Attitudes to the Body in Fourteenth Century English Mystical Literature’, STRCS, Pp

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Heythrop College Publications 1 Attitudes to the Body in Fourteenth-Century English Mystical Literature Stefan Damian Cornelius Reynolds for PhD Heythrop College, University of London February 2013 2 ABSTRACT There is a stereotype, common to textbooks, of the Middle Ages as ‘dualistic’ – that is despising or fleeing ‘matter’ or ‘the body’. Common sentiment is that mystical or ascetical literature is the most culpable expression of this and that this tendency reaches its culmination in the fourteenth century. According to Jacques Le Goff, for example, in the spiritual culture of the Middle Ages “a clash between the physiological and the sacred resulted in an effort to deny the existence of biological man”.1 By looking at the English writings of Richard Rolle, the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich I will show that late medieval mystical writing, at least in England, was not as 'anti-body' as popular, and some scholarly, perceptions have seen it. In fact these writings show an active concern to make sense of the body as an important part of the spiritual life. Far from accepting a dualistic anthropology the concern of these writers is the integration of the human person whereby body, along with soul, is a place for encounter with God. English mysticism in the fourteenth century consciously subverts any penitential practice antagonistic to the body, self-injurious behaviours, or dualistic discourse about the spiritual life. Where they affirm asceticism, which they do, it is only so that the body can play a positive role in the spiritual life. By looking at fourteenth-century mystical texts this thesis shows: 1) The anthropological models they worked with involved an integration of body and soul. 2) Attention to flesh and decay characteristic of the period is not a ‘flight from’ but more a ‘submersion in’ the body. 3) Gendering of the body as ‘female’ in the late Middle Ages because it was seen as ‘passive’, ‘negative’ and ‘irrational’ is over-simplistic and inaccurate to the complexity of gender symbolism and corporeal understandings of the time. My thesis is that their actual concern is the integration of body and soul in a way that takes attention away from outward ascetical practice. Spirituality for them was not a matter of bodily practice, but nor was it something irrelevant to the body. They all endeavour to demythologise the use of body as a metaphor arriving at a ‘realist’ attitude to the body as something tangible, perceptible, locatable. Yet at the same time they saw a helpful and theologically meaningful attitude to the body coming about as a fruit of the spiritual life. 1 The Medieval Imagination, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 83. 3 Contents Page Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgments 5 List of Abbreviations 6 Introduction: Body as Locus of Divine-Human Encounter 8 Dualism, Asceticism and Mysticism 10 Texts and Contexts 14 Themes and Ideas 18 Lives 21 Thesis and Counter Thesis 23 Methodology for the Body 27 Chapter One: Body as Wholeness and Transformation 30 Bodily Realism and the Language of Spiritual Sensation 34 Resurrection and the Body of Christ 38 Language of Spiritual Sensation in the Cloud and Epistle 46 Resurrection and the Body of Christ in the Cloud and Epistle 53 Bodily Feeling and the Critique of Experience 57 Conclusion 62 Chapter Two: Body as Boundary and Barrier 64 Julian of Norwich: A Theology of the Body? 67 Substance and Sensuality 72 Anthropology and Christology: Julian and the Heritage of Augustine 79 Walter Hilton: Body as a Preparation for Prayer 86 Hierarchy of Body and Soul 91 Hilton, Julian and the Heritage of Augustine 96 Conclusion 102 4 Chapter Three: Body as Sight and Sensation 105 Seeing, Hearing and Feeling in Julian’s Showings 107 Medieval Optical Theory as a Model for Mystical Vision 114 Unified Sensorium in Rolle’s Raptus Carnis 120 Embodied Interiority 134 Conclusion 144 Chapter Four: Body as Dialectic and Denial 147 Darkness and Blindness in the Cloud and Hilton 149 Enclosing the Windows of the Body 157 The Humanity of Christ: Imagination and Apophasis 162 Corpus and Caro: The Naked Body 170 Soul in the Form of the Body: Hilton’s Image of Sin 176 Conclusion 185 Chapter Five: Body as Threshold and Meeting Place 187 Mysticism and Gender: Recent Scholarship 190 Bodily Sanctity as Spectacle in the Later Middle Ages 196 Spiritual Physiologies 206 Interior and Exterior 217 Conclusion 220 Conclusion: Body as Process and Paradox 223 Appendix: Translations of Middle English Quotations 228 Bibliography: Classical, Medieval and Early Modern 240 Secondary Sources 344 5 Acknowledgments My gratitude goes to Heythrop College for providing excellent research facilities, companionship and encouragement, to my tutor Dr Edward Howells for invaluable support, to my friends, Dr Josephine von Zitzewitz, and especially Dr Martina Caruso, for advice with editing, to my wife Silvia for patience, inspiration and for keeping me sane and to God, who prompted all that is of real value in this thesis, the rest, for what it is worth, is mine. 6 ABBREVIATIONS for frequently cited Collected Works AMEAMT Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, eds. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden, & Roger Ellis, (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005) CS II Christian Spirituality II, ed. Jill Riatt, (London: Burns & Oates, 1987) DMLBS I-II Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. R. E. Latham, (London: Oxford University Press, 1981) EMMA English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), FABML Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, eds. Linda Lomperis & Sarah Stanbury, (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1993) FM Forming the Mind. Essays on the Internal Senses and the Mind/Body Problem from Avicenna to the Medical Enlightenment, ed. Henrik Lagerlund, (NY & Heidelberg: Springer, 2007) FMR Feminine, Masculine and Representation, ed. T. Threadgold & A. Cranny-Francis, (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1990) JNBE Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra McEntire, (NY: Garland, 1998) MED Medieval English Dictionary 1100-1500, A-F ed. Hans Kurath, G-O ed. Sherman M. Kuhn, P-Z ed. Robert E. Lewis, (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1952-1999) MEREL Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G.H. Russell, eds. Gregory Kratzman & James Simpson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 7 MMTE I-VII Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, 7 vols., 1980- (vols. 1-6 ed. Marion Glasscoe, vol. 7 ed. Eddie Jones; vols. 1-2 Exeter: Exeter University Press, vols. 3-7 Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer) ODEE The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. C. T. Onions, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966) OED The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. Lesley Brown, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) RRPV Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, Early English Text Society, ed. S. J. Ogilvie- Thompson, (Oxford: OUP, 1988) SSPGWC The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, eds. Paul Gavrilyuk, & Sarah Coakley, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) STRCS Sources of Transformation: Revitalizing Christian Spirituality, ed. by Edward Howells and Peter Tyler, (London, NY: Continuum, 2010) TBGTI Theology and the Body: Gender, Text and Ideology, ed. R. Hannaford & J. Jobling, (Hertfordshire: Gracewing, 1999) VBBR Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. Robert Nelson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) WJN The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and a Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson & Jacqueline Jenkins, (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 2006) The Modern English translation of the Middle English texts is given throughout in the ‘Appendix’ under the relevant small case Roman numeral. 8 Introduction: Body as Locus of Divine-Human Encounter There were many ‘bodies’ in the Middle Ages: dead bodies, living ones, ill bodies and healthy ones, spiritual bodies and fleshly bodies, bodies of carnal transience and angelic bodies. There was a body of Divine Incarnation, a Eucharistic body, bodies that became relics, and concupiscent bodies that decayed and corrupted. There were male bodies and female bodies, of various ages, levels of functioning, and diverse non-generic characteristics. There were metaphorical bodies of thought or nations and sensual bodies made up of biological processes. The ‘body’ to which Middle English mysticism referred could take many forms. This can be seen in the distinct use of the terms caro and corpus in the Middle Ages. Caro or ‘flesh’ involved in some sense a lack or an excess of body in relation to the abstract precision of corpus. In the Middle Ages this ideal was not so much the classical cult of bodily perfection but a sense of corporate belonging: the Church as the body of Christ, the guilds as bodies of professionals with co-ordinated economic interests, the state as a set of legal and chivalric obligations between vassal and lord. In medieval Latin, corpus could denote, amongst other things: a group of buildings, the hull of a ship, a corporation or body politic, the nave or congregation of a church, a source of revenue, or a collection of writings.1 All of these implied a sense of cohesion, co-ordination, commonality, solidity, reliability, certainty. This idea of bodily harmony was less dominant by the fourteenth century due to divisions within the Church, the rise of an entrepreneurial merchant class using their own capital and the rise of more national and civic forms of political polity that displaced agrarian feudalism.2 In its place the awareness of the actual fleshly human body as an imperfect and unstable, ambivalent, transient and uncertain fact of experience became dominant. There was a new realism to the body.3 The age of social, political, religious and intellectual change in the fourteenth century coincided in the middle of that century with a time of acute physical anxiety due to the Black 1 DMLBS II, pp.

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