{"id":27,"date":"2007-08-06T10:44:51","date_gmt":"2007-08-06T10:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.qub.ac.uk\/geographies-of-orthodoxy\/discuss\/2007\/08\/06\/review-of-michelle-karnes-nicholas-love-and-medieval-meditations-on-christ-interiority-imagination-and-meditations-on-the-life-of-christ-speculum-82-2007-pp-380-408\/"},"modified":"2009-07-20T15:22:22","modified_gmt":"2009-07-20T15:22:22","slug":"review-of-michelle-karnes-nicholas-love-and-medieval-meditations-on-christ-interiority-imagination-and-meditations-on-the-life-of-christ-speculum-82-2007-pp-380-408","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geographies-of-orthodoxy.qub.ac.uk\/discuss\/2007\/08\/06\/review-of-michelle-karnes-nicholas-love-and-medieval-meditations-on-christ-interiority-imagination-and-meditations-on-the-life-of-christ-speculum-82-2007-pp-380-408\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviews<\/strong>: Michelle Karnes, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Karnes<\/strong>, “Nicholas Love and Medieval Meditations on Christ: Interiority, Imagination and Meditations on the Life of Christ.” Speculum<\/a><\/em> 82 (2007): pp. 380-408.<\/p>\n

\nCitations from this post must be properly and appropriately acknowledged<\/strong><\/p>\n

\tMichelle Karnes has provided a welcome sign of the renewed critical interest in pseudo-Bonaventuran \u2018Lives of Christ\u2019, or, as she argues they might be more fittingly tagged, \u201cGospel Meditations\u201d (p. 382, n. 8). Her essay provides an important reconsideration of Nicholas Love\u2019s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ<\/em> in opposition to Eamon Duffy\u2019s idea of \u201cthe democratisation of the tradition of affective meditation on the Passion\u201d (p. 381) with the concomitant proposition that vernacular translations such as the Mirror<\/em> 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<\/em> against its Latin source, Meditationes vitae Christi<\/em>. The case is presented that the ultimate ambition of meditation in the theological tradition (and in Latin texts such as the Meditationes<\/em>), is to transcend from purely material meditation on Christ incarnate to an intellectual knowledge of the immaterial, the divine.<\/p>\n

Through this essay\u2019s initial consideration of Love\u2019s intended audience, its useful study of medieval cognitive theory, and by highlighting Love\u2019s revisions of the Meditationes<\/em>, Karnes sets out the idea that the Mirror<\/em> reconstitutes the idea of meditatio<\/em> as it appears in the Latin archetype. It is argued that in the Mirror<\/em> 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 \u201cbodily þ<\/html>inges\u201d (p. 394). The author reveals, in Karnes\u2019 words, \u201chis idea of what a proper lay spirituality both is and is not\u201d (p. 386), and thus demarcates the lay from the religious, the material from the ineffable. In what almost feels like a \u2018bonus track\u2019, Karnes goes on to assess the Mirror<\/em>\u2019s relationship to the Bible, and thus to the context in which Love\u2019s book is so regularly placed, as a reactionary source of safe Gospel materials in opposition to Lollard Biblical translation. Rather than reading Love\u2019s text as a critique of Lollardy through its very \u201cmethod\u201d (Gospel meditations rather than Gospel translation), the Mirror<\/em> is deemed to render the scriptures \u201cirrelevant to lay devotion\u201d (p. 403), an attribute that is not necessarily proof of its ideological opposition to Biblical translation.<\/p>\n

\tThis essay represents a significant contribution to critical discussion of the Mirror<\/em>, particularly in highlighting the dangers of the idea of vernacular translation as \u2018democratising\u2019, and in pointing out the insufficiency of viewing Love\u2019s translation as constituting the<\/em> textual and ideological binary to the Wycliffite Bible. Karnes\u2019 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<\/em> and the \u2018Middle English Meditationes de Passione Christi<\/em>\u2019 that are similarly limited to consideration of Christ\u2019s humanity), and indeed, with reference to the manuscript corpus of the Mirror<\/em>, a body of materials whose import is entirely elided within the scope of her piece.<\/p>\n

The most significant problem from the perspective of the Geographies of Orthodoxy<\/em> project is in correlating Karnes\u2019 understanding of Love\u2019s intended audience<\/em> with the actual audiences<\/em> who patronised and owned manuscripts of the Mirror<\/em>. Here the Mirror<\/em>\u2019s description of its readers as \u201csymple creatures\u201d, 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\u2019s intended audience. Moreover, Karnes consigns this amorphous audience of the Mirror<\/em> to a state of permanent spiritual stasis due to her belief that the text \u201cdoes not allow those \u2018creatures\u2019 to graduate to any less simple state\u201d (p.385). The audience thus \u201cconstitute the unlearned rather than the learning\u201d (p. 385) from the perspective attributed to the Mirror<\/em>\u2019s author. Such a view of Love\u2019s audience is incompatible with the manuscript evidence. Among the earliest identifiable owners of the Mirror<\/em> we may count the familiae<\/em> 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<\/em> books tends to suggest that either seigniorial or institutional patronage was the usual context for the work\u2019s production and transmission. The actual<\/em> readership of Love\u2019s Mirror<\/em> thus bears a much closer resemblance to those for whom Walter Hilton wrote his epistle on the Mixed Life, \u201cprelates and oþ<\/html>ur curates, <\/html>þ<\/html>e w3uche han cure & souereynte of oþ<\/html>ur men\u201d, and \u201ctemporal men\u2026wi<\/html>þ<\/html> lordschipe ouer oþ<\/html>ur men\u201d (Horstman, Yorkshire Writers<\/em> p. 268), rather than the nebulous and unsophisticated readership Karnes understands the work as addressing.<\/p>\n

\tReconciling the socially sophisticated ownership contexts of the Mirror<\/em> with the \u2018simple\u2019 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\u2019s Syllabus<\/em>. It must be considered that erudite noble and gentry audiences alongside religious neophytes might be tagged \u2018lewed\u2019 or \u2018symple\u2019, 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<\/em>. An essential paradox in this essay is the fact that Love\u2019s book is imagined to circulate in contexts in which other books are absent. Karnes argues:<\/p>\n