bridgettine House, Syon Abbey,” Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995): 209; Ann Hutchinson, “The Myroure of oure Ladye: A Medieval Guide for Contemplatives,” in Studies in St. Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, vol. 1, ed. James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana 35.19 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), 217. 77. For an excellent treatment of how The Myroure both participated in and restricted the scope of traditional English vernacular theology, see Elizabeth Schirmer, “Reading Lessons at Syon Abbey: The Myroure of Oure Ladye and the Mandates of Vernacular Theology,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 345–76. 78. Hutchinson, “The Myroure,” 218. 79. St. Bridget of Sweden, The Word of the Angel, trans. with introduction and notes by John E. Halborg (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1996).



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part translates and expounds upon Mary’s life story as told in lessons for matins over the course of each week so that the nuns might imitate the Virgin, know her better, and prepare to see her in heaven: And for asmoche as ye may se in this boke as in a myrroure / the praysynges and worthines of oure moste excellente lady therefore I name it. Oure ladyes myroure / Not that oure lady shulde se herselfe therin / but that ye shulde se her therin as in a myroure / and so be styred the moore deuoutly to prayse her / & to knowe where ye fayle in her praysinges / and to amende: tyll ye may come there ye may se her face to face wythouten eny myrroure.80

Seeing Mary in The Myroure, the Bridgettine nuns encountered a steadfast and wise “mother superior,” model for both themselves and the saint who envisioned their Order of St. Savior. As Claire L. Sahlin notes, St. Bridget, the Swedish princess who spent most of her widowhood in Rome, working toward a reconciliation of the pope and the holy Roman emperor and gathering a following of those impressed by her prophecies and pious life, thought of her religious role as complementary to that of the Virgin. Approximately a third of St. Bridget’s visions recorded in her Revelations involve Mary, and St. Bridget’s selfcharacterizations as bride of Christ and vessel of the divine mimic the Virgin Mary’s roles.81 Sahlin illustrates that St. Bridget’s Christmas Eve experience of a mystical pregnancy—a movement in her heart comparable to a child’s turning in a womb—is a Marian event, and that God penetrated and dwelled in St. Bridget’s body, just as he had in Mary’s.82 God’s invasion of the devout, female body results in heightened understanding and even the ability to prophesy; in St. Bridget’s Revelations 1.50.8, Christ declares that the sun of divine wisdom entered Mary’s body and illuminated it when the Son of Man entered her womb.83 St. Bridget declared that Christ infused her with the visions that resulted in her Revelations and her prophecies. Women’s spiritual leadership, authorized by a divine manifestation in the female body, is a central tenet of the new order for which 80. The Myroure, 4. 81. Claire L. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2001), 79–83. Birgitta of Sweden, Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations, trans. (from Middle English) Julia Bolton Holloway (Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Information Group, 1992). 82. Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden, 82–96. 83. Ibid., 96.

48  The English Lives of Mary St. Bridget sought approval; her own leadership and involvement in papal politics was inspired by her belief in the Virgin Mary’s encouragement of the post-Ascension Christian fellowship.84 Through the organization of its members, including twenty-seven sisters, five priests, two deacons, and four lay brothers (the number of disciples and apostles) in a double monastery Mary Magdaline under the leadership of an abbess, the Order of St. Savior modeled itself on the pre-Pentecost church, with Mary as its guiding light. By reenacting the structure of the early church as it existed before the writing of the gospels, the Bridgettine fellowship, according to Katherine Zieman, “situate[ed] Marian wisdom as anterior to that of the apostles and evangelists”; thus, authority rests “in Mary’s body . . . rather than in the words of the sacralized text.”85 In the Bridgettine services, the nuns bow to Mary’s authority by chanting a liturgy adapted from the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Myroure of Oure Lady, as it teaches the meaning of that liturgy and prepares the nuns to participate in it, emphasizes the Virgin’s sagacity in her position as prePentecostal head and connects her wisdom to her body and the provision of spiritual food.86 Especially in part 2 on the lessons for matins, The Myroure tells of Mary’s life, intellectual gifts, bodily purity, and spiritual succor. Each day of the week during matins, the Bridgettine sisters heard three lessons pertaining to Mary’s life from the Sermo Angelicus. As the author of The Myroure recounts, St. Bridget received these lessons in Swedish from an angel, wrote them down, and delivered them to Master Peter, her confessor, who wrote them in Latin. The present author turns the lessons to English for nuns whose Latin is limited to basic church vocabulary. Throughout his explanation of The Myroure’s transmission, the descriptions of St. Bridget’s “moderly tongue” and her reception of Marian teachings through “the Aungel’s mouthe” begin connections made 84. On the authority in Mary’s body and the idea of “Maria doctrix,” see Katherine Zieman, “Playing Doctor: St. Birgitta, Ritual Reading, and Ecclesiastical Authority,” in Olsen and Kerby-Fulton, eds., Voices in Dialogue, 319–23. 85. Ibid., 323. 86. The classic text on food and medieval women’s spirituality is still Carolyn Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). For a survey of texts as food and the idea of rumination and spiritual mastication of holy works, see Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. C. Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), especially the chapter “Sacred Learning,” 89–90.



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throughout the text among the mouth, language, eating, and the Eucharist.87 The nuns are advised to receive The Myroure as “soulles fode” and to regard the Virgin’s body, as it travels through all the events recounted during matins, as the container of the Bread of Life.88 As Caroline Walker Bynum notes about late medieval art, in the common image of the Virgin offering an intercessory breast or in the Vierge ouvrantes, “Eucharistic tabernacles,” we see the Virgin’s body offering spiritual nutrients for redemption; similarly, The Myroure offers soulful food to be digested slowly for greater understanding and effective preparation for worship.89 The author cautions against “hastynge to rede moche at ones / but labouryng to knowe what you rede that ye may se and vnderstonde her holy seruice / and how ye may serue her ther with to her most plesaunce.”90 Through a deliberative lectio divina, the nuns are more likely to enjoy the “gostly fruyte” of Mary’s spiritual biography.91 Mary’s biography is told throughout the week during matins lessons: for Sunday, the Trinity’s joy in Mary from the beginning; for Monday, the angels’ eternal praises of the Virgin; for Tuesday, the comforting foreknowledge that Adam, the prophets, and patriarchs had of Mary; for Wednesday, the Virgin’s Nativity; for Thursday, the development of her graces that led to the Incarnation; for Friday, the sorrows Mary suffered from Jesus’ birth up until the Passion; for Saturday, the Assumption.92 This cycle of Bridgettine worship places Mary’s life history inside the providential scheme. The narratives for Sunday through Tuesday prepare her way, while that for Saturday illustrates how she continues to be an agent of salvation in heaven. The stories for Wednesday through Saturday, which focus on the Virgin’s words, thoughts, and actions, rather than those of others about her, especially emphasize the wisdom emanating from her divinely infused body and the spiritual food that it provides. During the Wednesday matins service for the Virgin’s Nativity, a celebration of light underscores the Virgin’s cerebral illumination.93 The hymn for matins, Errorum pleno (“Lyghte spryngeth oute to the worlde full of darckenesse whyle mary cometh out of the preuy place of her 87. The Myroure, 19, 20. 88. Ibid., 8. 89. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 101–3. 90. The Myroure, 4. 91. Ibid., 66. 92. Ibid., 4–5. 93. Ibid., 205.

50  The English Lives of Mary mother wombe”), begins a motif that will be prevalent throughout the services for the entire day, that of Mary as the light leading away from human ignorance.94 The antiphon, Corrige virgo, calls to the Virgin to correct our lack of wisdom: “Uyrgyn most prudence correcte thow oure unwise hertes that thy sonne lokeynge from heuen mote see vs vnderstandynge and sekynge hym.”95 Such hymns and responses surround the matins lessons with supportive sound. The second lesson for matins combines a number of analogies that culminate in the main motif of light. Like the sun after the dark winter, it teaches, so Mary is the light to the dark world.96 With a transition from the beams of light in the second lesson, the third lesson opens with the “thre flaumes of charyte of the blyssed trynyte.”97 As the embodiment of holy charity, Mary at her birth “was lyke vnto a new lanterne not yet lyghte,” but three flames soon spark from her holiness.98 These flames are chastity, humility, and obedience, all virtues suggesting her superior understanding of God. One important way in which Mary illuminates our understanding is through her relationship with the law, and the first lesson for matins reveals that she conformed to its dictates even before birth, as her conception was the result of Joachim and Anne’s honest and faithful wedlock.99 In the Wednesday lessons, Mary’s body, whether incipient in the womb, manifest on earth, or transcended to heaven, is radiant with a divine light that indicates clear understanding and offers spiritual nutriment to others. In one of the many analogies offered in the Wednesday lessons, Anne’s womb is the flower to which the “bee that flyeth aboute flowry fyldes” resorts in the making of his delectable honey.100 Offering this honey to the world, Mary “after her byrthe receyued wytte and vnderstondynge in less age then other chyldren,” and soon grew into the virtues and wisdom providing support for a charitable life.101 For Thursday, The Myroure’s matins lessons tell the story of the Annunciation and Incarnation. The narrative of Mary’s growth in spiritual knowledge resumes here in the first lesson for matins, which explains her mental preparation for Gabriel’s arrival. The first lesson teaches that when the Virgin perceived God to be creator, judge, and focus of worship, 94. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 210. 98. Ibid., 213. 100. Ibid., 210.

95. Ibid., 206. 97. Ibid., 212. 99. Ibid., 206–7. 101. Ibid., 214.



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“then the wytte and vnderstandyng ran vp from the brayne of the virgin in to the heyghte of heuen as water runynge oute of a sprynge well.”102 Like the natural overflow of a spring well, the Virgin’s intelligence leapt out the bounds of earthly knowledge toward heavenly realization. The fresh water of divine intuition bubbles up, but as a result, the blood of Christ runs down, and “the feruoure of synne was quenched” by Mary’s honest and inspiring words of obedience to the angel’s declaration that she should bear the Christ child.103 The first lesson impresses upon its hearers that Mary satisfied humanity’s thirst for concord with the divine and that her recognition of the meaning of the Incarnation had a chastening effect on her own body. “This wytte and also vnderstondynge of the virgin,” claims the translator of Thursday’s first lesson, made her body “so subiecte to y sowle for to sarue god” that she could preserve herself in abstinence, temperance, and good health to the glory of God.104 Here, the Virgin’s wisdom both derives from and fortifies her pure body, which offers fortification to others through the Bread of Life. After lesson 2 completes the narrative of the Annunciation, lesson 3 for Thursday’s matins focuses on the Virgin’s divine impregnation, the “vnspecable knyttynge togyther . . . of her flesshe and blode and the godhed.”105 The story for Friday turns to the sacrifice of the flesh and blood uniting God and humankind and to the Virgin’s compassion during the events of Good Friday. In order to maintain its focus on sustenance derived from Mary’s inviolate body, the references to holy food drop away during the discussion of Jesus’ suffering and Mary’s response, even though all allusions to the Eucharist in The Myroure depend, of course, on the violated and broken body of Christ. The lessons for matins for this day especially underscore the extent of the Mother’s understanding, claiming that “she vnderstode the wordes of the prophetes better then dyd the same prophetes them selfe.”106 The first lesson for Friday’s matins illustrates how fear and sadness resulted from the Virgin’s superior knowledge of the workings of salvation and focuses on her sorrows in advance of the birth of Christ.107 First of all, when she was old enough to perceive God’s power, she knew to fear him and grew to become the 102. Ibid., 222. 103. Ibid., 223. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 229. 106. Ibid., 244. 107. The first lesson is erroneously entitled “The seconde lesson” in the edition (176).

52  The English Lives of Mary rose amidst many thorns of tribulation.108 Knowing the scriptures and prophets so well, she suffered agonies over the impending pains of the Christ child to the extent that all of her joys were mingled with sorrows. She celebrated the conception of her son without sin, but she was heavy in the foreboding of his foul death. The second lesson details the Mother’s sufferings after Jesus’ birth and before his Passion. Thinking on the prophets, she sorrowed as she beheld the perfection of the infant body that she knew would be destroyed by pain. Swaddling him, she thought of how his body would be unprotected at the crucifixion, scourged, and torn. Binding his hands and feet in infant clothes, she imagined nails binding them to the cross. All of these graphic pictures from the second lesson serve to focus the reader or hearer on the suffering of Christ as well as on the foreknowledge and attendant suffering of the Mother. According to the third lesson, foreknowledge—this time of Christ’s Resurrection—gave her comfort as she stood by the cross. During the three days of his absence in hell, she corrected the failing faith of the disciples with the reminder that he would conquer death.109 Overall, the lessons for Friday’s matins demonstrate how Mary’s responses are governed by her scriptural study and interpretation. Saturday’s stories revive the references to heavenly food as they celebrate Mary’s undecayed body at the Assumption. The author of the Myroure comments that “excepte only the body of criste, the body of his mother was moste worthy to receyue with her sowle the rewardes of merytes,” and it advises that the repentant should cast their eyes up to her assumed body if they “desire to be fedde of criste that is the fruite of this tree; laboure they fyrste with all strengthes to bowe the smalle braunches of thys tree, that ys to say, to grete with charite . . . hys mother.”110 Uncorrupted by death, Mary constitutes the branches of the Tree of Life, and her son is the holy fruit, divine counteragent to the fruit of which Eve tasted in the garden. The first lesson for matins points out that the Virgin deserved her glory since, unlike Eve, Mary concentrated on divine knowledge, conveyed by the prophets: “After the dethe of [Jesus’] manhod, when many were in all wyse in dowte of hym, she alone affirmed moste stablely that he was the very sonne of god endelesly undeadly in hys godhed.”111 On the third day, when all distrusted Jesus’ 108. The Myroure, 241. 110. Ibid., 269, 270.

109. Ibid., 250. 111. Ibid., 261.



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reappearance, she went to the grave and awaited him faithfully. Even though scripture reports that the Magdalen had first sight of the risen Lord, the author notes, the Mother certainly knew of his Resurrection. After Jesus’ Ascension, the Virgin played much the same role as after the crucifixion: she encouraged others in belief and the faith that Christ will come again. “For she was the maystresse of the apostles, the confotoure of martyres, the techer of confessors, the moste clere myroure of vyrgyns, the confortoure of wydowes, the moste holsome counseyloure of them that lyued in wed locke, and the moste parfyt strengther of all in the common ryghte faythe.”112 She instructed those who were hungry for a more intimate knowledge of Jesus, and she determined the appropriate times and methods for worship. For her perfect conformity to God’s will, her body was raised up to heaven; she left behind no bitterness, as had Eve, but instead the fresh Bread of Life.113 As the sisters of the Order of St. Savior at Syon Abbey partake of the soul’s food offered in The Myroure of Oure Ladye, the author wishes that his translation and explication of their daily services might “goyth dayly thorughe [their] mouthes so let yt synke & sauoure.” Through such holy nourishment, they will become “doughtres of Syon / that is to say of holy chyrche.”114 As Roger Ellis notes, The Myroure was intended to be read by all contemporary and future residents at Syon that they might perform their Marian identity in unity.115 Connecting knowledge, food, and salvation, The Myroure teaches the Bridgettine nuns that chewing slowly upon this text, particularly dear to St. Bridget, will help the nuns serve Mary as well as the Mother served God. In their renewed spiritual understanding, they will be mirror images of Mary, examples to others and righteous reflections of the church.

The Mary Play The fifteenth-century Mary Play dramatized trends in the Marian wisdom literature covered earlier in this chapter and made them available to a wide audience, since it was performed either alone or in tandem 112. Ibid., 262. 113. Ibid., 269. 114. Ibid., 4. 115. Roger Ellis, Viderunt Eam Filie Syon: The Spirituality of the English House of a Medieval Contemplative Order from its Beginnings to the Present Day (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1984), 116.

54  The English Lives of Mary with other biblical dramas.116 Like Advent Lyric VII and The Myroure of Oure Lady, the Mary Play employs language and song from Catholic liturgy to represent single scenes from the Virgin’s life. Capitalizing on direct dialogue as in Advent Lyric VII, the Virgin of the Mary Play addresses other characters and the audience directly in forceful proofs of her sagacity. Through its depiction of the Virgin’s early education and married life, the Mary Play tells a story similar to the first portion of the Virgin’s biography in Gower’s Mirour de L’Omme, but without stressing her emotions. Interestingly, the Mary Play endows the Virgin with serene authority by avoiding crises of feeling; for instance, the anxiety over Mary’s pregnancy that Joseph expresses in Advent Lyric VII and in other mystery plays of Joseph’s doubts is absent. Whoever saw this play would be impressed with young Mary’s reasonable nature, quick intelligence, and unshakeable adherence to divine ideals. The Mary Play represents an established tradition of devotional theater in medieval East Anglia, where the shrine at Walsingham drew pilgrims to see the replica of the house in which the Annunciation took place.117 A twelfth-century widow of Norfolk, Richelde de Faverches, had the house built according to the Virgin’s command in a vision. According to Gail McMurray Gibson, the increasing richness of the shrine and its chapel, due to royal grants to “Our Lady of Walsingham,” set expectations for the opulence of the Mary Play’s staging, which employed a doll descending to the Virgin’s womb on wires.118 I would also add that the centrality of Walsingham to Marian spirituality in East Anglia might encourage a play as devoted as the Mary Play is to the Virgin’s early years and her pregnancy. It forms part of the N-Town cycle of biblical pageants from Creation to Doomsday.119 In the cycle’s title, the letter 116. Peter Meredith’s edition of the Mary Play was first published in 1987 by Longman. I will be using the second edition here: Peter Meredith, ed., The Mary Play from the N.Town Manuscript (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). 117. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 127. 118. Ibid., 139–47. Also, M. D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 132. 119. For a recent edition of the N-Town plays, see Stephen Spector, ed., The N-town Play, EETS s.s. 11 and 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). The cycle has been variously called the Ludus Coventriae after a false attribution to Coventry, the Hegge cycle after its patrons, and finally the N-Town plays after a note in the banns that the plays should be performed at N-Town at the sound of the bell.



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“N” is an abbreviation for “nomen,” and after much speculation about city names that might be filled in, most scholars agree that “N-Town” was intended to be a traveling show that could be adapted to the requirements of different communities.120 A scribe and compiler working for the Hegge family in 1486 created the cycle by combining Mary and Passion plays with an older group of biblical dramas whose titles are announced in the manuscript’s banns.121 The older cycle of biblical plays is denoted the Proclamation Play, from the opening proclamation, and probably constitutes the original group of traveling plays.122 The Mary Play, marked off in the manuscript from the Proclamation material by red paragraph marks with dotted loops, provides a unique example of medieval English theater depicting the early life of the Virgin, although other such plays may be lost.123 In the Mary Play, the Virgin proves herself to be a precocious child and a prescient young woman.124 The Mary Play tells the Virgin’s story up through the age of fourteen, highlighting her sagacity and scriptural learning.125 It focuses on 120. Hardin Craig first made the case that the N-Town plays derive from Lincoln. See Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). This idea was supported by Kenneth Cameron and Stanley J. Kahrl in “The N-Town Plays at Lincoln,” Theatre Notebook, xx.ii (1965), 61–69, but ultimately overturned because the dialect of the manuscript is East Anglian. Gibson suggests that N-Town is a traveling play, wheeling out of Bury St. Edmunds (Theater of Devotion,127). Other suggestions about the cycle’s East Anglian genesis include Thetford (Alan J. Fletcher, “The N-Town Plays,” in Medieval English Theater, ed. Richard Beadle [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 164) and Acle (Meredith, Mary Play, 10), none of which can be proven by direct connections between the text of N-Town and external records. 121. British Library, Cotton Vespasian D. viii. 122. Fletcher, “The N-Town Plays,” 168. 123. John M. Wasson notes the frequency with which church parishes, especially those in the London area, produced plays. Besides Westminster Abbey, at least eleven London area churches staged plays between 1451 and 1565 that are now lost. Citing the records for plays at Lincoln Cathedral, he shows that the favorites between 1399–1400 and 1543–44 were Mary plays (now lost): The Coronation of the Virgin and The Assumption. See John M. Wasson, “The English Church as Theatrical Space” in A New History of Early English Drama, eds. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 27. 124. Elizabeth Witt, Contrary Marys in Medieval English and French Drama (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 52–53. Although Witt argues that English dramatic representations of Mary privilege her motherhood and thus underscore her submission to God, the Mary Play accentuates the intellectual and spiritual superiority by which the Virgin deserves celestial status. While Witt makes the case that Mary’s position of motherhood allows her access to divine knowledge, the Mary Play demonstrates the reverse: that through her attainment of ecclesiastical and scriptural learning, Mary prepares herself for the providential role that God will offer her. 125. The Mary Play’s narrative relies chiefly on the Legenda Aurea’s distillation of apocryphal sources on Mary’s early life such as the Protevangelium of James and Gospel of Pseudo-

56  The English Lives of Mary six main episodes: the conception of Mary, Mary in the temple, the marriage of Mary and Joseph, the parliament in Heaven, the Annunciation, and the visit to Elizabeth. When adding these narratives into the Proclamation Play, the scribe and compiler of N-Town sometimes substituted scenes from the Mary Play for the original or blended and juxtaposed the Mary Play with those announced in the banns. He copied the Proclamation Play through the seventh pageant, which foretells the coming of Mary and Jesus, then introduced several scenes from the Mary Play: her conception, presentation, and marriage. Into the marriage ceremony, he added material from the Proclamation Play, marking off his different resources with red paragraph marks with dotted loops. After the marriage of Mary and Joseph, he returns to the Mary Play for the parliament in Heaven and the Annunciation, skips back to the Proclamation material for the doubts of Joseph and back again to the Mary Play for the Visitation. After this, he follows the Proclamation Play until introducing new Passion dramas. As Peter Meredith points out, in the N-Town manuscript the banns are clumsily revised to reflect these additions, but the numerical order and titles of the plays still do not reflect the expanded content of the whole.126 Besides the red paragraph marks in the manuscript, one obvious separation between the Proclamation and Marian episodes is the verse, the prevalence of thirteeners in the former and the use of rhyme royal in the latter.127 As Theresa Coletti notes, the scribe and compiler of N-Town superimposed upon the Proclamation Play not only the early stories of Mary, but also Passion dramas that highlight both the Virgin’s and the Magdalene’s roles. According to Coletti, the scribe and compiler of N-Town made an “effort to write a dramatic version of salvation history that gives equal time to its major feminine interventions.”128 Even the Mary Play as extriMatthew. In its representation of Mary’s time in the temple and of the Visitation, the Mary Play employs Nicholas Love’s translation of the pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ. 126. Meredith, Mary Play, 1–5. 127. Spector discovered seventeen different stanzaic forms employed throughout the NTown cycle. He notes that the Proclamation Play is governed by “proclamation stanzas” of thirteen lines, rhyming ababababcdddc. The plays in the Mary group, which he calls “Contemplacio plays” are marked by “long octaves” rhyming ababbcbc. See Stephen Spector, The Genesis of the N-town Cycle (New York: Garland, 1988), 6–17, 22–24. 128. Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints: Theater, Gender, and Religion in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 229.



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cated from N-Town by Meredith’s edition shows an impulse to balance masculine and feminine authority. According to Contemplacio’s summary of the action in the beginning of the Mary Play, there is no scene of the doubts of Joseph, which might cast aspersions on the Virgin.129 Most importantly, as the young Mary gains knowledge throughout the play, her wisdom rivals and eventually surpasses that of the bishop, Isakar. Mary’s precocity becomes apparent when at three years old she enters the temple. Her parents, who have dedicated Mary to God because she was conceived through divine intervention, deliver here there, and ask of her, “Wole ȝe be pure maydyn and also Goddys wyff?”130 This is the same question posed to postulants in the liturgy of the Consecration of Virgins and one reason why Raymond St.-Jacques believes that the Mary Play was modeled on the ceremony for committing nuns to the cloister.131 It is also possible, however, that the playwright constructed this question from popular theology concerning the Virgin: she was often represented as a pure maiden or bride of Christ. To her parents, Mary answers that just as they have made their vow to offer her up, she will remain “Goddys chast seruaunt.”132 She has heard prophecies that the time of the Messiah is at hand and that his mother will be sweet; Mary hopes that the temple will put her in a position to serve the Mother.133 Upon leaving her parents, Mary hardly weeps like a threeyear-old, but entreats their forgiveness for any sin she may have committed against them.134 According to J. A. Tasioulas, this representation of little Mary as puella senex is at once astonishing and humanizing, for unlike the Cursor Mundi, Protevangelium, De nativitate Mariae, and the Legenda Aurea—all sources in which the Virgin similarly completes the miracle of climbing the temple steps—the Mary Play insists on the Virgin’s family attachments at the same time as it illustrates her new commitment to a life of chastity and prayer.135 As her parents watch, Mary 129. Meredith, Mary Play, 9–15. 130. Ibid., line 286. 131. Raymond St.-Jacques, “The Hegge ‘Mary in the Temple and the Liturgy of the Consecration of Virgins,’” Notes and Queries 225, n.s. 27 (1989): 295–97. 132. Meredith, Mary Play, line 289. 133. Ibid., lines 292–94. 134. Ibid., line 330. 135. J. A. Tasioulas, “Between Doctrine and Domesticity: The Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays,” Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 232.

58  The English Lives of Mary climbs the steps to the temple on her own, an ascension that indicates her increasing understanding. The bishop waits atop the steps to the temple and challenges Mary to make her passage from “Babylony” to “hevynly Jherusalem” with his guidance.136 She climbs toward him, adeptly learning at each step one of the fifteen Gradual Psalms.137 To prove her comprehension, she provides a lesson and English translation of the head verse of each psalm and then proclaims that head verse in Latin.138 The recitation from the Latin Vulgate here and in other instances renders the play macaronic and allows it to represent the instruction of Mary while offering the same instructions to the audience.139 For instance, concerning Psalm 120/121, Mary translates the opening sentence—“To þe mownteynes of hefne I haue lyfte myn ey, / From qwens xal comyn helpe me tylle”—and interprets the passage as a call to “stody with meke inquysissyon.”140 She then recites the Latin head verse (“Leuaui oculos meos in montes; / unde ueniat auxilium mihi”) so that all comprehend its meaning. Mary is a good student and calls others to approach the mountain of learning with God’s help. Meredith has found no dramatic source for this section of the play, but reminds us that the Gradual Psalms are often included in primers and thus suitable for elementary instruction, though most children at their primers would be a few years older than Mary.141 The bishop promises Mary that she will “be þe dowteree of God eternall / If þe fyftene grees þu may ascende.”142 He imagines that the accomplishment of this feat would be a “meracle” and challenges the audience to say the fifteen psalms in this maiden’s memory, should she achieve such a wonder.143 As she indeed completes an assignment that seems impossible for a three-year-old, Mary encourages the audience to perform their own miracle of memorization. When Mary arrives at the top of the temple stairs, the bishop teaches her the Ten Commandments and the Great Commandment, introduces her to the special companions who will accompany her in the temple, 136. Mary Play, line 352. 137. Ibid., lines 119–33. 138. Ibid., lines 355–444. 139. Janette Dillon, Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39. 140. Meredith, Mary Play, lines 363–64, 361. 141. Ibid., 16, 95 n. 355–444. 142. Ibid., lines 349–51. 143. Ibid., lines 351, 354.



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and then offers a ritual blessing to all. Commanding a group of “serys” to kneel, the bishop could be addressing the small group of actors, postulants at a commitment, or an entire congregation in church or on a green to participate in the dramatic ceremony. If the latter scenarios were the case, the actor of the bishop’s part must certainly have been a priest, and the realization that Mary’s intelligence impresses him as well as her contemporary Isakar must have made an even more powerful impression on the audience. The bishop praises God for Mary’s quickness in digesting sacred lessons and invites the audience to marvel at and imitate her: “A, gracyous Lord, þis is a mervelyous thynge / Þat we se here all in syght; / A babe of thre ȝer age so ȝynge / To come vp þese grecys so vpryght.”144 Establishing a life in the temple, Mary is surrounded by five maidens representing the Virgin’s holy comportment: Meditation, Contrition, Compassion, Cleanness, and Fruition.145 Furthermore, seven priests who provide figures for her intellectual and spiritual gifts minister to her: Discretion, Devotion, Delight (spiritual love), Deliberation, Declaration, Determination, and Divination. Mary hopes that the pursuit of these righteous behaviors and intellectual ideals will prepare her to serve the lady who will be God’s mother, and the vision of this future strengthens her resolve to remain chaste.146 When the bishop and others attempt to bind her to the stipulation that she must be betrothed at fourteen, Mary reminds them prudently of the vows made by her parents and herself concerning her virginity, and she argues effectively that a “clean” life is great service to God.147 Her wise words move the bishop and cause him to think further on her special situation. Rather than trusting to his own conclusions, Isakar invites the company to pray that “it may plese his [infynyte] deyté / Knowleche in þis to sendyn vs.”148 The angel advises the bishop and his advisors to seek among the House of David for the chosen husband of Mary. All bachelors are to fetch white rods, and the one whose rod f lowers is the designated spouse. When Joseph’s rod flowers, humor arises at his advanced age and lack of comprehension. From this scene on, Mary’s authority provides a counterpoint to her husband’s as well as to Isakar’s. While Mary 144. Ibid., lines 445–48. 146. Ibid., lines 521–25. 148. Ibid., lines 705–6.

145. Ibid., lines 481–83. 147. Ibid., lines 659–71.

60  The English Lives of Mary submits to a marriage that will perpetuate her chastity and her parents’ holy vows, Joseph resists because he cannot imagine a partnership in virginity. A bit blockheaded, Joseph must be cajoled into making his marriage vows, and the order of the marriage ceremony is reversed so that Joseph makes his promises first before he can escape.149 Finally accepting his place as Mary’s husband, Joseph goes off to arrange for their dwelling place, and Mary bides her time with the psalms. This dichotomy in their relationship continues: Joseph makes the practical arrangements while Mary studies scripture. Like Mary’s childhood ascension of the temple steps, this scene allows for a teaching moment on the blessedness of the psalms.150 With an impassioned cry—“O holy psalmys! O holy book!”—Mary instructs the audience in how they lead the reader away from sin and toward heaven.151 While the Virgin is casting her eyes toward heaven, the celestial council considers what to do about sin on earth. After the debate among Truth, Justice, Mercy, and Peace, Jesus announces his intention to act for human salvation, and God the Father pronounces the Savior “Sone Sapyens.”152 The role of Wisdom is soon transferred back to Mary, however, in the Annunciation scene, where she learns that she herself will be God’s mother. The angel finds her without her maidens and priests and without a book in her hand because at fourteen she has already internalized holy attributes and texts. When Joseph returns from his labors in another country, he marvels that Mary’s face is as luminous as “þe sonne with his bemys qwan he is most bryth.”153 She is brilliant intellectually and spiritually. Because Joseph returns from an extended absence just as Gabriel leaves the scene of the Annunciation, Joseph may not notice Mary’s pregnancy, but since he expresses no anxieties about it either here or when Elizabeth acknowledges the Savior in the Virgin’s womb, the Mary Play leaves the impression that all is right with humans and with God, as Mary mediates divine intentions. Therefore, Mary’s attitudes and actions—and especially her willingness to bear the Christ child—reflect the parliament in Heaven, ending in the victory of mercy and peace. Meredith describes the relationships among the human 149. Richard Rastall, The Heaven Singing: Music in Early English Religious Drama, vol. 1 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 287. 150. Meredith, Mary Play, lines 1002–29. 151. Ibid., line 1018. 152. Ibid., line 1237. 153. Ibid., line 1407.



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characters and between those humans and God as “a world of good will” made possible by Mary’s recuperation of the Old Law during her temple studies, in which she learns the Ten Commandments side by side with the commandment to love God, neighbor, and self.154 Mary learns that love is a “crystyn” virtue and inhabits a quasi-Christian world because she discerns the truth in the prophesies of the Incarnation.155 In the final scene of the Mary Play, the Visitation, Mary orally composes the Magnificat.156 Just as Mary recited and translated the fifteen Gradual Psalms on the temple steps, here she utters the Latin verses and Elizabeth translates them. Mary concludes, “This psalme of prophesye seyd betwen vs tweyn, / In hefne it is wretyn with aungellys hond; / Evyr to be songe and also to be seyn, / Euery day amonge us at oure evesong.”157 Contemplacio, the chorus and “doctor,” brings the whole to an end by reminding the audience about the Mary Play’s many instructions in prayer. Not only does it teach the genesis and the meaning of various psalms and the Magnificat that is chanted every evensong, but also of the Ave, with which the play begins and ends. Because of the basic instruction in Marian prayer and song that binds the Mary Play, Meredith thinks it likely that the play was written for a fraternity or guild related to the Virgin or St. Anne.158 He recognizes, however, the many complicated gestures toward audience in the play. Since the play was circulated both on its own and in conjunction with the other pageants in the N-Town cycle, it must have been adapted for a variety of situations. Even the staging requirements indicate the cycle’s and the individual Mary Play’s flexibility. Mary’s ascent to the top step of the temple, for instance, demands a setting other than could be provided by a pageant wagon; indeed, as Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston remark, it would have been impractical for a traveling troop of N-Town players to lug the heavy pageant wagons from town to town.159 We are dealing, instead, with a scaffold and place arrangement, 154. Ibid., lines 453–68; Peter Meredith, “Performance, Verse and Occasion in the NTown Mary Play,” Individuality and Achievement in Middle English Poetry, ed. O. S. Pickering (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 211. 155. Mary Play, line 468. 156. Ibid., line 1492. 157. Ibid., lines 1538–41. 158. See Meredith, Mary Play, 10–12, and Meredith, “Performance,” 220. Also, Fletcher, “The N-Town Plays,” 166. 159. Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston, Medieval Drama (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

62  The English Lives of Mary but from the sparse stage directions, Meredith judges that “the play is as likely to have been performed indoors as out, and the main central scaffold could easily be the rood screen and loft of a church, or the screens and gallery of a medieval hall.”160 Divergent audiences, clerical and lay, could have been called to imitate Mary’s learning. Describing the monastery at Bury St. Edmunds as an important center for East Anglian playwriting, Gibson illustrates how this region’s medieval dramas speak to values of both the cloister and the market, and certainly the Mary Play addresses both worlds, making it adaptable for both lay and religious contexts.161 In the Mary Play, the character Contemplacio, the episodes inside the temple, and the emphasis on memorizing the psalms gesture toward monastic practices, while the pious marriage of the Virgin’s parents and her practice of sending food out to the poor provide models for lay charity.162 The Mary Play would be instructive for both mass audiences obtaining their amplified biblical history on the green and for clerics or monks reflecting on the Virgin’s connection to their daily rituals. Certainly, a variety of liturgical material surfaces in the Mary Play—psalms, hymns, marriage service, and more. Along with the instruction in prayer that is the focus of the Mary Play, angels sing such well-known hymns as Veni creator spiritus as a means of announcing heavenly involvement with earthly action, and the marriage of Mary and Joseph imitates the service in both the Sarum and York missals.163 Such a variety of liturgical material reflects the practices of both religious and secular audiences. Although the venue for these rituals may be ultimately undecideable, Richard Rastall notes the suitability of medieval liturgies for drama and the resourcefulness of playwrights in putting actions to church speeches.164 In the case of the Mary Play, liturgical language and song bridges differences between different kinds of audiences by representing the Virgin’s involvement in the rituals of various groups. Since the Mary Play reflects and models liturgical practices, especially common prayers, its speeches, according to Hans Jürgen Diller, 160. Meredith, Mary Play, 20. 161. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion, 127. 162. Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints, 105. 163. Meredith, Mary Play, 100, n. 708sd; 103–4, ns. 874sd–875–76. Also, Rastall, The Heaven Singing, 285–89. 164. Rastall, The Heaven Singing, 287.



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serve edification over histrionics.165 Studying the whole compilation for N-Town, Diller notices that while the dialogues and monologues of the Proclamation Play seem composed for dramatic affect, those of the interpolated Marian and Passion dramas show a greater concern for didacticism. This seems especially true of the Mary Play, in which the young Virgin is taught to teach us.

The Life of Our Lady In Mary’s mature role as Christ’s mother, her wisdom is more directly associated with Jesus, the Trinity’s person for Wisdom, and since this wisdom is often explained as the illumination of the Son/sun, it is natural that poetic light imagery expresses Mary’s supreme knowledge. In the other texts covered in this chapter, we have seen light as a backdrop or a metaphor for the Virgin’s sagacity, for instance in the shining heavens of The Advent Lyrics, the continual reference to light in the Wednesday lessons in The Myroure of Oure Ladye, or the sunbeams illustrating the bright young Mary in the Mary Play. The most extended use of light imagery for Marian wisdom in a late medieval English work on the Virgin’s biography is developed in John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady.166 John Lydgate (1370–1450), monk of Bury St. Edmunds and poet patronized by three English kings (Henry IV, V, and VI), as well as various nobles and merchants, wrote a substantial body of Marian literature. His Marian lyrics will be considered in chapter 5, on popular Marian songs.167 Here, I focus on the Life of Our Lady as a literary example much akin to The Myroure of Our Lady in the way that it highlights the Virgin’s life of wisdom for the purpose of inspiring meditation. The Syon sisters of the Order of St. Savior were encouraged to read the English Myroure before their Latin services so that they might pause and digest 165. Hans Jürgen Diller, The Middle English Mystery Play: A Study in Dramatic Speech and Form, trans. Frances Wessels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 152. 166. Joseph A. Lauritis, Ralph A. Klinefelter, and Vernon F. Gallagher, eds., A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of our Lady (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961). The section on the Life of Our Lady was adapted from my previously published essay “The Light of the Virgin Muse in John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady,” in Romance and Rhetoric: Essays in Honour of Dhira B. Mahoney, ed. Georgiana Donavin and Anita Obermeier, 75–90 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010). Thanks to Brepols for allowing this revision and republication of my work. 167. Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, part I, EETS e.s. 107 (London: Oxford University Press, 1911).

64  The English Lives of Mary the meaning of their praises; similarly in the Life of Our Lady, Lydgate offers moments in the Virgin’s life for meditation. While the Bridgettine Myroure is a translation and explanation of Bridgettine services that examines Mary’s apocryphal biography in the course of explaining the daily liturgy for the nuns at Syon Abbey, Lydgate’s Life arises in an uncertain context, but it is nevertheless meant to sponsor prayer and meditation on the sagacious Virgin. While the author of The Myroure of Oure Ladye translates and comments upon the Bridgettine liturgy in didactic prose, Lydgate’s poem is self-consciously literary, declaring Mary the inspiration for its aesthetic appeals and sophistication and employing the profuse light imagery that is our main interest here. As Shannon Gayk has argued, unlike other popular devotional texts of the late English Middle Ages, Lydgate’s use of Marian images solicits not an affective but an intellectual response, and the light imagery in the Life of Our Lady beams upon the Virgin’s mental and verbal excellence.168 The Life of Our Lady was a popular text, existing in forty-two manuscripts, but unfortunately this great variety has not helped in determining the date or occasion for the poem. Five of the manuscripts suggest an early date, possibly 1409, and Prince Hal’s patronage through an illustration of Lydgate kneeling and presenting a manuscript to the future Henry V.169 Following Walter Schirmer’s lead, Derek Pearsall suggests that the Life of Our Lady may have been a part of Henry’s promotion of vernacular doctrinal writings that could rival Lollard texts.170 The editors of our current critical edition, however, prefer the much later date of 1421–22, and Phillipa Hardman would split the poem’s composition into two chronologically distant phases, the first three books on Mary’s life for a Henrican celebration of the Virgin’s birthday circa 1409 and the latter three books on nativity feasts possibly twenty years later for monastic liturgies.171 Whatever the occasion, the poem certainly invites 168. Shannon Gayk, “Images of Pity: The Regulatory Aesthetics of John Lydgate’s Religious Lyrics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 175–76. 169. The manuscripts suggesting the Prince of Wales’s patronage are as follows: British Library, Cotton Augustus MS A IV; Bodleian Library, Digby MS 232 and Rawlinson C. 446; Rylands Library MS Eng. 1; Trinity College, Cambridge MS 0.5.2. 170. Walter Schirmer, John Lydgate: A Study in the Culture of the Fifteenth Century, trans. Ann E. Keep (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 41. Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate, 1371–1449: A Bio-Bibliography (Victoria, Canada: English Literary Studies, 1997), 19. 171. Ralph A. Klinefelter argues that “the presentation by Jean Galopes of a French trans-



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meditation on the Virgin through a series of lit tableaux that encourage the reader to gaze and concentrate upon Mary. The Life of Our Lady begins with a narrative of the Virgin’s conception, youth, and marriage to Joseph, followed by the glorification of Jesus’ birth, infancy, and relationship to the Mother. The poem is structured in six books, the third effecting a transition between a strong focus on the events in Mary’s young life and a treatment of Christmas feasts.172 The liturgical calendar propels the poem’s structure, since Lydgate begins the poem on a “long winters nyght,” makes references to the current springtime in books 2 and 3, wraps up the latter in December, and dates the last three books on the Circumcision, Epiphany, and Purification according to their January and February feasts.173 Thus, the poet returns the Life of Our Lady to the beginning of the liturgical year, the same calendar upon which he claims to have composed the poem. In this way, the Life encourages its readers to meditate upon events concerning the holy family in their proper time and to see these events in the light of the Virgin’s wisdom. The poem ends at the celebration of Candlemas, rather than with the Coronation of the Virgin, but as we shall see, this seemingly truncated conclusion has a purpose within Lydgate’s interconnections among Mary, spiritual knowledge, rhetoric, and light. The shining tapers of Candlemas provide a suitable climax for the number of scenes in which Mary is placed in a poetic spotlight for meditation. As a meditative text, the Life of Our Lady relies upon the thirteenthcentury Anglo-Latin poetry for meditation that will be discussed in chapter 3, not only on John Peckham, whose Philomena Lydgate paraphrased in the Seying of the Nightingale, but also on Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden.174 The poems of Peckham, Wimborne, and Howden are contemporaneous with or preceded the composition of the lation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi [to Henry V] in May, 1420, and its relationship to the Life of Our Lady; the matured, more religious character of Henry by 1421; his possible gratitude to Our Lady for the success in France; and the astronomical allusions point towards 1421–22” (10); on the other hand Phillipa Hardman (“Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady: A Text in Transition,” Medium Aevum 65.2 [1996]: 258–59) argues that Lydgate composed the Life in two separate stages. 172. Hardman, “Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady,” 249. 173. Lydgate, Life, 1.2; Lauritis, Klinefelter, and Gallagher, Introduction, 9. 174. Lois A. Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 127.

66  The English Lives of Mary famous pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes vitae Christi, mentioned earlier in this chapter as a source for Gower’s Mirour and probably written by John of Caulibus, a Franciscan in Tuscany.175 All of these authors expand upon the story of Mary and Jesus from the gospels, especially upon the narrative of the Passion, and offer their readers detailed images to employ in devotions. Wimborne and Howden, whose Marian poems comprise the main discussion in chapter 3, analyze the foundations of their narratives of the holy family and declare Mary the very language of their work. Wimborne and Howden thus embellish the Mother’s connections to grammar, rhetoric, and logic in their attempts to invoke her prayers for themselves and their readers. Lydgate, on the other hand, though he also desires his readers to meditate on Mary with providential effect, prefers more general references to her as his muse, or as lady bathing in the light of her own and the poet’s learning. Lydgate casts this emphasis on Mary’s learning in resplendent beams of light imagery that spotlight the Virgin, creating what Derek Pearsall calls a “luminous rhetoric” with a “transfiguring effect.”176 The poet’s eloquence is heightened through the grace of the Virgin’s gift of speech and shines like a stained-glass window upon the Virgin’s life, so that the reader might be transformed through contemplation of her. Although many critics, including John Norton-Smith, Judith Davidoff, and Lois Ebin, have written about the great lights and their connection to rhetoric and poetics in Lydgate’s corpus, no one has yet tapped the Virgin Mary as a source of illumination.177 Lydgate opens the Life of Our Lady by recounting how he awoke from a slothful slumber on a winter’s night to a beckoning star. This introduction compares to the frame of Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, in which the 175. Sarah McNamer argues that the long text of this work, represented in StallingsTaney’s edition and written by the Franciscan Johannes de Caulibus, is an emendation and extension of “an earlier, livelier, and more radically ‘incarnational’ recension [Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Ital. 174] originally written by another author . . . [who was possibly] a Poor Clare” (907). See Sarah McNamer, “The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi,” Speculum 84.4 (2009): 905–55. 176. Derek Pearsall, Gower and Lydgate (London: Longmans, Green, 1969), 42. 177. John Norton-Smith, ed. John Lydgate: Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 178; Judith M. Davidoff, “The Audience Illuminated, or New Light Shed on the Dream Frame of Lydgate’s Temple of Glas,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 103–25; Lois Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, Vates: Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 19–48.



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dreamer sees bright Venus through the darkness. In the Life of Our Lady, this star is Mary, Stella Maris, who is a “bright poole,” and “passethe pliades / Bothe of shynyng and of stremes clere.” Following her, the narrator will not be plunged back into the dark, as in the Temple of Glas, but will proceed ever higher toward the light.178 Whereas the narrator of Temple of Glas awakes with “gret lamentacioun” over the lost vision of his beloved, the penitent of the Life of Our Lady enjoys the hope of grace in the end as the tapers of Candlemas shine upon him.179 Unlike Venus in the Temple of Glas, who withholds her words of comfort until the lover’s entire petition is made, in the Life of Our Lady Mary’s fair orb dries the narrator’s tears from the beginning, as the sun burns away the clouds, and offers him a light by which to see his Marian material.180 Lydgate thus rejoices that the Mother has poured into his heart the matter of poetry: “So late the golde dewe of thy grace fall / Into my breste, like skales, fayre and white / Me to enspyre of that I wolde endyte / With thylke bame.”181 These lines are replete with associations informing Lydgate’s Marian poetics, especially concerning the Virgin’s inspiration for poetic matter, and with their Eucharistic overtones they imply that Mary metes out the bread of each verse’s life. As the narrator requires his heart to be soaked with “golde dewe,” Mary’s inventional liquor produces the Life of Our Lady, a text akin to the Gideon’s fleece.182 Lydgate casts his fleece (vellum) before the Mother for a sign of proof that he has been chosen to save his people through a script for their Marian meditations. While her grace drops upon him in shining white scales, it may be compared to the pearl of price, manna from heaven, or the mysterious grain that the Mother places upon the little clergeon’s tongue in Chaucer’s Prioress’s tale, also a poem dependent upon the Virgin’s inspiration.183 As a pearly droplet, the Mother’s grace distills purity of spirit into Lydgate’s writing, which should return sagacious pearls, to be cast not before swine, but before Mary herself. As manna 178. Lydgate, Life, I.10, 22–23. 179. Lydgate, Temple, 1375; Lydgate, Life, VI. 442–55. 180. Lydgate, Life, I. 36–49. 181. Ibid., I. 52–55. 182. Jgs 6:33–40. 183. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miff lin, 1987). The grain has been variously interpreted as a pearl, the grain of paradise, the host, a mere prop for the plot. For an overview see Florence Ridley’s summary of scholarship in the Riverside Chaucer, 916.

68  The English Lives of Mary or the grain placed upon the little clergeon’s tongue, Mary’s grace enables the author’s communion: Lydate will be fed with the bread of life that Mary “baked,” and thus the poet will feed his readers. The shape of the scale that the Virgin lets fall into the heart of Lydgate’s matter is like a rain, tear, or blood drop, recalling the blood of Christ dropping from his forehead. According to Julian of Norwich, whose fame spread across East Anglia to Bury St. Edmunds, the dropping of Christ’s blood compares to a downpour upon the eaves of a house, or to fish scales.184 Both Julian and Lydgate obtained the image of the droplet from Psalms 64:11 and 71:6, occurring in the Benedictine night office for Wednesday. The whiteness and scaliness of Mary’s outpouring suggest bread and flesh, while the shape implies wine and blood. Lydgate shows how his sadness is washed away by Christ’s sacrifice and his barren imagination is filled with the Mother’s nourishment. Spiritually healed and fortified, Lydgate might “endyte / With [the Virgin’s] bame,” the balm of Gilead flowing through his stylus as a salve for the mortally sinful reader.185 Concluding the Prolog, Lydgate entreats Mary as follows: “And the licour of thy grace shede / Into my penne, tenlumyne this dite / Thorough thy supporte that I may procede / Sumwaht to saye in laude ande p[r]eys of the / And first I thynke at the natiuitee.”186 Mary’s inspiration transfers from the poet’s heart to his pen and lights up the matter of the birth of the Mother, who sprang from God like Minerva from “the fadirs sapience.”187 As Ebin argues, the cluster of terms employed in the Prolog of the Life of Our Lady, such as “golden,” “balm,” “liquor,” and “enlumine,” are characteristic of Lydgate’s efforts to theorize his poetics.188 Choosing golden words, the poet creates a spiritual balm from the elixir of holy liquor and light. Ebin summarizes Lydgate’s aesthetic purpose as follows: In contrast to his immediate English predecessors, who are anxious about the limits of the poet’s craft and ability of language to embody truth, Lydgate defends the inherent truthfulness of poetry and the poet’s intention. He envisions the poet essentially as an illuminator who uses the power of language to shed light on the poet’s matter and make it more significant and effective.189 184. Julian of Norwich, Showings, ed. Edmund Colledge, James Walsh, and Jean Leclercq, Classics of Western Christianity (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1978), chap. 9, 2nd Revelation. 185. Jer 8:22. 186. Lydgate, Life, I. 57–61. 187. Ibid., I. 178. 188. Ebin, Illuminator, 19–48. 189. Ibid., 19.



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In the Prolog to the Life of Our Lady, Mary is the chief source of this illumination. In following the Mother’s light and relying on her invention, Lydgate does not so much defend the inherent truthfulness of poetic language, as Ebin contends, as burnish his rusty words with the Virgin’s purity. His faith in the truth communicated through the Life of Our Lady and in the spiritual efficacy of its delivery is linked inextricably to his faith in the Virgin. She embodies the principles of divine invention and “translation” that allow the mortally corrupt and contingent language of poets to rise up to a spiritual stage and be worthy of such a spotlight. As the narrator of the Life of Our Lady admits, his speech is “rude for to Rehersen” the Virgin’s story, but he puts the poem “mekely to her correction.”190 In the Prolog, Lydgate’s poetic invention is initially weighed down by “trowble . . . [o]f worldely wawes,” but the Virgin releases him from spiritual pain, supplies the matter, and causes the words of devotion to flow.191 The invocation to the Virgin in the Prolog of the Life of Our Lady buoys up the narrative in book 1, about Mary’s girlhood in the temple and betrothal to Joseph. When in book 2 the poet arrives at the Annunciation, he doubts his ability to write and notes that if St. Bernard struggled with a description of the Annunciation in the homily “De Laudibus Virginis Matris,” even the greatest poet might.192 The narrator begs that a counterpart to Gabriel might be sent from heaven to purify his mouth and shape his tongue for the task, just as an angel touched the prophet Isaiah’s mouth with a stone and purged his lips.193 Lydgate’s newly hewn tongue becomes a torch as the truth about the Annunciation is now cast in light. The poet declares that at the Annunciation the sun of life shone his beams upon the Virgin, that this sun pierced the Virgin as it would glass and she in turn shone as a bright gem, that Mary sacrificed her life upon a fire of holy love, burning more brightly than stars on a frosty night.194 The reconfiguration of the narrator’s tongue in order to spark this virginal light relies not only on the passage from Isaiah, but also on contemporary depictions of Lady Grammar with a small knife for cut190. Lydgate, Life, I. 869, 880. 191. Ibid., 1. 12–13. 192. St. Bernardi Claraevallensis, “De Laudibus Virginis Matris,” PL 182, cols. 55–61b. 193. Lydgate, Life, 2. 429–35, 2. 430–35. 194. Ibid., 2. 483, 2. 521–22, 2. 603–6.

70  The English Lives of Mary ting away barbarisms, and on trends in late medieval meditative literature of the English north. While Isaiah gave to Lydgate the motif of the sanctified tongue and Lady Grammar taught him to employ it in correct expression, northern English poets such as John of Howden—who, as F. J. E. Raby comments, was incredibly influential over fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English meditational writing and whose Philomena was translated into Middle English—connected this motif to light and to the Virgin Mary.195 In his Philomena, an Anglo-Latin poem providing meditations on the life of Christ and Mary’s participation in it, John of Howden features passages similar to Lydgate’s on the shaping of the tongue and the sparks emerging from the grindstone; he begs the Virgin to “hew [his] ignorant tongue into a lyre with pleasing sounds.”196 Once he finds his voice, he contends that Mary produces “the lights of learning . . . interwoven in the text.”197 Depicting the Philomena as a virginal light show, John of Howden elaborates upon a complicated image connecting the Virgin’s wisdom, bookishness, brilliance, and domesticity. In the Life of Our Lady, Lydgate appropriates Howden’s wideranging connotations by following his own section on the Annunciation with a narrative concerning spiritual illumination within the family. Lyd­gate underscores the contrast between the darkness of little faith and the brightness of belief with a debate with an imagined interlocutor, a “blynde man” who cannot acknowledge the possibility of the Virgin’s pregnancy; then, when Joseph doubts Mary’s fidelity and chastity after the Annunciation, the Virgin’s husband characterizes such a “blynde man,” who requires the virginal light to see.198 Although he is aware of his masculine forebears such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux and most probably John of Howden, Lydgate privileges the Virgin’s authority over all of the canons of rhetoric. This submission to feminine discursive power explains the curt nod in the epilogue to book 2 to Chaucer, who, like the Virgin “made . . . to distille and rayne / 195. F. J .E. Raby, “A Middle English Paraphrase of John of Hoveden’s ‘Philomena’ and the Text of his ‘Viola,’” Modern Language Review 30.3 (1935): 339–43. The Middle English translation of the Philomena was published by Charlotte D’Evelyn, Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, EETS 158 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921). 196. John of Howden, Philomena, “Virgo . . . [d]ola linguam hanc imperitiae / In sonantis lyram placentiae” (3. 1–3). 197. Ibid., “Textu luces intexta literae” (1071. 2). 198. Lydgate, Life, 2. 652, 1110–1246.



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The golde dewe, dropes of speche and eloquence / Into our tunge.”199 Just as the Virgin’s inspiration is compared in the Prolog to the dew on Gideon’s fleece that quenches the heart and lights the writer’s way, so Chaucer’s rhetoric “enlumyne[s]” English verse.200 For human intermediaries in divine verse, Lydgate also mentions Cicero and Petrarch, but he dispatches with these compliments quickly, explaining that all of the masters are dead and that in life they offered no direct model for the Life of Our Lady. Abandoning the male masters, the epilogue to book 2 reveals Mary to be Lydgate’s only muse, his sole “helpe, counsel and socour.”201 By studying only with Mary, he switches from the masculine to the feminine foundation for inspiration. He inquires first of Cleo and Calliope, but finds them insufficient and pledges his poetic faith in the Mother of the Word.202 As in the Prolog, in the epilogue to book 2 Mary’s guidance leads the poet into the light, this time into the beginning of book 3 on the nativity of Christ in the spotlight of the star over Bethlehem. With book 3 the focus shifts from the temple or Joseph’s house and Mary’s preparation for a life in God’s honor to Bethlehem and her participation in the life of Christ. When Mary enters the stable, “a newe soden light / Gan the place enlumen environ”; there she gives birth to the Christ child, who immediately “shed his light to glad all man kynde.”203 During the Virgin Birth, the sun/Son emerges from the Virgin, and the star over Bethlehem marking the humble place is a counterpart to the Stella Maris making her accommodation there. Book 3 is ablaze with the ascendance of the Word, the light emanating from both mother and child, each paradoxically the source of the other, while the reader is invited to pause and pray. The lights die down during book 4, with its focus on the Circumcision and foreshadowing of the Passion, but rise up again as the Magi follow the star in book 5 and the celebration of Candlemas begins in book 6. As the narrator reminds us in the prologue to book 6, the entire story is dedicated to the “blisfull queen,” who “neuere brennyng of no f lesshely hete,” nevertheless provides a bright tabernacle for the Word.204 While Lydgate desires to imitate all of the virtues that Mary applies to speech, it is important to note that while the Virgin shines the “Seven 199. Ibid., 2. 1632–34. 201. Ibid., 2. 1665. 203. Ibid., 3. 168–69, 177.

200. Ibid., 2. 1636. 202. Ibid., 2. 1659–65. 204. Ibid., 6. 2, 8.

72  The English Lives of Mary lampes schene” of her spiritual candelabra—fear of God, charity, knowledge, strength, prudence, intelligence, and wisdom— in brevitas, the poet does so with amplificatio.205 Amplification is an important principle in all of Lydgate’s poetry, and it serves the special purpose of prompting meditation in the Life of Our Lady. Joseph Marotta points out that the expansions Lydgate makes to his narrative are characteristic of poets following the medieval rhetorical teachings on amplification such as those in the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrenium (book 4), Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Matthew of Vendôme, and John of Garland.206 Characterizing Lydgate’s expansive style, Pearsall comments on the freezing effect created by embellishments upon single scenes and contrasts such set pieces unfavorably with the more active plots of other poets.207 While Lydgate’s elaborations of single scenes may seem more conceptual and generalized than a narrative controlled by the deeds of individuated characters, such stable, embellished depictions do serve meditation. For instance, in book 2 Lydgate stops the action for over three hundred lines in order to arrest the reader before icons of the Virgin: a tree that bears birds, an unmovable rock that cures wounds, a bee that makes wax and honey.208 He calls his readers to meditate upon these Marian signs of wondrous fruitfulness, stability, and health under the “fayre stremes” of her virginal majesty.209 The connections among meditation, light imagery, and Mary’s wisdom surface brilliantly in book 6, the seeming “surprise ending” of the poem. Although the conclusion with the celebration of Candlemas (the Purification of the Blessed Virgin and Presentation of the Christ Child in the Temple) rather than with the Coronation of the Virgin in heaven may seem curious today, it is not an incomplete ending. Filling in the “missing” events, book 5 supplies a short history of Jesus’ life and Mary’s ascendancy to the heavenly court and opens the possibility of a conclusion for the Life of Our Lady based on liturgical cycles and rhetorical themes, rather than on chronology. Beginning with Mary’s nativity and ending with Candlemas, the Life of Our Lady imitates the cycle 205. Ibid., 1. 358–59, 365–78. 206. Joseph Gerald Marotta, “John Lydgate and the Tradition of Medieval Rhetoric” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1972), especially 31–60. 207. Derek Pearsall, Gower and Lydgate (London: Longmans, Green, 1969), 26–28. 208. Lydgate, Life, 2. 680–86, 2. 862–65. 209. Ibid., 2. 938–43.



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of devotions for Monday recommended in the Meditationes vitae Christi and allows Lydgate to compare his writing process to the liturgical year. Along with its liturgical underpinnings, the Life begins, ends, and shines throughout with the motif of light, which Candlemas brings to fruition. Book 6 opens with an invocation to Mary who “neuere brennyng of no flesshely hete” is represented by the chaste taper of Candlemas.210 Lydgate explains how Mary chooses out of humility to perform the rite of purification, even though she conceived in cleanliness. Her decision to sacrifice two turtles and present herself in the temple for spiritual cleansing is consonant with her conformity to scripture throughout the Life of Our Lady; she ever desires that her life and words might be a rhetoric in action, a manifestation of the divine text. Her holiness is celebrated by a procession of lights at Candlemas, Lydgate recounts, because of Pope Sergius’s reconstitution of the Roman lighted victory march to Februa’s temple. Mary’s victory, Lydgate continues, is in her successful mediation for souls. While as a young girl on earth she prayed for the opportunity to advise the future mother of God, in heaven she is a divine counselor, her eloquent speech and wisdom applied to the eternal judgment.211 Of the three parts of the Candlemas taper representing the Trinity as well as the body, soul, and godhead of Jesus, Mary is the wax, claims Lydgate, for the flame that ignites his poetry.212 In the light of Mary’s prayers and the seven lamps of her wisdom, the poet concludes the Life of Our Lady.213 By concluding the poem at Candlemas, John Lydgate underscores the importance of light imagery to his concept of divine illumination through the Virgin Mary. In the Life of Our Lady, the Virgin’s beams enlighten the poet and generate light at stations for the reader’s meditation. The Life of Our Lady leads the reader on “[w]ith tapres fresshe and bright torches shene / To kepe and halowe in honour of that queen.”214

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated a variety of ways in which medieval English writings on the life of the Virgin Mary emphasize her wisdom. Whether teacher of all humanity, including her own betrothed, in Ad210. Ibid., 6. 8. 212. Ibid., 6. 386–403. 214. Ibid., 6. 454–55.

211. Ibid., 6. 358–71. 213. Ibid., 6. 440–48.

74  The English Lives of Mary vent Lyric VII, courtly lady of refined yet sentimental piety in Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, food for spiritual nourishment in the Bridgettine Myroure of Oure Ladye, precocious schoolgirl in the N-Town Mary Play, or illuminated icon for meditation in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, Mary occupies a position of superior spiritual understanding. Her various positions in the meditative, liturgical, dramatic, and courtly discourses discussed here all provide a foundation for Mary’s more specific involvement in the crafting of literature that we will investigate in the chapters to come. As this book continues to inquire into John Garland’s Marian grammar, the northern meditational poets’ use of Mary’s body as a construct for their contemplative language, Chaucer’s invocation of the Virgin as headmistress of the trivium, the Middle English lyrics’ many representations of the Virgin’s forceful speech, and Margery Kempe’s theological language “conceived” on a model of the Virgin Birth, we will find that these diverse depictions of the Virgin’s involvement in the invention and execution of medieval English texts depend utterly on the widely held notion of her superior sagacity. The integrity and devotion that she brings to scriptural study in texts such as the N-Town play bear fruit in her mature literary achievements: the composition of the Magnificat and the advanced interpretation of Jesus’ life according to the prophets in adulthood. The movement of this book from consideration of Mary as Sophia to investigations of her as a new Rhetorica or popular model of perfected speech indicates that the fruition of the Virgin’s wisdom would be in the power to convey it.

Two

John of Garland, Gram/marian

rom the Anglo-Saxon period through the late English Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary was revered as a wise woman who inspired great literature. As we saw in chapter 1 during the discussion of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, the medieval English representation of Mary as sapient muse leads quickly to discussions of rhetoric and poetics. In the imagination of medieval English authors, Mary reigns over these disciplines of the trivium. As in the Royal Portal at Chartres, on whose tympanum Mary is enthroned and regaled by figures of the seven liberal arts, students were encouraged to enter the palace of learning through the Virgin’s gateway. Among English authors, the work of John of Garland illustrates most clearly the scholarly trends placing Mary at the center of all knowledge and of methods for reading and writing poetry. Garland’s Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie and Parisiana Poetria respectively represent the Virgin as the mistress of the liberal arts and as the exemplar of fine writing.1 1. John of Garland, Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie, ed., Italian translation and commentary by Antonio Saiani (Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1995). John of Garland, Introduction, The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland, ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974). Lawler’s translation is used unless otherwise noted.

75

76  John of Garland, Gram/marian Garland’s Position in Academe John of Garland was born in England around 1195, studied under John of London in Oxford and taught at the University of Paris during the first half of the thirteenth century.2 In 1229, he was named master of grammar at the new University of Toulouse, and held that post for three years before returning to the University of Paris. Like his contemporaries who were secular clerks or priests, rather than monks, Garland was engaged in promoting the rise of the public schools that had usurped higher education in the monasteries since the twelfth century.3 Although he spent his professional life in France, he maintained correspondence with English intellectuals and identified himself as an English author. In the Parisiana Poetria, he addresses England and proclaims that he proceeded from her, but succeeded in Parisian academe, where he took his “flowery” nickname from his residence in the Clos du Garlande.4 Manuscripts and glosses of his teaching materials were conveyed, probably by students, back to England, employed in English schools, and exercised substantial influence on later English thinkers and authors.5 Among Garland’s relative contemporaries, Roger Bacon, one of his most distinguished students, admits great respect for the Parisian master in the Compendium Studii.6 Among later English medieval writers, John Gower in the Mirour de l’Omme, discussed at length in chapter 1, imitates Garland’s Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie in the description of the Virgin Mary combating vices of perverted sexuality. Later, John Milton would collapse the psychomachia of virtue versus vice preserved in Garland and Gower into individuated characters, with the battle occurring not between figures for lust and chastity and other binaries, but between particular angels in heaven or hell.7 Until 2. Traugott Lawler, Introduction, Parisiana Poetria, xi–xxv. 3. Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools from Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 89. 4. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 6.184–87: “Anglia, processi de te, cui cesserat orbis / Angulus; accessi Parisiusque fui. / Parisius vici cum sit Garlandia nomen, / Agnomen florens contulit illa mihi.” 5. Parisiana Poetria manuscripts of English provenance include Cambridge University Library Ms. Ll. 1. 14, ff. 55r–69r, and Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Lat. Misc. d. 66, ff. 1r–40v. 6. Roger Bacon, Compendium studii theologiae, trans. Thomas S. Maloney, ed. D. S. Brewer (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 453. 7. Merrit Y. Hughes, John Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1957), 173–470. Milton similarly employs twisted desires to represent sin and vice in



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just before the English reformation, Garland’s poems and treatises remained popular among not only the most erudite authors, but also modest schoolmasters. His grammatical and rhetorical works, especially, maintained a good reputation. Even though in “The Conflict between Thalia and Barbarism” Erasmus satirizes Garland’s Latin, the famous De Copia, which the great humanist dedicated to John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, is modeled on the presentation of lexical variety in John of Garland’s thesaurical works.8 John of Garland wrote copiously on the liberal arts, especially in the fields of grammar and rhetoric, and on the Virgin Mary. Besides the two poems that I will focus on here, the Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie and the Parisiana Poetria, John of Garland wrote the Compendium Grammatice and the Accentarium (Art of Reading in Church), a Dictionary (a short encyclopedic work), the Commentary (a word list), and various other treatises.9 Like other new university masters, he wrote in verse that would enable memorization, since few schoolbooks existed for the new free-standing schools.10 Louis Paetow argues that Garland’s emphasis on the first two arts of the trivium and the classical authors who represented them marks him as “a lone humanist . . . stem[ming] the tide of new learning,” but Garland also wrote treatises reflecting the interests of scholasticism, for instance the Liber de constuctionibus, which privileges logic’s influence on grammar.11 According to William G. Waite, Garland’s treatises on music also break with classical music theory in their emphasis on practical voice teaching, the new polyphony, and connections between music and poetic theory. Such interdisciplinarity and broad coverage of the liberal arts mark Garland as a transitional figure who employed his strong foundation in the classics to develop new pedagogical theories in a number of fields.12 the incestuous triangle of Lucifer, Sin and Death; however, a product of English Calvinism, Paradise Lost removes the Virgin from her salvific role as the chaste counteragent to evil. 8. R. Hugh Schram, Jr., “John of Garland and Erasmus on the Principle of Synonymy,” University of Texas Studies in English 30 (1951): 31. 9. For summaries of Garland’s works on the trivium and the Virgin Mary, see A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 163–76. 10. Orme, Medieval Schools, 89. 11. William G. Waite, “Johannes de Garlandia, Poet and Musician,” Speculum 35 (April 1960): 179–80. 12. Ibid., 180.

78  John of Garland, Gram/marian Garland wrote textbooks meant to usurp the place of the masters before him and ambitiously inserted his own voice in the literary debates of his day. The composition of the Epithalamium and the Parisiana Poetria indicate his method of grounding his writings in the auctores of earlier generations, while at the same time proclaiming the superiority of his own classroom texts; excerpting content and structure from the works of respected masters, including his own, while at the same time insisting on the progressiveness of his methods. The Epithalamium began with Garland’s scribbling of verses in the margins of the Alexandreis, Gautier de Châtillon’s book out of which Garland was teaching grammar. These verses, entitled the Georgica Spiritualia, Garland employed again in the Epithalamium, an imitation of Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Mercury and Philology and challenge to its popularity.13 In the Parisiana Poetria, the title announces an obvious debt to and revision of Horace; as with the Epithalamium, Garland co-opts verses by himself and others as poetic exemplars for a text he hopes will surpass the practical rhetorical tools of previous masters.14 Garland’s originality lies in his deployment of the sapient Virgin as a sign of his textbooks’ superiority and the perfection of their language-teaching tools. For John of Garland, the Virgin Mary provided the principles and examples for an in-depth study of the liberal arts and especially the language curriculum. In his textbooks John of Garland assumes that his university students have learned to read Latin through the usual methods, outlined in the introduction to this book, that began with veneration of the Virgin. As children, they learned the Latin alphabet and then pronunciation of Latin syllables in the psalter, antiphonal, and hymnal, often internalizing Latin phonology by singing Marian hymns. By the thirteenth century, many students had access to primers, including an alphabet and suitable for beginners. Chapter 4, which focuses on Chaucer’s description and employment of early childhood education for An ABC and The Prioress’s Tale, will discuss primary classroom books and 13. Evelyn Faye Wilson, “The Georgica Spiritualia of John of Garland,” Speculum 8.3 (1933): 368. William Harris Stahl, ed. and trans., Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971). 14. Traugott Lawler, “John of Garland and Horace: A Medieval Schoolman Faces the Ars Poetica,” Classical Folia 22 (1968): 3–13; Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926).



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practices in more detail. Once children had mastered some elementary Latin reading, pronunciation, and chant, they would be introduced to Donatus and Priscian, the Alphabetum minus and Alphabetum maius, as well as to classical auctores such as Ovid and Horace, whose poems were understood through the moralizing traditions of the accessus commentaries explaining the narratives in Christian terms.15 John of Garland, therefore, taught university students who developed their Latinity in worship of the Virgin Mary and found the commonplaces of worship in the great Latin authors. In the generation before Garland, Alexander of Ville Dieu’s Doctrinale (1199) was established as the most important comprehensive grammar for university students; Garland denounced Ville Dieu’s lack of philosophical grounding, and set out to provide it through a characterization of the Virgin Mary.16 Especially in the Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie and the Parisiana Poetria, Garland returns his students to the method of learning the basic principles of the liberal arts in narratives about the Virgin. The biblical assertion that Mary bore the Word was the ultimate foundation for John of Garland’s connections between the Virgin and studies in the trivium arts of grammar and rhetoric. However, for the thirteenthcentury pedagogical traditions in which John of Garland participated, links between Mary and the trivium begin with wedding narratives based on the Song of Songs and their similarities to the widely respected epithalamium on the liberal arts, Martianus Capella’s The Marriage of Mercury and Philology. As we shall see, Garland intended for his textbooks to replace not only those masters of previous generations, but also Martianus’s much-studied mythology of the liberal arts.17

15. Suzanne Reynolds, Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 16. Despite Garland’s objections to it, Alexander’s Doctrinale continued to be popular. Orme, Medieval Schools, 90–91. 17. For more information about Martianus’s work, see the introductory chapters to Stahl’s English translation cited in note 13 above. This introductory material comes in two parts: the Introduction (1–72) by William Stahl, and “The Allegory and the Trivium” (81–244) by Richard Johnson, with the exception of the section on dialectic, composed by E. L. Burge (104–14). For a complete list of Martianus’s sources, see Hans-Werner Fischer, “Untersuchungen über die Quellen der Rhetorik des Martianus Capella” (Diss., Breslau, 1936). For a literary treatment of the Marriage, see Fanny LeMoine, Martianus Capella: A Literary Reevaluation (Munich: Arbeo-Gesellschaft, 1972).

80  John of Garland, Gram/marian Martianus Capella: Garland’s Foundation Martianus was a fifth-century author who lived during the transition from pagan to Christian culture and probably wrote to summarize and preserve classical knowledge. These achievements were most appreciated during a medieval period of encyclopedic production, when the Marriage was most popular as a classroom text. It is not surprising that Garland chose Martianus as his foundation when composing a comprehensive work on the liberal arts that venerated the Virgin Mary. In building his Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie upon the model of Martianus’s Marriage, Garland sought both authorization from and displacement of Martianus in the university liberal arts curriculum. Martianus’s Marriage of Mercury and Philology, in which allegorical narrative the bride is given a dowry of handmaidens representing the seven liberal arts, became “one of the most popular books of Western Europe for nearly a thousand years,” and as Alexandre Leupin notes, “a pillar of culture and of pedagogy.”18 While Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore also produced summaries of the seven liberal arts, Martianus did so in a comprehensive text of both reasonable size and dramatic appeal. According to William Stahl, the latter’s originality rests in adapting the genre of symposium writing, with attractive scenes and characters as mouthpieces for ideas, to a wedding in the tradition of a Menippean satire.19 The symbolism of the marriage between Mercury and Philology in Martianus is the union of eloquence and learning, of the trivium with the quadrivium. In the thirteenth century, Garland would follow the lead of others in composing a Christianized Marriage in his own Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie. Transforming the figure of Philology into Christ’s Mother, Garland’s Epithalamium articulates what many Western scholars took for granted in this period: the Virgin Mary’s reign over all creation and thus over the liberal arts. While in the Marriage Mercury and Philology are recognizable personifications of communication and wisdom, respectively, Martianus’s complex characterization of Philology may have led Garland to equate 18. Stahl, Introduction, 21; Andre Leupin, Fiction and Incarnation: Rhetoric, Theology and Literature in the Middle Ages, trans. David Laatsch (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 77. 19. Stahl, Introduction, 26–27.



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her with the Virgin. In the beginning of the Marriage, Philology prepares to rise toward the heavens to meet her bridegroom, a clear parallel to exegesis on the Song of Songs interpreting Mary as the Bride and to narratives of the Assumption.20 No dry embodiment of learning who would be completely reliant on Mercury as her messenger, Philology is praised by both Polymnia, muse of mime, and Melopomene, muse of tragedy, for songs whose tunes ring out all wisdom. Philology is not only charmingly musical, but according to Clio, muse of history, she is also a persuasive “rhetorician” who can “set free by [her] passion the man accused.”21 Clearly, in Martianus’s prenuptial descriptions, Philology embodies aspects of both knowledge and rhetoric, precisely the Virgin’s role in Garland’s Epithalamium, as the Mother receives these gifts from her Son. Just as Philology’s advocacy is able to release those who are indicted in the law courts, Garland’s Mary releases the entire world from sin. When in Martianus Philosophy comes to lead Philology to the heavens, the latter’s heart is so swollen that she must vomit forth scholarship of all kinds, which the Arts and Disciplines gather up as books on great matters.22 In Garland’s Epithalamium, the Virgin suffers no such physical paroxysms, but every aspect of her life and marriage, as related in the poem, teaches something about one of the liberal arts. After Philology has entered the heavens, the maidens of the liberal arts are granted to her as a dowry, but Garland’s Virgin has inherited these gifts from her divine inception. As the venerable maidens of the trivium proceed onto Martianus’s Marriage scene—Grammar, then Dialectic, and climactically Rhetoric—it becomes evident that not only Philology, but also Rhetoric, a most stunning and imposing woman, armed with the adornments of her discourse, tall, beautiful, and commanding as her speech, provides a precursor to Garland’s Virgin.23 In Martianus, Rhetoric is “like a queen with power over everything, she could drive any host of people where she wanted,” just as Garland’s Virgin successfully commands the army of Virtues against the Vices in the Epithalamium’s book 9.24 Although Mar20. Although the Assumption would not become official Roman Catholic doctrine until 1950, Garland and many of his contemporaries accepted it as truth. An Assumption narrative occupies book 10 of Garland’s Epithalamium. 21. Martianus, Marriage, 1. 42. 22. Ibid., 1. 47. 23. Ibid., 5. 156. 24. Ibid, 9.

82  John of Garland, Gram/marian tianus employed more sources for book 5 on the persuasive arts than on the other aspects of the trivium, his Rhetoric emphasizes Cicero’s teachings from the first book of De Oratore on the types and offices of rhetoric, stasis theory, and style.25 Significantly, Garland concludes the Epithalamium with reflections from Cicero on the public virtues that should result from studying the liberal arts from the Virgin Mother. The setting for the Marriage and the disquisitions on the liberal arts is important—not Mount Olympus, but the heavenly spheres, in which the pantheon supplies the planetary deities of an astral religion.26 This setting allows Garland yet another opportunity for a Marian revision of Martianus in which the Virgin as the Stella Maris reigns in the heavens. Along with the astral religion, Martianus alludes to other theological and philosophical trends such as stoicism, neopythagoreanism, neoplatonism, and hermeticism.27 The Marriage opens with a hymn to Hymen, god of marriage and neoplatonic representative of “divine concord, that principle of unification.”28 With unity in hierarchy, all of the gods and goddesses are subsumed under the Supreme Deity, sometimes figured as Jupiter, who cannot be known. In the neopythagorean system, bodies such as Philology’s that are purified by fiery souls rise to a higher level of being close to the gods, an idea easily co-opted by Christian poets, though there is nothing akin to mercy and redemption in Martianus. The purifying force in Martianus is cultural literacy or paideia, and Garland, too, makes this point in the conclusion of the Epithalamium when the civic virtue of Justice, absorbed by study of the liberal arts, produces the child “Piety.”29 Writing in the thirteenth century, John of Garland received Martianus’s text through commentaries on the Marriage and on the Song of Songs. In the Carolingian heyday of the Marriage’s popularity, Frankish scholars worked to explain Martianus’s more difficult passages of Latin and offered Christian interpretations of Mercury and Philology’s nuptials.30 In books 1 and 2, where Martianus introduces Philology and 25. Ibid., 5. 188–213; Johnson, “The Allegory and the Trivium,” 119. 26. Johnson, “The Allegory and the Trivium,” 83–88. 27. Marcia L. Colish places Martianus in the tradition of stoic philosophers in The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 330–32. 28. Johnson, “The Allegory and the Trivium,” 86. 29. Garland, Epithalamium, 10. 97–100. 30. M. L. W. Laistner, Martianus Capella and his Ninth Century Commentators (Aberdeen:



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depicts the celestial wedding, the style is extravagant, with numerous neologisms, complex sentences, multiple metaphors, and rhetorical figures. In fact, the writing of books 1 and 2 stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the treatise, in which the seven handmaidens of the arts expound upon their respective disciplines in fairly basic and straightforward language. The linguistic and interpretive challenges of books 1 and 2, therefore, occupied scholars such as John Scot Eriugena, Martin of Laon, and Remigius of Auxerre, who lectured in Frankish schools on Martianus. From the ninth and tenth centuries on, manuscript illuminations and the facades of cathedrals at Chartres, Laon, Auxerre, and Paris paid tribute to these scholarly efforts by depicting figures of Martianus’s allegorized liberal arts. That the handmaidens from Martianus’s pagan Marriage should adorn Roman Catholic cathedrals illustrates how successfully the scholarly accessus had developed a Christian interpretation of Mercury and Philology. Claudio Leonardi points out that once Alcuin’s program of classical recovery became a cornerstone of the Carolingian court, scholars were more apt to view the truths of Roman Catholicism from the point of view of the Greek and Roman rather than the Hebraic past. “Alcuin est donc à l’origine du succès de Martianus,” he concludes, but it would be the third generation of Carolingian scholars who would make the Marriage a centerpiece of Christian instruction in the liberal arts.31 John Scot Eriugena, for instance, wrote in his Annotationes in Marcianum that Martianus must be credited with transmitting Plato’s concept of the anima mundi to the Catholic West, since the Marriage demonstrates how God manifests himself throughout the universe and in all souls and in all learning.32 In Eriugena’s reading, The Marriage of Mercury and Philology provides hints on the Christian Father and Creator: the world and all forms of knowledge reflect upon God, while the marriage itself promises that human understanding might approach, though never attain, divine perception. Aberdeen University Press, 1925); Danuta Schanzer, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella’s “De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii,” vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Haijo Jan Westra, ed., The Commentary on Martianus Capella’s “De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii” attributed to Bernardus Silvestris (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1986). 31. Claudio Leonardi, “Martianus Capella et Jean Scot: Nouvelle Présentation d’un Vieux Problème,” in Jean Scot ècrivain: Actes du IVe Colloque International, ed. Guy-H. Allard (Montreal: Bellarmin, 1986), 200–201. 32. Iohannis Scotti, Annotationes in Marcianum, ed. C. E. Lutz (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy, 1939), I. 34.

84  John of Garland, Gram/marian After the Carolingian renaissance, production of commentaries on the Marriage continued into the late Middle Ages, as Martianus continued to be taught when centers of learning gravitated from court and monastery to the emerging universities. For John of Garland’s twelfthcentury forebears—Bernardus Silvestris, William of Conches, Alexander Nequam, and Alan of Lille—Martianus still pointed toward a neoplatonic allegory for Christian creation similar to that worked out by Eriugena. When these same twelfth-century scholars also wrote commentaries on the Song of Songs, they concentrated on another allegory of marriage providing a glimpse of divine understanding. As they strove to cull Christian truths from Martianus and Solomon, these twelfthcentury writers, and John of Garland in their footsteps, demonstrate how knowledge is the result of desire for spiritual merger with God.33 If medieval commentaries on the Marriage offer Christian Neoplatonic resignifications of Martianus’s God, exegeses on the Song of Songs interpret the Old Testament Bride and Bridegroom in a way that parallels Mercury and Philology.34 As Thomas the Cistercian writes, there are three kinds of epithalamia for Christian study—historical, philosophical, and theological—the first represented in Genesis, the second in Martianus’s Marriage, and the third in the Song of Songs.35 The commentaries to be discussed here are most invested in comparing the latter two categories. Since in such readings of the Song of Songs, Christ’s entry into Mary’s womb is the “wedding” between Jesus and Mary, whose celebratory second stage occurs at the Assumption and Coronation, exegetes steeped in classical learning saw parallels between this Christian interpretation of the Old Testament and Marianus Capella’s narrative of the wise earthly Virgin, Philology, who ascends to the heavens to marry the messenger god, Mercury. The trend in interpreting the Song of Songs as the marriage of Christ and the Virgin began with Honorius’s Sigillum beate Mariae, in which Mary is the sigillum or “seal” between humanity and Jesus, but reached its apogee of interpretive vigor in the twelfth century.36 Honorius wrote the Sigillum 33. Leupin, Fiction and Incarnation, 83. 34. Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 35. Thomas the Cisterican, In Cantica Canticorum, Praefatio, PL 206, cols. 17–18. 36. Honorius Augustodunensis, Sigillum beatae Mariae, PL 172, cols. 495–518. For an



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in eleventh-century Worcester, where, as Valerie Flint has shown, Marian devotions had long been expressed in cathedral and monastery rededications and in the compilation of Marian miracle tales.37 Following Honorius’s coherent, first-person narrative of the bride and bridegroom as Mary and Jesus, authors such as Rupert of Deutz, Philip of Harvengt, and Alan of Lille heard the Song of Songs through Marian liturgy and understood the rich metaphors for Solomon’s bride as an amplification on the Virgin.38 Since, as E. Ann Matter has demonstrated, commentary on the Song of Songs highlights the author’s imaginative engagement with scripture, Honorius’s twelfth-century followers Rupert, Philip, and William of Newburgh would keep Honorius’s use of the first person and cohesive narrative, but place less emphasis on the bride and bridegroom in heaven.39 Alan of Lille, on the other hand, would declare the Song of Songs a Marian prophecy from which a cogent story could not be expected. It is Philip of Harvengt’s Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum that brings these various strands of commentary together by making an explicit link between Martianus’s Marriage and the Song of Songs.40 Although there is no evidence that John of Garland read Philip’s commentary, the Commentaria deserves mention here because it openly expresses connections between Martianus’s pagan wedding party and Mary and Jesus that are assumed in John of Garland’s Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie. According to Philip, the Christian bride and bridegroom Mary and Jesus fulfill the allegory in Martianus’s Marriage, meant to show a coupling of reason and word. Since Christ is the Word and Mary, a foremost example of scriptural learning, applies her reason to biblical expressions, their marriage as described in the Song of Songs eloquent and condensed survey of the exegetical tradition on the Song of Songs from Honorius through the twelfth century, see Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 287–95. 37. Valerie Flint, Honorius Augustodunensis, Authors of the Middle Ages: Historical and Religious Writers of the Latin West 2, (London: Variorum, 1995), 89–183, especially 96–97, 102–8, 110, 122–28, 136, 146–47, and 167–69. 38. Rupert of Deutz, Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum de Incarnatione Domini, ed. Rhabanus Haacke, CCCM 26 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1974); Philip of Harvengt, Commentaria in Cantica canticorum, PL 203, cols. 181–490; Alan of Lille, Compendiosa in Cantica Canticorum ad laudem deiparae virginis Mariae, PL 210, cols. 51–110. 39. Matter, Voice of My Beloved, 56. 40. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 351–404.

86  John of Garland, Gram/marian represents a blessed union of divine knowledge and Christian rhetoric. Philip compares the Virgin’s studiousness while she awaits her bridegroom to Philology’s zest for reading; both Mary and Philology desire informed conversations with their immortal lords.41 Before their marriages, both Mary and Philology receive a gift of divine understanding, Mary the twin offerings of sapientia and scientia that had rested between the bridegroom’s breasts, and Philology the seven maidens.42 While Martianus’s Philology rises to heaven immediately to join the bridegroom, Philip points out, Mary, in contrast, celebrates the nuptials in her own womb, this earthly ceremony privileging the Incarnation and resulting salvation. In Fulton’s estimation of Philip’s commentary, the delay in Mary’s Assumption places great emphasis on the body, both the incarnated Christ’s and the pure, incorporating flesh of Mary.43 By remaining on earth even after the departure of her beloved, Mary might embody the Word and forms of transcendent understanding and experience that lead to truth.44 Finally at the Assumption, the heavenly chorus lauds Mary in the same way that Martianus’s gods and goddesses praise Philology before the marriage to Mercury. Mary may have arisen for her celestial Coronation, but even better than the books left behind by Philology, the Virgin endowed the apostles—and now Philip and his Premonstretensian brothers—with holy revelation. Philip hoped that, by the Virgin’s example, scriptural study would attract Premonstretensian canons to progress from their classical reading to biblical exegesis; that they, like St. Paul, would celebrate a wedding between Christian truth and secular language skills in their own hearts and be set on fire for preaching and teaching.45 While Philip explored connections between Martianus and Solomon that would allow for a deeper spiritual engagement with Mary and Jesus, holy bride and bridegroom, other twelfth-century respondents to Martianus, when not engaged in commentaries on the Song of Songs, deemphasized the allegorical nuptials in favor of more instruction in the liberal arts. Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus, for instance, is an important precursor to Gar41. Philip of Harvengt, Commentaria, 1.1 [1:1], 190. 42. Ibid., 1.6 [1:1], 200–201. 43. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 383–97. 44. Philip of Harvengt, Commentaria, 1.6 [1:1], 201. 45. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 362, 372.



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land’s Epithalamium in the way that the former imitates Martianus and characterizes the liberal arts as a conduit to heaven.46 In the Anticlaudianus, Nature desires to form the perfect man because of the degeneration of all of her previous works, and seeks the help of the Virtues. Among them, Prudence accepts the charge of traveling to heaven to request a soul from God and mounts a chariot constructed with the seven liberal arts and led by the five senses (five horses) that conveys her to the boundaries of the universe. At this point, secular learning is insufficient to travel onward, but Theology and Faith lead Prudence to God, who grants her a new soul with which Nature is able to fashion the New Man. In book 5 of his Epithalamium, on the construction of the Virgin Mary’s soul, Garland borrows passages from Prudence’s journey to heaven, but even more pervasively, he employs Alan’s notion of the liberal arts as a vehicle for reaching the outer celestial limits—for comprehending the Virgin’s place in heaven.47 Garland emerges from his reading of pedagogical marriages—whether Martianus’s, the treatises of his imitators, or commentaries on the Song of Songs—with a complicated network of associations on the Virgin as learned bride, embodiment of the liberal arts, and model for the spiritual and intellectual journey of his university students.

Garland’s Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie John of Garland sought permission to read the Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie at both Paris and Toulouse and probably lectured on the poem at both universities. In the invocation praising the Virgin in iconographic terms, Garland quotes from Ecclesiastes 1:1 in arguing that while “there is nothing new under the sun,” Mary is the parent of renewal. Therefore, she is at the center of the Epithalamium’s refurbishing of authoritative texts—chiefly Martianus’s Marriage, other models of epithalamia, and moralized classics, as Evelyn Faye Wilson has shown.48 In his Epithalamium, Garland revises Martianus’s narrative to make 46. Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973). 47. Evelyn Faye Wilson, “A Study of the Epithalamium in the Middle Ages: An Introduction to the Epithalamium beate Marie virginis of John of Garland,” (Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1930), 257. 48. Garland, Epithalamium, Prologue, 32–34; Evelyn Faye Wilson, “A Study of the Epithalamium,” 324–25.

88  John of Garland, Gram/marian Christ the “author of the trivium” and “font of the quadrivium,” a divine figure superior to Mercury in combining eloquence and wisdom.49 Christ gives a dowry-book on the origin of all things to the Virgin Mary, who embodies the greatest of human achievement in the liberal arts, and as we shall see, especially in rhetoric.50 The Epithalamium Beate Marie Virginis is an epic narrative of Mary’s virtuous triumph over vice. It consists of ten books written in hexameters, the prologues and rhetorically highlighted verses in leonines. It begins with the history of the world, the fall into sin and the need for Mary’s humble obedience to God’s plan. From book 4 until the conclusion, the Epithalamium narrates a life of the Virgin Mary that illustrates how chastity and studiousness purify her mind and spirit for knowledge of the truth. In book 7, her sanctity leads to the marriage with Christ in the court of the Virtues. In Garland’s story line, episodes from the history of the world and the life of Mary transition into teachings from the seven liberal arts, and Garland argues that if his students are to learn the seven artes, if they are to incorporate the knowledge that God has set before them in nature and word, they must imitate and venerate Mary. Book 1 of the Epithalamium opens by praising the Virgin Bride and celebrating the victory over death that she enjoys by the end of the poem. Garland’s narrator addresses her directly, calling her the flower of flowers and vowing to write this poem in celebration of her chaste marriage bed that reproduced eternal life.51 Furnishing a spiritual classroom for the liberal arts, the marriage bed offers a “copula mentis” (coupling of the mind), a place of connection between the pure in thought and the wisdom of God.52 The term “copula” applies to both poetic and music theory and therefore intimately joins the divine marriage bed to the liberal arts. In poetics, the copula joins dissimilar feet, just as the godhead and humanity unite in the Epithalamium. In music, the copula is a style combining the features of “discantus” in which all of the parts sing notes at the same time for a chord, and of “organum” in which the upper part sings melismas in a descant. In a musical copula, the different voice parts alternate in notes and rests.53 Like the poetic copula, the musical style allows the audience to hear difference in either tone or rhythm that 49. Garland, Epithalamium, 7. 33–34. 51. Ibid., 1. 10–24. 53. Waite, “Johannes de Garlandia,” 194–95.

50. Ibid., 7. 339. 52. Ibid., 1. 37.



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harmonizes in a unified whole. A symbol of such artistic unity, the marriage bed of the Epithalamium is the site where all human knowledge and skill is obtained from divinity and employed in veneration of the divine. Since this sumptuous couch rejects all corruption, book 1 continues to describe the sins that are banished so as to increase the glory of Mary’s triumph. God determines to espouse the Virgin in holy wedlock, Garland notes, so that the adulterer and others whose thinking is vitiated by licentiousness might not steal or rape the truths (raptas) of the divine kingdom.54 In the Epithalamium, then, Mary occupies her traditional role as an antidote to sin, with a special emphasis on how she counteracts the interlinked perversions of intellect and appetite. Book 2 begins the dolorous battle against evil that is ongoing until the ultimate triumph of the Virgin Mary. In book 1 Mary is the antidote to Eve and fulfillment of Deborah, as Old Testament scripture looks forward to the Mother’s unsurpassable glory. Moving from the Bible to classical literature, book 2, on the other hand, introduces binary personifications of righteousness versus unrighteousness and showcases Astrea, a figure of chastity and light who provides a foil to the impulses of lechery and darkness. Garland appropriates Astrea from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and Georgics and assimilates her to the figure of Justice in the Justice/Mercy debate in Isaiah 59:14.55 Astrea enters just as Spes, in a scene taken from the Anticlaudianus, is consoling Nature over the degeneration of the latter’s works. Just as in another of Alan of Lille’s models, the Complaint of Nature, Garland’s Natura is bemoaning the sexual sins of her progeny, and it is clear that immoral lust is like bad writing; in grammatical terms, coupling with an “unnatural” sexual partner is akin to appositive phrases that do not accord to the noun.56 Astrea debates with Hope as to whether to punish such wickedness, and even54. Garland, Epithalamium, I. 157–58. 55. Ibid., 2. 221–46; Evelyn Faye Wilson, “Pastoral and Epithalamium in Latin Literature,” Speculum 23.1 (1948): 50. By enacting a Justice/Mercy debate and placing it in the context of an epithalamium, Garland imitates the anonymous Epithalamium, which is edited by G. M. Dreves for Analecta hymnica 46 (Leipzig: Fuess Verlag, 1905), 377–83. Wilson attributes this text to Alan of Lille (“Pastoral,” p. 47, n. 61), but Marie Therese d’Alverny remarks that “qu’il est plus sage de laisser cette piece dans l’anonymat.” See Alain de Lille, Textes Inédits, ed. M. Therese d’Alverny (Paris: Vrin, 1965), 48–49. 56. Garland, Epithalamium, 2. 401–2: “Copula subiecto succedit anomala: discors terminus appositus crimen in arte facit” (Sex with a counterfeit yields anomalies: the discordant appositive end makes a crime in art).

90  John of Garland, Gram/marian tually departs looking back upon an Iron Age where an edenic garden used to be. While also promising hope in the Virgin Mary, Garland challenges the reader to feel Astrea’s outrage and reject the darkness of sin. He describes this darkness as a mental incapacity and often uses the word mens (mind) when locating the site of potential moral change. Since in the beginning of the battle “the enemy . . . captures and kills vicious minds,” Garland offers his poem as a source of mental strength, a “simple reading that . . . cooks spiritual food.”57 The most nutritious portion is the representation of the Virgin, whose birth, book 3 points out, resolves the debate between Justice and Mercy ushered in by Astrea and promises the Eucharistic meal. The pledge that Mary shall resolve all tensions catalyzed by sin extends to the hope that the Virgin’s reign means improvements in the arts: the Mother stands for achievement in the arts and mastery of the language that teaches them; only the Virgin’s example of study can overturn the forces of the devil.58 While preparing for the Virgin’s arrival on earth with biblical prefigurations and classical allegories, the first three books of the Epithalamium cover a wide range of teachings in the liberal arts. In book 1’s biblical history of the world and presentation of Old Testament Marian prototypes, as well as book 2’s discussions of justice, Garland lectures on theology and canon law. When Astrea denounces human sexuality/ writing and when Justice and Mercy debate, the language arts of grammar and logic provide the subject matter and the method of discussion. Whenever amplifications on the Virgin Mary occur, Garland draws out his rhetorical arsenal for demonstration. While books 2 and 3 look forward to Astrea’s Christian substitute, book 4 prepares the ground for Mary’s arrival, and in so doing covers the disciplines of natural science, philosophy, and again, rhetoric. Here, the scene of Mary’s birth is detailed, including information about the Holy Land’s flora, allegorically extended in a description of the Tree of Jesse, and the region’s fauna— the Virgin’s dowry all. The Virgin’s creation lends itself to a philosophi57. Ibid., 2. 85–86: “Hostis prescripti fallacia blanda, venenum / viscosum mentes nectit easque capit; 2. 27–28: lectio simplicium rudium liber inde resultat, / qui doctis epulum spiritual coquit.” One of Mary’s most popular epithets is “baker of the bread of life.” As Mother of Christ, Mary offers the promise of Eucharistic food, one reason why the anonymous author of the Bridgettine Myroure of Oure Ladye (discussed in chap. 1) continually associates the Virgin’s wisdom with food. 58. Garland, Epithalamium, 3. 347–48.



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cal discourse on the conjunction of body and soul, and any mention of the Virgin’s form ushers in a display of figures and tropes. As it heralds Mary’s Conception, book 4 recounts the lives of Joachim and Anna and praises their married love, which constitutes a middle term between the unnatural, devilish copulation lamented by Nature in book 2 and the chaste fidelity of Mary and Jesus promised in the Epithalamium’s prologue.59 If, according to Garland’s narrator, libidinous behavior is like bad writing in that unlawful coupling equates to ungrammatical syntax, Joachim and Anna’s chaste marriage is a salutary correction in that it produces the beautifully spoken Virgin who inspires rhetorically ornate poetry. Throughout the poem, sex, chastity, and virginity—reflected in various marriages—continue to function as catalysts for certain kinds of speech, and the Epithalamium underscores the beautifully written product of Anna and Joachim’s marriage by switching from elegiac couplets to leonines at the moment of Mary’s birth, the internal rhyme scheme of the leonines knitting the lines tightly together in imitation of the Virgin’s bodily and spiritual integrity.60 Once born, the Virgin becomes the Mother of rhetorical perfection. Indeed, in a section entitled “Commendatio Virginis per attributa Christiana et locos rhetoricos” (a commendation of the Virgin through her Christian attributes and rhetorical parts), Garland associates Mary’s formation in Anna’s womb with the production and delivery of decorous speech. By deploying the word locos in the section title, Garland alludes to places, moments, and literary passages giving way to the beauties of moral rhetoric, for which Mary’s birth is the point of invention. Garland claims that Nature and Grace endowed the Virgin with such gifts of modest discourse that neither Mary herself nor those who speak about her Nativity may be drawn into verbal sin: Nature donis convictus dona ministrat . . . . Non incompositos gestus, non ludicra vana, non fatuos risus, matre docente, sapit. Aurea convictus huic verba monetat, honestat incessus, linguam malleat, ora regit; gratia summa tamen formatrix instruit illam, in cuius fabrica turpia nulla fluunt. 59. Ibid., IV. 349–50. 60. Ibid., V. 287–324.

92  John of Garland, Gram/marian Through the gifts of Nature, the festival provides offerings . . . Not wild gestures, not vain ludicrousness, not fatuous laughter does the Mother know, through Mother   Nature’s teaching. The golden words of this Nativity Nature coins, dignifies Mary’s arrival, hammers out the tongue, rules mouths; Yet highest Grace, the form-mother, informs the Mother in whose fabric flows no disgrace.61

This passage establishes a hierarchy of those forming the Virgin: while Nature attends to the body’s production of righteous speech and controls the utterances of Mary and those who would celebrate her Nativity, Grace infuses the Mother with the purity of an immaculate body and the resulting Christian wordsmithing. The word “fabrica” in the final line carries a double meaning, implying both the fleshly material of the Virgin’s body and the workshop in which she practices her rhetorical arts. Like Nature and Grace, Mary becomes a form-mother, skilled in the verbal arts of salvation. “Fabrica” suggests multiple images: of Mary’s corpus as text, scriptorium, and spotless site for the delivery of moral rhetoric. The passage looks forward to several others occurring in the later books of the poem in which the Virgin’s uprightness is reflected in modest, mellifluous speech and perpetuated by her own shaping of discourse. Because of the need to battle all vices (especially those of lechery) in order to achieve decorous speech, the Virgin, like Nature who made her, commits righteous violence against the speaker, pounds barbarisms out of the poet’s tongue. The Virgin’s tongue, tamed before her birth by Nature, reminds Garland’s students of Mary’s innate control over the phallus. While other mortals require Lady Grammar to chisel their tongues with the small, sharp knife held in iconography of the liberal arts, and need moral support against Venus’s persuasions, Mary emerges from Anna’s womb prepared to contradict lascivious words and actions. It is significant that this passage focusing mainly on the rhetorical offices of style and delivery and insisting on sober and appropriate performance occurs in the context of the Virgin’s “delivery” to the earth. God’s creation of, and Anna and Joachim’s conception of, the Virgin are like a well-ordered speech, and Mary lives to teach such holy 61. Ibid., V. 355, 359–64.



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rhetoric to her followers, who become “that one in whose fabric flows no disgrace,” feminized “illam” as they speak or write with tongues castrated like the Virgin’s through Grace’s purifying forces. It is possible for Mary to continue her teaching and study in adulthood because of her pure marriage to Joseph. Book 5 of the Epithalamium covers Mary’s young life and includes the narrative of her betrothal to Joseph, with an emphasis on the wonder of their purity, vows of chastity, and commitment to the Virgin’s continuing her life of learning the scriptures. The Virgin’s marriage to Joseph continues the graduated list of couples represented in the Epithalamium: from sexually obsessed humankind to Anna and Joachim’s faithful conjugality, to Mary and Joseph’s chastity, to the Virgin and Christ’s abstinent glory. The marriage between Mary and Joseph sets the scene for the Annunciation and for the most exalted nuptial of all, the meeting of the bride and bridegroom in the Virgin’s womb and the eventual celebration at the Assumption, after which the Virgin will reign in heaven as God’s queen. In preparation for these events, Mary continues her discipline in lectio divina, and at this point Garland launches an argument for devoted study, aimed at the university pupils reading his textbook. The implication in the following lines is that Garland’s students should, like the Virgin, have their minds so trained upon God that they might magnify their understanding and thus receive “the Virgin’s dowry” of wisdom: Virginis in dotem studium succedit honestum, quod servire Deo mente manuque studet . . . . Mente capit prius illa Deum, quam claudat in arca ventris, quem mundi claudere spera nequit. Honest study follows in the Virgin’s dowry because she strives to serve God with mind and hand. . . . Beforehand, she captures God in her mind before she encloses in the cell of her womb Him whom the sphere of the world cannot enclose.62

What Mary has received for subordinating herself to the providential marriage with Joseph and a life of virginity—her “studium,” religious zeal and habits of study—Garland’s students can inherit if they also pursue the Virgin as their beloved. The “wedding song” is written especially for them, that they might “marry “ themselves to holy things and 62. Ibid., 5. 491–92, 495–96.

94  John of Garland, Gram/marian entrap knowledge in their minds, just as Mary’s “captures” God, while she holds the world’s creator in the sphere of her womb. According to Garland, then, a pure mind is a counterpart to a virgin body espoused to God, and as the mind couples with holy things (“copula mentis”), it reinforces a desire for bodily cleanness. As a result of focused, holy study, the Virgin is “magistra horarum” (teacher of hours) and “lucis nuntia” (messenger of light), to be heard and imitated reverently by Garland’s students on her wedding day and ever after.63 With book 6 on the Annunciation and Incarnation, images of the divine marriage bed that awaits Mary and Jesus abound. According to Garland, as Mary conceives Jesus through the ear, hearing and reproducing the Word, she reclines upon “the marriage bed of the mind, which a white light surrounds, beams burn in golden flame.”64 This is the intellect purified and burnished, prepared to receive holy gifts. On this bed, Mary, “castitatem generans” (generating chastity), consummates all of the biblical archetypes of woman and emerges the Sophia.65 An extended descriptio on the Virgin follows, taken from Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versaficatoria and its description of Helen: in her physical similarity to the fair Helen, the Virgin at once appropriates and surpasses the classical exemplar of the beautiful woman, just as the Epithalamium is meant to imitate and usurp Martianus’s Marriage.66 On her marriage bed, Mary is the best of women from both biblical and classical history, and she represents the finest achievement in language as she both hears Gabriel’s words and bears the holy Word. Detailing Mary’s physical and spiritual beauties, Garland strives for the most ornate language; he transforms traditional Marian iconography through the flowers of rhetoric. In the following lines, Garland alludes to the star and rose, symbols of the Mother’s guidance and perpetual virginity, respectively, and through polyptoton (repetition of the same root word with different endings) he extends their significance. Virgo puerpera, sidere sidera vincis in uno, que superas teneras flore decore rosas;

63. Ibid., 5. 503–4. 64. Ibid., 6. 497–98: “mentis thalamus, quam candor eburnus cingit, succendit aurea flamma trabes.” 65. Ibid., 6. 41. 66. Ibid., 6. 175–224.



John of Garland, Gram/marian 95 flos tibi celicus est Deus unicus et sibi florem filius eximius in genetrice gerit. Virgin in childbirth you conquer the stars with one star And surpass the tender roses with a beautiful flower; The flower for you is the one heavenly God and for himself The exceptional son bears the flower in the mother.67

In the first line of the quotation, the depiction of the Christ child as the most brilliant star to appear in a constellation presents the Emanuel in his own creation—a creation fostered by Mary, who is also a star, the Stella Maris. The rest of the passage dwells upon various puns on the word “flower”: Mary overcomes roses with a flower as she had stars with a star. Employing the base flor in nominative, accusative, and ablative forms, Garland insists that the “flower” is at once Christ, budding from the Virgin’s womb, the Mother in the Son’s eyes, and the rhetorical wordplay underscoring the brilliance of buds and stars, the crossgendering of creation, and the power attained by the Mother in bearing the Word. Book 7 makes clear that the wisdom to be shared on the divine marriage bed of the Virgin’s womb can be categorized according to the seven liberal arts, which Garland desires his students to learn from the Epithalamium. Christ, the “author of the trivium” and the “font of the quadrivium,” the “true wisdom” and the “book of the liberal arts” gives to his mother a dowry book that explains the origins of all things.68 Here, Mary’s dowry portion, to which book 6 alluded during the Virgin’s betrothal to Joseph, is defined. Better than Martianus’s Mercury, who chiefly represents eloquence, Jesus is eloquence and knowledge combined, as is developed in the extended passages entitled “De eloquentia Salvatoris” (On the eloquence of the Savior) and “Salvator omnia scit” (The Savior knows all things).69 The Savior manifests his omniscience and verbal prowess in Mary through the Incarnation, making it possible for humanity to comprehend the seven liberal arts. According to the Epithalamium, a renaissance in the arts would counteract the devil’s dark persuasions and return humanity to an edenic scene in which 67. Ibid., 6. 185–88. 68. Ibid., 7. 33–34: “auctor trivia fons quadruvialis / vera sapientia liber liberalis.” 69. Ibid., 7. 355–68; 7. 369–78.

96  John of Garland, Gram/marian wisdom gushes forth from the mainstream of knowledge. Here, Garland borrows an image of the fountain of wisdom from Geoffrey of St. Victor: streams of the seven liberal arts gush forth into two different channels, one for the trivium, the other for the quadrivium. Eloquentia is the river of the trivium, and teachers from ancient and modern times sit in their cathedra on its banks.70 Book 7 goes on to detail the great Roman Catholic masters of the liberal arts, beginning with Jerome for grammar, Augustine for logic, and Gregory the Great for rhetoric, and continuing into the quadrivium with a mention of Bede.71 In this lush display of Catholic knowledge bursting from the virginal stream, Astrea returns to earth. Revealing its emphasis on the language rather than the natural arts, book 7 passes quickly over Bede’s mathematical and astronomical learning to a list of saints—John the Baptist, Peter, Katherine, Agatha, Cecilia, and others—who convey the good news of the Word to the world and who are all superseded by the Virgin. In the case of St. John the Evangelist, Garland especially underscores the connections among virginity, great wisdom and powerful utterance. St. John is the “vir cum virginibus electus, virgo Iohannes / virginat: hic custos Virginis esse solet” (man chosen among virgins, the virgin John, lived the pure life: this man is accustomed to be the attendant of the Virgin).72 Because he elected the chaste life and guarded chastity, he was the great revelator. The list ends with St. Cecilia, who like Mary had a chaste marriage to an earthly man and a spiritual commitment to the Bridegroom. Although all of the apostles and saints inherited divine knowledge from Christ, the source of the liberal arts, Mary is the “Virgo sapiens” who allows for the transfer of understanding and eloquence to this world.73 Providing a reminder of the struggles between Virtue and Vice in the first three books of the Epithalamium, book 8 begins with a victory song of the divine nuptials. The wedding between Mary and Jesus will result in a triumph for virtue, civility, and philosophy as well as for religion, and Garland invokes Cicero’s discussion of virtues here and again at the end of the Epithalamium as a way of explaining the consequences of their reign for both heaven and earth: 70. Wilson, A Study of the Epithalamium, 313. 71. Garland, Epithalamium, VII. 393–440. 72. Ibid., 7. 489–90. 73. Ibid., 7. 530.



John of Garland, Gram/marian 97 Ordine Virtutes regnant quo Tullius olim, in speciem sectum, dixerat ire genus. Civis honestatem prudens intelligit, idem providet et memorat tradita iura patrum. Est Pietas iusto comes, Observantia Verum Ultio Relligio Gratia grata iuris. Mens fortis stabilis patiens fidensque triumphat, hec est magnifica. The Virtues reign, according to the order that Tully once had said They marched, each kind divided into species. The prudent citizen understands respectability; he provides for the same and remembers the traditional laws of the fathers. Piety, Observance, Truth, Vengeance, Religion, and the esteemed Grace of the law are companions to justice. The strong, stable, patient and faithful mind triumphs. This is magnificent.74

Mary the Bride evinces this magnificent mind; humility becomes a scourge to all the intellectually perverting Vices commanded by the character of Pride. When the mystical marriage banquet concludes book 8, Gluttony is conquered by the Eucharistic food that Mary bears to the world. As the Epithalamium increases in militaristic tone and apocalyptic register by the beginning of book 9, the vanquishing Virgin is declared Christ’s right arm: Sponsa Dei militat || corone matura, cum supernis civibus || vivens mente pura; perseverans igitur || commutare dura meretur exilia || celum aditura. Ripe for a crown, the spouse of God serves as a soldier, living pure in mind with heavenly citizens; persevering therefore, she puts by exile earning soldier’s wages on her way to heaven.75

Unlike Martianus’s Philology, who joins Mercury in the heavens immediately upon their marriage, the Virgin must demonstrate tenacity 74. Ibid., 8. 13–20 75. Ibid., 9. 41–44.

98  John of Garland, Gram/marian of mind and spirit before taking up permanent residence with Christ. In the days following Jesus’ Ascension, she is as a general to the Virtues and the good company of souls, particularly in the battle against Venus. Venus and her followers are represented as the opposing forces to the Virgin and her faction, an ironic arrangement given Venus’s traditional position in classical epithalamia. As Wilson has noted, the dramatic choral responses of the Greek epithalamia gave way in Latin writers such as Statius to a standard dialogue between Venus and Cupid, meant to prove the equality and thus the suitability of the bride and bridegroom.76 In Garland, however, while the love of Mary and Jesus brings out peace of mind, the luxury of Venus instills mental error. The divine marriage bed produces “mentis lux animeque” (light of the mind and spirit), but Venus’s court fosters “insania mentis” (insanity).77 In order to characterize the intellectual and spiritual inconsistencies of Venus’s followers, the narrator lists the oxymorons of courtly love: love is, for instance, an “inextinguishable ardor” and a “sweet evil.”78 Such perplexities cloud the mind and make study of the liberal arts difficult and the ascent to heaven impossible. Therefore, with her chamberlains, the Virgin conquers Venus’s host and vanquishes Death. After such a triumph, the Virgin is ready to join her spouse in heaven, and Garland takes the occasion to offer lessons in nature and astronomy as she ascends in book 10, the concluding narrative of the Assumption. In the prologue to book 10, Garland’s verse becomes even more self-reflexive, commenting on the characteristics of Marian poetry while displaying them. He makes two claims about his verse on the Assumption: that the rhetoric of the conclusion must be more ornate to be suitable for the great festival in heaven and that the Epithalamium itself becomes a part of the Virgin’s crown.79 As the human embodiment of Wisdom, the Virgin is crowned by the most embellished Word, physically by Christ and perpetually by poets such as Garland who honor the Virgin’s contribution. Adorned by all of the figures and tropes, the Virgin reminds the reader of both Martianus’s Philology, who is joined to 76. Wilson, “Pastoral,” Speculum 23.1 (1948): 35–57. 77. Garland, Epithalamium, 9. 272; 9. 249. 78. Ibid., 9. 250–51: “ardor inextinctus . . . dulce malum.” 79. Ibid., 10. 21–24: “Qua corona glorie Virgo coronetur / in libello plenius ipso continetur: / profecto festivius ut versus ornetur / ornatus rhetoricus hic invenietur.”



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Mercury’s rhetoric, and the dotal handmaiden Lady Rhetoric, who is, as we have seen, a beautiful and commanding woman of powerful speech. Just as Martianus’s Lady Rhetoric wears a robe ornamented with all of the figures of speech and bears herself as a “queen” who “could drive any host of people where she wanted,” Garland’s Virgin wears a poetic diadem, marshals the forces of Virtues, and routs those of Venus.80 The combination of Garland’s spectacular displays of figures and tropes in describing the Virgin and his presentation of her as a military commander who can sway forces to virtuous action reinforce the double figuration of the Virgin Mary in the Epithalamium. As Wilson notes, when the Virgin Mary conquers Venus’s forces and even Death, she becomes a figure for the church and its moral power, but I would add also for its powers of speech in missionary efforts, sermons, and even university lectures that led to theological careers. Throughout the poem, Garland makes it clear that veneration of the Virgin leads to his own powerful speech. Mary has inspired him in the chaste life of learning and deeply focused reading, which provides compelling material for amplification, if one only knows the art of rhetoric. Just as Garland declares Christ the fountain of both the trivium and the quadrivium, he illustrates in book 10 that Mary also embodies all of the seven arts, as her life story bears them out and gorgeous Christian language conveys them. In the Epithalamium, then, Garland attempts to rise above Martianus’s deification of the arts in the Marriage by exposing the limits of Mercury and Philology, who chiefly stand, respectively, for rhetoric and knowledge. In the Epithalamium God and his mother represent the wholeness and plenitude of the Christian universe by holding sway over both.81 Comparing the Virgin to Lady Rhetoric, Garland inverts the rhetorical processes in Martianus’s Marriage: whereas Philology seeks a divine mouthpiece for human understanding in the celestial realm, Mary, herself a Mercurian messenger, bears heaven-sent truth out toward the world. To underscore his difference, Garland shows that while Mary arrives at the Assumption like an ascendant planet, she surpass80. Martianus, Marriage, 5. 426–28. 81. Garland’s sense of Christian superiority in knowledge and rhetoric extends to a condemnation of the loquaciousness of the Jews, in the Epithalamium 10. 285–364. As Mary rises to her triumph at the Assumption, she must also overcome, in Garland’s view, the perfidy of the Jews who crucified her bridegroom. For a treatment of Marian rhetoric and its engagement with the Jews, see chap. 4, “Chaucer and Dame School.”

100  John of Garland, Gram/marian es all of the astral deities mentioned in Martianus: in Garland, Mercury takes flight along with Venus.82 The paideia effected by Jesus and Mary’s betrothal encompasses both the secular virtues suggested by Martianus and the moral reign of Christian salvation. While giving credit to Cicero for a treatment of ethics and to the muses for showing the way in the arts, Garland concludes that the holy marriage between Mary and Jesus bears eternal justice, piety, and truth and that Mary’s studious example offers those seeking wisdom through the liberal arts a model of achievement in intellectual and spiritual virtues. With God’s blessing, the Mother stands in the center of the liberal arts and inspires a Christian rhetoric through which they may be interpreted and declaimed.

The Parisiana Poetria While the Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie renders the Virgin the bearer of all human wisdom and the figuration of the Christian rhetoric that conveys it, the Parisiana Poetria exemplifies the practical consequences of this representation of Mary by revealing her presence in all forms of discourse. While in the Epithalamium Garland provides an allegory for Mary’s reign over the liberal arts, in the Parisiana Poetria he employs Marian poetry to illustrate various implements of style for prose, quantitative verse, and rhythmic verse. The Epithalamium and Parisiana Poetria were composed at about the same time (1220s through early 1230s), illustrating how Garland sought connection and consistency among his own textbooks.83 In the latter, he employs quotations from the former as examples of fine writing, and it is unclear whether Garland incorporated Marian verses already composed for the Epithalamium into the Parisiana Poetria or composed verses bit by bit for the Epithalamium while thinking about different forms and their rhetorical effects for the Parisiana Poetria. In either case, Garland demonstrates that adoring the Virgin and composing fine writing should be the same thing. 82. Garland, Epithalamium, 10. 411–12. 83. Louis J. Paetow contends on the basis of the Parisiana Poetria’s quotations of the Epithalamium and of references to contemporary figures that the Marian poem must have been written earlier. See Louis J. Paetow, ed. and trans., Two Medieval Satires on the University of Paris: “La Bataille des VII ars” of Henri d’Andeli and the “Morale scolarium” of John of Garland, Memoirs of the University of California 4.1–2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927), 65–258. However, Evelyn Faye Wilson challenged the certainty of references to contemporary personages on which Paetow based his argument and placed the Epithalamium after the Parisiana Poetria. See Wilson, “A Study of the Epithalamium in the Middle Ages,” 252.



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As a teaching manual on poetry and prose, the Parisiana Poetria is organized in seven sections based on the offices of rhetoric and popular modes of discourse in the thirteenth century. In the following order these seven chapters are on invention, focus, arrangement, the structure of letters, stylistic flaws in any discourse, stylistic embellishment of quantitative verse and prose, and finally, sample compositions (letters, as well as quantitative and rhymed verse). The chapters roughly follow the order of Ciceronian rhetorical treatises, without an ending emphasis on memory and delivery and with the addition of whole chapters for examples. Although the concluding section is set apart for exemplars, Garland offers brief models of principles throughout the treatise. These models include a pastoral allegory, the life of St. Denis, and a tragic tale of two washerwomen (among others), but the predominant exemplar throughout is that of Marian verse. While Garland builds the Parisiana Poetria on the advice offered in many other rhetorical and poetic texts—the structure from Cicero, rhetorical strategies from the Rhetorica ad Herennium, advice on dictamen from Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, and theory of poetics from Horace’s Ars Poetica—the Parisiana Poetria is unusual among other thirteenth-century ars poetriae in treating prose composition so explicitly and emphatically among other teachings on verse forms. As Douglas Kelly demonstrates, the rhetorical advice in the artes poetriae was also used for prose composition, but Garland makes this pedagogical practice especially clear.84 Garland’s most important contribution in the Parisiana Poetria was in founding the principles for these discourses upon Marian writings. Stating his own reasons for writing the Parisiana Poetria, Garland announces: The author’s purpose is to publish a manual of style. Its usefulness is that it imparts a technique for treating any subject whatever in prose, quantitative verse, or rhymed syllabic verse. This book belongs to three particular fields of knowledge: Grammar, since it teaches how to speak properly; Rhetoric, since it teaches how to speak elegantly; and Ethics, since it teaches or instills a sense of what is right.85 84. Douglas Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 39–40. 85. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 1. 6–10: “Intentio auctoris est tradere artem eloquentie. Vtilitas est scire tractare quamcumque materiam prosayce, metrice, et rithmice. Liber iste tribus speciebus philosophie supponitur: Gramatice, quia docet congrue loqui; Rethorice, quia docet ornate dicere; Ethice, quia docet siue persuadet ad honestum.”

102  John of Garland, Gram/marian This statement of intentions confirms an argument we have seen Garland make in the Epithalamium: that expert knowledge of the liberal arts begets ethical choices, an argument he especially credits to Cicero. Outlining the disciplinary contexts for the Parisiana Poetria, Garland links the arts of speech to ethics, again with a nod to the classical vision of the model citizen as a “good man speaking well,” intimated in Cato and Cicero and codified in Quintilian. When attempting in the Epithalamium to surpass Martianus’s popularity in the schools, Garland maintains that just as The Marriage of Mercury and Philology supports a classical paideia of civic justice and piety, an allegory of a divine marriage between Jesus and Mary teaches peaceful living, antidotes to evil, and the way to heaven. In the introduction to the Parisiana Poetria, he again gestures toward the Virgin as a standard bearer for both cardinal and theological virtues. According to the Epithalamium, Mary’s virginity lifts her atop this ethical and moral pedestal so that she might be a beacon to the new Christian manifestation of Cicero’s model. In a move similar to his appropriation of Martianus’s nuptial allegory for the artistic triumph of Mary and Jesus, in the Parisiana Poetria Garland superimposes his Marian ethics and morality upon a classical forebear, Horace. The ethical impulse announced in the statement of purpose is also an extension of Horace’s maxim that literature should both delight and instruct. Moreover, with a title that suggests an alternative teaching of Horace’s Ars Poetica at the University of Paris, Garland radically expands upon the classical text, again with an eye to usurpation.86 As Traugott Lawler demonstrates, Garland “must have known [the Ars Poetica] by heart” since he quotes twenty-six different lines from it, in twelve different places of the Parisiana Poetria.87 As Lawler points out, even though sharp contrasts with Horace’s text abound, Garland takes pains to imitate Horace’s concern for verisimilitude of character. Garland does this by raising character construction to the first principle of invention, connecting level of style to the social class of the reader or writer, invoking Horace’s six aspects of character formation, and employing the rhetorical commonplaces (name, nature, social position, 86. Parisiana is the first word of Garland’s text, another reason for its appearing as the first word of the title. 87. Traugott Lawler, “John of Garland and Horace: A Medieval Schoolman Faces the Ars Poetica,” Classical Folia 22 (1968): 7.



John of Garland, Gram/marian 103

wealth, character, motives, disposition, occupation, circumstances, actions, words) to form characterizations.88 Garland’s interest in characterization is consonant with his recitation of the life and the personal and spiritual qualities of the Virgin in the Epithalamium and with his descriptions of Mary as representatives of standards of discourse in the Parisiana Poetria. By placing Mary’s character at the center of his art of poetry and prose, Garland moralizes a tendency in thirteenth-century composition texts to hold the teenage male student’s attention with salacious tales and descriptions. For instance, while Gervase of Melkley uses jokes about sexuality to demonstrate rhetorical figures, and Matthew of Vendôme offers extended descriptiones of women’s bodies, Garland substitutes short poetic statements about the Virgin’s attributes in order to teach various verse forms and rhetorical ornaments at the same time as he extols a moral and ethical character.89 In the Parisiana Poetria a Virgin of moral authority rules the rhetorical realm.90 As F. J. E. Raby remarks, “John Garland was above all else a 88. Ibid., 11–12. 89. Margery Curry Woods discusses the prevalence of sexual content in the arts of poetry and prose in order to illustrate Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s restraint and decorum in the Poetria nova. See her Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), 60–70. 90. Because of the Virgin’s moral authority, Garland subsumes all forms of narrative— descriptions of the liberal arts, civic events and the letters documenting them, various genres of poetry—under her rule. Narrative content derives directly from the Mother, since her inspiration is necessary to the writer’s invention and her biography provides a context for all knowledge. Simultaneously, Mary’s actions, whether during her life on earth or in her continuous reign in heaven, are set off by the principles of composition that she leads Garland to define. This reciprocity between the Virgin and her discourses Garland develops beyond the Epithalamium and Parisiana Poetria, although among all of his poems, these texts place the most emphasis on Mary as queen of the liberal and especially the rhetorical arts. Among other examples of Garland’s poetry, the Stella Maris, a much later collection of Marian miracle tales (ca. 1250), Garland wrote for use in the grammar classes at the University of Paris, once again connecting the Virgin to the language arts. Noting that several of these miracle tales “explicitly involve [discussions of ] language,” Corey J. Marvin, in a Kristevan analysis that compares the Stella Maris to Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, notices how Garland’s poem pits a portrait of a nurturing Mother against a sense of loss and the judgment of the Father, the moment, according to Julia Kristeva, for acquisition of self hood and language. For instance, in De monacho submerse (On the drowned monk), the main character drowns as a punishment for his lechery, but is restored to life as a reward for having prayed the rosary before going out and coming back in each night. Viewing the monk’s prayers as a breakout of the semiotic that “materializes in the gaps of an otherwise strongly situated paternal logic,” Marvin sees a strong connection between Garland’s invocations of Mary and language learning. Although Garland’s depictions of a combative, more professorial Mother in the Epithalamium

104  John of Garland, Gram/marian teacher,” and in his works Garland constantly sought to present useful examples to his students from theology, philosophy, and theory.91 With inexorable deduction, Garland concludes that if the Virgin is Queen of the Liberal Arts, then praises of her offer the finest examples of rhetoric. Since the subjects taught under the discipline of rhetoric in the medieval curriculum included the arts of poetry, dictamen, and sermon composition, in the Parisiana Poetria Garland covers a large range of possible material that must reflect a teaching method in which he effectively combined a discussion of style for both verse and prose and continuously offered examples of precepts, down to the most minute difference in cadence, grammatical effect, and meter. To begin with the Parisiana Poetria’s Marian exemplars, we find them immediately in the opening section on invention. Unlike other contemporary authors of composition texts, for instance Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Garland is unique in treating invention. The comprehensiveness of the Parisiana Poetria is akin to the Epithalamium’s teachings from all of the liberal arts and suggests that the Marian muse always leads Garland to the plenitude of discourse. In the Parisiana Poetria’s discussion on the art of inventing verbs, the following example is derived from the Epithalamium. Garland advises taking a well-known word and creating a verb out of it, in other words “inventing” a new thought, action, and expression, and he refers to the final book of the Epithalamium to show how that is done. Lauding the Virgin at her Assumption in the Epithalamium’s book 10, Garland creates “hymnize” from “hymn”: “Organa si cordis hymnizent consona voci, / concordi corda musica dulcis erit” (If consonant instruments make a sound of the heart’s voice, the musical chord of concord shall be sweet).92 Citing these lines, the Parisiana Poetria refers to the cosmic melodies celebrating Mary’s Assumption, with the “organa,” or “instruments,” connoting especially human voand Parisiana Poetria and his truncated miracle tales in the Stella Maris do not emphasize Mary’s succoring breast, as other literatures treated in this book do, Marvin’s analysis indicates that intersections between the Virgin and language in Garland’s textbooks are borne out by both medieval rhetorical theory and postmodern methods of textual interpretation. See Corey J. Marvin, “‘I Will Thee Not Forsake’: The Kristevan Maternal Space in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and John of Garland’s Stella Maris,” Exemplaria 8.1 (1996), 57–58. 91. F. J. E. Raby, A History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginnings to the Close of the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 386. 92. Garland, Epithalamium, 10. 552; Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 1. 489–90.



John of Garland, Gram/marian 105

cal cords. The passage demonstrates a Marian transformation (“hymn” to “hymnize”) of a word’s part of speech that compares to the Virgin’s bodily and spiritual transformation as she bore the Word. Overall, the lines suggest a principle underpinning Marian rhetorical invention: the harmonic heart and the consistent mind, made regular by the application of virtue and calm by chaste living, bursts forth in sweet discourse that is akin to music. Marian principles aid a writer in inventing, expanding, and also reducing material, according to the Parisiana Poetria. One strategy for amplification in letters, hypophora, presents a “many-sided exposition of the facts of a case, achieved through a combination of questioning, assertion, and denial,” and the case that garners the most points of view, according to Garland, is that for virginity.93 Again quoting from the Epithalamium, Garland indulges in an extensive rebuttal against the material seductions of suitors.94 He entreats virgins to combat their suitors’ promises of wealth with a host of counterpoints and accusations, such as those concerning the dubious sources of the patrimony and the unlikelihood that it would pass down to a ne’er-do-well.95 Marian virtues offer the most opportunities for expansion, and the vices that attempt to corrupt them invite hard-hitting brevity. Under “Art of Shortening Material,” Garland employs an example of asyndeton from the Epithalamium that laments violence and rape: “Mars rages, blood flows . . . rapine gathers in.”96 By leaving out the coordinating conjunctions, Garland emphasizes the swift and catastrophic progress of war. On the other hand, positive moral examples in brief discourse are often rendered in proems, and Garland offers an example of “words that go to the heart of the matter” from the first two verses of the Epithalamium: “Triumphal palace of the virtues, flowerlike virgin, flowerlike spouse and flowerlike mother of God, hail!”97 In these lines, Garland quickly announces that 93. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 4. 393–96: “Potest responderi per Subiectionem, que est crebra et frequens ostensio rei quam proponimus, aliquando cum interrogacione, aliquando cum affirmation, aliquando cum negatione.” 94. Garland, Epithalamium, 10. 231–38. 95. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 4. 389–405. 96. Garland, Epithalamium, 1. 59–60; Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 4. 295–96: “Mars furit, exundat cruor . . . rapina metit.” 97. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 4. 307–8: “Ite, eligere debemus uerba illa in quibus consistit uis materie . . . . Aula triumphalis uirtutum, florida uirgo, / florida sponsa Dei, florida mater, aue!”

106  John of Garland, Gram/marian the Epithalamium’s treatment of the liberal arts will proceed from a narrative of Mary’s roles in salvation. Once the writer’s material is appropriately invented and amplified or reduced, Garland teaches, it is time to edit for stylistic vices. In chapter 5, on vices in meter and expression, Garland does not quote from any of his own Marian poetry, since, of course, his does not exhibit such faults! He does, however, employ a few Marian verses composed simply to exemplify stylistic errors, since the Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie proves the Virgin’s power as a combatant against all vices. By invoking Mary in compositions, the writer in effect offers a potent prayer against barbarisms. For instance, on the subject of metrical flaws, the Parisiana Poetria warns against running vowels or consonants together as in the following line: “Te gemmam mundi virgo commendo Maria” (Virgin, world’s gem, Mary, I commend you).98 Here, the m’s in “gemmam” and “mundi” run together; an easy and effective revision would put “mundi” before “gemmam.” Later, offering advice about verbal repetition, the Parisiana Poetria shows how to change letters or syllables. With the sentence “The virgin in labor makes our enemies infirm, and both confirms our strength, and reforms our hearts” (Hostes infirmat intacta puerpera nostros / Robur et affirmat et pectora nostra refirmat), Garland illustrates that different prefixes can contribute to more varied diction.99 Not wanting to associate the Virgin too heavily with stylistic vices, Garland dramatically increases his samples of Marian poetry in chapter 6 on rhetorical embellishment, and brings them to a crescendo in the positive discursive exemplars in chapter 7. As an example of rhyme in chapter 6, Garland includes the following: “I came here long before, touched down on this gentle shore. If Christ pleases, my ship will sail on with ease. May Mary be along with me in every sea, a guide by my side, my hope, my way, my goal, my stay.”100 Garland explains that such rhyme “prompted the invention of leonines and syllabic [or rhythmic] verse,” and by providing rules for poetic construction, Garland hopes 98. Ibid., 5. 195. 99. Ibid., 5. 230–31. 100. Ibid., 6. 135–38: “Huc dudum veni, tetigi loca litore leni. / Si Christus faueat, prospera puppis eat; / Assit per maria mihi preuia stella Maria, / Dux pia, spes uenia, Gloria, meta, uia.”



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to avoid the crude rhythmic verses he lambastes in the prologue to the Epithalamium.101 There Garland complains about moderni who corrupt poetry with careless novelties and declares that the Virgin can reverse these defects.102 The Parisiana Poetria illustrates that the Virgin’s cures for defects in rhyme and rhythm include an emphatic sense of closure and associations with hymns. Closure in Marian poetry is always associated with the enclosure of Mary’s body, the integrity of her perpetual virginity fostering a poetry of repeated sounds and ideas that weave the verse together. Such strong closure is illustrated in the wheel of Marian verse that directly follows Garland’s treatment of rhyme (figure 6).103 Garland’s Marian wheel encircles a poem about the Virgin in a style that approximates the Victorine sequence in septisyllabic lines: puella castitatis / cisterna fons dulcoris tabella venustatis / lucerna, vas splendoris pudoris laus superna / deitatis stella decoris lux eterna / pietatis agnella Girl of chastity / cistern, font of sweetness Record of loveliness / lamp, container of splendor High praise of purity, star of deity Eternal light of beauty, little lamb of piety104

In the wheel diagram, a circle invoking associations with the globe and creation is drawn around the poem. Garland further underscores the idea of creation by composing most of the verses in seven syllables, the phrases before and after the caesura making up a verse. The following lines are written clockwise about the border of the wheel: Creata est beata Sacrata est ornata Signata est donata Translata est leuata

101. Ibid., 6. 133–34: “Similiter desinens est sub quo uersus leonine et rithmi inuenti sunt.” 102. Garland, Epithalamium, 1. 29–31, 43. 103. Lawler, Parisiana Poetria, fig. 5, 118. In the present volume, fig. 6 reproduces the Marian wheel, by permission of Yale University Press. 104. The translation is my own.

108  John of Garland, Gram/marian The creature was blessed The sanctified woman was adorned The signified was given The translated was assumed105

These same four lines also provide a rectangular border on the inside of the wheel around the poem, hedging it inside the globe of creation and emphasizing its integrity. Approximating the look of a manuscript page, the rectangular border equates verses on the Virgin with exemplary text. Allusions to Mary’s adornment with the Word who is “signified” with her flesh and “translated” to earth promise the deification of discourse composed according to the Virgin’s principles. The enclosure of the Marian verse and the closure provided by both circular and rectangular borders can be compared to the Virgilian wheel on the three levels of style, which Garland derives from the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Donatus’s Vita Virgiliana and also includes in the Parisiana Poetria.106 There, the wheel notes Virgil’s authorship in the center and is like a pie divided into three slices for high, middle, and low style and their appropriate subjects. The rotating wheel on the classical model cycles through stylistic choices while the virginal wheel of rhyme maintains phrases inside a moral universe. Besides its inviolate structure, the Marian wheel rhyme, in its similarity to hymns and particularly the Victorine sequence, sanctifies and resuscitates Garland’s concept of the rhythmic poem. The Victorine sequence developed from the singing of the “Alleluia” in the mass, with the final a being sung in a complicated melody that later accommodated lyrics called prosa. According to B. A. Park and Elizabeth S. Dallas, Garland wrote both music and lyrics for the sequentia cum prosa “Aula vernat virginalis” (The maidenly court blooms), and the Parisiana Poetria also includes a Victorine sequence on the life of St. Catherine.107 Classifying the Victorine as a poem that begins with a stressed syllable and ends with an unstressed, Garland establishes the same rhythm for the poem in the Marian wheel.108 His statement in the section “On Con105. The translation is my own. 106. Lawler, Parisiana Poetria, fig. 4, 40–41. 107. B. A. Park and Elizabeth S. Dallas, “A Sequentia cum Prosa by John of Garland,” Medievalia et Humanistica 15 (1963): 54–68; Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 7. 781–815. 108. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 7. 778–79.



John of Garland, Gram/marian 109 †

signata est donata, translata est levata

at a

rn to

Sig

ata

tl

es signata est donata, translata est levata

sl a ta Tra n

a

decoris lux eterna, pietatis agnella

†

pudoris laus superna, deitatis  stella

Sa cr

t es

tabella venustatis, lucerna, vas  splendoris

es

puella castitatis, cisterna, fons  dulcoris

ata

ornata est sacrata, beata est creata

†

e

be

ta na do

creata est beata, sacrata est ornata

Cr ea ta

st

ata ev

na t

†

Figure 6. Marian wheel of verse. John of Garland, Parisiana Poetria. Reproduced by permission of Yale University Press

sonances and Proportions in Rhymed Poems” that the alternation of rhymes may be compared to intervals in music intimates that Garland was constantly assessing the various sounds of his poetic schema and possible concordances with the music of the spheres.109 Park and Dallas wonder whether Garland’s intertwined theories of music and poetry are not just one more way of superseding Martianus Capella, whose Lady Grammar fears invading Music’s territory.110 In the Parisiana Poetria, as Garland concludes the arts of prose and quantitative verse, he declares: Rhymed poetry is a branch of the art of music. For music is divided into the cosmic, which embraces the internal harmony of the elements, the humane, which embraces the harmony and concord of the humors, and the instrumen109. Ibid., 7. 590–600. 110. Park and Dallas, “Sequentia cum Prosa,” 56.

110  John of Garland, Gram/marian tal, which embraces the concord invoked by instruments. This includes melody, quantitative verse, and rhymed verse.111

Garland seems to stipulate that what follows in the remainder of chapter 7 involves qualitative rhymed poetry only, but he also includes nineteen quantitative poems in imitation of Horatian odes and points out how rhymes are employed in quantitative hymns, by way of contrast to how rhyme functions in syllabic verse.112 Because leonines, which are actually rhyming hexameters and therefore quantitative verse, are often mistaken for rhythmical forms, Garland notes, he wants to demonstrate the difference.113 As a comprehensive textbook, the Parisiana Poetria shows that many forms of religious poetry may be compared to hymns and that the “concord” of the singer’s humors links with the elements of creation. With its examples of hymns, tragedy, letters, and various sorts of poems, chapter 7 combines a miscellany of exempla with bits of technical advice on how to achieve the discursive ornaments of the models. Beginning with the simplest forms of rhyme, Marian verse exemplars are predominant in chapter 7 as they demonstrate thirty-four out of the forty-four different stanzas that can result by variations among spondaic and iambic rhythms. As Lawler explains, the final word of the verse line determines whether the line is an iambic or spondaic: if the penultimate syllable of that word is long, then the line is spondaic; if the penultimate syllable is short, then it is iambic. In modern terms, Garland’s spondaic line would include trochees, and his iambic, combinations of trochees and dactyls. In the spondaic line, different line lengths produce different kinds of poems.114 Thus, an example of a dispondaic poem— one with two spondaic stresses per line—would be written as follows: “O Maria/ Uite uia, / Per hoc mare, / Singulare / Lumen, aue,/ Ceptis faue” (O Mary, way of life, singular light, to these things begun, hail, guide us through this sea).115 In the dispondaic example, two spondees 111. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 7.467–74: “Rithica est species artis musice. Musica enim diuiditur in mundanam, que constat in proporcione qualitatum elementorum, et in humanam, que constat in proportione et Concordia humorum, et in instrumentalem, que constat in Concordia instrumentali. Hec diuiditur in mellicam, metricam et rithmicam.” These lines summarize the distinctions made by Boethius in the De institutione musica among the three kinds of music. See Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, De institutione musica, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867). 112. Ibid., 7. 1360. 113. Ibid., 7. 1172–74. 114. Lawler, Parisiana Poetria, 265, n. 467. 115. Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 7. 529–31.



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of two syllables each comprise all of the lines. On the other hand, with an additional two-syllable spondee, a trispondaic line would be written as follows: “Rosa sine nota, / Gemma pulcra tota, / Lutum peccatorum / Ablue nostrorum” (Rose without blemish, Gem all beautiful, wipe away the mud of our sins).116 Unlike the spondaic line, the iambic may vary between seven and eight syllables; more, in Garland’s teaching, creates a different kind of poem. It is possible, also, to combine spondaic and iambic lines of different sorts to create different kinds of poems. As he expands upon examples of alternative rhymes, Garland amplifies upon Marian truths. In the verses below, he puns on the base “mund,” whose masculine noun “mundus” means “the world” and connotes anything vitiated, and whose adjective in the feminine, “munda,” means “neat” or “pure.” These puns highlight the Marian paradox of her eternal purity, even amidst a sinful world that sacrificed her son. Employing the theological commonplaces that Mary is an antidote to Eve, purification amidst sin, and guiding star to heaven, Garland demonstrates a number of combinations with spondaic and iambic verses thus. 1) A tetraspondaic couplet with an iambic third line: “Eua mundum deformauit, / Aue mundum reformauit, / Stella maris preuia” (Eve deformed the world, “Ave” reformed the world, Star of the sea, our guide). 2) An iambic line appended to three spondaics: “Eua mundum deformauit, / Aue mundum reformauit, / Munda mundum emundauit, / Nostra mundans uicia” (Eve deformed the world, “Ave” reformed the world, a pure one purified the world, washing away our sins). 3) An iambic line appended to a spondaic quatrain: “Eua mundum deformauit, / Aue mundum reformauit, / Munda mundum emundauit, / Pia nephas expiauit, / Via uiris inuia” (Eve deformed the world, “Ave” reformed the world, a pure one purified the world, a good woman made good the sin, a path for men, yet unapproachable).117 In all of the examples above, the composite-type verses become more complicated as Garland includes more about the Virgin’s role in salvation. Mary is the main subject not only of samples for qualitative verse, but also for quantitative meter. Garland displays two Marian hymns of his 116. Ibid., 7. 535–36. 117. Ibid., 7. 741–56.

112  John of Garland, Gram/marian own on the Conception in order to demonstrate the Aesclepiadean choriambic and the Sapphic adonic meters.118 Whether in qualitative or quantitative verse, rhyme itself has a rhetorical effect and is best accompanied by certain rhetorical figures such as apostrophe and repetition that underscore the rhyme. In order to illustrate these figures, Garland presents “Virgo, Mater Salvatoris,” a poem revisiting the Old Testament types of Mary such as Ruth and Judith.119 Many of the lines in this poem repeat “Hec est” (She is), throwing emphasis onto the noun or adjective for the Virgin that comes at the end of the line and provides the rhyme. Listing the Virgin’s roles on the spiritual journey of life’s perilous seas as “boat, leader, protection, oarsman, breeze, anchorage,” “Virgo, Mater Salvatoris” enumerates without providing conjunctions between the nouns; the parataxis creates a concise style that hits hard upon the rhyming word.120 When not providing exemplars of beautiful poetry through Marian verse, Garland often turns verses on other powerful and holy women, for instance the Victorine stanzas on St. Catherine of Alexandria mentioned earlier that praise her intellectual fortitude and her “vita tota militaris” (totally militant life), reminiscent of the militant Mary of the Epithalamium. In order to model types of Horatian odes, Garland also presents “A Description of Urania,” who, as ruler of the stars, is a counterpart to Mary, Stella Maris.121 When Garland has reached the end of a long and impressive list of models for various kinds of poems, he includes a supplementary section of composite poems he has not yet mentioned, and all of the samples of the new spondee-iamb combinations convey a message about the Virgin’s mercy amidst human misery.122 Significantly, in an example of an iambic variation in the fifth line of a poem, Garland declares the Virgin “godlike in mind,” the heroic and chaste scholar who inspires the study of poetry in Paris.123

Conclusion John of Garland was poised to assimilate a number of important academic traditions at the beginning of the thirteenth century and the in118. Ibid., 7. 1368–1442. 119. Ibid., 7. 917–97. 120. Ibid., 7. 924–26: “In hoc mare sis solamen / Nobis, cimba, dux, tutamen, / Remex, aura, statio.” 121. Ibid., 7. 1533–56. 122. Ibid., 7. 1281–1340. 123. Ibid., Mente dia.



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ception of the universities. Steeped in the classics, he carried on and even attempted to replace the teachings in the liberal arts by Martianus, Horace, and others; influenced by contemporary academic debates, he alluded to his teachers, such as Alain of Lille, and contemplated different means of refreshing the classics and including new ideas from scholasticism. John of Garland advanced his thoughts and methods in textbooks, since the new schools of his time did not benefit from monastic libraries. Although Garland participated in a movement toward the secularization of education, he was ever mindful of the curriculum’s ultimate service to the church and of the theological underpinnings of what he considered to be a morally grounded theory of the liberal arts. That John of Garland stood at the lectern during this significant moment in intellectual and educational history and placed the Virgin Mary there—his book, muse, and teacher—indicates that generations of university students continued to understand Mary as the Queen of the Liberal Arts and especially language studies. This understanding will be reflected in all of the English authors discussed in this book who had access to pedagogical and textual traditions. John of Garland employed the story of the Virgin’s life as a frame for summaries of the liberal arts in the Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie. Casting the Virgin as bride of Christ, in imitation of Martianus’s Philology, bride of Mercury, Garland built a complex characterization for Mary meant to surpass her late classical forebear. Whereas Martianus’s Philology chiefly represents human wisdom and marries Mercury, messenger god of rhetoric, Garland’s Mary, endowed by her Bridegroom with a divine book, embodies both Wisdom and Word, attributes of Christ, as she bears the Christ child. Since Mary’s success in conveying her divine message to the world depends on conquering the vices, Garland figures her as a warrior for Christian virtues and also compares her to Martianus’s Lady Rhetoric, who leads hosts by her powerful speech. The Parisiana Poetria provides specific discursive principles and examples of a Marian rhetoric for Garland’s students to imitate. Marian victory over vice and her reign over the liberal arts, especially that of rhetoric, is akin to John of Garland’s triumph over the textbooks of the past. In the writers featured in the next chapter, the militant Virgin gives way to more peaceful scenarios of Mary than are offered in the Epithalamium. In the meditative texts described in the following chap-

114  John of Garland, Gram/marian ters, the dynamism of Garland’s narrative is replaced with the kind of stasis that we have seen before, in chapter 1’s discussion of Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. In thirteenth-century Anglo-Latin meditative poets, scenes of Mary’s ecstatic motherhood or wretched grief provide models for contemplation and for poetical imitation. John of Howden, Walter of Wimborne, and ultimately Richard Rolle build upon Garland’s connections between Mary and fine discourse and characterize her as the divine Mother of their expression rather than as the imposing Christian Rhetorica. She is, as we shall see, their Mother tongue.

Three

The Musical Mother Tongue in Anglo-Latin Poetry for Meditation

ike John of Garland, whose pedagogical poetry is discussed in the previous chapter, another contemporary English writer and teacher, Walter of Wimborne, employed narratives of the Virgin’s life in order to illustrate the liberal arts. This chapter shows how Wimborne, along with John of Howden and in the next century Richard Rolle, built northern medieval English traditions for a Marian meditative poetry out of textbook practices such as Garland’s. According to A. G. Rigg, John of Garland’s school texts produced “a humus of expressions and images that nourished the ‘affective’ devotional poems of Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden,” and in turn the expressions and images of Wimborne’s and Howden’s poems nourished Richard Rolle’s Canticum Amoris.1 For Wimborne, Howden, and Rolle, as Garland illustrates in the Parisiana Poetria, the Mater is the poetic materia. In chapter 2 we investigated Garland’s deployment of the Virgin as an icon of liberal arts learning and a Christian Lady Rhetorica. In his 1. A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 171.

115

116  The Musical Mother Tongue many verse textbooks, Garland’s generation of Marian genres, discursive principles, and poetic phrases provides a foundation for the works of Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden. With the latter two poets, composing like Garland in the thirteenth century, we come to verse grown from the fertile soil of liberal arts pedagogy to blossom into meditational reflections. Especially in the writing of Wimborne, who dedicated poetry to the grammar school boys he taught, we can see the transition from pedagogical to meditative texts. Like John of Garland, both Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden invoke the Virgin as the embodiment of all knowledge and representative of excellence in language. They take for granted the Virgin’s position as a linguistic principle and her rhetorical power as a muse. They agree with Garland that regular and highly elaborated verse forms akin to music are alone worthy of poetry about the Virgin, and they reposition Garland’s emphasis on music to suit more contemplative goals. In chapter 2 we saw that Garland renders Marian poetry musical as he compares the concord of the poet’s disciplined mind, made in God’s image, to the controlled and melodic felicity of religious verse. In contrast to Garland’s stress on the Marian music of the mind, Wimborne, Howden, and Rolle concentrate more on that music’s tunefulness and on Mary as herself a singer who offers her worshipful pupils voice lessons. As the poems of Wimborne, Howden, and Rolle develop meditative processes that focus on gorgeous depictions of Mary and moving moments in her life, they carry on Garland’s work through a musical verse appropriate for singing, and they extend Garland’s purposes by suggesting that melody is the best rhetoric for inspiring others in meditation. Unlike Garland, however, who positions the Virgin in action-packed allegories that instruct in the arts and in textbook lists of artistic practices, Wimborne, Howden, and Rolle are more interested in producing Marian images for memorization and meditation. The Marian tableaux they describe in order to aid their pupils’ memories or to inspire the prayers of patrons are often “stills,” while the narrator and mastermeditator acts piously in the foreground. Their composition of these “still” scenes that focus on the Virgin’s life and make reference to her position as muse, matter for invention, and icon of poetic style have much in common, therefore, with the fifteenth-century Life of Our Lady, John Lydgate’s poem discussed in chapter 1 as an example of Marian



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wisdom literature. As chapter 1 points out, Howden is most probably an influence on Lydgate, and although this book cannot extend far enough to track all resonances of the northern medieval English meditative tradition constructed here, the reader may note similarities between the meditative poems by Wimborne, Howden, and Rolle and other vernacular literature, for instance Chaucer’s An ABC, treated in chapter 4.2 The northern medieval English meditative tradition described in this chapter is adapted not only from the pedagogical heritage endowed by John of Garland, but also from new affective forms of piety, romance literature, and the long English heritage of Marian worship. The trends developed in the Marian poetry of Wimborne and Howden and later refashioned by Rolle include the rehearsal of the life of Christ from Mary’s point of view, static images for meditation, the profound humility of the narrator, reliance on the Mother to supply expressions and song, reflections on the Virgin’s glorious body and spirit, expositions on the music inspired by virginity, and formal verse forms with innumerable rhetorical flourishes, especially predominant alliteration. These poetic features appeared in northern English school texts offering Marian images for memory, biographical narratives declaring Mary the mother of all texts, hymn-like verses listing Marian epithets, and romantic invocations of the Virgin muse. Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden are important for their early manifestation of this sort of northern meditative writing that will later find fame with Richard Rolle.3 Although Wimborne’s and Howden’s focus on the Passion from a Marian perspective connects to continental models for meditations, such as the 2. For a discussion of Lydgate’s reliance in the Life of Our Lady on John of Howden’s Philomena, see Georgiana Donavin, “The Light of the Virgin Muse in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady,” in Romance and Rhetoric: Essays in Honour of Dhira B. Mahoney, ed. Georgiana Donavin and Anita Obermeier, Disputatio 19 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 82–83. 3. In his introduction to the edition of Poems of John of Hoveden, F. J. E. Raby ([London: Surtees Society, 1939], xi–xlix) traces an English devotional tradition in literature spanning from Anselm of Canterbury to Richard Rolle. Raby remarks that “John of Hoveden takes his place, and an important place it is, in the unbroken chain which links in England the Franciscan achievement with the great fourteenth century mystical movement, centred so largely in Yorkshire, and associated with the names of Richard Rolle of Hampole, Walter Hilton of Thurgarton and William of Rimington, who was once a monk of Salley” (xxiii). The structure of this chapter relies on Raby’s reading of the literary history of English meditation poems, while adding close readings and contextualizations according to contemporary scholarship on art, meditation, and Anglo-Latin literature. I will be using Raby’s edition for all of the poems of John of Howden discussed here, except the Philomena.

118  The Musical Mother Tongue pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi, their spectacular poetic style featuring alliteration for emphasis and concrete verbal imagery is quintessentially English. Because they wrote during a formative era (1216–1307) for Anglo-Latin literature in which English poetry in Latin is less subject to continental models and tended more toward insular traditions, Wimborne and Howden had more scope to carve out a local literary practice for meditative literature. Once the Angevin Empire dissolved over the loss of Normandy in 1205 and the defeat at Bouvine in 1214, England may have lost both political control over and many literary exchanges with France, but also gained an opportunity to focus on its own native artistry. Within this seminal period, Wimborne and Howden can be established as contemporaries by records from 1260–66 that the former was a lector at Cambridge, and from 1268–69 that the latter witnessed documents.4 Wimborne recounts in his own poetry that he began as a schoolmaster for a college of secular canons and that he joined the Franciscans. Later in life, he may have been attached to the Franciscan community in Norwich. As for Howden, he was certainly a clerk for Queen Eleanor, wife of Henry III, and may have been prebendary of the church of Howden in Yorkshire.5 As contemporaneous writers working on a Marian foundation for English meditation literature, Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden should be considered together because they employ “many common themes and expressions; unfortunately we cannot be sure of the direction of the borrowings.”6 The thirteenth-century 4. Information about Walter of Wimborne’s life occurs in his poems. See A. G. Rigg, Introduction, The Poems of Walter of Wimborne, ed. A. G. Rigg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 4–5. For information about John of Howden, see Josiah Cox Russell, Dictionary of Writers in Thirteenth Century England (New York: Franklin, 1971), and also A. J. Taylor, in F. J. E. Raby, ed., The Poems of John of Howden, 270–74. 5. The identity of John of Howden has been the subject of debate. Both the Chronicle of Lanercost (ed. and trans. Sir Herbert Maxwell [rpt. Oxford: Oxbow, 2001]) and William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum (Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, 2 vols., ed. R. Howlett [London: Rolls Series, 1884–89], 2.571–72) narrate the life of a saintly prebendary who put his own money toward the new choir at Howden. This “John of Howden” was also an astrologer and author of the astronomical treatise, Practica Chilindri. He was assumed to be the same person as Eleanor’s clerk and poet until J. C. Russell cast doubt upon this association (Dictionary, 65). Because of the astrological allusions in the poems considered here, Raby argues that the two men were likely one and the same ( Introduction, Poems of John of Hoveden, xiv–xv), but Rigg takes a more cautious view (Anglo-Latin, 208). 6. Rigg, Anglo-Latin, 208.



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poetry of Walter of Wimborne, written for his students and brother Franciscans, and John of Howden, composed for an august courtly audience, abounds with images of the Virgin Mary and descriptive language that encourage their audience’s close attention, rumination, appropriation, and meditation.7 Wimborne and Howden meditate upon—and write for others to meditate upon—the Mother so that her tongue might speak for all to the divine audience, and not only her mouth, but also other parts of her body function as sites of inspiration. Wimborne and Howden offer sensual descriptions of the Virgin’s corporality in order to open up linguistic passageways to God and to present readers with cues for memory and devotion.

Contexts for Meditation The deep English roots of meditative Anglo-Latin, from which Wimborne and Howden sprouted a thirteenth-century insular canon and eventually Richard Rolle blossomed, were tended by authors such as St. Anselm of Canterbury and St. Aelred of Rievaulx. While Western methods of literacy taught that private meditation upon texts should lead to a moral application of them in life, Wimborne and Howden learned from St. Anselm the individualized nature of personal reading and petition to the divine, and from St. Aelred an active engagement with the text. Wimborne and Howden would add to the examples of their English forebears the teachings of the Franciscans, who demonstrated that compelling images for contemplation provide the best encouragement for individual participation in the reading. Although St. Anselm and St. Aelred both wrote meditations on the Virgin Mary, Wimborne and Howden would go on to accentuate her position as mother of the Christian perspective on Jesus’ life and of the best expression to describe it. They would also place an emphasis on music and song as a way to convey Marian expressions. Although St. Anselm was born in Aosta and wrote his most important works at Bec, he ended his life as archbishop of Canterbury under 7. I have chosen the name “Howden” rather than “Hoveden,” found in some contemporary scholarship. According to Louise W. Stone, (“Jean de Howden: poéte anglo-normande du XIIIe siècle,” Romania 69 [1946–47]: 469–519) the name “Howden” is established by the meter of the poet’s French translation of the Philomena, the Rossignos. See the following for the latest edition of the Rossignos: John of Howden, Rossignos, ed. Glynn Hesketh, Anglo-Norman Texts 63 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2006).

120  The Musical Mother Tongue William Rufus, and the fame of his writing had an influence over meditational practices in Britain and elsewhere. Arriving in France and then in England, he followed the star of Lanfranc, his teacher and mentor, whose archbishopric St. Anselm assumed in 1089. As Sister Benedicta Ward characterizes him, St. Anselm was a scholar whose thinking was grounded profoundly in monasticism.8 By adapting the monastic liturgy of the divine office to private prayer and meditation, St. Anselm revolutionized the practice of oratio. Before St. Anselm, the Benedictine hours provided the major context for lectio divina and prayer, and the purpose for meditation was most often to memorize the psalms so that one could recite them during scheduled services. In his Prayers and Meditations, however, St. Anselm emphasizes personal introspection in meditation and individual address to God in prayer, attitudes taken up by the narrators of Wimborne’s and Howden’s poems. Although R. W. Southern emphasizes the distance from the Benedictine “corporate, anonymous environment” in St. Anselm’s prayers, in which the “sinner stands alone before God,” it may be more accurate to say that St. Anselm’s orations reveal the depth of introspection possible in ritual prayer and offers that depth to individuals praying alone.9 Three of these Orationes St. Anselm dedicated to the Virgin Mary.10 St. Anselm’s third prayer to Mary is a model for Marian lauds, and I will concentrate on it briefly here because of its relevance to the later poems of Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden.11 In this prayer, St. Anselm minimizes the expressions of abjection dominating his first two Marian prayers and concentrates on praise. He restricts his descriptions of personal inadequacies to the humility topos that will become a standard address to the Virgin in Walter of Wimborne, John of Howden, and later authors. Like St. Anselm in his third prayer, Wimborne and Howden convey dejection only about the personal qualities that prohibit them from inventing divine verse. As with St. Anselm, praise is the key8. Sister Benedicta Ward, Anselm of Canterbury: A Monastic Scholar (Oxford: SLG Press, 1990). 9. Richard William Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 100; Rachel Fulton, “Praying with Anselm at Admont: A Meditation on Practice,” Speculum 18.3 ( 2006): 700–733. 10. S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, vol. 3, ed. Franciscus Salesius Schmitt (Stuttgart: Fromann, 1946), 5–91. 11. Southern, Saint Anselm, 108–9.



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note for Wimborne and Howden, and all of these devotees to the Virgin struggled to find language adequate for it and meditated upon the Virgin in order to attain it. St. Anselm declares, “My tongue fails me,” and reiterates that nothing he might say could be worthy of Mary’s perfection, expressions of insufficiency also found often in Wimborne and Howden.12 In their later poems, the Virgin herself must be muse for her own poetic praise, as she inspires the rhetorical invention of devotional language that is conveyed to the meditating audience through musical verse. In St. Anselm, the problem of addressing the Virgin is exacerbated by the Mother’s exalted role and the tenderness of her feelings as she enacts it. According to Rachel Fulton, the Virgin of St. Anselm’s prayers is the exemplar of suffering and compassion, yet she is lifted up as co-redemptrix, a powerful and empathetic Mother inspiring meditation, entreaty, and devotion.13 St. Anselm sets the tone for personal Marian lauds with his exclamations that the Virgin is “greatest among all women,” “Queen of angels,” “Mother of the life of [the] soul,” and “Palace of universal propitiation.”14 St. Anselm’s employment of the inexpressibility topos when attempting to describe the Virgin’s grandeur will provide the introduction to many later poems, and his heartfelt addresses to her incite the fervor of later Marian literature, but he stops short of the gorgeous Marian images for meditation that will be a hallmark of the Franciscans and their imitators, such as Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden. In contrast, St. Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–67) began to supply such images, although they are not yet as ornate or amplified as those of later Franciscans. St. Aelred was born in Hexham, served at the court of King David in Scotland, and became abbot first at Revesby in Lincolnshire and then at Rievaulx, where he had initially become a monk. Under the influence of his friend and fellow Cistercian St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Aelred became one of the most important writers for the history of Anglo-Latin literature, and like St. Bernard’s sermons, St. Aelred’s devotional works are uniquely fervent.15 Although for St. Bernard, St. Aelred, and 12. Sister Benedicta Ward, trans., The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, with the “Proslogion” (London: Penguin, 1973), 116. 13. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800– 1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 204. 14. Ward, Prayers, 115–18, lines 3, 19, 44, 91. 15. Rigg, Anglo-Latin, 61.

122  The Musical Mother Tongue other twelfth-century monks the ability to meditate without images was a spiritual ideal, ironically the rich nature of their portrayals of the holy family led to increased veneration of icons and visions of the divine.16 Both Wimborne and Howden participate in this increased veneration of holy images and entreat the Virgin’s aid in inventing the pictorial language that could create them. Of special importance to Walter of Wimborne’s Marie Carmina is St. Aelred’s De Jesu puero duodecenni, a treatise that chronicles Jesus’ threeday disappearance in the temple and focuses on the anxiety of his mother.17 St. Aelred writes Jesus at the Age of Twelve for his friend Ivo, who had requested an explanation, according to the prologue, of “where the boy Jesus was during those days when his mother was looking for him, where he found shelter, what food he ate, in what company he took pleasure, what business occupied him.”18 Since the gospels are silent on these details, St. Aelred extrapolated them and others from his belief in Jesus’ divine mission, from experience with maternal concerns and knowledge of scriptural exegesis. For instance, when Mary finds her boy among the teachers in the temple, he was, St. Aelred explains, revealing God’s providential design. Seeing Jesus safe and the center of scholarly attention, Mary’s relief bubbles up to excitement and she exclaims, as in the Song of Songs 3:4, “I found . . . him whom my soul loves.”19 By amplifying the gospel narrative of Jesus’ three days in the temple, St. Aelred did not invent a new rhetorical mode for exegesis. Certainly, Origen, Jerome, and others had added to the scenes of scripture in their efforts to illuminate them. St. Aelred’s contribution consists, instead, in presenting the biblical tableau as if he himself, or the reader, were present, and this new sense of immediacy made the ancient technique of amplification even more compelling and more popular.20 While revealing the details of Je16. S. Bernardi Opera, vol. 8, Tractatus et opuscula, eds., Jean Leclercq and H. M. Rochais (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963), 63–108; Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 113. 17. In the Marie Carmina Wimborne’s stanzas 262–312 include the episode of Jesus in the temple. Resources for and editions of Aelred’s works include the following. Most works can be found in Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, vol. 1, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, Opera ascetica, CCCM 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), especially 662–73. Other sources include PL 195 and Quand Jésus eut douze ans, ed. Anselme Hoste and trans. Joseph Dubois (Paris: Cerf, 1958). 18. Theodore Berkeley, trans., Jesus at the Age of Twelve, The Works of Aelred of Rievaulx, vol. 1 (Spenser, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 4. 19. Ibid., 11. 20. Ibid., 4, n. 5.



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sus’ disappearance, St. Aelred’s narrator steps in to question the Mother and talk to God. Creating allegorical and moral lessons for Ivo after telling the story, St. Aelred encourages his friend to imitate the narrator and involve himself personally in meditating on this treatise, to consider how, like the journey of Jesus, the soul begins a poor wretch in Bethlehem and grows toward the celestial delights of Jerusalem.21 Both Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden continue St. Aelred’s work by speaking through a narrator who is present and active at biblical scenes in order to bring the reader to the very site for meditation. The Virgin Mary stands at the sites that the meditator hopes to occupy, and in addition to Wimborne’s and Howden’s Marian positioning, their appropriation of Mary-inspired phrases to describe their contemplative locations led to a feminized exegetical language that replayed endlessly with every new reader of their poems. The composition of meditational verse in thirteenth-century England is related not only to innovations in English devotions and St. Bernard’s inf luence over English authors, but also and especially to the arrival of the Franciscans in 1224. Although Wimborne was a friar minor and Howden was not, the poems of both participate in what Denise Despres calls a “Franciscan meditative tradition” that, like the order’s own practices of living, combine the contemplative with the active in order to provoke the prayerful penitent’s engagement with God.22 Like St. Aelred, the Franciscans bring the reader into the biblical scene, but in their work the scene is more detailed and embellished, and the meditating reader is wholly transformed by it. This interactive and personally transformative style of meditation suited the Franciscan life. In contradistinction to cloistered monks, friars went out into communities, preaching and ministering, their good deeds guided by a life of prayer. Even though John of Howden was not a Franciscan, he too lived a life that mixed contemplation and action through his activities at court. Meant for those who interact with the public, the Franciscan literature of meditation is dedicated to prayerful hours and methods of focusing a busy mind on God. Encouraging both quiet amidst an active life and imagined action within the time for meditation, this literature establish21. Ibid., 26. 22. Denise Despres, Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval Literature (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1989), 6–8, 19.

124  The Musical Mother Tongue es a scene of contemplation and an image of devotion so that the reader might interact with the vision. We can see why the busy housewife, mother, and mystic Margery Kempe, who is the subject of chapter 6, would be especially drawn to Franciscan teachings. Francis’s own reception of the stigmata taught that those who meditated on pictures of Christ and identified with his suffering could become both bodily and spiritually like him. Both Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden offered poetic tableaux encouraging even such merging of humanity with the godhead, but first they constructed Marian principles of language and rhetorical strategies that could express this holy interaction. For those willing to concentrate, images such as those invoked by both Wimborne and Howden arrested the prayerful in the midst of their eventful lives by unlocking strong feelings and recollections. For instance, Wimborne’s depiction in the Marie Carmina of a distraught Virgin searching for the lost boy Jesus, or Howden’s in the Philomena of the Virgin’s nursing breast, serve as reminders of maternal care and nurturing, connecting the readers’ earliest memories with Mary.23 St. Bonaventure, who became the minister general of the Franciscan order in 1257, was especially interested in reviving biblical teachings through popular literature and in leading the reader in a contemplative process that could lead to ecstasy.24 As a result, Franciscan meditations sought to tell the stories of Mary and Jesus in a way that would grip the minds and hearts of their audiences, eventually drawing them to a more intimate understanding of the divine. The most famous of these meditational texts, the Meditationes vitae Christi, was attributed to Bonaventure during the Middle Ages and drew the reader to empathize with the Mother’s observations of the life of her son.25 In his own Lignum vitae, St. Bonaventure intersperses scenes from Christ’s life with his own instruction for meditation, a structure that both Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden 23. Wimborne, Marie Carmina, 262–310; Howden, Philomena, 10–12. 24. Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure (Patterson, N.J.: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1965), 309–64. 25. M. Stallings-Taney, Iohannes de Caulibus Meditaciones vite Christi, olim S. Bonauenturo attributae, CCCM 153 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). Sarah McNamer argues that the long text of this work, represented in Stallings-Taney’s edition and written by the Franciscan Johannes de Caulibus, is an emendation and extension of “an earlier, livelier, and more radically ‘incarnational’ recension [Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon. Ital. 174] originally written by another author . . . [who was possibly] a Poor Clare” (907). See Sarah McNamer, “The Origins of the Meditationes vitae Christi,” Speculum 84.4 (2009), 905–55.



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follow.26 Barbara Newman notes that “meditational scripts to help believers visualize the life of Christ” often functioned as “spiritual training . . . [in] visionary experience,” and thus, the vivid images of St. Bonaventure, Wimborne, and Howden reproduce more divine pictures for worship in the minds of the meditator.27 We may well wonder whether Wimborne, when composing for schoolboys, hoped that the holy images they internalized during grammar and rhetoric lessons would surface in mature Marian prayers. Wimborne and Howden’s contemporaneity with St. Bonaventure shows that the meditative process followed in all of their writings is not one that proceeds from an important theologian to its practitioners, but a tradition deeply embedded in England and elsewhere that found its voice in the mid-thirteenth century. As texts for and about meditation began to present images in the Franciscan way, they self-consciously approached the pictorial arts.28 Like paintings and stained-glass windows representing biblical narrative, literary images, in Mary Carruthers’s estimation, were also rhetorical, “addressed directly to the memory of the reader, for it is only in one’s vis imaginativa and memoria that they are given picture form.”29 It is no surprise then that the development of a pictorial literature for meditation coincides with movements in the material arts proceeding from Rome. For instance, as Hans Belting has documented, the Imago Pietatis, or Man of Sorrows, made its way from Byzantine iconography to the West during the thirteenth century, the same time as texts such as the pseudo-St. Bonaventure’s famous Meditationes vitae Christi became popular and the poetry of Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden was written.30 Belting notes that with the new popularity of the Imago in Rome and the concomitant explosion of Passion art through26. Bonaventure, The Tree of Life, in The Soul’s Journey into God, trans. and ed. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 117–76. 27. Barbara Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture,” Speculum 80.1 (2005), 2–3. 28. Beryl Smalley notes the practice of pictora poesis of certain Franciscan friars in English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960), 112–18. 29. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 229. 30. Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and Raymond Meyer (New York: Aristide D. Caratzas, 1990), 1–8.

126  The Musical Mother Tongue out Europe, many images were created to accompany devotional texts at the same time that detailed pictures were written inside of these texts. The centrality of images to the devotions of nuns, well documented by Jeffrey Hamburger, demonstrates that the spread of art works and descriptions of the Passion and other holy events were not simply crutches for the unlettered, but aids to learning and cloistered worship.31 Taken together, Passion art and writings for meditation instilled in the reader and viewer a process for contemplation that included both attention to the movement of the Christological narrative and pause for gazing on scenes of that narrative. Images depicting the life of Christ manifested the divine in the material, as did the Incarnation, while allowing the viewers, themselves made in the image of God, to identify with the art and feel unity with Christ. Often, as in the case of Wimborne’s and Howden’s poetry, the viewer’s gaze rests upon the Virgin, cosufferer at the cross and partner in Christ’s life, who is in her own gazing an intermediary between the sinful and God. Or, it may be more accurate to say that the meditator’s gaze creates a communion with the Virgin, if we take into account how Franciscan belief in physical transformation might have colluded with medieval ocular theories such as Roger Bacon’s, which asserted that the body of the onlooker is altered by its subject.32 Recording their own imaginative visions of a lovely Virgin supporting the maturation and mission of Christ, Wimborne and Howden construct and participate in Marian pictures, their narrative subjects feminized by their adoration of the Virgin’s body and acceptance of the language she grants them to describe it. Whereas religious art may manifest the viewer’s faith and challenge interpretive skills, meditation literature prompts the reader to personalize and amplify the narrator’s picture of a divine scene. Often in the poetry of Wimborne and Howden, and later in that of Richard Rolle, song becomes a vehicle for conveying the narrator’s Marian vision to the reader for meditative realization. While there is invention in every reaction to art, the object of meditation is constructed anew from contemplative 31. Hamburger, Visual and the Visionary, 3–48. 32. For a discussion of Bacon’s treatment of sight in the De multiplicatione specierum, see Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), especially chap. 3, 63–84. An extreme proof of Bacon’s theory of the onlooker’s bodily transformation would be St. Francis’s receipt of the stigmata from a vision of the Passion of Christ. See Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 136–40.



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literature through memories of biblical narrative and related images. Once the reader constructs the vision of a devotional scene from the foundation of “the house of memory,” these materials in the mind are meant to lead to the eternal immaterial.33 As St. Bonaventure explains in the Itinerarium mentis ad Deum, mental recreations of worldly or textual matter are “tracks, simulacra and spectacles; they are divinely given signs set before us for the purpose of seeing God.”34 Presenting pictures in verse for the interpreter’s reconstruction, the poet, following God, is a maker of worlds meant to lead eventually to heaven.35

Walter of Wimborne One such maker, Walter of Wimborne, wrote satires for grammar school teaching, a treatise on the four elements ref lecting scientific studies in Cambridge, and, of course, Marian verse. Wimborne’s masterpiece, the Marie Carmina, a poetic narrative of Jesus’ life in which the narrator takes the Virgin’s point of view, combines an Anselmian invocation to the Virgin and St. Aelred’s sense of immediacy with references to scholasticism and lifelike descriptions of the holy family. Dedicated to the grammar school boys in the town of Wimborne so that they might pray for him, the Marie Carmina leads the reader’s contemplation of Mary through a series of memorable images.36 In the Ave Virgo Mater Christi, 164 Victorine stanzas of Marian praise, Wimborne explains that Mary herself is the language upon which his Franciscan devotional verse is built. According to the Ave Virgo, meditation on the Virgin is akin to trivium studies through which the learner masters Latin for everyday use. Wimborne probably taught from the Ave Virgo, since the poem defines a number of basic terms in grammar, rhetoric, and logic. For instance, as instruction in the literary interpretation that took place in the grammar classroom, Wimborne discusses the peeling away of a text’s literal meaning to arrive at the significance.37 For rhetoric, he defines 33. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 223. 34. Quoted in David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 165. 35. Freedberg, Power of Images, 166. 36. Wimborne, Marie Carmina, 643. 1–2: “Hoc opus pueris legendum offero;/ illi me precibus commendent.” 37. Wimborne, Ave Virgo, 3.

128  The Musical Mother Tongue eloquence as the spontaneous eruption of pious words, and for logic, he provides an example of major and minor premises.38 In fact, the Ave Virgo Mater Christi is much like John of Garland’s Epithalamium or Parisiana Poetria, as discussed in chapter 2, because Wimborne’s poem also uses descriptions of the Virgin Mary in order to teach principles of the seven arts. Wimborne’s Ave Virgo, however, accomplishes this teaching in a much more contemplative register; rather than providing a psychomachia of a battle-brave Virgin conquering the sins or a simple list of Marian verse showing patterns of discourse, Wimborne’s discrete images of the Virgin reflecting concepts from the trivium arrest the student and encourage rumination and remembrance. For example, the poem’s opening focuses on Latin and Greek letters of the alphabet, and depicts the Virgin as the “vein of life through whom the initial letter of the Greek word for foul death [“theta”] breaks off.”39 The students are invited to remember “theta” in its connection with death and imagine the Virgin’s holy life force disintegrating the letter. Besides the stasis of meditative stanzas, another important difference between Wimborne’s Ave Virgo and Garland’s pedagogical poems is the age of the former’s students: boys about ten years old versus the teenagers and young men who would have been Garland’s pupils. Whereas Garland dazzles members of the universities at Paris and Toulouse with complicated allegories in imitation of Martianus, Wimborne capitalizes on passages with an entertaining dramatic flair, such as the one in which he calls himself an owl (“ulula”) attempting to hoot about the Virgin.40 Furthermore, Wimborne’s close attention to the various beauties of the Virgin’s body, like the beautiful bend of the Virgin’s knee (“pulcra flexu fragi”) would no doubt have piqued the interest of his boys.41 While the Ovidian texts ubiquitous in medieval grammar classes and the new thirteenthcentury artes poetriae appeal to older boys through salacious narratives and exercises, Wimborne’s catalog of the Virgin’s beautiful body parts tantalizes, but nevertheless encourages a sanctioned admiration.42 38. Ibid., 33, 72. 39. Ibid., 2. 5–6: “Uena uite per quam theta / tetre mortis explicit.” 40. Ibid.,141. 6. 41. Ibid., 94. 1. 42. See the discussions of medieval trivium studies in chaps. 1 and 4. On Ovid, sexuality and rape in medieval classroom texts, see Marjorie Curry Woods, “Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence,” in Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, ed. Rita Copeland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56–86.



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Opening with the Virgin’s connection to the alphabet and continuing to Marian principles of hermeneutics, the Ave Virgo Mater Christi shows that Mary is the high magistra of the grammar class. Able to strip any text’s literal narrative down to its spiritual meaning, the Virgin embodies the best of commentaries. Since she bore the Word, her own body, so lovingly detailed, is a “comentum” that “fleshes out” the scripture.43 Between learning the alphabet and interpreting Latin texts, the boys must learn grammar and syntax, and in the Ave Virgo Mary constitutes the parts of speech for devotional verse. “The name of God is a noun,” Wimborne explains, and “in [the Virgin] He takes an adjective.”44 That is, if God is the original image or essence, the Virgin is a good description, as her spirit bends to the likeness of his will. Therefore, both student and poet would do well to meditate upon the “parts” of Mary and describe the godhead through her language. Essential to the teachings on both literacy and literary interpretation in Wimborne’s grammar classroom, the Virgin Mother may be compared to classical and medieval constructions of Lady Grammar, who, as Gary P. Cestaro illustrates, is sometimes depicted as offering the nutriments of language from her nourishing breast.45 In the Ave Virgo the Virgin’s body, praised for the beautiful hips, navel, and lovely lips surpassing those of Venus, is parsed and reconstructed in the creation of religious texts.46 It is as Catherine Chin remarks concerning the development of Christian discursive practices in the late Roman world: “Grammar’s significance as a practice . . . lies in its contribution to subjective disassembly and reconstitution.”47 In Wimborne’s Ave Virgo, Mary’s body is a panoply of lovely signs for divine communication that may be disassembled and reconstituted for different contexts. Wimborne contends that such grammatical analysis of the Virgin’s beauty leads to divine ecstasy:

43. Wimborne, Ave Virgo, 3. 44. Ibid., 59. 4–5: “nomen Dei substantiuum / in te capit adiectiuum.” 45. Gary P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 15–20, 35. 46. Wimborne, Ave Virgo, 88. 6, 91–92. 47. Catherine M. Chin, Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 170.

130  The Musical Mother Tongue Aue pulcra flexu fragi, uincens trica quicquid Tagi fuluum ripe redditur; aue, pulcra per quam, in qua Deitatis lux propinqua pulcre nobis oritur. Hail to one beautiful in the bend of the knee, surpassing with your hair whatever gold is washed up on the shore of the Tagus; hail beautiful one through whom, in whom the light of the deity draws near beautifully rises to us.48

Beautiful in drawing the faithful toward God but not carnal, the Virgin’s chastity provides inspiration for prayer.49 The cataloging of her physical attributes supplies meditational imagery through a somatic grammar.50 Wimborne’s students received a storehouse of pictures for contemplation in the Ave Virgo, as well as grammatical advice for their own Marian descriptions. In Marian syntax, according to the Ave Virgo, the Virgin in her embodiment of holiness is not only the prominent adjective to the noun “God,” but she is also every other noun declension supporting God’s nominative. That is, if God is the subject of every sentence—the tenor of every description and the actor of every action—the Virgin enables God’s speech act, the incarnation of the Word. In his discussion of noun cases, Wimborne explains that while God is the nominative, the Virgin is genitive, dative, and ablative: Tu mortis es ablatiua, quia prolis genitiua sine culpa genite, tu fletus est abstersiua, restauratrix et datiua libertatis perdite. 48. Wimborne, Ave Virgo, 94. 49. Ibid., 101. 50. For descriptions of Mary’s beauty, the Ave Virgo Mater Christi relies on typological terms established by the Dominican Richard of St. Laurent (1239–45); Walter adds to these Marian symbols in a way that creates memorable images. For instance, Mary is not only the star of the sea and a ship of faith, but a bark brimful of new merchandise, bringing these goods swiftly to the world. See Rigg, Anglo-Latin, 219.



The Musical Mother Tongue 131 You are the destroyer [ablative] of death because you are the bearer [genitive] of a son born from one without fault; you are weeping washed away, restorer and giver [dative] of lost liberty.51

In the stanza above, Wimborne describes the Virgin’s different roles in salvation by punning on and in the process teaching the terms for Latin declensions. While God is a noun in the subject position of the sentence, Mary can either modify that subject position or form her own noun in the possessive, ablative, or objective cases. Mary thus enhances, belongs to, becomes the agent for, or receives the actions of God. Mary created holy language through her participation in the Incarnation. By uniting “verbo” with “pneuma” (word with breath), she made pious expression possible for humankind, and by instructing his students in Marian language, Wimborne makes pious expression possible for them.52 The Ave Virgo reminds the reader frequently that, within her womb, Mary reenacted creation according to the Gospel of St. John, where all began with the Word.53 She is “uerbi zeta” (the final letter of the word), “uerbi cella” (temple of the word), “uas uerbale” (vessel of the word), “uerbi casula” (little cottage of the word).54 By containing the Word, wonderful speech-act of creation inside her, the Virgin became the best of mortal rhetoricians, in comparison to whom, according to the Ave Virgo, even the sharpest orator sounds vile.55 By inverting power structures in both human and divine institutions, the Virgin reverses all, including sin and judgment: Aue per quam fit creator creature ministrator, dominus mancipium,

51. Wimborne, Ave Virgo, 61; In his note on stanza 61, Rigg notes that the “D” version of the poem compares Mary to the accusative, as well. For a discussion of the grammatical punning throughout Medieval Latin literature, see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Pantheon, 1953), 414–16. 52. Wimborne, Ave Virgo, 31. 5. 53. Ibid., 1. 54. Ibid., 7. 1, 8. 1, 27. 1, 75. 3. 55. Ibid., 35. 5–6: “omnis rethor acer acet / et sordet eloquio.”

132  The Musical Mother Tongue rei iudex [us] Jhesus rhetor primus puer blesus, uerbum participium. Hail one through whom the creator becomes servant of the creature, the lord becomes a formal purchase, Jesus, judge of all things, becomes an accused criminal, the best rhetorician becomes a lisping boy, the Word becomes a participant in creation.56

Having embodied the divine command and rendered its speaker (the “rhetor primus”) a cooing infant, Mary gives birth to the incarnated Word, the vulnerable godhead who is willing to be tried for our salvation. Just as in chapter 1 we saw that Mary’s wisdom is associated with Christ’s trinitarian role of Wisdom, so in pedagogical texts such as John of Garland’s and Wimborne’s Ave Virgo, Mary’s mastery of language is associated with Christ’s role as the Word, and specifically her reputation as an orator derives from her son, “the best rhetorician.” As she introduces the figure of God’s speech to mortals, the Virgin’s own style in employing language is a model for those who yearn for salvation: Wimborne remarks in the Ave Virgo that Mary is “silent on worldly subjects, garrulous about divinity,” and that her eloquence lays the high scribe low and sours the sweetest rhetoric.57 Once Wimborne’s students attain a basic understanding of Latin grammar, including Marian declensions, and begin their own compositions, the Virgin’s circumspection offers a model of style—a style that reverses expectations about elaborating upon noble secular subjects in formal diction and presses them to amplify only on religious matters. After gaining competency in grammar and rhetoric, Wimborne’s schoolboys might have gone on to study logic. The Ave Virgo Mater Christi makes clear that while the Virgin overturns reasonable expectations in the Virgin Birth, she nevertheless offers a Christian understanding of logical terms. In Wimborne’s instruction in the deductive process, Mary offers the middle term between flesh and spirit, or the minor premise between the major assertion and the conclusion.58 If 56. Ibid., 122; see Rigg’s edition of Wimborne’s poems for his note about the crux at 122. 4. 57. Ibid., 116. 2–3: “de mundanis muta, tacens, / de diuinis garula”; ibid., 35. 58. Also in the Howden, Philomena, 539. See the note in Rigg’s edition of Wimborne’s poems for stanza 71.



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God is the major premise and the creation is what may be deduced from him, then Mary is a primary example of the manifestation of the Word. Wimborne claims that the major premise may be inferred from the minor, since Mary reproduces God, and the minor from the major, since Mary is a creation of God.59 Such inverted spiritual logic is the result of Wimborne’s paradoxical grammar of the Marian signifier. Because “the original Word is derived” from its derivative in the Nativity, Mary becomes the root Word and the indubitable conclusion in any deduction based on definitions.60 The Ave Virgo teaches basic definitions and practices in grammar, rhetoric, and logic at the same time that it offers mental pictures for memorization and meditation. The Ave Virgo asserts that Mary’s body constitutes a grammar, her righteous speech a religious rhetoric, and her role in salvation a holy logic. With its references to Marian characteristics and paradoxical roles, the poem offers detailed and engaging instruction in the starting principles of the language arts and compelling images to associate with those principles. In the Marie Carmina, Wimborne continues to teach the elements of Marian language by explaining how the name “Maria” undergirds all effective discourse. The Marie Carmina, Wimborne’s masterpiece, tells the story of the holy family through the Passion, its narrator interacting with the biblical characters and always sympathizing with the Mother’s point of view. The narrator’s position in the Marie Carmina, therefore, is similar to St. Aelred’s in De Jesu puero duodecenni, to which Wimborne alludes, and to St. Bonaventure’s in his many devotional works. Such positioning as one meditating upon the joys and trials of the holy family inspires readers to similarly interactive meditations upon Jesus and Mary’s lives. When read by the schoolboys at Wimborne, the interactive nature of the Marie Carmina could have catalyzed the sort of classroom theater that Martin Camargo has demonstrated to have been a staple of instruction in grammar and rhetoric.61 Besides a participating narrator who invites his audience to participate in events surrounding the holy family, the Marie Carmina binds the language of Maria to its readers in another way: through music. The plural use of “carmen/carmina” 59. Wimborne, Ave Virgo, 72. 60. Ibid., 60. 2: “Primitiuum derivatur.” 61. Martin Camargo, “Medieval Rhetoric Delivers; or, Where Chaucer Learned How to Act,” New Medieval Literatures 9 (2008): 41–62.

134  The Musical Mother Tongue in the title suggests poems, lyrics, or songs of, about, or by the Virgin. Although the Marie Carmina tells a whole life story of Jesus through Mary’s eyes, “carmina’s” plurality invites a division of episodes for contemplative concentration, grammar lessons, or classroom staging. For each of these scenes the poem’s song has the capacity to carry visions either seeing or seen by Mary to the audience. Wimborne dedicates the Marie Carmina to his students, young boys in the school at Wimborne who might identify with the Christ child and the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, whose story the poet adapts from St. Aelred’s. In the penultimate stanza, Wimborne writes: Hoc opus pueris legendum offero; illi me precibus commendent puero qui sero prodiit de uentre tenero ante luciferum de patris utero. This literary work I present to the boys to read; May they commend me in their prayers to the boy Who emerged in a late hour from the tender womb Before the morning star, from the belly of the parent.62

Appropriate for both the edification of his students and the devotions of his Franciscan brothers, the Marie Carmina soon looks to the Virgin’s womb for the Word to emerge, the source of aesthetic beauty and Christian communication.63 Just as his students and peers learned their ABCs and elementary Latin from Marian liturgies and songs, Wimborne implies, so they must await the emergence of the Word from Mary’s womb in order to compose a poem of praise. The Marie Carmina begins to tell Mary’s story by emphasizing her intimacy with the Word. It presents striking depictions of her as Mother of the Word and muse and of the narrator’s progress toward an oratory inspired by her. Mary’s associations with divine language begin at the Annunciation as Gabriel explains that Mary will become pregnant with the Christ child through the angelic proclamation: the Word will enter her and be enclosed in her womb.64 In the invocation to this poem, Wimborne meditates upon Mary so that he might be infused with her rhetoric and capable of praise. He relies heavily on the inexpressibili62. Wimborne, Marie Carmina, 643. 64. Ibid., 102. 3–4.

63. Ibid., 9. 1–2.



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ty and humility topoi developed by St. Anselm in an attempt to characterize the Virgin’s paradoxical exaltation and availability as the mater and materia of his own linguistic and poetic achievements. According to Wimborne, Mary is so superior that, even if every atom of the world took up a pen, “such a great number of praises would neither suffice nor describe the heel of the worthy Virgin,” but it is through her grace alone that creation’s language is possible.65 Granting her grace to the composition of the Marie Carmina, the Virgin deigns to place a pen in the undeserving poet’s hand.66 Trembling at the sight of her gift, the narrator offers himself up completely to Mary and promises to publish all that comes to him through her inspiration.67 Wimborne declares even his divinely influenced poetry inadequate, but without the Virgin’s aid, it would be disgusting, merely so much vomit.68 As it is, he must sit shaking and taking dictation at Mary’s feet, his pen dull and excruciatingly slow, the result weak with confused meaning.69 Here is an introduction that appeals both to the schoolboy’s delight in excretions (vomit) and the master’s debasement and to the Franciscan expectation of deep humility before Mary. In this invocation, the narrator indicates to all audiences that he is unable simply to convey the Mother’s meaning to the faithful, and through the composition of the Marie Carmina he must learn from Mary to internalize and deliver moving Marian material. By invoking Mary and declaring his endless availability for her inspiration, Wimborne’s narrator models a process of invention for religious poetry: meditate upon the divine subject, accept the discourse that arises, and form its language into meditations for others.70 Approaching the story of the Nativity, however, the narrator loses confidence in this process and seems even more abject than in the invocation. He entered the poem in a humiliating position comparable to that of his students—at the feet of his divine schoolmistress. The humble posture of Wimborne’s narrator promises the feminized discourse to come and puts the speaker at the same level as a primary school 65. Ibid., 4: “Si iam in calamos mundus decideret / et omnis athomus attente scriberet, / nec tantus numerus laudi sufficeret / nec calcem uirginis digne describeret.” 66. Ibid., 6. 4. 67. Ibid., 7. 68. Ibid., 2. 2. 69. Ibid., 8. 70. This is the same process of invention advocated by St. Augustine in the De doctrina Christiana. See On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1958), 4.15.32.

136  The Musical Mother Tongue student who learns his first Latin lessons from hymns and prayers to the Mother. Whereas Wimborne’s narrator began the poem as a selfcharacterized bumbler struggling about on the floor, at the point of articulating the Virgin’s significance in salvation during the Nativity, he becomes a nocturnal creature blinded by the divine light. In the following stanza, he describes himself as a blinking bat and as a screech owl (“bubo”), just as he compares the verses he composes without Mary’s aid to the cry of a hoot-owl (“ulula”) in the Ave Virgo: Canit solifuga de solis radio; diem horissono bubo preconio commendat, predicat, et uespertilio conniuens oculis scribit de Clario. Fleeing from the sun, the owl screeches about a ray of the sun; with horrible-sounding owl-crying he dedicates the day; he preaches, and the bat with blinking eyes writes about Apollo.71

In the lines above, the bat or owl is incapable of both seeing and responding to God, the “sun,” and Mary, who receives the bright “ray.” With “blinking eyes,” this vermin is blind to what he and others have written. Although Jesus, the sun / Son is the Christian equivalent of Apollo and stands for divine illumination in poetry, the Lord’s creature and devotee must hide in the dark and hoot until Mary’s inspiration permeates his poetry. The “horrible-sounding owl-crying” that he emits before the dawn of the Virgin’s light sounds just as repulsive in Latin as in an avian screech, and the narrator ironically compares his hooting to singing (“canit”), the ultimate goal for a carmen of meditational melody, the Marie Carmina. In this misery, the poet relies heavily on Mary’s uplifting hand and the language springing from her name. Acknowledging, however, that even Virgil would have been incapable of adequate Marian praise, the poet is compelled to explain again why he bothers to write and through what means his poem might find divine favor.72 As he explicates the paradox of his efforts in verse, “the weight of his [Marian] theme indicates silence, but garrulous love commands the opposite.”73 In this assertion, the nar71. Wimborne, Marie Carmina, 192. 72. Ibid., 194. 73. Ibid., 197. 1–2: “Indicit themati pondus silencium, / sed amor garrulus iubet contrarium.”



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rator echoes Wimborne’s teaching in the Ave Virgo that the Virgin is garrulous about holy things: the poet pursues his quest to imitate and learn from the Virgin so that he might sing about her. Since the Marie Carmina is a response to love’s impulses, he declares his poem imperfect, but sufficient, grounded in the stability of Mary’s name.74 Just as the Ave Virgo analyzes a Marian grammar that allows for divine discourse, the Marie Carmina employs the name of Mary as the key to songs of praise. While human speech is transitory and its expressions inadequate, Mary’s name is an enduring and effective signifier: “hoc uerbum . . . laudis est baiulum” (This word [Mary] . . . is the porter of praise).75 For seven stanzas, Wimborne elaborates upon the delights of reading and hearing “Maria”: this section of the poem reproduces the poet’s meditation upon her holy name and invites the reader to pause in its pronouncement and reflect upon its meaning.76 Received by Wimborne in dictation from “Maria,” the name “Maria” self-identifies the Virgin in her own sanctified language. Since only the names of Mary and Jesus ground devout expression, Wimborne admits doubts about language as taught in the schools. This admission must have been a delight to the students fidgeting in their seats and a suggestion (welcome or not) to school administrators. A schoolmaster himself who dedicated his work to his pupils, Wimborne repudiates grammar and scholastic endeavor to underscore his narrator’s humility and in this way to provide a humble model for those approaching his songs as meditations. Claiming his own lack of preparation to sing of Mary, Wimborne’s narrator impugns every level of language arts learning. Basic grammatical instruction is useless, Wimborne complains: Quero que congruant uerba preconio, et in gramatice minera fodio, sed diu fodiens nichil proficio; incultum enim est quicquid inuenio. I lament that the words in the speech must be congruent, and I dig in the mine of grammar, but while digging do not profit; For whatever I invent is even uncultivated.77

74. Ibid., 200. 76. Ibid., 208–14.

75. Ibid., 203. 3. 77. Ibid., 198.

138  The Musical Mother Tongue According to the frustrated narrator, the more he delves into his linguistic knowledge, the worse the expression. He likens the mining of his expertise to what is “uncultivated,” offering a comparison between what is cultured and what is plowed. The locus of learning is Mary’s womb implanted with the divine seed, but the narrator is no better than a rude farmer who has let his own fields lie fallow in failure to contemplate the Mother of all earth. The grammatical curriculum is bankrupt, the narrator claims, because human language is transitory. Wimborne uses vocabulary with the root “vol” for “flight” to describe earthly speech; for instance the word is “uolatili” (volatile), characterized by “volucre” (a flighty thing).78 The result of “praise that is wrapped up in hasty speech [is that it] quickly and noisily becomes useless clattering.”79 Even the implements used to pin speech down in writing are flawed. Walter claims that his pen is “blunt” and that all the manuscript leaves in the world could not cover Mary’s praises.80 Beyond the failure of grammar to teach a diction and syntax appropriate to Marian song and beyond the breakdown in rhetorical teachings about composition and effective delivery, Wimborne claims that even the great Latin masters of literature could provide him no model for Christian praise. Even the hexameters of classical verse are no help, the narrator claims: “Once I wrote a song about Mary in hexameters,” he sighs, “but her truth is asymmetrical.”81 For Wimborne, Mary’s “asymmetry” resides in her many holy reversals of logical expectation, that she is mother of her creator, for instance. To jar the reader into acceptance and veneration of Marian paradoxes, Wimborne employs an asclepiadic verse that alternates short and long meters, rather than offering six consistent meters (hexameter). Though not symmetrical, Wimborne’s asclepiad is certainly regular and easy to memorize, encouraging further opportunities to ruminate upon what he has written. When combined with consistent rhyme and alliteration, striking amplifications and other figures of speech, the verse in the Marie Carmina gives the impression 78. Ibid., 201. 1, 203. 1. 79. Ibid., 201. 2–4: laus que conicitur sermone cursili /cursim cum strepitu transit inutile.” 80. Ibid., 2. 1: “In laudes ebetum stilum exacuo”; the metaphorical equation of tree leaves (folia) and texts occurs in 5. 2. 81. Ibid., 1. 1–2: “Marie carmina quondam exametra / scripsi, sed ueritas eius assimetra”; the poem in hexameters is either lost or not yet identified.



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of a unit tightly organized in imitation of the Virgin’s inviolate body and in form for singing. Grounded in the name “Maria,” stanza 5 (B 1) from the Marie Carmina provides an apt illustration of Walter’s form and style: Pone scribencium tot esse milia quot habent nemora frondes et folia, litus lapillulos et guttas maria, indigne uirginis scribent preconia. Behind thousands of scribblers there are as many branches and leaves as the woods have, as many pebbles as on the beach and drops as in the sea: these rhetoricians will write unworthily about the Virgin.

In the stanza above, the asclepiadic quatrain employs twelve meters per line and the demanding rhyme scheme of aaaa. The repetitive rhyme scheme renders each stanza a unit, as if a bead for prayer. The initial choriamb, a sequence of four syllables proceeding stressed-unstressedunstressed-stressed, binds the meter of each line, and the rhymes underscore the key theme of countless, yet insufficient Marian praises. “Milia” (thousands) and “folia” (leaves) repeat the word-ending “lia” and through reiteration underscore humanity’s endless, yet still inadequate production of Marian lauds. Since the word “folia” puns on manuscript pages, the stanza suggests that there are as many pages in books extolling the Virgin as leaves in a forest. The ending juxtaposition of “maria” (the sea) and “preconia” (rhetoric) provides the solution to the problem of innumerable yet insufficient lauds; since “maria” puns on the Virgin’s name, it promises a new rhetoric grounded in a stable and satisfactory signifier. In the stanza above and everywhere in the Marie Carmina Mary is both the language and subject of a meditative vision. The pebbles on the Marian beach are “little pebbles,” or “lapillulos,” with the diminutive “ulos” often used by Wimborne to invoke precious feeling and contribute to the personification of a landscape reflecting Mary’s place in creation. While the alliteration is not heavy, repetition of m in “scribencium,” “milia,” “nemora,” “maria” brings the idea of as many writings as leaves in the woods back to Maria and a word in the controlling rhyme that will help the reader to remember Marian lessons or meditations.

140  The Musical Mother Tongue For all poetic forms and content, the writer must look to Mary’s mellifluous name, which, with its sweet sound, encourages a collective response. It is a name “figuitur in uerbo stabili” (fixed in a stable word), in contrast to the rest of human language whipping about in breath and wind.82 Because he dwells on “Maria,” Wimborne can justify the writing of the Marie Carmina: Laus fixa uirginis in illo figitur uerbo quod permanens et fixum legitur, quod ineffabilem perfecte loquitur, quod Dei filius et Deus dicitur. Praise set on the Virgin is fixed on a word that is permanent and set when read, a word that speaks the ineffable [God and Son] perfectly, a word that is called God’s Son and God.83

The rewards of concentrating on Mary’s name are the employment of a divine language, an intimate connection with the Virgin and the opportunity to share in the events of her life. “Maria” opens the door to the gospel narratives, and so having prayed in her holy name and entreated God to “recall these times,” the narrator finds himself coming into Bethlehem after the departure of the Magi.84 When the holy family escapes into Egypt, he is the ass upon which Mary rides.85 After they return to Judea, visit Jerusalem, and lose the boy Jesus in the temple, Wimborne sympathizes with the anxious Mother, and adopting the persona of her lawyer, approaches Christ’s court with the material evidence of her tears. In this extended appropriation of St. Aelred’s narrative, the narrator shows how far his oratory has progressed under the Virgin’s tutelage—so far that he can speak for Mary when she is overcome with emotion and speechless herself. Because of Wimborne’s effective plea, Jesus returns to his family and submits himself to their guidance.86 Toward the end of the poem, the narrator’s emotions rise as he struggles to understand Christ’s sacrifice. He lashes out in anger after witnessing the cross being made: he seizes the carpenter’s ax and kills both the carpenter and the smith who 82. Ibid., 205. 4. 83. Ibid., 206. 84. Ibid., 216. 1: “Pono quod revocet Deus hec tempora.” 85. Ibid., 242. 1. 86. Ibid., 311–12.



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made the ax.87 However, Mary’s sorrow helps him to focus his righteous rage. Present at the Crucifixion, the narrator stands with the grieving Virgin, and in his second role as the Virgin’s advocate, pleads with Jesus to ease her suffering.88 Now that the Virgin has taught Wimborne to speak and write in her name, he becomes a divine orator and accomplished author. In holy self-reflexivity, the Marie Carmina is the catalyst and also the result of Wimborne’s literary accomplishments as it offers the Marian meditations making authorship possible. It also makes the readers’ linguistic and spiritual improvements possible, since the narrator’s increasingly powerful rhetoric, violent actions against the enemies of Christ, and sympathetic mourning would supply exciting scenes for the schoolboys’ enactment while they learned Latin vocabulary, poetic forms, rhetorical delivery—and Marian meditations. The Marie Carmina offers prompts for the memory and aids to meditation, so that the readers, from Wimborne’s schoolboys to his more mature Franciscan brothers, might follow the poet in saying “Maria.” In dense, disciplined poetry, Walter of Wimborne presents meditation images of the Virgin’s beauty and of her life with Jesus at the same time as he teaches his schoolboys the principles of Marian song. In the Ave Virgo he combines definitions of grammar, rhetoric, and logic with an aesthetic iconography of the Virgin’s body to instruct the boys at Wimborne about the basics of the trivium. Reconstructing pictures of her loveliness in the imagination, the reader—schoolboy or more advanced devotee—may venerate Mary by repeating the Marian language that Wimborne harnesses in the Marie Carmina. The meditator’s poetry is purified and perpetuated through the inspiration and name of Mary, and it lends itself to endless meditation as it is conveyed to others in a song.

John of Howden As the Marie Carmina rises to its final strains of praise, the narrator’s new expertise in Marian language takes on the lyrical quality that the title (“Carmina,” or songs) promises. Before the dedication to the boys at Wimborne, five stanzas commence with apostrophes to the 87. Ibid., 534–41. 88. Ibid., 614–63.

142  The Musical Mother Tongue Virgin, imitating the invocations of hymns.89 Like Wimborne, John of Howden composed “songs” of devotion to the Virgin, meant to convey a Marian language that reproduced and fostered meditation. Howden, like Wimborne, employed the Anselmian humility topos in characterizing a narrator who requires the Virgin’s aid in order to sing. In his greatest poem, the Philomena (Nightingale), the narrator becomes that nightingale trilling enrapt devotions, just as Wimborne’s speaker in the Marie Carmina finally learns a powerful Marian rhetoric. While Wimborne’s song of the Virgin is bound together with alliteration and a regular verse form approximating sung praise, Howden’s verse is even more redolent with the repetitive sound that became a hallmark of meditational verse from the north. Perhaps the music of Howden’s verse makes a stronger impression because his poetry is less bookish and his attitude toward the Virgin more romantic, in the same way that we have seen Gower describe her as a courtly lady and Lydgate await her in the darkest night (chapter 1). Howden’s songs to and about Mary, therefore, compare to the reflections of troubadours upon an exalted love, and his narrative stance somewhat reflects the distance of the Virgin’s exaltation. Whereas Wimborne immerses himself in the Aelredian interactive meditation, Howden is merely present with Mary and Jesus as he speaks directly to them. Howden composed a number of Anglo-Latin verses for meditation focusing on the Virgin Mary: the Quindecim gaudia listing her fifteen joys, the Viola lauding her diverse and beautiful symbols, O Mira Creatura exploring the paradoxes of her position in creation, and Quinquaginta salutationes praising her role as co-redemptrix. Howden’s masterpiece, the Philomena, so called because of the symbolic association between the nightingale’s song and canticles of contemplation and also between the hour of the bird’s death and of Christ’s, foregrounds Mary’s involvement in Jesus’ sacrifice; it presents the allegorical character of Amor as the guide for the narrator’s culminating identification with Mary and thus her son. The latter poem and its Marian invitations to contemplation will be the main subject here, with brief remarks about comparisons and glosses found in the minor poems. It is instructive to follow a discussion of Walter of Wimborne with John of Howden because these contemporaneous poets share many fea89. Ibid., 638–42.



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tures that establish expectations for northern meditative poetry: hymninspired lauds, formal verse structures, breathtaking Marian pictures for participatory meditation, elaborate invocations of the Virgin that describe Mary herself as the language or the song of the poem, and extended narratives of Christ’s life from the Virgin’s point of view. Moving from Walter of Wimborne to John of Howden, however, is like reading Donne before Marvell. In contrast to the logical difficulty and scholastic nature of Wimborne’s poems, John of Howden’s Marian verses are more effusive, erupting in imagery. The Philomena, for instance, includes a threestanza encomium on the Virgin’s breasts and a spectacular “light show,” giving glory to God as author of the cosmos and to the Virgin as “star of the sea.”90 In the latter stanza group describing the circular motions of celestial bodies and Mary as the brightest star among them, Howden intimates why repetition and expansion are part of a northern virginal aesthetic for meditative poetry. As God is the “prime mover,” He commits himself to Mary, whose planetary orbits of motions enact both a replication and duplication of the Creator’s will. All poetry about Mary, therefore, must follow her spherical brilliance and circular path, begetting a creative world in imitation of the Virgin’s nature.91 A globe or bead, the Philomena begins and ends with Marian lauds in an attempt to orbit the Virgin, and all of Howden’s Marian poems have this cyclical structure. Alliteration brings repetition to the sound of many of John’s lines, and while Walter of Wimborne includes alliteration in his verse, Howden heightens the affect with tongue twisters, multiplying the assonance in single lines and combining it with stresses. Thus, Howden enjoins the Virgin, “Proles David, parens eximia, / Plectrum plices in laude propria” (Offspring of David, exceptional parent, / May you pluck the lyre in your own praise).92 The alliteration in these lines underscores the important connection between the Virgin’s lineage and her lyrical ability. Just as Howden is more interested than Wimborne in poetic sound, the former more often employs musical terms to express his aims. While Wimborne’s poem is a mental calculation, Howden’s is a symphonic reverberation. The contrast in these authors’ poetic styles may be partially ex90. Howden, Philomena, 10–12, 13–20. 91. Ibid., 14: “Et qui primo das motum mobile, / Cuius motu sphaerae volubili / Revolvuntur raptu meabili, / Te puellae committis humili.” 92. Ibid., 4. 1–2.

144  The Musical Mother Tongue plained by a difference in patrons and audiences. While Wimborne wrote for schoolboys and fellows within the Franciscan brotherhood, John of Howden was employed by kingly patrons who would especially appreciate spectacular sounding poetry and romantic amplifications upon the Virgin’s role. With his use of the personification Amor for “divine love” in the Philomena, John invokes the name of Cupid, and with erotic language from the Song of Songs in many of his Marian poems, he casts Mary as Jesus’ desired bride. Through such allusions to desire, Howden manipulates his readers’ physical reaction to the lacerated, beaten, and crucified Christ that he depicts in the Passion sequence of the Philomena and teaches them a spiritual attraction to a sight that might otherwise appear repulsive. Sara Lipton calls this gesture a “heuristic of revulsion,” which compels the meditator to seek union with the expiring Savior.93 Particularly, Howden sought to counterbalance unsightly images of the Passion in his Philomena with the ornate beauty of the Virgin, similar to the way in which medieval romances offset the gore of trial and combat with a love interest and a vision of a lovely lady. In Howden’s poems as in romances, the lovely, life-giving, nurturing feminine counteracts the agonized and dying masculine. In the Philomena, the Virgin is absorbed with tending her Son, whether in the manger or on the cross, and her constant gaze teaches the reader and meditator to interpret Christ’s body with pity and affection. Reciprocally, through the gaze of both the Son and the narrator upon the Virgin, Mary appears the lovely lady, an ideal for the meditator to imitate and a source of the Word for meditation. As one of the many intellectuals, including Adam of Barking and Robert of Grosseteste, who surrounded Eleanor of Provence, John of Howden may have been responding to the queen’s piety and emphasis on Marian icons when he wrote the Philomena and other Marian poems. While his Latin poetry was probably not directly intended for her, it was written in the climate of Marian devotions which she had established. The title of “Nightingale” (Philomena) is especially apt for a noble audience, since the bird represented courtly verse and entertaining song.94 93. Sara Lipton, “‘The Sweet Lean of His Head’: Writing about Looking at the Crucifix in the High Middle Ages,” Speculum 80 (2005): 1187. 94. See Rigg, Anglo-Latin, 378, n. 33 for references on contemporary uses of the symbol of the nightingale.



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Margaret Howell suggests that when translating the Philomena from Latin to Anglo-Norman specifically for Eleanor, John of Howden sought to capture the queen’s interests in both religious contemplation and political activity by emphasizing the comparison between Christ and other classical, romance, and real-life crusading heroes.95 The Rossignos in Anglo-Norman was revised and translated for Eleanor around the time in which Henry III took up the crusader’s cross (1268), and, of course, she would have appreciated the poem’s many appeals to the Virgin that were not new with the translation.96 As Richard Southern notes, the collaboration of noblewomen with churchmen often “fashioned the private devotions of the Middle Ages.”97 Although many queens throughout history compared their anointed divinity to that of the Queen of Heaven, Eleanor is also associated with several artifacts of Marian symbolism and practices illustrating her similarity to the Virgin. When at twelve years old, Eleanor arrived at the church door of Westminster Abbey for her coronation, the archbishop recited a prayer listing biblical women for imitation that culminated in the praise of the Virgin Mother.98 Just as the coronation ceremony emphasized the motherhood of Mary and by association praised the potential fecundity of the young queen, Henry III decorated Eleanor’s apartment in Windsor Castle with the Tree of Jesse, a reminder of the importance of perpetuating a royal lineage.99 The depiction of the Tree of Jesse is placed at Eleanor’s bedroom window, and the queen would later request a painting of herself kneeling in front of the Virgin and Child for a window in her chamber at Clarendon.100 As Howell demonstrates, Eleanor of Provence was influenced not only by images of divine motherhood and queenly authority in Coronations of the Virgin, but also by beliefs in Mary’s intercession.101 John Parsons has pointed out that royal acts of intercession often enhance a queen’s reputation 95. Margaret Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 83. 96. On the Rossignos, see Stone, “Jean de Howden,” 509–13. 97. Southern, Saint Anselm, 37. 98. J. J. Bruckman, “English Coronations, 1216–1308: The Edition of the Coronation Ordines” (Doctoral thesis, University of Toronto, 1964), 37–39. 99. T. Borenius, “The Cycle of Images in the Palaces and Castles of Henry III,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943): 42, 49. 100. Calendar of Liberate Rolls 1245–51, vol. 3 (London: Public Record Office, 1937) 324. 101. Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 255–60.

146  The Musical Mother Tongue through association with the Virgin Mary, and certainly during Henry III’s troublesome reign, Eleanor had many opportunities for intercession between her powerful uncles of Savoy and her husband’s Lusignan relatives, factions vying for land and preferment, and also between her son, later Edward I, and his aging father.102 Howell’s biography of Eleanor characterizes the queen as politically astute and forceful, while also sensitive to the trouble of others and devout. At the end of her life, Eleanor took the veil at Amesbury Abbey; the Amesbury Psalter composed sometime between 1250 and 1255 suggests special devotion to the Virgin at the house in an illuminated illustration of one of its nuns kneeling before an enthroned Virgin and Child.103 Until the end of her life, Eleanor kept a sharp watch over her possessions and lived in comfortable new rooms within the abbey, so she had not entirely exchanged her throne for a kneeling stool at the Virgin’s feet. Nevertheless, it is beyond doubt that she participated enthusiastically in the pious projects of her husband, such as the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, and she commissioned Marian poems and art works of her own. John of Howden was influenced by the piety of his patrons, the prevalence of Franciscan devotion, and possibly the Meditations of William of St. Thierry, fellow Cistercian and student of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. William of St. Thierry writes about the love within that seeks to imitate the God of Love; similarly in the Philomena Howden’s character Amor represents such love within that seeks imitation of God and a Marian understanding of the workings of providence. Written in part to teach novices how to pray, William’s Meditations document the soul’s odyssey in love and toward Love. In Meditation VII, William declares that “love is greatly daring, and humility fosters that confidence. . . . I shall tell thee boldly, ‘Lord, . . . Thou knowest that I want to love Thee.’. . . And that means that my heart desires nothing so much as it desires to love Thee.”104 For William, the soul will come to feel God through study and prayer and to assimilate itself to divine principles. As Ineke van’t Spijker has pointed out, William’s is a theology of affect, illuminating 102. John Parsons, “The Queen’s Intercession in Thirteenth-Century England,” in Power of the Weak, ed. J. Carpenter and S. B. Maclean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 151–53. 103. Amesbury Psalter, All Souls College MS 6, f. 2. 104. William of St. Thierry, The Meditations of William of St. Thierry, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (New York: Harper and Bros., 1954), 55.



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the way for the meditator to conform his or her inner person to God.105 Howden’s affective Philomena teaches the meditator about love so that he or she might become involved in God’s story. Many sections of the poem are entitled with explanations on how Love holds sway over the holy family and the observer’s feelings. For instance, after the Prologus, the Philomena’s first subheading “Amor exaltat matrem Verbi Incarnati” (Love exalts the mother of the incarnated Word) both unveils God’s plan for Mary at the Annunciation and indicates the tenderness with which the reader should regard Jesus’ mother. Throughout Howden’s Philomena, Amor is the personified reason for all of Mary and Jesus’ activities, and as the divine response to human sinfulness, is a consistently holy and trustworthy counterpart to Wimborne’s struggling narrator in the Marie Carmina. Just as Wimborne’s narrator matures into appropriate responses to and descriptions of the biblical narrative enacted in front of him, Amor models the reader’s reaction to the divine. Howden’s narrator struggles to conform his attitude to Amor, and his success leads to a climax of praise for the Virgin. Incorporating Cistercian and Franciscan meditative writings and attending to the pleasure of noble patrons, the Philomena is Howden’s masterpiece, including 1,131 mono-rhyming quatrains of ten-syllable lines.106 It tells of Christ’s life and Passion, but begins and ends with the Virgin. The Prologus (stanzas 1–3) is addressed to the Word and the Virgin, and through stanza 54, the poem focuses on Mary with meditative images on the Annunciation and Virgin Birth. Part 1 continues to relate Christ’s life, and part 2 focuses in graphic detail on the Passion, both of these sections providing vivid pictures through which the meditator might identify with Jesus. In part 3, the narrator plays the role of the apathetic meditator, as he examines his conscience, and admits to a sinful indifference to the sufferings of Jesus. The narrator’s soul-searching and desire for empathy function as a model for the reader. Seeking a spiritual cure, the narrator entreats Amor to write upon his hardened heart the Savior’s pains. In his request that Amor pound out the sacred story upon his body, the narrator desires a poetic stigmata. That is, his own 105. Ineke van’t Spijker, Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Disputatio 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 185–232. 106. Clemens Blume, S.J., ed., Johannis de Hovedene, Philomena (Leipzig: Reisland, 1930).

148  The Musical Mother Tongue poetic rendition of the crucifixion that failed to touch him in part 2 must be inscribed upon his heart. Throughout part 3, the repetition of the verb “scribe / scribas” is ubiquitous in the narrator’s humbling and ironic attempt to have his own writing written upon him.107 When the narrator is sufficiently moved by God’s sacrifice and able to appreciate the gifts of providence, part 4 concentrates on the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Assumption of the Virgin. The poem concludes with an epilogue to the Virgin that echoes the Prologus, completing that perfectly spherical prayer bead. Through Amor, Howden’s narrator finally internalizes a language of praise whose form imitates the Virgin Mother. Like Wimborne in the Marie Carmina, Howden begins the Philomena with a request for divine inspiration. While Wimborne depicts himself as a speechless penitent dependent upon Mary’s holy discourse, Howden addresses both the Word and his Mother in elaborate terms. With its balanced invocation to both Jesus and Mary, the Prologus to the Philomena is representative of much of Howden’s work, which exalts the Mother as co-redemptrix. To her he calls, “In praise, I pray, with full heart; / May you be, at the same time [as Christ], the admired subject of praise.”108 He acknowledges that Mary must change him in order for his “nightingale” to sing of God. Inheriting the gift of song from her ancestor David, Mary must now form the narrator’s mouth so that he can participate in this sacred lineage: Virgo, David orta progenie, Dola linguam hanc imperitiae In sonantis lyram placentiae, Et iam psallas manu munditiae. Virgin, born of David’s progeny, Hew this tongue of unskilled Into a lyre of pleasing sound And now, play upon it with your own pure hand.109

In the preceding lines, the narrator’s mouth, like that of Isaiah, which is sanctified for prophecy by a burning coal, becomes the lyre 107. Rigg counts 123 uses by Howden of “scribe/scribas.” See Rigg, Anglo-Latin, 211. 108. Howden, Philomena, 2. 3–4: “Laude, precor, reple praecordia, / Cum sis laudis mira materia.” 109. Ibid., 3.



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used for strumming during the psalms; a metonym for the poet himself, the tongue becomes Mary’s instrument.110 Just as medieval figurations of Lady Grammar often carried a knife for excising barbarisms and solecisms, Howden’s Virgin Mary cuts away all that does not belong to her own praise.111 Similar to the self-reflexivity of the Marie Carmina, the Virgin sets in rhythms language and song about herself. Howden employs such an invocation again in the Quindecim gaudia, which Raby declares “probably the finest latin [sic] poem which has for its subject the Fifteen Joys of the Blessed Virgin.”112 In the Quindecim gaudia the opening entreaty also involves Howden’s tongue, as it has been bound by sadness and must be released by Mary’s joys.113 In the Philomena, Howden proceeds from a request that the Virgin pluck him in special praise to the presentation of meditative images on the Nativity.114 Although in the joys pertaining to the Nativity (Annunciation, Conception, Visitation, Birth, Angel’s Heralds, Coming of the Magi, Presentation) the Quindecim gaudia explicitly discusses the Mother of the Word’s mastery of language, the Philomena makes the same point during its narration of Jesus’ birth with a riot of images for meditation. For instance, in the Quindecim gaudia Howden praises Mary for her composition of the Magnificat during the Visitation and for her understanding of prophecy at the Presentation. By contrast, in the Philomena, he offers pictures of the umbilical cord and Mary’s breasts. The Virgin binds the Word, who allows himself to be chained with a “funiculo,” or cord.115 While “funiculus” means “umbilical cord,” the string symbolism also relates to the lyre, or the poet’s tongue, which the Virgin strums. Just as the umbilical cord binds God to humanity, so the lyre’s strings offer a way for humanity to communicate with the divine. Similarly, Mary’s nipple is a locus of connection between God and creation, and the poet expostulates on its loveliness in f loral terms, which also symbolize rhetorical figures and allude to the Virgin’s mastery of language. Although some historians have argued that for Dominicans and other opponents of her Immaculate Conception (at least before the feast’s widespread celebration in the fourteenth century) 110. Ibid., 6. 6–7. 111. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar, 20–22. 112. Poems, Introduction, xxvii. 113. Howden, Quindecim gaudia, 1. 4–9. 114. Howden, Philomena, 4. 2. 115. Ibid., 7. 1–2.

150  The Musical Mother Tongue Mary’s lactation signified her original sin, in the following lines Howden clearly represents the nursing Mother’s freshness and purity.116 In order to underscore the interconnection between Jesus and his mother, Howden employs the image of the blossom sometimes for God, sometimes for Mary: Uber uber in lactis pabulo Lac propinat lactanti flosculo, Quem cum, mater, honoras osculo, Plus florescis quam flos diluculo. Breast abundant in the nourishment of milk, He whom you honor, Mother, with a little kiss, Drinks the milk from the lactating floweret. You blossom more than the flower at dawn. Lacte manans uber virgineum Imbrem flori dat temporaneum; Et flos sugens liquorem lacteum In nitorem se transfert niveum. With flowing milk, the Virgin breast Gives a seasonal shower to the blossom, And the flower sucking the milky liquor Transforms itself into brilliant snow.117

In stanza 10, the Virgin is the blooming flower, her nipple a “lactating floweret.” Like Wimborne, Howden deploys the suffix “ulo” in the endrhyming nouns to convey the sweet sentiment between mother and son that, here, gushes at the breast. According to Shulamith Shahar, in an age in which families often hired wet nurses and literature associ116. Historians who have connected the Virgin’s lactation to original sin include John Bossy, Christianity in the West: 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8–9, and Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), 204. In “Purity and Danger: The Paradox of Mary’s Body and the En-gendering of the Infancy Narrative in English Mystery Cycles” (Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993], 85–86), Theresa Coletti points out that most medieval people thought Mary’s body inviolately pure, but nevertheless subject to pregnancy and lactation. Donna Spivey Ellington concurs, remarking that the medieval preachers she studied did not link original sin with Mary’s breast-feeding of the Christ child. See Ellington’s From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 58–59. 117. Howden, Philomena, 10–11.



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ated maternal nursing with special love, Mary’s “breast-feeding is undoubtedly the most perfect expression of maternity.”118 In stanza 11, the baby Jesus is the little blossom receiving a spring rain from Mary’s lactation, his lips a tiny bud sucking on his mother’s milk. From the last line we understand that Jesus’ little mouth is snow white from drinking and can infer that Mary’s nipple is also awash. Baby and mother are bound at the milky nipple; both are flowers blooming with divine nourishment. Since “flos/floris” is also a speech ornament, we see that the Word is augmented by the beauty of maternal nursing, that it “se transfert” or transforms itself into snowy purity by the figure of Mary’s milk. Howden eventually moves from the floral imagery of Mary’s nursing to the Nativity’s master synecdoche: Mary is the container contained, the “rose” who bears all of the “roses” of creation, the feminine envelopment of the Word.119 As the angels sing on high about the Virgin Birth, Howden is reminded of his unworthiness to speak Mary’s praises. Like Walter of Wimborne, his expressions of humility and inadequacy are recursive. In order to tame his anxieties, Howden, like Wimborne, continues to invoke the beauties of the Virgin’s body, where the Word was formed. In the similes of the Song of Songs, Howden extols her belly, which is like a heap of wheat, and her neck like a tower of David.120 As “milk and honey leap under her tongue,” so the narrator hopes that concentration on the Virgin’s graces will allow him the grace of mellifluousness.121 In other poems, particularly the Viola, a catalog of epithets for the Virgin, Howden emphasizes the luxurious sensuality of her body as he seeks the spiritual healing that will allow him to write. The Virgin is “languenti medicina” (medicine for the faint), or “salvificans piscina” (salvific pool).122 Nectar runs through her veins, and she inebriates her lover.123 While Howden must adore her from a slight distance, for God she is the “framea vagina” (sheath of the spear), a reference to the peace 118. Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, trans. Chaya Galai (London: Routledge, 1992), 57. 119. Howden, Philomena, 30. 2: “Rosam gignens rosarum omnium.” 120. Ibid., 31–32. 121. Ibid., 32. 1: “Lac et mella sub lingua saliunt”; honey is also a recurrent motif in Wimborne’s poems. 122. Howden, Viola, lines 54, 56. 123. Ibid., lines 87, 138.

152  The Musical Mother Tongue of Christ, with an obvious pun on the divine intercourse necessary for the Incarnation. Borrowing a rhyme scheme from Michael of Cornwall, the Viola consists of five sets of fifty lines, with seven syllables each, rhyming on the same ending syllables. The first fifty lines end-rhyme “aris,” the second “ina,” the third “oris,” the fourth “atis,” and the fifth “ura.”124 This tight formalism binds what may seem to be a disjointed list of praises, but is a continual meditation on the symbols for the Virgin’s body, starting with the violet of blue. Once enraptured by the Virgin’s beauty in the Philomena, Howden’s narrator is enthralled by her song, as the Mother sings lullabies to the Christ child. He considers her music a model for his poem and claims she is “a symphonist . . . [who] surpass[es] the tune of other musicians.”125 While enrapt with the Virgin’s soothing voice, the narrator makes a direct reference to the poem’s title: “Nightingale, may you repel harsh sounds / toss them here, away from this song.”126 Having just addressed the Virgin directly, the narrator may be naming Mary as the nightingale whose trilling he seeks to imitate. The nightingale might also be the musical expression of Amor, or Christ himself. Like the images of the umbilical cord or the Virgin’s nipple, the nightingale represents a figure for conjunction between God and humanity: all are invested in continuing the songs of comfort, love, and praise. Howden contends that the lyre of his tongue, already strung by God’s mother, should play only the Virgin’s harmonies, and he explains how the Mother’s “strings” tie God and creature: Modulatur mater in virgine, Ut placetur Deus in homine, Qui tam caro compulsus carmine Flentes ditat cantus dulcedine. The Mother, in being a virgin, is modulated / tuned So that God, so moved by so dear a song, Is pleased in humanity / in being man. Mary’s chant endows the weeping with sweetness.127 124. Rigg, Anglo-Norman, 214. 125. Howden, Philomena, “Symphonista sola prae ceteris / Musicorum melos transgrederis” (42. 1–2). 126. Ibid., 42. 3–4: “Philomena, rauca repelleris, / Hic de cantu si te iactaveris.” 127. Ibid., 43.1–2, 44.



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Since the verb “modulor / modulari” may indicate acts of measuring, modulating, singing in accompaniment with or playing an instrument, the Virgin’s chastity represents both personal and musical modulation; it is the equivalent of tunefulness. The various meanings of “modulor/ modulari” and the Virgin’s embodiment of them reflect the influence of Boethian musical theory on Howden’s poetical work. Just as Boethius understands music as a discipline related to the measures and balances in the universe, so Howden emphasizes the Virgin’s chaste representation of both physical and mental equilibrium. And just as Boethius explains the musical ratios that exist in creation and make possible vocal or instrumental performance, so Howden declares the Mother’s virginity a proportion that allows for the juxtaposition of human and divine— and of course for the singing of beautiful lullabies.128 The result of God’s pleasure with Mary’s virgin melody and his own humanity is the banishment of the sinner’s sorrow, just as Mary’s lullaby calms the baby Jesus’ tears. While both Wimborne and Howden gesture toward Marian music in their titles—their Carmina or Philomena—and in their lyrical poetic forms, Howden claims that the nature of the Virgin’s intercession is musical, from the taut strings of her chaste body, to her composition of the Magnificat, to the lullabies with which she swaddles the Son, to the training of the poet’s voice. For Howden, Mary is the mother of lyric, of both music and words. Just as Wimborne declares her the highest rhetorician, so Howden claims in the Philomena that she surpasses the eloquence of Cicero and Livy, the verses of Virgil, and the genius of Augustine.129 By meditating upon Mary, both Wimborne and Howden spiritually and poetically become her, their tongues refashioned to reproduce her linguistic and literary talent. In the Quinquaginta salutationes, fifty Ave’s that show the Passion through Mary’s eyes, Howden explains that Mary is the very “heart in his rhetoric,” and a writing implement, “carved out by the hand of wisdom.”130 As Howden’s hand closes around the stylus and his mind absorbs Mary’s understanding, he begins to conform to her 128. See Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, De institutione musica, ed. G. Friedlein (Leipzig: Teubner, 1867). 129. Ibid., 49. 130. Howden, Quinquaginta salutations, 1. 7: “pectus nunc preconio”; 31. 2–3: “manu vas excisum / sapiencie.”

154  The Musical Mother Tongue through focused contemplation. Although the Philomena’s narrator understands his debt to Mary and her many graces, he cannot praise and imitate her fully, however, until the Passion narrative is written upon him. Repeatedly entreating Amor to write the story of the Crucifixion on the narrator’s heart, part 3 implies that the Word must invade the faithful bodily, just as the Word entered Mary’s womb, before divine discourse can emerge. We have already seen in chapter 1 how St. Bridget manifested this belief in her mystical pregnancy, a swelling of the heart indicating God’s presence, and we will see in chapter 6 how Margery Kempe regards the authorship of her Book as the issue of divine intercourse. Once the Philomena’s narrator receives the literary stigmata, his woeful sufferings cease, and he is able to rejoice in the Resurrection, Ascension, and Assumption. Whereas in part 1, he empathizes with the baby Jesus’ tears, in part 4, he rejoices in God’s glory, brought to fruition through the Virgin and the contemplation of her that rendered his own heart a text of Jesus’ love. When Howden describes the Assumption in part 4, he returns to several terms of praise that he had offered Mary in earlier sections of the poem. The Virgin is the most beautiful of all flowers, the brightest of all gems, the summa of all genius, the greatest rhetorician, the most persuasive preacher, and an exceptional translator of holy words.131 The latter is an unusual title for her, but a logical extension of her role in translating the Word to flesh. By glorying unabashedly in the graces of Mary, the poet comes closer to imitating her linguistic gifts. Like Wimborne, he finds the name of Mary a powerful signifier allowing him to ground his devotional poetry.132 Claiming that the “Virgin bears signs of the deity,” he hopes to aid Mary in an artistic perpetuation of the Word.133 After his meditative identification with God in part 3 and selfless adulation of the Mother, the poet begins to understand why Mary is the culmination of all divine texts. He discovers that she is the tablet for the Decalogue, the trumpet blaring when Moses spoke to God, Mount Sinai on fire, and the final result of the law.134 131. Howden, Philomena, 1072–1100. 132. Ibid., 1106–8. 133. Ibid., 1101–5; 1109. 1: “Deitatis Virgo signifera.” 134. Ex 34:28, 19:18, 20:3.



The Musical Mother Tongue 155 Te tabella, quam scripsit digitus, Tuba clangens, mons igne praeditus, Nubes noctem serenans caelitus Et te legit lex data primitus. The tablet, on whom the finger wrote The trumpet blaring, the prophesied mountain on fire, The cloud from heaven illuminating night And prefigures you the first-appointed law appoints you.135

Employing symbols from Exodus, Howden indicates that Mary’s body enables the Christian’s spiritual flight from Egypt and deliverance from hell. God wrote the law upon her and appointed her time within the law, rendering her the physical materials for Jesus’ justice and mercy, when Love would fulfill and transcend the Ten Commandments. Describing Mary as the site where God makes his final intentions known, Howden paints the scene around Mount Sinai with an apocalyptic resonance because all scripture is revealed in the Virgin. In the crescendo of this stanza, the Mother transforms from a singer of lullabies to a trumpet announcing the arrival of the Word, the volume of her holy music rising to indicate her timeless importance. Here again textuality merges with musicality, as the Mother’s body is not only a writing implement but also a brass instrument whose notes sound out broadly the truth imbedded in poetry and scripture. Mary is not only the law and its booming harbinger, the Philomena goes on to say, but also the audience for Solomon’s song, the turn of the prophets’ mystical key and the meaning of the Evangelist’s cry.136 Since Mary is the centerpiece of all scripture, she is an important principle of exegesis: Velut caelum celatur sidere, Textu luces intexta literae; Tibi servit lex tota libere, Quam non cessat inscriptam legere. Just as heaven is concealed by star, You shine, interwoven in letters. 135. Howden, Philomena, 1069. 136. Ibid., 1070: “Magni maris stella magnifica, / Salomonis te canunt cantica; / Prophetarum te clave mystica / Clausam pandit vox evangelica.”

156  The Musical Mother Tongue The whole law freely submits to you The inscripted, whom it does not cease to read.137

By tracing the Marian lights (foreshadowings and symbols) in scripture, the exegete can emerge from darkness to a clearer view of providence. As the Stella Maris, Mary is the star that covers over God’s abode; she is the body that encloses the Savior. At the same time, she is a “literary light” that illuminates the truth and the way, the most important exemplar of human union with Christ. When readers of scripture search for God’s meaning, they find Amor in Mary throughout the Old and New Testaments. Her love and self-sacrifice an imitation of Jesus’, Mary realizes the law’s purpose of focusing the will upon God, and therefore she is not subject to its rules. Instead, as in the stanza above, the law is subject to her and will repeat her truth endlessly. Therefore, toward the end of the Philomena, the narrator will ask that Mary placate justice at his death and instead of the Ten Commandments, apply the “lex Amoris” on his behalf.138 Mary has been servant to the dictates of nature in neither childbirth nor death, according to Howden, but instead provides a sign of the body in accord with God and therefore transcendent. Studying the Bible for prefigurations and manifestations of the Virgin should not cease; in the providential eternity taking Mary as a model will not cease. John of Howden offers his poem in the course of perpetual striving toward Marian inscriptions.

A Conclusion in Richard Rolle Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole (d. 1349, probably of the Black Death), was heir and transformer of the northern Anglo-Latin meditative tradition we have studied in Walter of Wimborne and John of Howden.139 Although Rolle defended the anchoritic life as the only sure way to heaven, he nevertheless, like Wimborne who was a teacher and Howden who acted as court chaplain, lived a semi-active life of preaching and teaching among his patrons and disciples in Yorkshire. Therefore, he was also invested like Wimborne and Howden in composing literature that inspired meditations amidst activity. Rolle pushes the empha137. Ibid., 1071. 138. Ibid., 1123. 1. 139. Ed. G. M. Liegey, “The Canticum Amoris of Richard Rolle,” Traditio 12 (1956): 369–91.



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sis on song that we have seen in Wimborne and Howden to its limits. Whereas Wimborne composes carmina and Howden declares the Virgin both his music and his text, Rolle’s poetry breaks out in and remains focused on singing, Mary being connected more to musical performance than to textuality. Rolle’s only Latin poem, the Canticum Amoris, takes the same title as a truncated version of Howden’s Philomena, a fragmentary set of stanzas concentrating on the life of Christ from the Annunciation to the Assumption, the Virgin’s point of view, and Love as the impulse for all.140 While Rolle’s poem is in no way a reproduction of Howden’s Canticum Amoris, by the appropriation of this title, abounding alliteration, sensual diction, techniques for active meditation, focus on the Virgin Mary, and direct allusions to poetic lines by Wimborne and Howden, we know that Rolle was influenced by northern AngloLatin poetic conventions that the two thirteenth-century poets promulgated.141 Rolle’s contribution to these expectations for meditative poetry was to completely change the narrator’s position. In contrast to Wimborne’s abject poet at the Virgin’s feet and to Howden’s enrapt visionary of Mary’s symbiotic role in salvation, Rolle is the Virgin’s enamored devotee. Rolle is not satisfied with conveying matter from the Mother’s tongue; he desires total union with her and immersion in her affections. Only through complete mystical union with the Virgin may the author complete the Canticum Amoris, his Marian song.142 While the Incendium Amoris is Rolle’s most popular work and the summa of his mystical career, the Canticum Amoris is an early writing, composed when “love freely bound me as a youth.”143 In the Incendi140. John of Howden’s Canticum Amoris breaks off at the 240th stanza. 141. Passages in which Rolle employs lines from Howden or Wimborne include the Incendium Amoris 259. 19–260. 2, a paraphrase of the Philomena, stanzas 464–74. Rolle also shows familiarity with Walter of Wimborne’s poetry, and repeats in lines 69–71 of the Canticum Amoris a honey image prevalent in Wimborne. For the honey image, see for instance the Marie Carmina, stanza 13. 142. Influential discussions of Rolle’s work include the invaluable manuscript study by Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for His Biography (New York: D.C. Heath, 1927), and more recently a close reading of Rolle’s writings by Nicholas Watson: Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 143. Richard Misyn, trans., The Fire of Love and The Mending of Life or The Rule of Living, EETS o.s. 106 (London: Kegan Paul, 1896); Rolle, Canticum Amoris, “Iuuenem ingenue amor alligauit” (11).

158  The Musical Mother Tongue um Amoris, Rolle describes himself as Jesus’ lover, the love manifesting itself to his senses in heat, sweetness, and song (“fervor,” “dulcor,” “canor”), effects that are the signatures of Rolle’s meditations.144 In the Incendium Amoris, he relates his own process for meditation for those willing to follow: he recommends satisfying the demands of bodily comfort so as not to be distracted (eat, drink, and sleep), sitting upright, praying, and keeping the vision of the Passion in one’s mind.145 The preparation for these meditations includes a life of relative poverty, chastity, and, of course, the composition of meditative texts. The reward for worldly self-denial and spiritual labor is overwhelming joy in the presence of God’s music and the assurance of heaven. In Rolle, music is an inspiration for the sound of poetry, as it is in Wimborne and Howden, but it is also a sweet spiritual reward. Reflecting an incipient form of Rolle’s meditational program and spiritual goals, the Canticum Amoris presents the narrator as Mary’s lover, rather than Jesus’, switching the gendering of holy desire as easily as Howden in the Philomena’s balanced treatment of Mary and Jesus as co-redeemers. The Canticum Amoris includes thirty-nine quatrains, each one with a single end-rhyme, for a total of 152 rhythmic lines of thirteen syllables. We have seen both Wimborne and Howden systematically repeat single end-rhymes over the course of multiple stanzas in order to create a Marian poem that is an inviolate sphere. Rolle’s verse is trochaic, with a caesura dividing each line and leaving an impression of formal space for music and also of combined Latin, romance, and Anglo-Saxon rhythms for it. Alliteration drives a heavy pulse on the trochaic stress, especially in expressions such as “Claret carnis castitas; flos feruens fundaris” (Chastity of the flesh makes all clear; may you, passionate flower, rain down showers).146 While Rolle does not engage in the intricate repetition, anaphora, and punning that mark Walter of Wimborne’s and John of Howden’s compositions, the images of the Virgin in Rolle’s Canticum Amoris create a dense, luxurious thicket of associations, in the same way that Wimborne and Howden conjure sensory traces of the Virgin’s presence. Like his predecessors, Rolle employs cascading Marian symbols to 144. Margaret Deanesly, ed., Incendium Amoris (Manchester: The University Press, 1915); Clifton Wolters, trans., The Fire of Love (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1972). 145. Rolle, Incendium Amoris, chaps. 13–15. 146. Rolle, Canticum Amoris, line 57.



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call forth the Virgin: she is “medicina,” “cortina,” “regina,” “columbina” (medicine, vessel, queen, dove).147 She is a light shining more brightly than stars, the reddest rose, a most festive holiday.148 The overall effect in all three poets is a formal presentation of compelling Marian epithets whose images unlock a lyrical language and a personal ritual for meditation. Beyond the Virgin’s traditional epithets, G. M. Liegey remarks, the vocabulary of Rolle’s Canticum Amoris reflects the “amour courtois” and troubadour lyric more faintly suggested in Howden’s Philomena. Rolle amplifies images of the Virgin in such a way as to recall the conventions of descriptio in rhetorical teachings. We remember that in the Ave Virgo, Wimborne teaches terms connected to the trivium by illustrating them in extended descriptions of the Virgin Mother. Recalling both effictio and notatio (amplifications upon the outer and inner person, respectively), Rolle similarly balances effusions over the Virgin’s charms with admiration for spiritual gifts.149 Rolle employs such romantic diction to underscore his desire for the Virgin, and his narrator takes on the persona of her lover. As in the Incendium Amoris and as in John of Howden’s and Walter of Wimborne’s poems, Rolle’s narrator for the Canticum Amoris is an active first person, participating in the life of the Virgin. However, while Wimborne poses as a companion of the holy family and Howden as an admiring witness to a biblical narrative romanticized by Amor, Rolle characterizes himself as a beloved intimate who is invited to be alone with either Jesus (as in his other mystical works) or with Mary (as in the Canticum Amoris). The opening line of Canticum Amoris strikes this note of yearning, dependent as it is upon the popular literature of secular desire, as well as on the language of the Song of Songs: “Zelo tui langueo, uirgo speciosa!” In this opening address Rolle is faint with jealousy for the precious Virgin, an expression of entitlement not hazarded by the earlier meditative writers, but prefigured in their concentration on Amor or Mary’s accessible love. When Rolle describes Mary’s appearance—her forehead, cheeks, lips, neck, hair, skin—he reminds us of both Wimborne’s and Howden’s loving treatments of the Virgin’s body.150 However, Rolle calls Mary “puella,” a young maiden 147. Ibid., lines 61–64. 149. Liegey, “Canticum Amoris,” 378. 150. Rolle, Canticum Amoris, lines 14–29.

148. Ibid., lines 41–43.

160  The Musical Mother Tongue or sweetheart, rather than “mater,” whose nurturing beauty consumes Wimborne and Howden.151 Rolle, the Virgin’s counterpart, is “puer,” a boy very much in love.152 At the beginning of the Canticum Amoris, expressions of frustrated yearning for Mary supplant the elaborate invocations of Wimborne and Howden, although the purpose of both kinds of introduction is the same: to summon Mary’s aid in invention and composition. The unrequited lover, Rolle calls to Mary to have pity on him and cure his longing.153 Although he does not look to the Virgin for a pen or a new tongue, midway through the poem he admits the inadequacy of his praise and calls on Mary for inspiration. The Virgin “carries the tune” both literally and metaphorically, as she is both the strongest singer and the porter of Rolle’s praises.154 In the following lines, he entreats her for a new song: Noua nitor nectere, auferens obscena, Ut queat consurgere clara cantilena, Quam, dulcis, non deseras, dum audis amena, Sed amantem arceas amoris habena. Banishing all impurities, I strive to weave new things So that I might break out a clear song, Which, being sweet, you may not neglect, so long as you hear delightful   things, But, Bridle of Love, you might keep away from the lover.155

Mary must supply the bright new tune that will please her, but for all that she may still remain distant and refuse to “rein in” the lover. While chanting may not guarantee the Virgin’s visitation, only by devoting himself completely to Mary’s music does the narrator experience spiritual harmony: Tibi, cara, canticum emitto mansuetus. Melos mulcet musicum; terror est deletus. Concino, quod carmine remanerem letus Pro tua dulcedine, qua fruor, concretus.

151. Ibid., lines 13, 73, 107. 152. Ibid., line 67. 153. Ibid., line 5. 154. Ibid., line 72: “baiulet melos”; for comparison, see Marie Carmina, 203. 3. 155. Rolle, Canticum Amoris, lines 77–80.



The Musical Mother Tongue 161 To you, dear, this tame singer dispatches a song. The musical tune is soothing; fear has been destroyed. I am in concert: happily I would continue singing On behalf of your sweetness; what I withhold makes me stiff.156

Whether or not the song produces the desired mystical union, Rolle must needs sing or suffer with an intractable spirit and body. His narrator, the “puer,” offers innuendos linking his yearning for divine union with sexual desire. Singing allows him to “emit” or ejaculate the sweet tune of this yearning, the throat becoming a phallus producing holy lyrics at the site of eruption. Just as Rolle characterizes a fresh, new song as a gift of Mary’s affection, so he likens any hesitation he may have for singing as a withholding of his own love, a cantus interruptus. In the lines above, the song grows within him like an erection, with the stifling of his voice equated to stiffness. In the Canticum Amoris we can see the hallmarks of the mystical experience (heat, sweetness, and song) as Rolle will describe them in later works. Most obviously, dulcet melody is the ideal composition for the Virgin’s praise, and the Canticum Amoris is a “facula” (little torch) that glows with heat and seethes with passion.157 Rolle describes himself as “sedentem” (sitting), awaiting the Virgin’s presence, as in later works he will seat himself to contemplate the Passion.158 Like Wimborne and Howden, Rolle offers images of the Virgin for meditation, the physical descriptions noted above and others. In the Canticum Amoris, the Virgin is the delightful “lance that transfixed the mind” in the form of Solomon’s bride, the pearl of price, sparkling gems, the brightest star, the purest snow at the highest altitude.159 Other images for contemplation are less traditional: Mary is the snare of sweetness, a little servant born in God’s house, the musical scale, divine bench in God’s court.160 These images correspond to the listing of the Virgin’s epithets in Wimborne’s Ave Virgo and Howden’s Viola and to the stanzas of enraptured praise in the former’s Marie Carmina and the latter’s Philomena. Although Helen Phillips remarks that such catalogs of symbols deflect the reader’s concentration on Mary the woman, in Wimborne, Howden, and Rolle they 156. Ibid., lines 81–84. 157. Ibid., lines 89–90. 158. Ibid., line 16. 159. Ibid., lines 5–28, 29, 31, 41, 59–60, 93: “Lancea letificat, que mentem transfixit.” 160. Ibid., lines 54, 105, 118, 142.

162  The Musical Mother Tongue serve as loci for meditation, little pictures that can unlock associations of the Virgin and language about her stored in the memory.161 To such pictures, Rolle adds a heady list of olfactory appeals, as aromas of cinnamon, balsam, and more rise up around Mary.162 The meditator’s senses are completely engulfed in her, and he becomes one with the Virgin, thereby completing the impulses of Wimborne and Howden to participate in Mary’s life through meditation. Rolle’s stance as lover smitten by the presence of the divine represents trends of affective piety in late medieval England in which personal, sentimental relationships with the godhead controlled the religious imagination. Certainly, the narrator of the Marie Carmina who interacts with the holy family on the providential journey and the narrator of the Philomena who follows Amor in his feelings for Mary and Jesus prefigure the closer connection to the godhead described in Rolle. However, Wimborne represents himself as the ass on which Mary rides to Egypt and Howden casts himself as a sympathetic observer who nevertheless struggles for divine intimacy, while Rolle’s narrator is already in the paradisal garden with the Virgin, walking on the same ground. Since a Middle English paraphrase of Howden’s Philomena was produced in the fourteenth century, it would not be accurate to say that Rolle’s passionate addresses supplanted earlier northern writings that were focused more on lauds to the Mother than on desire for the Maiden.163 In fact, John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady, as discussed in chapter 1, inherits Wimborne and Howden’s style of yearning for the blessed rhetoric of the Virgin Mother. Nevertheless, in the popularity of Rolle’s mystical teachings, we observe a trend in meditation literature which focuses less on achieving the Mother tongue than on merging entirely with her and her son and making their music. Chapter 6 of this book will bear witness to Margery Kempe’s appropriation of both forms of meditational practice: on the one hand, she shares and provides a mother’s perspective on Wimborne’s and Howden’s fascination with the Virgin’s expressive maternity; on the other hand, she takes Jesus into her own bed. 161. Helen Phillips, “‘Almighty and al merciable Queene’: Marian Titles and Marian Lyrics,” in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Jocelyn WoganBrowne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 86. 162. Rolle, Canticum Amoris, lines 70–72. 163. C. D’Evelyn, ed., Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ, EETS o.s. 158 (London: Oxford University Press, 1921).

Four

Chaucer and Dame School

n the previous chapter, we noted the Anglo-Latin medi tative “songs” that grew out of John of Garland’s musical pedagogical poems, all of these writings reflecting the Virgin’s position as Christian Rhetorica and conductor of holy tunes. This chapter on Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry continues a consideration of the interlinked practices of singing, teaching, and meditating upon Mary. It returns us to a discussion of primary education, briefly described in the Introduction and assumed as a context for Garland’s university studies and Wimborne’s grammar school teachings in the Ave Virgo Mater Christi. It investigates Chaucer’s treatment of the institutionalization of song instruction and of the connections between singing and Marian language studies. In Chaucer’s era, primary education took place under the Virgin Mary’s wing. In “Mary, Motherhood and Teaching in the Book to a Mother and Chaucer’s ABC,” Mary McDevitt excavates material and textual evidence to argue the medieval mother’s central place in teaching a basic religious literacy and the Virgin Mary’s status as magistra by extension.1 Teachers in elementary schools, where some young children old enough to leave the maternal hearth gained basic skills in both reading and singing, employed church service books for the worship of the 1. McDevitt’s article can be found in Marian Studies 53 (2002): 23–42.

  163

164  Chaucer and Dame School Virgin, a practice underscoring the connection between Mary and study for every schoolchild. That some of these teachers were nuns whose convents provided dame schools reinforced the association of elementary learning and those who imitated Mary’s virginity. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, song or dame schools were more apt to be separate from grammar schools which imparted more advanced knowledge of Latin, and the expansion of the universities and business and legal schools offered a “top tier” for those who had been successful in primary and secondary institutions.2 As English schools more strongly reflected an educational hierarchy, Chaucer explored in his early poetry and The Canterbury Tales the Virgin Mary’s influence over language instruction at a variety of levels.3 In a transcendent vision of dame schools, in which an abbess or prioress oversaw nun-tutors, Chaucer represents the Virgin Mary as a headmistress deeply concerned about facility with language and sacred music. Chaucer’s poetry suggests a hierarchy in the Marian curriculum of language and its sometimes musical expression. First, in An ABC, he provides his own Marian lesson in the essentials of English. Learning ABCs from the Mother is also the subject of The Prioress’s Tale, whose narrator is associated with and an advocate for dame schools. The Prioress sets her tale in an Eastern song school that offers a continuation of studies in singing and reading: from lessons in the primer, to direction in Marian hymn-singing and proper Latin pronunciation, to basic Latin grammar. Because the Prioress has an investment in dame schools overseen by women, she denigrates the male-supervised song schools and actually undermines the educational hierarchy assumed in her tale. Although the Prioress’s hero never masters the fundamentals, Chaucer shows what Marian schooling in rhetorical invention and accurate translation lies beyond in The Second Nun’s Tale. An ABC, The Prioress’s Tale, and The Second Nun’s Tale, examined together, represent a continuum of Marian learning: in An ABC, Mary is the fount of basic language instruction; in The Prioress’s Tale, a cue to melodies of inchoate adoration; and finally in The Second Nun’s Tale, a guide to the clear expression of 2. William J. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987),18. 3. All references to Chaucer’s poetry will be from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).



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church doctrine and history. In these three poems, Chaucer guides a student of Marian communication from childhood to maturity, muteness to speech, praiseful song to conversion preaching. The Marian processes of language acquisition and competency that these three poems suggest valorize learning phases of increased understanding over those immature intimations and at the same time privilege a wise, strong, and articulate over a sentimentalized Mother. In his representations of the Virgin as an educational leader, addresses to Queen Anne in An ABC, and emphasis on women narrators (the Prioress and the Second Nun), Chaucer depicts a feminine community skilled in language and thus a counterpart to the poems of Garland, Howden, Wimborne, and Rolle, who place more emphasis on masculine narrators, schooling, and courtly attitudes toward the Virgin Queen of the Liberal Arts.

Dame Schools and Song Schools The dame school reinforced the association of Mary with early language instruction through the presence of nuns, who were living in imitation of her, and the use of texts for Virgin worship.4 Even when medieval children did not obtain their primary schooling from nuns, but instead in song schools or other settings privileging Latin grammar, their early education was deeply grounded in the veneration of Mary’s virginity. In her groundbreaking book Medieval English Nunneries, Eileen Power estimates that two-thirds of English convents existing between 1275 and 1535 opened schools for small girls, who ate, slept, and attended mass with the nuns and received tutorials in the nuns’ private rooms.5 While the convents were obliged to train novitiates, these young pupils were not destined for the religious life and sometimes included boys.6 Often they were sent by parents who took up their duties of business or government far away and required a sort of educational childcare, or by those who wanted their daughters to receive some elementary learning in the genteel company of nuns.7 Of course, the nuns could teach 4. For further discussion on dame schools, see Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), 55; and Eileen Power, Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 80–82. 5. Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922; rpt. New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964), 264. 6. Ibid., 263. 7. Ibid., 269, 279.

166  Chaucer and Dame School only the knowledge they had at their own command, but the commonplace that learning in English nunneries significantly declined after the Anglo-Saxon age has been qualified by more recent investigations into women’s literacy, such as Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s.8 Since women could not partake in the f lourishing universities and since convents often struggled financially, support for women’s scholarship might be difficult, but certainly not impossible, to obtain during the later Middle Ages. While it remains unclear if many nuns were effective schoolmistresses or if the language of instruction was chiefly vernacular, it seems obvious that the nuns who tutored children would be able to convey to them at least recognition of the main terms in the Latin liturgy that all recited every day. The curriculum in dame schools diverged slightly for the secular girls and the boys. Aside from learning the alphabet, basic prayers, and easier hymns along with the boys, the girls’ instruction had an emphasis on courtly behavior, including good manners and the study of Anglo-Norman.9 The nuns accepted these children and the fees their parents offered for tutelage and supervision in order to support flagging convent funds, and since the motivation was income, dame schools were open only to the wealthy. Class restriction was not the only limitation keeping dame schools small, but also the number of nuns who had leisure for teaching and bishops’ warnings about diversions from devotion.10 Most children, therefore, attended song school in cathedrals and college chantries or reading lessons through town establishments or ad hoc arrangements with parish priests, although these alternatives served mainly boys.11 It is interesting that although the dame school represented a limited opportunity to medieval children, its appeal lasted well into the reformation, when widows or other secular schoolmistresses took up the training of babes.12 Wherever primary education was received in the fourteenth cen8. Ibid., 237. On women’s literacy and literary communities, see, for instance, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 9. Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages, 54–55. 10. Power, Nunneries, 262–63. 11. Orme, English Schools, 64–68. 12. J. H. Higginson, “Dame Schools,” British Journal of Educational Studies 22.2 (1974): 166–81.



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tury, however, it was imbued with the worship of the Virgin Mary. In the absence of textbooks created especially for children, church service books were adopted in primary schools so that children learned their ABCs right alongside Catholic prayers and hymns, often dedicated to the Virgin. As Daniele Alexandre-Bidon remarks, when medieval children possessed alphabet books, the Ave Maria was the prayer most often appropriated as an exercise in them.13 The most prevalent alphabet book was the primer, from which children would have memorized their letters from the “criss-cross row” (or Christ’s cross row) an alphabet divided into three rows, inscribed on parchment and preceded by a cross. The primer followed the alphabet with the Pater Noster, the Ave Maria, and the Credo as well as miscellaneous moral and liturgical instructions in the vernacular. Very often, it included the Little Office of the Virgin Mary, a collection of psalms, prayers, and meditations on the Mother, and finished with “amen.” Learning the alphabet and then phonetically applying it to the Little Office, a young pupil could not escape associating the ABCs and elementary Latin instruction with the Virgin Mary.14 Overall, medieval pedagogy for children was saturated with the language of devotions, often specifically Marian devotions. After mastering the alphabet and memorizing common prayers, the young student might proceed to plainchant in the song schools. Katherine Zieman has demonstrated that increasing demands for choristers and the performance of special liturgies, especially for Lady chapels and chantry masses, created a need in late medieval England for more choir instruction.15 Sometimes children performed the duties of choristers in order to earn their grammatical instruction. According to William Courtenay, the emphasis on synchronic vocalizing in choir helped children learn how to pronounce the Latin some would later study in depth.16 Students sang simple hymns from the antiphoner, many of them songs of Marian praise. By the time the pupils had finished the course of song school studies, usually between the ages of five and ten, 13. Daniele Alexandre-Bidon, “La lettre volee: apprendre a lire a l’enfant au moyen age,” Annales ESC 44 (1989): 955. 14. Orme, English Schools, 62. 15. Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 27–28, 92–100. 16. Courtenay, Schools and Scholars, 17.

168  Chaucer and Dame School they would be able to recognize, although not necessarily understand, the Latin of common prayers and to lift their voices in familiar praise. Some would go on to grammar school, in which they would study Latin in Donatus for the purpose of reading the classical authors, rather than Marian service books. Nevertheless, to prepare for more advanced Latin learning, a Marian foundation would have been laid. The Virgin was dame of the essentials.

An ABC Chaucer suggests that Mary might act as “dame” for adult learners of English in An ABC, where basic English phrases are taught through Marian devotion. In this early poem, he relies on his readers’ memories of elementary Marian instruction in order to appropriate the concept of the dame school for a courtly language manual.17 Chaucer’s An ABC is a lyrical prayer to the Virgin, an abecedary with one stanza for each letter of the alphabet. Entreating Mary’s intercession during God’s judgment of the narrator’s sin, it takes its subject matter and plan from Guillaume Deguilleville’s prayer to the Virgin in Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine. However, Chaucer’s translation is loosely rendered, offering powerful images of Mary and her symbology, where Deguilleville’s language is much more conceptual.18 An ABC has long been considered Chaucer’s gift to Blanche of Lancaster, although I have suggested that such adaptations as Chaucer made to the poem render it inappropriate for Duchess Blanche’s private devotions.19 For instance, 17. McDevitt, “Mary, Motherhood,” 39–42. The section in this chapter on Chaucer’s An ABC was adapted from my previously published “Alphabets and Rosary Beads in Chaucer’s An ABC,” in Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook, ed. Scott D. Troyan (New York: Routledge, 2004), 25–40. Thanks to Taylor & Francis for permission to re-use my work. 18. For a side-by-side comparison of Deguilleville’s French and Chaucer’s English versions of An ABC, see W. W. Skeat’s edition of the poem in The Complete Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). All references to Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine come from this edition. 19. In the first printing of An ABC in 1602, Speght began the tradition of attributing the motivation for the poem to Blanche’s devotional requirements. He glosses the poem as follows: “Chaucer’s A.B.C. called La Priere de nostre Dame: made, as some say, at the request of Blanche, Duchesse of Lancaster, as a praier for her priuat vse, being a woman in her religion very deuout” (quoted in Alfred David, “An ABC to the Style of the Prioress,” in Acts of Interpretation: the Text in Its Contexts, 700–1600 [Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982], 149). “As some say” carries a great burden in the preceding quotation since no corroborative evidence exists for Blanche’s patronage or ownership of the poem. Derek Pearsall criticizes



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Chaucer’s characterization of a warrior-like narrator who is, similar to Haukyn in Piers Plowman, especially mired in sin seems an ill-suited persona for Blanche, with its abject, masculine voice.20 In his study of Chaucer’s prosody, Alfred David also casts doubt upon the notion that An ABC was written specifically for the Duchess of Lancaster. David contends that Chaucer was not experimenting with such decasyllabic lines as control An ABC until after 1373, well after Blanche’s death in 1368, when the poet possibly acquired and then imitated Boccaccio’s de casibus tragedies.21 As I have argued, An ABC is much more likely to have been intended for adult foreigners, who required an English phrase list for court, town, and liturgy. The poem’s alphabetical structure provides a mnemonic for Marian words and phrases, rendering An ABC both a prayer to the Virgin Mary and a tutorial in basic English. The pedagogical purpose of An ABC is heralded by its title, noted specifically in both Bodleian Fairfax 16 and Speght’s 1602 edition.22 In Middle English as in modern, the phrase “an ABC” refers to basic lessons, particularly in reading, and on one level this is what Chaucer aimed to provide. The titles and incipits of fifteenth-century manuscripts of An ABC regularly underscore its alphabetical and thus tutorial nature. For instance, in the Coventry manuscript the title given to An ABC is “a preiour of our ladie per Geoffrey Chaucer made affter the ordre of the a.b.c.”23 In Cambridge University Library MS. Gg.4.27, bold blue ink declares the poem “Chaucer’s A.B.C.”24 Finally, Cambridge University Library MS. Ff.5.30, possibly the earliest manuscript of the poem, begins “Incipit carmen secundum ordinem litterarum alphabeti.”25 As to the meaning of “an a.b.c.,” the Middle English Dictionary emSpeght’s romanticizing of the connection between Chaucer and the house of Lancaster; see Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 83–84. I argue that both the narrative voice and the images of An ABC render it an unlikely woman’s devotional. See Georgiana Donavin, “Alphabets and Rosary Beads in Chaucer’s An ABC,” in Troyan, ed., Medieval Rhetoric, 26. 20. Alan J. Fletcher (“Chaucer the Heretic,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 [2003]: 57– 62) argues that the focus on the narrator’s errour is a reference to heresy. 21. David, “An ABC,” 149. 22. Riverside Chaucer, “Textual Notes,” 1185. 23. Coventry MS PA 325, 75r. 24. Cambridge University Library MS Gg. 427, 5r. 25. The incipit for Cambridge University Library Ff. 5. 30 occurs at 112r and can be translated, “Here begins a song according to the order of the letters of the alphabet.”

170  Chaucer and Dame School phasizes the instructional benefits of the alphabet in three of its four definitions of an “abece,” the first of which is literally “an alphabet.”26 The second and most widespread meaning of “abece” cited in the MED is a “primer.” Imitating the content of the primer, Chaucer’s An ABC follows the alphabet, offers instruction in Mariology and prayer, and finishes in “amen.”27 The third definition for “abece” is the rudiments of a discipline. Taken together, these three definitions set a paradigm for what Chaucer attempts in An ABC: an English language primer of moral value.28 Interestingly, the MED’s fourth definition of “abece” cites Chaucer’s poem as an example of a literary abece. Thus, Chaucer’s An ABC seems to encapsulate and cap all meanings. Rhymed language instruction tools, such as Walter De Biblesworth’s verse dictionary of French vocabulary with English gloss, were popular in the fourteenth century, and Chaucer’s An ABC belongs to this tradition.29 Like De Biblesworth’s dictionary, An ABC was intended for adults who could already read in at least one language, not for children who would have learned their ABCs at three or four years old and found the divine paradoxes in the poem confusing. Imagine a child’s comprehension, for example, of the references in the M stanza to Mary as the unconsumed burning bush on which the fiery tongues of the Holy Ghost descend.30 In any case, a poet as sensitive toward audience as Chaucer would have emphasized the humility and the simple humanity of Mary in her maternal 26. “Abece,” MED, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. 27. Pamela Sheingorn discusses the cultural associations between motherhood and teaching represented by St. Anne’s instruction of the Virgin Mary, the illustration of which is seen in many primers. See Pamela Sheingorn, “‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 105–34. In An ABC Mary has taken the role of magistra passed down to her by her own mother. 28. To avoid a confusion of terms, I should note here that in the fourteenth century, the word “prymer” often meant vernacular service books which the laity would carry to church. An example of such a primer is the following: Henry Littlehales, ed., The Prymer or Lay Folks’ Prayer Book (With Several Facsimiles), EETS o.s. 105 (London: Kegan Paul, 1895). Littlehale’s primer, from Cambridge MS. Dd. 11, 82 (circa 1420–30), is based on the Sarum service and includes the Hours of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the seven Penitential Psalms, the fifteen Gradual Psalms, the Litany, the Office for the Dead, and the Commendations. In contrast, the service books from which children first learned their alphabet and liturgical song were abbreviated—and mainly in Latin. 29. Walter De Biblesworth, The Treatise of Walter De Biblesworth: A Volume of Vocabularies, 2 vols. (London: privately printed, 1857). 30. Chaucer, An ABC, lines 89–96.



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role, if his student were to be a child. Instead, An ABC characterizes Mary etymologically, for instance, as the Stella Maris.31 Finally, the lavishness of the manuscript tradition suggests a reader more protective of pages than a child. An ABC was probably intended not for a child, but rather for adult readers, foreigners at English courts, who might have been able to compare it to Deguilleville’s version. Since Avril Henry has documented the wild popularity of Deguilleville’s poem, copied in at least fifty French manuscripts, the speculation that many courtiers would have had some access to it seems reasonable.32 Helen Phillips has suggested that one particular transplant to the king’s court—Queen Anne—is the secular object of Chaucer’s opening compliment to “an almighty and merciful queene.” According to Phillips, Chaucer’s double alliteration of a and m brings together Anne and Mary for veneration, in much the same way that Chaucer’s declaration in the Legend of Good Women that “oure firste letter is now an A” combines compliments to Anne and Alceste.33 Whether for Anne or for a larger international audience, writing an educational poem would not have been an anomalous process for Chaucer. Indeed, toward the end of An ABC he refers to the “lessoun” he is teaching through this poem, and he will go on to teach other lessons during the same decade.34 Sometime in the late 1370s or early 1380s, John Fisher argues, Chaucer translated Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy for the young King Richard’s improvement.35 Moreover, Chaucer treated the writing of the Boece seriously, consulting Nicholas Trivet’s commentary and the French version by Jean de Meun and glossing interpretive challenges as a good schoolmaster should.36 In the later 1380s and ‘90s, he wrote the Treatise on the Astrolabe, possibly for his son Lewis. An ABC teaches English through the art of memory; its alphabetical 31. Sumner Ferris, “The Mariology of The Prioress’s Tale,” American Benedictine Review 32 (1981): 249–50. 32. Avril Henry, Introduction, The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode, vol. 1, ed. Avril Henry, EETS n.s. 288 (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), xxviii. 33. Helen Phillips, “‘Almighty and al merciable queene’: Marian Titles and Marian Lyrics,” Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, Essays for Felicity Riddy, eds. Jocelyn Wogan Browne et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 97. 34. Chaucer, An ABC, line 179. 35. John Fisher, The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Holt, 1977), 814. 36. Donald R. Howard, Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York: Dutton, 1987), 380.

172  Chaucer and Dame School order both declares the poem a tutorial and provides the means of learning from it. Frances Yates’s and Mary Carruthers’s work, documenting the use of the alphabet in medieval mnemonic devices, illustrates how Chaucer employed his ABCs.37 While Yates demonstrates the alphabet’s usefulness in retaining material, Carruthers extends this argument to show how alphabetical memory tools also aid in rhetorical invention. Absorbing knowledge and putting it to new creative uses are thus the goals of scholars and church leaders who have composed in alphabetical structures since the classical and Old Testament eras. In the De memoria, which was perpetuated by Cicero and Quintilian and revived in Western university studies in the twelfth century, Aristotle recommends the letters of the alphabet as “places” under which to file information in the mind.38 The Bible includes alphabetical poems, such as Psalm 118/119, and Catholic churchmen classified their biblical learning according to alphabetical letters. Jerome’s indices of the Vulgate Bible are alphabetical, and later exegetes such as Robert Grosseteste glossed the scriptures with notae, alphabetical characters functioning as a heuristic under which bits of the texts were classified.39 In the Parisiana Poetria, discussed in chapter 2, John of Garland illustrates how these notae might have prompted the memory.40 Attempting to explain the pseudo-Ciceronian instructions on memoria in the Ad Herennium, Garland creates a link between alphabetical memorization and the bestiaries. Bestiaries had always provided repositories of moral instruction, the figures of animals becoming loci from which to recall the moral wisdom illustrated by each particular beast. By connecting the animal and the first letter of its name, John of Garland advises that the sound of the letter can help retrieve similar sounding words, and the image of the beast can create the visual prompt for this information.41 Similarly in An 37. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 38. Aristotle, On Memory, trans. Richard Sorabji (Providence R.I.: Brown University Press, 1972). 39. Lawrence Besserman (Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998], 119) notes the existence of alphabetical poems in the Bible which may have provided a model for Chaucer’s An ABC. 40. John of Garland, Parisiana Poetria, ed. Traugott Lawler, Yale Studies in English 182 (New Haven. Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), book 2. 41. For a detailed discussion of the texts for the methods of memorization mentioned here, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, especially 29–30, 115–18, and 126–27.



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ABC, the letter of the alphabet at the head of each stanza is a nota, associated with a Mariological image, and evocative of words characterizing the Virgin which begin in the same letter. The alphabet provides a mnemonic device not only for scholastic and ecclesiastical purposes, but also for popular literature in the vernacular. Lyrics such as “An Alphabetical Devotion to the Cross,” “An A.B.C. of Devotion,” and “An ABC Poem on the Passion” begin each new line with a succeeding letter of the alphabet. 42 These lyrics may imitate alphabetical Psalm 118/119 and seem to employ alphabetical letters mainly as an inducement for the reader to memorize a series of meditations. We will be considering some meditative aspects of the Marian Middle English lyrics in the next chapter. While the alphabet in Chaucer’s poem may also promote the memorization of Marian meditations, An ABC’s articulation of linguistic commonplaces, such as the inexpressibility topos and the need for the Virgin’s rhetoric at God’s court, suggests a complementary purpose in language teaching. A longer work, Etienne de Besançon’s Alphabetum Narrationum and its fifteenth-century Middle English translation, entitled An Alphabet of Tales in Mary Macleod Banks’s edition, illustrate how common stories were organized alphabetically.43 In An Alphabet of Tales, a Marian miracle occurs under almost every letter, showing the sort of common discursive inducement Chaucer might have had to structure his praises of the Virgin in an alphabetical rubric. Since scholastic, religious, and popular traditions employed the alphabet as an aid to memory and thus the perpetuation of knowledge, it seems sensible to suppose that Chaucer was doing the same in An ABC: teaching by classifying information according to letters. The layout, illustration, and glosses of the medieval manuscripts reinforce the notion that the alphabetical letters provide notae in An ABC. These notae, the foundation for language learning, offer a mnemonic device for English words and Marian phrases. Although all of the existing copies of An ABC were produced in the fifteenth century, their uni42. “An Alphabetical Devotion to the Cross,” Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), 149–50; “An A.B.C. of Devotion,” Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, ed. R. T. Davies (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 209; “An ABC Poem on the Passion,” Cambridge Middle English Lyrics, ed. Henry A. Person (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962), 5–6. 43. I consulted two British Library manuscripts of Etienne de Besançon’s Alphabetum Narrationem, Harley MS 268 and Arundel 378. Mary Macleod Banks, ed., An Alphabet of Tales, EETS o.s. 126 (London: Kegan Paul, 1904).

174  Chaucer and Dame School formity indicates a standard, possibly derived from Chaucer’s original, in presenting the poem.44 Commenting on this uniformity, George Pace describes how the initial letters at the head of each stanza are illuminated, focusing the reader’s attention on the alphabet as a structural device. According to Pace, thirteen of sixteen manuscript copies show artistic initials for each of the stanzas, ten of these being large Lombardic capitals especially associated with religious verse.45 In my own review of the manuscripts, I was impressed with the contrast between the illumination of the alphabetical letters for An ABC and the illustrations for other writings in many of the collections. For instance, in Bodley MS 638, a Chaucerian compendium, the alphabet of An ABC is more intricately drawn and illuminated than anything else in the manuscript (figure 7). Some of the earlier folios show small decorated capitals, lines between stanzas and stanza breaks, but nothing out of the ordinary like An ABC’s large, colorful Anglicana lettering. Five manuscripts of An ABC doubly underscore the alphabetical letter by enlarging the first letter of each stanza and also repeating the same alphabetical letter in the left margin.46 In three of these five, the marginal letters are certainly drawn by another hand than that which inscribed the text of the poem, giving the marginalia the status of a gloss.47 The design of these five manuscripts especially prompts the reader to associate the subject matter of the stanza with the correspondent capital letter. For example, under P for “purpos,” Chaucer teaches the vocabulary of the Annunciation when 44. Manuscripts in which An ABC occurs are the following. Group A: [Bod] Bodley 638, Bodleian; [Cov] Coventry MS (Accession 325), City Record Office, Coventry; [F] Fairfax 16, Bodleian; [Gg] Gg. 4.27, Cambridge University Library; [H3] Harley 2251, British Library; [H5] Harley 7578, British Library (lines 1–50 only); [P] Pepys 2006, Magadalene College, Cambridge (two copies, P1 and P2, lines 1–60 only). Both Pace and Benson include Speght’s second edition in this list of manuscripts. Group B: [A6] Additional 36983, British Library (formerly Bedford); [Ff2] Ff.5.30, Cambridge University Library; [G] Hunter 239, Glasgow University Library; [J] G.21, St. John’s College, Cambridge; [L] Laud Miscellany 740, Bodleian; [Mel] Melbourne MS, State Library of Victoria (Felton Bequest); [S] Arc. L.10.2/E.44, Sion College, London. George Pace (“The Adorned Initials of Chaucer’s A B C,” Manuscripta 23.1 [1979]: 98) notes three other unclassified manuscripts under “Unplaced Fragments.” Ff2 provides the basis of Benson’s edition. 45. Ibid., 90, 92–93. 46. Pace (ibid.) notes only four manuscripts which contain two alphabets. These four manuscripts are Bod, H3, J, and S. However, A6 also includes two alphabets. Speght’s edition follows the practice of two alphabets in the text. 47. The three manuscripts are H3, A6, and J.

Figure 7. Capitals “G,” “H,” and “I.” Geoffrey Chaucer, An ABC, Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 638, fol. 205r. Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.



175

176  Chaucer and Dame School the divine purpose of Jesus’ conception was communicated to Mary.48 Under R for “redresse,” Chaucer places the Middle English verbs or actions through which Mary makes the sinner worthy: “chastise,” “merci” “springe,” “biseeche.”49 In An ABC, the illuminated capitals remind the prayerful of the next set of Marian praises, and each letter is a cue to related vocabulary. An attractive pedagogical tool, An ABC turns “abstract typological figures into pictures.”50 This is true not only of the manuscripts’ visual artistry, but also of the poem’s content. Consistent with the alphabetical prompts in the manuscripts, Chaucer enhances Deguilleville’s metaphors and often replaces conceptualization of the Virgin with imagery. As Donald Howard sums it up, “Everything [in Chaucer’s version] is more concrete and specific.”51 In stanza 2—the B stanza—Chaucer specifies Deguilleville’s reference to the Virgin as a “haven” by creating a harborside picture of his soul as the Ship of Faith, which, without the Virgin’s help, would “to-breste.”52 Brilliantly “coloring in” Deguilleville’s poem, in the V stanza Chaucer sets the scene more particularly with heavenly furniture, as he refers to the Virgin’s bench.53 The ultimate pictorial enhancement occurs in the M stanza, where Chaucer pushes Deguilleville’s motif of fire to the limit. Marking the exact midpoint of the poem, the powerful M stanza is, according to William Quinn, “a sort of fulcrum in the dynamic equilibrium of [the] poet-petitioner’s moral consciousness by invoking mystical memories against anagogic dread.”54 Whereas the French poem contends that Mary, the unconsumed burning bush, is a sign to all sinners to quench their ardor, Chaucer adds an allusion to the pentecostal flames of the Holy Ghost and takes his readers into the fires of hell.55 Chaucer’s extensions of Deguilleville’s motifs 48. Chaucer, An ABC, line 11. 49. Ibid., lines 129, 133, 136. 50. David, “An ABC,” line 151. 51. Howard, Chaucer, 90. Helen Phillips argues in “Chaucer and Deguilleville: The ABC in Context” (Medium Aevum 62 [1993]: 1–19) that the vibrancy and movement of Chaucer’s images can be traced to the activity of the pilgrimage in other sections of Deguileville’s poem. 52. Chaucer, An ABC, line 16. Compare Chaucer’s extenuation of the harbor imagery with Deguilleville’s “Ma povre arme je t’aporte: / Sauve la: ne vaut que morte; / En li sont tous bien avortez” (lines 22–24). 53. Chaucer, An ABC, line 159. 54. William Quinn, “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere: An ABC as Artifact and Critical Issue,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 120 55. Compare Chaucer’s “The Holi Gost, the which that Moyses wende / Had ben a-fyr



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provide a more coherent vision of related epithets for the Virgin. Chaucer not only amplifies Deguilleville’s metaphors, but supplies roles for the Virgin where the French poem offers abstractions. Where Deguilleville calls Mary a place of refuge, a bounty of relief, a great person, Chaucer calls her “queen,” “advocate,” and “maistresse.”56 Such personification supplies a much clearer immediate audience to the praying narrator. It thereby encourages the reader to contemplate separate visions of Mary and memorize her names. Finally, Chaucer often replaces Deguilleville’s doctrinal truisms with actions. For instance, Chaucer asks that the Virgin chastise him when Deguilleville requests intercession, and depicts the Annunciation as an antidote to war with God (P stanza) when Deguilleville generally mentions Mary’s role in the Incarnation as a key to universal peace.57 By evoking mental pictures, Chaucer offers his reader iconographic reminders of the information filed under the letters of the alphabet. These pictures prompt the reader to remember the Marian diction placed under each particular letter. While the alphabetical letter provides a phonetic prompt for Marian concepts, the poetic image offers a pictorial summary of these concepts. The medieval practice of teaching the alphabet by associating letter and image begins even in infancy, when children were given embroidered cloth alphabets. Each square cloth shows a letter of the alphabet at its center and a pictorial border. and this was in figure. / Now ladi, from the fyr thou us defende / Which that in helle eternalli shal dure” (lines 93–96) to Deguilleville’s “Et tu, buisson de recreuz / Es, pour tremper leur ardure” (lines 140–41). 56. Deguilleville, Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine, lines 1–2, 154–56, 165; Chaucer, An ABC, lines 1, 102, 109. Compare Chaucer’s “Almighty and al merciable queene, / To whom that al this world fleeth for socour” (lines 1–2) to Deguilleville’s “A toy du monde le refui, / Vierge glorieuse, m’en fui.” (lines 1–2). Compare Chaucer’s “We han noon oother melodye or glee / Us to rejoyse in oure adversitee, / Ne avocat noon” (lines 100–102) to Deguilleville’s “N’avons autre tirelire / . . . . Ta bonté comme est parfonde” (lines 150, 156). Finally, compare Chaucer’s “From ancille he made thee maistresse” (line 109) with Deguilleville’s “Ains toy deis chamberiere / Quant en toy vint li grans geans” (lines 164–65). 57. Chaucer, An ABC, line 39; Deguilleville, Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine, lines 59–60, 179–80; Compare Chaucer’s “But thou er that day me correcte, / Of verrey right my werk wol me confonde” (lines 39–40) with Deguilleville’s “Las m’en clain quant bien m’avise, / Souvent en doy dire heu!” (lines 59–60). Also, Chaucer’s “Purpos I have sum time for to enquere, / Wherefore and whi the Holi Gost thee soughte, / Whan Gabrielles vois cam to thin ere. / He not to werre us swich a wonder wroughte” (lines 113–16) with Deguilleville’s “Pris m’est volenté d’enquerre / Pour savoir que Diex vint querre / Quant en toy se vint enserrer; / En toy devint ver de terre; / Ne cuit pas que fust pour guerre” (lines 169–73).

178  Chaucer and Dame School Game pieces, these textiles were intended to be tossed in the air and replaced in alphabetical order: small children would first complete the puzzle by matching up the pictorial borders around the letters.58 In An ABC, Chaucer paints word pictures which will help the student associate the alphabetical letter heading each stanza with Marian English phrases. For instance, under B for “bountee” Chaucer lists all of the characterizations of Mary as a generous lady in heaven’s court and also associates with b the consequence of failing to seek Mary’s succor—the to-bresting of one’s Ship of Faith. This stanza’s depiction of Mary as the port and the soul floundering in the water presents a mental image under which to recall the Virgin’s fredom. Similarly, in the V stanza, Chaucer situates the “Virgine” in her current settings, the tower of Paradise and Seat of Judgment.59 Through v he links “virgine” and “ever,” underscoring that these are the scenes of Mary’s activity into perpetuity.60 The apostrophe to the Virgin “O fresshe flour!” provides a pictorial image under which to classify mentally these Marian scenarios. The everflourishing flower, in other words, is an icon prompting the reader’s memory of the vocabulary for Mary’s everlasting roles. Finally, the Y stanza is a veritable cache of associations through y, mentally unlocked by the image of Mary as a shield. Since the head word to this stanza is “Ysaac,” whom God called upon Abraham to sacrifice and the prophets called a precursor of the Messiah, y underscores the polarized concepts of death and redemption.61 On the one hand, y stands for the Law which mandates death for sinners: Isaac’s death was “certeyn”; Abraham must God “obeye”; he must not mourn to see his son “slayn.”62 On the other hand, y communicates redemption from the Old Law: Jesus became the lamb to “deye”; Mary is now a “ladi ful of mercy”; sinners may now “preye” for the salvation of their souls.63 Belief in the Resurrection, which permitted divine justice to convert to mercy, requires faith, and so the mental picture for the Y stanza’s vocabulary of redemption is the “targe,” Mary as the Shield of Faith.64 As An ABC teaches a Marian lexicon, it also contextualizes a ba58. Alexandre-Bidon, “La lettre volee,” 982. 59. Chaucer, An ABC, line 153. 60. Ibid., lines 153, 160. 61. Ibid., line 171. 62. Ibid., lines 169–71. 63. Ibid., lines 172–74; all italics for the emphasis of y are mine. 64. Ibid., line 176.



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sic vocabulary for court and society. Since Chaucer’s language is much more pictographic than Deguilleville’s, new words would create an image in the reader’s memory. Teaching a variety of social titles, An ABC outlines the roles of important personages. The opening stanza characterizes the queen as one to whom inferiors sue for mercy—a characterization popular since the legend that a pregnant Queen Philippa kneeled before Edward III for a pardon for the burghers of Calais.65 Also dramatizing the roles of lawyers and judges, since Mary both intercedes as advocate and supersedes God as judge in this poem, An ABC sets scenes of justice, such as the “grete assyse” and the “hye justyse,” clarifies the use of a “bille,” and explains the process of “acquitaunce.”66 Beyond the terms of judicial settings, the poem provides place names of royal housing (the “tente” and the “tour”), of the city (“crooked strete” and “temple”), and of the cosmos (“erthe,” “see,” “stink eterne,” and “Paradys”).67 Overall, An ABC models polite language for petitions as the Chaucerian narrator makes his petition to Mary (to make her petition to God at the final judgment). The word “pitee / pitous” is one of the most often repeated, reflecting an audience’s proper attitude toward earnest requests and, of course, one of Chaucer’s most prevalent themes.68 The method for learning Marian and courtly vocabulary in An ABC is similar to counting rosary beads.69 The poem’s capital letters, notae facilitating memory, unlock each stanza of Marian praises in the same way that rosary beads cue Ave Marias. Chaucer himself likens the appeal to Mary in An ABC to that in the rosary: the poem is meant to solicit the same support as “an Ave-Marie or tweye.”70 Furthermore, the 65. Jean Froissart, Oeuvres, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, vol. 5 (Brussels: Academie royale des sciences, 1868), 215. 66. Chaucer, An ABC, lines 36–37, 59, 60, 110; On the use of bills and writs in An ABC see Joseph Allen Hornsby, Chaucer and the Law (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1988), 150–54. 67. Chaucer, An ABC, lines 9, 41, 50, 54, 56, 70, 145, 154, 155. 68. Ibid., lines 68, 88, 126, 135, 137. 69. Underscoring An ABC’s status as a prayer, William Quinn traces its relationship to both Ps 118 and the rosary. See Quinn, “Chaucer’s Problematic Priere,” 124–28. On An ABC as a prayer, see also Sister Mary Madleva, A Lost Language, and Other Essays on Chaucer (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951), 16; Gerard Maria Corr, O.S.M., “Chaucer’s Praise of Mary,” Marianum: Ephemerides mariologiae 14 (1952): 305–20; Georgia Ronan Crampton, “Chaucer’s Singular Prayer,” Medium Aevum 59.2 (1990): 191–21; and Kay Gilligan Stevenson, “Medieval Rereading and Rewriting: The Context of Chaucer’s ‘ABC,’” in “Divers Toyes Mengled”: Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, ed. Michel Bitot (Tours: l’Université François Rabelais, 1996), 27–42. 70. Chaucer, An ABC, line 104.

180  Chaucer and Dame School structure and content of An ABC is comparable to that of the most popular fourteenth-century rosaries. In Chaucer’s time, the rosary, although different from today’s Catholic meditation, was a well-recognized mode of prayer and often mentioned in literature. Chaucer’s Prioress owns a pair of beads “gauded al with grene,” and Gower’s Amans of the Confessio Amantis reaches for his beads at the end. Prayer beads are common to many religions; however, in the Roman Catholic tradition the beads themselves were considered holy and were often lovingly carved.71 In the early Middle Ages, beads were used to count Pater Nosters, but as Roman Catholic Mariology developed, they also served Marian prayers.72 In the eleventh century Peter Damian brought to the West the earliest Marian prayer from the Eastern liturgy for the Annunciation and Ember Wednesday, and Franciscan and Dominican friars spread the prayer among the Roman Catholic laity.73 Popular throughout Europe by the twelfth century, the first Hail Mary, or Ave Maria, combines two biblical texts in the Virgin’s praise: the angel Gabriel’s greeting in Luke 1:28 (“Hail full of grace”) and Elizabeth’s adoration of her cousin in Luke 1:42 (“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb”).74 Adding the name “Jesus” in the thirteenth century, this simple prayer was sometimes known as the Psalter of Our Lady and was recited instead of the Divine Office by uneducated lay members of monastic communities who could not be expected to memorize the psalms.75 Tales of Marian miracles such as are included in The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin argue the efficacy of repetitions of this prayer.76 In them the Virgin appears to rescue the faithful at the mere 71. Chaucer, General Prologue, line 159. See Beverly Boyd’s close analysis of the meaning of the phrase “gauded al with grene” in “Chaucer’s Prioress: Her Green Gauds,” Modern Language Quarterly 11 (1950): 404–16. Prayer beads are used in Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. According to Anne Winston-Allen (Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997], 14), Marco Polo recorded that King Malabar wore a prayer chain. She also notes that it is commonly thought that crusaders were mainly responsible for the popularization of rosary beads as they returned from the Holy Land with such prayer chains. 72. Boyd, “Chaucer’s Prioress,” 405–9. 73. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), 306. 74. Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose, 13–14. 75. Boyd, “Chaucer’s Prioress,” 407. 76. Beverly Boyd, ed. The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin (San Marino, Calif.: Huntingdon Library, 1964), 50–55, 119–22.



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articulation of an Ave Maria. By the fourteenth century an expanded rosary, influenced by Marian psalters interpreting the 150 psalms as prefigurations of the lives of Jesus and Mary, included 150 verses in praise of the Virgin. These praises were often counted on a chain of fifty beads. During Chaucer’s lifetime, this traditional form of the rosary was transforming again to include narrative meditations on the life of Christ, an amplification arising from the popularity of the Passion story.77 As Anne Winston-Allen remarks, however, the most common form of fourteenth-century rosary was “a typical list of unconnected [Marian] accolades.”78 Chaucer’s An ABC is a rosary in that it is a poetical circlet dedicated to the Virgin Mary.79 An ABC’s closing reference to penitents who are “merci able” returns the reader to the opening invocation to the “al merciable queene” of heaven, imitating the rosary’s never-ending cycle of prayer. Like the poem’s circular structure, the rhyme scheme (ababbcbc) produces tightly integrated stanzas, inviolate virginal bodies. Also an ABC, the rhyme scheme shapes a trinity of rhymes from the Mother’s materia. This enclosed form renders An ABC a hortus conclusus, which the rosary reproduces, structurally similar to John of Howden’s accolades to the Virgin and also to Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, two poems which begin and end at the same scene.80 Since in An ABC Chaucer is, notwithstanding, less concerned than the Pearl-poet with thematic unity, P. M. Kean complains that “beyond the fact that each [stanza] is addressed to the Blessed Virgin, there is no consecutive thread running through the poem.”81 It is precisely this loose connection of apostrophes and epithets, however, which makes An ABC a fourteenth-century rosary. Declaring repetitive devices and circularity characteristic of Marian compositions, Patrick Diehl argues that cohesiveness lies in the stability of the tenor around which vehicles, sometimes various as creation itself, cluster.82 Donald Howard calls the logic 77. Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose, 15–20. 78. Ibid., 19. 79. Pace, “The Adorned Initials of Chaucer’s A B C,” 95. 80. David, “An ABC,” 150. 81. P. M. Kean, Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry, vol. 2, The Art of Narrative (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 193. 82. Patrick Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 105.

182  Chaucer and Dame School of An ABC “centrifugal,” as its associations spread from the virginal center.83 As Alfred David remarks, if “repetitiousness . . . make[s] [An ABC] tedious to the modern reader . . . that is, of course, what makes it a prayer.”84 When the prayer is also a language instruction tool, repetitiousness encourages memorization. Primer and prayer, An ABC takes for granted the Virgin Mary’s presence at the beginning of language instruction and imaginatively elaborates on John of Garland’s potential motives for positioning Mary so prominently in his advanced textbooks. More immediately than Garland’s work, perhaps the narrative context of Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine encouraged Chaucer to link the Virgin Mary to language study in An ABC, since Grace Dieu gives Pilgrim a “scripture” to study before he prays to Christ’s mother. Even without this context, however, the prevalence of dame schools and the employment of Marian prayers for elementary language learning would have encouraged Chaucer to associate the Virgin Mary with ABCs. Chaucer revives this association for the adult learner of the English language. As we leave Chaucer’s early writing and move toward an analysis of Marian literature in The Canterbury Tales, we will notice that just as for song school students chorister training follows the ABCs, a focus on Marian song follows An ABC. Certainly, An ABC contains references to music and song. The title in three manuscripts declares the poem a “carmen,” or a lyrical song; the N stanza calls the Virgin a “melodye or glee”; and the Y stanza implies a community of penitents singing.85 Nevertheless, An ABC is aimed at a basic competency in English vocabulary rather than the tones that might carry it along. In its depiction of Mary as advocate at God’s court, it emphasizes scenes for rhetoric and logic, rather than music. Skipping over choir training as an opportunity for Marian instruction in the trivium, An ABC would seem to represent the gradual separation of language and song instruction during the fourteenth century, when a demand for choristers outpaced grammar schools and preparations for those performing liturgies and those who would depend upon literacy diverged.86 In the two Canterbury Tales dis83. Howard, Chaucer, 90. 84. David, “An ABC,” 150. 85. British Library Additional 36983, Cambridge University Library Ff.5.30, Sion College Arc.L.10.2/E.44; Chaucer, An ABC, lines 100, 175. 86. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 16–18.



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cussed below, however, Chaucer directly faces the question of the place of music in the Marian language arts.

The Prioress’s Tale Throughout his career, Chaucer continues to write about the Virgin Mary’s relationship to language acquisition and in The Canterbury Tales focuses on its musical performance. The Prioress’s Tale explicitly connects Mary to elementary grammar and choral education through the student-hero, who is the Virgin’s special devotee, and also through the Prioress-narrator, who is associated with dame schools. By humorously locating the Prioress’s French in the dialect of “the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,” Chaucer places her at a dame school, for which Power finds evidence after 1346.87 However, while An ABC’s vision of Mary as the penitent’s headmistress suggests a “dame school” that can be spiritually and linguistically edifying into adulthood, the Prioress’s representation of dame school restricts the Virgin’s lessons to illiterate babes.88 The Prioress’s connection to the convent at Stratford solidifies her association with dame schools. The convent at Stratford, Henry Ansgar Kelly notes, lost more than half its community between 1356 and 1381, while most nunneries of this period were gaining in numbers and amassing funds. This fact seems to indicate increasing poverty, even though the convent was supported by Elizabeth of Hainault, Queen Phillipa’s sister; it also explains the necessity of opening a dame school for financial support.89 The Prioress, according to Nicolas Orme, manifests the attributes of such a dame school’s typical offerings for girls: “religious devotion, French of the Anglo-Norman dialect, table manners, deportment and good behavior.”90 Kelly agrees, remarking, 87. Chaucer, General Prologue, line 125; Power, Nunneries, 264, 577. 88. By developing Chaucer’s criticisms of the Prioress’s ideas of education, I do not believe, as Helen Phillips writes, that the poet does “a hatchet job . . . [on] an unmarried woman with some independent authority, analogous to a headmistress or college principal, and then undermines her dignity.” See Helen Phillips, Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Fiction, Writing, Context (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2000), 39. Instead, as I argue later in this chapter, Chaucer amplifies on the intellectual dignity of the Second Nun, who shows herself to be a truly learned woman. 89. Henry Angsar Kelly, “A Neo-Revisionist Look at Chaucer’s Nuns,” Chaucer Review 31.2 (1996): 118. 90. Nicolas Orme, “Chaucer and Education,” Chaucer Review 16.1 (1981): 42. See also Hardy Long Frank, “Seeing the Prioress Whole,” Chaucer Review 25.3 (1991): 230.

184  Chaucer and Dame School “Perhaps, then, we are to think of [the Prioress on pilgrimage] as a headmistress advertising her educational program.”91 If such is the case, the advertisement suffers from a limited view of the tutoring in the Virgin Mary’s name and from the gratuitous denigration of song schools administered by men, offering further trivium studies—and competing with dame schools such as the Prioress’s. In contrast to An ABC, which adapts Marian instruction in the primer to adult language learning and prayer, The Prioress’s Tale insists that Mary’s tutelage is most powerful at the lowest ends of the curriculum when children are still tied to the m/Mother’s (or mother superior’s) nurturing. Although The Prioress’s Tale is set in an Eastern song school equipped to go beyond this basic instruction and ostensibly shows the next level in language and choral education after children learn their Latin ABCs, the tale indulges a regressive yearning for lessons at the maternal hearth and in the dame school. Having learned the alphabet, memorized communal prayers, and begun to read the Little Office phonetically from the primer, children, as depicted in The Prioress’s Tale, enter the choir to sing Marian lauds and do show Mary’s influence over plainchant instruction. In the Prioress’s view, however, it would be better if they proceeded no further: no further, that is, than the typical dame school could guide them. Possessing a basic vocabulary for Latin prayer, but unable to construe the sentences of Marian hymns, children learning to sing in a dame school or entering an institutional choir in a song school could feel the mood of the music and barely grasp the purpose of their performance. Since the Prioress’s hero, the “clergeon,” concentrates on singing before even studying his primer, he avoids any Latin learning that would prepare him for further study and, as Bruce Holsinger emphasizes in his reading of this tale, sings boldly what cannot be fathomed.92 As a result, the clergeon excludes himself from further offerings in grammar at his song school and remains at the level of beginner in both song and dame school. By glorifying his intuitive expression and seeking to join him in instinctive praise—narrator and hero of this tale providing a single melody of inchoate Marian adoration—the Prioress instantiates and perpetuates the very basic levels of literacy and song learned in con91. Kelly, “Chaucer’s Nuns,” 118. 92. Bruce Holsinger, Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 267.



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vent schools for children. In her ostensibly naïve chanting, the Prioress seems to connect the educational level of the little boy with the extragrammatical literacy of unlearned nuns, whose liturgical performances familiarized them with Latin cues and common expressions in holy language, if not with precise meanings. The Prioress, however, is not unlearned in Latin, as we shall see from her tale’s exegesis of Psalm 8 and imitation of Marian psalter books, and in reality such a prioress would have known that even unlettered nuns were encouraged to hear translations and meditate in the vernacular during Latin readings.93 As a leader of women whose dame school teaching imitated Mary, Queen of the Liberal Arts, the Prioress might take pride in a school that emphasizes foundations for more advanced training. By projecting, instead, a Mother who requires little more than what can be learned from the cradle, the Prioress dismisses higher study in the liberal arts in an effort to promote and unfortunately retain students at the levels of learning her own dame school would be likely to offer. Mary’s biblical association with music and chant—especially with the Magnificat—invites not only the musical imitation of beginners such as the Prioress pretends to be and her little clergeon, but also the thoughtful consideration of advanced exegetes and poets. By identifying with the Marian learning of children, the Prioress excludes herself from writers who engage Mary’s musicality at a higher level. Augustine, for instance, called the Virgin “nostra tympanistria” in a typological reading comparing her to Miriam, sister of Moses. As Miriam leads the Hebrews in praise with a tympanum, Mary leads all the faithful and the angels in a choir of praise.94 This reading is based on Psalm 68:25—“Among them were the damsels playing with timbrels.” Mary is often connected to the music of the psalms, and since she derives from the house of David, a connection we have already seen emphasized in John of Howden’s Philomena, she is depicted as having inherited her ancestor’s artistry in lyrical praise. By launching her Prologue with Psalm 8 and providing a Marian miracle story as a gloss on the same psalm, the Prioress works within the frameworks of biblical exegesis and accepted poetic motifs, but as we shall discover, she deploys hermeneutical tools in order to deny the student’s further reading and discovery. 93. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 121–27. 94. Augustine, Expositions on the Book of Psalms, 67:26. PL 36–37.

186  Chaucer and Dame School The Prioress takes her preference for childish wisdom from the dictum of Psalm 8 that truth shall proceed from the mouths of babes. In its employment of Psalm 8, The Prioress’s Tale also connects Mary to the house of David and imitates the Latin psalter books that a prioress would have used in worship. That the gift of song came down from David, filled the Virgin, and burst forth in the Magnificat is clear in medieval psalters that include the Hours of the Virgin. These manuscripts produce all 150 psalms as well as the Little Office, which also includes psalms and the Magnificat within its sequences of Marian worship. Linking David’s songs with Mary’s, they insist on a lineage for church music that is also occasionally depicted in manuscript illuminations of the David cycle, psalms emphasizing the patriarch’s musical gifts and expressions. One typical example of these texts is the “Psalter with Missal and Calendar,” British Library Harley MS 2871, a fourteenthcentury compilation of the psalter, miscellaneous songs, and the Hours of the Virgin. After the church calendar, the psalter begins with Psalm 1, blessing the man who walks in the counsel of the Lord. The decorated capital B for “beatus” initiates the text and intimates that King David is not only the author, but also such a man, since he crouches in the letter’s curves, playing the harp (figure 8).95 This important visual association of David, holiness, and music is underscored by all of the psalms calling the audience to sing or play instruments and finally by the last image of the psalter—David ringing bells in exultation over divine favor (figure 9).96 When the Hours of the Virgin begin almost one hundred folios later, the same scheme of illustration is repeated; the Virgin is portrayed praising the Lord at the Annunciation inside a capital D (figure 10).97 The text reads “Domine labia mea aperies” (Lord, may you open my lips), a refrain throughout the office that binds Psalm 50/51:17 and the Magnificat. Psalm 50/51:17 continues, “my mouth will declare your praise,” and it is in the Magnificat that Mary opens her lips so that her “soul magnifies the Lord.”98 Throughout the rest of the Little Office, psalms are interspersed with reflections on important events for the holy family. For instance, Psalm 6, beginning “Domine ne in furore tuo arguas me” (Lord may you not convict me in your anger), is juxtaposed with a meditation on and illustration of Christ displaying the stig95. British Library Harley MS 2871, 13r. 97. Ibid., 209r.

96. Ibid., 120r. 98. Lk 1:46.

Figure 8. Decorated “B” of the David Cycle. British Library MS Harley 2871, fol. 13r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library. 187

Figure 9. King David ringing bells. British Library MS Harley 2871, fol. 120r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library.

188

Figure 10. Annunciation depicted in a capital “D.” British Library MS Harley 2871, fol. 209r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library. 189

190  Chaucer and Dame School mata.99 The psalmic verse is placed in Christ’s mouth, just as Mary and David share lyrics for their songs of praise. Psalters such as Harley MS 2871 show that the psalms prefigure the lives of Jesus and Mary through a song cycle. The music of the psalms is an eternal medium for praise and revelation, and Mary is inheritor and conductor of the main score. As a reflection upon Mary, the psalms, and education in plainchant, The Prioress’s Tale is, as the narrator insists, a “song,” and it is enveloped by songs.100 While the songs of John of Garland, Walter of Wimborne, and John of Howden assume or teach knowledge of the trivium, the Prioress insists that the uneducated singing of children best channels the Mother’s will. Elizabeth Robertson determines “song” to be an appropriate mode for the narrator and hero of the Prioress’s tale, since song is “an alternative style [of discourse] for women and children, that is for those who have less access both to theological training and to Latin.”101 In light of John of Garland’s epithalamium and the carmina of the northern Anglo-Latin poets, however, we must qualify Robertson’s observation by noting that it is not “song” itself, but a particularly affective approach to its understanding that seems suitable for educational level of the young hero and attractive to the narrator. By employing the word “speech” only twice and “song” eleven times, the Prioress accents her tale’s relationship to music, and specifically to the choral presentation of the psalter.102 Others have remarked upon the repetitiousness of the Prioress’s syntax and rhetorical patterns which render her tale a musical refrain.103 For instance, discovering a melodic sameness rather than a literary dynamic in the structure of the plot, Robert O. Payne concludes that “the Prioress’s tale . . . becomes almost pure lyric, with the action scarcely narrated at all but only referred to in order to establish points of reference for emotional elaboration.”104 In The Prioress’s Tale, then, 99. British Library Harley MS 2871, 258r. 100. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 487. 101. Elizabeth Robertson, “Aspects of Female Piety in the Prioress’s Tale,” in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1990), 154. 102. C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 137. 103. See David, “An ABC”; and Richard H. Osberg, “A Voice for the Prioress: The Context of English Devotional Prose,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 25–54. 104. Robert O. Payne, The Key of Remembrance: A Study of Chaucer’s Poetics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963), 162.



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“song” signifies affective chant in honor of the Virgin, with or without a musical score. The rhyme royal stanzas formulate verses for the Prioress’s cantus that may be compared to the tight metric scheme integrating the alphabetic stanzas of An ABC. Consonant with the Prioress’s characterization of her tale as a song, two lyrics underscore her narrative: Psalm 8 and the Alma redemptoris mater. Psalm 8, the first psalm of matins in the Little Office, provides the Prologue and thematic reflection for her tale, and the Alma redemptoris mater, a Marian hymn from the antiphoner, motivates the plot.105 Employing Psalm 8 in her Prologue’s opening invocation to the Virgin, the Prioress demonstrates her ability to translate Latin liturgical passages for students and leads her audience of Canterbury pilgrims in a vernacular chanting of the Little Office. According to the typological structure of psalters with the Hours of the Virgin, the Prioress introduces a miracle of the Virgin narrative with a psalm in order to underscore the psalm’s revelation concerning Mary’s miracles. The first stanza of the Prologue offers a Marian paraphrase of Psalm 8:1–3 in the following words: O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveilous Is in this large world ysprad—quod she— For noght oonly thy laude precious Parfourned is by men of dignitee, But by the mouth of children thy bountee Parfourned is, for on the brest soukyng Somtyme shewen they thyn heriynge.106

In her opening words, the Prioress emphasizes and participates in religious performance nurtured by womanhood, just as the books of hours frame the chanting of the psalms with the Mother’s spiritual succor. The Prioress praises Mary in two ways, both by performing a Marian liturgy and by imitating Mary’s most renowned lyric—the Magnificat. Proclaiming the “merveilous” name of God, the Prioress magnifies the Lord, as does Mary in the Magnificat, which also echoes Psalm 8:1. In the ensuing and invented contrast between nursing babes and “men of dignitee,” the Prioress interrupts patriarchal channels to God 105. Beverly Boyd, Chaucer and the Liturgy (Philadelphia: Dorrance Press, 1967), 67. 106. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, lines 453–59.

192  Chaucer and Dame School with her own feminized voice, tuned to the Virgin Mary, and denounces other educational institutions run by distinguished men.107 With Chaucer’s interpolated “quod she” to remind the reader that a prioress is speaking, feminine discourse is again underlined.108 Because the Mother’s breast swells to nourish the feminized song, the lauds “parfourned” by “men of dignitee” are, according to the Prioress, overmatched by the thanksgiving “parfourned” by “children . . . on the brest soukynge.” Repeated in unusual passive structures here, the Middle English verb “parfourme” underscores the rote reproduction of a musical ritual that in the Prioress’s tale is best achieved by a small boy, barely removed from nursing.109 Images of suckling Christian wisdom from the holy breast are widespread in medieval England, from John of Howden’s loving description of the Virgin’s nipple to Julian of Norwich’s Jesus as Mother.110 Nevertheless, these authors balance the comfort and ecstasy imbibed at the breast with the need for classical and ecclesiastical education and include all ages and genders in the perpetuation of Christian truth. Howden insists that Mary and Jesus evince and overmatch classical rhetoricians, while Julian of Norwich engages in complex definitions of the Trinity. Both authors approach an understanding of God from diverse points of view and levels of education, from the child’s perspective on holy motherhood to an educated person’s thoughts on classical traditions and church doctrine. The holy breast milk sustaining the Prioress, on the other hand, does not deliver such conceptual knowledge and may be contrasted with the bright light of Mary’s intellect informing the narrator in Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. 107. Robertson, “Aspects of Female Piety,” 152–53. Stephen Spector (“Empathy and Enmity in the Prioress’ Tale,” in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991], 211) argues that the Prioress pits the “men of dignitee” against the Virgin, whose power “ravyshedest” the Holy Spirit (VII 469). Also see Winter S. Elliott, “Eglentyne’s Mary/Widow: Reconsidering the Anti-Semitism of The Prioress’s Tale,” in The Canterbury Tales Revisited: 21st Century Interpretations, ed. Kathleen A. Bishop (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), 113–17. 108. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 454. 109. William Orth, “The Problem of the Performative in Chaucer’s Prioress Sequence,” Chaucer Review 42.2 (2007): 197. 110. Julian of Norwich, A Showing of Love, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway (Florence: SISMEL, 2001). A magisterial study on the “Jesus as mother” motif that helps to explain the prominence of God’s feminization in the late Middle Ages is Carolyn Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).



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Continuing to imitate the Hours of the Virgin appended to psalters, the Prioress’s Prologue quickly leads from Psalm 8 into a direct meditation on Mary. Consonant with the Marian emphasis on verses 1–3, the Prioress, now strong from imbibing at the holy breast, bursts into apostrophes to the Virgin: “O mooder Mayde/ O mayde Mooder free!”111 She continues on to reverence the Virgin’s role in salvation and invoke Marian inspiration for the tale that will follow. While the first stanza of the Prologue, adapting Psalm 8, opens a channel of feminine authority through which the Prioress hopes to sing, the remainder of this introduction to the tale proves the Virgin’s power in having “ravished” God with humility.112 The Prioress ends her invocation to the Virgin with a passionate plea, expressing confidence in Mary’s efficacy: “Gydeth my song that I shal of yow seye.”113 In the last three stanzas of the Prologue, the Prioress has moved from third- to second-person address, from adoration of to identification with the Virgin. With the Prologue’s final line, the Prioress cries out that her own voice might merge with the Mother’s, and Chaucer has carefully mingled Marian attributes into her characterization so that the Prioress might be seen as the Virgin’s near counterpart. Having begun by showing how a psalm prefigures Marian miracles, the Prioress fashions herself a corporeal sign of the continuing reduplication of typology. The courtly Mary represented in popular lyrics such as “The Corpus Christi Carol” and beloved of a Christ-knight seems reincarnated in a Prioress who employs fashion and manners as outward tokens of spiritual commitment. In his General Prologue, Chaucer studs the Prioress’s portrait with Marian allusions: her “symple and coy” “smyling” reflects the Virgin’s, who is “simple and quoie” toward her son in one fourteenth-century serventois; she makes oaths to St. Loy, who is the Virgin’s cupbearer in the Miracles de Nostre Dame; and her name, Madame Sweetbriar, or wild rose, refers to one of the Virgin’s flowers.114 By insisting that her “konnyng is so wayk,” like that of “a child of twelf month oolde, or lesse,” the Prioress insists that she, too, must suck praise at Mary’s breast and thereby depicts herself as even more vulnerable and 111. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 485. 112. Ibid., lines 469, 479–80. 113. Ibid., line 487. 114. Chaucer, General Prologue, lines 118–62; Hardy Long Frank, “Chaucer’s Prioress and the Blessed Virgin,” Chaucer Review 13.4 (1978): 347, 349.

194  Chaucer and Dame School in need of Marian mothering than the little clergeon at the center of her tale.115 Through such extreme humility, Madame Eglentine seems also to equate herself with the Virgin, humble handmaid at the Annunciation.116 Eglentine’s meek courtousie and affective piety also compare with the Virgin’s in John Gower’s noble depiction of Mary in the Mirour de L’Omme, as discussed in chapter 1. There Gower illustrates how Mary’s gentle feelings, and particularly her joys and sorrows, lead to spiritual understanding. Similarly, Chaucer’s Prioress advances the same sentimentalism as a way of knowing God, but what we find missing in Madame Eglentine is the Virgin’s sapient foresight. The Prioress would rather see her young hero die before maturing in his knowledge of scriptural truth. Comparing her own level of understanding to that of a child, the Prioress connects herself not only to the Virgin Mother, but also to her young hero. The Prioress and the clergeon are linked inextricably by their Marianism, penchant for singing, and even by the green and coral of the rosary that symbolize the clergeon’s beatified state.117 Chaucer likens the translated schoolboy to the Prioress’s beads “of smal coral . . . gauded al with grene” by calling the boy martyr “this gemme of chastite, this emeraude,/ and eek of martirdom the ruby bright.”118 By intertwining the figures of the Prioress, clergeon, and Virgin Mary, Chaucer increases the volume of the Marian voice interpreting and illustrating Psalm 8. The overall effect of this mingling of characteristics is a Marian monophony, as the Prioress’s and her hero’s experiences fulfill the words of Psalm 8 and babes proclaim the glory of the Lord. Yet the song is somewhat out of tune, since both eschew an understanding of the Holy Mother they praise. As Bronwen Welch has argued, since the Prioress and clergeon open their throats as vessels of the Lord, they relate harmoniously to the Virgin, who was vessel of the Word of God.119 However, as we observed in chapter 1, Marian narrative traditions do not show the Mother to be an empty container, but one lined with scripture 115. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, lines 481, 484. 116. Robertson, “Aspects of Female Piety,” 152. 117. Edward I. Condren, “The Prioress: A Legend of Spirit, A Life of Flesh,” Chaucer Review 23.3 (1989): 203. 118. Chaucer, General Prologue, lines 158–59; The Prioress’s Tale, lines 609–10. 119. Bronwen Welch, “‘Gydeth My Song’: Penetration and Possession in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” in Bishop, ed., The Canterbury Tales Revisited, 131–134.



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and prepared with great thought to meet the godhead. The Prioress’s conception of vacuous childhood innocence contrasts dispiritingly with the N-Town Mary Play’s characterization of young readiness for the spirit’s Word. Whereas the Prioress and her student hero relish a complete intellectual via negativa, the three-year-old Virgin of the Mary Play sets about to gather the buds of learning. A precocious thinker, she grasps and memorizes the Gradual Psalms and even provides an English translation of the Latin verses as she climbs the stairs into the temple. Such a comparison renders the clergeon a poor student indeed, and calls into question the Prioress’s educational ideals. When the fictive revelation of Psalm 8 begins in The Prioress’s Tale and the clergeon leaves his widowed mother to attend song school, the most important likeness between the Prioress and her hero emerges. It becomes clear that both, having familiarity with feminized forms of education only, are now positioned on the threshold of a male-dominated academy and in the entryway gain a liminal understanding through the Virgin.120 The co-educational, predominantly vernacular program that the Prioress represents contrasts with the emphatically masculine, Latinate academy attended by the clergeon, where he learns “swich manere doctrine as men used there / This is to seyn, to syngen and to rede,/ As smale children doon in hire childhede.”121 In a song school overseen by an abbot and taught by masters, an institution largely unknown to a woman such as the Prioress, the clergeon has an opportunity to learn Latin grammar and song. As noted earlier, scholarship is divided on the degree to which fourteenth-century nuns would have had sustained access to Latin learning, and Chaucer remarks in the general Prologue only on the Prioress’s vernacular skills.122 Yet, positioning herself to narrate a story about a song school somewhere in “Asye, in a greet citee,” 120. On entry into grammatical instruction as an initiation into patriarchal discourse and values, see Walter J. Ong, “Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite,” Rhetoric, Romance and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971), 113–41; Gary P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 9–48. 121. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, lines 499–501, emphasis mine. 122. Power, Nunneries, 246–55; Chaucer, General Prologue, lines 124–26. While many critics, including myself, have read Chaucer’s reference to the Prioress’s “Stratford-French” as a criticism of her linguistic provincialism, Rothwell has made a case for the respectability of Anglo-French in this period. See W. Rothwell, “Stratford Atte Bowe Re-Visited,” Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 190–207.

196  Chaucer and Dame School the Prioress attempts to identify the significance of an institution that is as strange to her as the distant East.123 The Asian song school is unfamiliar to the Prioress because of her confinement to dame schools, and to the clergeon because of his youth. As the Prioress characterizes herself in the Prologue as an untutored infant, so her tale emphasizes the clergeon’s youthful inexperience with formal education by reducing his age to seven from the available sources.124 Like the Prioress, who hopes for Mary’s inspiration, the clergeon is attached to the teaching of women. Because his mother has taught him well, the little boy habitually kneels and prays an Ave Maria whenever he sees an image of the Virgin: “Thus hath this wydwe hir litel sone ytaught / Oure blisful Lady, Cristes mooder deere, / To worship ay, and he forgat it naught.”125 In these lessons from the widow’s lap the boy has memorized simple Marian devotions, cultivating a liturgical understanding similar to that taught in nunnery schools where the vernacular would be the predominant language of instruction and children would sound out the Little Office, while not recognizing all of the words. When he arrives at school and hears the choir class ahead of his own, the clergeon identifies an opportunity to continue the same sort of intuitive learning (about the Mother) that his mother inspired. Most children, even in song schools that emphasized Latin learning, memorized phrases from service books before they could translate them, as is demonstrated by the older student who teaches the Alma redemptoris mater to the hero. The older boy admits that although his class has the text of the antiphon, he doesn’t know enough Latin yet to understand it: This song, I have herd seye, Was maked of our blissful Lady free, Hire to salue and eek hire for to preye 123. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 488; Anthony Bale (The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 60) notes that “there is little concern for the ‘reality’ of the site of the Other, the location’s purpose is to be concordant with the site of those representing it, here facilitating an examination of Christian rather than Jewish authority.” 124. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 447–85. 125. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, lines 509–11.



Chaucer and Dame School 197 To been oure help and socour whan we deye. I kan namoore expounde in this mateere; I lerne song, I kan but smal grammeere.126

Nevertheless, the Prioress’s little clergeon actually desires the extension of this stage of learning, rather than apologizes for it, as his fellow does. By avoiding the simple Latin in his primer and performing his antiphon before the choir master could teach him pitch, intonation, and pronunciation, the clergeon insists on maintaining the level of awareness already acquired in his home. Thus, within the Prioress’s song, the boy bursts forth in the Alma redemptoris mater. For both the clergeon and the Prioress, uninitiated as they are to a masculine academe, ecclesiastical truths and practices to be learned by the masters as well as “the mysteries of Christianity appear . . . refracted through a lens of motherhood.”127 As both the Prioress and her hero rely on a maternal welcome into a masculinized institution and sing praises to the Virgin for her aid, they take Psalm 8 as their starting pitch, and the plot begins a Marian unraveling of the psalm. The tale proper provides a musical Marian gloss on Psalm 8 by illustrating how melodic praise issues from the “mouths of children” through the Mother’s intervention.128 Taught by his widowed mother to worship the Virgin, the clergeon experiences an Annunciation, purportedly orchestrated by Mary herself, rather than by Gabriel. When he hears the Alma redemptoris mater sung by the choristers at their antiphons, he takes in the wonder of Mary through the ear canal, as Mary is imagined to have conceived the godhead. However, whereas Mary consulted the Book of Wisdom and questioned Gabriel in order to confirm her understanding of divine events, the clergeon proceeds without any comprehension of the Latin and soon memorizes the first verse of the Alma redemptoris mater. In the Prioress’s telling, Mary supports thoughtless worship and moves the clergeon to learn the antiphon by Christmas in her honor, ostensibly as the Virgin had sung the Magnificat to honor the divine conception. The Virgin, however, was thought to have composed and certainly to have comprehended her own song, 126. Ibid., lines 531–36. 127. Carolyn P. Collette, “Sense and Sensibility in the Prioress’s Tale,” Chaucer Review 15.2 (1980): 141. 128. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 457.

198  Chaucer and Dame School and so whereas the clergeon’s antiphon seems to realize the promise of Psalm 8 to the glory of Mary, it actually short circuits the exegetical process by limiting interpretation to the cognition of babes. The Prioress’s Tale comments on not only the portions of Psalm 8 paraphrased by the narrator, but also those omitted, particularly a reference to violence.129 After the image of infant praise in the Prologue, the Prioress excises the psalmist’s phrase “propter inimicos tuos, ut destruas inimicum et ultorem” ([Praise is performed by the mouths of infants] because of your enemies so that you might destroy the enemy and the avenger), deferring the theme of vengeance until the tale.130 Of course, the vengeance taken by the Jews against the singing clergeon and reciprocally by the Christians against the homicidal Jews is one of the most troubling aspects of this tale; no wonder that Chaucer indicates it as a blind spot of the Prioress’s in her Prologue. The incident created a blind spot in criticism until the Holocaust, Chaucerians nearly unanimous in their compliments on the Prioress’s aesthetics and silent on her treatment of the Jews.131 More recently, Lawrence Besserman has disapproved of the critical swing in the opposite direction, toward an “ideological solidarity” abhorring the tale’s anti-Semitism, and approving critical readings attempting to “get past” the question of Chaucer’s attitude toward Jews.132 While Besserman’s essay offers a helpful corrective against interpreting all literature as a vehicle for a social or political agenda, The Prioress’s Tale actually encourages us to look directly into the narrator’s blind spot. That is, if The Prioress’s Tale is a lyrical Marian exegesis on Psalm 8 in the manner of books of hours, then the tale explicitly presses us to investigate the Prioress’s construction of Mary’s relationship to the Jews’ vengeance. 129. Marie Hamilton notes that the Prioress’s revisions of verses 2 and 3 are the same liberties taken with Psalm 8 by the Introit to the Mass of the Holy Innocents, to which The Prioress’s Tale also alludes. See Marie Padgett Hamilton, “Echoes of Childermas in the Tale of the Prioress,” Modern Language Review 34 (1939): 1–8. 130. Richard Rex, “The Sins of Madame Eglentyne” and Other Essays on Chaucer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 36. 131. See, for instance, George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925), 175–78; or G. K. Chesterton, Chaucer (London: Faber and Faber, 1932; rpt., 1965), 171. 132. Besserman, “Ideology, Antisemitism, and Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” 49. On attempts to “get past” the question of anti-Semitism, see for instance Welch, “Gydeth My Song.”



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In the Prioress’s view, the relationship consists in the contrast between Mary’s purity, which represents an ideal for all Christians, and the impure Jewish Other. Since Louise O. Fradenburg’s seminal essay “Criticism, Anti-semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” it is a critical commonplace that in this narrative Chaucer contrasts the spiritual and bodily cleanliness of the Virgin, Prioress, clergeon, and widow with the filthiness of the Jews.133 Though they cast the murdered schoolboy in a privy, the Jews cannot defile his chastity, or by extension that of other Christians. The Prioress perceives Jewish Otherness and the need to stigmatize and eradicate it from the point of view of her educational platform, where the Mother offers her breast as both the conduit of all intuitive knowledge and the link in an infantile cathexis.134 In a Kristevan reading of this tale, Corey Marvin has noted the “little clergeon’s somatic involvement with Mary” in which he associates the Alma redemptoris mater with “melodies, sounds and rhythms” and the natural movements of the mother’s body.135 In this stage before awareness of symbolic language, Marvin argues, the clergeon, sucking at the Virgin’s breast, as the babe in Psalm 8, praying the rosary for his mother and choosing virginal songs at school, imbibes the pure, feminine, sustenance that bonds him to the One and pits him against the Jewish Other. In an expression of the polarizing effects of societies bound by and touting their purity, the Jews of the Prioress’s tale decide to “chace” “innocen[ce] out of this world.”136 As we have seen in chapter 1, however, Marian innocence is connected to entry into the language of the Father through Holy Scripture and liturgy, not pre-linguistic bonding at the breast, which is, in effect, a pre-moral state. That the conflict between the Jews and the clergeon in this tale resides in the failure of both to ascertain the full meaning of the Alma redemptoris mater for different audiences demonstrates the need for advanced language studies. Although the clergeon is too naïve to realize that the Jews whose neighborhood he passes through are his mortal enemies, he is quite aware that oppositional stances and behavior can bring down painful 133. Fradenburg’s essay is in New Casebooks: Chaucer, ed. Valerie Allen and Ares Axiotis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 193–231. 134. Corey J. Marven, “‘I Will Thee Not Forsake’: The Kristevan Maternal Space in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and John of Garland’s Stella maris,” Exemplaria 8.1 (1996): 38. 135. Ibid., 42–43. 136. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 566.

200  Chaucer and Dame School reprisals. When he chooses to memorize the Virgin’s antiphon rather than complete his master’s assignments in the primer, he imagines that he will be “beten thries in an houre” for his disobedience, and the more severe punishment meted by the Jews seems an exaggeration of the child’s fears.137 As Lisa Lampert so astutely remarks, by portraying the Jews rather than the master as punisher, the tale displaces problematic differences between the masculine song school in Asia and the feminine dame school of the Prioress onto the Jews and casts them as the monstrous-masculine.138 Whereas the master is harsh and punitive, the dame represented by the Prioress is nurturing; she cannot even bear to see “men smoot [smale houndes] with a yerde smerte.”139 When the master presses ahead to Latin learning, the dame is content with vernacular explanations of the liturgy. While the song school sets standards for performance, the dame school demands adherence to the Mother and by implication an unsullied life that cannot be attained by acquiring masculine competencies and practicing them out in the world. According to the Prioress, Mary’s spotlessness sets her in opposition to both Jews and to male song school teachers, who may act violently against the Mother’s children, but not finally stain them. The Prioress’s Tale both presents the differences between the male- and femaledominated academies and sweetens them for the mixed Canterbury company by projecting any animosity onto the Jews. Furthermore, the Prioress employs elements of the Catholic liturgy shared by all of the Canterbury pilgrim audience in order to incite rancor against the Jews and mask her attempts at scapegoating them. Through this narrative sleight of hand, the Prioress’s character of the Virgin Mary requires violence both to wipe out smut and to divert attention away from the potentially controversial gender and curricular differences with which her service books are taught. Only by diluting these differences in approach—vernacular versus Latin, praise versus punishment, rote memorization versus language competency—may Mary, in the Prioress’s tale, maintain her integrity as the one means of instruction. Since, however, 137. Ibid., line 542; Robert Hanning, “From Eva and Ave to Eglentyne and Alisoun: Chaucer’s Insight into the Roles Women Play,” Signs 2 (1977): 590. 138. Lisa Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 76. 139. Chaucer, General Prologue, line 149.



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as Kelly has thoroughly demonstrated, the treatment of the Jews varies widely in the sort of Marian miracle stories that provided models for this tale, the Prioress did not need to enforce Marian unity by harsh repression. Some versions of the Chorister story even include the conversion of the Jews, so that the Prioress, in fact, had the option of characterizing Mary in the same intercessory and peacemaking role as we have seen in Chaucer’s An ABC.140 With the Prioress’s black-and-white mental landscape that is populated by either gem-like Christians or defecating Jews, however, Mary’s positioning cannot be intermediary, gray, or conciliatory in order to be righteous. In her attempt to restrict the Marian teaching model to primary, provincial, pre-linguistic education and limit knowledge to intuitions about binary oppositions, the Prioress rejects the possibility of learning from a rational pedagogical method. This failure is inappropriate for a nun who would imitate the Virgin—a Holy Mother who in apocrypha and English legends of her life develops strategies for informing the faithful after Jesus’ Ascension. As Holsinger observes, in an irony concerning the tale’s connection to primary instruction in “song,” the Prioress and her little clergeon completely ignore the popular school method of the Guidonian hand, of introducing the musical scale by associating notes with sections of the hand and commanding the choir to sing a certain pitch by pointing to the appropriate digit or joint. While use of the hand chart derived from the practical musical manual of Guido d’Arezzo for solmization would allow choir boys to learn more songs without having first heard them, the clergeon must needs remember the sound of each individual note in the Alma redemptoris mater.141 If the antiphon may be learned without pedagogical method, then the value of any educational system, including the Prioress’s, is dubious. It is no accident that only Chaucer’s version of this Marian miracle tale portrays the clergeon conning the Alma redemptoris mater outside of the classroom.142 The Prior140. Henry Ansgar Kelly, “‘The Prioress’s Tale’ in Context: Good and Bad Reports of Non-Christians in Fourteenth-Century England,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History: Nation, Ethnicity, and Identity in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Philip M. Soergel (New York: AMS Press, 2006), 71–129. 141. Bruce W. Holsinger (Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture, 268) presents a helpful illustration of the Guidonian hand. 142. Carleton Brown, “The Prioress’s Tale,” in Bryan and Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues, 29.

202  Chaucer and Dame School ess’s simplistic and restricted world view rules her employment of music and her presentation of how it is learned. Fixated on the manners, fashions, and sentiments at court and on the maternal domestic space, the Prioress treats Marian music as if it were merely a product of the good behavior that manifests purity, rather than a discipline in its own right. In other words, according to the Prioress, church music is a practice, like other Western Christian habits, that delineates the line between “us” and “them,” and in demarcating the One from the Other imitates and perpetuates the violence that maintains the division. Music, which is meant to instill universal harmony, sounds out in religious discord.143 The cause of dissonance, of course, is the clergeon’s performance of the Alma redemptoris mater that completes the Prioress’s musical commentary on Psalm 8. The Jews murder him for bursting forth in the Mother’s praise, while he travels through their neighborhood. As Merrall Llewelyn Price has pointed out, maternal forces continue to instigate the boy’s singing, even after his death: the voice of his fearful mother prompts his singing from the pit, and the Virgin places a grain under his tongue so that he might repeat the following verses about divine motherhood:144 Alma redemptoris mater, quae pervia caeli Porta manes et stella maris, succurre cadenti Surgere qui curat populo; tu quae genuisti Natura mirante tuum sanctum genitorem; Virgo prius ac posterius Gabrielis ab ore Sumens illud Ave, peccatorum miserere. Nourishing mother of the redeemer, who remains the passable gate of heaven and the star of the sea, succor those falling people who try to arise; while Nature wondered, you 143. Plato’s Timaeus propounds the theory of the music of the spheres and the harmony of the world. Combining this Platonic imagery with a Pythagorean numerical system, medieval theorists of the liberal arts allied music with arithmetic in the quadrivium and studied the numbering system underlying pitch and rhythm. In the De institute musica, Boethius discusses the analogies between the rational system of music and the composition of the world. In his writing, the balanced elements in the human body are called “human music” to reflect such an analogy. 144. Merrall Llewelyn Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality: Absorbing Antisemitism in Chaucer’s Prioress,” Chaucer Review 43.2 (2008): 206.



Chaucer and Dame School 203 begat your holy begetter; you who were a virgin before and also after plucking that “Ave” from the mouth of Gabriel, have mercy on sinners.

As a completion of the Prioress’s Marian exegesis on Psalm 8, the Alma redemptoris mater resonates with many concerns of both the psalm and Chaucer’s tale. This is natural since antiphons first arose in the church as responses to psalms, and the Prioress has been consistent in her Marian responsory. One of four Marian antiphons including the Salve regina, Ave regina coelorum, and Regina coeli, the Alma redemptoris mater was originally sung with psalms, but isolated as a single chant by Gregory IX, who ordered that the Marian antiphons be heard at the end of the office in an appropriate season.145 As a result, any of the four Marian antiphons might be sung at feasts, such as the Annunciation, that emphasize the Virgin’s role.146 In the Prioress’s presentation of this hymn, we see a panoply of discursive associations between it, Psalm 8, and the Prioress’s advancement of maternal inspiration. For instance, the alma, or nourishing one, provides the food for song, the sacred breast, and eventually the grain that strengthens babes such as the clergeon for praise.147 Kathleen Oliver directly links the grain to song, which Mary’s love sustains, and notes that the Host was called “singing bread” or “singing host,” after the celebration of the mass.148 In the hymn, the Virgin with her spiritual nutriments raises those who have fallen, as she sustains the clergeon laid low in the privy, and her marvelous role as mother of the Creator empowers her to perform miracles such as the preservation of the boy’s life. While she has plucked the truth from the angel’s 145. Bale discusses the variety of other hymns employed in analogues and sources for Chaucer’s “Chorister” narrative and notes that one possibility, the Gaude Maria virgo, presents a Virgin militant in the punishment of Jews, a characterization of her that might also suit Mary’s instigation of Chaucer’s clergeon to sing in the Jewry (67–72). Bale calls the use of these various antiphons an example of “inharmonious multiplicity” that divides Christian from Jewish territory in The Prioress’s Tale (68). 146. “Antiphon,” Catholic Encyclopedia. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01575b.htm. July 23, 2010. 147. The grain has been variously interpreted as a pearl, the grain of paradise, the host, a mere prop for the plot. For an overview see Florence Ridley’s summary of scholarship in the Riverside Chaucer, 916. 148. Kathleen Oliver, “Singing Bread, Manna and the Clergeon’s ‘Greyn’,” Chaucer Review 31.4 (1997): 363.

204  Chaucer and Dame School Annunciation, the boy contains her own truth under his tongue, and it must be plucked from him at his death. After the withdrawal of the Virgin’s nutriment allows for the clergeon’s death, he passes the gates of heaven, a process described by the Alma redemptoris mater. By referring to Mary as a “passable gate,” the hymn emphasizes her corporeal permeability.149 This is the perviousness of the Virgin’s body to both the divine conception and her final assumption.150 Made of the flesh which survives the occupation of both God and death, the Virgin’s openness is her power. Considering Mary’s position as a portal in both the Alma redemptoris mater and in the Prioress’s narrative of induction to the classroom, the Virgin seems less an embodiment of immutability, as Louise O. Fradenburg describes her, or of liminality, as Richard Rambuss argues, but rather of transfiguration. Her porous body placed in the archway between innocence and knowledge, life and death, human and divine, the best analogy for her is an entrance into beatitude. Once “through” her by preserving their chastity, by wrapping their flesh in the Virgin’s protective covering as they cross the passageway of experience, the devout do not so much close a door on an old existence, as transform their early maternal yearnings into an eternal desire for the Queen of Heaven. This message conveyed in the clergeon’s miraculous singing would be edifying if it also pressed the faithful to go beyond chastity to what Mary’s virginity enabled: a strong mind for the study of language that could promulgate Christian truth. In The Prioress’s Tale, song propels the faithful through the gate and around the court of heaven; the little clergeon will advance toward the Lamb and “synge a song al newe.”151 Music, like the redeemed soul, ushers forth from the Marian opening. Others have noticed the Prioress’s vacillating gestures toward openness and closure, which imitate the flow and the stop of air in the creation of music.152 Many of these ges149. Richard Rambuss, “Devotion and Defilement: The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Corporeal Hagiographics of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale,” in Textual Bodies: Changing Boundaries of Literary Representation, ed. Lori Hope Lef kovitz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 75. 150. Although a feast of the Assumption was not officially recognized by the Roman Catholic Church until Pope Pius XII in 1950, Marina Warner has illustrated the pervasiveness of narratives and beliefs about the Assumption throughout the Middle Ages. See Alone of All Her Sex, 81–89. 151. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 584. 152. Fradenburg, “Criticism, Anti-semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,” 212; Rambuss, “Devotion and Defilement,” 78.



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tures occur in the setting of various episodes. For instance, the Jewry through which the clergeon passes is “free and open at eyther ende” but stiflingly restricted in the privy where the boy’s body is cast.153 The little clergeon passes from the safe enclosure of the widow’s home, through the Jewry, and into the guarded space of the school. Once murdered, he is moved from the ungated Jewry into an irrevocably shut casket. In The Prioress’s Tale song proceeds through open pipelines—physically, “entuned in hir [tretys] nose ful semely,” and spiritually, ushered through Mary.154 In this Marian miracle, harmonious sound occurs even at the “stops,” as the clergeon’s throat is severed and Mary, nevertheless, provides a corporeal tunnel for her hymn. In The Prioress’s Tale Mary intervenes in plainchant instruction and provides the text for memorization. Her porous body opens a passageway for song, and the notes sung by the clergeon would be truly inspirational if understood, delivered in a rhetorically appropriate setting, and offered in peace. As the Prioress constructs it, Mary’s corporeal tunnel is a dark alley, a place of murder provoked by the polarization of pure and impure. The Prioress’s and her hero’s songs of praise to the Virgin adore Mary’s fulfillment of David’s psalmic worship, but like Psalm 8, which the Prioress’s Prologue sets as a text for interpretation, their songs create lines of opposition rather than realms for a pax Christiana. The limitations set on music, both by the Prioress’s provincialism and the boy’s naïvete, reflect the fact that elementary education will be indeed elementary. While in the dame school for vernacular learning and maternal support advertised by the Prioress children would indeed get beyond their ABCs and learn songs of Marian praise, they would not approach the fulfillment of Marian learning that, as we shall see next, is represented by the Second Nun.

The Second Nun’s Tale While the Prioress oversees and represents the introductory stages in liturgical study and plainchant, Chaucer’s Second Nun exemplifies the benefits of a more advanced curriculum in the liberal arts. The Second Nun’s tale of the life of St. Cecilia focuses on the patron saint of music, but rather than represent sacred music as an end in itself, the 153. Chaucer, The Prioress’s Tale, line 494. 154. Chaucer, General Prologue, lines 123, 152.

206  Chaucer and Dame School Nun characterizes song as a counterpart to St. Cecilia’s high level of intellectual achievement. The Nun, like Cecilia, demonstrates her own accomplishments in the trivium: she employs her knowledge of grammar in the translation of Cecilia’s life from Latin, her skill in rhetoric by combining various sources toward the seamless invention of a new tale, and her adeptness at logic through a dramatic rendering of Cecilia’s rebuttal of Almachius. With her chaste life of scholarship in the cloister as the Prioress’s secretary, the more textual Second Nun imitates a Virgin Mary whom the Prioress does not seem to know: one much like John of Garland’s powerful Queen of the Liberal Arts, one who spent her youth studying scripture in the temple, as related in the Mary Play and other narratives of the Virgin’s wisdom covered in chapter 1. As discussed there, these life stories of an intellectual Mary derive from the apocrypha and Jacobus de Voragine’s famous summation of apocryphal tales in the Legenda aurea. Both the apocrypha and the Legenda describe Mary as a precocious pupil of religious literature, and the Second Nun calls upon the Virgin’s expertise before commencing her tale. Since the Second Nun declares the Legenda aurea her main source, she builds on a foundation that assumes Mary’s literate sapience and takes the Virgin as the ultimate inspiration for continuing education in grammar, rhetoric, and debate.155 As a response to The Prioress’s Tale and a step up from the song school instruction described there, The Second Nun’s Tale assumes that a musical education is a basic foundation as well as a continued expression for more advanced knowledge. In the Nun’s tale St. Cecilia demonstrates the ability to sing and not only to understand, but also to invent her own lyrics, just as medieval theologians believed that Mary composed the Magnificat. During her wedding ceremony, St. Cecilia privately chants a prayer for the preservation of her chastity: And whil the organs maden melodie, To God allone in herte thus sang she: “O lord, my soule and eek my body gye Unwemmed, lest that I confounded be.”156 155. Maud Burnett McInerney has demonstrated the verbal prowess of the Legenda aurea’s virgin martyrs in Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003), see especially chap. 6. The Second Nun presents such an “eloquent virgin” in St. Cecilia and in the Virgin Mary, the foundation for this eloquence. 156. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, lines 134–37.



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This episode established St. Cecilia as the patron saint of music, and in Chaucer’s version of her life, it shows that music aids the singer in maintaining chastity, as is the case for the Prioress’s clergeon.157 In The Second Nun’s Tale, however, the hymn reveals the singer’s understanding of language and holiness, rather than her ignorance, and eventually the lyrics translate into persuasive preaching about virginity. As Zieman puts it, in The Second Nun’s Tale singing reflects both the internalization of holy texts and their transmission to others, while in The Prioress’s Tale the meaning of Alma redemptoris mater is neither internalized nor spread to the community; it redounds, instead, to reflect the singer’s purity.158 In contrast, St. Cecilia sings intentionally during her wedding for two interdependent reasons: first to preserve her virginity and second to avoid being confounded. According to the Middle English Dictionary, the verb “confounden” denotes both annihilation and confusion; it therefore associates personal collapse with the destruction of mental powers that the Second Nun seeks to perpetuate.159 Significantly in St. Cecilia’s song, chastity is tied to understanding; its opposite leads to the bewilderment and confusion that Almachius demonstrates later in the tale. In her song St. Cecilia implies that virginity is functional, as Janemarie Lueke describes it; that is, it allows her some distance from social and domestic concerns that would impede her progress in the knowledge of Christ.160 This idea of a functional virginity reflects Mary’s ability in various narratives of her life chronicled in chapter 1 to spend her time in studying scriptures rather than fulfilling domestic duties. In her Prologue, the Second Nun, like her saintly heroine, links asceticism to learning. She will keep away from “Ydelness, / That porter of the gate is of delices” by busily translating a saint’s life.161 Through textual labor, she will enter, instead, Mary’s gate, as she hints in her Invocacio ad Miriam. Whereas the Prioress repeatedly represents open passageways and their stop gates as instruments for holy sound, the Second Nun instead emphasizes enclosures, like the cloister or Mary’s womb, as spaces from which texts emerge. The Word is made within “the cloistre 157. “Saint Cecilia,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 3:473. 158. Zieman, Singing the New Song, 184–204. 159. “Confounden,” MED, v. 1 and 3, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. 160. Janemarie Luecke, “Three Faces of Cecilia: Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale,” American Benedictine Review 33.4 (1982): 342–44. 161. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 3.

208  Chaucer and Dame School blisful of [Mary’s] sydis.”162 The Second Nun desires to enter Mary’s gate and close the door on this holy library, a movement that would seem to send her, like the Prioress, back to infancy, but instead the Second Nun discovers the font of sacred texts that she might translate, the Word inside Mary’s womb. In the Prologue to her tale, the Second Nun begins a complicated program of translation and appropriation of texts that illustrates her achievements in Latin grammar and rhetoric. Some critics of the Second Nun’s tale have wondered whether such a narrator should be credited with advanced knowledge of Latin and other languages, since her Prioress advocates only a dame school level of education. Furthermore, since the narrator is described as an “unworthy sone of Eve,” an ostensibly masculine reference, several critics have contended that Chaucer, having translated the Lyf of Seynt Cecile sometime between 1373 and 1386, barely revised the Prologue and tale for the Nun and that the masculine author still speaks, calling attention to the fact that Chaucer, rather than a nun, produced the translation.163 It is true that the narrator of the Second Nun’s Prologue shares several characteristics with the Chaucerian narrator of An ABC, whom I have argued to be masculine: an abject posture, a fascination with paradoxes, and an interest in etymologies for names. However, the attributes that actually render An ABC’s narrator masculine, for instance, his self-description as a warrior fleeing from a satanic enemy, are not present in the Second Nun’s Prologue, allowing the possibility of the Nun’s feminine voice.164 Furthermore, the reference to the “sone of Eve,” in the context of the Nun’s performance, is very likely an allusion to the Little Office, often recited in the cloister.165 Through such allusions to the Latin liturgy and other texts, Chaucer may well be pointing out the Second Nun’s unusual erudition and establishing her authority to speak.166 Although, in the 162. Ibid., line 43. 163. Ibid., line 62; the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women (F 426), composed by 1386–87, lists the “lyf of Seynt Cecile” among Chaucer’s writings. Written in rhyme royal, the life indicates the influence of Italian prosody beginning to manifest itself in Chaucer’s lines by 1373. Therefore, scholars hypothesize that the Second Nun’s tale must have been written between the initial indicators of Italian influence and the reference in The Legend of Good Women. 164. Chaucer, An ABC, lines 47–48. 165. Sister Madeleva (A Lost Language, 54–55) argues persuasively that constant repetition of this phrase from the Marian hours renders it genderless. 166. Karen Arthur, “Equivocal Subjectivity in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale,” Chaucer Review 32.3 (1998): 227.



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Second Nun’s Prologue, the speaker’s gender and focus on writing rather than speaking may be somewhat confusing and are possibly signs of lapses in Chaucer’s process of revision, there is no need to imagine that the Second Nun is silenced in the Prologue or that her linguistic authority is diminished.167 Indeed, as Russell Peck has demonstrated persuasively, the Prologue’s invocation of Mary establishes a context for the Nun’s delivery and allows the narrator a new parallel between the saint and the Virgin.168 As to the credibility of the Second Nun’s learning, she is, after all, the Prioress’s “chapeleyne,” a secretary whose conventual tasks necessitated more preparation in reading and writing, both in Latin and various vernacular languages.169 As we shall see, the Second Nun is an expert in all facets of the trivium. Before presenting the life of St. Cecilia, her most extended project in Latin translation, to the Canterbury company, the Second Nun weaves her Prologue with multiple allusions. With its dense intertextuality, the Prologue’s verses represent miniature translations, aided by the Virgin Mary. The Prologue is structured in three sections—an introduction, Invocacio ad Mariam, and Interpretacio nominis Cecilie—each with its own foundation in familiar works by church authorities and renowned writers.170 The introductory section announces the Nun’s commitment to ward off sloth by translating the life of St. Cecilia; this is the same motivation for writing offered by two thirteenth-century authors of Cecilia’s life, Jacobus de Voragine and his French translator, Jean de Vignay. Although the Second Nun’s personification of “Ydelnesse” is general enough to have been absorbed anywhere, it does recall Jean de Vignay’s opening of his 1282 French translation of the Legenda aurea.171 The idea that “bisynesse” in producing saintly literature can be an antidote to sloth derives from the original text of the Legenda.172 By conflating her introductory verses with those of thirteenth-century authors of Cecilia’s life, the Second Nun places herself in a tradition of scholarship 167. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 78. 168. Russell A. Peck, “The Ideas of ‘Entente’ and Translation in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale,” Annuale Mediaevale 8 (1967): 17–37. 169. Chaucer, General Prologue, line 164. 170. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, Introduction, lines 1–28; Invocacio ad Mariam, lines 29–84; and Interpretacio nominis Cecilie, lines 85–119. 171. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, ed. Th. Graesse (Osnabrück: Otto ZellerVerlag, 1969), lines 85–1382. 172. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 5; de Voragine, Legenda, 2: 361–62.

210  Chaucer and Dame School that preserves holy narratives of the past and makes them available in languages of the present. By repeating the themes of idleness and busyness from de Vignay and de Voragine, the Second Nun appropriates the thirteenth-century writers’ reasons and authority for textual production. Continuing to focus on authorizing texts, the second section of the Prologue opens with an allusion to St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on Mary in order to expand the Nun’s canon beyond saints’ lives. Furthermore, thirteen lines of the Invocacio are directly translated from Dante’s “Virgin Mother,” St. Bernard’s prayer for Dante the pilgrim in the Paradiso 33.173 When the Nun entreats Mary’s aid in relating such sources, however, authority transfers to the Virgin, and thus a masculine tradition is feminized, opening a way for the Second Nun to speak for herself. Like the Prioress, the Second Nun entreats the Virgin Mary to guide her song, to lead her to the place “theras withouten ende is songe ‘Osanne.’”174 The Second Nun’s invocation of the Virgin seems to echo the Prioress’s in the order of The Canterbury Tales, but if the Nun’s tale was composed between 1373 and 1386, the Prioress’s invocation is actually modeled upon the Nun’s.175 Although, like her superior’s Prologue, the Second Nun’s Invocacio ad Mariam recognizes the sublimity of song as a mode of praise, it focuses sharply on the written rather than the oral, and translation rather than divine inspiration. Whereas the Prioress is as an infant waiting for Mary’s breast to fill her mouth with lauds, the Second Nun already has the text in hand and entreats the Mother’s help in rendering it in English: “Thou confort of us wrecches, do me endite/ Thy maydens deeth, that wan thurgh hire merite / The eterneel lyf.”176 Throughout the invocation, the Nun depicts the painstaking effort of translation, especially in her following entreaty to the Virgin: “And, for that feith is deed withouten werkis, / So for to werken yif me wit and space, / That I be quit fro thennes that most derk is!”177 Translation, as the Nun says repeatedly, is toil, and in these lines even a coun173. Sister Lucia Treanor, “The Cross as TE in ‘The Canticle of Creatures,’ Dante’s ‘Virgin Mother,’ and Chaucer’s ‘Invocation to Mary,’” in Dante and the Franciscans, ed. Santa Casciani (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 273–76. 174. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 69. 175. See the Riverside Chaucer’s explanatory notes for both the Prioress’s and Second Nun’s tales, 913 and 942. 176. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, lines 32–34. 177. Ibid., lines 64–66.



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terpart to hell; that is, she cannot be ushered out of that dark place until her labor is completed. The Virgin’s wisdom and generosity will speed the Nun to this release; the “sonne of excellence” will shine her light on the prison of the Nun’s soul and illuminate grammatical obscurities.178 Awaiting a virginal light that will clarify and burnish her language, the Second Nun’s invocation anticipates John Lydgate’s hopes for the light of the Virgin’s golden rhetoric, as discussed in chapter 1. In the final stanza, a direct address to her Canterbury audience, the Nun reinforces the notion that the processes of learning through which Mary leads her privilege reading and writing over listening and telling about models of holiness: Yet preye I yow that reden that I write, Foryeve me that I do no diligence This ilke storie subtilly to endite, For bothe have I the wordes and sentence Of hym that at the seintes reverence The storie wroot, and folwen hire legende, And pray yow that ye wole my werk amende.179

While the Prioress’s tale begins with a textual practice of interpreting psalms and employs it toward the performance of a Marian hymn, the Second Nun’s Prologue and tale begin with musical pleas—the Nun’s to Mary or Cecilia’s to God—and employs such singing and other lyrics in weaving a web of writing; lines from the Salve Regina, another Marian antiphon, occur throughout the Invocacio.180 St. Bernard, who is mentioned in the beginning of the Invocacio, is an appropriate figure for this stress on the textual, since many of the sermons which St. Bernard wrote, for instance the collection on the Song of Songs, were meant to be studied rather than preached.181 Therefore, in his exegesis on the Song of Songs, St. Bernard makes a discursive move that the Nun desires to imitate: he captures religious lyric for the service of a didactic text. According to the Second Nun, the Virgin Mary is the best guide to 178. Ibid., lines 52, 71. 179. Ibid., lines 78–84, emphases mine. 180. Ibid., lines 57, 62, 68. 181. See especially Wim Verbaal, “Preaching the Dead from their Graves: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Lament on His Brother Gerard,” in Speculum Sermonis: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Medieval Sermon, ed. Georgiana Donavin, Cary Nederman, and Richard Utz, Disputatio 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 113–38.

212  Chaucer and Dame School the study and production of edifying literature. “Salvacioun / Of hem that been in sorwe and in distresse,” the Virgin enables the sinner’s resurrection in heaven and the works that add good deeds to the final account.182 In contrast to the Prioress, whose efforts culminate in singing by rote, the Nun sees a higher challenge on the way to heaven, that of comprehending religious texts and being able to compose them in different languages. Having established a spiritual motivation and a Marian voice for her tale of St. Cecilia, the Second Nun grounds her Invocacio ad Mariam in Dante’s Paradiso 33. 1–51.183 The descriptions of and paradoxes surrounding the Virgin in this section of her Prologue derive chiefly from Dante’s; for example the Nun’s characterization in the second stanza of Mary as “Mayde and Mooder, doghter of thy Sone” translates Paradiso 33. 1: “Vergine madre figlia del tuo figlio.”184 A foundation in the Paradiso underscores once more that Mary is the guide to heaven. She Nat oonly helpest hem that preyen thee, But often tyme of thy benygnytee Ful frely, er that men thyn help biseche, Thou goost biforn and art hir lyves leche.185

In order to achieve Paradise, the Second Nun will translate a saint’s life in Mary’s honor and with Mary’s help; the Nun also chooses a saint who mirrors the Virgin: Cecilia is, as the Second Nun notes, “Mary’s maiden.”186 By invoking Mary as the muse of translation, modeling the invocation on another famous appeal to the Virgin, and introducing a saint’s life in imitation of the Virgin, the Second Nun lines her literary way with Mary. Although Chaucer translated the life of St. Cecilia before he assigned it to the Second Nun or composed her invocation to the Virgin, the alignment of Cecilia’s story with the Nun is consonant with religious women’s imitation of the Virgin. It also speaks to the popularity, mentioned in my Introduction, of St. Cecilia’s life among religious women seeking models of intellectual virginity. The third section of the Nun’s Prologue is marked by the title In182. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, lines 75–78. 183. Riverside Chaucer, Explanatory Notes, 943. 184. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 36; Dante, Paradiso 33. 16–18. 185. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, lines 53–56. 186. Ibid., line 33.



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terpretacio nominis Cecilie quam ponit Frater Jacobus Januensis in Legenda. This title establishes the authority of the etymologies for Cecilia’s name in Jacob of Genoa’s additions to the saint’s life. It also places the Second Nun’s Prologue in the encyclopedic tradition, most notably perpetuated by Isidore of Seville in his Etymologies.187 The Interpretacio nominis Cecilie provides an excellent transition from the Prologue to the tale as it shifts emphasis from Mary’s names and her wisdom to Cecilia’s. Whereas the Invocacio rehearses Mary’s epithets—“flour of virgins,” “welle of mercy,” “Creatour of every creature”—and does so with many parallels to An ABC in order to establish Mary’s sway over Chaucer’s and the Nun’s intellectual labor, the third section of the Prologue elaborates on the names spelling out Cecilia’s likenesses to the Virgin.188 First, Cecilia’s name is expressive of the Virgin’s flowers: “Cecilia” is rendered “coeli lilia,” which the Nun translates “hevenes lilie”; she is the very embodiment of the Mother’s white bloom of chastity.189 After connecting Cecilia’s name to one of Mary’s most popular floral symbols, the Interpretacio nominis Cecilie focuses on the saint’s supremacy in learning and teaching, which can be compared to Mary’s. As the caecis via or “wey to blynde,” Cecilia provides illumination in the spirit, as does the “sonne of excellence” in the Invocacio.190 As the Nun elaborates, Cecilia’s name thus reflects “hir grete light / Of sapience.”191 Other etymologies listed for “Cecilia” in this section underscore the benefits of the saint’s learning to the people. “Coelo et lia” indicates the juncture between heaven and the active life; “coelo et leos,” “heaven of the people,” declares that all can see heavenly virtue in Cecilia.192 Just as the Prologue attributes the narrator’s grammatical and rhetorical skills, as well as the heroine’s saintliness, to Mary, so The Second Nun’s Tale continues to lay a Marian foundation for the matter of translation. For instance, Cecilia’s resistant compliance to marriage is much 187. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, ed. W. M. Lindsay, Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), 1.1.29. The Riverside Chaucer (944) notes that while the etymologies of Cecilia’s name are false, they were accepted as a traditional means of expressing the virtue or the qualities of the bearer of the name. 188. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, lines 29, 37, 40, and 75 compare to An ABC 14 and 177–78. 189. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 87. 190. Ibid., lines 52, 92. 191. Ibid., lines 100–101. 192. Ibid., lines 96–98, 104–12.

214  Chaucer and Dame School like Mary’s. The saint is betrothed to Valerian because Roman culture, like the Hebrew, valued marriage as a means of perpetuating family and society, and the cultural imperative for Cecilia’s wedding is underscored in the beginning of the tale: “this mayden sholde unto a man / Ywedded be.”193 This situation in which Cecilia “sholde” or “must” marry is the Nun’s interpolation into de Voragine’s text, and establishes a comparison to the Virgin Mary, who in medieval legend had vowed eternal chastity but was nevertheless paired with an aging Joseph.194 The crowns received by Cecilia, her spouse, and her brother-in-law are woven with roses and lilies, the Virgin’s flowers. Moreover, the spiritual fecundity of Cecilia in preaching and converting, and the nurturing of her husband in the way of Christian truth, are modeled on Mary’s virgin fruitfulness and maternal guidance.195 Most importantly, the font for Cecilia’s vigor in spreading the Word is her virginity—a virginity modeled on Mary’s. As Marina Warner remarks in Alone of All Her Sex, the idea of virginity inherited from the classical world “was powerful . . . and conferred strength,” and Cecilia is certainly an embodiment of that strength.196 In The Second Nun’s Tale Chaucer manipulates the sources for translation to emphasize the focus on truth that virginity affords and the power resulting from the pursuit and preaching of the knowledge of Christ. In her composition of the life of St. Cecilia, the Second Nun revises her sources “to highlight [the saint] herself,” letting us hear, as Karen Arthur has noted, “Cecilia’s strident voice.”197 Although the Nun claims in her Prologue to be translating the life from the Golden Legend alone, Sherry Reames’s work has demonstrated Chaucer’s reliance on an additional source, a Franciscan abridgement of de Voragine’s text.198 Thus, until line 344, when St. Cecilia has converted her husband and her brother-in-law, the Second Nun follows the Legenda aurea, and after193. Ibid., lines 127–28. 194. Lynn Staley Johnson, “Chaucer’s Tale of the Second Nun and the Strategies of Dissent,” Studies in Philology 89.3 (1992): 325. See, for instance, the Protevangelium of James, http://www.intratext.com/IXT/ENG1018/_P9.HTM, July 23, 2010. 195. Karen Arthur, “Equivocal Subjectivity in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale,” Chaucer Review 32.3 (1998): 217–31. 196. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 48. 197. Johnson, “Chaucer’s Tale of the Second Nun,” 325; Arthur, “Equivocal Subjectivity,” 222. 198. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 82; Sherry L. Reames, “A Recent Discovery concerning the Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Tale,’” Modern Philology 87.4 (1990): 337–61.



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wards the Nun employs a shortened version of Franciscan provenance. Reliance on the complete text in the beginning allows the Nun to amplify St. Cecilia’s similarity to the Virgin and her relationships with others whom she will convert while reference to the shortened text in the end permits more concentration on St. Cecilia. The Franciscan abridgement reduces Valerian’s and Tiburce’s speeches and the narratives of their respective martyrdoms in order to situate “Cecilia center-stage as the spokesperson for the Christian faith, since she emerges as the Tale’s true preacher.” As Staley Johnson remarks, switching to the edited version for the last part of the tale gives a strong impression of a saintly woman who derives her spiritual prowess from the Virgin.199 The Nun’s claim that she follows one source faithfully turns out to be more humility topos than reality of composition; her use of two sources rather than one matches her tale well with her textually complicated Prologue and proves once again her great skill in grammar and rhetoric. By manipulating the Latin sources for her tale so that Cecilia’s importance and boldness are emphasized beyond the models of the saint’s characterization in other lives, the Second Nun makes translation a rhetorical act demonstrating the efficacy of living and learning after the Virgin.200 In her influential book Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages, Rita Copeland explains how vernacular translations carry out the office of inventio in the discipline of rhetoric.201 That is, Latin texts become matter for narrative innovation in which the significance of the translated text resides in its departures from the sources. These departures often result in a critique of the Latin tradition, and The Second Nun’s Tale loudly disparages questions concerning the intellectual abilities of female ascetics, or at least the digressions which deemphasize those abilities. Staley Johnson has called the criticism resulting from the Second Nun’s tale a “strategy of dissent” against a church grown paradoxically too powerful and too fragmented in the age 199. Staley Johnson, “Chaucer’s Tale of the Second Nun,” 323. 200. See, for instance, Osbern Bokenham’s life of St. Cecilia in Legendys of Hooly Wummen, EETS 206 (London: Oxford University Press, 1938, rpt. Draus, 1988), 203–25; and Eileen S. Jankowski’s commentary on the same in “Reception of Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale: Osbern Bokenham’s Lyf of S. Cycyle,” Chaucer Review 30.3 (1996): 306–18. 201. Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

216  Chaucer and Dame School of the papal schism.202 The object of dissent, according to Catherine Sanok, includes the status of women, their learning, and the opportunities to convey it—issues that Sanok observes are also pertinent to Margery Kempe, whom we shall discuss in chapter 6.203 As Susan Hagen notes, the disparity between the egalitarian Christian church in its inception and the gendered hierarchies of fourteenth-century Catholicism surfaces in the Second Nun’s tale.204 Specifically, Cecilia’s license to preach and ability to send converts directly to Pope Urban contrast starkly with the Second Nun’s need to couch her textual innovations as the words of others and to communicate with the world outside of their nunnery mainly on the Prioress’s behalf. Nevertheless, St. Cecilia is not an impossible model for the Nun. The saint’s similarities to the Virgin Mary bridge the differences in gender politics; St. Cecilia mimics the same Mother whose virginity the Nun imitates in her cloister. Since centuries had passed since women were allowed in the pulpit, what the Nun chiefly lacks is a public forum for her learned voice. She is neither a mystic with spiritual followers nor even a leader in her own monastic community. Her humility in addressing the Canterbury company and references to a written text from which she will speak imply shyness and unfamiliarity, as well as her rejection of contemporary Lollard calls for women preachers. Strangeness aside, though, the Nun is committed from her Prologue to advancing a case for women’s learning and language production that could compare to Cecilia’s. The Nun’s rhetorical sleight of hand with two sources proves how women’s learning and teaching is valuable in the Christian West. The Second Nun’s Prologue and tale illustrate the author’s accomplishments in all aspects of the trivium, accomplishments modeled on those of her saintly heroine. Just as in her Prologue the Second Nun calls song a vehicle to heaven, St. Cecilia sings in order to prepare the way for her spiritual triumphs. Just as the Nun translates and appropriates matter for her tale adeptly, St. Cecilia conveys the Word to the many she converts, both women demonstrating excellence in both the construction and delivery, grammar and rhetoric, of language. Mastery of de202. Staley Johnson, “Chaucer’s Tale of the Second Nun,” 315. 203. Catherine Sanok, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 168–70. 204. Susan K. Hagen, “Feminist Theology and ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’: or St. Cecilia Laughs at the Judge,” Medieval Perspectives 4–5 (1989–90): 42–52.



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bate would be the next level in the tiered language curriculum, and even though universities where bachelors claimed their degrees through success in debate were closed to women, the Second Nun proclaims the incontrovertibility of St. Cecilia’s logic, and her own appreciation of its fine points during the debate scene with Almachius. In the medieval curriculum, logic, demonstrated during participation in debate, was the culminating study of the trivium. The Nun’s translation of the life spotlights Cecilia’s debate by following the Franciscan abridgement in eliminating a long passage in which the saint preaches to the officers who bring her to Almachius’s court. In the Second Nun’s version, Cecilia arrives swiftly and, proving her control over the rules of debate, speaks dramatically in defense of her “unlawful” Christianity. To Almachius’s opening demand for Cecilia to tell about both her “religioun” and her “bileeve,” she replies that the prefect had begun the disputation foolishly by soliciting two separate answers to one question.205 Her response recognizes not only the prefect’s error in posing the question, but also the need to employ a philosopher’s care in defining terms during a debate. During the ensuing argument, she relies on the use of distinction, for instance discriminating between Almachius’s ephemeral and God’s eternal power and on the charge of non sequitur, pointing out that it does not follow that being a Christian means being a criminal. In the climax of this exchange, in which Cecilia rebuts Almachius’s claim to authority over life and death, the Nun’s version stays very close to the Franciscan abridgement; while de Voragine’s original declares Almachius’s belief in the gods and his own might erroneous, the abridgement clarifies that no earthly authority over life and death exists. As Joseph L. Grossi points out, such a challenge to Almachius’s reality allows the saint to “turn the tables on Almachius by effectively putting him on trial and appealing both to spectators within the narrative and to readers outside it to find the prefect himself guilty of deception and irrationality.”206 Toward the end of the debate, Cecilia turns to all onlookers and cries out: “Lo, he dissymuleth heer in audience; / He stareth, and woodeth in his advertence!”207 With these words, Cecilia claims victory in this dispute. 205. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, line 427. 206. Joseph L. Grossi, “The Unhidden Piety of Chaucer’s ‘Seint Cecilie,’” Chaucer Review 36.3 (2002): 303. 207. Chaucer, The Second Nun’s Tale, lines 466–67.

218  Chaucer and Dame School In the end, verbal hostilities lead to violence: Cecilia is martyred in her bath. Like the Virgin who in Exodus is represented by the unconsumed burning bush, Cecilia is not destroyed by the flames and must have her throat cut in order to die. Like the Prioress’s little clergeon, she lives on after her beheading—not to sing unaware, but to preach and make others aware. It is significant that in both the Prioress’s and Second Nun’s tales the saint is mortally wounded, though not silenced, at the site of praise: the clergeon’s instrument for singing is cut, and St. Cecilia is severed from her head full of knowledge. Knowledge and violence are intimates in The Second Nun’s Tale. In fact, the binary opposition resulting in physical harm in the Nun’s narrative is knowledge versus ignorance; St. Cecilia is learned while Almachius is “lewed.” In The Prioress’s Tale, in contrast, tension pulls between the pure and the impure, making the Virgin Mary icon of the first term and enemy of the second. In the Second Nun’s Prologue and tale, on the other hand, Mary may be a benefactor of the liberal arts, but she does not inspire hatred of the simple or untutored, who stand in seeming opposition to knowledge. During the life of St. Cecilia, all who open their ears to Christian preaching are blessed, situating sinfulness and conflict in resistance to the truth, not in mere unfamiliarity with it. Dissimilarly, in the Prioress’s tale, because purity and impurity are states of being (one cannot retrieve one’s virginity and total bodily integrity after it is lost), the conf lict between the Asian Christians and Jews is eternally selfperpetuating, with no chance for peace. Fortunately, in the Nun’s tale, violence can be stopped by study: although in the beginning of her tale, St. Cecilia threatens Valerian with the wrath of her guardian angel and Valerian vows to slay Cecilia if she is lying, both dangers are avoided once the husband visits Pope Urban and hears the truth of Christ. Only those such as Almachius who harden their hearts to the message are vilified; that is, the few who will not learn are enemies, and act out hatred, even if, as in the case of St. Cecilia’s death, those acts of hatred are cataclysmic. The study of the trivium that leads to the knowledge of Christ and is represented by the Virgin Mary, St. Cecilia, and the Second Nun is not their opposite, their foe, but their rejected opportunity.



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Conclusion In An ABC, The Prioress’s Tale, and The Second Nun’s Tale, Mary offers opportunities to learn: in the first, for foreigners to learn English words used in church, court, and town; in the second, for the unlettered to learn a song of Marian praise; and in the third, for skilled students of the liberal arts to learn the intellectual power of female asceticism. These poems allude to the gamut of language studies available in fourteenth-century England from infancy to adulthood. That Mary oversees many levels of language instruction in these poems—from the ABCs, to elementary vocabulary building, to the lyric of plainchant, to the grammatical and rhetorical work of translation, to debate—renders her an accomplished, heavenly schoolmistress. Only in The Prioress’s Tale, where Mary’s intellectual powers are restricted by sentimentality, does the Virgin’s place at the head of trivium studies seem in doubt— and this doubt is only a reflection of the Prioress’s limitations. Familiar with the institution of dame schools, or nunneries that fostered elementary education, Chaucer places the Virgin, Christ’s dame, at the head of the language curriculum, where her example both inspires and constitutes the matter of the text. In the continuum of Virgin scholarship illustrated by An ABC, The Prioress’s Tale, and The Second Nun’s Tale, Chaucer illuminates how a full curriculum of language studies perpetuates Christ’s peace. In An ABC, adults who are already competent in one language are introduced to a vocabulary that allows them to integrate into English society. Although the Prioress’s tale falls short of integrating dissimilar groups through Marian song because the course of instruction represented there is incomplete, the Second Nun demonstrates how St. Cecilia’s virginal understanding and ability to convey it promote a Christian community. Since St. Cecilia is characterized in the Virgin’s image and this compelling version of her story derives from the Virgin’s guidance, the expertise in language production that the saint illustrates—from study of Christian doctrine to the fine points of logic—shows the culmination of the Virgin’s teachings. By placing these teachings in the mouth of a nun, Chaucer seems to sketch out possibilities for a renewing intellectualism in fourteenth-century nunneries, a possibility that those who live by the Virgin’s chaste rule might be sapientia plena.

Five

Mary’s Mild Voice in the Middle English Lyrics

n The Prioress’s Tale a beginning student in an Eastern song school learns a Latin hymn and its lyrics about the nurturing Mother. Investigating Mary’s language gifts in the Middle English lyrics, we often confront translations of such Latin hymns for use by itinerant preachers, singing at festivals, or meditations in manuscript margins. Although it is possible that Middle English translations of Marian hymns were taught in dame schools, in the late medieval English lyrics we turn away from classroom scenes and the Virgin as a magistra in long narrative poems to shorter verses inviting us to hear Mary’s speech. Responding to the angel Gabriel, singing a lullaby to her son, wooing the sinner’s soul, and arguing before the court of God, these are the sounds of Mary’s mild voice in the Middle English lyrics.1 Although 1. The Middle English lyrics discussed here are short Marian poems written in England and recorded between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Most are included in Carleton Brown’s three editions, all produced at Oxford by Clarendon Press: English Lyrics from the Thirteenth Century (1932), Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century (1924, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1952), and Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century (1939, 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 1952). This chapter will also make reference to Richard Morris, ed., An Old English Miscellany, EETS o.s. 49 (London: Oxford University Press, 1872), and Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., The Early English Christmas Carols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), as well as other editions of single authors noted later. It will often cite Karen

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the Virgin’s connection to the written word may be emphasized in Latin meditations such as those of John of Howden and in other vernacular poems by canonized authors such as Chaucer, Mary’s linguistic expertise in the popular, mostly anonymous lyrics resides in her speech. In fact, the realization that Mary never reads in the popular medieval English lyrics is shocking amidst the many portraits of her perusing scripture, most notably the variety of Annunciation pictures in which the Virgin studies the Book of Wisdom.2 Since many of the Middle English lyrics celebrate the Annunciation as well as other Marian feasts, it might be expected that like visual arts, the poems would represent Mary as a student of the Bible. But this is not the case.3 Presenting a fine example of consonant form and function, of the melding of genre and content, the Middle English lyrics often meant for oral performance, for singing or recitation, raise up Mary’s oral performance. She is an icon of beautiful speech and song.

A History of the Marian Middle English Lyric Of course, we must exercise caution when generalizing about the genre, purpose, and effect of the Middle English lyrics. It is true that the religious lyrics are, as Christiania Whitehead characterizes them, Saupe’s teaching edition for TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages), which conveniently collects many of the Marian Middle English lyrics in a single volume. See Karen Saupe, ed., Middle English Marian Lyrics (hereafter MEML) (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998). Because of differences in the manuscript and poetic traditions, I consider the Middle Scots lyric a separate, though comparative, body of work and will not therefore include discussions of poems by Dunbar and others here. See A. A. Macdonald, “Lyrics in Middle Scots,” in A Companion to the Middle English Lyric (hereafter CMEL), ed. Thomas G. Duncan (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 242–48. 2. In “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture” (in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988], 149–87), Susan Groag Bell examines a number of manuscript illustrations of Mary reading books. 3. Kathryn J. Ready in “The Marian Lyrics of Jacopone da Todi and Friar William Herebert: The Life and the Letter” (Franciscan Studies 55 [1998]: 221–38) argues that Mary is depicted in these authors’ poems as the only human who can truly read the Logos of God and throughout her examination of their lyrics emphasizes a Mary-as-reader trope. While Ready successfully demonstrates that the Virgin embodies and bears the Word, she does not establish any direct connection in the lyrics between Mary and reading. On Herebert’s lyrics, which will also be treated here, Ready claims that Marian analogies, such as the Stella Maris, embody the Virgin in the textual tradition and therefore constitute her as a reader. While the constructions of Mary in the popular Middle English lyrics certainly recall textual traditions, that fact does not make the Virgin herself a reader in the poems.

222  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics “a singularly heterogeneous brood,” with differing formal properties, narrative stances, dialects, and contexts within church or private devotions.4 The lyrics range from carols and ballads to unique verse forms to vaguely similar stanzas. Carols, hymns, and other lyrics may occur in manuscripts with musical scores; on occasions where no notation accompanies the verse, the presence of a burden, marginal gloss of “cantus,” or other signs imply that the verse provided words for a well-known tune. The narrator—whether speaker, chanter, or singer—may be a member of the holy family, a personification of the cross, an observer of the biblical scene, a soul pining with love for Mary or Jesus, a doctor of the church. The narrator may communicate in any Middle English dialect, reflecting its development over a period of more than three hundred years. In some cases, the narrator may speak from the pulpit or sing from the congregation, since medieval English preachers included lyrics in their sermons in order to capture the attention of the flock and increase the popularity of hymns.5 In other cases, lyrics seem destined for private rather than public uses, when they were copied into miscellanies for penmanship practice or domestic contemplation. Since many lyrics occur in multiple manuscripts, the same poem might have served a number of different purposes and appealed to a variety of aesthetic pleasures. As Julia Boffey remarks, the divergent ways in which the Middle English lyrics were copied into manuscripts—whether for sermons, private consultation, anthologies, preservation of a single author’s works, songbooks, or multiple purposes—make it difficult to draw conclusions about the cultural uses of the lyric and show why the Middle English lyrics were more often studied during the heyday of New Criticism.6 The wildly divergent manuscript sources and the anonymity of many of the lyrics’ authors encouraged interpretations that analyzed individual poems in relative isolation. Although such diverse and anonymous modes of preservation apply to Marian verse as to the Middle English religious lyrics in general, it is possible to trace a few historical trends. The earliest Middle Eng4. Christiania Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” CMEL, 96. 5. Alan J. Fletcher, “The Lyric in the Sermon,” in CMEL, 189–209; Alan J. Fletcher, Preaching, Politics and Poetry in Late Medieval England (Dublin: Four Courts, 1998); Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986). 6. Julia Boffey, “Middle English Lyrics and Manuscripts,” in CMEL, 1–18.



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lish Marian lyrics are translations of Latin hymns; for instance, “From heovene into eorthe,” composed in the first half of the thirteenth century, is an adaptation from the Latin Annunciation tradition.7 These early hymns are even more likely than those written down later to be collected haphazardly as poems in the margins or between the pages of other, lengthier texts. Around 1250, however, a new artistic consciousness concerning the lyric arose, and poems were more often grouped in collections. The Cambridge Songs from the eleventh century, a famous book of verse in Latin, French, and English, is an exceptionally early example of these collections.8 Anthologies including Marian lyrics acknowledge not only an increased aesthetic appreciation for the lyrics, but also the usefulness of Marian verse for preaching. Compiled in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the commonplace books of William Herebert, John Grimestone, and James Ryman preserve preaching tools that list Marian verses for inclusion in sermons and hymn-singing. The famous Harley lyrics collected in British Library MS Harley 2253 record some better-known Marian verses such as “Stond wel, Moder, under rode.” Although Marian hymns throughout the entire late medieval period could appear in manuscripts with musical notation, a new emphasis on music arises in the fifteenth century, with the inception of the carols. Other fifteenth-century Marian songs, if not the aureate revisions of older poems, return to the simple, repeated refrains of Marian instruction that were common in the earliest lyrics. The later lyrics particularly accent Mary’s gifted performance in love songs, lullabies, rehearsals of prophesies, and oral argumentation. As we search for patterns within a large body of Marian literature, we must also acknowledge the impediment of contemporary suppositions about poetic voice. The post-Romantic concept of a personal, autobiographical lyric narrator does not apply to the Middle English corpus, so often employed in church-sanctioned worship. Although Ruskin declared the lyric “the expression by the poet of his own feelings,” and although the heightened emotional quality of many Middle English poems may give the impression of an individual’s outpourings, the speaker in question can be a character from the Bible, whose first-person 7. Morris, Old English Miscellany, 100. 8. The Cambridge Songs, Cambridge University Library MS Gg.5.35. See Jan. M. Ziolkowski, The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia) (New York: Garland, 1994).

224  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics expressions are not the poet’s, or the congregational voice.9 Because the poet is usually anonymous, it would be nearly impossible in any case to flesh out a meaningful interpretive context for his or her feelings. While lyrics are often translations of Latin hymns or other models, others are loose adaptations, or “originals,” deriving from no discovered source. The originality of the latter, though, does not necessarily imply the isolated individuality of the speaker, who may be offering a doctrinal message or a perspective on the Virgin Mary that medieval English Catholics would share. With the diversity of manuscript evidence and the alterity of the medieval narrator in mind, it is still possible to see a common attribute throughout the medieval lyrics that shapes their presentations of the Virgin Mary, that is, their performative nature. Because the lyrics are short and repetitious in both formal structure and phrasing, they are easily memorized and delivered. Whether the delivery occurs in solitary devotion or private reading, in a setting for public worship or community entertainment, oral repetition must have been common. In her groundbreaking book, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages, Rosemary Woolf demonstrates that lyrics were employed in programs for meditation.10 Following Woolf’s line of scholarship, Whitehead points out, for instance, that even poems meant for personal meditations about the Passion, such as Lydgate’s The Dolerous Pyte of Crystes Passioun, were recited during contemplative exercises in which the meditator regarded an image of the Man of Sorrows.11 Also creating such exercises for devotion to the Virgin, Lydgate sets the scene of “Hayle, glorious lady and hevenly quene” before an icon of Mary and indicates that the poem must be spoken aloud to her.12 Certainly, poems to the Virgin were recorded side by side with the rosary for alternative chanting and prayer.13 They were collected in friars’ handbooks, such as James Ryman’s, for communal 9. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes Ruskin under “Lyric,” A adj. 1. 10. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 11. Whitehead, “Middle English Religious Lyrics,” 99. 12. Lydgate emphasizes his posture before the Virgin in the poem “And here we knelyng before thyne image” (line 7). See Henry Noble MacCracken, ed., The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, part 1, EETS e.s. 107 (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), 280–82. 13. In Bodleian MS 21700 (92a-b), the rosary provides a marginal gloss for “ Hayle Mayden of maydyns, thorgh worde consaywyng.” The words of the rosary are written down the left hand column beside the poem.



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hymn-singing.14 In all of these examples the oral delivery of the poem is made possible by textual preservation and dissemination. In the Middle English lyrics, the line between orality and literacy is crossed again and again when conventions from song and dance are inscribed, when a preacher pronounces popular verse from a written sermon, when English poets translate or allude to Latin sources, when modern editors employ conventions of literary scholarship in preservation, and in many other instances. By concentrating on the potential for oral delivery in the Middle English lyrics, however, we can attend to something new in popular Marian verse: how Mary becomes the vehicle and exemplar of perfect speech. It is significant that while Middle English lyrics may be delivered at the crossroads of orality and literacy, Mary herself does not stand there. She does not read or allude to textual traditions, but speaks with divine inspiration in the moment that the poem is performed. One sort of oral performance shared by everyone in medieval English society, although at different levels of competency, was the liturgy. Although Marian poems were not usually employed within liturgical readings and responses, but rather in sermons or hymn-singing, they mark the liturgical calendar, since many are translations from Latin hymns or narratives concerning the Virgin’s feasts. These poems are often devotions in which Mary can be either the object or the voice of praise. Lay people often internalized Mary’s example and voice by repeating churchsanctioned prayers and songs. Through such repetition, they might learn about Mary’s participation in the life of Jesus, her name, the quality of her love, or her place in Roman Catholic doctrine. As in the Middle English Marian lyrics, the impulse to meld popular song and church instruction is ancient in Roman Catholicism. For instance, Augustine’s Psalms against the Donatists were composed to combat heresy, through popular verse that could be understood and memorized by the unlearned. Similarly, Ambrose’s hymns, dominating Western hymnaries, serve as simple and memorable instructions in matters of doctrine and calendar; hymns such as his “Come, Thou Redeemer of the world, show forth the virgin birth” offer fourth-century examples of lyrical praise to the Virgin. The Marian Middle English lyrics considered in this chapter participate in the Ambrosian effort to embed scripture and tradition in the memories 14. Ryman’s handbook may be found in Cambridge University Library MS Ee.1.12.

226  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics of the laity. By marking Mary’s feast days or offering praises appropriate to her roles in salvation, the Middle English lyrics teach a Mariology that can be remembered by the church calendar. As they detail and laud Mary’s words and actions at the Annunciation or the Assumption, they provide information about Mary’s life not offered in the biblical accounts. The Middle English Marian lyrics compare in their embellishments upon the Virgin’s life to the texts considered in chapter 1; however, as short poems, each lyric concentrates on a single event in Mary’s life, whether historical, such as the Nativity, or contemporary, such as the opportunity to save a penitent. The Middle English lyrics expand upon Mary’s life story, mark her feasts, and reinforce her importance as a saint, while emphasizing the Virgin’s spoken word. Some debate exists over the avenues traveled by the church in the endeavor to bring Marian lyrics to the people. Following the leads of Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins, David L. Jeffrey contends that the appearance of Franciscan friars in England in 1224 coincided with the increasing popularity of the Middle English lyric and catalyzed the production of an overwhelming proportion of this poetry.15 Francis’s joy in music and in the discovery of divinity in simplicity found expression in the lyrics of English Franciscan composers, such as James Ryman and John Grimestone. These writers realized St. Francis’s vision of ioculatores Dei, “preachers who would sing [humankind] into the kingdom of Heaven.”16 Composers such as Grimestone and Ryman took a different tack from Walter of Wimborne, whose poems were discussed in chapter 2, in wanting to reach a wide audience in a popular medium that could be readily adapted for preaching. St. Francis’s insistence on conformity to the life of Christ prompted songs that told the stories of Jesus and Mary and encouraged personal identification with them. In De reductione artium ad theologiam, St. Francis’s disciple St. Bonaventure outlined the theory that by presenting the image of God, poetry and also other art forms could lead to divine union for the soul.17 Like 15. Carleton Brown, “Texts and the Man,” Bulletin of the Modern Humanities Research Association 2 (1928): 104; Rossell Hope Robbins, “The Earliest Carols and the Franciscans,” Modern Language Notes 53 (1938): 239–45; David L. Jeffrey, The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975). 16. Jeffrey, Early English Lyric, 172. 17. Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Emma Thérèse Healy (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1955).



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St. Bonaventure’s sermons, the Middle English lyrics render Christian mysteries commonly accessible, and do so in a verbal, vernacular medium available to all. It is Mary’s voice that often renders such mysteries accessible. While it is clear that Franciscan spirituality had an effect on the Middle English lyric, the immigration of the friars minor into England was not the only inspiration for these poems. Siegfried Wenzel has demonstrated that the number of Franciscan miscellanies and poems has been exaggerated, and we should therefore investigate other influences upon the Middle English lyrics.18 Another order of friars, the Dominicans, excelled in Marian devotional verse and invented the rosary, providing the form and vocabulary for a number of Marian Middle English lyrics.19 Looking to the monastic orders, Brian Noell has shown how Cistercian lyrics to the Virgin flourished as compositions for lectio divina in twelfth-century France and persisted into the thirteenth century despite the order’s reluctance to admit these compositions to services. Even though intended for private contemplation, Cistercian lyrics imitated the conventions of hymns and were therefore adaptable to song. They were put to the purpose of combating heresy, Noell notes, because the sweetness of the Virgin’s love brought doubters back to church.20 A collection such as Mary Most Holy: Meditating with the Early Cistercians shows how the order’s Marian verses spread across the channel with, for instance, Baldwin of Forde and Stephen of Sawley.21 The lyrics found a warm reception, given the early establishment of Marian devotion in Anglo-Saxon England that Mary Clayton has so carefully documented.22

Lyrics from the Annunciation to the Assumption The Middle English Marian lyrics reflect the devotions of several religious orders, hymns, festival narratives, secular poetry, and of course 18. Wenzel, Poets and Preachers, 7–9. 19. For a history of Marian devotional verse leading up to the Dominican invention of the rosary, see Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 20. Brian Noell, “Marian Lyric in the Cistercian Monastery during the High Middle Ages,” Comitatus 30 (1999): 37–61. 21. Rozanne E. Elder, ed., Mary, Most Holy: Meditating with the Early Cistercians, Cistercian Fathers Series 65 (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2003). 22. Mary Clayton, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Anglo-Saxon England, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; rpt. 2002).

228  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics scripture. Their subject matter often takes a biblical text for the keynote. Mary’s divine use of speech begins in Luke’s gospel with the Annunciation, when the angel’s message declares Mary to be Mother of the Word.23 The various exegetical explanations of how Gabriel’s announcement is realized—of how the Holy Ghost could impregnate this maiden—were somewhat conditioned by Old Testament types: that is, Mary’s womb was like Gideon’s dewy fleece, Aaron’s spontaneously flowering rod, manna falling from heaven.24 According to these allegories, she would receive God’s grace, but her reception would not be passive; she must choose to absorb the dew, burst forth in flower, or gather the manna. Similarly, the Virgin’s attention and response to Gabriel’s message exhibits righteous choices; her listening and speaking are perfect and indicate her perfection. Through the balanced construction of Mary as the antithesis of Eve, as the receiver of the “Ave” who could answer Eva, the idea arose that Mary was so open to the word of God that she conceived by ear. Justin Martyr wrote that “Eve, being a virgin and uncorrupt, conceived by the word spoken of the serpent, and brought forth disobedience and death. But Mary the Virgin, receiving faith and grace . . . [conceived the Word] . . . by whom God destroys both the serpent and those angels and men that became like it.”25 Expressing the same concept in a poem in his commonplace book, William Herebert declares, “Thylk Ave thai thow vonge in spel / Of the aungeles mouheth kald Gabriel, / In gryht ous sette and shyld vrom shome, / That turnst abakward Eves nome” (May that Ave that you heard in speech / From the mouth of the angel called Gabriel / Protect us and shield us from shame / Turn backwards Eve’s name).26 Having heard and understood the mystery imparted to her by Gabriel, the Virgin responded flawlessly by offering herself as the handmaid of the Lord. In Annunciation visual art, she is reading the Book of Wisdom, which prepares her for her faultless rejoinder, but the text is not mentioned in the lyrics. The closest the lyrics ever come to the maiden studiousness portrayed in Marian paintings is in a late medieval Christmas poem in which the Virgin 23. English quotations of the Bible from the Revised Standard Version; Lk 1:26–38. 24. Jgs 36–40; Nm 17:8; Ex 16:14. 25. Quoted in Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex (New York: Knopf, 1976), 59–60. 26. Thomas Wright and J. O. Halliwell, eds., Reliquiae Antiquae, Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts (London: J.R. Smith, 1841–43), 2:228–29, lines 5–8.



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glories in her conception of the Christ child and promises to “her hys lawes taught.”27 Note, however, that she promises to hear, rather than read, God’s laws. Consistently, the popular Middle English Annunciation lyrics lift up Mary’s excellence in hearing and speaking. For instance, “Blissid be that lady bryght,” a carol of the fifteenth century, underscores the interpretation that Mary conceived through the ear: “The great Lord of heaven / Owr servant is becom / Thorow Gabriels stevyn” (through Gabriel’s voice).28 An acrostic poem of the same era built upon the angel’s salutation opens “Hayle mayden of maydyns, thorgth worde consaywyng” (through the word conceiving).29 Mary’s reply to the Word is flawless because obedient, or mild. In “Gabriel, fram evene kingh,” an adaptation of the thirteenth-century Angelus ad Virginem, Mary, the “milde maiden” answers “mildeliche with milde mud”: “Hur Lordes theumaiden iwis / Ics am, that her aboven is” (I am the handmaiden of our Lord above).30 Concerning herself, Mary adds, let all “fulfurthed be / [ according to] thi sawe” (fulfilled according to thy commandment).31 In “Gabriel fram evene kingh,” Mary’s response to the angel is perfectly concordant because she describes the divine hierarchy in which she plays a leading part. She admits her subservience to the commandments of God “aboven” and happily declares her own physical nature under his sway: “Ics, sithen his wil is / Maiden withhuten lawe / Of moder have the blis” (Since it is his will, I, a maiden, will have the joy of motherhood, outside the law of nature).32 “Gabriel fram evene kingh,” like other Annunciation poems, contains lines closely translated from Luke 1:26–38. Consistently, these Middle English verses from Luke dramatize the conversation between Gabriel and Mary by recounting the divine announcement, Mary’s inquiry into how she, a virgin, might bear a son, Gabriel’s explanation on the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost, and finally Mary’s willingness to participate in these events. “In that time, als was ful wel” quotes Mary’s query of the angel—“Hou mai this be? No man knaw I”—and her enthusiasm for Gabriel’s explanation: “‘Godes handemaiden lo me here!” The narrator reports that the Virgin exclaimed her obedience “with 27. Saupe, MEML, no. 7, line 20. 29. Ibid., no. 11. 31. Ibid., no. 3, lines 32–33.

28. Ibid., no. 15, lines 14–16. 30. Ibid., no. 3, lines 16, 27, 30. 32. Ibid., no. 3, lines 34–36.

230  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics milde chier.”33 “Nu this fules singet and maket hure blisse” underscores the thoughtfulness that is credited to Mary in Luke 1:29 in making her rejoinder to Gabriel. In “Nu this fules singet” Mary “gon to bithenchen and meinde hir thout” (began to think and mind her thought) displaying her care in assessing holy speech.34 Occasionally, the Middle English lyrics take liberties with the gospel account in order to emphasize Mary’s obedience and her sense of verbal integrity. For instance, “The angel to the vergyn said” presents Mary’s strong adherence to vows of chastity that medieval legends and church tradition claimed she had taken before the Annunciation; she demands of the angel: “How schuld I breke that I have forehete / Of thoght stedfast and trewe?” Once Gabriel fully explains the providential plan, however, Mary “bare chyelde with mylde chere” (bore the child with mild bearing).35 In possibly the earliest of these verse translations of Luke, “From heovene into eorthe, God gretynge he sende,” Mary describes herself as “Godes wenche,” who is “swithe gled” (very glad) of Gabriel’s tidings.36 Like the Angelus ad virginem, which was included later in the Latin liturgy, “From heovene into eorthe” appears in the manuscript from which this lyric is edited, Oxford, Jesus College MS 29, folios 188b and 181a, with the Latin cue “Item cantus” (Another song).37 In the Middle English Annunciation lyrics, Mary’s reception of Gabriel’s message and correct response is often cause for singing. Besides their musical scores, Annunciation poems often highlight their own performative nature by making petitions meant for oral delivery, the Virgin’s to Jesus, Jesus’ to the Virgin, the sinful narrator’s to the Virgin, or the Virgin’s to sinners. After “Gabriel, fram evene kingh” tells the Annunciation story, for instance, its narrator begs Mary to bid Jesus for each sinner’s salvation. Referring to the Annunciation as one of Mary’s five joys in “Hayle, glorious lady and hevenly quene,” Lydgate 33. W. Heuser, ed., “In that time, als was ful wel,” Anglia 29 (1906): 401–2; Saupe, MEML, no. 1, lines 32, 46, 45. 34. Robert D. Stevick, ed., One Hundred Middle English Lyrics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964; rpt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), no. 10; Saupe, MEML, no. 16, line 14. 35. Ella Keats Whiting, ed., The Poems of John Audelay, EETS o.s. 184 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931; rpt. New York: Kraus, 1971), 159–60; Saupe, MEML, no. 4, lines 13–14, 31. 36. Morris, Old English Miscellany, 100; Saupe MEML, no. 2, lines 12–13. 37. John Stevens, “Angelus ad Virginem: The History of a Medieval Song,” in Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett aetatis suae LXX, ed. P. L. Heyworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 297–328.



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characterizes Mary’s obedient answer to Gabriel as her marriage vow, in response to which “we sey for our homage, Ave Maria, gracia plena” and bid Mary to “pray for us.”38 Many Annunciation and petition poems assume the efficacy of speech in salvation, either through the creation of the Word or pleas for forgiveness. When Annunciation and petition poems focus on the narrator’s adoration of and abjection before the Virgin Mother, they can be difficult to distinguish from secular love lyrics.39 As Woolf points out, Annunciation lyrics such as “Edi beo thu, hevene queen” ref lect the feudal lover-lady relationship and the inf luence of French court poetry over the Middle English Marian lyric.40 The narrator of this poem declares himself the lady’s “knicht.”41 “Edi beo thu” also relies upon an important assumption of amour courtois, that the lady will entertain and respond to only the most well-crafted entreaty. The poem is structured according to an eight-line stanza with an ab rhyme scheme, which the speaker passionately delivers to his lady: “Ic crie the merci, ic am thi mon, / Bothe to honde and to fote, / On alle wise that ic kon” (in all ways that I am able).42 Clearly, the poetic effort is meant to strengthen the lover’s petition and mirror the depth of devotion. Annunciation lyrics representing the Virgin as a beloved lady are indebted to the exegesis on the Song of Songs and the Latin poetry that first appropriates it. As Ann Astell illustrates so thoroughly, medieval exegetes often read the Song of Songs typologically, as a prefiguration of the bond between Mary and Jesus.43 Perhaps the best known Latin appropriation of such exegesis is the eleventh-century “Quis est hic?” a dialogue of desire modeled upon the exchange between the biblical bride and bridegroom.44 Peter Dronke reads “Quis est hic?” as an interchange between Jesus and Mary: the Virgin opens the poem by wondering who 38. Saupe, MEML, no. 12, lines 23–24, 65. 39. In his treatment of contemporaneous French lyric, Daniel E. O’Sullivan reminds us that too strict a division between the sacred and the secular in evaluating lyrics is unhelpful because of the variety of motifs and melodies shared by poems in both categories. See Marian Devotion in Thirteenth-Century French Lyric (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 1–5. 40. Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 128. 41. Brown, 13, no. 60; Saupe, MEML, no. 8, line 16. 42. Brown, 13 no. 60; Saupe, MEML, no. 8, lines 22–24. 43. For an excellent survey of exegesis on the Song of Songs, see Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 44. “Quis est hic?” ed. F. J. E. Raby, The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 115.

232  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics is knocking upon her door and Christ follows by answering that he has arrived to set souls free.45 Setting “Quis est hic?” in a large, multilingual context of other lyrics employing the language of sensual yearning to convey a longing for union with God, Dronke notes how often Mary is the vehicle for that union, how through both the permeability of her body and the efficacy of her spoken requests, the Virgin provides an intersection between human and divine.46 The Annunciation offers the proper moment for this intersection, and therefore the lyrics for this feast entertain the paradox of describing the ineffable in a spoken or musical medium. A Middle English example in the “Quis est hic?” tradition is “Undo thi dore, my spuse dere.”47 In the English poem, the crucified Christ knocks upon the door and begs to come in to the one for whom he has made the greatest sacrifice. Although “Undo thi dore” is not a dialogue between Jesus and Mary, it does allude to Jesus’ espousal to members of the church and by extension to Mary as a counterpart of Ecclesia. Undoubtedly, the most admired Middle English Annunciation lyric that relies upon exegesis for the Song of Songs is the fifteenth-century, anonymous “I syng of a myden / That is makeles.”48 In this poem, Mary is a maiden who is matchless, spotless, mateless, one who awaits Jesus, her beloved.49 According to the first line of stanzas 2 through 4, Jesus, like a discreet lover, comes “also stylle” (so very silently, or secretly) to Mary’s bower. As Jesus descends to earth like the “dew in Aprille,” the poem recalls that the Virgin fulfills the promise of Gideon’s fleece and of the vespers antiphon for the Annunciation describing Jesus’ descent to the Virgin’s womb as the rain falling upon the grass.50 Mary’s reception of this holy insemination is not passive, however; according to “I 45. Peter Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 269. 46. Ibid., 64–95. 47. Brown, 14, no. 68. 48. Brown, 15, no. 81; Saupe, MEML, no. 13. 49. More has been written about “I syng of a myden” than any other Middle English lyric, particularly on the topics of the puns in “makeles” and the theological allusions. See Stephen Manning, “‘I Syng of a Myden,’” PMLA 75 (1960): 8–12; D. G. Halliburton, “The Myden Makeles,” Papers on Language and Literature 4 (1968): 115–20; Sarah Appleton Weber, Theology and Poetry in the Middle English Lyric: A Study of Sacred History and Aesthetic Form (Akron: Ohio State University Press, 1969), 55–60; Edmund Reiss, The Art of the Middle English Lyric: Essays in Criticism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), 159–63; and Douglas Gray, “Typology in Some Medieval English Religious Lyrics,” in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. Hugh T. Keenan (New York: AMS, 1992), 275–88. 50. Saupe, MEML, no. 13, lines 7, 11, 15; Weber, Theology and Poetry, 58.



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syng of a myden,” “[the] Kyng of alle kynges / to here sone che ches.”51 By representing Mary as having chosen the king of all kings for her son, “I syng of a myden” makes an important revision to its source, “Nu this fules singet,” which emphasizes instead why God chose Mary.52 In the later poem, the Virgin’s sacred choice implies verbal assent and contrasts sharply with God’s silence in his approach. Just as “I syng of a myden” places Mary and Jesus in a lovely and fertile April setting, close to the celebration of the Annunciation on March 25, a number of Middle English Annunciation poems in the tradition of “Quis est hic?” feature gardens in springtime as the proper place for the human meeting with the divine. The voluptuous nature imagery in these poems derives from the Song of Songs, natural Marian archetypes like the ever-f lowering rose or the dewy f leece, the edenic landscape, Franciscan praises of plants and simple creatures, French reverdie, literary depictions of courtly gardens, and more, the variety of these influences reflecting the many fountains from which the Marian Middle English lyrics spring. While visual art of the Annunciation privileges Mary’s chamber and furniture for study such as the bookstand, the lyrics open up to the outdoors as a way of emphasizing the liturgical cycle of Mary’s bodily and spiritual fertility. One such verdant lyric, “Maiden in the mor lay,” makes a point of moving Mary’s chamber outside, where it might be decorated with the “rede rose an te lilie flour.”53 There, the maiden reenacts creation by lying in for seven nights. Appearing in an Easter sermon in a fourteenth-century preaching collection from Worcester Cathedral, “Maiden in the mor lay” provides an illustration of the Golden Age, and describes it as an Eden in which chastity reigns and simple desires are satisfied by God’s bounty.54 By invoking this poem in the protheme to the 51. Saupe, MEML, no. 13, lines 3–4. 52. Brown, 13, no. 31; Saupe, MEML, no. 16; Weber, Theology and Poetry, 56. 53. Although in The Medieval Lyric ([Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996], 195) Peter Dronke maintains that the maiden of this poem is merely a water sprite of German tradition and no reference to the Virgin Mary, Reiss reminds us that the nature images of this poem are largely Marian: the primerole and violet for meekness, water for purification, and the rose and lily for charity (see Reiss, The Art of the Middle English Lyric, 100). Siegfried Wenzel (“The Moor Maiden—A Contemporary View,” Speculum 49 [1974]: 69–74) and Ronald Waldron (“‘Maiden in the Mor Lay’ and the Religious Imagination,” Unisa English Studies 29 [1991]: 8–12) evaluate the impact of religious imagery upon the poem; Saupe, MEML, no. 81, line 28. 54. Wenzel, Poets and Preachers, 83–84. See Worcester Cathedral, MS. F. 126, ff. 145rb– 146ra.

234  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics sermon, the preacher brings the primrose and crystal spring sustaining the pregnant Virgin inside the church. As the garden scenery charms the congregation and displaces the Virgin from her studies, it offers an opportunity for song in tune with the impulses of creation. “Nowel, nowel, nowel / Syng we with myrth” likewise interpolates an Annunciation nature scene into a mass and mini-sermon on scripture and divine law.55 There, singing a song of comfort to her God and beloved, Mary is “by a wod syd,” where the narrator is “sportyng.”56 The Virgin compares her holy pregnancy to the movement of the seasons, as she announces, “I am with child this tyd.”57 Because of her great love and willingness to submit herself to the divine tide, she vows to take joy in the “goostly case” that doth her “embrace”: Withowt dystresse In grete lyghtnesse I am both nyght and day; This hevenly fod [food] In hys chyldhod Schal dayly with me play.58

Referring to her child as the heavenly food, Mary characterizes herself in familiar terms, as the oven that bakes divine bread and makes the Eucharist available to sinful humanity. She also suggests that this “food” enables her to survive in the wilds of creation and to trust in the sustaining powers of God, themes similar to that of Matthew 6:25–33 in which Jesus asks his followers to “consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin.”59 The Virgin’s time with the Christ child may be joyous play, but as she clarifies in the previous stanza, she must strive to “her hys laws taught” (hear his laws taught) so that she might understand the forces motivating holy cycles of fertility.60 Her yearning for the “trewe gospel” that the apostles spread offers an exemplum to those who might hear this lyric and desire to know the church’s teachings better.61 Thus the Virgin becomes a woodland preacher who offers the body of Christ, teaches the importance of hearing scripture, and promises to sing like a bird upon Jesus’ birth. 55. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics, no. 133; Saupe, MEML, no. 7. 56. Saupe, MEML, no. 7, lines 6–7. 57. Ibid., no. 7, line 11. 58. Ibid., no. 7, lines 24–25, 30–35. 59. Mt 6:28. 60. Saupe, MEML, no. 7, line 20. 61. Ibid., no. 7, line 22.



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Of course, Mary’s most celebrated song is the Magnificat. In Luke 1:46–55, Mary performs the Magnificat as a response to her cousin Elizabeth’s blessing and recognition that the Virgin is pregnant with the Messiah. Mary’s song links her experiences to Old Testament figures, as well as to others who sing praises in the Gospel of Luke. The Virgin’s cantus, then, both underscores Mary’s fulfillment of messianic prophesies and her concordance with contemporaries to whom God’s truth is revealed. The Magnificat especially recalls the glad hymn of Hannah, who after years of barrenness conceives Samuel, a wise man and precursor of Jesus.62 It also participates in a musical overture of praise in the first two chapters of Luke; as the first Lucan canticle, it is followed by the Benedictus of Zacharias and the Nunc dimittis of Simeon.63 The events surrounding the Benedictus, offered in thanks for the birth of St. John the Baptist, especially illuminate the perfection of the Virgin’s hearing and speaking. While Zacharias had doubted Gabriel’s announcement that a son would be born to him and Elizabeth, requested a sign from God, and was therefore struck dumb, Mary questions but eventually understands and offers obedience at her Annunciation. In these passages from Luke on the Annunciation and the birth of St. John the Baptist, silence is associated with exile from God, beautiful conversation with his grace. A striking example of sacred dialogue is the exchange between Mary and Elizabeth as they acknowledge the Holy Spirit’s role in conception and laud God’s work in their lives. When Mary arrives at the home of her cousin, the baby leaps in Elizabeth’s womb, and the older woman calls out to Mary the words that will become a most enduring prayer: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.”64 As a song of glory to God’s might, the Magnificat not only initiates a series of canticles and underscores the need to articulate praises, but it also harks back to David’s psalms and reminds its audience that Mary derives from the house of the greatest of biblical kings, poets, and singers. For an example of the Magnificat among the Middle English lyrics, we can look to James Ryman’s adaptation for use at vespers:

62. 1 Sm 1. 64. Lk 1:42.

63. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 8–9.

236  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics Thus seide Mary of grete honoure: “My soule my Lord dothe magnifie, And in my God and savyoure My spirite rejoyseth verily. “For he the mekenes hath beholde Of his handemayde, that Lorde so good; That I am blessed manyfolde Alle kynredes shal say, of myelde moode. “For he that is so full of myght So grete thinges to me hath done; Holy his name is ay of right, By whome our goostly helth is won. “And in alle tho that hym doth drede (Truly thus seithe holy scripture) His mercy dothe bothe spring and sprede, And of heven they be fulle sure. “Thys myghty Lorde of grete renowne By his swete Sonne the helthe hath wrought Of meke people, and hath put downe Prowde people onely with a thought. “Tho that desireth that Lorde, oure helth, That king of grace soo goode and swete, Fro whome cometh alle goodenes and welth, With alle virtue they be replete. “Of his grete mercy havyng myende, He toke nature in Ysraell And became man to save mankynde, To oure faders as he did telle.” Joy be to God in Trinitie, Fader and Sonne and Holi Goost, That was and is and ay shall be Both three and one, of myghtes most.65

Ryman’s adaptation dwells on the meek and peaceable nature that Mary describes in the tenth line as her “mild mood”; in the same place in Luke’s version, the Virgin calls herself “blessed.”66 After remaining 65. Saupe, MEML, no. 6. 66. Lk 1:48.



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true in the first stanza to Luke’s presentation of the Magnificat, Ryman makes significant revisions to Mary’s song from the second stanza onward in order to emphasize her gratitude for and acceptance of God’s righteous plans. For instance, in the third and sixth stanzas, Mary sings of the spiritual healing promised in the Incarnation and highlights Christ’s goodness and sweetness in offering abundant mercies. Goodness and sweetness, however, while they might prove for Ryman that the Virgin’s personal qualities coordinate with God’s, are not characteristics of God in the biblical Magnificat in which the awesome and holy avenger stoops to remember his handmaid and offer clemency to those in Israel who fear and remember him. Ryman diffuses the biblical song’s emphasis on the relationship between God and the houses of Israel in order that the Mother might convey a sense of holy sacrifice for all. Whereas Luke’s Magnificat presents a God who “has put down the mighty from their thrones” and “exalted those of low degree,” Ryman’s Virgin-narrator is not interested in political revolutions, but rather in unspecified “meek people” such as herself, who will receive a greater spiritual reward than the “proud people.”67 Ryman downplays God’s magnificence and a sense of the Magnificat’s similarity to the more militant psalms in order to characterize a mild Virgin who sings a milder song. Ryman’s version begins by inviting the congregation to sing along: “Unto Marie he that love hath, / To here synge he Magnificat.”68 Just as the Gospel of Luke equates holy speech and song with true belief, Ryman’s Magnificat asks the congregation to demonstrate faith by singing. Ryman therein leads the congregation in imitation of this mildest Mary, their faithful voices in parallel with hers. The corpus of Middle English lyrics reflecting the first two chapters of Luke and surrounding the Annunciation and Nativity is vast. Jaroslav Pelikan remarks that “among all the scenes in the life of the Virgin Mary that have engaged the piety of the devout and the creativity of the artists, the annunciation has been predominant.”69 Similarly, it could be said that the Annunciation preoccupies the imagination of the popular Middle English lyricists. By contrast, lullaby poems that comprise a subcategory of Marian carols on the Nativity, are, as Woolf declares, “aston67. Lk 1:52. 68. Saupe, MEML, no. 6, lines 1–2. 69. Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 81.

238  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics ishingly sparse.”70 Their rarity might be an accident of preservation or a reflection of limited opportunities, outside of liturgical plays and Christmas festivals, to perform Marian lullabies. Nevertheless, the lullaby poems, few though there be, underscore either the wonderful mastery of song that Mary demonstrates with the Magnificat or the exceptional grasp of the spoken word shown to the angel Gabriel. One of these lyrics, “Als I lay upon a nith” from Grimestone’s commonplace book, shows how Mary learns to sing about the divine plan for her son from the baby Jesus himself.71 Here, Jesus, being rocked to sleep, complains that his mother is remiss in not singing to him and ought to invent a lullaby, as other mothers do, of what will befall him. In contrast to Marian pictorial art that insists on Mary’s reading of Old Testament prophecies, in “Als I lay upon a nith,” Mary responds that she as yet knows no more about Jesus’ mission than what Gabriel had declared to her and what the heavenly choir of angels proclaimed to the shepherds. To increase her awareness and supply matter for song, Jesus proceeds with a long lecture about what shall befall him, hardly a sleepinducing subject. However, as Mary provides an emotional response to her son’s prophecy, exulting upon hearing of his kingship and sorrowing at the preview of his crucifixion, she offers, in Jeffrey’s words, “an effective presence, a vital referent for personal, human identification” with Christ.72 As the supreme icon of that identification, Mary achieves her superior understanding through an aural medium in this poem. The result is more vocal discourse: from here on out she is prepared to sing. In other poems in which she does sing, Mary lulls her son to sleep with apologies for his suffering, the paradoxes of creation, or restrained mourning.73 The second stanza of the lullaby “Ler to loven as I love thee” combines all of the Virgin’s inducements to sleep. She sings: Jesu, swete sone dere, In porful bed thu list nou here, And that me grevet sore. For this credel is als a bere, Ox and asse bent hi fere; Wepen mai I ther fore. 70. Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 114. 71. Robbins, Early English Christmas Carols, no. 27; Saupe, MEML, no. 25. 72. Jeffrey, Early English Lyric, 32. 73. Saupe, MEML, nos. 24, 27, 26.



Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics 239 Jesu, dear, sweet son, You lie in a poor bed here, And that grieves me sorely. For this cradle is also a bier, The ox and the ass are your companions; I must weep, therefore.74

In “Ler to loven” Mary sadly contrasts the dearness and sweetness of her son with his miserable accommodations on earth. The baby fares no better than the animals that he created; all is leveled in the impoverished stall in Bethlehem. Mary presents the cradle as the central image of the stanza above—one that rocks Jesus toward his death on the cross—and in its narrow confines imitates a coffin. All of these lines present distressing thoughts, but the Mother’s empathy and tears subdue the pain and soothe the Christ child to sleep in deferral of the agony to come. Like the lullaby poems, Marian Passion lyrics provide dramatic dialogues between Jesus and Mary, and more often between the Mother and the sinner. Passion lyrics were often delivered dramatically by the preacher during Good Friday sermons and are comparable to exchanges in the mystery plays on the crucifixion. The dialogues in the Passion poems sometimes have the character of a debate, various Middle English versions of the “Stabat Mater” representing the last arguments on earth between the Mother and her son. Since the preacher would enact both sides of the argument and teach its resolution, the lyrics participate in an inculcation of providential synthesis for which the eventually mild and accepting voice of Mary is a model. Although none of the gospels record familial discord at the cross, the biblical construction of Mary and Jesus’ relationship includes verbal disagreements in other scenes through which Jesus establishes his divine nature. For instance, when Jesus is twelve and stays behind in Jerusalem after the Passover, Mary and Joseph search frantically for him for three days, finally finding him in the temple. When they discover him discoursing with the teachers there, they are amazed and Mary asks, “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” Jesus replies, “How is it that you sought me? 74. Ibid., no. 24, lines 7–12.

240  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics Did you not know that I would be in my Father’s house?”75 Similarly, during Jesus’ time of itinerant preaching, Mary and his brothers attempt to visit him, but the crowd impedes them. Upon receiving their message that his mother and brothers would like to see him, Jesus responds, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.”76 In these episodes when Mary assumes some privileges as Jesus’ mother—the obedience of a child and the familiar companionship of her adult son—she is reminded, instead, of Jesus’ priorities as the Son of God. In the passage from Luke, a statement about the inclusiveness and intimacy of Christian love, Jesus asserts that his followers are as closely related to him as his mother and brothers, and Mary has no opportunity to comment about such a relationship. In the Middle English lyrics on the Passion, however, her dialogue fills in what to a medieval audience would have seemed a biblical gap. Just as the Catholic tradition from texts such as the Protevangelium of James, the Gospel of Pseudo Matthew, and the Nativity of Mary supplies Marian details unavailable even in Luke, so the lyrics articulate the maternal feelings the mother would have endured over disagreement with and distance from her son.77 In “A Son! tak hede to me whas sone thou was,” she orders him, “Stynt now, Son, to be harde to thi moder, / Thou that ever was god to all other” (Stop now, Son, being hard on your mother—you, who were ever good to all others.)78 While Mary is silent in the Bible in response to Jesus’ words, in the lyrics her voice is more often balanced with his, and through her copious responses, the audience witnesses the process through which Jesus and Mary reach resolution and the Virgin conforms to God’s will. When Jesus requires her to be merry over salvation in “Stond wel, Moder, under rode,” she asks him how he can call her to feel divine joy, confronted as she is with his pain.79 “Sune,” she demands, “hu mitti teres wernen? / Hy se tho blodi flodes hernen / Huth of thin herte to min fet” (Son, how might I stop my tears? I see those bloody streams run out of your heart to my feet).80 In other poems, the bloody streams find a corollary in Mary’s “blody terys,” to which she ges75. Lk 2:41–49. 76. Lk 8:19–21. 77. M. R. James, ed. and trans., The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Apocalypses (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; rpt. with corrections, 1953). 78. Brown, 14, no.128; Saupe, MEML, no. 36, lines 5–6. 79. Saupe, MEML, no.33. 80. Ibid., no.33, lines 16–18.



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tures as a sign of her compassion.81 Each stanza of “Stond wel, Moder, under rode” is divided evenly between the Passion and compassion: Moder, merci, let me deyen, For Adam ut of helle beyn And al mankin that is forloren. Sune, wat sal me to rede? Thi pine pined me to dede; Let me deyn thee biforen. Mother, mercy, let me die, In order to buy Adam from hell And all mankind that is lost. Son, what shall make me ready for that? Your pain pains me to death; Le me die before you.82

Both the mother and the son take three lines for the dialogic cycle of correction, complaint, and response; in the stanza above, both ask to die, the son in the service of humankind and the mother to escape her son’s sacrificial pain. They finally come to terms toward the end of the poem when Jesus once more raises the subject of salvation; he entreats Mary to offer her nurturing care to all sinners, and she agrees, requesting of Jesus that he help all who cry to her: Moder, reu of moder kare, Nu thu wost of moder fare, Thou thus be clene mayden man. Sune, helpe alle at nede, Alle tho that to me greden— Mayden, wyf, and fol wyman Mother, take pity of a mother’s care Now that you know how mothers fare Though you are a pure virgin. Son, help all in need, All those who cry to me Whether maiden, wife or foul woman.83 81. For an instance of Mary’s bloody tears, see “Thou synfull man of resoun that walkest here up and downe,” Saupe, MEML, no. 40, 3. 82. Saupe, MEML, no.33, lines 31–36. 83. Ibid., no.33, lines 43–48.

242  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics In this reconciliation stanza, mother and son do not call out to each other accusingly, but in the spirit of cooperation. Although Mary had felt her motherhood slighted by the dying Jesus, he makes peace with her by acknowledging the salvific effect of her maternal care for the faithful and by agreeing to support all women, no matter their station in life. Such equity, synthesis, and agreement between Jesus and Mary is achieved in a number of other Passion lyrics, for instance, “Maiden and moder, cum and se” from Grimestone’s commonplace book, in which both mother and son speak for a stanza at the crucifixion before reconciling over the plan to place Mary in John’s care.84 Occasionally, the mother’s voice overpowers that of her son, as in “Suete sone, reu on me, and brest out of thi bondes,” also from Grimestone’s commonplace book.85 Here, Mary’s complaint at her son’s suffering fills the whole poem, her reaction at Good Friday creating that Bonaventurian sense of evangelical art. As Mary describes the nails driven through Jesus’ hands into the tree so that he hangs “reufuliche” (ruefully), his “faire face droppet al on blode,” and his body bowed “dounward” from the cross, she evokes a sensory response from the reader that, as St. Bonaventure theorized, leads to the union of the soul with God.86 Although Mary’s first instinct is to flee and her second is to die with Christ, she concludes that only life with him can make her happy. Her emotional responses ranging from horror to despair to longing provide a model for the reader during Holy Week. In her analysis of the Virgin’s outspokenness in Passion lyrics, Sarah Stanbury invokes George Bataille’s concept of “sanctified transgression” to explain how Mary’s words and actions guide the reader in a response to the events of Good Friday.87 The mother’s public speech, her staring at Christ’s naked body, and her emotional outpouring may violate standards of decency for medieval women, but they are excused by grief, which the audience is moved to share. Mary’s violations are sanctified because they lead the reader through the processes of shock and acceptance that aid in understanding the sacrifice at the cross. Stanbury focuses on Mary’s gaze 84. Ibid., no. 48. 85. Brown, 14, no. 64; Saupe, MEML, no. 34. 86. Saupe, MEML, no. 34, lines 3, 5, 6; Jeffrey, Early English Lyric, 101. 87. Sarah Stanbury, “Gender and Voice in Middle English Religious Lyrics,” in CMEL, 231. See also Stanbury’s earlier work, “The Virgin’s Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion,” PMLA 106 (1991): 1083–93.



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because it both mediates the appearance of the crucified body and incites Jesus’ teachings from the cross. By producing both visual poetry on the Passion and divine discourse within it, Mary’s gaze is a tool for rhetorical invention within the lyrics. In a poem such as “Stond wel, moder, under rode” we see Christ’s wounds through the Virgin’s eyes and hear the justification for his suffering that is prompted by his mother’s anguish. In “Stond wel, moder, under rode,” Mary’s gaze wills Jesus to live—at least long enough to deliver a short Good Friday sermon. Although in many Middle English renditions of the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi’s “Stabat Mater” the Virgin’s interactions and verbal jousts are with Christ, in others she contends with the sinner who should be meditating on the Passion. In “Sodenly afraide, half waking, half slepyng,” she challenges the narrator for being so hardhearted. “Now breke, hert, I thee pray,” she calls out, “this cors [of Christ] lith so rulye” (Now let your heart break; this body lies here so pitifully).88 In “Thou synfull man of resoun that walkest here up and downe,” she argues that if the sinner is moved neither by her son’s pain nor her tears, then he must weep for his own sins.89 In “Of alle women that ever were borne,” she encourages other women to compare their happy maternal experiences with her great sorrow: Beholde, women, when that ye play And hase your childur on knees daunsand: Ye fele ther fete, so fete are thay, And to your sight ful wel likand. But the most fyngur of any hande Thorow my sonnys fete I may put here And pulle it out sore bledand, For now liggus ded my dere son, dere. Behold, women, when you play And dandle your children on your knees, You feel their feet, and so lovely and Pleasant to see they are, But the largest finger of either hand, I may put here through my son’s feet, And pull it out sorely bleeding, For now lies dead my dear, precious son.90 88. Saupe, MEML, no. 39, line 21. 90. Saupe, MEML, no. 42, lines 41–48.

89. Ibid., no. 40.

244  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics The premise of all of these poems is that when neither sermons, nor confessionals, nor church Passion art move the sinner to penitence and imitation of Christ, the mother’s pleading might effect conversion. She is the last resort and the most exalted source of righteous persuasion. In an unusual version of the debate motif, “O litel whyle lesteneth to me,” Mary disputes with the cross.91 The narrator of this poem assures the audience that “this apocrifum is no foly” because it teaches “man to seke mercy” and “Maryes woo to wite.”92 The poem begins with Mary’s accusations against the cross: it makes unnatural use of Christ, the fruit she bore and the bird she protected within her own maternal branches, a sheltering foliage in contrast to the stark wood of the cross. After the cross defends itself by showing its role to have been prefigured in the Old Testament, the Virgin must agree that her opponent is indeed fulfilling God’s plan. However, then Mary surpasses the cross’s explanation of its providential place by prophesying St. Paul’s comments on the crucifixion about the hardness of Jewish hearts.93 The cross invokes a vision of the heavenly “parlement” where it will be vindicated, and Mary concords with its representation of a Judgment Day scene by kissing the cross.94 Through such debates, Mary stands not only under the cross, but also in the shadow of academe, as medieval students graduated from grammar and rhetoric to logic or debate and finally earned university degrees by participating in organized disputations. However, in none of these lyrics does Mary actually participate in the reading of any sacred texts. In “O litel whyle lesteneth to me,” the cross raises all of the biblical references, except Mary’s Pauline allusion to 1 Corinthians 5–7, which is an epistle to be written in the future. The impression is maintained that Mary is exemplary in hearing, aurally learning, and verbally responding. Marian debate on earth is a precursor to her advocacy for the sinner before the Judgment bench in heaven. The celestial court of justice is imagined in several poems, such as William Herebert’s “Thou 91. Ibid., no. 43. See Susanna Greer Fein, ed., Moral Love Songs and Laments (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), 87–160. While the Marian debate with the cross may be unusual in Middle English poems, another such poem exists in Paris, BnF fr. 17068. 92. Saupe, MEML, no. 43, lines 347, 349, 355. 93. Ibid., no. 43, lines 215–25. 94. Ibid., no. 43, line 304.



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wommon boute vere,” in which the narrator begs the Virgin to speak for him “tovore the domesmon” (before the judge).95 According to these poems of Mary’s intercession, the Virgin’s case about her client’s redemption proceeds from a maternal desire to comfort the sinner who has sent up such pitiful prayers; again, Mary is speaking beautifully in reaction to the speech of others. In some of the lyrics, the narrator attempts to match his prayers with Mary’s humble tones; in “Mary, modur of grace, we cry to thee,” the speaker cries with “mylde steven.”96 The Mother’s arguments at God’s bench ideally end in peace; just as Mary and the cross end their disagreement in a kiss, so Mary’s words might bring the sinner to Christ’s embrace. These peaceful endings help the audience accord the most common description of Mary in the lyrics as a “modir mylde” with the contentious stance she takes in disputation. The poems must stay on the doctrinal side of a thin theological line, as Rachel Fulton notes about prayers to the Virgin from the High Middle Ages, by not overdetermining the Virgin’s verbal efficacy in making peace between her son and the penitent.97 God does, after all, have the final say as to the soul’s eternal abode. Because poems about penitence and intercession, however, end either in the narrator’s plea or in the Virgin’s response, they stop short of pridefully representing an unknowable outcome: “Levedie, ic thonke thee,” for example, concludes in the hope that the Virgin will shelter the narrator under God’s mercy at death.98 Mary’s harbor in these poems is constructed on the strength of her prayers, and if her petition to the Son does not end in the sinner’s redemption, no one’s would. According to “Blessed beo thu, lavedi, ful of hovene blisse,” Mary prays to Jesus during the sinner’s earthly life so that God will not fail him and at the sinner’s death so that God will not cast him away. The narrator speculates that he will not dare to cry out directly to the Son on the Judgment throne, but will make his “mone,” instead to “Seinte Marie.”99 Similarly, James Ryman wrote two Middle English lyrics with the macaronic refrain “Ora pro nobis” (pray 95. Brown, 14, no.16; Saupe, MEML, no. 60, line 45. 96. Saupe, MEML, no. 65, line 7. 97. Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). See especially the chapter entitled “Praying to the Mother of the Crucified Judge,” 204–43. 98. Brown, 13, no. 27; Saupe, MEML, no. 62. 99. Brown, 13, no. 55; Saupe, MEML, no. 63, lines 33–36.

246  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics for us) in order to solicit the Virgin’s prayers both during life and the final judgment at death.100 One fine example of a penitential poem entreating the Virgin’s intercession, beautifully crafted in rhyme royal is Thomas Hoccleve’s “Worsshipful maiden to the world, Marie.”101 This poem participates in the Chaucerian tradition of Boethian verse that looks for consolation in distress; in Hoccleve Mary is the source of consolation. Throughout the poem the Virgin incites and produces holy speech. Because of Mary’s great charity, the whole world cries out to her, the narrator himself a metonymy for the unanimous voice of entreaty. “To whom shal I truste so sikerly, / To axen help in my necessitee / As unto thee, thow modir of mercy?” asks the narrator.102 Since Mary is the Mother of Mercy and understands best the extremity of Christ’s sacrifice, she can be counted on to show pity to sinners.103 God spares her pain, and she that of humanity through her persuasive prayers: “Thou sparyng and thow preyynge, / Or elles wisse us whidir to flee / To hem that been mercyfullere than yee.”104 Although the narrator acknowledges sins that may be irredeemable, he has faith that “God nat list denye / [Maries] axynge.”105 Lyrics petitioning the Virgin’s advocacy at the Judgment throne are often praise poems or hymns to the Virgin’s joys. The narrator anchors his hopes for salvation on the virtues of the Virgin that call forth her praises and cause her joys. William Huchen praises Mary in “Swete and benygne moder and may,” a lyric noted for its vocabulary derived from French love poetry and devotional works.106 After lauding Mary’s floral and stellar beauty, Huchen claims that such excellence grants the Virgin power over her son. “Now, lady fayre,” he entreats, “thou us not fayle. / Lat never vice on us prevayle; / Entrete thi babe so, quene on hie / In whom to thee is no denye.”107 In Huchen’s words, Jesus is Mary’s “babe,” influenced by her as much now at the Judgment court as he was in the cradle. Like Huchen’s praise poem that lists Marian symbols and 100. Saupe, MEML, nos. 55, 56. 101. Frederick J. Furnivall and Israel Gollancz, eds., Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems, (rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 283–85. 102. Ibid., lines 8–10. 103. Ibid., lines 11–14. 104. Ibid., lines 26–28. 105. Ibid., lines 48–49. 106. Saupe, MEML, no. 85. See her notes to this poem for a discussion of French resources, 272–73. 107. Ibid., no. 85, lines 25–28.



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lauds the Virgin’s superiority, lyrics celebrating her celestial or earthly joys enumerate the ways in which Mary is close to Jesus. In poems on the Virgin’s joys, the narrator reminds the mother of her intimacy and authority with the son. Addressing Mary’s celestial joys, one lyric enjoins Mary to “be glad” and lauds the effectiveness of her prayers before the Trinity.108 “Haile be thu, Mari maiden bright,” a lyric on the earthly joys, reminds Mary that her final celebration brought her to heaven where she might intervene for the sinner most persuasively.109 Mary rose to this place of discursive power in the Assumption, when she was taken up by Jesus to sit as his queen in heaven’s court. Although the dogma of the Assumption was not proclaimed until Pope Pius XII in 1950, the events of this feast have their genesis in early Greek stories about the Virgin.110 Public processions for the Assumption on August 15 were established by Pope Sergius I in the eighth century and spread across Europe around the millennium with the Emperor Otto’s interest in the celebration.111 In their attempt to retell the Virgin’s story—biblical or traditional—for a popular audience, the Middle English lyrics describe Mary’s glorious occupation of the paradisal throne. Interestingly, however, Mary does no singing or talking in these poems that often intone macaronic refrains. Choirs of worshippers attend her, chanting “Ecce virgo, radix Jesse” or “Ave regina celorum.”112 The Assumption poems approximate a pageant rather than a dialogue, and as such show that the Virgin’s reward is a joyful noise, the sort of which she had been offering quietly in other Middle English lyrics based on the liturgical cycle. The Assumption poems externalize the Virgin’s beautiful voice into a chorus of the faithful. John Lydgate’s “Hayle luminary and benigne lanterne” offers such an angelic chorus of “the holy orders nyne” to the Queen of Heaven.113 As in Life of Our Lady, discussed in chapter 1, Lydgate employs light imagery to shine and focus the reader on the Virgin’s attributes, here the music she inspires. Similar to Life of Our Lady’s invocation and its humility topoi, Lydgate begins the lyric by admiring the heavenly “lau108. Brown, 15, no. 34; Saupe, MEML, no. 72. 109. Brown, 14, no. 31; Saupe, MEML, no. 74. 110. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 82. 111. Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 268–69. 112. Saupe, MEML, nos. 50, 51. 113. MacCracken, Minor Poems of John Lydgate, 291–92, line 2.

248  Mary’s Mild Voice in Middle English Lyrics dacion” and the “superexcellence of Cantica canticorum; / The aureate beames do nat in me shyne.”114 Seeking Mary’s light, he is able to imitate the celestial music through the refrain “Ave regina celorum!” and to suggest the Virgin’s appearance in the heavenly court through a series of dazzling images. She is the “dew diamant, most precyous of pryse,” “water crystal, / Perpetually our peynes to wasshe and repell,” and the “sugor celestiall.”115 Engulfed in her song and her radiance, the narrator hopes to come “where more joy ys then tung may telle.”116

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, we have heard the lovely sound of Mary’s tongue in the Middle English lyrics. Associated with the liturgical feasts of the Annunciation, Nativity, Passion, and Assumption, the lyrics set Mary in different rhetorical scenes appropriate to the celebration day and show her excellence in different modes of speech or song. The Annunciation poems offer the widest range for her verbal delivery, demonstrating her poetic gifts in love songs and divine praises and her quiet understanding of God’s mysteries. For the Nativity, she sings lullabies; for the Passion, she debates with her son, the sinner, or even the cross; for the Assumption, she leads a heavenly chorus; and afterwards, she represents the sinner before the divine judge. In an age when women could not preach, when the Pauline injunction against women’s teaching was in force, and when female reformers might have been declared lollards, the key to the Virgin’s verbal effectiveness is her mildness, or obedience. Her most strident words beneath the cross may be excused as the agony of a mother whose son is dying, and the disagreements with Jesus at the Passion or the Judgment always end in peace or reconciliation with God’s will. This is not to say that the pleasure of the Virgin’s verbal gifts in the popular lyrics resides in her passivity, because her representation in these poems recalls either her most powerful moments in the Bible, such as her composition of the Magnificat, or ranges into the apocryphal and church traditions where her righteousness prevails. In offering extensions appropriate for feast days to the biblical acts and words of the Virgin, many of these lyrics illustrate feminine dialogue and difference as an important counterpart to masculine divinity that ultimate114. Ibid., lines 3, 6–7. 116. Ibid., line 47.

115. Ibid., lines 37, 41–42, 43.



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ly must be synthesized in the providential purpose. While the extent of her meekness may seem antithetical to an assertion of her vocal power, one must remember that her humility provided a well-used topos for both male and female writers who would be heard as authorities. Unlike much pictorial art surrounding Mary’s feasts, especially the Annunciation, the Middle English Marian lyrics do not show the Virgin studying the providential purpose in divine texts. These lyrics may divorce Mary from her books, but reassert her linguistic prowess in oral ways. With their emphasis on Mary’s vocal powers—her perfect responses, sensual exchanges, psalms, lullabies, and orations—the Middle English lyrics assimilate form and meaning. Largely intended for oral delivery, they illustrate best Mary’s orality, and by ventriloquizing her lovely voice, the poem’s speaker or singer comes closer to the divine. If, as Peter Dronke argues, the narrative first person of these poems is a strategy to connect the audience with the speaker, then anyone hearing these poems can say “I” along with Mary and thus share, at least sometimes, in her mastery of words.117 117. Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

Six

Margery Kempe and the Virgin Birth of Her Book n considering the Middle English lyrics in the last chapter, we turned from the scholarly and courtly poems of chapters 2 through 4 to popular texts, sometimes known through hymns or other traditional melodies to which they were sung. Often intended for aural reception, the lyrics transferred us from the Chaucerian realm of self-consciously intertextual writings to a sometimes oral medium privileging the Virgin’s voice over her reading. This chapter continues and concludes our consideration of orality in medieval English Marian texts: Margery Kempe (1373–ca.1439) was a middle-class laywoman of uncertain schooling who, in order to create her own book ref lecting upon her Christological visions, relied on public sermons, the devotional lectures of others, and the willingness of scribes to take her dictation.1 Karma Lochrie has demonstrated that mystics such as Margery Kempe underscore the truth of their texts by invoking the Word spoken by God, and 1. Barry Windeatt, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition (hereafter BMK) (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000; rpt. 2004). Lynn Staley argues that Kempe actually wrote her own book and that her description of the scribes is a literary device providing authority. See Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). I will treat the scribes as real historical figures while acknowledging Staley’s important premise: that in order to understand The Book of Margery Kempe, we must assume a level of sophistication in the author’s narrative strategies.

250 



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certainly The Book of Margery Kempe showcases the many dialogues that Kempe enjoyed with the Godhead and the many pious exchanges she had with others that were informed by the way God spoke to her within.2 Nevertheless, representations of orality are not straightforward or simple in Kempe’s book, any more than they are for the Middle English lyrics, which we now know through texts preserved in late medieval manuscripts. As Joyce Coleman famously contends about the overlapping categories of orality and textuality in the late Middle Ages, the widespread aural acquisition of book learning in medieval societies allowed those who might be considered illiterate today to attain a high level of familiarity with the written word, and Margery Kempe reflects such aural literacy.3 Like the Middle English lyrics, The Book of Margery Kempe bridges the oral and the written by inscribing what is spoken and by speaking in dictation what has been heard. Kempe’s oral transmission of her Book presents us with a “gynaecentric language,” which in Liz Herbert McAvoy’s analysis privileges motherhood and its verbal issue.4 Although readers of The Book of Margery Kempe often remark upon the author’s near silence concerning her own children, The Book is very much a maternal act, and this chapter will examine in particular Kempe’s identification of her own authorship with the Word-producing Mother.5 The Book of Margery Kempe belongs in a study of the Virgin Mary’s inf luence over medieval English language production because Kempe sought to emulate the Virgin in bear2. Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 64. 3. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; rpt. 1998, 2000, 2003; paperback edition, 2005). 4. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 176. This chapter’s argument that Margery Kempe developed parallels between the Virgin Birth and the effort of producing her Book confirms Miri Rubin’s discussion of a “European [Marian] language of affect.” See Miri Rubin, Emotion and Devotion: The Meaning of Mary in Medieval Religious Cultures (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), 80. Rubin contends that an emotional language of devotion sprang from contemplating the images of the Madonna at the Nativity and the cross. 5. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 96–130. For investigations into concepts of motherhood and their influence on Margery Kempe, see McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 28–64, 170–205; Wendy Harding, “Medieval Women’s Unwritten Discourse on Motherhood: A Reading of Two Fifteenth Century Texts,” Women’s Studies 21.2 (1992): 197– 209; Laura L. Howes, “On the Birth of Margery Kempe’s Last Child,” Modern Philology 90.2 (1992): 220–25; and Ricki Jean Cohn, “God and Motherhood in The Book of Margery Kempe” Studia Mystica 9.1 (1986): 26–35.

252  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book ing God’s Word. As we shall see, Kempe’s visionary encounters with Christ’s mother had an enormous impact on the narrative strategies and structures of her Book, through which Kempe manifested her spiritual fruitfulness in an imitation of the Virgin Birth. In order to argue the connection between Kempe’s veneration of the Virgin Birth and the dictation of her Book, this chapter develops the following chain of interpretive thinking. To begin, Kempe’s visions and activities reveal her efforts to imitate the Virgin Mother and other saints such as Bridget of Sweden who also took Mary as their holy model. The Virgin and other Marian saints of interest to Kempe bore a physical and maternal witness to Christ’s truth: the Virgin at the Nativity and St. Bridget in her mystical pregnancy. Identifying with their holy motherhood and also with their roles as brides of Christ, Kempe desired to bear her own bodily witness of the Word and did so in convulsive tears that induced her to “labor” with a testimony of pity for Jesus’ manhood and in the dictation of her Book. While documenting the Word’s presence in her own life, Kempe, following the Virgin, sought sanctification of the relationship with her own son; Kempe restored this eldest-born to the church and employed him as the first scribe of her Book. The episodes in Liber 2 concerning her son emphasize Kempe’s triumph in refashioning her own motherly position according to a Marian model and in employing her maternal capacities to bring forth God’s intentions. When her son takes up the stylus to record Kempe’s life and visions, he is the instrument born to convey the Word that his mother will bear. Finally, once Kempe acted successfully as intercessor for her son, she adopted in the concluding prayer a Marian mediating role for all of humanity. Margery Kempe was the daughter of John Brunham, mayor of King’s Lynn. In 1393 she married John Kempe, who was apparently of a lesser social stature than her father; she soon bore the first of their fourteen children. After the birth of that first child and an ensuing bout of madness, Kempe began to have visions and participate through them in biblical events concerning the holy family. Eamon Duffy presents her as a more enthusiastic or extreme participant in what he characterizes as the vibrant life of public piety in the fifteenth century.6 The advent of 6. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 12, 19, 25, 28, 62–63, 93, 100, 109–10, 119, 174, 176, 212, 237, 248, 261, 297–98, 323, 363–64.



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Kempe’s visionary experience did not for a time alter her middle-class life, and she subsequently established brewing and milling businesses. In 1413, however, she left King’s Lynn behind and departed for the Holy Land, the first of her major pilgrimages. In June of that same year she had come to an agreement with her husband to live chastely in their marriage, and eventually they inhabited separate households, at least until John’s final illness. By disengaging from familial duties, Kempe opened a way for a life of devotion, but she was an anomaly in her community. Although other religious women of the Middle Ages, including St. Marie d’Oignies and St. Bridget of Sweden, late medieval Marian figures from the Continent after whom Kempe patterned her own life, had also sought opportunities for lay devotion, Kempe’s escape from domesticity, her habit of wearing white, and especially her gift of tears, which noisily interrupted local sermons, masses, and processions of the cross, were an annoyance to many of her contemporaries. Kempe persevered in conflict with neighbors, traveling companions, and authorities, but gained spiritual friends in her scribes and confessors, in Julian of Norwich, the bishop of Lincoln, and miscellaneous sympathizers she met on her travels, some of whom protected and even paid Kempe’s way. At sixty years old, she was still traveling across Europe to holy sites and thinking about completing The Book, an account of her visions and experiences. In 1436, she convinced a priest to recopy the work of another scribe, probably her own son, on Liber 1, relating the twenty-five years since the birth of her first child (probably the same one who acted as scribe). In 1438 the priest took up the writing of Liber 2, treating Kempe’s relations with her son and his wife—later widow—and also most probably the writing of the prayer that completes The Book of Margery Kempe. Having pursued the life of a religious devotee, Kempe did not conform to any of the categories of medieval writers; she was not a canonized saint, nun, or scribe. The birth of her Book, designated the first autobiography in the English language, reflects her determination to perpetuate a Marian model of lay piety. In The Book of Margery Kempe, this extraordinary narrator acquires authority by imitating the Virgin. Dictating her experiences, Kempe refers to herself in the third person as “this creature,” calling attention to her humble place in creation and reminding the reader of the Marian paradox of the creature bearing the Creator. “This creature,” Margery Kempe,

254  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book in an act of textual parturition modeled on the Virgin Birth, delivers the Word in her own Book. As Gail McMurray Gibson has pointed out, in taking the Virgin Mary as the exemplar for her worship and other spiritual work, which includes the dictation of The Book, Kempe follows “the primary devotional model offered by the Meditationes vitae Christi [which] is imitatio Mariae.”7 In chapter 3, we saw this devotional model also in the poetry of Walter of Wimborne, John of Howden, and Richard Rolle. As the Meditationes encourages identification with the humanity of Christ, it privileges the Mother’s perception of Jesus’ work and sufferings. Kempe internalizes the Mother’s perception by “becoming” her, by comparing herself to Mary in many ways. Taking on the Marian role of handmaid, Kempe serves the holy family in her visions: assisting St. Anne at the birth and in the care of Mary, swaddling Jesus in the manger, and accompanying the holy family into Egypt. In Gibson’s words, Kempe “outhumbled and out-performed the Virgin Mary herself by being not just the handmaiden, but the handmaid to the hand-maiden.”8 When Kempe receives the gift of tears, her overwhelming sorrow over Christ’s Passion is modeled upon Mary’s compassion as illustrated in the Meditationes, material arts on the pietà, and Middle English lyrics for Good Friday such as those discussed in the last chapter. This chapter will develop the various ways in which Kempe’s narrative persona elides with the Mother in the contexts of motherhood and especially birth. The principles of both the narration and the structure of The Book of Margery Kempe are Marian, since the three main sections of the text represent different postures of divine motherhood. Although David Aers has criticized Kempe’s “divinization” of motherhood as a method for sacralizing repression, in the contexts of Kempe’s domestic experience and the devotional literature of her day, writing as “Mother” was the surest way to authorize and clarify her new contemplative life.9 In Liber 1—the first and longest section of The Book, describing a variety of pilgrimages, visions, and encounters with church authorities—Kempe begins with references to her own first experience in childbed and continues in 7. Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 49–50. 8. Ibid., 50. 9. David Aers, “The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in the Late Medieval English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 35.



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a struggle to transcend the sexuality implied by biological motherhood. Liber 1 expresses a continual tension between Kempe’s spiritual desire to escape the sexual and domestic duties of medieval motherhood and at the same time venerate the pregnancy of St. Anne and the simple services rendered by the Virgin to the baby Jesus. Kempe aspires throughout Liber 1 to occupy Mary’s role of chaste intimacy with the Godhead and therefore to bear the fruits of Christian motherhood to the faithful at large. After having shaken off the roles of mother and wife in favor of a life of pilgrimage, contemplation, and narration of her Book, Kempe returns as a newly hallowed figure to the subject of her son in Liber 2. No longer hampered by domestic duties, but sanctified in the image of Mary through her visions, Kempe relates her maternal struggles—and her final triumph—in the issue of her grown son’s salvation. McAvoy notes the “structural balance” Kempe effects in beginning both books with references to biological children, and she speculates that these references may be to the same child.10 Continuing to found narrative division and continuity upon maternal roles, Kempe offers a Marian “coda” to her Book. Having led her own child to her new spiritual family in heaven, Kempe concludes with a prayer that represents her Marian intercession for the whole of humanity, anyone who might pray with her. Kempe’s motivation to construct her narrative persona and also the organization of her Book on Marian principles is Jesus’ advice in an early vision: “Dowtyr, thynke on my modyr, for sche is cause of alle the grace that thow hast.”11

“Labowrying wyth chylde” The Book begins with the scene of Kempe’s giving birth, unlike many other saint’s lives that insist on the childhood piety of the canonized. Kempe speaks of “the labowr she had in chyldyng” with this first baby and the ensuing madness in which she is “labowryd with spyritys half yer, viii wekys and odde days.”12 In the opening of her narrative, Kempe’s “labowr” compares to the sort of illness that often inaugurates a visionary period for women mystics. One visionary whom Kempe knew, Julian of Norwich, was on her deathbed and miraculously restored before the visions came. It seems that Kempe undergoes two layers of illness before her own visions: first the difficult childbirth and afterwards the insanity 10. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 40. 11. Windeatt, BMK, I. 6, 545–46. 12. Ibid., I. 1, 179; I. 1, 200–201.

256  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book brought on by the sharpness of a confessor who severely reproves her. Believing that she might die from the rigors of pregnancy and parturition, Kempe calls her confessor, who rebukes her before hearing the extent of an unnamed sin, and between her terror of the confessor’s judgment and that of damnation, Kempe descends into madness.13 Devils appear to her, and she must be restrained so as not to harm herself or the household; out of this nightmare Jesus bids her in her first vision. The connection made in The Book of Margery Kempe between childbirth and demons is also reflected in the story of the legendary St. Margaret of Antioch (demoted from the general calendar in 1969), who, while imprisoned by Olibrius, prays that she might see the Foe; a devil appears to her in the shape of a dragon and swallows her whole. By making the sign of the cross before her demonic ingestion (a parody of the Eucharist), Margaret causes the devil’s belly to split asunder and “deliver” her. Before her martyrdom, she prays that mothers may call upon her in childbirth to ease them through their labors and to ensure healthy, perfectly formed children. In Medieval English Prose for Women, Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne refer to “the popularly accepted logic [that] founded Margaret’s special powers in the ease with which she is expelled from her dragon’s jaws or stomach.”14 During Margery Kempe’s time, various versions of Margaret’s story existed, and relics brought to Western Europe from the First Crusade’s conquest of Antioch in 1098 still circulated.15 Amulets made in the form of the book of Margaret’s life were given to pregnant women, and having borne fourteen children in King’s Lynn and worshipped at its church dedicated to St. Margaret, Margery Kempe may have clutched one of these amulets during the horrors of her first pregnancy.16 As in the story of St. Margaret, childbirth and the conquest of demons are mingled in The Book of 13. Ibid., I. 1, 190–200. 14. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Introduction, in Medieval English Prose for Women, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), xxii. 15. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, 3rd ed., ed. Th. Graesse (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1969), 401. The story of St. Margaret in the Golden Legend is translated in The South English Legendary, “Life of Margaret,” ed. Charlotte d’Evelyn and Anna Mills, EETS o.s. 235 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), i. 297, lines 157–70. The author of St. Margaret’s life in the Katherine Group, ed and trans. by Millett and Wogan-Browne in Medieval English Prose for Women, followed the Latin version of Mombritius. On Mombritius, see T. Wolpers, Die Englische Heiligenlegende des Mittelalters (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1964). 16. Millet and Wogan-Browne, Introduction, xxii.



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Margery Kempe: Kempe’s delivery of her firstborn is a precursor to Jesus’ delivery of her from the hell of insanity with the simple question: “Dowtyr, why has thow forsakyn me, and I forsoke nevyr the?”17 Kempe goes on to bear thirteen more children, but only one other pregnancy is mentioned in The Book and never again is her own act of childbearing connected to the dark night of the soul and the threat of damnation. Instead, in McAvoy’s words, having emerged from the “curse of Eve,” Kempe “heralds her own rebirth as Mary, Mother of God, whose path she will increasingly follow in an insistent expression of an imitatio Mariae.”18 Regarding the only other mention of pregnancy in The Book of Margery Kempe, Laura L. Howes explains the plausible chronology of events leading up to the birth of Kempe’s last child in the twenty-first chapter of Liber 1.19 Soon after taking a vow of chastity with her husband and amidst plans to depart for her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Kempe receives a vision informing her that she is pregnant. Jesus comforts her that he “schal ordeyn for a kepar” for the baby, and Kempe continues on her way to Venice, where she remains for thirteen weeks before taking a ship to Jaffa, six of those weeks spent confined to her room.20 Although Kempe does not mention a lying in or a new baby, she does remark upon an illness that made it difficult for her to eat and that suddenly dissipates—most probably with the birth of a child. Howes speculates that Kempe neither completely elides the episode of her final pregnancy nor develops it because Kempe’s “carnal and spiritual experiences may not ever have ever been neatly differentiated,” a point we will see borne out in this chapter’s discussion of Kempe’s visions.21 It seems that the mention of this last pregnancy allows Kempe the occasion to record Jesus’ vows of love for her, even though her body boldly declares her a sexually experienced wife, rather than a chaste nun. After having informed her of her pregnancy, Jesus declares, “Thow the state of maydenhode be mor parfyte and mor holy than the state of wedewhode, and the state of wedewhode mor parfyte than the state [of] wedlake, yet, 17. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 1, 232. 18. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 40. 19. Howes, “On the Birth,” 220–25. On Kempe and motherhood, see also Wendy Harding, “Medieval Women’s Unwritten Discourse on Motherhood: A Reading of Two Fifteenth Century Texts,” Women’s Studies 21.2 (1992): 197–209. 20. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 21, 1558–59. 21. Howes, “On the Birth,” 224.

258  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book dowtyr, I lofe the as wel as any mayden in the world.”22 While we may note a comparison here with Jesus’ reassurance of love after the birth of Kempe’s first baby, it is no longer necessary for him to draw her out of spiritual and mental agony; rather, Jesus’ reassurance underscores and justifies Kempe’s determination to go on pilgrimage. Throughout The Book, Kempe’s confidence grows in her holy womanhood and especially in her expertise in childbirth. By the seventy-fifth chapter, her experiences with childbirth come full circle when her presence heals a woman whose postpartum madness bears similarities to Kempe’s own. Kempe has traveled from a young mother carrying an unspeakable sin at the same time that she is carrying her first child to a wise healer whose own sufferings mitigate the pain of other mothers. In other words, although she enters her own story as an Eve, pregnant with both a child and a curse, Kempe becomes more like the Virgin whose sorrowful foreknowledge and tragic experience of her son’s destiny renders her sympathetic to the trials of all mothers. Finally wielding command over the agonies of parturition and their aftermath, Kempe approximates herself to the Virgin, who felt no physical pain in giving birth to Jesus. Kempe’s development in a Marian persona is connected to her increasing spiritualization of the word “labowr,” a common word for “labor” of all sorts, which she uses in the beginning of Liber 1 to reflect childbirth pains and in the end to indicate religious work.23 Indicative of the latter usage, for instance, would be the “labowr” of Richard from Ireland, whom Kempe pays to convey her to Rome, that is motivated by Christian intent.24 By placing the word “labowr” less and less in contexts concerning childbearing, she frees herself for efforts of devotion in imitation of the Virgin Mother. At the same time that Kempe is working toward a religious concept of “labowr,” she is also moving away from the work appropriate to her secular, gender, and middle-class status in late medieval England. As Susan E. Colón has demonstrated, Kempe’s response to God’s “drawt,” his calling her to the life of contemplation, is destabilizing to late medieval notions of labor and vocation.25 Kempe’s own ideas of what work would be fitting for her pro22. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 21, 1570–74. 23. MED s.v. “labour.” 24. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 30, 2497. 25. Susan E. Colón, “‘Gostly labowrys’: Vocation and Profession in The Book of Margery



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ceed from the traditional (motherhood) to the marginal (owning her own brewery and mill) to the radical (a life of pilgrimage and contemplation and, as some have argued, of preaching).26 Similarly, in Kempe’s use of the word, “labowr” transforms in signification from the traditional and literal—her sufferings as a young married woman and mother—to the unexpected and spiritual. After the initial throes of labor and struggles with insanity that catapult Kempe into the life of a visionary, her Book often invokes the term “labowr” for spiritual temptation and more often for her endurance of the gift of tears. The labors of childbirth may be regarded as the culmination of the sexual role Kempe hoped to escape, but they also dramatize her choice between a world of temptation and one of contemplation—the birth of herself as a visionary and of the matter for her Book. As Kempe is born into the new life of her religious calling, her use of the word “labowr” represents moral struggle and godly work. She labors more obdurately, for instance, against temptation. After being cured of her madness and undergoing penance, “sche had iii yer of gret labowr wyth temptacyons whech sche bar as mekely as sche cowde . . . and was as mery whan sche was reprevyd, skornyd, or japyd for ower Lordys lofe, and mych mor mery than sche was befortyme in the worshepys of the world.”27 In three years of enduring the rebukes of her neighbors over her newly focused life, Kempe learns the Marian virtue of humility. Besides the internal work of battling temptation, “labowr” becomes associated with all sorts of tasks commanded by God, including “mech labowr” that she endured in caring, as Jesus asked her to, for her frail and incontinent husband John in his last days and her travels to speak with other sisters in faith.28 In her old age, Kempe delays a visit to the nuns at Denny because “sche myth evyl duryn the labowr.”29 Labor is also associated with Kempe,” English Studies 86.4 (2005): 283–97. Colón elaborates on the meaning of “drawt” as defined by Hope Emily Allen: “the Divine action on the soul.” See Sanford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, eds., The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 260. 26. On Kempe’s preaching career, see, for instance, Rosalynn Voaden, “‘Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’: Margery Kempe as Underground Preacher,” in Romance and Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of Dhira B. Mahoney, ed. Georgiana Donavin and Anita Obermeier (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 109–21. 27. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 2, 380–84, emphasis mine. 28. Ibid., 1. 76, 6067. 29. Ibid., 1. 84, 6805.

260  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book godly speech. For instance, the unnamed bachelor of canon law with whom Kempe has much conversation about the Bible, she calls “a wel labowrd man in scriptur.”30 Kempe also notes “the gracyows labowrys” Robert Spryngolde takes in hearing her confessions.31 It is interesting that while Kempe deploys the word “labowr” to denote the physical and mental sufferings of parturition that led to a new life of holiness and also the work of that new life, she and the scribe rarely use the word “labowr” to characterize the composition of The Book of Margery Kempe. In the final chapters of the first book, Kempe speaks of being “ocupiid abowte the writyng of this tretys” and remarks on how the time and effort of dictating The Book caused her to say fewer prayers than usual.32 In the prologue attached to The Book by the second scribe, this priest chronicles the process by which The Book was written, without using the word “labowr” for the textual transmission in which he participated. The process for this textual transmission may be pieced together as follows from the priest’s remarks. Approximately twenty years after Kempe first began to have visions, she finally believes the time is right to record them. First, a man from Germany who comes to England to live with his wife and child—probably Kempe’s son and the subject of Liber 2—“had wretyn as mech as sche wolde tellyn hym” before he died.33 Then, Kempe solicited a promise from the second scribe and writer of the prologue to copy over what had been written and what became Liber 1 of The Book. Because the former scribe had not “schapyn ne formyd” his letters in a recognizable way and had used a dialect that seemed between English and German, the second scribe had difficult work ahead.34 Moreover, he suffered a four-year period of doubt concerning the authenticity of Kempe’s spiritual “felyngys” and a struggle with a seemingly selective blindness during which he could not see to compose. Finally, the priest was able to “wretyn a qwayr” and to copy the whole of Liber 1—but none of this is described as “labowr.”35 Introducing Liber 2, for which he would be the only scribe, the priest continues to use various forms of the Middle English verb for “write” to characterize his work. He composes from a vantage point in God’s court in which Kempe is, as Diane Watt has pointed out, one of the “Lordys owyn sec30. Ibid., I. 69, 5639–40. 32. Ibid., I. 89, 7368–69; I. 88, 7273–75. 34. Ibid., I. Pro., 100–101.

31. Ibid., I. 8, 629. 33. Ibid., I. Pro., 95–96. 35. Ibid., I. Pro., 149.



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retariis,” or “confidants,” and the priest inscribes holy confidences “aftyr [Kempe’s] owyn tunge.”36 The priest employs the word “labowr” only once in regard to Kempe’s dictation or another’s copying: he notes in the prologue that during his four-year period of doubt, Kempe had promised to pay a potential copyist a “grett summe of good for hys labowr,” but this writer—probably an acquaintance of her son—wrote only one leaf; he could not complete the work.37 About the copy of The Book actually completed, “labowr” has special significance for Christian orality—for the goodly confessions of Master Spryngolde and especially the moments when Christ inscribes his Word onto Kempe’s body—when she is overtaken by the gift of tears. Although we have seen Kempe use the term “labowr” in regard to work for which she pays her supporters and although she uses “labowr” in reference to textual work, as in the canon lawyer’s devotion to scriptural learning, she avoids the word as a descriptor of the writing of her own text in a move to privilege its Virgin Birth and the “labour” of its oral genesis.38 That is, venerating the Virgin Mary’s physical birth of the Word, Kempe emphasizes how the Word manifests itself through the raptures and ruptures of her body. As Lochrie contends, in late medieval mystics, “the Word made flesh [is] uttered through the flesh,” and the priest’s writing according to Kempe’s own tongue gains its authorization through the physical labor that Christ induces on his beloved’s body and from the mouth that expresses the feeling of divine contact.39 Kempe’s most repeated and significant employment of “labowr” after the birth of her first child is in reference to her gift of tears. In the gift of tears, the convulsions of childbirth deliver a message of compassion for Christ’s humanity. Although Kempe weeps copiously during her early visions—for instance after a revelation of the Nativity, she is moved to tears “ii owyres and oftyn lengar”—she does not commence the roaring sobs for which she is so notorious until after she had taken 36. Ibid., I. 28, 2306; II. 1, 7432–33. See Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 1. See MED s.v. “secretari(e).” 37. Windeatt, BMK, I. Pro., 119. 38. Nicholas Watson, “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 407–10. 39. Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, 45.

262  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book a vow of chastity with her husband and begun a more itinerant life.40 When Kempe first receives the gift of tears during her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1414, her body is wracked with pity for Christ’s suffering while she observes Good Friday on Mount Calvary. By her own account, Kempe crumples and writhes on the ground, her body twisting, turning, and sweating with her arms spread wide; her face turns blue and she erupts in loud cries. As McAvoy observes, Kempe’s “depiction of this affective response to the Passion reflects the synonymy of the female body, transgressive voice and the birth of a dangerous text.”41 Kempe declares her convulsions a “gostly labowr” here and elsewhere, for instance when “hir labowr was so greet” in celebrating Good Friday at home again in Lynn with boisterous tears.42 Kempe describes her feelings of compassion on many Palm Sundays as she anticipates the Crucifixion on the following Friday. On these Palm Sundays, she was “al on a watyr wyth the labowr of the crying,” completely drenched in sweat.43 When Kempe is overcome with tears sympathetic to the manhood of Christ, her outcries mimic the Virgin Mary’s wild grief at the cross, which exegetes describe as the fulfillment of Simeon’s prophecy—that Mary’s soul would be pierced by a sword in a providential exchange for the painless Virgin Birth.44 Rupert of Deutz, typical of this tradition, compares Mary’s sorrow at the cross to birth pangs; through her suffering, she becomes Mother of us all.45 Kempe’s uncontrollable sobbing is through such exegesis connected to both the Virgin Birth and Mary’s compassion at the cross. Kempe’s bodily labor is so demanding in her endeavor to comment on the pity of Christ’s sacrifice that the Virgin begs her in a vision to leave fasting and eat for sustenance: “Owr Lady, aperyng to hir sowle, bad hir gon to hir confessowr and seyin that sche wolde han hir dischargyd of hir vow, that sche schulde ben mythy to beryn hir gostly labowrys, for wythowtyn bodily strength it mytyn not ben enduryd.”46 The Virgin knows Margery Kempe must keep up her 40. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 7, 601–2. 41. Liz Herbert McAvoy, “‘After Hyr Owyn Tunge’: Body, Voice and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 160. 42. Windeatt, BMK, I. 28, 2259; 1. 57, 4717. 43. Ibid., 1. 78, 6216–17. 44. Lochrie, Translations of Flesh, 7, 177–92; Lk 2:35. 45. Rupert of Deutz, Commentaria in evangelium sancti Johannis, 13, PL 169, 789 C. 46. Windeatt, BMK, 2. 66, 5440–43.



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strength to endure the way in which God overshadows the body and delivers his Word. The “labowr” that Kempe undergoes in her own body and spirit enables her to identify with the women in the holy family whom she knows through her visions. At the same time that Kempe’s concept of “labowr” is taking on more spiritual connotations, she has visions of scenes of birth in the holy family. Through her mystical intimacy with the holy family, Christopher Roman argues, Kempe develops a “domestic mysticism” that both relies on and seeks to transcend her experiences at home with John and their many children.47 Kempe underscores the value of her Book by illustrating that while Christ manifests his Word through her body, he positions her inside his own immediate kin group, whence she can tell the “inside story.” Her visions of St. Anne’s and the Virgin’s conceiving, bearing, and caring for children, and her humble service during these times demonstrate that Kempe is invaluable to the holy family and born to a higher spiritual status through her witness of divine birth. Immediately after Christ commands Kempe, “Dowtyr, thynke on my modyr, for sche is cause of alle the grace that thow hast,” Kempe receives a sequence of visions concerning the birth of members of the holy family: Mary, St. John the Baptist, and Jesus, himself. First, Kempe sees St. Anne “gret wyth chylde” and serves her through the birth and up until Mary is twelve years old.48 During the later Middle Ages, veneration of St. Anne increased; in England St. Anne’s feast on July 26 had been obligatory since Richard II married Anne of Bohemia in 1382, and Kempe clearly identified with the saint’s motherhood. After a hiatus in Kempe’s vision, Mary returns to announce that she is now Mother of God, pregnant with the Christ child. Kempe accompanies Mary on the Visitation and joins the Virgin at Elizabeth’s childbed. From Elizabeth’s house, they make their way to Bethlehem, where Kempe procures harborage, swaddling clothes, and bedding for the Virgin Birth. Unlike other authors who emphasize the easy passage of Christ from his mother’s womb, Kempe focuses on the poverty and concomitant suffering implicit in the Nativity narrative—on the “labowr” required to deliver Christ. The holy family is so poor that she must beg for the basic requirements 47. Christopher Roman, Domestic Mysticism in Margery Kempe and Dame Julian of Norwich, Medieval Studies 24 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005), 147–210. 48. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 6, 545–46; 547.

264  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book for the Virgin’s delivery. Kempe herself swathes the Christ child “wyth byttyr teerys of compassyon, havyng mend of the scharp deth that he schuld suffyr.”49 Kempe’s preoccupation with clothes and swaddling, as Gibson shows, is connected to the Incarnation: “[To understand] Margery Kempe’s meditations on the swaddling clothes,” she contends, “it is sufficient to note that the cloth’s significance lies in its substitution for an abstract theological concept—Mary as the mother who clothes the Logos in fleshly mortality.”50 A recurring motif in Kempe’s visionary interactions with divine birth is her feeling of unworthiness to care for the divine-made-flesh. However, Elizabeth’s reassurance is typical of all; she praises Kempe by saying, “thu dost right wel thi dever.”51 That Kempe continues to feel and offer spiritual satisfaction in contemplative midwifing and childcare is attested by repetition of visions of the Virgin swaddling or suckling the child; Jesus even thanks Kempe for her good care in his infancy.52 As Kempe ascends spiritually in the ranks of the holy family and establishes her major role as handmaid to the handmaid, she remains interested in childbirth among mortals, whose offspring remind her of the Christ child. When Kempe returns from Jerusalem to Venice, she is in the company of a woman who carries a figure of baby Jesus in a chest; the doll is laid in the laps of wives, who kiss and dress it as “it had ben God hymselfe.”53 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber has documented the use of these bambini, especially in late medieval Italy; handed down from mothers to daughters in trousseaux and taken by young nuns into convents, these dolls served in Nativity celebrations, as beloved signs of spiritual fertility once inside the convent, and for maternal devotions encouraged by the Meditationes.54 Klapisch-Zuber remarks that the “endearments, the kisses, the fondling, and the loving attention that the mystics pour out toward the divine child echo the hypermaternal attitudes that the devotional texts attribute to the Virgin herself.”55 During 49. Ibid., 1. 6, 585–86. 50. Gibson, Theatre of Devotion, 53. 51. Windeatt, BMK, I. 6, 577. 52. Ibid., 1. 85, 7052–56; I. 86, 7073–75; I. 84, 6841–42. 53. Ibid., 1. 30, 2527. 54. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. Lydia Cochran (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 316–26. 55. Ibid., 325–26. See also Carolyn Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 198.



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Margery Kempe’s time in Venice, she witnessed how many laywomen adored the effigy of the child, their devotions toward it underscoring the active meditations taught in such books as the Meditationes. Sentiment for the Christ child overtaking her, Kempe breaks out in loud sobbing and is cared for like a child; the Venetian women lay her upon a soft bed and comfort her. Kempe considers this event in Venice to be an extension of the meditations on childbirth within the holy family. She says that “whil sche was in Inglond, sche had hy meditacyons in the byrth and the childhode of Crist, and sche thankyd God for-as-mech as sche saw thes creaturys han so gret feyth in that sche sey wyth hir bodily eye lych as sche had beforn wyth hir gostly eye.”56 Clearly, as Giuseppe Marcotti speculated in 1881, the Venetian women are engaged in a fertility ritual, the doll being placed in their laps in order to ensure reproduction and the transference of Christlike characteristics to an infant.57 The ritual speaks to Kempe and functions as an extension of her meditations on childbirth because it collapses the experience of pregnancy with devotion for the baby Jesus and thus offers a transcendent representation of motherhood, aligning all mothers with the Virgin Mary. During her time in Italy, Kempe continues to experience such maternal care as the Venetian women offered. In a vision the Virgin Mary seeks food for Kempe while the latter attempts to visit Rome in holy poverty. Having positioned herself inside the holy family as a servant especially useful in childbirth and childrearing, Kempe comes to enjoy both the sort of care she had offered the holy family in her early visions and a reputation for being a holy mother. The pregnant wife of a man named Marcelle, who invites Kempe to eat at their house two days each week, greatly wishes Kempe to be godmother to their child, although Kempe does not remain in Rome long enough to attend the birth.58 A destitute mother with a baby at her breast offers Kempe what little there is in her household: some wine in a stone cup. Seeing the poor mother’s sorrow, Kempe sees in her the figure of the Virgin and begins to weep copiously in pity for the Passion.59 Once home in England, Kempe continues to see the Virgin and Christ in mothers and their children. When mothers 56. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 30, 2531–35. 57. Giuseppe Marcotti, Un mercante fiorentino e la sua famiglia nel secolo XV (Florence: Barbera, 1881), 121. 58. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 38, 3070–75. 59. Ibid., 1. 39, 3078–89.

266  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book present their children during Candlemas, she would envision the Virgin at the Purification.60 Presiding over what her scribe calls a “gret myrakyl,” Kempe restores to sanity a woman who undergoes a postpartum madness similar to Kempe’s own at the beginning of The Book.61 It is in these experiences with women’s labor—her agonies with her first child, her visions of holy women giving birth, her participation in fertility rituals, and her interactions with women pregnant or newly delivered—that Kempe can connect the love and suffering exemplified by both Christ on the cross and the Virgin at his feet. “Labowr” is the physical struggle that ends in charity, and throughout Liber 1 Kempe continues to grapple with the tension between the works of the body and those of the spirit. As her own body labors with children and then with the gift of tears, Kempe endures the birthing of Christ’s Word.

Saints Who Labored Margery Kempe’s imitation of the Virgin was sometimes firsthand, as she observed Our Lady in visions, and sometimes secondhand, as she observed the Virgin in other women. Among the living, young mothers especially inspired Kempe, but among the dead a number of saints who imitated the Virgin also informed The Book of Margery Kempe. Many of these saintly women had been married and conceived children, their lives providing a historical continuum for divine motherhood in which Kempe meant to position herself. As we shall see, among all of the Marian saints Bridget of Sweden was most compelling to Margery Kempe. We have already seen the importance of St. Margaret to Kempe’s story, St. Margaret whose name graced Kempe’s parish church and whose miraculous emergence from the bowels of the devil promised safe delivery to women in labor. Although St. Margaret never bore a child, her story resonates through the opening narrative of The Book of Margery Kempe in the author’s recollection of her first childbed and ensuing escape from a mental hell occupied by demons. Margaret’s dedication to virginity in the face of Olibrius’s threats renders her a Marian type, and indeed, Kempe’s church was dedicated to St. Margaret and all holy virgins. More often than she did in women (fictional or otherwise) of the early church, Kempe perceived a Marian exemplar in late medieval saints 60. Ibid., 1. 82, 6686–95. 61. Ibid., 1. 75, 6001.



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about whom biographies were circulating in Middle English.62 Hope Emily Allen first noticed the similarity between Margery Kempe and a variety of such continental women mystics, and Clarissa Atkinson and others have elaborated on a list of venerable medieval women informing Kempe’s concept of a woman’s devotional life.63 As Jeannette Dillon remarks, it is not necessary to prove that Kempe had access to particular lives of saints in Middle English since her confessors were learned men who could read and transmit a variety of texts in Latin. The fact that the lives of Catherine of Siena and many others were circulating in Middle English in the early fifteenth century suggests an acceptance and even a promotion of these materials for audiences such as Margery Kempe.64 We know from Liber 1, chapter 62 of The Book that Kempe’s scribe, during a period of doubting the authenticity of Kempe’s visions, read books including Jacques de Vitry’s life of St. Marie d’Oignies, a beguine who wore white, took a vow of chastity with her husband, practiced devotions to the infant Christ, and was renowned for her gift of tears, and also a treatise purportedly by Elizabeth of Hungary. Furthermore, although she never mentions her explicitly in The Book, Kempe evinces knowledge of Dorothea of Montau (1347–94), for whom the Teutonic knights were conducting an ultimately ineffective campaign for canonization when Kempe was in Danzig with her daughter-in-law.65 Because of Dor62. Catherine Sanok (Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007], 116–44) argues persuasively for Kempe’s indebtedness to the Magdalene legend and other heroines of the early church whose lives had been translated into Middle English. What becomes clear is that Kempe’s performances of sanctity dramatize the characteristics of a number of holy women. 63. Throughout the notes to her edition of the BMK, Allen comments on Kempe’s connections to the continental mystics. Among scholars who have investigated Kempe’s relationship to continental mystics, see Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983); Julia Bolton Holloway, “Bride, Margery, Julian and Alice: Bridget of Sweden’s Textual Community in Medieval England,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), 203–21; Alexandra Barratt, “Margery Kempe and the King’s Daughter of Hungary,” in McEntire, ed., Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, 189–201; Susan Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1984), 150–68; Janette Dillon, “Holy Women and Their Confessors or Confessors and Their Holy Women? Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition,” in Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996), 115–41. 64. Dillon, “Holy Women and their Confessors”; Alexandra Barratt, “The Revelations of St. Elizabeth of Hungary: Problems of Attribution,” The Library, 6th series 14 (1992): 1–11. 65. See Windeatt, BMK, 17, 34, 82, 407.

268  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book othea’s religious practice—her asceticism, holy weeping, and visions, among them a Marian vision of espousal to God—and because of Dorothea’s lifestyle as a married woman with nine children who nevertheless managed to make pilgrimages and spend hours in contemplation, Kempe must have identified strongly with her. Many of Kempe’s sisters in Christ were mothers and devotees of Mary. Among those holy mothers imitated by Kempe, the lives of two, as McAvoy has noticed, figure prominently in her Book, the first being St. Elizabeth of Hungary (1207–31, canonized 1235), daughter of King Andreas II.66 St. Elizabeth had married and borne three children; widowed at a young age, she joined the Third Order of St. Francis and as a Franciscan tertiary lived the mixed life of contemplation and action that Kempe was attempting. In voluntary poverty, St. Elizabeth cared for the poor and the sick. A text entitled The Revelations of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, the one read by Kempe’s scribe, was attributed during the Middle Ages to the saint herself, but was most likely composed by St. Elizabeth’s great-niece, Elizabeth of Töss (1294–1336), the daughter of King Andreas III of Hungary and also a Dominican nun.67 Alexandra Barratt argues that a number of passages of The Book of Margery Kempe, many of which involve the Virgin Mary, are modeled upon the treatise of Elizabeth. Like St. Elizabeth, for instance, Kempe relies on Mary as a spiritual teacher. In St. Elizabeth’s first vision occurring during a dark night of the soul, Mary comes to her and claims to be the best teacher in things of the spirit. Making a similar claim to Kempe, Mary declares, “Dowtyr, I am thy modyr, thi lady, and thy maystres for to teche the in al wyse how thu schalt plese God best.”68 While Barratt argues that Kempe derives the image of Mary as wise woman specifically from St. Elizabeth, both women no doubt were deploying the traditions of Mary as a Sapientia, outlined in chapter 1.69 In matters of personal suffering and the threat of martyrdom, it is clearer that Kempe appropriates language from St. Elizabeth’s text, including dialogues with the Virgin Mary. During Kempe’s visit to Canterbury, she stands accused of lollardy and begins to consider the 66. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 44. 67. See Windeatt, BMK, 296 (note to lines 5173–74) and Alexandra Barratt, “The Revelations of St. Elizabeth of Hungary,” 1–11. 68. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 21, 1606–8. 69. Barratt, “Margery Kempe and the King’s Daughter of Hungary,” 195.



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imminent possibility of being burned at the stake. She speculates that it would be a pleasure to suffer in Jesus’ name, but Christ assures her that she will not undergo a martyr’s death. “I thank the, dowtyr,” he says, “that thow woldyst for my lofe, for as oftyn as thow thynkyst so, thow schalt have the same mede in hevyn as thow thu suffredyst the same deth.”70 Similarly, in her eighth revelation, St. Elizabeth has a dialogue with the Virgin about her own willingness to suffer martyrdom, and the Virgin reassures her that sufferings on earth are as good as martyrdom. More than St. Elizabeth, Kempe concentrates on the possible means of death and her imagination of their pain, and Barratt may be right in concluding that “in her attention to this literal and arresting aspect of [Elizabeth’s] text [Kempe] seems to have missed the Virgin’s point—that each mode of martyrdom, however spectacular or grotesque, has its precise moral equivalent in everyday life.”71 Nevertheless, it is clear that Kempe was impressed enough by the Virgin’s advice to St. Elizabeth to put similar advice in the mouth of Christ. One form of suffering that both Elizabeth and Kempe experience and bear in imitation of the Virgin is uncontrollable crying. Barratt notes that “of the seven references to Elizabeth’s weeping, all but one link tears and prayers.”72 The Virgin provides a model for St. Elizabeth’s weeping, which was as copious as Kempe’s: Mary explains to St. Elizabeth that even after bearing the Christ child, it was necessary to strive continually for God’s grace with weeping during travails of the soul; the Virgin also claims that weeping for sorrow is a natural reaction to a divine vision, as the soul knows itself unworthy of the grace it has received.73 Second and most important among the Marian mothers frequently cited by Kempe is St. Bridget of Sweden.74 Recorded among the books that Kempe’s priest read to her (Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, pseudoBonaventure’s Stimulus Amoris, and Rolle’s Incendium Amoris) is St. 70. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 14, 949–52. 71. Barratt, “Margery Kempe and the King’s Daughter of Hungary,” 194. 72. Ibid., 198. 73. Ibid., 198–99. Barratt finds the references to Elizabeth’s weeping in Cambridge University Library Hh.111, ff. 91B–125r. The Wynkyn de Worde text of Elizabeth’s Revelations occasionally omits the references to tears. 74. There is not scope in this chapter for all of the obvious parallels Kempe draws between herself and Bridget of Sweden which apart from those mentioned here include the practice of seeking out clerics for holy conversation, a vision of the host, and a belief in being appointed to teach God’s laws. See Windeatt’s notes in BMK at 1251–61, 1523, and 3328.

270  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book Bridget’s Revelations.75 Chapter 1 of this book provides an introduction to St. Bridget, a Swedish princess who established the Order of St. Savior after the death of her husband and a period of political involvement with the papal curia. The focus of that discussion of Bridget is on the Bridgettine liturgy book, The Myroure of Oure Ladye, as a site in which Marian wisdom feeds the reader’s soul, and St. Bridget’s Marian sainthood fed Kempe’s. The Myroure’s presentation of its Marian liturgy as Eucharistic food grounds religious instruction in physical comparisons, just as Kempe receives godly messages from the corporeal experiences of pregnancy. Kempe shared the Bridgettine emphases on the body as a spiritual teacher and on the Marian body as the supreme example of holiness, and Kempe offered important counterpoints in her Book to St. Bridget’s Revelations of the saint’s own visions. As Janet Wilson remarks, “It is now widely accepted that Kempe consciously modeled her mystical life as a ‘competitive’ imitatio upon St. Bridget (who died in 1373, the year when Kempe was probably born), . . . and [Kempe] probably believed she had inherited St. Bridget’s spiritual graces.”76 Margery Kempe cultivates many parallels between herself and St. Bridget, especially concerning devotions to Mary’s motherhood. Kempe’s repeated visions of the Nativity connect to St. Bridget’s celebrated vision of the Virgin Birth in which Mary delivers the Christ child painlessly during a time of contemplation.77 Furthermore, chapter 1 describes the Marian event of St. Bridget’s spiritual pregnancy, when the saint experienced a swelling and movement around her heart. In passages of The Book of Margery Kempe that collapse St. Bridget’s narrative with Richard Rolle’s spiritual advice, Kempe receives a hair shirt within her own heart and a flame of divine love that kindles in her breast for sixteen years.78 With a hair shirt for penitence, Kempe’s heart bears copious tears, but also beats with warmth and joy for Christ’s love, much like the fire of love described in Rolle’s Incendium Amoris, which was read to Kempe and is also discussed in chapter 3. Like St. Bridget, Kempe provides images of the inception of Christ’s love within her heart, images of pregnancy that 75. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 58, 4818–21. 76. Janet Wilson, “The Communities of Margery Kempe’s Book, in Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 161. 77. Alexandra Barratt, ed., Women’s Writing in Middle English (London: Longman, 1992), 87. 78. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 5, 504–8; I. 35, 2892–97.



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are ultimately modeled upon the Virgin Birth. Kempe’s soul extends in order to take the entire court of heaven inside it, as a pregnant woman’s womb extends to accommodate a child, and in a gesture of maternal protection, Kempe invites the Virgin Mary into the soul so that Our Lady can suckle the Christ child.79 Like St. Bridget, Kempe has a Candlemas vision of Mary at the Purification; clearly, as mothers, both women often understood the Incarnation through the rituals surrounding parturition that they shared with the Virgin Mary.80 When in Rome, Kempe lived in voluntary poverty, which imitated both the holy poverty to which St. Bridget aspired and the biblical penury of the Virgin Mary as she traveled with Joseph into Bethlehem. In Rome, Kempe had both St. Bridget and Christian motherhood much on her mind, possibly, as Windeatt suggests, because St. Bridget’s canonization (confirmed in 1419) was under discussion.81 Kempe visits the chamber in which St. Bridget died and through an interpreter speaks with St. Bridget’s maid about the saint’s humble and cheerful character.82 Recognizing Kempe’s Marian imitation of St. Bridget, a Roman gentlewoman who had known the saint asks Kempe to be the godmother of a child named “Brigypt.”83 Even in her own time, Kempe impressed others—both lay and religious—with her likeness to the Swedish saint. Master Aleyn, a Carmelite friar in the convent at Lynn, learned man, and friend to Kempe, had compiled indices to St. Bridget’s revelations and prophecies that exist in Lincoln College, Oxford, MS 69, and it is no doubt Aleyn’s familiarity with St. Bridget that convinced him of Kempe’s authenticity.84 Of the many clerks who address Kempe as “modyr,” certainly some would have recognized the connections among Margery Kempe, St. Bridget of Sweden, and the Virgin Mary. In her imitation of a maternal St. Bridget who imitated the Mother of God, Kempe establishes a motherly ethos for the narration of her own revelations, born from visions of the Virgin Mary.

God’s Bride In Kempe’s England, St. Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations was referred to as “Bride’s book”; this is the title by which Kempe knew the collection 79. Ibid., 1. 86, 7072–85. 81. Ibid., 1. 39, n. 3097. 83. Ibid., 1. 39, 3095–97.

80. Ibid., 1. 82, 6666–85. 82. Ibid., 1. 39, 3118–24. 84. Ibid., 1. Pro. n. 67.

272  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book of St. Bridget’s visions, and of course, it was through the status of bride of Christ that one could hope to emulate the Virgin Mary. St. Bridget situated herself as God’s spouse; in the Liber celestis, Jesus says to her, “I have chosen the . . . wharefore I take the to me as mi spouse unto mi awen proper delite . . . with a chaste saule.”85 Kempe strove to live chastely as a lover of God in a life that imitated St. Bridget’s imitation of Mary and to bear the Word through holy conversation and the dictation of her Book. In Sarah Beckwith’s insightful comment, Margery Kempe is “liberated from her role as wife, but also perfected in it.”86 The spiritual fruit of Kempe’s Marian espousal of God is The Book of Margery Kempe. From the inception of her visions, Jesus encourages Kempe to become his bride. He leads her out of a postpartum madness with the question “Dowtyr, why hast thow forsakyn me, and I forsoke nevyr the?” He wonders why Kempe rejected a life of contemplation in favor of marriage and motherhood.87 From this moment, sex with her husband John is undesirable, and a life of chaste commitment to Jesus beckons, but John is not eager to abandon his conjugal rights, even though he agrees that chastity is a worthy spiritual goal. Emma Lipton explains that the conflict between Kempe and her husband ref lects the contradictions in contemporaneous theories about marriage: the “sacramental model validated marriage as a virtuous practice but did not require marital sex, whereas the doctrine of the marital debt required marital sex without treating it as virtuous.”88 John sees that his insistence on the marital debt clashes with the sacramental marriage based on consent, as well as with saintly models of celibate wedlock, and he attempts to mediate the distress caused in the bedroom by being a helpful companion to his wife during their insular travels. Finally, after a famous scene in which Kempe persuades her husband to relinquish the marriage debt and take a vow of chastity, she has a ring made with the inscription “Jhesus est amor meus,” comparable to the motto of the Order of St. Savior, St. Bridget’s order, “Amor meus crucifixus est.”89 85. Roger Ellis, ed., The Liber Celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden, EETS o.s. 291 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 8. 86. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 87. 87. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 1, 232. 88. Emma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 130. 89. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 2; 1. 31, 2543.



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Kempe’s abandonment of conjugal rights and her advertisement of a betrothal to Jesus do not mark an end to her worldly sensuality; indeed, she struggled with sexual temptation for most of her life, in Jeanette Dillon’s words, her desire “both policed and produced by her continual preoccupation with chastity.”90 Her Book recalls the St. Margaret’s Eve during which a fellow parishioner nearly tempted her to lechery and a dark night of the soul during which she had foul visions of clerics baring their privates to her.91 When performing the charitable act of kissing leper women, she felt desire because, as Staley notes, leprosy was associated with sexuality, the skin lesions being similar to an outbreak of venereal disease.92 After Kempe’s conversion, the bedroom “becomes a site of revelation [and temptation] for her,” since Jesus often visits her chamber for “dalyawns.”93 During her early experiences as Christ’s bride, Kempe reveals her sensuality in being drawn to God’s manhood—the infant Jesus, the handsome teacher, and the Man of Sorrows—and her devotion to Christ’s humanity and contemplation of her own relationship to an incarnated Christ continues throughout her Book. After she has visited the Holy Land and been visited with the gift of tears, God the Father proposes marriage to Kempe: “Specialy for that thu belevyst in manhode of my sone.”94 Fearful of being drawn away from the body of Christ, Kempe weeps and keeps silent, but with Jesus’ encouragement is persuaded to make the same vows with the Father that she most likely made with John long before. The following is Kempe’s own analysis of the enhanced intensity of her worship after the marriage to the Father: Owr Lord of hys hy mercy drow hir affeccyon into hys Godhed, and that was mor fervent in lofe and desyr, and mor sotyl in undirstondyng, than was the manhod. And nevyrthelesse the fyr of love encresyd in hir, and hir undirstandyng was mor illumynyd and hir devocyon mor fervent than it was befor, whyl 90. Jeannette Dillon, “The Making of Desire in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Leeds Studies in English 26 (1995): 115. 91. Windeatt, BMK, I. 4, 434–74; I. 59, 4861–83. 92. Ibid., I. 74, 5940–59; Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 72. 93. Roman, Domestic Mysticism, 159. On the erotic and spiritualized terms “dalyawns” and “comownycacyon,” see Wendy Harding, “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 175. 94. Windeatt, BMK, I. 35, 2814.

274  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book sche had hir meditacyon and hir contemplacyon only in hys manhode. Yet had sche not that maner of werkyng in crying as sche had befor, but it was mor sotyl and mor softe, and mor esy to hir spirit to beryn, and plentyvows in teerys as evyr it was beforn.95

In the passage above Kempe declares the increased sophistication of her spiritual understanding after the marriage to the Godhead. No longer limited to veneration of Christ’s body, her love grows with the expansion of her concept of God. She suggests that she achieves a new balance between mental enlightenment and bodily travail for the sake of the spirit. The “labowr” of her tears decreases, although the flow continues, and her contemplations range more widely among the Trinity. As Watson points out, although Kempe’s devotions expand to include the Trinity as a result of marriage to the Father, she does not abandon her adoration of Christ’s corporeal nature. Kempe’s spiritual feelings reflect a more mature marriage with the Godhead, but the theology of The Book consistently incorporates Kempe’s physical and secular experiences into her visions of the divine, by way of demonstrating how Christ’s humanity touches the lives of all sinners.96 Since Kempe has been “ordeyned . . . to be a merowr” to all faithful, Christ’s embraces and interactions in her daily life are signs of hope to others.97 Even after her marriage to the Father, Kempe continues to employ erotic language for her meditations on and feelings of closeness to the Son. Her emphasis on the body and physical activity as sites for union with God establishes her as a cataphatic or positive mystic, who finds the divine in reference to herself, rather than in divesting herself. Watson observes that The Book of Margery Kempe consistently narrates episodes of sensory meetings with God and “comes to a close with scene after scene of unblushingly carnal religious devotion,” including a vision in which Kempe lovingly handles Christ’s toes.98 Indeed, in the chapter immediately following Kempe’s marriage to the Father, Jesus speaks to her again as a loving husband in order to allay her fears of unworthiness and to convince her to feel comfortable in her intimacy with him: 95. Ibid., I. 85, 7036–44. 96. Watson, “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe,” 417–18. 97. Windeatt, BMK, I. 78, 6242. 98. Ibid., I. 85, 7020–21; Watson, “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe,” 413. On the corporeal focus of Kempe’s visions see also Michelle Karnes, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ,” Speculum 82.2 ( 2007): 380–408.



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For it is conveyent the wyf to be homly wyth hir husband. Be he nevyr so gret a lorde and sche so powr a woman whan he weddyth hir, yet thei must ly togedir and rest togedir in joy and pes. Ryght so mot it be twyx the and me, for I take non hed what thu hast be, but what thu woldist be. And oftyntymes have I telde the that I have clene foryove the alle thy synnes. Therefore most I nedys be homly wyth the and lyn in thi bed Wyth the.99

Kempe continues to “lie” with Jesus even while her contemplation of the Trinity expands her spiritual awareness, Jesus remains her “amor,” and the burning fire akin to St. Bridget’s spiritual pregnancy and Richard Rolle’s mystical sensation increases. Lipton believes that in this complex model for spiritual marriage, which in its affectionate openness and mutual dependence has something in common with bourgeois unions, Kempe has forged an intimate relationship with Jesus that includes and validates both love and sex—the kind of relationship that was not encouraged by contemporaneous attitudes believing higher love to be chaste and sexuality to be sinful or a conjugal obligation.100 Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Kempe validates both love and Marian eroticism, since God comes to Kempe’s bed as to his Virgin Bride’s. Just as the Virgin Mary is central to Kempe’s earliest visions on holy childbirth, the Mother is present at Kempe’s marriage to the Father and at her adoration of the body of Jesus, her holy beloved. Mary counsels Kempe to “be not aschamyd of hym that is thi God, thi Lord, and thi lofe.”101 Like Jesus, Mary calls Kempe “dowtyr,” underscoring their mutual participation in the holy family, as well as the Virgin’s position as “mother-in-law.” Mary advises a renewed commitment to their spiritual unit in order to fortify the spirit for the rigors of seeing the Passion: “And therfor, dowtyr, yyf thu wylt be partabyl in owyr joye, thu must be partabil in owyr sorwe.”102 In visions of the Passion, Kempe stands alongside the Virgin, two grieving mothers and widows. Contemplating Christ’s wounds and noticing that the Virgin does not weep as vehemently as she, Kempe cries out in agony, “Lord, I am not thi modir. Take awey this peyn fro me, for I may not beryn it. Thi Passyon wil sle me.”103 Kempe both is and is not Jesus’ mother, as her body labors with 99. Windeatt, BMK, I. 36, 2944–50. 100. Lipton, Affections of the Mind, 129–60. 101. Windeatt, BMK, I. 29, 2373–74. 103. Ibid., I. 67, 5523–24.

102. Ibid., I. 29, 2378–79.

276  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book the onslaught of tears, which are her corporeal witnesses to the Incarnation that marks her. With Mary, Kempe occupies both roles of bride and mother as the lay imagination appropriates medieval scholarship and devotional treatises on the Virgin Mary. Jesus asks Kempe to take him to her bed as “for thi weddyd husbond . . . [and] for thy swete sone.”104 In chapter 2 this book illustrates how Mary’s position as Christ’s bride is grounded in exegesis on the Song of Songs that explains the divine conception as a spiritual marriage between humanity and God. The Book of Margery Kempe reveals a common lay perspective on Mary’s bridal role that collapses images of motherhood with those of the pure, beatified soul in eternal pearls. In another vision of Jesus proceeding toward the Passion late in The Book of Margery Kempe, Kempe sees Christ take his mother tenderly in his arms and promise to make her his queen.105 Kempe entreats Jesus for a similar blessing and is promised that if she comforts Mary, all joy will follow.106 The result of Kempe’s Marian positions of bride and mother is that she can encompass all things holy and sinful in her own soul and bring forth righteous conversation. In response to the bishop of Lincoln’s men and many others, she speaks “pregnawntly.”107 Like the Virgin Mary after both Crucifixion and Ascension, Jesus places Kempe on earth in order to pronounce God’s laws and illustrate his love—and in those ways to maintain his disciples in faith. Jesus thanks Kempe for upholding his commandments—especially for rebuking the people for swearing— and in the face of Friar William Melton’s preaching against her tears, he promises her, “I schal werkyn so mech grace for the, that al the werld schal wondryn and merveylyn of my goodnes.”108 This grace is manifested in the many holy conversations with those who are either enlightened or irked by her discourse. While many of her traveling companions during her pilgrimages tire of her holy themes, respected church figures such as Archbishop Arundel, Richard of Caister, and St. Julian of Norwich enjoy extended spiritual exchanges with Kempe. When called before the archbishop of York on charges of heresy, she defends herself well and accrues followers from his court through her provocative and edifying speech.109 The archbishop asks that she forgo teaching in his 104. Ibid., I. 36, 2952–53. 106. Ibid., I. 79, 6340–47. 108. Ibid., I. 65, 5381–82; I. 63, 5256–57.

105. Ibid., I. 79, 6300–6331. 107. Ibid., I. 15, 1106. 109. Ibid., I. 52.



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diocese, but she refuses with a Marian exemplum: “The Gospel makyth mencyon that, whan the woman had herd owr Lord prechyd, sche cam beforn hym with a lowed voys and seyd: ‘Blyssed be the wombe that the bar and the tetys that yaf the sowkyn.’”110 In her own loud voice, Kempe continually dwells on the Virgin Mother’s gift to the world, the Word that emerged in order to teach and salvage his own creation. Although Kempe denies entering any pulpit when the archbishop accuses her of sermonizing, several scholars have acknowledged the sophistication of her homiletic rhetoric and have called her a preacher.111 Moreover, Rosalynn Voaden goes so far as to argue that after her pilgrimages through the Holy Land and Italy, Kempe intentionally embarked on a preaching tour of England.112 Comparing her to Catherine of Siena, Jane Chance has recently underscored Kempe’s alterity and illustrated Kempe’s spiritual need to bridge the social divide with “unhomely dalyawns” in both conversation and preaching.113 By occupying the positions of Christ’s bride and Marian mother, Kempe authorized a public voice that was forbidden by the church according to St. Paul’s strictures against women’s teaching. She was another Mary, left on earth to proclaim the truth to a sinful world after the Ascension of her beloved.

A Son’s Mother Throughout Liber 1 of The Book of Margery Kempe, the position of motherhood is transformed from a site of potential evil and madness to one of productive goodness in Christ’s name. As Kempe imitates the Virgin and other saintly mothers who revered Mary, she continues to reproduce children, but eventually she labors only with the gift of tears and bears the Word of Christ’s teachings. Once free of childbearing, Kempe travels abroad, an emboldened bride of Christ who proclaims the 110. Ibid., I. 52, 4200–4204. 111. Genelle Gertz-Robinson, “Stepping into the Pulpit? Women’s Preaching in The Book of Margery Kempe and The Examinations of Anne Askew,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 459–79; Cheryl Glenn, “Author, Audience and Autobiography: Rhetorical Technique in The Book of Margery Kempe,” College English 54.5 (1992): 540–53. 112. Rosalynn Voaden, “‘Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,’“ 109–21. 113. Jane Chance, The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 120–26.

278  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book gifts of her beloved and cares for him in her visions as a tender mother. Kempe’s newly adopted Marian motherhood reconfigures her relationship with her children, most specifically her grown son, who is probably the first scribe of Liber 1. For this son, Kempe performs a Marian miracle, which results in the son’s conversion and in the production of Liber 1. While the subject of Liber 1 is properly Kempe’s transformation of the terms of motherhood, a main focus of the much shorter Liber 2 is Kempe’s actual motherhood transformed. By refashioning the terms of her own maternity, Kempe prepares herself to deliver her own manifestation of the Word in The Book of Margery Kempe. Like St. Bridget, who agonized in her soul over her faithless son Karl, Kempe opens Liber 2 with the narrative of her libertine son. While Kempe was forging a contemplative path, she greatly desired the conversion of this unnamed son, but the more she counseled him to follow Christ, the more the son avoided her. During an exchange of sharp words between them, Kempe gives up on her attempts to mediate his spiritual improvement and sends him off with a curse: “Now sithyn thu wil not leevyn the world at my cownsel, I charge the, at my blissyng, kepe thi body klene at the lest fro womanys feleschep tyl thu take a wyfe aftyr the lawe of the Chirche. And yf thu do not, I pray God chastise the and ponysch the therfor.”114 With this parting shot, Kempe implies that if her son will not eschew the temptations of the merchant-trading life which he has chosen, he should at least avoid prostitutes and lechery so as to keep his body pure for the sacrament of marriage. Just as her own spiritual journey involves a Marian pursuit of chastity, so she advises her son that abstinence is the common ground for a moral life. The son departs on an overseas venture for the merchant from Lynn with whom he lives and works, only to fall into lechery and acquire a venereal disease on the Continent. His face erupts in welts and boils to such an extent that when he returns to Lynn, his former master believes him a leper and discharges him from service. At this point, the young man believes that the curse of his mother has been visited upon him, and he tells everyone in Lynn about his mother’s rebukes and his resulting illness. When in humility the son finally seeks out his mother, Kempe does not forget “the frute of hir wombe”; she recognizes that in order to carry out her Marian roles of bride and mother to Christ, she must see her 114. Windeatt, BMK, 2. 1, 7453–56.



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own son born again.115 She thinks of him in the same language that Elizabeth employs at the Visitation to describe the unborn Christ child and continues her work to deliver him to a life in imitation of Jesus.116 Her son confesses to her and entreats her mediation with God; she goes immediately to her prayers and asks for his physical and spiritual health. Kempe thus performs a miracle in acting as a Marian intercessor in her son’s cure, and he is so completely restored that he continues in his travels and eventually marries a Prussian woman and begins a family. In her prayers that her son might be healed of the diseases of skin and soul caused by lechery, Kempe takes the Virgin’s role in popular miracle tales such as “Of a Knight to whom Our Lady Appeared whilst he Prayed,” in which a knight is purged of the agony of lovelonging when he finally perceives the beauty of the Virgin and its dependence upon chastity.117 Kempe has impressed upon her son the necessity of abstinence, and he has formally confessed to her in all compunction, like the pentitent knight, a candidate for a miracle that would ease the pain of destructive passions. When the son arrives in Lynn again after his marriage, his appearance shows that he not only upholds the chastity to which his mother called him, but also rejects the other vanities of this world which had seduced him before, such as modish clothing and vain language. In Kempe’s estimation, God clearly allowed her intercession in order that her son might attain a righteous life. When she questions her son about his new comportment, he responds by acknowledging her work as a Marian intermediary: “‘Modyr,’ he seyd, ‘I hope that thorw yowr preyerys owr Lord hath drawyn me.’”118 When the young man’s reverence increases, Kempe “openyd hir hert to hym, schewyng hym and enformyng how owr Lord had drawyn hir thorw hys mercy and be what menys; also how meche grace he had schewed for hir, the whech he seyd he was unworthy to heryn.”119 Perhaps Kempe begins to dictate Liber 1 to him at this time. The young man is so impressed with her story that, like his mother, he goes on many pilgrimages and attempts to live a life of contemplation while still a married man and father earning a family’s living through trade. 115. Ibid., 2. 1, 7486. 116. Lk 1:42. 117. Anonymous, “Of a Knight to whom Our Lady Appeared whilst he Prayed,” trans. Alice Kemp-Welch, The Tumbler of Our Lady and Other Miracles (Cambridge: In Parentheses Publications, 1999), 18–24. 118. Windeatt, BMK, 2. 2, 7515–16. 119. Ibid., 2.1, 7526–29.

280  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book When the son returns home from many pilgrimages, he “enformyd hys wife of hys modyr in so meche that sche wolde leevyn hir fadyr and hir modyr and hir owyn cuntre for to comyn into Inglonde and seen hys modyr.”120 Privy now to the contents of Kempe’s visions, the son represents her to his wife in a new way, and according to Kempe’s memory, the young woman is desirous, as is the biblical Ruth, to leave behind her own people to cleave to her mother-in-law’s people. At his wife’s request, then, the son plans a trip to England to see his parents shortly before his father dies. Although by this time the son is a very experienced traveler, he consults Kempe about the means by which he and his wife should cross over—by land or by sea—because he believes his mother a prophet. In a parallel episode to that in which Kempe prayed for her son’s health and it was restored, she now asks God to reveal to her the best means for her family’s travel and is informed that all would be well, either by land or by sea. Again, Kempe plays the role of Marian intermediary in her son’s safety, since in popular tales such as “Of the Drowning Man Delivered” the Virgin was known to guarantee safe passage.121 Arriving in good time with his wife, the son, however, falls ill almost immediately and after a month of illness, dies. Kempe is sure that her prophecy that he should come safely home includes the safe transport of this spirit to heaven. The beginning of Liber 2 expands Kempe’s presentation of her place inside the holy family by rendering her son and his wife as biblical types. Whereas the son has acted out the roles of the Prodigal and of Jesus, his wife promises to be a Ruth as faithful as Kempe has been to St. Anne and the Virgin.122 Unfortunately for Kempe, after her son’s death, the young Prussian woman does not declare as does Ruth “your people shall be my people,” but instead, having left a young child behind with friends, seeks permission to return to the Continent and is eventually quite irritated by her mother-in-law’s insistence on accompanying her.123 In this episode, Kempe may not be able to maintain the 120. Ibid., 2. 2, 7532–35. 121. Anonymous, “Of the Drowning Man Delivered,” in Kemp-Welch, trans., The Tumbler of Our Lady, 44–50. On the Virgin as intercessor for her son, see McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, 43. 122. McAvoy has commented on the parallel between the son and the figure of the Prodigal in Authority and the Female Body, 40. 123. Ru 1:16.



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parallel between her own family and biblical characters, but she continues her focus on motherhood and the Virgin Birth. In Aachen with her daughter-in-law on St. Margaret’s Day (July 13 in Aachen, July 20 in England), she views the Virgin’s smock and other relics connected to swaddling the Christ child, such as St. Joseph’s stockings, used to protect the baby Jesus against the cold. Liber 2 continues a narrative of Kempe’s travels, conversations, and visions, but in this study of medieval English Marian discourses, the important point is that The Book of Margery Kempe is born from the spiritual rebirth of the author’s own son. Because Kempe has transformed her own role as mother in imitation of the Holy Mother, she acknowledges that the fruit of her womb must be Christlike and propagate the Divine Word. Once her son is converted to a life of contemplation and privy to his mother’s visions, he is prepared to take the dictation of The Book that has been collecting in Kempe’s memory for so long. Although the prologue mentions a number of churchmen who encouraged Kempe to have her visions recorded as many as twenty years before the actual dictation, Kempe “was comawndyd in hir sowle that sche schuld not wrytyn so soone.”124 She finally determined to write about the same time as her son’s miraculous conversion and healing—and willingness to tell his mother’s story to kin and other interested faithful. Most probably one of the motivations for the son’s plans for an extended visit with his wife was the composition of The Book. As Watson observes, the “circumstantial evidence” from the prologue’s description of The Book’s first scribe establishes the writer as Kempe’s son: Than had the creatur no wryter that wold fulfyllyn hyr desyr ne yeve credens to hir felingys, unto the tym that a man dwelling in Dewchlond (whech was an Englyschman in hys byrth and sythen weddyd in Dewchland and had ther bothe a wyf and a chylde), havyng good knowlach of this creatur and of hir desyr, meved, I trost, thorw the Holy Gost, cam into Yngland wyth hys wyfe and hys goodys, and dwellyd wyth the forseyd creatur tyl he had wretyn as mech as sche wolde tellyn hym for the tym that thei wer togydder. And sythen he deyd.125

Why does the priest and second scribe not identify the son outright in this description of the first scribe? Perhaps the priest thought the obfus124. Windeatt, BMK, 1. Pro., 81–82. 125. Watson, “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe,” 398. Windeatt, BMK, 1. Pro., 88–96.

282  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book cation would give more authority to the first version of Liber 1, which he recopied. The suppression of the son’s identity and of his name throughout, however, is similar to Kempe’s insistence on calling herself “this creature” in her Book, emphasizing her place in creation and especially her spiritual co-existence with the Virgin Mary and other holy women. That through her efforts, her son joined the holy family long enough on earth to earn his eternal reward in heaven must have been a matter of great satisfaction to her, and it would have been consistent with her imitatio Mariae that Christian motherhood made possible the writing of her Book.

Our Intercessor Unfortunately, the second scribe exposes the poor quality of the writing of Kempe’s son. When the priest perused Liber 1 for recopying, he discovered that it “was so evel wreyn that he cowd lytyl skyll theron, for it was neithyr good Englysch ne Dewch, ne the lettyr was not schapyn ne formyd as other letters ben.”126 After four years or more of avoiding the task, the priest, beset by both his conscience and Kempe’s prayers, is suddenly able to make out what had been before only illegible penmanship.127 Conveyed by this linguistic miracle, The Book of Margery Kempe relates many other instances of grace enabling communication. The prayer offered at the end of The Book is a culmination of these linguistic miracles and also of Kempe’s self-fashioning as a Marian intermediary. This prayer, occurring on the verso of the final leaf of Liber 2 and full of specific references to Kempe’s life, is most likely a record of the author’s private devotions after she returned from the Holy Land.128 The intention she announces in dictating the prayer is a Marian intention—to mediate the redemption of all humanity. The Book of Margery Kempe announces that its language is sanctified through the date of its inception. Liber 1 was begun on the feast day of St. Bridget’s death (July 23, 1436), and in a circular structure like a rosary Liber 2 ends with a visit to the Bridgettine house of Syon Abbey. Many of the linguistic miracles recorded in The Book of Margery Kempe are connected to St. Bridget. For instance, the miraculous recopying of Liber 1 126. Windeatt, BMK, 1. Pro., 99–101. 127. Ibid., 1. Pro., 130–33. 128. See Windeatt’s note in BMK at 8337–38, 421.



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in which God grants the priest grace to understand the son’s writing is much like the miraculous dictation of the Bridgettine Rule, in which a great wind fills the ears of St. Bridget’s confessor with the founding principles for the Order of St. Savior.129 In addition, at the Church of St. John Lateran, where St. Bridget was seen levitating, Kempe experiences the miracle of the German priest’s coming to understand her confessions.130 As Christine Cooper shows, Kempe emphasizes this divine translation of her English for the German’s comprehension because it is important in establishing the author’s inheritance of the apostle’s gift of tongues, of the xenoglossia of a host of saints and of St. Bridget’s breaking down the communication barrier with clerks trained in Latin.131 It was well known that St. Bridget had learned Latin with astonishing speed in her forties—under the tutelage of St. Agnes. Kempe also engages with the clerical Latin she insists she does not know. When asked by a clerk in York the meaning of “Crescite et multiplicamini,” Kempe replies as well as any exegete, “Ser, thes wordys ben not undirstondyn only of begytyng of chyldren bodily, but also be purchasyng of vertu, whech is frute gostly, as be herying of the wordys of God, be good exampyl yevyng, be mekenes and paciens, charite and chastite, and swech other, for pacyens is more worthy than myraclys werkyng.”132 Perhaps Kempe’s prophecies— utterances of divine foresight—are also imitations of St. Bridget’s prophecies concerning the spiritual state of Sweden and the schism, although Kempe confines her warnings to more local circumstances.133 Besides the predictions she makes about her son’s safety and the private matters of others, Kempe accurately prophesies the outcome of a dispute in St. Margaret’s church over whether christenings and purifications should take place in the chapels.134 As Watt observes, making prophecies associates Kempe with a venerable tradition of prophetic women—among them, Mary, sister of Moses; Hannah, mother of Samuel; Deborah, the 129. See Windeatt’s note in BMK at 7377–78, 383. 130. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 33, 2675–2703. 131. Christine Cooper, “Miraculous Translation in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Studies in Philology 101.3 (2004): 270–98. 132. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 51, 4013–17. 133. On connections between Latinity and prophecy, see Carolyn Muessig, “Prophecy and Song: Teaching and Preaching by Medieval Women,” in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 146–58. 134. Windeatt, BMK, 1. 25.

284  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book only woman judge in Israel; Huldah, the wife of Shallum; in the New Testament, Elizabeth and Anna—and as we have seen before, Kempe often links herself to biblical figures through St. Bridget. 135 The composition of The Book of Margery Kempe, then, as well as much of the content within it, depends upon divinely aided communication in which the speaker is a conduit for God’s Word. In other words, The Book undergoes a fifteenth-century Virgin Birth, described by Kempe as the result of much labor and many tears. In books 1 and 2 of her text, Kempe repositions herself as a Marian bride and mother who bears God’s fruit. The prayer appended to Liber 2 displays an extended devotion spoken by this latter-day Mary, and in Staley’s words “image[s] Margery as a singular figure of intercession.”136 Thus, The Book of Margery Kempe comes to an end with the author standing at the Virgin’s bench in God’s court, with pleas for the salvation of humanity. Although it is the culmination of both The Book’s linguistic miracles and Kempe’s Marian intercessions, the prayer is often overlooked and misunderstood. Most refer to the prayers (plural) that end The Book, but Dhira B. Mahoney is certainly correct in emphasizing the cohesiveness of Kempe’s final devotion and its appropriateness as a climactic text.137 Mahoney argues that the prayer, in which Kempe employs the firstperson pronoun instead of third-person references to “this creature,” evinces the mastery of language acquired during many years of aural learning and public teaching. Mahoney points out the formal language of the prayer, so unlike the conversational tone of the rest of The Book, and the rhetorical figures employed.138 Although Mahoney’s reading invites others to investigate the prayer more closely, the misleading commonplace that it is similar to the contemporaneously popular devotion the Fifteen Oes still obtains. While Staley has a point that because the Fifteen Oes was attributed to St. Bridget Kempe produces a competitive devotion, there is little to gain in a comparison between the Bridgettine prayer on the Passion and Kempe’s intercessory pleas.139 Quite unlike the Fifteen Oes’s meditation on the Stations of the 135. Watt, Secretaries of God, 23. 136. Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 180. 137. Dhira B. Mahoney, “Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), 37–49. 138. Ibid., 47–49. 139. Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 179.



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Cross, Kempe’s prayer is grounded in the idiosyncrasies of her own spiritual circumstances and Marian roles. In the scribe’s prefatory remarks, he notes that the prayer represents her orisons after she knelt before the sacrament in church and said the Veni creator.140 As he records it, Kempe’s prayer begins with the assertion that although she might have permission to know all of God’s secrets, she could not in all humility accept full divine disclosure. Such rejection of the plenitude of God’s “prevyteys” demonstrates Kempe’s concern to establish the limits of her visionary and prophetic insights.141 Prepared to justify such visions and prophecies about which she has written, however, Kempe places trust in her own discretio spirituum and proceeds to deny that the devil has given her “fals cownsel.”142 As Voaden has demonstrated, the discernment of spirits is an enduring concern for Kempe and a reason why she consults so often with well-respected figures of the church.143 Once Kempe has established her authority, she entreats the Lord to send her even more tears, if they should save souls: “Good Lord, spar no mor the eyne in myn hed than thu dedist the blood in thi body whech thu scheddist plentevowsly.”144 Offering sacrificial tears much like Mary’s in contemporary representations of the Crucifixion, Kempe proceeds with her Marian request—that she be allowed to intercede for all of humanity. The following passages of the prayer imitate the Kyrie eleison as Kempe “cries the Lord mercy” for various classes of people, from the pope to “all [hir] childeryn, gostly and bodily.”145 In the latter unnoticed line, Kempe alludes to her concern for her young ones, although her babes are barely mentioned in The Book, and to the fact that some, besides the grown son of Liber 2, are alive at the time of the prayer’s composition. As we have seen, Kempe concentrates on motherhood throughout her Book in her efforts to imitate the Holy Mother. Once finished praying for mercy for all of the world, Kempe turns to the Virgin Mary to ask for mercy for herself, showing thereby that while the author has attained high spiritual status as a divine matriarch, Mary remains the mother of all humanity and of the Word conveyed in every prayer. 140. Windeatt, BMK, Prayer, 8337–50. 141. Ibid., Prayer, 8345. 142. Ibid., Prayer, 8363. 143. Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writings of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999), 109–54. 144. Windeatt, BMK, Prayer, 8376–77. 145. Ibid., Prayer, 8445–46.

286  The Virgin Birth of Margery Kempe’s Book Conclusion Margery Kempe belonged to a lay community of aural learners and thus represents a perception of Mary as the mother of language that differs significantly from that of other authors discussed in this book. Like the academic, church, and court poets treated in chapters 2 through 4, Kempe understands Mary to be the bearer of the Word, but not having learned to read by studying Marian liturgies as they had, Kempe understands the Virgin’s power over language in physical terms and according to maternal performances. Like the writers of the Middle English lyrics, Kempe envisions Mary in the roles of the major Marian feasts, but unlike them, emphasizes Mary’s aid in the production of speech that can be dictated for texts about oneself and one’s own visions, rather than about the liturgical cycle. Most like Mary and other nearly contemporaneous saints—especially St. Bridget—who imitated the Virgin, Kempe herself labors with Christ’s Word to produce her Book, and the tears, godly speeches, and even sermons which fill its pages. Ever questing to fill the Virgin’s roles, Kempe takes on the personas of Christ’s bride and mother in order to authorize the inscriptions of these speech acts made from the maternal sufferings of her body. That the very child of such sufferings—her grown son—should actually copy The Book shows Kempe’s investment in motherhood and her trust in its holy issue; that she should play the role of a Marian intercessor and miracle worker with this same son shows the extent to which Kempe had become the Virgin’s counterpart. The prayer appended to the end of Liber 2 displays the intercessory language appropriate for this new Mary. In all, The Book of Margery Kempe is conceived through Kempe’s imitatio Mariae, and as the Word of Christ, offers the fruit of the Virgin Birth.

Conclus ion

cribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England has explored a variety of trends in pedagogical and popular culture placing the Virgin at the source of linguistic power and rendering her an icon of rhetorical excellence. From the AngloSaxon period through the late English Middle Ages, one of these trends links music and song to aesthetic and effective expressions by and about the Virgin. This concluding synthesis revisits the Marian medieval English literature connecting the Mother’s sway over language to the music conveying her purposes. Thinking about various medieval authors’ investment in music leads to a deepened understanding of why the Virgin’s reign over the liberal arts declined in early modern England. Throughout Scribit Mater, a variety of literary genres highlight Mary’s concomitant associations with both language and song. Liturgical texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Advent Lyrics, some of the Marian Middle English lyrics, and the Bridgettine Myroure of Oure Ladye associate Mary’s words of wisdom with hymns. Among performances outside the church, the Mary Play spotlights the little Virgin chanting the Gradual Psalms and providing her own exegesis on them while on her way up the temple stairs. In classrooms taught by English intellectuals, John of Garland deploys a wedding song and musical rhythms as reflections on the Virgin’s harmonious mind, and Walter of Wimborne offers Marie Carmina to his schoolboys learning basic and intermediate grammar. Wimborne’s poetry provides a transition between pedagog 287

288  Conclusion ical and meditative verse such as John of Howden’s musical Philomena and Richard Rolle’s Canticum Amoris, song of love to the Virgin. In Chaucer’s work, we saw fictional narrative verse combining thirteenthcentury poets’ interest in teaching, music, and meditation. His Prioress’s tale, for instance, is set in an Eastern song school, launched by a meditation on Psalm 8, and concluded with a miraculous performance by the “clergeon.” Additionally, in The Second Nun’s Tale St. Cecilia’s song of entreaty during her wedding reflects her desire to remain chaste, in imitation of the Virgin, so that she might continue to preach and convert. It is not surprising that the eloquent Virgin, as well as the eloquence of others who emulate her, is often surrounded in medieval English literature by song: Mary’s greatest glory at the Assumption is always accompanied by heavenly choirs. During the course of Scribit Mater the ubiquitousness of literary Marian choral celebrations has been explained according to Boethian musical theory, pedagogies connecting song and grammar, and of course practices of liturgical singing. The medieval English literature discussed in Scribit Mater often participates in or derives from Marian hymns and chants. The Advent Lyrics, with their glorious and regal Virgin, dwell on Mary’s knowledge of divine mysteries and portray her responses to a congregation of the uninitiated. When Lyric VII dramatizes her conversation with Joseph about the Virgin Birth, it presents the liturgical pattern of psalm and antiphon, scriptural statement and response, in a private and personalized setting. Scribit Mater has investigated Marian literature that rests on public practices for church services, private habits of devotion, and the many instances in which public liturgies are privately employed. As an example, in his lyrical Philomena John of Howden transforms and romanticizes Mary’s participation at the Stations of the Cross for the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Provence. By the fourteenth century, when Chaucer composed the invocations to the Virgin for both the Prioress’s and Second Nun’s tales, Marian songs with liturgical underpinnings had found their way to a variety of English audiences, from middle-class worshippers chanting from their own books of hours to those packing the fields and squares where mendicants led congregations in Middle English Marian hymns. In Marian literatures conveying the power of hymns and psalmody in a variety of voices, the compelling sway of music underscores the persua-



Conclusion 289

siveness of Mary’s speech, implies the heavenly spheres in which Mary dwells, and conveys the divine ineffable to human ears. In instances such as The Prioress’s Tale, in which liturgical singing falls short of acknowledging the Virgin’s magnificent wisdom, it is not the music that is at fault, but the limited ability of the singer. As the English Middle Ages draw to a close, however, we can witness some disruptions in the tight connection between Marian language arts and song, for instance in the work of Margery Kempe. While John of Garland teaches the liberal arts from a new wedding song for the Virgin, Walter of Wimborne, John of Howden, and Richard Rolle represent music as a sound through which Mary might be heard, Chaucer portrays a chorister adoring the Mother through a Marian antiphon, and the Middle English lyrics often appear in manuscripts with musical notation, Margery Kempe provides a surprising exception in that she does not sing. That is not to say that Kempe refuses to participate in the music of the liturgy or is deaf to the heavenly chorus above. Her habit of going often to church and to the public arenas in which itinerant preachers led hymn-singing certainly immersed her continually in choral worship. She must have heard various Middle English Marian lyrics at home in Lynn and during her pilgrimages throughout England. Occasionally, celestial melodies initiate her visions or are promised as a reward for a holy life. For instance, a sweet sound from heaven disrupts a peaceful sleep with her husband, John, and moves her toward a life of chastity and devotion.1 In one of Kempe’s visions, Christ promises Mary a symphony of celebration at her Assumption.2 In these events, Kempe passively appreciates the heavenly melody, rather than actively joining in song. Such episodes, nevertheless, prove that Kempe was familiar with medieval mysticism that depended on communicating with the divine through music. One of her favorite sources of the mystical life, Richard Rolle, declared canor, sweet song, a sign of the divine presence. In addition, St. Marie d’Oignies’s life, which was so important to Kempe, celebrates the heroine’s ability to invoke the holy family’s presence with her singing. According to Jacques de Vitry, before her death, St. Marie burst out in “a high and clear voice, and for three days and three nights 1. Barry Windeatt, ed., BMK, 1. 3. 2. Ibid., 1. 79.

290  Conclusion she did not stop praising God and giving thanks. She rhythmically wove in sweet harmony the most sweet song about God, the holy angels, the blessed Virgin, other saints, her friends and the Holy Scriptures.”3 For three days, St. Marie carried on a “jubilation,” part of which included a recitation and explanation of the Latin Magnificat.4 De Vitry remarks that these songs from her deathbed were a surprising counterpart to the cries of a woman in labor.5 Kempe, on the other hand, transformed the cries of a woman in labor to the weeping of holy tears. While St. Marie also received the gift of tears, de Vitry emphasizes the liturgical aspects of her religious practices, practices that include singing. In contrast, Kempe’s acts of piety as she reports them in her Book often separate her from the church community breaking out in one voice. Kempe does not consider entering a cloister for daily performances of the divine office, and during lay worship she is often locked in the piteous agony of her tears while the rest of the congregation sings. In her Book she describes events in Mary’s life as characterized by the Middle English lyrics, but without understanding music as a force for the peace among the faithful that Mary would orchestrate. Whereas music provides such Marian intermediation between God and humanity in the work of other mystics, Kempe declares that her own body and the Word produced from her mouth are the binding force between herself, her audience, and heaven. Her desire to prove her singularity as Christ’s bride, humbler than Mary as she serves the Virgin, closer than Bridget whom Jesus loved, led to more individuated forms of devotion in visions and isolated contemplation. Her beloved body, Kempe claims in her Book, is wracked by tears and consumed by the Word, but not overcome by the songs she could have in common with all of her neighbors. Mentioning only the airs she could hear privately or those to be wished for in heaven, Kempe chose divine communications that underscored her righteous particularity over those folding her into the practices of other believers. Kempe continually revels in her exclusion as a sign of her own exclusivity with Christ, especially during her times of isolation on pilgrimage when her companions reject her because of her plenteous weeping. 3. Margot H. King, trans., The Life of Marie d’Oignies by Jacques de Vitry (Saskatoon: Peregrina Publishing, 1986), 95. 4. Ibid., 98. 5. Ibid., 95.



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Besides a tendency to remove herself to a special position with Christ, other reasons that Kempe does not sing include her lack of exposure to the very institutions that would have trained her in song. Kempe’s emphasis on the issue of her own body—the spiritual childbirth of her Book—as the sound of the divine reminds us that since she was not raised in a dame school and did not undergo even elementary choral training, she did not learn how to reproduce the Word through the corpus of Marian hymns. Neither was she exposed to the mathematical theory of musical ratios that suggested the perfect balance and proportion of the Virgin’s body and soul that manifest themselves in choral harmonies. By contrast, Kempe proves her religiosity and chastity through excess—not balance and restraint— and does not imagine music as an expression of cosmic and communal accord. Furthermore, since Kempe apparently had no formal education in reading and writing, she remained unaware of how Marian language pedagogies can inhabit the learner’s imagination through song, how beginning to pronounce the Latin “Maria” while chanting the Little Office would inextricably tie language production such as her Book to music. Instead, in The Book of Margery Kempe, the bodily absorption of Marian wisdom privileges experiential knowledge of the Mother as guide and teacher, knowledge that might be obtained outside educational institutions. By valorizing the particularity of her experiences, even though they were modeled on Mary and other Marian saints, Kempe is like other late medieval middle-class people who appropriated liturgical practices for individual and domestic needs, whose books of hours contained diverse and idiosyncratic matter for healing the sick, preparing the dead, and of course aiding in childbirth. Kempe, similarly, accentuates the domestic quality of her devotions, not least by minimizing her connections to the choir. With her personal and nonmusical forms of worship and praise, Kempe represents a contemporary diffusion in the means of following the Virgin to an understanding of the Godhead, a diversity of understanding that had co-existed for three centuries during which an affective epistemology operated alongside more traditional pedagogies teaching language through Marian texts and songs. Chapters 2 and 3 of this book, on John of Garland and the Anglo-Latin meditative poets of the North, respectively, develop the Latin pedagogies upon which a variety of traditional Marian linguistic teachings rested. Garland taught the seven liberal arts through the life story of the Virgin Mary and then

292  Conclusion distilled his precepts for the best rhetorical practices into the many Marian exempla in the Parisiana Poetria. Walter of Wimborne described in the Ave Virgo Mater Christi a Marian grammar that he deployed in the Marie Carmina. By the time Chaucer wrote An ABC and transformed Latin teachings for primary schools into a primer whereby adults at court might learn Middle English Marian phrases, the humility topos combined with an invocation of Mary’s aid in invention was an established rhetorical commonplace, employed at the end of this tradition by John Lydgate, whose light imagery spotlights the Virgin’s scriptural illumination in the Life of Our Lady. In Chaucer and Lydgate, vernacular poets whose competency in Latin was achieved at a cathedral school and monastery, respectively, we can see the adaptation of a tradition in Latin schooling—that of learning to read through Marian services— to vernacular verse depictions of the Virgin’s sway over all language. Although shifting the emphasis from Latin to vernacular teaching, Chaucer and Lydgate repair to a feminine and Christian version of the classical hierarchy of learning through which the basics of language were taught—from ABCs in the primer and Divine Office to the Marian hymns in the antiphoner and from there to more advanced grammatical, rhetorical, and logical understanding, all redounding to the Virgin at even the highest level of competency. Garland, Wimborne, Chaucer, Lydgate, and other masculine authors who are heirs to trivium studies closely linked to music all resorted to song with its powerful rhythms and association to heavenly spheres when writing about the Virgin and thanking her for the Word manifesting itself on the page. Among women who perpetuated established practices of combining Marian language learning with song were Kempe’s contemporaries and acquaintances, the sisters of the Order of St. Savior in Syon Abbey. The Bridgettine sisters were, in contradistinction to Kempe, engaged in performing their deep understanding of the Virgin’s wisdom in liturgical chant. While Kempe aurally learned some biblical and liturgical Latin during church services and private readings by the clerics who supported her, the nuns of Syon Abbey were taught in the Myroure of Oure Ladye to recognize and interpret their Marian Latin liturgy through sanctioned translations. As chapter 1 bears out, the Bridgettine nuns incorporated the order’s Marian services in their collective body of wisdom and promulgated the image of Mary, Mother and teacher of texts,



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as they chanted responses during matins. Illustrating gendered practices in language pedagogy with which Chaucer struggles in The Prioress’s Tale, the nuns of Syon, although literate in Middle English, required the mediation of clerical men for an understanding of their own Marian pronouncements in liturgical Latin. Their lately learned Latin phrases reinforced by singing their Marian offices, the Bridgettine sisters strove in real life for what Chaucer praised in his Second Nun: the advanced linguistic ability to translate images of a sagacious and articulate Virgin, while they sang of the Mother’s gifts and translated their own souls. The nuns at Syon Abbey were late medieval English instantiations of the wise and well-spoken Mary, taught by English writers for hundreds of years. In his Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie, John of Garland depicts a Virgin Bride espoused to Christ, Wisdom and Word, just as the nuns of Syon who, having cloistered themselves in scriptural study, reap the fruit of divine understanding. The Bridgettine nuns at Syon read, reproduced, and enacted the final act for the reign of Mary over literacy, her throne first cemented in Latin liturgies and pedagogies, but thereafter holding sway also over the vernacular, as in Chaucer’s Middle English primer, An ABC. At the same time that the tuneful Marian language arts blossomed in Syon and other venues for vernacular devotional literature, Margery Kempe reminds us of trends uncoupling Marian expression from melody: the separation of choir instruction from grammar schools, the increase of domestic devotions that prioritized individual prayer over choral singing, and the advent of Marian literary prose, a genre which Kempe helped to invent. Garland’s Parisiana Poetria illustrates that poems, not prose, employ the meters of songs, and although Martin Camargo demonstrates the teaching of cursus (rhythms for prose sentences) in dictaminal treatises performed by schoolchildren, such rhythms were equated with intonations for delivery, rather than the tonality of song.6 It is significant that Margery Kempe dictates her life story for a prose recounting that imitates the cadences of informal speech 6. Martin Camargo, “Medieval Rhetoric Delivers; or, Where Chaucer Learned How to Act,” New Medieval Literatures 9 (2008): 41–62. In Nota bene: Reading Classics and Writing Melodies in the Early Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), Jan Ziolkowski documents the many famous poems, including those by Horace, Lucan, Statius, and Terence, that appeared with neumes in medieval manuscripts. Ziolkowski argues that such musical notation provided a guide for declaiming or singing the classics. His rich body of evidence shows the continuing

294  Conclusion and the genre of many other women saints’ lives that she admired. Inhabiting an intermediary space between the comfortable but decidedly unmetered prose of Margery Kempe and the formal, melodic poetry of a John of Garland or Geoffrey Chaucer, many of the Middle English lyrics, whose stanzaic forms may not be perfectly regular, still allowed singing. As we saw in chapter 5, many of the Marian Middle English lyrics do translate Latin hymns or other devotions that were often sung and heard rather than read, but they conveyed the Virgin’s powerful speech without emphasizing literacy or the rhetoric of texts, and in this way contributed to the disjunction of Marian literacy and Marian song. Through many intermediary steps, too numerous to trace here, practices in churches and schools that connected the Virgin Mary to the invention of literary songs fell into disuse. As the English renaissance unfolds—and with it the age of printing and the reformation—many more grammar schools are opened, many more textbooks are written and mass-produced, and many Marian service books are destroyed, all events that gradually undermine constructs of the Virgin Mary developed in this book. Once Mariology became Mariolatry to the rulers of renaissance England, the Little Office that provided phonetic exercises for young choristers and readers may still have circulated widely in books of hours, but the educational imaginary of the sapient and literate Virgin came under attack as unbiblical. As Miri Rubin remarks, “The powerful medieval link between Mary and song was not totally severed by Protestants. It was transformed, as the new tone was biblical rather than emotional or mystical.” 7 Anglican choristers continued to intone evensong, but without the materia of the Mater, who rarely appears in the gospels. When Protestant reformers rose to power in the latter days of Henry VIII and beyond, Marian feasts and services were banned, and children no longer took their first dose of grammar from the Virgin’s spoon. Nor did England’s brief return to Catholicism under Mary Tudor produce a vibrant Marian literature. Into the absence of a nurturing mother of discourse rode Queen Elizabeth I, and for a time she appropriated the Virgin’s roles as intelconnections between music and language as students progressed to more advanced literary studies and also reveals the special association between poetical and musical verses. 7. Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 371.



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lectual queen, compelling speaker, and muse of poetry. The many testimonies to her literary inspiration in the works of Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others demonstrate that the power of her reign enabled a powerful new national literature. Elizabeth presided as Gloriana or the sonneteer’s desire during her own lifetime and as a legendary mentor for the colonies’ first female author, Anne Bradstreet. However, because Elizabeth’s patronage and encouragement of literary production depended upon political position and not upon theological connections inculcated in children for many generations, the image of Elizabeth as queen of the arts soon waned and gave way to more personalized poetic muses, such as John Donne’s interlocutors, Jonathan Swift’s “Stella,” or the belles dames of Romantic poets. During the English Middle Ages, Mary was figured as mother tongue and magistra of language arts for all, though she spoke to authors in a manner appropriate to their era, education, gender, and class. Literature narrating an amplified life of the Virgin and representing Mary as the feminized Wisdom flourished from the Anglo-Saxon period through the late Middle Ages, the instantiations of Maria/Sophia being as different as the little prodigy in the N-Town Mary Play and the sensitive courtly lady of John Gower’s Mirour d’ l’Omme. The ubiquitous portrayal of Mary as Sapientia in medieval English literature launched a more specific characterization of the Virgin as learned interpreter of scripture, persuasive advocate before God’s court, queen of the liberal arts. Mother of the Word, she contained the creative impulse in divine language and herself inherited copious means for inventing holy discourse. In the works of medieval English authors, holy discourse includes John of Garland’s textbooks, composed for the rise of the universities; meditative texts that responded to the influx of Franciscans into England and also an increasing lay piety; Chaucerian religious verse that offered a Marian intellectual ideal in an age of dissent; Middle English songs written for every imaginable audience; and the autobiographical reflections of Margery Kempe. Kempe emphasizes the “birthing” of her Book, but all of the aforementioned texts rely on Mary’s aid in providing form and matter. As the authors discussed in this book took up the stylus, they humbly and gratefully acknowledged, “scribit mater”: the Mother writes.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources Alan of Lille. Anticlaudianus. Translated by James J. Sheridan. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1973. ———. Compendiosa in Cantica Canticorum ad laudem deiparae virginis Mariae. PL 210. Allen, Emily Hope. Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, and Materials for his Biography. New York: D.C. Heath, 1927. The Anglo Saxon Poetic Records. Vol. 3. New York: Columbia University Press, 1936: 1–15. St. Augustine. Ennarationes in Psalmos. PL 36–37. Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. Berkeley, Theodore, trans. Jesus at the Age of Twelve, The Works of Aelred of Rievaulx. Vol. 1. Spenser, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971. Blount, John Henry, ed. The Myroure of Oure Ladye. EETS e.s. 19. London: Trubner, 1873. Blume, Clemens, S.J., ed. Johannis de Hovedene, Philomena. Leipzig: Reisland, 1930. St. Bonaventure. De reductione artium ad theologiam. 2nd ed. Edited and translated by Emma Thérèse Healy. St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: Franciscan Institute, 1955. ———. “The Tree of Life.” Works. Edited and translated by Ewert Cousins. New York: Paulist Press, 1978: 117–179. Boyd, Beverly, ed. The Middle English Miracles of the Virgin. San Marino, Calif.: Huntingdon Library, 1964. Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations. Translated by Julia Bolton Holloway. Newburyport, Mass.: Focus Information Group, 1992. St. Bridget of Sweden. The Word of the Angel. Translated by John E. Halborg. Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1996. Brown, Carleton, ed. English Lyrics from the Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932. ———. Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939.

297

298  selected bibliography ———. Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century. 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Campbell, J. J. The Advent Lyrics of the Exeter Book. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959. Collins, A. J. The Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey. Worcester: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1969. Cook, Albert S., ed. The Christ of Cynewulf. New York: Librarian Press, 1900. Davies, R. T., ed. Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964. De Biblesworth, Walter. The Treatise of Walter De Biblesworth. A Volume of Vocabularie. 2 vols. London: Privately Printed, 1857. Deguileville, Guillaume. Le pelerinage de la vie humaine. Edited by J. J. Stürzinger. London: Roxburghe Club Publications, 1897. D’Evelyn, Charlotte, ed. Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ. EETS o.s. 158. London: Oxford University Press, 1921. D’Evelyn, Charlotte, and Anna Mills, eds. “Life of St. Margaret of Antioch.” The South English Legendary. EETS o.s. 235. London: University of Oxford Press, 1956. Dreves, G. M., ed. Epithalamium. Analecta hymnica 46. Leipzig: Fuess Verlag, 1905. Elder, Rozanne E., ed. Mary, Most Holy: Meditating with the Early Cistercians. Cistercian Fathers Series 65. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2003. Etienne de Besançon. Alphabetum Narrationem. Harley MS 268 and Arundel 378. Edited by Mary Macleod Banks. EETS o.s. 126. London: Kegan Paul, 1904. Froissart, Jean. Oeuvres. Vol. 5. Edited by Kervyn de Lettenhove. Brussels Académie royale de Belgique, 1868. Furnivall, Frederick J., and Israel Gollancz, eds. Hoccleve’s Works: The Minor Poems. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Gower, John. The Complete Works of John Gower. Edited by G. C. Macaulay. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1902. Henry, Avril, ed. The Pilgrimage of the Lyfe of the Manhode. Vol. 1. EETS n.s. 288. London: Oxford University Press, 1985. Honorius Augustodunensis. Sigillum beatae Mariae. PL 172. Horace. Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926. Hoste, A., and C. H. Talbot, eds. Opera ascetica, CCCM I. In Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, vol. 1, 662–673. Turnhout: Brepols, 1971. Hoste, Anselme, ed., Joseph Dubois, trans. Quand Jésus eut douze ans. Paris: Cerf, 1958. Isidore of Seville. Etymologiae. Edited by W. M. Lindsay. Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911. Jacobus de Voragine. Legenda Aurea. 3rd ed. Edited by Th. Graesse. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1969. James, M. R., ed., trans. The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Apocalypses. 1924. Reprint with corrections, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. John of Garland. Parisiana Poetria. Edited by Traugott Lawler. Yale Studies in English 182. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.

selected bibliography 299 ———. Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie. Edited and translated by Antonio Saiani. Florence, Italy: L.S. Olschki, 1995. Julian of Norwich. Showings. Edited by Edmund Colledge, James Walsh, and Jean Leclercq. Classics of Western Christianity. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1978. Lauritis, Joseph A., Ralph A. Klinefelter, and Vernon F. Gallagher, eds. A Critical Edition of John Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961. Leclercq, Jean, and H. M. Rochais, eds. Tractatus et opuscula. In S. Bernardi Opera, vol. 8, 63–70. Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963. Liegey, G. M., ed. “The Canticum Amoris of Richard Rolle.” Traditio 12 (1956): 369–91. Littlehales, Henry, ed. The Prymer or Lay Folks’ Prayer Book (With Several Facsimiles). EETS o.s. 105. London: Kegan Paul, 1895. Love, Nicholas. Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ: A Critical Edition Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686. Edited by Michael Sargent. New York: Garland, 1992. M. Therese d’Alverny, ed. Alain de Lille, Textes Inédits. Paris: EPM, 1965. MacCracken, Henry Noble, ed. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Part 1. EETS e.s. 107. London: Oxford University Press, 1911. Meech, Sanford B., and Hope Emily Allen, eds. The Book of Margery Kempe. EETS o.s. 212. London: Oxford University Press, 1940. Meredith, Peter, ed. The Mary Play from the N.Town Manuscript. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997. Misyn, Richard, trans. The Fire of Love and The Mending of Life or The Rule of Living. EETS o.s. 106. London: Kegan Paul, 1896. Morris, Richard, ed. An Old English Miscellany. London: Oxford University Press, 1872. Norton-Smith, John, ed. John Lydgate: Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Paetow, Louis J., ed., trans. Two Medieval Satires on the University of Paris: “La Bataille des VII ars” of Henri d’Andeli and the “Morale scolarium” of John of Garland. Memoirs of the University of California 4.1–2, 65–258. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1927. Person, Henry A., ed. Cambridge Middle English Lyrics. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Philip of Harvengt. Commentaria in Cantica canticorum. PL 203. Raby, F. J. E., ed. “A Middle English Paraphrase of John of Hoveden’s ‘Philomena’ and the Text of his ‘Viola.’” Modern Language Review 30.3 (1935): 339–43. ———. The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. Raby, F. J. E., and A. J. Taylor, eds. Poems of John of Hoveden. London: Surtees Society, 1939. Rigg, A. G., ed. The Poems of Walter of Wimborne. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. Robbins, Rossell Hope, ed. The Early English Christmas Carols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Rolle, Richard. Incendium Amoris. Edited by Margaret Deanesly. Manchester: The University Press, 1915. Translated by Clifton Wolters. The Fire of Love. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972. Rupert of Deutz. Commentaria in Canticum Canticorum de Incarnatione Domini. Edited by Rhabanus Haacke. CCCM 26. Turnhout: Brepols, 1974.

300  selected bibliography ———. Commentaria in evangelium sancti Johannis. Edited by Rhabanus Haacke. CCCM 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 1969. Saupe, Karen, ed. Middle English Marian Lyrics. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998. Schmitt, Franciscus Salesius, ed. S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia. Vol. 3. Stuttgart: Fromann, 1946. Spector, Stephen, ed. The N-town Play. EETS s.s. 11, 12. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Stahl, William Harris, ed., trans. Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1971. Stallings-Taney, M., ed. Iohannis de Caulibus Meditaciones vite Christi, olim S Bonauenturo attributae. CCCM 153. Turnhout: Brepols, 1997. Thomas the Cistercian. In Cantica Canticorum. Praefatio. PL 206. Thorpe, B., ed. Codex Exoniensis. London: Society of Antiquaries, 1842. Treharne, Elaine. “Advent Lyric VII.” In Old and Middle English c. 890–1400: An Anthology, 3rd ed., 50–51. Oxford: Blackwells, 2009. Ward, Sister Benedicta, trans. The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, with the “Proslogion.” London: Penguin, 1973. William of St. Thierry. The Meditations of William of St. Thierry. Translated by A Religious of C.S.M.V. New York: Harper and Bros., 1954. Wilson, William Burton, trans. John Gower: Mirour de l’Omme (The Mirror of Mankind). East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1992. Windeatt, Barry, ed. The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition. 2000. Reprint, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Ziolkowski, Jan M., ed. The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensia). New York: Garland, 1994.

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304  selected bibliography Hagen, Susan K. “Feminist Theology and The Second Nun’s Tale: or St. Cecilia Laughs at the Judge.” Medieval Perspectives 4–5 (1989–90): 42–52. Hamburger, Jeffrey F. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Hamilton, Marie Padgett. “Echoes of Childermas in the Tale of the Prioress.” Modern Language Review 34 (1939): 1–8. Hanning, Robert. “From Eva and Ave to Eglentyne and Alisoun: Chaucer’s Insight into the Roles Women Play.” Signs 2 (1977): 580–99. Hardman, Phillipa. “Lydgate’s Life of Our Lady: A Text in Transition.” Medium Aevum 65.2 (1996): 248–68. Helvétius, Anne-Marie. “Virgo et Virago: réf lexions sur le pouvoir du voile consacré d’après les sources hagiographiques de la Gaule du nord.” In Femme et pourvoirs des femmes à Byzance et en Occident (VIe–VIIe siècles), edited by Stéphane Lebecq, Alain Dierkens, Régine Le Jan, and Jean-Marie Sansterre, 189–203. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Centre de recherché sur l’histoire de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest, Université Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3, 1999. Higginson, J. H. “Dame Schools.” British Journal of Educational Studies 22.2 (1974): 166–81. Hill, Thomas D. “A Liturgical Source for Christ I, 164–213 (Advent Lyric VII).” Notes and Queries 217 (1972): 84–89. Holsinger, Bruce W. Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001. Howard, Donald R. Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World. New York: Dutton, 1987. Howell, Margaret. Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Howes, Laura L. “On the Birth of Margery Kempe’s Last Child.” Modern Philology 90.2 (1992): 220–25. Hutchinson, Ann M. “The Myroure of oure Ladye: a Medieval Guide for Contemplatives.” In Studies in St. Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, vol. 1, edited by James Hogg, 215– 27. Analecta Cartusiana 35.19. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993. ———. “What Nuns Read: Literary Evidence from the English Bridgettine House, Syon Abbey.” Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995): 205–22. Irvine, Martin. The Making of Textual Culture: Grammatica and Literary Theory, 350– 1100. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Isaacs, N. “Who Says What in Advent Lyric VII (Christ I. 164–213).” Papers in Language and Literature 2 (1966): 162–66. Jankowski, Eileen S. “Reception of Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale: Osbern Bokenham’s Lyf of S. Cycyle.” Chaucer Review 30.3 (1996): 306–18. Jeffrey, David L. The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975. Kelly, Henry Ansgar. “A Neo-Revisionist Look at Chaucer’s Nuns.” Chaucer Review 31.2 (1996): 115–32. Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 2000. Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, and Marina Leslie, eds. Menacing Virgins: Representing Virgin-



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Index

Advent Lyrics, 21, 23, 28–30, 33, 36–37, 43, 63, 287–88: I, 35; II, 30–31; IV, 30–31, 35; VII, 29–37, 54, 73–74, 288; IX, 30– 31, 36 Aelred of Rievaulx, St. 119, 121–23, 127, 133–34, 140, 142 Affective Piety, 40, 45, 115, 117, 146–47, 162, 190–91, 194, 262, 291 n Alan of Lille, 84–87, 89, 113 An Alphabet of Tales, 173 Anglo Saxon: Exeter Book, 29, 34, 37; poetry 21–22, 27–28, 36; schools, 10– 11, 15. See also Advent Lyrics Anne, St., 4, 6f1, 50, 61, 91–93, 170n27, 254–55, 263, 280 Anselm of Canterbury, St. 117n3, 119–21, 127, 134–35, 142 Antiphons, 29, 31, 50, 196–98, 200–203, 211, 232, 288–89; antiphoner, 167, 191, 292; hymnal 78 Apocrypha: Evangelium de nativitate Mariae, 28, 240; Protevangelium of James, 4, 28, 55n125, 214n194, 240; Pseudo Matthew, 4, 28, 55n125, 240 Augustine, St., 9, 12,15, 96, 135n70, 153, 185, 225 Bede, The Venerable, 12, 96 Bernard of Clairvaux, St., 37, 69–70,

121–22, 146, 210–11. See also Religious Orders Blanche of Lancaster, 168–69 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 12, 15, 80, 110n111, 153, 171, 202n143, 246, 288 Bonaventure, St., 124–25, 127, 133, 226– 27, 242. See also Religious Orders Book of Wisdom, 4–5, 197, 221, 228 Books of Hours, 4–5, 13–14, 191, 198, 288, 291, 294 Bridget of Sweden, St.: imitated by Margery Kempe, 25, 154, 252–53, 266, 269–72, 275, 278, 282–284, 286, 290; Myroure of Oure Ladye, 23, 28, 37, 46–53, 63–64, 74, 90n57, 270, 287, 292–93; Order of St. Savior, 47–48, 53, 63–64, 270, 272, 283, 292–93; Sermo Angelicus, 46–48; Syon Abbey, 21, 28, 46, 53, 63–64, 282, 292–93; Revelations, 47, 269–72 Capella, Martianus, 80, 113; and classical paideia, 82, 100, 102; medieval commentary on, 81–86, Marriage of Mercury and Philology, 19, 23, 78–87, 94–95, 97–100, 102, 109, 113, 128 Catholic Church: chant, 14, 48, 61, 79, 160, 167, 184–85, 190–91, 203,

311

312  index Catholic Church: chant (cont.) 205–6, 219, 224, 247, 288, 291–93; churches, 83, 118, 145–46, 256, 266, 283; doctrines, 2–3, 13, 164–65, 192, 204n150, 224–25, 234, 277; early church, 48, 216, 266–67; hymn, 10–11, 13, 49–50, 62, 78, 104–5, 107–8, 110–12, 135–36, 141–43, 164, 166–67, 184, 191, 203–5, 207, 211, 220, 222–25, 227, 246, 250, 287–89, 291–92, 294; liturgy, 19, 21–22, 29, 36, 46, 57, 62, 64–65, 72–74, 85, 120, 166–67, 169, 170n28, 185, 191, 199–200, 205, 208, 225, 230, 233, 238, 247–48, 270, 286–293; power, 215–16; traditions, 9, 180, 230, 240, 248 Cecilia, St., 20, 24, 96, 205–19 Chartres Cathedral, 5: figures of liberal arts, 5, 9f4, 10f5, 75, 83 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 13, 20, 24, 29, 70–71, 74, 163–64, 171, 180, 219, 221, 246, 250, 288–89, 292–95: An ABC, 17– 18, 24, 78–79, 117, 163–165, 168–84, 191, 201, 208, 213, 219, 292–93; The Prioress’s Tale, 14, 17–18, 24, 67–68, 78–79, 99n81, 103n90, 164–65, 182– 86, 190–207, 211, 218–20, 288–89, 293; The Second Nun’s Tale, 17–18, 24, 164–65, 205–219, 288, 293 Deguilleville, Guillaume, 168, 171, 176– 77, 179 Dorothea of Montau, St. 267–268 Education: alphabet, 13–14, 78, 128–29, 166–67, 169–70,172–74, 177–78, 184; cathedral schools, 12–13, 26, 292; dame schools, 24, 163–66, 168, 182– 85, 196, 200, 205, 208, 219–20, 291; grammar schools, 11, 116, 127, 163, 168, 182, 293–94; primers, 13, 16, 18, 58, 78, 163–64, 167–68, 170, 184, 196–97, 200, 292–94; song schools, 14, 24, 164–68, 182, 184, 195–97, 199–200, 205–6, 220, 288. See also Liberal Arts Eleanor of Provence, 118, 144–46, 288 Elizabeth of Hungary, St., 267–269

Francis, St., 124, 126n32, 226. See also Religious Orders Gospels, 48, 66, 122, 140, 230, 234, 239, 277, 294: John, 21, 131; Luke, 3–4, 21– 22, 180, 228–30, 235–37, 240; Matthew, 31, 35, 234 Gower, John, 23, 28–29, 36–46, 54, 66, 74, 76, 142, 180, 194, 295 Grimestone, John, 223, 226, 238, 242 Henry III, 118, 145–46 Henry V, 21, 46, 63–64 Herebert, William, 221n3, 223, 228, 244– 45 Hoccleve, Thomas 246 Jacopone da Todi, 221n3, 243 Jesus Christ: Ascension, 48, 53, 98, 148, 154, 201, 276–77; bambini, 264–65; Circumcision, 42, 65, 71; Crucifixion, 44, 52–53, 99n81, 141, 144, 147–48, 154, 232, 238–39, 242–44, 262, 276, 285; Eucharist, 19, 28, 48–49, 51, 67, 90, 97, 256, 270; Incarnation, 21, 30– 32, 34–35, 44, 49–51, 61, 86, 94–95, 126, 130–32, 147, 151–52, 177, 237, 264, 271, 273, 275–76; Nativity, 42, 71, 133, 135–36, 149, 151, 226, 237–38, 248, 251n4, 252, 261–65, 270; Passion, 22– 24, 40, 44, 49, 51–52, 55–56, 63, 66, 71, 117–18, 125–26, 133, 144, 147–48, 153–54, 158, 161, 173, 181, 224, 239– 244, 248, 254, 262, 265, 275–76, 284; Resurrection, 44–45, 52–53, 148, 154, 178; Virgin Birth, 2–3, 31–32, 34–35, 42, 71, 74, 132, 147, 151, 225, 251n4, 252–54, 261–63, 270–71, 280–81, 288 John of Garland, 15–16, 18–19, 21, 23– 24, 29, 72, 75, 116, 165, 190, 287, 289, 292: academic career, 76–79; Astrea, 89–90, 96; copula, 88–89, 94; Epithalamium Beate Virginis Marie, 23, 75–82, 85–100, 102–7, 112–13, 128, 190, 293; Marian wheel, 107–9; Parisiana

Poetria, 23, 75–79, 100–13, 115, 128, 172, 291–93 John of Howden, 16, 18, 20, 24, 65–66, 70, 115–26, 140–46, 156–58, 160–62, 165, 181, 190, 221, 254, 289: Amor, 142, 144, 146–48, 152, 154, 156, 159, 162; O Mira Creatura, 142; Philomena, 23–24, 70, 117n3, 119n7, 124, 132n58, 141–62, 185, 287–88; Quindecim Gaudia, 142, 149; Quinquaginta salutations, 142, 153–54; Viola, 142, 151–52, 161 Julian of Norwich, 68, 192, 253, 255, 276 Latin: in schools, 10–14, 17–18, 24, 26, 78–79, 127–29, 132, 134–36, 141, 164– 68, 184–85, 191, 195–97, 200, 220, 291–93; language, 11, 26–27, 48, 58, 61, 63, 65, 77, 82, 98, 118, 131n51, 138, 158, 185, 195, 200, 206–9, 214–15, 221, 223–25, 231, 267, 283, 291 Legenda Aurea, 4, 28, 55n125, 57, 206, 209–10, 214–15, 217, 256n15 Liberal arts: Cicero, 71, 81–82, 96, 100–2, 153, 172; grammar, 5, 9–12, 14, 15n30, 16–17, 20–21, 23, 28, 66, 74, 77–79, 89, 90–91, 96, 101, 104, 125, 127–34, 137–38, 141, 163–65, 168, 183–84, 195–97, 206, 208, 211, 213, 215–16, 219, 244, 287–88, 292–94; Horace, 78–79, 101–3, 113, 293n6; Lady Grammar; 11, 69–70, 81, 92, 109, 129, 149; Lady Rhetoric; 5, 23, 81–82, 99, 113; logic, 5, 9–10, 12–13, 16, 66, 77, 90, 96, 127–28, 132–33, 141, 182, 206, 217, 219, 244, 292; music, 5, 14–15, 18, 22–23, 77, 88–89, 104–5, 108–10, 116– 17, 119, 133–34, 143, 152–53, 155, 157–58, 161–62, 164, 182–86, 201–2, 204–7, 222–23, 226, 247–48, 287–92, 293n6; Ovid; 12, 79, 128; pedagogy, 15–19, 22–24, 77, 79–80, 87, 101, 113, 115–17, 128, 132, 163, 167, 169, 176, 201, 287– 88, 291, 293; Poetria Nova, 15, 103n89; Quintilian, 9, 14, 16–17, 102, 172; rhetoric, 3,5, 9, 10–13, 15–17, 26, 65– 66, 70–73, 75, 77–79, 81–83, 85–86,

index 313 88, 90–94, 96, 98–106, 112–13, 117, 125, 127–28, 132–34, 139–39, 141–42, 149, 153, 162, 164, 172–73, 182, 190, 206, 208, 211, 215–16, 219, 243–44, 277, 284, 291–92, 294; textbooks,13, 15–17, 23, 29, 77–79, 93, 100, 103n90, 110, 113, 115–16, 167, 182, 294–95; trivium. 5, 13–14, 16–19, 21–24, 26, 74–75, 77, 79–82, 87–88, 95–96, 99, 127–28, 141, 159, 182, 184, 190, 206, 209, 216–19, 292. See also Chartres Cathedral Lydgate, John: Life of Our Lady, 23, 28, 37, 40, 63–75, 113–14, 116–17, 142, 162, 192, 211, 247–48, 292; lyrics, 224, 230–31, 247–48; poetics, 64, 66–69, 73; Temple of Glas, 66–67 Magnificat, 3, 61, 74, 149, 153, 185–86, 191, 197, 206, 235–38, 248, 290 Margaret of Antioch, 256–57, 266, 273, 281 Margery Kempe, 250, 252–53: The Book of Margery Kempe, 25, 154, 250–86, 290– 91; childbirth, 252–59, 261, 263–66, 275, 291; gift of tears, 25, 252–54, 259, 261–62, 266, 269–70, 273–77, 284– 86, 290; imitation of female saints, 25, 252–53, 255, 263, 266–72, 277–78, 283–84, 286, 289–91, 293–94; imitatio Mariae, 18, 20, 25, 74, 252–53, 257–58, 262, 266, 269, 271, 279, 281, 285–86, 290–91; “labowr,” 25, 252, 255, 258– 63, 266, 274–77, 284, 286, 290; Liber I, 25, 253–55, 257–58, 260, 266–67, 277–79, 281–84; Liber II, 25, 252– 53, 255, 260, 278, 280–82, 284–86; meditative practice, 162, 264–65, 273– 74; pilgrimage, 253–55, 257–59, 262, 264–65, 271, 276–77, 279, 289–90; prayer, 25, 252–53, 255, 260, 278–80, 282, 284–86; preaching, 258–59, 276– 77, 286; visions, 25, 250, 252–58, 260– 78, 280–81, 285–86, 289–90 Marian Feasts: Annunciation, 3–5, 7f2, 21–22, 31–32, 34–36, 42, 50–51, 54, 56,

314  index Marian Feasts: Annunciation (cont.) 60, 69–70, 93–94, 134, 147, 149, 157, 174, 176–77, 180, 186, 189f10, 194, 197, 203–4, 221, 223, 226–35, 237, 248–49; Assumption, 40, 45, 49, 52, 55n123, 65, 72, 81, 84–86, 93, 98–100, 104, 145, 148, 154, 157, 204n150, 226–27, 247– 48, 288–89; Nativity of the Virgin, 40, 49–50, 64, 72, 91–92; Purification, 42, 65, 72–73, 265–66, 271; Visitation, 3, 42, 55n125, 56, 61, 149, 263, 279 Marian Middle English Lyrics, 24–25, 220–29, 248–49: “Als I lay upon a nith,” 238; “A Son! tak hede to me whas sone thou was,” 240; “Blessed beo thu, lavedi, ful of hovene blisse,” 245; “Edi beo thu, hevene queen,” 231; “From heovene into eorthe,” 223, 230, “Gabriel, fram evene kingh,” 229– 30; “Hayle glorious lady and hevenly queen,” 224, 230–31; “Hayle luminary and benigne lantern,” 247–48; “I syng of a myden / That is makeles,” 232–33; “Ler to loven as I love thee,” 238–39; “Maiden and moder, cum and se,” 242; “Maiden in the mor lay,” 233–34; “Nowel, nowel, nowel / Syng we with myrth,” 234; “Of alle women that ever were borne,” 243; “O litel whyle lesteneth to me,” 244; “Quis est hic?” 231–33; “Stabat Mater,” 239, 243; “Stond wel, Moder, under rode,” 223, 240–43; “Suete sone, reu on me, and brest out of thi bondes,” 242; “Swete and benygne moder and may,” 246–47; “Undo thi dore, my spuse dere” 232; “Worsshipful maiden to the world, Marie,” 246 Marie d’Oignies, St., 253, 267, 289–90 Mary, Blessed Virgin: as advocate, 3, 81, 177, 179, 182, 201, 220, 230, 241, 244– 47, 295; in art, 4–8, 9f4, 19, 49, 126, 146, 186, 189f10, 221, 228, 233, 249, 251n4; bride of Christ, 30, 47, 57, 81, 84–89, 93–94, 96–100, 102, 113, 144, 252, 271–72, 275–76, 293; child, 4, 23,

28, 39–41, 54–63, 65, 69, 71, 73–74, 93; courtly lady, 37, 43, 74, 142, 144, 178, 193–94, 231–32, 295; compassion, 44, 51–52, 121, 241, 254, 262; as Ecclesia, 99, 232; Lady Grammar, 11, 17, 20, 28, 70, 129, 149; Lady Rhetoric, 3, 17, 20, 23, 28, 74, 81, 99, 113–115, 163; model for motherhood, 3, 20, 25, 145, 251–255, 264–265, 271, 277, 285; Mother of the Word, 18, 21–22, 29, 71, 79, 94–95, 105, 113, 129–34, 147–48, 151, 154, 194, 207–8, 228, 251–52, 261, 264, 277, 286, 295; muse, 5, 13, 18, 24, 28, 41, 64, 66–71, 75, 104, 106, 113, 116–17, 134–36, 142, 160, 193, 206, 209–10, 212, 219, 292, 294–95; passable gate, 31, 36, 202, 204–5, 207–8; queen of the liberal arts, 5, 9–10, 13, 16–18, 21, 23, 29, 75, 79–80, 88, 90, 103n90, 104, 113,165, 185, 206, 218–19, 287, 294–95; Stella maris, 66–67, 71, 82, 94–95, 103n90, 106, 110–12, 143, 155– 56, 159, 161, 171, 202; teacher, 5, 20, 24, 27–28, 30–32, 34–37, 45, 53, 60, 63, 73–74, 92–94, 113, 135, 137, 164– 65, 168, 183–84, 200–201, 211–13, 219, 234, 268–69, 291–93; Wisdom (Sophia or Sapientia), 3, 5, 8f3, 13, 19, 23, 60, 63, 74, 94, 98, 113, 132, 268, 295; compared to Eve, 35, 52–53, 89, 111, 228, 257; descriptions of her body, 15–16, 20, 48–52, 74, 92, 107, 117, 119, 126, 128–30, 133, 138–39, 141, 143, 149–56, 159, 161, 192, 199, 204–5, 207, 232, 248, 270, 291; garden, landscape or flower imagery, 88, 94–95, 105, 111, 149–52, 154, 158–59, 178, 192–93, 213–14, 233–34, 244; Hours of, 13–14, 48, 167–68, 170n28, 184, 186, 191, 193, 196, 208, 291, 294; in holy family, 28, 40, 65–66, 121–22, 127, 133, 140, 147, 159, 162, 252, 254, 263–65; joys and sorrows, 28, 40, 42–45, 49, 51–52, 194, 230–231; prayers to, 13, 16, 18, 21, 24, 40, 61–64, 66, 103n90, 106, 116, 120–21, 123–25, 130, 135–36, 140, 148,

160, 168–70, 176–77, 179n69, 180–82, 184, 193,196–97,199, 209–12, 224–25, 230–31, 235, 245–46, 285; marriage to Joseph, 28, 30–36, 41, 54, 56–57, 59– 60, 62, 65, 69–71, 93, 95–96 214, 288; and music, 3, 23, 25, 185, 287–89; with St. Anne, 4, 6f1, 49–50, 91–92, 254– 55, 263 Meditative Tradition, 13, 16, 18, 22–24, 28, 38, 145, 167, 185–86, 220, 243: Continental, 27, 117–18, 227; English, 23–24, 65–66, 69–70, 74, 115–26, 142–43, 156, 224, 288, 291–92, 295; Meditationes vitae Christi, 28, 37, 40, 44, 55n125, 65–66, 72–73, 117–18, 124– 25, 254, 264–65; Memory, 22, 116–17, 119, 124–28, 130n50, 133, 138–39, 141, 161–62, 171–73, 177–80, 182, 224–26 Orality, 24–25, 28, 61, 210, 221, 223–25, 230, 249–51, 261 Peckham, John, 65–66 Philip of Harvengt, 85–86 Psalms, 3, 13, 35, 60, 62, 68, 120, 148– 49, 167, 170n28, 172–73, 180, 185, 190, 203, 235, 237, 288: Psalm 8, 185–86, 191–95, 197–99, 202–3, 205, 211, 288; Gradual, 58, 61, 170n28, 195, 287; psalters, 5, 8f3, 78, 146, 180–81, 185– 86, 187f8, 188f9, 190–91, 193 Queen Anne, 165, 171, 263 Religious Orders: Cistercians, 84, 146– 47, 227; Dominicans, 130, 149, 180, 227, 268; Franciscans, 66, 117–19, 121, 123–27, 135, 146–47, 180, 214–15, 217, 226–27, 233, 295

index 315 Richard II, 171, 263 Richard Rolle, 23–24, 275, 289: Canticum Amoris, 115, 157–162, 288; Incendium Amoris, 157–59, 269–70; meditative practice, 115–17, 119, 126–27, 156–159, 161–62, 254, 270 Rosary, 103n90, 179–181, 194, 199, 224, 227, 282 Song, 3, 14, 18–19, 23–24, 54, 61–63, 81, 93–94, 96, 117, 119, 121, 126, 134–35, 137–38, 141–44, 148–49, 152–53, 156– 58, 160–61, 163, 165, 167–168, 169n25, 170n28, 182, 184–86, 190–99, 201, 203–207, 210–11 216, 219, 221–27, 230, 232, 234–35, 238, 248, 287–95. See also Liberal Arts. Song of Songs, 17, 37, 79, 81–82, 84–87, 122, 144, 151, 155, 159, 211, 231–33, 276 Theater: Mary Play, 23, 28, 37, 40, 43, 53–63, 74, 195, 206, 287, 295; staging, 55, 59, 62, 287; N–Town plays, 23, 28, 37, 40, 54–55, 61–62, 74, 195, 295; Proclamation Play, 55–56, 63 Walter of Wimborne, 20, 65–66, 114–15, 117–18, 120–21, 123, 254, 289, 292: Ave Virgo Mater Christi, 23, 127–33, 136–37, 141, 159, 161, 163, 292; grammar school master, 16, 18, 23–24, 116, 118–19, 125, 144, 156, 159, 163, 190, 287–88; Marie Carmina, 23–24, 122, 124, 127, 133–42, 147–49, 153, 157n141, 161–62, 287, 292; use of images, 135–36, 138–40, 142–44, 147–48, 150–51, 153–54, 156–62, 165, 226. See also Religious Orders

Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England was designed in Scala and typeset by Kachergis Book Design of Pittsboro, North Carolina. It was printed on 55-pound Natures Recycled and bound by Sheridan Books of Ann Arbor, Michigan.