Michelle Karnes, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ: Interiority, Imagination and Meditations on the Life of Christ.” Speculum 82 (2007): pp. 380-408.

Citations from this post must be properly and appropriately acknowledged

Michelle Karnes has provided a welcome sign of the renewed critical interest in pseudo-Bonaventuran ‘Lives of Christ’, or, as she argues they might be more fittingly tagged, “Gospel Meditations” (p. 382, n. 8). Her essay provides an important reconsideration of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ in opposition to Eamon Duffy’s idea of “the democratisation of the tradition of affective meditation on the Passion” (p. 381) with the concomitant proposition that vernacular translations such as the Mirror acted to spiritually empower the laity and to homogenize spiritual ambition across the lay/clerisy divide. Karnes problematises such a perspective by comparing the relative spiritual ambition of the Mirror against its Latin source, Meditationes vitae Christi. The case is presented that the ultimate ambition of meditation in the theological tradition (and in Latin texts such as the Meditationes), is to transcend from purely material meditation on Christ incarnate to an intellectual knowledge of the immaterial, the divine.

Through this essay’s initial consideration of Love’s intended audience, its useful study of medieval cognitive theory, and by highlighting Love’s revisions of the Meditationes, Karnes sets out the idea that the Mirror reconstitutes the idea of meditatio as it appears in the Latin archetype. It is argued that in the Mirror such devotional exercises are not intended to prepare for a spiritual progression to consideration of the Godhead, but that instead Love subtly alters his source to delimit meditative activity for his lay audiences to imagining only “bodily þinges” (p. 394). The author reveals, in Karnes’ words, “his idea of what a proper lay spirituality both is and is not” (p. 386), and thus demarcates the lay from the religious, the material from the ineffable. In what almost feels like a ‘bonus track’, Karnes goes on to assess the Mirror’s relationship to the Bible, and thus to the context in which Love’s book is so regularly placed, as a reactionary source of safe Gospel materials in opposition to Lollard Biblical translation. Rather than reading Love’s text as a critique of Lollardy through its very “method” (Gospel meditations rather than Gospel translation), the Mirror is deemed to render the scriptures “irrelevant to lay devotion” (p. 403), an attribute that is not necessarily proof of its ideological opposition to Biblical translation.

This essay represents a significant contribution to critical discussion of the Mirror, particularly in highlighting the dangers of the idea of vernacular translation as ‘democratising’, and in pointing out the insufficiency of viewing Love’s translation as constituting the textual and ideological binary to the Wycliffite Bible. Karnes’ article, nevertheless, leaves tantalizing problems whose answers may lie in pseudo-Bonaventuran texts not discussed within her essay (texts such as the Privity of the Passion and the ‘Middle English Meditationes de Passione Christi’ that are similarly limited to consideration of Christ’s humanity), and indeed, with reference to the manuscript corpus of the Mirror, a body of materials whose import is entirely elided within the scope of her piece.

The most significant problem from the perspective of the Geographies of Orthodoxy project is in correlating Karnes’ understanding of Love’s intended audience with the actual audiences who patronised and owned manuscripts of the Mirror. Here the Mirror’s description of its readers as “symple creatures”, is taken to be approximate with an extraordinarily variegated class of person, the laity, and the essay ultimately suffers due to the imprecision of this epithet, or the lack of any attempt to define a more specific model of Love’s intended audience. Moreover, Karnes consigns this amorphous audience of the Mirror to a state of permanent spiritual stasis due to her belief that the text “does not allow those ‘creatures’ to graduate to any less simple state” (p.385). The audience thus “constitute the unlearned rather than the learning” (p. 385) from the perspective attributed to the Mirror’s author. Such a view of Love’s audience is incompatible with the manuscript evidence. Among the earliest identifiable owners of the Mirror we may count the familiae of the most powerful baronial classes in England alongside members of religious orders, patrons who in all likelihood directly obtained their exemplars through dissemination by the Carthusians. The consistently high quality of Mirror books tends to suggest that either seigniorial or institutional patronage was the usual context for the work’s production and transmission. The actual readership of Love’s Mirror thus bears a much closer resemblance to those for whom Walter Hilton wrote his epistle on the Mixed Life, “prelates and oþur curates, þe w3uche han cure & souereynte of oþur men”, and “temporal men…wiþ lordschipe ouer oþur men” (Horstman, Yorkshire Writers p. 268), rather than the nebulous and unsophisticated readership Karnes understands the work as addressing.

Reconciling the socially sophisticated ownership contexts of the Mirror with the ‘simple’ audiences described by Love is a task beyond the remit of this review. It should be noted, however, that such dichotomising characterisations of audiences by monastic writers date back as far as the spate of vernacular translations that post-dated Pecham’s Syllabus. It must be considered that erudite noble and gentry audiences alongside religious neophytes might be tagged ‘lewed’ or ‘symple’, and such expressions are, perhaps, to be best understood as tropes. If the idea that Love was aware he was writing for sophisticated readerships is accepted, then it may allow us to formulate new hypotheses to explain the failure of his text to follow up on the spiritual ambition of the Meditationes. An essential paradox in this essay is the fact that Love’s book is imagined to circulate in contexts in which other books are absent. Karnes argues:

It is, of course, unlikely that a member of Love’s intended lay audience, the simple soul steeped in carnal thinking, would have access to the Bible or that Love would expect him to. (pp. 406-7)

If, however, one instead imagines an audience who might have access to other devotional books (not only, or necessarily the Bible), it is possible that Love’s Mirror is self-consciously fulfilling a particular and important spiritual need (as meditation on the humanity of Christ undoubtedly was), rather than signalling the absolute limits of its audience’s spiritual potential. Spiritual progression of the kind that concerns Karnes might not have occurred through the reading of the Mirror, but its author may well have understood that the spiritually ambitious in his audience would fulfil such aspirations through their consultation of other texts.