(A version of this paper was presented at the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 2009)

Citations from this post must be properly and appropriately acknowledged

David Falls is the project doctoral student, in the second year of his PhD at Queen’s University Belfast

In his essay, ‘The Haunted Text’, Vincent Gillespie, following A. I. Doyle, has warned that ‘we need to look more carefully at Carthusian interventions in contemporary spiritual writing and … assess the evidence for textual circulation cautiously, without assuming that wide dissemination beyond an audience of confreres or fellow religious was ever a common intention of Carthusian scribes and authors’.[1] This re-examination is, however, not applied to one of the most widely circulating Carthusian texts produced in the fifteenth century: Nicholas Love’s translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. In fact Gillespie claims that, ‘in the fifteenth century … Carthusian intervention in public religious cultures starts at a high water mark with the exception that perhaps proves the rule: the confident, almost glib control that Nicholas Love, in his Mirror … brings to its engagement with the Meditationes’.[2] In light of this slightly contradictory drive to re-examine the circulation of Carthusian texts this paper will attempt, through an analysis of Love’s role as Prior of the Mount Grace Charterhouse and the ‘translator / compiler’ of the Mirror, as well as an investigation of the text itself, to demonstrate that its wide circulation may never have been the goal of Love’s translation project; and that the imagined audience of ‘symple soules’ created by Love may have been at least partially misread.

Indeed, while the majority of modern scholarly work on Love’s Mirror seems preoccupied with examining its place within the context of the ‘Oxford Translation Debate’ and Arundel’s ‘Constitutions’, no doubt in part due to the importance assigned to the text in Nicholas Watson’s seminal Speculum article ‘Censorship and Cultural Change’, it is hoped that by briefly setting aside the narrative which suggests the Mirror springing complete from the hand of Love in 1410 to be passed to the hands of Arundel for his approval, and focusing on other circumstances of its production, such as the influence of the charterhouse, we may be able to more closely analyse Love’s possibly decade long project of translation, and examine several questions which seem never to have occurred in the critical history of the Mirror; such as why Love chose to translate the Meditationes at all.

While Love’s Carthusian vocation and the Franciscan vocation of his pseudo-Bonaventuran source may have been direct opposites, and led to a substantial reworking of Love’s text from its Latin source, it is possible that they shared a common originating impulse. In a section of the ‘Prologue’ of the Meditationes the pseudo-Bonaventure reveals both his purpose in composing the work and the audience for which it was composed, presumably a ‘Poor Clare’ of the Franciscan Order, declaring:

Now though, it is my intention to introduce you in some way to these meditations on the life of Christ … So if you wish to profit from all this, Sister, you must place yourself in the presence of whatever is related.[3]

This role of providing spiritual guidance for a dependant could be seen as analogous to Love’s role as Prior of the Mount Grace Charterhouse, as would the production of such guidance in the form of a text. As Guigo I, the fifth Prior of the La Grande Chartreuse and so-called second founder of the Carthusian Order, records in his ‘Constitutions’:

We desire that books be made with the greatest attention and kept very carefully, like perpetual food for our souls, so that because we cannot preach the word of God by our mouths, we may do so with our hands. In effect, however many books we copy, that many times we are seen as heralds of the truth; and hope for a reward from the Lord, for all those who through them are corrected from error, or profess universal truth, and for all those also who repent of their sins and of their vices or who are enflamed by a desire for the heavenly land.[4]

Indeed, elsewhere, Gillespie has commented that ‘from early in its history, the Carthusian Order recognized that withdrawal from the temptation of the world did not eliminate the need for pastoral care of those in its communities … [and] for most purposes the chapter’s pastoral function was devolved to the Prior of the individual house’.[5] As such, a devotional guide like the Meditationes would not only provide an example of the kind of ‘preaching by hand’ required by the Carthusian vocation, but its popularity and the authority garnered by its association with Bonaventure would make it an obvious ‘source text’ for a Prior such as Love.

Further, while the pseudo-Bonaventuran author was providing spiritual guidance for the Franciscan Order’s female members, Love’s role as Prior of a Carthusian charterhouse could be seen as coming with its own set of spiritual dependants. Here I think it is important to take a moment to think about what we mean when we talk about Carthusians. E. Margaret Thompson has commented that from their very beginnings ‘the Carthusians, shutting themselves off from the world, had intended to live entirely by working the estates within their boundaries, so as to be independent of foreign rates or profits’,[6] however, as a purely contemplative and enclosed order supposedly ‘dead to the world’ they were also forced to rely on a separate body of labour to fulfil their temporal needs. As such, ‘the Carthusian polity consisted of two bodies of religious, both subject to the same prior and to the decrees of the same chapter, but each leading its own existence. The one body consisted of the solitaries or choir-monks, living in the upper house, and the other of the lay brothers or converses, dwelling in the lower house’.[7]

Thompson among others has argued that ‘the institution of converses was an obvious way out of the difficulty of cultivating their estates, when the monks of any Order were intended to devote themselves to contemplation and study’;[8 and while the ‘life of the choir-monk may be described as mainly passed in prayer, … that of the converses [was passed] in the scarcely less devout labour of the temporal business of the community’.][9] In turn these two bodies can be seen as establishing a symbiotic relationship between the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ houses, in which the lay-brothers provided for the monk’s temporal needs, while the monks provided for the lay-brothers spiritual needs.

Although the ‘lower house’ has been described as leading its own existence ‘the supervision of both houses belonged to the Prior, of the upper house immediately, and of the lower through the procurator, except during the week which he [the Prior] spent with his sons below’.[10] As has been noted by Gillespie, ‘if pastoral care in the upper house placed the Prior in the role of first among equals in the exercise of pastoral ministry, his function in the lower house is more comparable to that of a priest in a secular environment’.[11] In fact, the Prior was mandated by Guigo’s ‘Constitutions’ to provide spiritual care for those in the lower house and Thompson has recorded that ‘four weeks he passed in his cell like the rest of the solitaries, and the fifth he spent with the lay-brothers … when his intercourse with them must have been more direct’.[12] It is in this direct intercourse with the lay-brothers of the Mount Grace Charterhouse that we may see an originating impulse for Love’s translation of the Meditationes.

This may be especially true given that ‘from the earliest legislation of the order it was assumed that the instruction and private prayer of the members of the lower house would be in the vernacular’.[13] As such, ‘the Carthusian order had direct experience of vernacular instruction of a pastoral and catechetic nature which predated by some years the concern for similar vernacular instruction for the laity as a whole’.[14] This rich tradition of vernacular spiritual guidance could easily have led to the composition of an early form of a work such as the Mirror, drawn into English from a Latin source, and with a similar originating impulse: to enable Love to provide spiritual guidance to his dependants.

However, from the very beginning of the Mirror there is a clear departure from the ‘Franciscan’ nature of Love’s Latin source. In his exposition of Paul’s letter to the Romans in the ‘Proheme’ Love comments that ‘tweyne þinges’ strengthen a man’s hope of eternal life ‘pacience in herte’ but also the ‘ensaumple of vertues & gude liuyng of holy men written in bokes’.[15] As such, it seems interesting that one of the first major excisions of material from the Meditationes should be its invocation of St. Francis as a model for the Christian devotee:

How do you think blessed Francis arrived at so great an abundance of virtues and so lucid an understanding of the Scripture, and also at such a clearsighted realisation of the deceits and vices of the enemy if not from meditation and habitual association with his Lord Jesus? He was so ardently drawn towards that life that his own life became a mirror resemblance of Christ’s life.[16]

The obvious question then becomes why would Love excise a reference to one of the most holy men from his own book? The answer may be found in the final section of the ‘Proheme’ in which Love names his work:

For als miche as in þis boke bene contynede diuerse ymaginacions of cristes life, þe which life fro þe bygynnyng in to þe ending euer blessede & withoute synne, passing alle þe lifes of alle o þer seyntes, as for a singulere prerogatife, may wor þily be clepede þe blessede life of Jesu crist, þe which also because ‘it may not be fully discriuede as þe lifes of o þer seyntes, bot in a maner of liknes as þe ymage of mans face is shewed in þe mirroure. þerfore as for a pertynent name of tis boke, it may skilfully be cleped, þe Mirrour of þe blessed life of Jesu criste.[17]

This section demonstrates the first significant split between source and translation, and signals the inherent tension of a Carthusian translator / compiler composing a work for his own purposes from a Latin exemplar heavily influenced by the personal theological politics of its Franciscan author. While it can be argued that the Meditationes and the Mirror share a common function in providing spiritual instruction to dependant members of their respective orders, such as the Franciscan Clares and the Carthusian lay-brothers, their content must ultimately differ to reflect their own vocation. While one was out in the world imitating Christ following the model codified by St. Francis, the other was enclosed, meditating on the Divine, and ‘preaching with his hands’. As such, for the author of the Meditationes Vitae Christi the ‘mirror’ of Christ was the life of St. Francis, for Love the ‘mirror’ was the text itself.

If the two texts can be seen as demonstrating two distinct vocations it should not be surprising that they also diverge in favouring the practices of their particular orders. While several of Love’s re-workings of the Meditationes can be seen as speaking directly to the practices of his own Order, others can also be seen to demonstrate a distinct separation from the Franciscan practices of the pseudo-Bonaventuran source. While a complete comparison of the differences between Franciscan and Carthusian practices and their expression in the Meditationes and the Mirror is beyond the scope of this paper, it should be pointed out that practices which the pseudo-Bonaventure applies to the ‘character’ of Christ, such as begging and travelling barefoot, are almost completely excised by Love.

In effect the ‘character’ of Christ in the Mirror can easily be read as a site of cultural and theological conflict, for while Love’s translation removes the specifically Franciscan and mendicant aspects from the Meditationes ‘character’ of Christ in its place we find a Christ closely connected to the solitary and enclosed life of the Carthusian. Indeed, Love reworks a great deal of the domestic life of Christ, as found in the Meditationes, to promote his own Carthusian vocation. This is most obviously demonstrated in the chapter ‘What manere of lyuyng oure lorde Jesus hadde’. The importance of this addition is marked by Love in a passage which describes Christ’s domestic life as central to the purpose of theMirror:

Bot now to go aзeyn to oure principale matere of þe mirrour of þe blessed life of oure lord Jesu. beholde we þere þe maner of lyuyng of Þat blessed cumpanye in pouerte & simplenes.[18]

In this section the house of the Holy family is transformed into a Carthusian charterhouse in which Christ, Mary and Joseph ‘wenten to praiere by hem self in hir closetes. For as we mowe ymagine þei hade no grete house bot a litel, in þe whiche þei hadde þre seuerynges as it were þre smale chaumbres, þere specialy to pray & to slepe’[19]. The detail provided in this passage clearly reworks the material of the Meditationes in which the arrangement is described as ‘Three beds in some kind of little room’, possibly recalling the early practices of Francis’ first followers who, on returning from Rome settled ‘in a derelict hut at a place known as Rivo Torto, where the buildings were so small and cramped that the friars had scarcely room to sit down, and Francis had to make chalk marks on the beams to indicate where each of the brothers might lie’.[20]

Love’s interpolation of another authority into his translation of the Meditationes may demonstrate that his work was composed from a position within, or at least with an awareness of, a specifically Carthusian tradition of devotional writing. In explaining his purpose for composing the Mirror Love suggests that he will provide ‘meditacions of cristes lyfe more pleyne in certeyne partyes’[21] as ‘edifying to hem þat bene [of] simple vndirstondyng’[22]. This motivation is drawn not only from Love’s immediate Latin source, but also from a source closer to Love’s own personal vocation, William of St. Thierry’s Golden Epistle, often wrongly attributed to St. Bernard, and composed in the twelfth century for the Carthusian brothers of Mont Dieu. Indeed, in the ‘Proheme’ to the Mirror Love refers specifically to William’s advice on devotional composition:

Simple soules as seynt Bernerde seye contemplacion of þe monhede of cryste is more liking more spedefull & more sykere þan is hyεe contemplacion of þe godhed ande þerfore to hem is principally to be sette in mynde þe ymage of crystes Incarnation.[23]

While this passage is often used to equate Love’s ‘simple soules’ with the lay readers of the fifteenth century, William’s simple souls are in fact Carthusian novices.

Although scholars such as Michelle Karnes have attempted to separate William’s ‘simple souls’ from Love’s; arguing that William ‘characterizes as “simple” those novices who have yet to ascend in spiritual proficiency’, while Love’s ‘“symple creatures” … represent “laypeople” … because he does not allow these “creatures” to graduate to any less simple state’,[24] Ryan Perry has recently argued that ‘Love’s text should be seen as complimenting, and indeed, directing its audience to other books of interest that extended beyond the devotional limits prescribed in the Mirror’.[25] This is most obviously demonstrated in the abridgement of the section on the ‘actif & contemplatife’ life, in which Love excises the majority of the material from the Meditationes, and refers the reader to the work of Walter Hilton.

William’s Golden Epistle is in fact a source Love can be seen to be drawing on throughout the Mirror, suggesting that he may have shared William’s motivation to instruct the younger brethren and the novices freshly arrived to the Carthusian life. Indeed, in some ways Love’s Mirror could be read as the practical evolution of William’s devotional guidance. This can most clearly be seen in a long passage in the chapter ‘Of þe fasting of oure lord Jesu & hese temptacions in deserte’, in which Love rewrites a substantial amount of material from the Pseudo-Bonaventuran source to further root certain practices of the Carthusian vocation in Christ’s example. This section would already have had particular resonance for a Carthusian audience with their appropriation of the role of desert dwellers, and indeed, Love begins the section by addressing the reader as a ‘solitarye’, an address not found in the pseudo-Bonaventure:

Now take gode entent here specialy þou þat art solitarye & haue in mynde, when þou etest þi mete alone as without mannus felashepe, þe manere of þis mete, & how lowely oure lorde Jesus sitteþ don to his mete on þe bare gronde for þere hade he neiþer bankere nor cushyne.[26]

Love also takes the opportunity to further link Christ’s meal to his Carthusian brethren, claiming that ‘þis felawship hast þou þouh þou se hem not, when þou etest alone in þi celle’[27]. This sentiment echoes William’s Golden Epistle which claims ‘the man who has God with him is never less alone than when he is alone’,[28] as, ‘when heavenly pursuits are continually practiced in the cell, heaven is brought into close proximity to the cell’.[29] In effect, this addition to the Mirror seems to be a practical fulfilment of William’s devotional scheme. While in the Golden Epistle William had suggested to the novices of Mont Dieu that ‘when you eat do not give yourself wholly to the business of eating … but dwell upon and as it were digest something that recalls the Lord’s sweetness or a passage from the Scriptures’,[30] Love may have actually set out to produce an appropriate ‘passage’ for the residents of his own charterhouse.

Love’s rewriting of this section of the Meditationes, along with many other examples not touched on in this paper, can clearly be seen as suggestive of an ‘implied’ Carthusian audience for the Mirror, as he appears to be speaking to, and reminding them of their own specific practices.

While this paper has attempted to examine the importance of the milieu of the charterhouse much work still remains to be done on examining the full extent of Love’s vocation and career on the composition and dissemination of the Mirror, and indeed many questions remain to be answered. Specifically, how did Love’s own personal and professional interaction with members of other religious Orders shaped the text and its patterns of circulation? This is especially urgent given that it circulates not only within the Carthusian Order but also the Abbeys of Barking and Syon. Similarly, how and when did Love come across texts such as the Meditationes and the Golden Epistle? Given that recent research may have uncovered both more details of Love’s career and his possible textual sources, there may soon be more to say here. And finally, can the dissemination of Love’s text outside the milieu of the charterhouse into the hands of a lay owner such as Joan Holland be seen as a deliberate strategy in the service of a kind of ‘Carthusian affinity’ upon which the charterhouse relied for support? Indeed, much work remains to be done on the relationship often taken for granted between Love and Arundel. By examining these issues it is hoped that we can move past the static and indeed monolithic image often held of Love’s Mirror as a text which was ‘created’ in response to a specific socio-political and cultural pressure. Instead we might further assess what seems to be a deliberate strategy of adaptation and dissemination either by Love, in his role as Prior, or by a member of his Order.

Notes

1 Vincent Gillespie, “The Haunted Text: Reflections in The Mirrour to Deuote People”, 133-134.

2 Gillespie, “The Haunted Text” 134.

3 Johannes de Caulibus, Meditations on the Life of Christ, 3-4.

4 Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England, 48.

5 Vincent Gillespie, ‘Cura Pastoralis in Deserto’, 162.

6 E. Margaret Thompson, The Carthusian Order in England, 123.

7 Thompson 27.

8 Thompson 86 n.3.

9 Thompson 27.

10 Thompson 28.

11 Gillespie, ‘Cura Pastoralis in Deserto’ 165.

12 Thompson 28.

13 Gillespie, ‘Cura Pastoralis in Deserto’ 166.

14 Gillespie, ‘Cura Pastoralis in Deserto’ 166.

15 Nicholas Love,The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text, 9: 13.

16 Caulibus 3.

17 Love 11: 9-18.

18 Love 63: 33-35.

19 Love 64: 9-12.

20 John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517, 20.

21 Love 10: 8.

22 Love 10: 22.

23 Love 10:24-26.

24 Michelle Karnes, ‘Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ’, 385.

25 Ryan Perry, ‘Thinking on Christ’s Passion: The Cultural Locations of Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord and the Middle English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Tradition’, (Forthcoming) 39.

26 Love 74: 6-10.

27 Love 74: 16-17.

28 William of St. Thierry 19.

29 William of St. Thierry 21.

30 William of St. Thierry 54.

30 William of St. Thierry 54.

Works Cited:

Brantley, Jessica. Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England. London: U Chicago P, 2007.
Johannes de Caulibus. Meditations on the Life of Christ. Ed & Trans. Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller and C. Mary Stallings-Taney. Ashville: Pegasus Press, 1999.
Dechanet, J.M. “Introduction.” The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren at Mont Dieu. By William of St. Thierry. Trans. Theodore Berkeley. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1976. ix-xxxiii.
Gillespie, Vincent. “Cura Pastoralis in Deserto” in De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England. Ed. Michael G. Sargent. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989. 161-181.
—. “The Haunted Text: Reflections in The Mirrour to Deuote People”. The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors and Readers. Eds. Jill Mann and Maura Nolan. Notre Dame: U Notre Dame P, 2006. 129-172.
Karnes, Michelle. “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ”. Speculum 82. (2007): 380-408.
Love, Nicholas. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text. Ed. Michael G. Sargent. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2004.
Moorman, John. A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968.
Perry, Ryan. “Thinking on Christ’s Passion: The Cultural Locations of Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord and the Middle English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Tradition.” Forthcoming, 1-50.
Sargent, Michael G. Ed. De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989.
—. Ed. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition. By Nicholas Love. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2005.
Thompson, E. Margaret. The Carthusian Order in England. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1930.
Watson, Nicholas. “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409″. Speculum 70. 4. (Oct. 1995): 822-864.
William of St. Thierry. The Golden Epistle: A Letter to the Brethren of Mont Dieu. Trans. Theodore Berkeley. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1976.