{"id":43,"date":"2009-04-24T11:07:56","date_gmt":"2009-04-24T11:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.qub.ac.uk\/geographies-of-orthodoxy\/discuss\/?p=43"},"modified":"2010-06-14T14:12:34","modified_gmt":"2010-06-14T14:12:34","slug":"hospitable-reading-and-clerical-reform-in-fifteenth-century-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geographies-of-orthodoxy.qub.ac.uk\/discuss\/2009\/04\/24\/hospitable-reading-and-clerical-reform-in-fifteenth-century-london\/","title":{"rendered":"“Hospitable Reading” and Clerical Reform in Fifteenth Century London"},"content":{"rendered":"

(A version of this text was presented at After Arundel<\/a>, St John’s College Oxford, 16th-18th April, 2009)
\nCitations from this post must be properly and appropriately acknowledged<\/strong><\/p>\n

1.<\/strong>
\n\u201cCategories of historical explanation are indispensable,\u201d says the German historian of the Protestant Reformation, Berndt Hamm. \u201cBut when they lose their status as questions\u201d he continues, \u201cwhen it is no longer apparent that they are thought constructs placed upon the past, such categories come to have fatal effects on scholarship\u201d (2004: 1). Our work on Geographies of Orthodoxy coincides with what is becoming a widely held sense that the questions asked of late medieval English piety, religious writing and ecclesiological dissent have themselves come to limit our encounter with the theological and literary controversies of fifteenth century England. Our interest in the project has been to challenge the clich\u00e9 that Carthusian Prior Nicholas Love\u2019s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ<\/em> stands as ideological opponent to the Wycliffite Bible. We aim to re-assess the coherence of this narrative and to locate Love in relation to other texts in the Pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition. Of interest to us is the issue of the security and coherence of \u201corthodoxy\u201d as a classifying strategy in late medieval English devotional writing, either in the later Middle Ages or in contemporary literary history. The scholarly attention paid to the circulation of Wycliffite ideas and of the Wycliffite Bible itself distorts, we contend, the scene of fourteenth and fifteenth century theological speculation in England. Scholarship has presented us with a camera obscura, in which either the influence on religious writing of Wycliffite thought is pictured as all-pervasive or Wycliffitism is perceived as an ideological fiction propagated by the authorities in order to legitimate a tightening of secular and\/or ecclesiastical control. While recent scholarship has often worked with the fine grain of religious writing in England and in English, it is our contention that these two grand r\u00e9cits continue to determine much of the thinking on the status of Wycliffite, Lollard or other heterodox thought. <\/p>\n

Geographies of Orthodoxy instead has sought and is seeking to track – to map – the traffic of nominally orthodox texts across and among textual and reading communities in later medieval England. We have resisted an editorialising focus on texts themselves in favour of close investigation of the codicological contexts of their propagation. We would hope that our findings demonstrate the value and benefit to the scholarly community of such large-scale, collaborative projects. The literary and theological subtleties of late medieval writing are too great for the lone scholar, unless that scholar donates his or her career to their excavation. Large-corpus projects, while curtailed by specific time-frames and subject to the often crass whims of funding councils (\u201cimpact\u201d?), provide scholars with an opportunity to shake up presuppositions by cutting across or through the standard registers of critical debate.<\/p>\n

The plasticity of context for devotional writing in the years after the publication of the Constitutions<\/em> suggests, as Mishtooni Bose has most recently argued, that utilising either the rhetoric of legislation or the rhetoric of dissent as an historiographical framework is no longer tenable. The meta-categories of \u201corthodoxy\u201d and \u201cheresy\u201d, of \u201creform\u201d and \u201cdissent\u201d subject us to vocabularies of description which are far from disinterested and not of our own choosing. \u201cFantasies,\u201d says Bose, \u201care codified in legislation as surely as they are ever expressed in fiction\u201d (2007: 51). Heresy and orthodoxy, as well as having specific cultural and linguistic etymologies often overlooked in their deployment by critics, have lost, we want to suggest, their explanatory and descriptive power. Attending to how books perform and materialise contemporary attitudes through what Anne Hudson calls \u201cmanuscript juxtaposition\u201d (1988: 423) provides, we suggest, a more sensitive barometer of attitudes to religious writing and its relation to secular and ecclesiastical authority.<\/p>\n

2.<\/strong>
\n The MSS that we will refer to here were all produced in London in the first half of the fifteenth century, in the decades following Arundel\u2019s death. MSS Bodley 789, Bodley 938, Westminster School MS 3, Laud Misc. 174 and Laud Misc. 23, are devotional anthologies and they fall within the scope of the Geographies of Orthodoxy survey because they contain one of two pseudo-Bonaventuran translations; in the case of three of the books, the Laud MSS and Bodley 789, that pseudo-Bonaventuran translation is the Middle English Meditationes de Passione Christi<\/em>, a text that treats the events of the Passion from the Last Supper through to the Harrowing of Hell. The text structures its account of the events of the Passion into a series of meditations for the canonical hours, beginning with the \u201cnight and morwetyde\u201d, then prime, terce, midday, none, vespers and compline, with further meditations relating to the Saturday, and closing with the meditation for Christ\u2019s descent into hell. Our colleague, Allan Westphall, has found that these meditations are characterised by (I quote) an \u201ceconomy of expression\u201d, omitting, \u201cwhat is not strictly necessary to the core narrative of Christ\u2019s Passion\u201d. Although the text does follow the Latin Meditationes<\/em> in enjoining the reader to engage in affective consideration of Christ\u2019s suffering, encouraging the reader to \u201cmake thee self as thou were present\u2026with the eyen of thy soule\u201d, and thus imaginatively witnessing scriptural events, in this the translator is also economical, shortening and sometimes omitting entirely the original\u2019s extended affective focus on the pain of Christ and Mary. <\/p>\n

The Short Rule of the Life of Our Lady<\/em>, found in Bodley 938 and Westminster 3 is a much less substantial text, usually only occupying two or three folios in MS copies. Translated from chapter three of the Meditationes vitae Christ<\/em>i, the Short Rule<\/em> gives an account of the manner of life lived by Mary in the years before she married Joseph. The text immediately and unapologetically signals its extra-biblical source- Mary, we are told, revealed the text to St. Elizabeth of Hungary through revelation. The Rule encourages imitatio of the young Mary, inviting the reader to follow her in her utter humility and submission to both the will of God and to ecclesiastical authority. Mary becomes an exemplary figure for a sort of mixed life, with her days dedicated to prayer and manual work. <\/p>\n

Clearly these are texts that are thoroughly orthodox (if you were pushed to labelling them according to such political binaries), and for the most part, they occur in diverse text collections that are similarly unproblematic- religious miscellanies and anthologies with prominent pastoral, Christological and mystical interests. Indeed, the ME Meditationes<\/em> even occurs as an interpolation in several MSS of that scholarly paradigm of orthodoxy, Nicholas Love\u2019s Mirror of the Blessed Life.<\/em><\/p>\n

In London production contexts, however, these texts are copied in much more politically unstable MSS. Almost invariably, the metropolitan contexts for these pseudo-Bonaventuran translations are books that mix supposedly Wycliffite texts (and undoubtedly reformist texts) with materials that are unequivocally orthodox. The fact that this occurs only in London contexts, might help us gain a sense of devotional tastes in the City, and how those tastes were being serviced by those involved in London\u2019s book-trade. My necessarily brief discussion here speaks to these issues and I will focus largely on Laud. Misc. 23.<\/p>\n

Laud 23 is one of six MSS discussed by Margaret Connolly in her 2003 article, \u201cBooks for the \u2018helpe of euery persoone \u00feat \u00feenki\u00fe to be saued\u2019: Six Devotional Anthologies from Fifteenth-Century London\u201d, where she traced textual connections between books which had a cluster of devotional texts in common. One of the texts shared between 4 of Connolly\u2019s six \u201cDevotional Anthologies\u201d is a prologue that precedes the \u201cxij lettyngis of prayere\u201d, and the text varies in its wording depending on the blend of items in each book. The prologue offers us a chance to reflects on the texts included in the Laud MS- and some of the issues more generally pertinent in relation to these anthologies:<\/p>\n