WRITERS IN RELIGIOUS ORDERS AND THEIR LAY PATRONS IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of the Ohio State University

By

Christopher Edward Manion, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2005

Dissertation Committee Approved by Professor Karen Winstead, Advisor

Professor Lisa Kiser ______

Professor Ethan Knapp Advisor English Graduate Program Copyright by Christopher Edward Manion 2005 ABSTRACT

My dissertation explores how writers in religious orders and their readership were

responding to changes in religious life in late medieval England. By the beginning of the

fifteenth century, lay people were challenging traditional ideological boundaries between

secular and religious social spheres. Moreover, religious houses, which had always been

caught up in the vicissitudes of politics, found themselves enmeshed in the factional

struggles that raged in England during the fifteenth century. In this context, I examine

how religious writers represented cloistered forms of life for people who lived in the

secular world, and how they represented a literate lifestyle once limited to men for a

growing audience of women patrons and readers.

Following an introduction that explores how ideological boundaries between

religious and secular people were being contested in late medieval England, my first

chapter examines how The Book of Margery Kempe presents one East Anglian merchant housewife who provocatively challenges those boundaries. My second chapter turns to the Benedictine monk John Lydgate as he confronts the hostile politics of his regal patrons in his Chaucerian poem The Siege of Thebes and in his Lives of Saints Edmund

and Fremund, written for a young King Henry VI. My third chapter addresses the work

of the Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, who struggles to turn a nativity of the Virgin

Mary reflecting religious values into a more secular portrait of the Virgin’s mother Anne,

ii and then attempts to recount the life of the ascetic princess Elizabeth of Hungary for a noble woman who could not afford to reject the world in any way. In my fourth chapter,

I examine how Bokenham’s Norfolk confrere John Capgrave constructs a relationship between himself, his order, and his patron through his representation of the complex familial bond between Saint Augustine of Hippo, the supposed founder of his order, and the saint’s mother Monica. Ultimately, I reveal how these three religious writers attempt to maintain their identity as authoritative clerical figures and as professed members of their order, when their patrons, like Margery Kempe, are demanding work that challenges the ideological distinctions on which their identity depends.

iii Dedicated to the communities of faith that have

sustained me throughout my life,

especially my loving family and

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church,

Columbus, Ohio

iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank my advisor, Professor Karen Winstead, who has patiently shepherded me through my work, and has supported me with candid, wise and kind advice when I have needed it the most.

I would also like to thank the members of Committee, Professors Ethan Knapp and Lisa Kiser for their insightful help on this project, as well as Professor Nicholas

Howe, who guided me through the prospectus colloquium.

I would like to thank the Ohio State University’s Department of English for generously awarding me a Summer Fellowship in 2002 and a Dissertation Fellowship in

Spring of 2004, both of which helped me to make significant progress on several chapters.

I have dedicated the dissertation to those communities of faith that have sustained me throughout my life. I include two families under this designation. The first includes my mother, father, sister, brother-in-law and extended family, all of whom have encouraged me, loved me, and, most importantly, have never allowed me take myself too seriously. I have also included the parish families that have nurtured my spiritual growth through the years. I single out the people of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Columbus,

v OH, for their unfailing support and love during my time in graduate school. I could not have finished this without them.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge Katie Braun, who has been a comforting and loving partner toward the end of this long journey, and whose companionship I will cherish on the path we take from here.

vi VITA

July 4, 1975…………………….Born – Geneva, New York

1997…………………………….B.A. English, State University of New York at Geneseo

1999…………………………….M.A. English, The Ohio State University

1997 - 2004…………………….Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University

2005 - Present…………………..Coordinator, Writing Across the Curriculum, Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing, The Ohio State University

FIELD OF STUDY

Major Field: English

vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………..…v

Vita………………………………………………………………………..……………..vii

Chapters:

Introduction: The Common Life of Religious Writers and the Laity……………..………1

1. The Scandal and Indignation of Honest Matrons: Margery Kempe and the Religious………………………………………………………………………....25

2. “Confederate, as Kyng with Kyng”: John Lydgate and the Making of Religious and Regal Identities…………………………………………………...70

3. “Protestations” and Patronage: Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Saints Anne and Elizabeth of Hungary………………………………………………………121

4. Accommodating Households: John Capgrave and his Life of Saint Augustine………………………………………………………………....164

Conclusion: Writing Across the Cloister…………………………………………...…..206

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………210

viii INTRODUCTION

THE COMMON LIFE OF RELIGIOUS WRITERS AND THE LAITY

Critics have long recognized that the religious orders played an important part in

the production of vernacular devotional literature in late medieval England. The orders

were well suited to this task. Reading and writing were an important part of the life of

those who lived under a rule, as literate practice in some way encompassed a great part of

any religious person’s daily routine—from the liturgy, to readings at meals or chapters, to

private study, or to administrative duties. Vernacular aids to this literate practice

developed to address the needs of brothers and sisters who were not learned in Latin.1

The orders also had institutional structures which efficiently produced, kept, and distributed books, including scriptoria, libraries, and long-standing networks of sister houses and patrons. Furthermore, the long-term continuity of religious institutions insured the preservation and development of old but vibrant literary traditions, providing a stability for vernacular writing that it might not otherwise have had. Vernacular writing developed in a broad multilingual context, as writers mined material from many different

1 See A.I. Doyle, “Publication by Members of Religious Orders,” and Vincent Gillespie, “Vernacular Books of Religion,” in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 109-23 and 317-44.

1 traditions.2 Scholars have also recognized that the audience of this vernacular religious literature expanded in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Lay people were becoming more literate (particularly in the vernacular), more interested in owning and reading books, and more eager to practice their own forms of devotion. Books were more often exchanged within the familial and social networks of lay people.3 Many were demanding a fuller participation in religious life, and a growing lay readership was seeking a vernacular devotional literature that adapted Latinate monastic traditions for their secular lifestyles.4 The body of vernacular treatises written for those religious not literate in Latin was easily adapted to this cause. In some cases, lay people found access to contemplative works that had once been forbidden to them. By the fifteenth century, religious writers were also beginning to produce and distribute works that were explicitly developed for a lay readership.5

2 See Christopher Cannon, "Monastic Productions," Cambridge Guide to Middle English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1999), 316-48; for accounts of literary patronage and the orders, see Samuel Moore, "Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk," PMLA 28 (1912): 188-207, 28 (1913): 79-105; and Peter J. Lucas, "The Growth and Development of English Literary Patronage in the Later Middle Ages and Early Renaissance," The Library 6th ser. 4 (1982): 228-230, 234-8. For a study of the production of a specific order, see Ralph Hanna III, “Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature.” The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A.S.G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna (London: The British Library, 2000), 27-42.

3 For an important but unpublished study on book ownership, see Susan Cavanaugh, “A Study of Books Privately Owned in England 1300-1450,” Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvannia, 1980; also P. J. P. Goldberg, “Lay Book Ownership in Late Medieval York: The Evidence of Wills,” The Library, 6th Series 16 (1994): 181-89; For specific studies of women’s book ownership, see Anne M. Dutton, “Passing the Book: Testementary Transmission of Religious Literature to and by Women in England 1350-1500,” Women, the Book, and the Godly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (London: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 41-54.

4 Ann M. Hutchison, "Devotional Reading in the Monastery and in the Late Medieval Household," De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), 215-27.

5 The classic study of the dissemination of religious texts is I. R. Doyle’s dissertation, “A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th, and Early 16th Centuries With Special Consideration of the Part of the Clergy Therein,” Vol I, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, 2 What critics have only begun to recognize, however, is how religious writers dealt with the changing relationships between their orders and wider society. Literary developments occurred as the place of the orders in society transformed radically. By the fifteenth century, there was a decisive shift in attitudes toward religious authority that effected broader changes in the political, social, and economic influence of the religious.

The economic and political independence the orders had once enjoyed gradually began to erode, and religious houses had to redefine their relationship with the secular world now that they were unable to maintain as distinct a separation from it. Patrons insinuated themselves more into the life and business of the religious communities they supported, looking for spiritual and even material return on their investment. Houses became more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of political life as they became pawns in factional struggles.

Many challenged the moral authority of the orders, revealing what they saw as corruption within them. Some sought to impose reform on religious communities, while others went further to dispute the need for these orders within the life of the Church, calling for the dissolution of religious houses and the redistribution of their wealth by the Crown. Over two centuries, the disputes over the position of the religious orders in society would continue up to the dissolution of the orders during the Reformation. My project here seeks to examine how writers in religious orders during this period had to renegotiate their identity amidst these cultural shifts.

Cambridge, 1953. See also Michael Sargent, "The Transmission by the English Carthusians of Some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 225-40; and S. S. Hussey, “The Audience for the Middle English Mystics,” De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 109-22. 3 All religious orders claimed to reject the world in some way, though the various

religious orders were different in their understanding of what the “world” constituted.

The stricter monastic orders left the world most directly by entering the cloister in self-

sustaining communities that regulated contact with secular life as rigorously as possible.

The orders whose mission entailed active pastoral ministry, such as the mendicants,

symbolically distinguished themselves from secular life through a profession of poverty

or by partial claustration. Historians of English religious life have begun to examine the

boundaries between the cloister and the wider world in new depth, and have suggested

that the distinctions between secular and religious lives were being troubled in the later

Middle Ages. For example, Benjamin Thompson notes that the very distinction between

the religious and secular became problematic. As much as the religious tried to reject or

escape the secular world, they were essentially dependant on it and fundamentally a part

of it. The men and women who vowed a religious life, of course, came from secular

society, brought its values and mores into their profession, and often maintained the

social bonds from their former state of life. Even those who assiduously took every

precaution to avoid secular intrusion ran into difficulty. Religious communities that

attempted to make themselves self-sufficient had to deal with the wider economy to

maintain that self-sufficiency.6 Ancient, well founded monasteries were able to maintain

great political influence, and yet often became beholden to external political powers and

6 Benjamin J. Thompson, “Introduction: Monasteries and Medieval Society,” Monasteries and Society: Proceedings of the 1994 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Benjamin J. Thompson (Stamford: Harlaxton Medival Studies, 1999), 4-24; see also his “Monasteries and their Patrons at Foundation and Dissolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series 4 (1994): 103-25; and “Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England,” The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. James G. Clark (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 165-96.

4 were vulnerable to erratic political exigencies.7 The ideological boundaries that separated

the secular from the religious were malleable, and were profoundly affected by the social

changes that were taking place. As Thompson put it, “the membrane between the cloister

and the world, which had always allowed osmosis, became so thin as to be transparent.”8

One might take Thompson’s cellular metaphor further. As fluids passing from one cell to

another exert pressure during osmosis, so could lay people’s engagement in the religious

life trouble the monastic ideologies that distinguished the religious and the secular.

In the midst of their changing environment the religious attempted to regulate the

access the professed had to secular life and the access those outside of their profession

had to their lives. In her archaeological study of female religious communities, Roberta

Gilchrist reflects on how the space of monastic houses was organized to reflect the ideals

of religious life and the broader ideological relationship between a house’s religious

inhabitants and secular people:

Monastic perceptions of space were informed by boundaries, which in character

were both symbolic and actual. Thus the precinct boundary had legal

significance, but it also idealized the division between secular and religious

domains. Space was used to regulate encounters between groups. The precinct

was separated into an outer court, which was accessible to seculars and served

non-religious functions, and the inner religious cloister. This inner area was

constructed to manage contact between groups of differing social, religious, and

7 James G. Clark, “Selling the Holy Places: Monastic Efforts to Win Back the People in Fifteenth Century England,” Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. T. Thornton (Stroud, 2001), 13-32; “The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England,” The Religious Orders in Pre- Reformation England, 3-33.

5 gender identities. Such control was achieved through the physical manipulation

of space through which the inhabitants traveled, and by conceptual spatial

divisions inherent to monastic ideals. Attitudes toward space were created though

shared knowledge and transmitted through sermons, written liturgy, and rules.9

The physical boundaries of the cloister reflected the ideological boundaries between secular and religious life, and the regulatory assumptions which controlled the entrance to the cloister also informed other discourses. When lay people seek to participate in the religious life of the cloister, be it by visiting the cloister itself or by imitating aspects of religious practice outside, they potentially cross many of the boundaries monastic regulations sought to protect. Private devotion is made public; the integrity, distinction, and discipline of the religious life are threatened, and its markers of gender and status are blurred.

Recently, several literary critics have also begun to explore these boundaries, particularly in relation to the literate activity of women, lay and religious. Nancy Bradley

Warren examines the complex cultural exchanges that took place across the material and ideological boundaries that enclosed religious women. By looking at such sources as visitation records, institutional documents, monastic rule translations, as well as literary works, Warren shows that women religious were not nearly as isolated as they are often represented to have been. Rather, women religious played an important part in the construction of spiritual identity, not only within the cloister, but in the wider secular

8 Thompson, “Introduction: Monasteries and Medieval Society,” 29.

9 Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Religious Women (New York : Routledge, 1994), 151-2. 6 world.10 Similarly, Mary Erler explores the exchange of devotional texts among secular

and religious women, even when such exchange was discouraged or forbidden by

conventual regulations. Erler shows how the exchange of texts was part of a wider

network of social bonds among women that were maintained across institutional

boundaries.11 The work of scholars like Warren and Erler have brought new attention to

how the literate activity of the religious was part of broader trends in the religious life.

My own work seeks to explore how writers in religious orders present material from their religious traditions to an audience of lay readers and patrons. I want to see, for one, how the models of religious life writers of devotional literature were presenting to lay audiences were adapted as the social roles of those in orders changed: how these writers, for example, represented cloistered forms of life for people who lived in the secular world, and how they represented a literate lifestyle once limited to men for a growing audience of women patrons and readers. I also examine how monastic and fraternal literary production operated in broader networks of patronage: how the literature of the religious was commissioned and circulated within these networks, and how this literary activity was part of wider political, economic, and social exchanges. Ultimately,

I want to see how the writers I study construct their authorship around their relationships with patrons: how these writers maintain their identity as authoritative clerical figures and as professed members of their order when their patrons are demanding work that challenges the ideological distinctions on which their identity depends.

10 Nancy Bradley Warren, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press).

7 In order to illustrate the significance of these issues for religious writers, I would

like to examine several passages from two very different texts. The first is the Wycliffite

Sermon Cycle, which contains sermons that attack the religious orders, and the second is

the Carthusian Nicholas Love’s popular gospel harmony, The Mirror of the Blessed Life

of Jesus Christ. The authors of each work seek to portray the boundaries of the religious

life in ways that serve polemical ends. By appropriating the language of monastic

enclosure, one represents the cloister as a space that walls itself off from the true “order”

established by Christ. The other attempts to defend the integrity of the cloister by

avoiding discussion of the privileged contemplation that occurs within. Both texts show

an awareness that the cloister is a contested space—that the language that demarcates the

religious life can be adapted, subverted, defended or occluded in countless ways.

The manuscripts of the most widely circulated Wycliffite sermon cycle are

necessarily secretive about who owned them, and how or even when they were used,

since ecclesiastical authorities throughout the fifteenth century saw the production and

distribution of such books as one of the most threatening aspects of the Lollard heresy.

Heterodox communities did their best to mask the circulation of their most valuable

assets.12 What scholars have shown, however, is that this sermon cycle seems to have

been created as an alternative to orthodox literary production and hermeneutic practice,

11 Mary Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2002).

12 Anne Hudson, “Lollard Book Production,” Book Publishing in Britain 1375-1475, ed. Derek Pearsall and Jeremy Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 125-42; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 174-208.

8 enterprises that were central to the mission of the religious orders.13 It is thus not

surprising that many of the sermons take up many of John Wyclif’s common attacks on

the religious orders. Wyclif objected to the religious orders because he felt that they

proudly asserted their distinction in the life of the Church, setting themselves apart from

common Christians and greedily hoarding goods and property under the pretension of

serving their patrons’ spiritual needs. To Wyclif the “sects,” which usually numbered

four in his polemical writing (monks, canons, friars, and prelates), were an innovation to

Christ’s original mission for the church, and only served to divide and corrupt Christian

community.14

One Wycliffite sermon argues that the enclosure of the religious is antithetical to the apostolic charge set up by Christ. Jesus called the apostles to

wende into the world and lyve comun lyyf as labrierus, as it was taught in Petre

and othre. But here we trowon that Crist dude thus to confounde thes cloystrerus,

for Crist wyste wel that thei schulden come and disseyve myche of this world, and

seye that it falluth not to hem to labure, ne dwelle owt of ther cloystre, sith thei

passon other men in newe signes that thei han fownde. And to destruye this

ypocrisye dude auctor of religioun this, he ches not thes disciples unto cloystre

that he dwelte inne, but into place removable as was Moyses thabernacle; and this

13 Pamela Gradon and Anne Hudson, “Introduction,” English Wycliffite Sermons, Vol. IV, ed. Pamela Gradon and Anne Hudson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 8-40; see also Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 112-46.

14 See Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 347-51; see also Thomas Renna, “Wyclif’s Attacks on the Monks,” From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 267-80; for an account of these themes in the Wycliffite Sermon Cycle, see English Wycliffite Sermons, Vol. IV, 121-34.

9 is betture odre here, sith here we han no cite dwellynge, but here we sekon the

blisse of hevene.15

For the Wycliffite homilist, the professed “common life” of the religious is a deceitful cover for idle wasters who contribute nothing to the Church’s spiritual economy. They hypocritically hide behind “newe signes” while they fail to minister to the faithful.

Following Wyclif, the homilist turns religious terminology against itself, arguing that

Christ is the true “abbot” watching over a common Christian “rule.” For the homilist, the

“signes” of the religious are empty, and can be reshaped to fit Wyclif’s revolutionary ecclesiology, pitting the “true” church of the apostles against an established church corrupted by innovation. The true “cloister” is the world, in which Christians must labor to enter the heavenly cloister. This cloister is not fixed but moveable like the holy tabernacle the Hebrews carried during their wanderings under Moses, not like the “cite dwellynges” of acquisitive monks and friars.

A passage in another sermon also appropriates religious terminology to attack the cloistered for their abandonment of the true apostolic calling, this time pointing to the antidote the Lollards saw for the corruption of the orders:

Thei say that thei ben herberys bettur than comun pastur, for eerbys of vertew that

growenin hem; certes, making of eerberys in a comun pasture wolde destrye the

pasture and lyfe of the comonuys, bothe for dychyng and heggyng and delving of

turvys. And yif we marke alle syche eerberys in Englond that be plantyd of newe

in comune Christis religioun, as thei spuylen the remnaunt of temporal goodys, so

15 The English Wycliffite Sermons, Vol. II, ed. Pamela Gradon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 184.

10 that is more duyl thei spuylen hem of vertewes … syth these patrownes han no

leve of God to make syche eerberys in his commune pasture, lawe of this cheef

lord schulde destruye these sects, sith Crist lovith more is comunys than thes

newe eerberys.16

In contrasting enclosed religious “gardens” with the “commons” of the true, wider

Christian church, the homilist distils one of Wyclif’s most frequent attacks on the

“private” religious orders into an image that both summarizes the evangelical doctor’s theological opposition to the sects, and signals the political objectives his followers saw for disendowing them of their temporal holdings. While the Oxford heresiarch was never able to turn his polemics toward public policy, his followers seem to have petitioned

Parliament several times between 1382 and 1410 to disendow the orders and redistribute their wealth to public welfare and education.17 The petitions of the Lollards were never successful, but their ideas resonated up to the dissolution of the monasteries during the first decades of the Protestant reformation in England. The Wycliffite homilist’s association here between enclosure and Lollard disendowment propaganda is clever.

Throughout the Middle Ages, like many secular owners of arable land, religious houses had sought to consolidate their holdings, and their enclosing of certain plots raised the ire of many of their poorer tenants.18 Tying Wyclif’s common attacks on the orders to an

16 The English Wycliffite Sermons, Vol. I, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 266.

17 Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 337-42; see also Margaret Aston, “‘Caim’s Castles’: Poverty, Politics and Disendowment,” The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Barrie Dobson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 45-81.

18 See, for example, Spencer Dimmock, “English Small Towns and the Emergence of Capitalist Relations, c. 1450-1550,” Urban History 28 (2001): 15-17.

11 ongoing sore spot like the enclosure of monastic lands had the potential to be very persuasive to those who had suffered economically from the practice. Among the institutions most damaged by the peasant’s revolt in 1381 were monastic houses. The rebels made a particular point of destroying tenurial records and demanding that new ones be drawn up to favor their interests.19

Given these challenges to their very existence, the religious put themselves at the center of the orthodox response to the Lollard heresy. Scholars like the Benedictine

Uthred of Bolden, the Franciscan William Woodford, the Dominican Roger Dymmock, and the Carmelite Thomas Netter wrote academic disputations of the heresiarch’s works in Latin. Some became part of the institutional crack down on Lollardy, sitting as prosecutors or judges for trials and other ecclesiastical investigations of heresy. Others sought to create a body of vernacular work that could stand against Lollard productions like the Wycliffite sermon cycle. The Carthusian Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed

Life of Jesus Christ offers such an orthodox response. According to a note at the beginning of several manuscripts, Love presented his work to Archbishop Thomas

Arundel for official approval. As a Latin inscription in many manuscripts reveals, the

Archbishop not only enthusiastically endorsed the work, but ordered its publication “for the edification of the faithful and the confutation of the heretics and Lollards,” giving the

Carthusian’s work a much larger audience than it might have had otherwise.20 Love explicitly constructs his work as a response to Lollard attacks. His source is the widely

19 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 40-48.

12 circulated Meditationes Vitae Christi, once attributed to Bonaventure, but now considered to be the work of another Franciscan writing in the mid-fourteenth century.21 Originally

penned for an enclosed Franciscan nun, the work was adapted many times for different

audiences throughout Western Europe. Love’s work is only one of ten English

translations of the Meditationes, but it is certainly the most widely circulated. Love

adapts his source to serve as a vernacular alternative to Lollard literary practice, and

serves to defend orthodox devotional norms. His most thorough revisions of the

Meditationes involve explicit rejoinders to Lollard thought, and the apparatus of the text calls attention to its polemical purpose, marking refutations of Lollard doctrine with interlinear notes.22

One might imagine that Love would make a specific defense of the religious life a

central part of his translation, given that he was a member of one of the most strictly

cloistered orders. Carthusians spent only a few hours out of their individual cells, never

speaking except to sing the liturgical hours or discuss serious matters with their brethren

during their daily exercise—the very sort of “idle” practices the Wycliffite homilist

attacked. But, what is notable about Love’s work is that he avoids discussing the life of

the religious at any length or detail. In fact, he calls attention to the fact that he is passing

20 “…ad fidelium edificacionem, & hereticorum sive lollardorum confutacionem.” Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Critical Edition, ed. Michael Sargent (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), 7/21-2.

21 Michael Sargent, “Introduction,” Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, xiv-xx; for a recent edition of this work, see Iohannis de Caulibus Meditaciones Vite Christi, Olim S. Bonaventuro Attributiae, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CLIII, ed. M. Stallings-Taney (Turnholt: Brepols, 1997).

22 See Michael Sargent, “Introduction,” Nicholas Love’s Mirror xliv-lviii.

13 over material that might give a more intimate glimpse into the cloister than he finds necessary for his secular audience. For example, in a discussion of the active and contemplative life placed after an account of Mary and Martha, Love notes that he will skip Pseudo-Bonaventure’s discussion of the two lives because it seems “inpertynent in gret party to many commune persones and simple soules, that this boke in english is written to …”23 Love calls attention to such omissions in several places, most often where Pseudo-Bonaventure discusses the contemplative life in depth, as he does at the beginning of another discussion of the distinctions between the active and contemplative:

Bot fort speke of the maner of lyvyng in these tweyn lifes actif and contemplative

in special, and namelich of actif life that stant in so many degrees, as of seculeres

and religiouse and lerede and lewede, it were hard and wolde ask longe processe,

and also as it semeth it nedeth not.24

Love here passes over nearly eighteen chapters of his source which delineate in great detail the various categories of the active and contemplative lives as well as the devotional practices that are appropriate to each.25 For Love, a full and complete account of the various categories of the religious life is unnecessary because the only distinction that matters for Love is between active and contemplative, strictly corresponding to the distinction between secular and religious.

Although he avoids speaking of the religious life in too much detail, Love seems very aware that he is writing his discussion of Mary and Martha in the context of Lollard

23 Nicholas Love’s Mirror, 120/10-12.

24 ibid., 122/37-123/2.

14 criticism like that mentioned in the Wycliffite sermon cycle. He steps forward to defend

the orders from accusations that the contemplative lifestyle is idle. In a passage that is

almost entirely original to his translation, Love makes a particular point to portray Jesus’s

instruction of the apostles and Mary Magdeline as worthy labor. Christ “wolde not be

ydule, bot as his commune manere was, occupiede him with spekyng of edificacion and

wordes of everlastyng life.”26 Turning to Martha’s complaint to Jesus that her sister was

“sittyng as it were in ydulnes” while she served the apostles, Love reminds his readers of

Luke 10:42, where Jesus praises Mary for “choosing the best part” by listening to his

teaching.27 For Love, this is a lesson that “he that is occupied vertuesly in actif life shal

not reprove him that is in rest of contemplatif life, though it seme to him that he be

ydul.”28 According to Love, Martha “grucced not of hir part, but continued forth in hir

manere lyvyng.”29 Those in the active life cannot know the “prive domes” of Christ in

his privileging of the contemplative. Active folk should console themselves that “yit was

the service and the bisynesse of Martha full pleisinge to Jesu and medeful to hir, as actif

life is gode, but contemplative bettur.”30 Love thus defends a division of labor that not only answers Lollard critiques of religious idleness, but also privileges the work of

25 See Johannis de Caulibus Meditaciones, 171-216.

26 Nicholas Love’s Mirror, 118/30-32.

27 For a thorough discussion of the contemplative traditions surrounding Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha, see Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1-141.

28 Nicholas Love’s Mirror, 119/41-3.

29 ibid., 123/30-31.

30 ibid., 123/25-7.

15 contemplatives. Lay folk cannot have full access to the “best part” of the spiritual labor

that Mary Magdalene chooses, and must resign themselves to the lesser “part” of her

sister Martha.

Love does, however, suggest modes of devotion appropriate to his readers culled

from a monastic tradition of vernacular contemplative literature. In his Proheme to the

Mirror, Love alludes to a long tradition of works that cater to not only contemplative audiences, but active ones as well:

Wherfore nowe bothe men and women and every Age and every dignite of this

worlde is stirid to hope of every lasting lyfe. Ande for this hope and to this entent

with holi writte also bene written diverse bokes and trettes of devoute men not

onelich to clerkes in latyne, but also in Englyshe to lewde men and women and

hem that bene of simple undirstondyng.31

Within this tradition, of course, are works for “symple creatures” like Pseudo-

Bonaventure’s religious woman, who for Love best approximates his secular readership,

needing as children the “mylke of lyghte doctryne and not with sadde mete of grete

clargye and of hye contemplacion.”32 As some have pointed out, an infantalization of

devotional instruction like that Love proposes here allows him to control his readers’

contact with religious texts and to preserve his privileged identity as a learned cleric.33

The tradition that Love alludes to also grants lay people a stake in the life that he professes as a religious man, however limited this stake might be. This same

31 ibid., 10/1-6.

32 ibid., 10/15-17.

16 commonality is emphasized at the end of the chapter on Martha and Mary, when Love eulogizes the Augustinian canon Walter Hilton, whose Epistle on the Mixed Life he commends as a “sufficient scole and a trew” for those in “worldly astate” who wish to live a partially contemplative life. The Carthusian commends Hilton’s soul to

“everlasting pese” as one who chose “the best part” with Mary Magdelene. His final prayer is that Christ will grant him and his readers “felawchipe” in this “part.”34

Although Love will not allow his secular readers full access to privileged contemplative material, he permits them to be a part of a carefully defined community: a common life of religious writers and secular readers.

This final move by Love to connect his readers and himself to an English devotional literary project like that of Hilton’s is the sort of gesture that I seek to study in other religious writers. By openly truncating his source to proscribe his readers’ knowledge of the contemplative experience, Love self-consciously shores up his status as a professed religious man. At the same time, he opens up possibilities for his readers to participate in certain aspects of a vernacular devotional tradition. In this way he is able to control how his readers encounter the religious life. The other writers I will examine here likewise structure authorial identities that simultaneously defend their religious profession while developing modes of piety for lay people that in some way appease the demands from patrons for greater access to religious discourse. They appropriate work from their orders’ literary tradition or from a wider tradition of religious writing and

33 See Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

17 adapt it for their lay readership. The religious writers I study often call attention to this appropriation, and through it construct their authorial identity and their relationships with patrons, just as Love connects himself to a tradition of vernacular religious writers such as Walter Hilton. Like Love, the writers I examine are responding to significant challenges to religious sovereignty, though these challenges are perhaps not as openly threatening as the polemic of Wyclif and the Lollards. To illustrate to these challenges, I will read these authors’ works against other texts that reflect the malleability of religious discourse I noted above, such as protocols for receiving secular guests, articles of reform imposed by secular rulers, or reflections on the genealogy of founders. These texts demonstrate how the literary production of the orders was caught up in wider social changes that were affecting the religious.

I have chosen to limit my study to writers from East Anglia working during the first half of the fifteenth century. There have been many studies of the devotional culture of late medieval East Anglia, given the richness and variety of the material that survives from that region.35 During the late Middle Ages, this region enjoyed a booming economy from the wool trade, as several of its major costal cities were located across from the most important trading ports on the continent. Along with this economic boom came a cultural renaissance of sorts as patronage for the literary and visual arts abounded, and a vibrant dramatic tradition developed. The devotional life of East Anglia seems to have

34 Nicholas Love’s Mirror, 124/37-44. Hilton’s Epistle is included in several manuscripts of Love’s Mirror; see Michael Sargent, “Introduction,” Nicholas Love’s Mirror, xxiv

35 See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) derives much of his discussion of late medieval religion from East Anglian sources and artifacts. 18 been rich as well. In his study of wills in East Anglia's largest city, Norwich, Norman

Tanner notes that the region abounded with religious institutions.36 Gail McMurray

Gibson notes that East Anglian lay people were particularly generous to local religious

foundations, often seeing religious communities as “extensions of family piety.”37 This richness in devotional life also bred many diverse and even non-traditional forms of religious life, such as informal communities of religious women resembling the beguines on the Continent, as well as several active communities of Lollards. There was much in the devotional culture of East Anglia for members of religious orders to respond to and to compete with for the attention of lay patrons. In particular, lay people in East Anglia were demanding fuller participation in religious life than the institutions of the church had offered before. I seek to contribute to previous studies by exploring how the writers I examine construct their understanding of local religious community. Even though my writers all hail from within fifty miles of each other, operate within some of the same spheres of influence, and even share some of the same patrons, each of them constructs their image of community in strikingly different ways. Each of the writers I examine are juggling diverse, competing local interests, and each uses a variety of approaches to negotiate those interests. Indeed, the malleability of the connections between secular and religious interests prevents any easy, monolithic understanding of regional character among these writers.

36 Norman Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370-1532. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), xvi-xvii.

37 Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 20. 19 My first chapter looks to the Book of Margery Kempe, and I examine there how cultural tensions develop as one East Anglian lay person seeks involvement with religious communities. Margery’s provocative devotional style challenges both her detractors and her supporters to reconstrue traditional religious boundaries. Some among the religious condemn her, appealing to authoritative religious precedents to censure her.

Others accept her within recognized parameters, and invoke textual precedents of their own to justify her devotion, often referring to devotional texts that were circulating among religious communities and their patrons. However provocative her devotional style may be, Margery’s piety is largely a collaborative effort, as she develops and nurtures tight local networks of sympathetic secular clerics, lay people, and religious figures to support her cause and defend her from the persecution of her detractors.

Ultimately, the dynamic between Margery and her friends among the religious points to the dynamic of literary authority developed in the Book. Margery attempts to find scribes who can defend her and effectively situate her life within authoritative precedents in devotional literature. Interestingly, even though two religious figures offer to commit her life to vellum, Margery refuses, opting for two different secular scribes. As many allies as Margery has among the religious, the Book portrays them as being too often constrained by external regulations to fully support her devotion, making them inadequate scribes. The ideological obstacles that religious writers confronted in presenting devotional texts thus dramatically play out in the text of the Book. I will return to the example of Margery Kempe throughout my project, since The Book anticipates many of the issues that the other writers I study face as they attempt to construct productive relationships with their lay patrons. 20 Where my first chapter examines the obstacles lay people faced confronting the religious, my second examines how the religious negotiated often intrusive secular authority. I turn to one of the most influential writers of the fifteenth century, the

Benedictine John Lydgate from Bury St. Edmunds, in order to examine how he situates his authorial identity in relation to his lay patrons. I begin with Lydgate’s Siege of

Thebes, which portrays the monk of Bury on the return journey of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrimage. Lydgate writes this portrait as a response to Chaucer’s anti-monastic satire and to secular infringement on monastic privileges, such as his longtime patron Henry

V’s reform of the Benedictine order. In his poem, Lydgate not only recuperates monastic identity, but reveals the deep political shortcomings of the chivalric nobility. I then look to another moment when Lydgate and his house were concerned about the scope of regal authority, as Henry’s heir, Henry VI, was quickly approaching the age when he would take control of the kingdom from a troubled council and his feuding uncles. Lydgate composed The Lives of St. Edmund and Fremund after the young king’s visit to the monastery at Bury in 1334. Adapting material from Bury’s rich hagiographical tradition,

Lydgate offers Henry an exploration of the troubles of kingship, presenting his patron saint’s spiritual power as a safeguard against the very political dangers he had laid out in the Siege of Thebes. Lydgate proposes a “confederacy” between his house’s patron saint and the young ruler that gives Henry the martyr’s symbols of holy kingship, but which also obligates the young king to preserve the house’s interests in East Anglia and beyond.

I then move to two writers from the same order, the Augustinian friars Osbern

Bokenham and John Capgrave. Like Lydgate, both very carefully construct relationships with their patrons in their writing. They adapt works once restricted to an audience 21 learned in Latin and professed to a religious life. They each reflect on their patrons’ relationship to their house (in Bokenham’s case) or order (in Capgrave’s). As Margery

Kempe develops a closely connected community of local clerics and religious figures,

Bokenham and Capgrave cultivate religious and lay networks within East Anglia through their literary work. They are able to maintain authorial identities as religious men while recognizing their obligations to their patrons. Each recognizes the possible theological and institutional limitations on their relationships with lay folk, yet each manages to frame their work to mediate their patrons’ access to their religious communities. Though their goals are similar in these respects, the way that they achieve a balance between inclusion and recognition of boundaries is quite different.

In his lives of holy women, Bokenham frequently reflects on his local patrons and their commissions, and he carefully adapts his sources to suit his patrons’ needs and interests. However, Bokenham’s sources often reflect a rejection of his patrons’ busy secular life, so he must find ways of accommodating his commissions in ways that won’t alienate his readers’ expectations. He transforms the lives of two saintly matrons, St.

Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, and St. Elizabeth, a Hungarian princess turned ascetic. The Austin friar’s source reflects a decisive rejection of secular values, and

Bokenham must stretch his poetic resources to accommodate his patron’s worldly responsibilities. Bokenham uses this disconnect between his source and his patron’s religious ambitions to signal the difference between his own profession as a friar and the difficulties of the life his patrons lead. At the same time, he mitigates this difference by painting himself as a simple, humble poet who himself has rhetorical and spiritual limitations. 22 Capgrave adapts an important Life of St. Augustine for a “gentil woman” patron that likewise values virtuous simplicity. But rather than focusing on a simplicity haunted by rhetorical and spiritual limitations, Capgrave values a simplicity of Christian virtue that sets itself against an overly ambitious intellectualism. This simplicity is modeled in the figure of Augustine’s mother Monica, whose character Capgrave develops significantly from his source. While Augustine in his youth is seduced into a heretical sect through his own proud intellectualism, Monica confidently holds on to a steadfast, orthodox faith, demonstrating the spiritual virtue her learned son lacked. Monica becomes a figure at the head of an Augustinian religious community that stands in stark contrast to the spiritually diseased heretical groups that her son strives against. Capgrave presents this community as an image for the joint lay and religious partnership he envisions for his patron, his order, and the wider religious community in East Anglia, opposed to the subversive Lollard conventicles. Within this anti-heretical project, however, Capgrave allows lay people surprisingly open-access to religious texts and practices, even suggesting that lay people are capable of profound spiritual insight in contemplation.

The common life of the religious and their lay patrons generated social tensions that shaped how the writers I study understood their authorship. As the ideological distinctions between the secular and religious were challenged in the Late Middle Ages, religious authors like John Lydgate, Osbern Bokenham, and John Capgrave responded by reconfiguring religious identity to preserve their profession on the one hand, and to mollify their patrons’ ambitions on the other. Their orders’ literary traditions gave them the basic matter from which they shaped their work, and they molded images of 23 community between religious and secular folk, images that often coalesced in the figure of saints: Saints Edmund and Fremund for Lydgate, Saints Anne and Elizabeth of

Hungary for Bokenham, and Saints Augustine and Monica for Capgrave. These authors thus bind religious and secular people through the “communion of saints” invoked in the

Apostles’ Creed. However, this communion with sanctity had the potential to stretch the boundaries that defined these authors’ way of life. Margery Kempe, as we shall see, positions herself as a singularly holy figure within a community of religious and secular people, challenging even the most well-meaning attempts to contain her. Her exploits uncover much of the difficulty that the other authors I study must face in mediating the demands of their patrons.

24 CHAPTER 1

THE SCANDAL AND INDIGNATION OF HONEST MATRONS: MARGERY KEMPE AND THE RELIGIOUS

In 1336, during their General Chapter, the Carmelite Friars amended an article of

their Constitutions that regulated the admission of women into the dormitories and

cloisters of their houses. The original article had stated that no woman was to be allowed

into the residencies, at the table of any friar, or even within the boundaries of the cloister

except under “approved necessity and special license of the prior.”1 A second component

of the article qualifies the restriction, stating that no woman was to be allowed into the

cloister or workshops unless she was “an honest matron or some other woman of good

fame who cannot be denied without scandal,” in which case she was to be accompanied

by an “honest and approved female companion and well-prepared friars.”2 The 1336

General Chapter amended the restrictive first part of the article to fall in line with the

second part’s more welcoming--if strict--regulations, declaring that a woman could be

allowed into the residencies if she is “a noble lady or honest matron who cannot be

denied hospitality without notable indignation, and then can be admitted only with proper

1 “Item statuimus quod nulla mulier hospitetur in domibus nostris, nec aliquis frater ad mensam mulierum comedat infra septa loci, excepta competenti necessitate et licentia prioris speciali, sub poena gravis culpae.” Constitutiones antiquae a. 1324, Monumenta Historica Carmelitana, Vol. 1, ed. Benedict Zimmerman (Lirinae: Ex typis abbatae, 1905), 35.

2 “Nec aliqua mulier visitet claustrum vel officinas interiores, nisi matrona honesta, vel aliqua alia bonae famae cui sine scandalo non poterit denegari, et tunc cum honesta et competenti comitiva et fratribus praemunitis, sub poena gravis culpae.” ibid. 25 escort within her household.”3 This clarification suggests that Carmelite houses were

under pressure from laypeople, particularly “noble ladies” or “honest matrons,” to allow

them to enter the most private places within a religious community. Even though

allowing laywomen entrance threatened to violate the privacy and sanctity of the cloister,

the public indignation or scandal brought on by turning such women away seems to have

been considered a worse fate. Carmelite religious communities thus attempted to

compromise, carefully monitoring and mediating a laywoman’s access to the religious

life under controlled circumstances.

This amendment to the Carmelite Constitutions shows how carefully religious orders regulated access to the cloister and, in turn, the practice of the religious life itself.

It seems to recognize that total material isolation from the outside world is not possible.

To refuse access to secular people can bring “indignation” or “scandal” to the house and its order from patrons or potential patrons, possibly damaging necessary economic and political alliances in the world outside the cloister. Compromise is necessary, and local houses and their priors are given flexibility to allow laywomen intimate access to the community. The amendment, in turn, tries to manage the entrance of laywomen into the inner cloister by offering protocols to account for the “honesty” and “good fame” of visitors. The local prior has full prerogative to determine the virtue of any visiting secular people. He alone can approve—“competere”—the necessity of a visitor’s entry into the cloister, as well as the acceptability of a visitor’s companions. He also insures

3 “Item in eadem Rubrica ubi dicitur : (1) quod nulla mulier hospitetur in domibus nostris, addatur nisi nobilis domina fuerit aut honesta matrona quibus sine indignatione notabili hospitium negari non posset et tunc cum decenti comitativa cum sua familia hospitetur.” Acta capitulorum Generalium a. 1336, Monumenta Historica Carmelitana, Vol. 1, ed. Benedict Zimmerman (Lirinae: Ex typis abbatae, 1905), 125. 26 that accompanying friars are “praemuniti” (literally “fortified-in-front”), well-prepared to

negotiate a visitor’s interaction with the community.4 However virtuous the visiting

matron and her retinue might be, they are to be accompanied in the inner cloister by a

religious person at all times. Their access to the religious house is to be carefully

mediated by its inhabitants. The amendment thus lays out a social dynamic between a

religious community and lay people that allows lay people access to the religious life

while preserving the community’s integrity as a spiritual refuge from the world. But the

fact that the Constitutions had to be amended to accommodate laywomen and that

religious communities faced “scandal” and “indignation” if they refused secular visitors

reveals how contested the interaction between the secular and the religious could be.

The Book of Margery Kempe presents a particularly compelling opportunity to

explore the dynamics between lay and religious people in fifteenth-century England. The

Book of Margery Kempe is particularly helpful in that it examines how the piety of a middle class urban housewife is steeped both in the discourse of monastic life and in an emerging bourgeois consciousness. The Book portrays the confrontation between lay and

religious spheres as one of its central concerns. Margery causes controversy within the

Book because she crosses many of the institutional and discursive boundaries the

religious sought to police. In her encounters with religious communities and individuals,

Margery demands public engagement in the religious life. When the religious refuse to

allow her to practice her devotion fully, Margery, like the “honest matrons” whom the

revisers of the Carmelite Constitutions feared, shows indignation and stirs up scandal.

4 Constiutiones antiquae a. 1324, 35. This is an editor’s emendation. The manuscript apparently reads “praemoniti,” which could mean “forewarned” in this case. 27 And as the Constitutions instruct Carmelites to mediate carefully the access that “honest

matrons” had to their houses, the Book represents Margery as developing alliances with important religious figures. Margery’s allies testify to her spiritual virtue ordained by

God and justify her piety in the face of strident criticism. The dynamic the Book

represents between Margery and the religious favors those who allow Margery to practice

her public piety, and unfavorably positions those who interfere with her engagement with

forms of religious life practiced in the cloister. This dynamic allows her such significant

spiritual authority that she is often not only able to pierce the intimacy of the cloister, but

also to pass judgment on the religious life of its inhabitants. Margery’s claims to

religious authority, however, create antagonism within the Book. Not only does

Margery’s public devotion provoke negative reactions among her enemies, but it also

produces a certain tension in her relationships with her staunchest supporters. This

dynamic even manifests itself in the fiction of the Book’s genesis, as Margery refuses the

offers of two members of religious orders to write her life.

A topic which vexes criticism of The Book of Margery Kempe is the complicated

relationship between “this creature” Margery Kempe, whose life is narrated in the Book,

and the Book’s author. Lynn Staley broadened previous discussions of the issue by arguing that the figure Margery, “this creature” referred to in the Book, is the fiction of an

authorial figure “Kempe,” whom she tentatively associates with an historical woman.5

Scholarship following Staley’s work can no longer take the Book’s scribal fiction at face value and assume that the work is necessarily a scribe’s transcription of Margery’s oral

5 Lynn Staley-Johnson, “The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe” Speculum 66 (1991): 820-38. 28 telling of her life. However, some critics, who accept the Book’s complicated and skilled

authorial construction, have recently offered compelling alternative perceptions of the

authorship of the Book. For instance, Sarah Rees Jones argues that The Book of Margery

Kempe is firmly established in a tradition of clerical criticism--of writing “by men and for

men … using the example of women as a correctional impetus.” Jones, rather than

making “the experience of Margery as the central truth of the work,” suggests the Book’s

central purpose is its exemplarity for male clerical figures, in particular its representation

of the authority of bishops.6 While I accept Staley’s distinction between an authorial

figure and his/her fictional persona in The Book of Margery Kempe, I will pass over

assumptions about the author’s identity to examine the problematics of religious authority

in the work, both in Margery’s devotional practices and in her search for literary

authority in the Book itself. I am convinced that we cannot really make any adequate

statements about the identity of the figure behind the Book without in some way

occluding the problematics of authority that the Book puts forward. It is the contradictory

claims that arise from Margery’s self assertion of religious authority and her dependence

on male clerical literary authority which are at the center of the Book. In the end, all we

can refer back to with confidence is the complex fictional dynamic that the Book presents

between its female subject and the male clerics whom she encounters. Whoever created

the text that survives as The Book of Margery Kempe, be this person male/female,

lay/cleric--or even secular/religious, for that matter--had a very keen sense of how

authorship and sanctity might be constructed in religious literature and played with

6 Sara Rees Jones, “‘A Peler of Holy Cherch’: Margery Kempe and the Bishops,” Medieval Women: Text and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan Brown et al. (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), 376-91. 29 different conventions for doing so, often in interestingly contradictory ways. Thus I am

most comfortable writing about what “the Book presents” without referring to a definite

authorial figure. In the end, The Book of Margery Kempe was ultimately the product of a complex, troubled social dynamic like that represented in the book.

The social conflict created by Margery’s engagement with different social spheres has made the Book central to our understanding of the religious culture of late medieval

England. Over the past twenty years, scholars have showed how the Book is deeply

engaged with the conflicts arising from an urban middle class attempting to find its

identity within late medieval English devotional life.7 As Kathleen Ashley has pointed

out, The Book of Margery Kempe “enacts a solution to the cultural dilemma of how to

achieve spiritual validation while remaining an active member of mercantile society.”8

Criticism has explored how Margery’s engagement in different cultural spheres provokes varied reactions from her contemporaries, revealing many of the most charged cultural conflicts in late medieval England. Lynn Staley argues that through Margery’s transgressiveness, the Book “underlines, or gives dramatic form to, some of the unresolved conflicts and tensions” its author saw in late medieval English culture.9

7 The most influential early explorations of this development as reflected in The Book of Margery Kempe are Anthony Goodman, “The Piety of John Brunham’s Daughter, of Lynn,” Medieval Women: Essays Dedicated and Presented to Rosalind M. T. Hill, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 347-58; Sheila Delaney, “Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe,” Minnesota Review 5 (1975), 104-15 and David Aers, Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430 (London: Routledge, 1988). More recent explorations of Margery’s relationship to mercantile culture include Michael D. Myers “A Fictional-True Self: Margery Kempe and the Social Reality of the Merchant Elite of King’s Lynn,” Albion 31 (1999): 377-94, and Roger A. Ladd, “Margery Kempe and her Mercantile Mysticism,” Fifteenth Century Studies 26 (2000): 121-41.

8 Kathleen Ashley, “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998), 374. 9 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 9. 30 Margery is, for instance, engaged with much of the same questioning of spiritual

authority that preoccupied Wyclif and his followers, and, as Ruth Shklar has pointed out,

while Margery herself cannot be said to be a Lollard, her “engagement with Lollardy and

the larger issues of dissent and disobedience is central to and inseparable from her

spirituality.”10 Margery’s status as a laywoman makes these conflicts particularly acute.

Staley suggests that the Book’s author “employs gender stereotypes to explore the

potentially … dangerous issue of spiritual authority.”11 Margery aggressively engages

spiritual topics as a woman and as a layperson, and provokes figures within the Book to

confront the most charged issues of the day. These confrontations, furthermore, effect

how Margery can perform her devotion. These confrontations usually occur with clerical

figures, both secular and religious.

Most criticism addressing Margery’s relationships with clerical figures only

examines them across a general clerical/lay divide, regardless of whether particular

figures are members of the religious or secular clergy. It is my contention here that

Margery’s interaction with the religious requires special attention. Religious differ from

secular clerics in that they are beholden to particular institutional structures that regulate

their relationship with the world. They must always answer to their prior, abbot, or to the

wider administrative centers of their order. While members of religious orders share

many clerical responsibilities and privileges with other clerics, such as access to

ecclesiastical courts, academic training, sacramental powers, and pastoral responsibilities,

10 Ruth Shklar, “Cobham’s Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking,” Modern Language Quarterly 56 (1995), 278.

11 Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, 85. 31 the religious mediate these through the particular institutions and traditions of their

orders. A monk, canon, or friar, for example, might have access to academic training like

any other cleric, but this access is negotiated in particular ways. A budding academic

among the religious might receive arts training as a novice, obtain permission to attend a

school or university from his prior or provincial, attend a specific college or hall at a

university maintained by his order (often separate from or even at odds with the

university community at large), and train within his order’s own academic traditions.12 A particular religious order or house also might have its own methods of literary production, which might or might not include dissemination of materials to the laity, depending on its particular policies.13 As we shall see, the religious had a particular set of relationships with Margery, both positive and negative, and they deserve particular attention, especially since it is mostly through religious figures that Margery finds solace

(and, in many cases, trouble). Her piety, moreover, was influenced by devotional texts that circulated largely through religious channels.

Much of Margery’s tension with clerical figures results from her public, performative appropriation of religious practices. This provocativeness creates a particular tension among the monastic orders, whose valuing of the privacy of devotion in the cloister makes them predisposed to respond negatively to Margery’s public piety.

12 See the recent collection of essays entitled Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig (New York: Leicester University Press, 2000).

13 A. I. Doyle, "Publication by Members of the Religious Orders,” Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 109-124; Christopher Cannon, "Monastic Productions," Cambridge Guide to Middle English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1999), 316-48; Hanna, Ralph III. “Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature.” The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, ed. A.S.G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna (London: The British Library, 2000), 27-42. 32 Even members of orders that advocated a more public piety among their brethren, like the friars, more often than not frowned upon certain types of public devotion among lay people, especially women. Often, Margery’s private, inner visions manifest themselves performatively as outbursts on a public stage. Some in her audience interpret her fits as genuine religious experience authorized by God, and others reject them as insincere, hysterical, or even diabolical. Her performances thus cause division in society and call attention to how her community’s values are enforced. Sarah Beckwith examines

Margery’s performance in light of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.14 Beckwith asserts that Margery’s life reflects the interrelationships between bourgeois and ecclesiastical values. Her habitus is “one that readily converts symbolic capital into economic capital and economic capital back into cultural capital.”15 Beckwith illustrates this dynamic by examining the tension within the parish structure of Lynn between the influential lay Trinity Guild and the Benedictine community that vie for a position within the parish of St. Margaret’s church. Margery has a special relationship with the

Benedictine monks of Lynn who were in charge of the parish church of St. Margaret, which Margery attended. When a local party of burgesses petitions for an independent baptismal font in one of the chapels within the church, Margery takes the side of the priory, which opposed the petition, concerned that an independent chapel might detract from the priory’s prerogatives within the parish. The Book worries over the influence that capital and political prestige have over the conflict, noting that it is “rewth that mede

14 Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 104.

15 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 110. 33 xuld spede er than trewth.”16 Beckwith points out that this stance, which places itself

above material desires and influence, ultimately is put forward to strengthen rhetorically

the priory’s own material interests. In other words, while lambasting the Lynn burgesses

for their political and economic maneuvering, Margery is defending the priory’s own

political and economic interests in the parish. Margery, then, cannot simply be

understood within “a conceptual apparatus that maintains the distinction between those

two forms [bourgeois and ecclesiastical] of capital.”17 Her devotional habitus also calls

attention to how medieval monastic and emerging mercantile values interrelate,

demonstrating the priory’s privileged place in the economic and social life of Lynn.

Margery’s actions in monastic space reveal how she forges a relationship with

religious communities and develops a piety that crosses the boundaries between monastic

and secular worlds. The prior of the Benedictine community in Lynn often allows

Margery into his cloister when her weeping becomes especially boisterous and

burdensome to both her and those around her. She is in these cases taken to the prior’s

cloister “for air,” in one case because she is “turning blue” (140/17-23 and 155/25-33).

Thus Margery is given intimate access to the private space inhabited by the community’s

head. According to Benedictine protocol for welcoming visitors, the abbot or prior’s

duty is to welcome guests. Indeed, for the Benedictines, as with most religious orders,

the abbot or prior is the primary mediator between his community and the secular world

16 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 59/16. I will cite from this edition in my text from this point.

17 Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 110 34 outside.18 Margery’s entrance into the prior’s cloister places her in that space within the

community where those from the secular world can meet those from the cloister in a

place in-between, neither in the world nor entirely outside it. It is here that Margery

sometimes receives visions, as she does after one of her weeping fits. When she is fearful

that her weeping will disturb those in the church, Christ orders Margery to return to the

nave, telling her that he will stop her weeping (155/25-33). Margery’s private devotional

moment with Christ in the prior’s cloister thus allows her to reincorporate herself into the

public space of the parish church and to cross the boundaries between the monastic and

secular worlds.

Margery’s intimacy with the Lynn Benedictine community, however, is not

without controversy. Some in Lynn seek to limit her access to the cloister and paint her

devotion as insincere, hysterical, or even diabolical. Not long after leaving the prior’s

cloister at Christ’s command, her weeping becomes less boisterous, and many interpret

her apparent control as a response to a visiting friar’s rebuke of her disruptive piety.

Furthermore, her enemies see her newfound self-control as proof of her hypocrisy (156/1-

6). In another case, a monk visiting from the priory’s motherhouse in Norwich who

“loved not” Margery refuses to enter a chapel if she is there. Forced to choose between

his duty to his order and the expectations of a controversial lay woman, the prior

apologetically asks Margery and her confessor to find another place to hold her private

communion. Margery and her confessor deftly look for ways of regaining access to the

chapel. Margery’s confessor then reminds the prior that they have orders from the

18 See, for example, David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, Vol. II (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1955), 280-7. 35 Archbishop of Canterbury himself to administer communion and confession as often as

Margery requires. In order to accommodate the Archbishop’s orders, Margery is given communion at the high altar of St. Margaret’s, and her weeping is heard all over the church (139/3-30). Thus the Norwich monk’s attempt to drive a wedge between Margery and the Lynn community noisily backfires. Margery’s confessor skillfully pressures the prior into accommodating his charge’s devotional needs in the space shared by the parish and the religious community. He is able to invoke the priory’s obligations to provide for the pastoral care of the parishioners of St. Margaret’s church, and the special needs of

Margery in particular, authorized by the archbishop himself (139/14-19). The compromise the prior makes to place Margery in another, more public area of the church away from the religious community is rendered unworkable by Margery’s weeping. The failure of this compromise suggests that Margery’s special devotion should allow her greater access to the religious community than the visiting monk would allow.

Margery’s access to divine revelation also allows her in some ways to involve herself in the operation of a religious community. Through a revelation from God,

Margery predicts that the burgesses’ attempt to petition for an independent chapel in St.

Margaret’s church will fail. The priest who served as Margery’s scribe asks her if “sche felt in hir sowle in this mater whethyr thei schuld have a funte in the chapel or nowt”

(59/34-5). Margery responds that “thow thei woldyn geve a buschel of nobelys, thei schuld not have it” (59/37-8). In the end, Margery’s predictions are confirmed when the parishioners break the terms of the bishop’s decree, and the bishop revokes the chapel’s privileges. Margery’s prophetic authority not only can touch the Benedictines’ relationship with the secular world, but can even extend to the intimate workings of the 36 Lynn community itself. In one case, a priest who trusts Margery’s visions asks her if the prior of Lynn should be replaced. Margery responds that the prior would be called back to the priory’s motherhouse at Norwich and another prior would be sent. The prior of

Lynn is indeed called home as Margery predicted, and a new prior arrives. After a short time, however, the new prior returns to Norwich and the old prior is placed back into his former post. Later, when the old prior dies, after a week of revelations on the subject,

Margery predicts that the former prior would eventually return to Lynn.19 On the seventh day of revelations, Margery’s prediction comes true (170/26-171/26). Both of these prophetic visions serve to verify Margery’s sanctity, particularly in her relationship with the religious in Lynn. In fact, the Book recounts a certain amount of overt confidence on

Margery’s part that her visions should be confirmed, calling attention to the importance that these visions have on her status as a holy woman. After Margery promises her scribe that the burgesses will fail in their petition for a baptismal font in the chapel, the Book notes that she is particularly bold in praying on the subject, since “sche had be revelacyon that thei schuld not have it” (60/6-7). The description of the tone of her prayer suggests, as well, that her revelation is quite public, that she prays audaciously “to wythstonde her

[the burgesses] intent and to slakyn her bost” (60/8-9). She wishes the priory’s foes on this issue to know that God is on the priory’s side through her.

This episode, as well, is said to be recounted out of chronological order, since it relates to the “materys written before,” that is, a long series of episodes where Margery successfully predicts miraculous events, several of which relate to religious people

19 The first of these visions also notably occurs in monastic space, within a chapel within the Carmelite house at Lynn. 37 (58/26-9). The previous chapter, for instance, recounts two events where Margery judges the character of suspicious religious men: a man who claims to be an impoverished monk fallen into irregularity, and another who says that he is an Augustinian canon from

Penkeney Abbey. Each of these men asks for monetary help from Margery’s scribe, who ignores Margery’s warnings that these men are untrustworthy. Margery’s suspicions are confirmed for both figures when they each cheat her scribe out of money. In these episodes, the Book establishes Margery’s spiritual authority at home in Lynn before the narrative moves on to recount her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Rome, where she faces tribulation overseas.

Despite Margery’s spiritual authority to predict events important to the Lynn community, the Book usually carefully distances her from direct involvement in the events themselves. Her visions in these cases do not serve to advise the religious; instead, they merely state the inevitable occurrence of events. In at least one case, however, Margery’s visions do serve to advise the religious directly. This episode appears to invest her with much deeper power to involve herself in a religious community. A chapter early in the Book tells how Margery is sent by God to “diverse places of religioun” (25/28-9). The chapter relates a particular episode among a “place of monks wher sche was rygth welcome for owyr lordys lofe, save ther was a monk which ber gret office in that place despised hir and set hir at nowt” (25/28-32). However, after he hears her speak “many good wordys as God wold hem puttyn in hir mende,” he is moved by her “dalyawns” to change his opinion of her, and approaches her for advice.

The monk asks Margery to pray for him, to identify his sins, and to determine whether or not he will be saved from damnation. Christ reveals the monk’s sins to Margery, and 38 explains that he will only be saved if he ceases to sin and resigns the prestigious office he has outside of the monastery. The monk follows Margery’s advice, and on a later visit to the same house, Margery finds that the monk has become a “well governing superior”

(26/5-27/17). Here Margery’s visionary advice not only saves the monk from damnation, but grants him newfound authority in the community. It is interesting to note here, as well, that Margery’s advice serves to correct the monk’s relationship to the outside world; part of the monk’s sin is that he bears “gret office” and it is only after he resigns this office that he can fully reform himself. Thus Margery directly helps to police the integrity of the monk’s relationship to the corrupting outside world. While Margery’s habitus stretches the normal boundaries set up by monastic ideologies to the extent that it establishes religious authority for her even as a laywoman, it also ultimately stands to confirm the integrity of the religious communities with which she is involved.

Margery’s self-empowering engagement with monastic habitus and the tensions that her engagement provoke call attention to a wider debate in late medieval England about emerging forms of religious life that were developing outside of regular monastic traditions. Joel Fredell, for example, has pointed out how the tension between Margery’s private visions and public spectacles plays into wider debates about spiritual and social governance seen in writers such as Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the author of the

Summe le Roi.20 He notes that the monastic hierarchy of the private, contemplative life over a public, active one is challenged when Margery’s contemplative visions occasion such public spectacles as her weeping. These spectacles in turn provoke negative

20 Joel Fredell, “Margery Kempe: Spectacle and Spiritual Governance,” Philological Quarterly 75.2 (1996): 137-66.

39 reactions from much of her contemporary audience because of their affront to the

traditional monastic hierarchy. Similarly, Denis Renevey examines how Margery’s

idiosyncratic public performances transfer meditative practices from the anchoritic

tradition to a public arena before an unsympathetic audience that is unable to understand

that “translation” of eremitical practice to the public world.21 He notes:

The neatly regulated bodily performance which took place within the secrecy of

the reclusorum or the monastic cell is dramatically and loosely translated by

Margery before a large public. Her translation of those events is enacted before a

disapproving public unable to read her rendition of discursive religious

practices.22

In moving certain forms of devotion out of their traditional contexts, Margery creates an adaptive piety that reflects her place both as a merchant housewife and as a holy woman seeking a form of religious life. This amalgamated devotional style is reflected in the

Book’s presentation of very different and often conflicting discourses. Some scholars, for example, have noted how the Book seems to be filtering Margery’s devotional practice through popular dramatic and literary forms. David Wallace shows how the Book’s methods of representing Margery’s devotion use popular, imagistic forms of narration and dramatic engagement with the life of Christ that are often in tension with more

21 Denis Renevey, “Margery’s Performing Body: The Translation of Late Medieval Discursive Religious Practices,” Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 197-216.

22 ibid., 206. 40 official forms of representing the lives of holy women.23 Similarly, Carol Meale argues

that Margery is just as much influenced by religious drama, such as the cycle plays and

public liturgical practices, as by less public textual traditions such as those of the

continental mystics. Meale points out that Margery’s public performance and the

response of audiences to her behavior can be seen within the context of conflicted

attitudes toward religious drama. Civic and ecclesiastical authorities made sure that lay

responses to the liturgy and religious drama were carefully monitored to prevent social

disruption, and Margery’s public devotion in the Book often pushes the boundaries of

acceptable practice.24

Margery’s visit to Christ Church Cathedral priory in Canterbury, which was perhaps the most prestigious religious house in England, shows just how contentious her engagement in monastic life could be. During her visit, Margery becomes alienated from both the monks and the other pilgrims visiting the house through her loud, boisterous devotional weeping. Even her husband has abandoned her in embarrassment, “as he han not a knowyn her” (27/23-4). An “eld monk” who in secular life had been a treasurer for the Queen approaches Margery, grabs her by the hand, and asks her what she can speak of God. Margery explains that she wishes to both hear and speak of God, and proceeds to relate a story from Scripture (27/25-31). When the monk reprimands her, saying that he wishes that she “wer closyd in an hows of ston that ther schuld no man speke with” her

(27/31-3), Margery boldly defends herself, noting that the monk should “meynteyn

23 David Wallace, “Mystics and Followers in Siena and East Anglia: A Study in Taxonomy, Class and Cultural Mediation,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1984, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1984), 169-91.

24 Carole M. Meale “‘This is a Deed Bok, the Tother a Quick’: Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in the Book of Margery Kempe,” Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, 29-67. 41 Goddys servauntys,” rather than be the first to “hold against hem” (27/33-28/1). A younger monk expresses his concern about Margery’s behavior: “Eyther thou hast the

Holy Gost or ellys thou hast a devil within the, for that thou spekyst her to us is Holy

Wrytte, and that hast thu not of thiself” (28/1-4). Margery asks for permission to tell a tale, a request that the crowd at the monastery asks the older monk to grant, and he does.

Margery tells a parable of a contrite man who pays others to reprove him for his sins, who on one occasion is persecuted while he is among “many gret men,” whom he thanks for allowing him to “kepe his sylver in his purs” (28/5-22). Just as the repentant man in her tale, Margery thanks her persecutors because she had not found “schame, skorne, and despite” back home in Lynn, and found it so readily in Canterbury (28/22-27). She then leaves the monastery, followed by an angry mob that threatens to burn her as a “lollare.”

Margery prays to God to deliver her and two “fayr yong men” return her to the house where she was staying with her husband (28/28-29/8).

This passage is usually discussed in relation to orthodox reactions against the perceived public clerical role that Lollards were said to give to women.25 While such readings are cogent, I would add that this episode also addresses more specifically the dilemmas raised by lay engagement in the religious life. Margery here is seeking to find accommodation among the Canterbury Benedictines so that she might both “spekyn and

25 Work exploring the debate about women preachers in late medieval England is vast, much of it building off of Claire Cross’s “‘Great Reasoners in Scripture’: The Activities of Women Lollards,” Medieval Women: Essays Dedicated and Presented to Professor Rosalind M. T. Hill, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 359-80, and Margaret Aston’s “Lollard Women Priests?,” Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: The Hambledon Press, 1984), 49-70. H. Leith Spencer’s English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 49-54 includes an illuminating discussion of the debate about laymen and laywomen preaching. A. J. Minnis, “De impedimento sexus: Women’s Bodies and Medieval Impediments to Female Ordination,” Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 1997), 109-39, contains a thorough exploration of the theological tradition behind the late medieval debate. 42 heryn” the Word of God with them. Margery’s desire to engage with the Canterbury community as she does at home within the Lynn priory is within the acceptable bounds laid out by the Rule of St. Benedict. The Rule commands that houses of monks receive guests “as Christ,” and that “due honor be shown to all.”26 A “God-fearing” brother is to be assigned to the visitors and they are to be accompanied to prayer and have the “divine law” read to them.27 Yet, like the Carmelite Constitutions, the Benedictine Rule also instructs communities of monks to carefully negotiate both their duty to welcome all visitors graciously and their need to protect themselves from being disturbed by the world outside the cloister. The kitchens of the Abbot and the guests are to be kept apart from those of the community itself, so that the monks might not be disturbed by the guests, who “arrive at uncertain hours and are never absent from the monastery.”28 Apart from the prior and brother assigned to serve the needs of the guests, no other brother is to associate or speak with them without permission.29 The old monk at Canterbury might be seen as attempting to defend the privacy and peace of his community by objecting to

Margery’s public rehearsing of Scripture. It is not just the fact that Margery as a lay woman appears to be openly preaching, but that she does so in the place where any public discourse is tightly controlled. Furthermore, such discourse is controlled not only for lay

26 “Omnes supervenientes hospites tamquam Christus suscipiantur … et omnibus congruus honor exhibeatur,” St. Benedict of Nursia, Regula Sancti Benedicti LIII, Order of Saint Benedict Website, 2002, 8 Nov., 2002 .

27 “Item et cellam hospitum habeat assignatam frater cuius animam timor Dei possidet … Suscepti autem hospites ducantur ad orationem … Legatur coram hospite lex divina ut aedificetur.” ibid.

28 “Coquina abbatis et hospitum super se sit, ut, incertis horis supervenientes hospites, qui numquam desunt monasterio, non inquietentur fratres.” ibid.

29 “Hospitibus autem cui non praecipitur ullatenus societur neque colloquatur.” ibid. 43 people, but for the monks as well. Such control over monastic space was particularly

crucial at a pilgrimage site as popular as Canterbury, where lay people were constantly

coming into contact with the community.30 In wishing her enclosed, the old monk desires

her to be confined in a place where her Scriptural meditations might be more appropriate

in a monastic context. Margery’s rebuke that the old monk should be “maintaining God’s

servants” rather than being “the first to hold against them” demonstrates her aspiration to

be welcomed into a collaborative relationship with a religious community. Her

exemplum implicating the community in the persecution of the faithful when they refuse

to welcome her, however, infuriates the Benedictines and others within the cathedral.

In the context of the Benedictine Rule’s protocols for visiting lay people, the Book can be seen as portraying Margery’s violent ejection from Canterbury as inexcusably inhospitable. The threatening crowd and the two young men who save Margery recall

Lot’s encounter with two angels before he escapes from the lecherous mob of Sodom in

Genesis. This reference to Sodom in the Book presents a critique of a community whose inhospitality has become endemic.31 Canterbury, one of the largest and most important

Benedictine houses in England, should receive its guests “as Christ,” according to the

Rule on which it was founded. Its inhospitality signifies its corruption and its failure to

live up to this Rule. For Margery, part of monastic hospitality involves a particular

30 For a discussion of women pilgrims and the discourse surrounding them using modern performance theory and including a chapter on Margery Kempe as a pilgrim, see Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety and Public Performance (New York: Routledge, 2000).

31 Lynn Staley rightly notes that this reference to Sodom could be a “critique of an English church that had coupled unnaturally with secular institutions,” echoing contemporary condemnations of simony as the sin of Sodom, Dissenting Fictions, 103. Along these same lines, for an in-depth look at accusations of sodomy between Lollards and their accusers, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), Chapter 1, “Lollards, Sodomites, and their Accusers,” 55-99. 44 acceptance of lay people into the community and a willingness to engage with them in monastic practice: to “accompany them to prayer,” and to read the “divine law” with them, as the Rule commands. For her accusers at Canterbury, her public engagement with Scripture violates established hierarchies for interpreting scripture in a place where such hierarchies were especially important.32

In an extended attack on Lollard views of lay preaching, the polemicist and

Carmelite prior provincial Thomas Netter notes a prohibition against non-ordained preachers among both lay people and the religious that is relevant to this episode.

Netter’s discussion is also significant here in that the Book later presents Netter himself as stepping in to limit Margery’s engagement with one of his charges, the Carmelite doctor of divinity Alan of Lynn. According to Netter, those in religious orders who are not sanctioned to leave the confines of the monastery to engage in pastoral duties with the world outside are forbidden to preach just as lay people are:

I know that Apostolic Law was fixed against men so that no one might presume

the honor [of preaching] for themselves unless he is called by God as Aaron

was—not only if he is a lay person, but even if he is a monk or religious person of

any kind. If he does not have the power of Ordination, in no way may he take

up the honor of a preacher.33

32 For a discussion of the pedagogical hierarchies in late medieval education, see Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

33 “Quantum autem ad viros, scio Apostolicam legem esse praefixam, ne quisquam sumat sibi honorem, nisi vocetur a Deo tamquam Aaron: non tanum si sit laicus, sed etiam si sit monachus, aut religious suiusvis schematis: si non habeat Ordinis potestatem, nullatenus ambiat praedicatoris honorem.” Thomas Netter, Docrinale Antiquitatem Fidei Catholicae Ecclesiae, Vol. I, ed. B. Blanciotti (Venice, 1759), col. 641. For 45 To support this assertion, Netter cites a passage from Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons on

the Song of Songs where the Cistercian father notes that “we monks know that our office

is not to teach but to mourn … it is truly clear and certain that it is not fitting for a monk

to preach publicly, nor is it advantageous for a novice to do so, nor is it permitted to any

one not sent by God.”34 Monks in the cloister, as much as lay people in the household,

must recognize the limited scope of their ability to engage in Scriptural interpretation.

The patriarchal confines of the household are in some senses equivalent to the isolation of

the cloister. Lay people may read and teach their families basic Scriptural texts at home,

and monks can meditate on the Word in their cell, but neither can venture out of those

bounds.35 Those who do seek to move beyond these duties of the cloister (and in the

context of this discussion of lay preaching, the household) must be mistaking their call, or

worse, are being deluded by dark powers. Netter cites Saint Bernard, who notes that a

bad angel, “a lying little fox, that is, something bad lurking under the appearance of

something good,” deceives such self-ordained priests.36 The younger monk’s restrictive interpretation of Margery’s public behavior at Canterbury reflects similar attitudes about

Netter’s more involved discussions of women and lay preachers see Vol. I, col. 637-42 and “De Sacramentalibus Ordinis,” Vol. III, col. 371-82.

34 “Et scimus monachi officium non docere esse, sed lugere … Ex his [passages he cites] nempe claret, & certum est, quod publice praedicare ne monacho convenit nec novitio expedit, nec non misso licet.” ibid., Vol. I, col. 641.

35 Netter makes the limitations of women teaching in the household explicit earlier in the treatise by quoting Haymo: “In suo sexu permittitur mulier docere in domo sua, & pueros. In Ecclesia hoc prohibetur.” (“Women are permitted to teach children in their home among their own sex. In a church it is prohibited.”) ibid. col. 640. Rebecca Krug’s Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002) explores how women engaged with texts in various ways within familial structures. For a discussion of religious women readers and their relationships with secular women, see Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

36 “Ergo quidquid tale animo suggeratur, sive sit illud tua cogitatio, sive immissio per angelum malum, dolosam agnosce vulpeculam, idest, malum sub specie boni.” ibid. 46 preaching within monastic ideology as he wonders that Margery could only interpret scripture through the Holy Spirit or through a devil, and cannot “have Scripture” of herself.

But Margery does not claim textual interpretation “of herself.” She envisions an engagement with texts as collaborative, something social. Margery takes great care to obtain and nurture relationships with a variety of sympathetic religious figures such as the prior of Lynn. As she tells the old monk at Canterbury, she wishes not only to “speke of God” but “heryn of” God as well. All of the terms that Margery uses to describe her more positive relationships with clerical figures suggest a certain collaboration in religious discourse, terms such as “comownyng,” “conversacioun,” or “dawlyaunse,” as with the monk who becomes a “well-governing” superior after speaking with Margery.

For authoritative figures such as the old monk and Netter, collaboration threatens to violate their interpretive hierarchies, giving lay people like Margery too much of a stake in a practice specially reserved for the ordained. When Margery collaborates with religious figures, she recalls certain hierarchy-condemning pedagogical strategies of the

Lollards.37 However, in the context of the Book, it is Margery’s cooperation with religious figures that absolves her from charges of heresy. The Book represents Margery as the connecting force between a local group of religious figures, a woman who creates a community of religious and secular clerics that crosses many boundaries of clerical status

37 In her Introduction to Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Late Middle Ages, 10-17, Rita Copeland points out that Lollard pedagogy valued discussion in opposition to more traditional pedagogies which stressed a hierarchy between authoritative teachers and subjected learners. 47 and religious order.38 This local community, in fact, is willing to come into conflict with

the wider governing institutions of the established church. The Benedictine prior of Lynn

is only one of several religious and secular clerics who frequently come to Margery’s

defense. He is part of a group of clerics commended in the Proheme of the Book which,

when Margery relates her life and her visions, confirms that these experiences are “of the

Holy Gost and of noon evyl spyryt.” These clerics even “tokyn it in perel of her sowle

and as thei wold answer to God that this creatur was inspired with the Holy Gost …”

(3/9-23).

One prominent religious figure within this group of clerics is the Carmelite doctor

of theology, Alan of Lynn. Alan’s connection to Margery is first seen early in the Book

when he verifies a miracle involving Margery at St. Margaret’s church. Having heard

that Margery has felt no pain after a large stone has dropped upon her, Alan “inqwired of

this creatur alle the forme of this processe,” obtains the stone, weighs it, and even pulls a

timber that had also fallen on Margery out of a fire to examine it (21/18-22/95). Alan

then declares the incident to be a great miracle and spreads word of the event. Later,

when Margery comes under fire from a visiting Franciscan preacher, Alan is among those

friends of Margery in Lynn who petition the “good” friar to reconsider his opposition to

Margery. He is mentioned with one of Margery’s confessors, a bachelor of law, as

having “made hem mythy and bolde to spekyn for [the Lord’s] party in excusyng the

seyd creatur, bothyn in the pulpit and beseyden wher thei herd anything mevyd agen hir,

38 Anthony Goodman mentions that Margery developed her network of clerical allies in Lynn as an alternative to the urban bourgeois community she had rejected in “The Piety of John Brunham’s Daughter, of Lynn,” 356-8. See also Janet Wilson, “Communities of Dissent: The Secular and Ecclesiastical Communities of Margery Kempe’s Book,” Medieval Women in their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 155-85. 48 strengthyng hir skyllys be aucoriteys of Holy Scriptur sufficiently” (167/34-168/1). Alan and the other clerics plead for Margery to ecclesiastical authorities through their status as learned clerics and, in Alan’s case, his standing as a prominent member of a religious order. Margery never hesitates to seek help from this group of clerics when she is in trouble, as when, after being arrested in York for a second time, she returns to West Lynn to seek their help in getting a letter and seal from the Archbishop of Canterbury (136/13-

26).

Margery’s allies in Lynn allow her to engage publicly with clerical discourse such as their preaching, even when her participation threatens to disrupt them. When the themes of their sermons reflect on Christ’s life and passion, Margery weeps loudly.

Margery’s devotional outbursts in these cases function as an engagement with the preacher: a performed, affective response to the content of their sermon. Margery’s allies all openly recognize Margery’s weeping in these cases as a genuine and valid engagement with the subject matter of their sermons. The prior of the Lynn Benedictines

“suffers” Margery “full meekly and no thing mevyd ageyn hir” when she weeps during a

Good Friday sermon on the death of Christ. The Book notes that Margery has been so affected—as if physically “wowndyd”—by “pite and compassion,” that she cries out “as yyf sche had seyn owr Lord ded with hir bodily eye” (167/19-23). At the end of the previous chapter, an Augustinian Friar from Lynn preaches on Christ’s passion during

Lent, and Margery is moved to fall down weeping. When people in the audience start reprimanding her, the friar rebukes them, telling them to be silent, since they “wote ful lityl what sche felyth” (167/1-13). Margery’s prayers even seem to have power over the efficacy of the sermons of her allies. At one point, Margery prays that Alan of Lynn will 49 give an inspiring sermon. Christ then answers in her soul that Alan will in fact preach a divinely inspired sermon, and exhorts her to “beleve stedfastly the wordys that he schal prechyn as thow I prechyd hem myselfe, for thei schal be wordys of gret solas and comfort to the, for I schal spekyn in hym” (219/25-8).

Despite the fact that the Book represents Margery as being functionally illiterate, it nevertheless shows her engaging in various types of written clerical discourses with the support and aid of her allies. Several of Margery’s allies grant her access to a variety of texts, which they read and discuss with her. Many scholars have pointed out how

Margery’s devotion mirrors continental amalgamations of lay and religious life, which were beginning to be imitated in England and were causing some controversy there. Ever since Hope Emily Allen thoroughly explored Margery Kempe’s similarities to continental mystics in her notes to the Early English Text Society’s 1940 edition of the Book, scholars have examined her debts to these continental devotional traditions. Indeed, the

Book includes references to continental holy figures such as Bridget of Sweden and Mary of Oigines. It also contains lists of native and continental devotional texts that various clerical figures read and discuss with her.39 Scholarship has examined how Margery’s piety reflects possible engagement with these texts and the religious traditions they represent, particularly how she controversially adapts these traditions as an active laywoman. Susan Dickman shows how Margery’s piety to a great extent fits with established continental forms of what she calls female “quasi-religious” life. In other words, in her independence from institutional orders, her devotion to chastity within

39 See, for example, Margery’s encounter with Richard Caister, 39/23-5 (discussed below), and the discussion of her relationship with a priest who reads to Margery and his mother, 143/25-9. 50 married life, and her public engagement in ecclesiastical politics, Margery resembles

figures such as Dorothy of Montau, Bridget, and Mary of Oingies, figures who carefully

associated themselves with religious people. Nevertheless, Dickman also points out how

many aspects of Margery’s religious practice distinguish her from her forbears, such as

her diminished concern for apostolic poverty, her reliance on social persecution for

justification of her spiritual authority, her relative independence from clerical oversight,

and her willingness to critique male clerical authority openly. All of these characteristics

put her at odds not only with her opponents among the religious, but with many of her

allies as well.40

Margery claims a certain spiritual autonomy that allows her to appropriate actively the textual traditions she is given access to. Margery does not merely receive instruction passively, but rather freely applies texts to her own experience, as she does when presenting herself for a well-known vicar in Norwich, Richard Caister. She tells him that her devotional feelings are so intense that

Sche herd nevyr boke, neythyr Hyltons boke, ne Bridis boke, ne Stimulus Amoris,

ne Incendium Amoris, ne non other that evyr sche herd redyn that spake so hyly

of lofe of God but that sche felt as hyly in wekyng in her sowle yf sche cowd or

ellys mygth a scewyd as sche fell (39/23-8).

The books that Margery lists here in her conversation with Caister are among those religious texts from the monastic and eremitical traditions that were finding their way

40 Susan Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Glasscoe (1984), 150-68. In God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, Inc., 1999), Rosalynn Voaden has recently pointed out that controversy over Margery’s devotional style arises from contradicting discourses, namely the discourse of scorn and persecution and the discourse of the discretion of spirits. 51 into the hands and ears of lay people, particularly through monastic literary publication.

Here Margery claims that her devotional experience exceeds those that are described in the texts clerics have read to her. In one place, the Book notes how Margery’s holiness might further exceed that of St. Bridget. After seeing a vision at the showing of the Host,

Margery receives assurance from Christ that “Bryde sey me nevyr in this wyse” (47/27).

This active appropriation of continental precedents in holy women can also be seen in

Margery’s second scribe. At one point, we find that this scribe has distanced himself from Margery after a preaching friar has condemned her copious weeping during sermons. The scribe does not associate with her until he reads a passage (cited by chapter) from the Life of Mary of Oignies describing her devotional weeping, and then experiences a bout of weeping himself during the Mass (152/29ff). The scribe returns to his support of Margery, and reads more devotional texts that describe the sort of devotional weeping that Margery seems to experience. The Book, in fact, records

applicable passages from these texts describing the nature of devotional weeping. Once

again, these texts are among the most popular works from continental and native English

devotional traditions that were beginning to circulate widely among lay people through

religious channels, including “The Prykke of Lofe,” Richard Rolle’s Incendio Amoris,

and the Life of Elizabeth of Hungary (153/37-154/17). These texts become sources to justify Margery’s piety, texts through which Margery’s devotion can be understood.41

The fact that it is Margery’s second scribe here who illustrates textual precedents for

41 See also the episode in Chapter 68 where a Dominican doctor of theology named Custance reassures Margery that he had “red of an holy woman whom God had gouyn gret grace of wepyng & crying” (165/38-166/1).

52 Margery’s spiritual life is particularly significant, because these texts provide generic models for his transcription of Margery’s life. However, Margery herself never considers these texts to be sources of her devotion; her religious life is already authorized by God.

The validity of her spiritual experience appears to be independent of textual precedents, and sometimes, as in the case of her discussion of Bridget, superior to experiences described in popular devotional texts. But her scribe invokes them, and thus clearly places Margery within the tradition that these texts represent.

In addition to looking at Margery’s active, provocative appropriations of the piety of continental holy women, scholars have examined how Margery’s contemplative mode reflects traditions of meditation on the life of Christ, particularly in relation to the

Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes de Vita Christi and Nicholas Love’s translation of that text. Many have pointed out that Margery’s active, public approach to meditations on Christ’s life and passion stands in conflict with Love’s carefully controlled private visualizations in the Mirror. Sarah Beckwith asserts categorically that the author of the

Book knew Love’s Mirror and deliberately styled Margery’s imitatio Christi in relation to the Carthusian’s work. While Love’s Mirror tries to limit potentially radical identifications with Christ, the Book presents Margery as using affective meditation on

Christ’s life to “renegotiate her own cultural position” by manipulating social roles for

Christ, the Holy Family, and the apostles suggested in Love’s Mirror.42 One of the most wide ranging instances of this is in a chapter where the Book describes Margery’s acceptance of persecution, when Christ claims that because of this persecution she is “a very dowtyr to [him] and a modyr also, a syster, a wife, and a spowse” as she becomes a

42 Beckwith, Christ’s Body, 79-88. See also Lynn Staley, Dissenting Fictions, 117-21, 141-6. 53 witness for the gospel (31/22-35). Christ’s private acceptance of Margery within this malleable set of familial relationships allows her to fashion a spiritual authority for herself even in situations where her piety is most resisted. Denis Renevey notes that

Margery’s re-enactment of the passion is “provocatively challenging,” and that while

Love instructs his audience of lay people to passively observe and privately meditate on the events described, Margery places herself within a meditative context in a way that blurs the boundaries between the object of meditation and Margery’s place as meditating subject.43 This blurring between meditative subject and object has complex effects on

Margery’s social interactions with the religious. As she is able to use her shifting relationship with Christ to bolster her spiritual authority in different ways, Margery is able to construct equally pliable relationships with religious figures.

We can see Margery’s affective engagement with the life of Christ in her relationships with the religious during her trials at Leicester. After the hostile mayor of

Leicester permits Margery to travel to Lincoln and obtain a letter from the bishop,

Margery visits the Augustinian abbey near Leicester. The abbot, who has been present for the trial, comes with a group of his canons to greet Margery and welcome her to the abbey. As they approach, Margery is overwhelmed with devotion as she imagines the abbot and his canons as Christ and his apostles:

When sche sey hem comyn, anon in hir sowle sche beheld owr Lord coming wyth

hys apostelys, and sche was so raveschyd into contemplacyoun wyth swetnes and

devocyoun that sche myth not stondyn ageyns her coming as curtesy wolde but

lenyd hir to a peler in the chirche and held hir strongly therby for dred of falling,

43 Renevey, “Margery’s Performing Body,” 202ff. 54 for sche wold a standyn and sche myth not for plente of devocyon which was

cause that sche cryed and wept ful sor (117/15-23).

As with other examples of her affective devotion, Margery’s inner associations of outer persona and events with the life of Christ openly manifest themselves with weeping, and in this case, an inability to stand. It is interesting here, as well, that her inability to stand becomes a potential breach of “courtesy” during her reception by the abbot and his community. She wishes she could stand, but the depth of her devotional experience prevents her from doing so. This outward show of devotion presents itself for interpretation by its viewers—it can either be of the Holy Spirit or of the devil, as the young monk of Canterbury noted.

In this case, the abbot of Leicester, in stark contrast to the town’s over-zealous mayor, warmly welcomes Margery into the community despite her inability to stand:

“Whan hir criying was ovyrcomyn, the Abbot preyd his brethyr to have hir in wyth hem and comfortyn hir, and so they govyn hir ryth good wyn and madyn hir ryth good cher”

(117/23-6). The abbot then grants Margery a letter for the bishop of Lincoln regarding

“what conversacyon sche had sen the tyme that sche was in Leicetyr” (117/28-9). The

Dean of Leicester, who also has been present for Margery’s trial, then grants her his own letter for the bishop. Margery thus is able to connect herself to another network of local religious figures around Leicester who support her. Her allies are able to interpret her devotion properly and defend her cause to hostile authorities. Margery’s vision of Christ approaching with his apostles in the presence of the abbot of Leicester and his canons allows her to shape her relationship with the Augustinian community according to a definition of apostleship that includes her in the picture. Margery thus uses her 55 singularity as a visionary to confirm her relationships with allies among the religious

independently.

As the Book proceeds, Margery progressively begins to rely less and less on clerical approval. Through her intimate dialogues with Christ, Margery finds a certain independence from clerical authority, and she even begins to judge clerical figures using the very same binary that hostile clerics such as the young monk at Canterbury had once applied to her. At one point, Christ tells her that “ther is no clerk in al this world that can, dowtyr, leryn the bettyr than I can do … ther is no clerk can spekyn ageyns the lyfe which I teche the, and, yyf he do, he is not Goddys clerk; he is the develys clerk” (64).

Of course, Margery’s singularity often strains her relationships with clerical figures.

However, the fact that she works within religious traditions and clerical discourse to establish her singularity somewhat diminishes her radicalism and independence. David

Wallace points out that the Book demonstrates a tension between a clerically mediated

devotional life and a self-directed devotion striving for independence from clerical

regulation: “Margery repeatedly confounds clergy’s critique of her personal devotional

practice: but only by mirroring back the truths that clergy has supplied her with.”44

Janette Dillon points out that the complexities of Margery’s interrelationship with clerical figures, particularly with her confessors, mirror the relationships between continental holy women and their confessors. The strict rules and regulations that surrounded confession--particularly for women--presented contradictory demands on confessors. On the one hand, they were to contain women under the rule of obedience, maintaining their spiritual discipline under the authority of the church and authorizing the divinity of their

44 Wallace, “Mystics and Followers,” 186. 56 spiritual experience. On the other hand, confessional discourse surrounding holy women also stressed the responsibility of confessors to console, support and defend their charges.

A woman’s access to divine revelation places responsibility on her confessor to support her through her spiritual trials. Failure to offer deserved consolation could invalidate a cleric’s authority, in rare cases permitting a certain amount of disobedience on the part of a holy woman. Dillon points out that the extent of Margery’s disobedience in the Book makes it unique among writings about holy women. In fact, even Margery’s obedience,

Dillon notes, is often related to a certain “negotiated disobedience.” Christ offers Kempe his commandments and her confessors must endorse these commandments in turn, however controversial. This is the case when Margery seeks clerical permission to wear a white mantle. Christ commands her to adopt vestments symbolic of virginity, and when clerics forbid, attack, or otherwise impede Margery from doing so, she impugns their authority.45

Margery’s challenging of clerics who restrict her devotional habits is particularly clear in her encounter with the bishop of Lincoln, the Augustinian canon Philip

Repingdon. Margery and her husband wait several days to see the bishop, and when he is finally able to grant them audience, Repingdon shows a benevolent interest in Margery,

“derly” welcoming her, noting that “he had long desyred to speke with hir and he was rygth glad of hir coming” (33/31-2). Margery appreciates the bishop’s willingness to engage with her, and she is inspired by his holiness, weeping at his generous display of

45 Janette Dillon, “Holy Women and their Confessors or Confessors and their Holy Women? Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition,” Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England, ed. Rosalynn Voaden (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer Inc., 1996), 115-140. For another discussion of the practice of confession, see Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), Chapter 1. See also Rosalynn Voaden’s chapter on Margery Kempe in God’s Words, Women’s Voices. 57 almsgiving (34/28-35). Margery has visited Repingdon so that she might publicly declare her chastity with her husband and obtain permission to wear the mantle and the ring, symbols of a newly restored virginity. While the bishop does bless Margery and her husband’s profession of chastity, he balks at allowing her to wear the mantle and ring, since his counselors recommend against it. These counselors, the Book mentions, have met with Margery, asking “many herd qwestyons, the which be the grace of Jhesy resolvyd, so that hir answerys lykyd the Bysshop ryghth wel and the clerkys had ful gret mervayl of hir that sche answeryd so redyly and pregnauntly” (35/2-6). The tension here between Repingdon and his counselors’ reaction to Margery’s doctrinal examination suggests that there was some disagreement about what sort of leeway should be given to lay people in engaging in questions of faith and in public displays of their devotion. To answer doctrinal examinations “pregnawntly” in a doctrinal examination, that is, to not merely repeat an official answer to doctrinal questions, but either to leave out or suggest

“yet-to-be-born” interpretive possibilities, was quite provocative in an English church that had made it policy to search out and reveal dissidents who often suggested their opposition in trials, but protected themselves from prosecution by being sufficiently vague in their answers. This suspicion is clear during Margery’s trial in Leicester, when the mayor accuses her of not meaning “wyth hir hert as sche seyth with hir mowthe” after she gives a perfectly orthodox explanation of the consecration of the Sacrament of the altar (115/21-2).

Repingdon seems to appreciate Margery’s forthrightness and active engagement in the examination, but ultimately cedes to the more restrictive judgment of his advisors, referring her to Archbishop Arundel at Canterbury instead. Margery goes to church to 58 pray about “how sche xuld ben governd in this mater and what answer sche mygth gife to the Bysshop” (35/17-18). Christ himself offers Margery his rebuke of Repingdon:

Dowtyr, sey the Bysshop that he dredyth mor the shamys of the world than the

parfyt lofe of God. Sey hym, I schuld as wel han excused hym yf he had fulfyllyd

thi wyl as I dede the children of Israel when I bad hem borwe the goodys of the

pepyl of Egypt and gon awey therwith (35/20-5).

The bishop thus fails to lead Margery, as if out of Egypt, beyond the restrictions of a repressive ecclesiastical regime overly nervous about heresy. Nor does he allow her to appropriate, as if Egyptian gold, the white mantle and ring, symbols of virginity that might not otherwise be available to her as a middle class urban housewife with fourteen children. Repingdon’s concern for devotional propriety may protect Margery from ecclesiastical suspicion of certain forms of lay devotion. In Margery’s eyes, however, this caution prevents him from fulfilling his pastoral commission. After she reports

God’s rebuke to the bishop, Margery insists that she will go to the Archbishop of

Canterbury on her own volition, not because the bishop suggests that she should:

Ser, I wyl go to my Lord of Cawntyrbery wyth rygth good wyl for other cawsys

and materys which I have to schewe hys reverens. As for this cawse [i.e.

obtaining permission to wear the mantle and ring] I schal not gon, for God wyl

not I aske hym theraftyr (35/24-7).

Repingdon allows himself to be swayed by an overly restrictive episcopal court rather than boldly permit Margery to practice her unconventional piety, as he first seems to be inclined to do when he first greets her.

59 Repingdon’s failure to support Margery stands in direct contrast to the support that the abbot of Leicester—who holds the very post at the abbey that Repingdon held before he became bishop—provides during her later trials. The abbot and other local clerics who ally themselves to Margery provide letters to convince the bishop to intercede with the mayor of Leicester on her behalf. Repingdon’s duties as bishop of Lincoln ultimately alienate Margery, while his former religious community graciously supports her. Perhaps Repingdon’s status as bishop prevents him from offering the sort of support he might have provided as a canon of Leicester. While a contrast between Repingdon as a bishop and as a canon is not made explicit in the Book, the contrast is evident in the testimony of William Thorpe, who echoes many of Margery’s criticisms of the canon- turned-bishop. Early in his testimony, Thorpe explains to Archbishop Arundel that

Repingdon had once been a supporter of Wyclif at Oxford “whilis he was a chanoun of

Leycetre,” but now, as a bishop, he “pursueth Cristen peple.”46 God will punish

Repingdon and other lapsed Wycliffites because they will not “strecche forth her lyues” by preaching the truth against the established church as they had before, and instead

“bisien hem thorough her feynyng for to schlaundre and to pursue Crist in his membris rather than thei wolde be pursued.” Just as Christ condemns Repingdon in The Book of

Margery Kempe for being more concerned with the “shamys of the world than the parfyt lof of God,” Thorpe argues that Repingdon and others show themselves to be “worldly

46 Two Wycliffite Texts, EETS 301, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39, 41. For a discussion of Thorpe’s polemical hermeneutics during his testimony, see Rita Copeland’s Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages, 191-219.

60 lyuers” by hiding themselves within oppressive ecclesiastical regimes.47 When the

Archbishop praises Repingdon’s change of heart from when he was “no but chanoun of

Leycetre,” Thorpe points out that many now “speken him myche schame and holden him

Cristis enemye.”48

There are also ambiguities in Margery’s relationship with her staunchest ally among the religious, Alan of Lynn. Like Repingdon, Alan is prevented from fully supporting Margery because of institutional restrictions. However, with Alan, this inability to support Margery is not voluntary. Responding to complaints from “envious personys” that Alan is “to conversaunt” with Margery by supporting her public weeping and by “enformyng” her in “qwestyons of Scripture” (168/4-9), the Carmelite Provincial

General—whom we know to have been Thomas Netter, though he is not named in the

Book—forbids Alan to associate with her. Netter’s restrictions are very specific. Alan can neither speak with nor write to Margery regarding Scriptural matters: “than was he monischyd be vertu of obediens that he xulde no mor spekyn with hir ne enformyn hir in no textys of Scriptur …” (168/9-11). Alan reluctantly obeys his superior, but admits that

“he had levar lost an hundryd pownd, yyf he had an had it, than hir communicacyon, it was so gostly and fruteful” (168/12-14). The collaborative relationship that Margery developed with Alan is represented as mutually dependant. Margery may receive clerical support from Alan, but he sees himself as gaining spiritual benefit by associating with a holy woman. In fact, Margery’s authority in the relationship is confirmed in a miracle.

After Netter forbids Alan to contact her, Margery hears that the doctor is gravely ill.

47 ibid., 41.

48 ibid., 42. 61 Worried that a revelation promising that she would once again be allowed to speak with him will be discounted, Margery prays to God that He might allow Alan to live longer.

Soon after, Alan is cured of his illness and is granted leave by his superior to speak with

Margery once more.

Margery is able to articulate her relationship with Alan in a way that underlines her status as a holy woman and that even further suggests her independence from clerical authority. Toward the end of Book One, after Margery prays to God that Alan might give a good sermon, the Book records a qualification to Margery’s revelation that Christ will speak through the Carmelite doctor. Margery goes to tell her confessor and two priests about what has been revealed to her about Alan’s sermon, but then regrets doing so:

And, whan sche had telde hem hir felyng, sche was ful sory for dreed whethyr

sche schulde sey so wel as sche had felt er not, for revelacyouns be herd sumtyme

to undirstondyn. And sumtyme tho that men wenyn wer revelacyouns it arn

deceytys and illusions, and therfor it is not expedient to gevyn redily credens to

every steryng but sadly abydyn and prevyn yf thei be sent of God (219/31-220/1).

Margery here is questioning the validity of her revelations at the moment she is doing the very thing holy women are traditionally supposed to do to confirm their visions—going to clerical figures who are authorized to discern such phenomena. This is what Margery herself does toward the beginning of the Book. The Proheme states that she went to tell her “maner of levyng” to various clerical figures, who in turn encourage her to trust her feelings and to believe that they “weren of the Holy Gost and of noon evyl spyryt” (3/20).

The discretion of spirits was one of the primary duties of the clerical community she

62 associated herself with.49 But here she regrets going to her clerical allies to tell them of

this vision, and rather feels that she should “sadly abydyn and prevyn yf thei be sent of

God,” in other words, wait on her own to see if the vision is independently verified.

Furthermore, it is Alan’s status as a vessel for God’s Word that is at stake in this vision;

when he becomes this vessel, it is because of Margery’s prayerful intervention.

Margery’s revelation about Alan is “very trewth schewyd in experiens” (220/2-3), and

her visionary authority is confirmed to be independent even from her most supportive

allies among the religious.

Margery’s assertion of independence from clerical authority here comes at the

very moment that the Book describes how she is called to have her life written.

Throughout the Book, Margery’s search for literary authority is fraught with the same

tensions as her relationships with religious figures. Because the Book represents Margery

as a non-literate laywoman, the writing of her life depends on her working with a literate

man. Lynn Staley has shown how the careful construction of a scribe within the fiction

of the Book lends Margery an air of literary authority that would not normally be available to a non-literate, middle class urban housewife:

Kempe carefully positions Margery between the learned clerks on the one hand

and God on the other. Once Margery knows God intends to use her words to

manifest his goodness, she needs to find a writer who can inscribe her experience

for her and thereby give “credens to her felyngys.”50

49 For a discussion of the discourse concerning the discernment of spirits, including a chapter on Margery Kempe, see Rosalyn Voaden’s God’s Words, Women’s Voices.

50 Staley, Dissenting Fictions, 31-2. 63 Margery’s juxtaposition of scribes and God allow her to have “credens” though a literate

man, but also to have a certain independence from his authority through her direct

communication with God. As the rhetoric of the Book favors religious figures who

develop cooperative relationships with Margery that empower her to openly express her

devotion, so the scribal fiction describes a collaboration between Margery and her scribes

that gives Margery a certain sovereignty to dictate how her life is to be recorded. A

scribe’s fitness to write Margery’s life depends on the scribe’s loyalty to Margery and to

the instructions that God has given her.

It is interesting, then, that for all of her positive relationships with religious men,

Margery does not choose a scribe from a religious order. If she were to have chosen one,

she might have had an order’s literary resources at her disposal: scribes, libraries,

scriptoria, and avenues of textual dissemination. Instead, Margery first chooses a literate

layman and then a secular priest. She refuses the offers of two members of religious

orders to write her life. The Proheme to the Book mentions that after a “White Frer”

offers to write down her life, Margery refuses, explaining that “sche was warnyd in hyr

spirit that sche schuld not wryte so sone” (6/10-11). Likewise, during her visit to see

him, Bishop Repingdon counsels her “sadly that hir felyngys schuld be wretyn” and

Margery declines, insisting that “it was not Goddys wyl that thei schuld be wretyn so

soon” (34/6-8). Margery constructs her literary authority by invoking what Lynn Staley

calls the “chronological relationship between experience and transcription.”51 Margery claims for herself the authority to order the events in her life into what she sees as a coherent narrative telling of the “hy and unspecabyl mercy of ower sovereyn savyowr

51 ibid., 31. 64 Cryst Jhesu” (1/3-4). It is only with self-reflection and guidance from God that Margery can decide how to record her life. This decision is made independent from clerical advice. What remains is that she find a scribe that can properly comprehend this self- narration and faithfully transcribe it.

We are told very little about Margery’s first scribe, other than the fact that he is an

English-born man who lived in Germany before he married a woman there, had a child, and returned to England. He produces a composite German/English text before he dies.

The second scribe, however, is written into the narrative as having to grow into a proper awareness of Margery’s sanctity. This second scribe has to learn to distance himself from the “slaunder” and tribulation that are part of Margery’s plight as a holy woman. At one point, it is noted that he is unable to read the muddled German-English text of the first scribe, and furthermore out of “cowardyse” avoids Margery’s company and refuses to write because of so much “evel spekyng” of her (4/21). He does not want to be “put in peril” because of her. It is not until after he follows his guilty conscience and accepts

Margery’s prayers for him to read the book that he miraculously becomes able to make sense of the first scribe’s text. I have already mentioned how this same scribe learns to accept Margery’s weeping as a gift from God, even under the pressure of public ridicule provoked by the visiting Franciscan preacher. In both of these episodes, the scribe learns to “read” Margery’s devotion sympathetically and to transcribe this experience into a literary form. His submission to Margery’s divinely ordained witness makes him a suitable amanuensis.

Part of Margery’s refusal of the White Friar and Philip Repingdon, then, may be connected to their inability or unwillingness to allow Margery to practice her piety fully 65 or to contravene suppressive tendencies in the English church which limited lay devotion.

Repingdon, as I have noted, shrinks from putting his authority behind Margery, and in

Margery’s eyes fails to support her unconventional but genuine request to put her devotion into practice. The White Friar, like Alan of Lynn (unless the “White Frer” is a veiled reference to the Carmelite doctor himself), is answerable to the restrictive authority of Thomas Netter, who would be unlikely to endorse a project like the Book of

Margery Kempe. He certainly would not sanction the vision of public lay devotion it represents. While the Book of Margery Kempe presents models for positive interaction between religious and lay people, it is perhaps less positive about the capability of the religious to produce a literature that invites lay people to actively engage in the religious life.

However, later reception of the Book suggests that there were some religious people who sympathized with Margery’s piety more fully than those represented in the text. The sole surviving copy of the Book comes from the Carthusian charterhouse of

Mount Grace, the home of Nicholas Love. The copy includes red ink annotations to the text.52 Among other things, these annotations call attention to relationships Margery has with religious figures. Furthermore, they also seem to have significant praise for

Margery’s active engagement in the religious life, as well as for those among the religious who aid Margery in her search for religious authority. Several annotations call

52 For discussions of these annotations, see Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 206-12, and Kelly Parsons, “The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience,” The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, ed. Kathryn Kirby-Fulton and Madie Hilmo (Victoria, B.C., Canada: English Literary Studies, The University of Victoria, 2001), 143-216. Parson’s article includes a new transcription of the annotations, corrections, and rubrications in the surviving manuscript containing The Book of Margery Kempe.

66 attention to Margery’s weeping, and some compare her weeping to that of two monks of

Mount Grace: Richard Methley, a prolific writer of Latin devotional treatises, and John

Norton, another writer who became prior of the charterhouse at the beginning of the sixteenth century.53 One annotation commends the famous Carmelite William Southfield as a “goyd white frere” for his willingness to talk to Margery.54 These annotations also condemn those who impede Margery’s devotion, such as the Franciscan preacher who visited Lynn. Although the visiting Grey friar is first noted as a “good freyre,” after he turns hostile and wishes that the weeping Margery leave the church where he is preaching, an annotation explains in Latin that “it is not in the power of man to restrain the Holy Spirit.”55 The annotations thus seem to judge Margery’s encounters with the religious on almost the same terms as Margery herself uses.

Since the annotations are generally thought to date from the early sixteenth century, based on references to Mount Grace Carthusians living around that time, it is possible that attitudes toward the interrelationship between lay and religious spheres had changed, at least at Mount Grace. Indeed, these annotations were written when a wide range of devotional texts were finding their way into print, including many associated with the Carthusian order. A highly abridged version of Margery’s Book was printed by

Wynkyn De Worde in 1501.56 Henry Pepwell later republished the abridgement in a

53 For a discussion of Methley’s piety, see Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh, 212- 220.

54 Parsons, “The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe,” 169.

55 ibid., 179.

56 Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of lyn[n]. STC 14924 67 1521 anthology of religious works adapted for lay people. While many have argued that this abridgement “domesticates” Margery by deleting references to her radical public piety,57 some have recently argued that the abridgement is more accommodating to lay devotion than first appears. Jennifer Summit points out that Pepwell’s edition of the abridgement is designed to appeal to a “new devotional reader” looking for spiritual benefit “without having to abandon the domestic space for the far-flung pilgrimage or the rigors of monastic enclosure.”58 Although the printed abridgements of the Book do not include many accounts of Margery’s public piety, they do include accounts of Christ’s discussions with Margery where he insists that she can individually gain spiritual reward apart from outward practice. The annotation begins, for example, with Margery’s wish that she might be openly martyred with an ax. Christ responds that “I thanke the doughter that thou woldest dye for me love / for as often as thou thynkest so thou shalt have the same mede in heven as yf thou suffredest the same death.”59 Spiritual fulfillment can be found individually through prayer and meditation apart from reliance on clerics and outward ritual. While this vision of lay participation in religious life is perhaps less active than what is presented in the original text of the Book, it nevertheless gives lay people a way of imitating the religious life with a surprising degree of autonomy.

57 See George Keiser, “The Mystics and the Early English Printers: The Economics of Devotionalism,” and Sue Ellen Holbrook, “Margery Kempe and Wynkyn de Worde,” both in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (London: D. S. Brewer, 1987).

58 Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 133.

59 Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon, fol. A i. 68 The Book of Margery Kempe provides models for productive interactions between lay people and those who lead a religious life. It also demonstrates the pitfalls and consequences of encounters between secular and religious spheres. Lay engagement with the religious life often involved radically changing the context of religious practice, moving devotional practices from the private seclusion of the cloister to the bustling activity of the public arena. Some among the religious, such as Thomas Netter, saw lay devotional practice as a threat to the sovereignty of the religious life. Others were more willing to enter into relationships with lay people. The Book offers various strategies for those seeking to create forms of devotion that adapt religious practices for those in the world. These strategies involve a complex dynamic of collaboration between lay and religious people. The other authors I will examine in this project make use of many of these strategies, finding innovative ways of engaging active lay people without stirring up

“scandal” or “indignation.”

69 CHAPTER 2

“CONFEDERATE, AS KYNG WITH KING”: JOHN LYDGATE AND THE MAKING OF RELIGIOUS AND REGAL IDENTITIES

Margery Kempe’s contemporary John Lydgate occupied almost entirely different social spheres than the bold lay-visionary from Lynn. He was university educated, having spent time at Oxford during the first decade of the fifteenth century. He enjoyed aristocratic patronage as well as patronage from the gentry and urban elite. As a propagandist for the Lancastrian regime, he had access to some of the greatest households in England, including those of the earl of Warwick, king Henry V’s brothers Humphrey

Duke of Gloucester and John Duke of Bedford, and even of the kings themselves, Henrys

IV, V and VI.1 Lydgate’s literary work reached a much wider audience than Margery’s

Book, particularly because he not only had access to the scriptorium at his home monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, but also to metropolitan publication centers maintained by literati such as John Shirley.2 Furthermore, although Lydgate did not travel as widely as Margery, he certainly traveled more prestigiously, accompanying Richard Earl of

1 Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio-bibliography. English Literary Studies Monograph Series 71 (Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1997), 18-39.

2 For a discussion of Bury St. Edmund’s library and scriptorium, see Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1970), 32-43. For the work of John Shirley and his relationship with Lydgate’s work, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth Century England (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), 69-88, 145-69. 70 Warwick to France in 1426.3 He also likely spent time in London, perhaps attending the

court to oversee the performances of several mummings that he had written.4 On the one

hand, it makes sense that Lydgate had access to a wider literary clientele and to the ears

of prominent political figures, given his reputation as a learned cleric and accomplished

poet-propagandist. On the other, Lydgate’s wide exposure might seem surprising, since

Lydgate is a Benedictine monk, and should be avoiding the sort of wandering that his

Rule forbids. He comes dangerously close to resembling Chaucer’s outrider monk, the

“fish that is waterlees” who held the restrictions of the Rule “nat worth an oystre.”5 Or, worse, in his familiarity to prestigious households, he resembles the monk of the

Shipman’s Tale, who is “as famulier” in the merchant’s house “as it is possible any freend to be” (CT VII.31-32).

In the previous chapter, I pointed out the controversy that arose when Margery

Kempe crossed between certain religious boundaries, which reflected debate within the religious orders concerning their relationship with the world outside the cloister.

Controversy also arose in the reverse, when religious men entered secular spheres.

Chaucer’s satirical portraits of monks reveal the apprehension many religious and secular authorities had over the potential scandal the religious could cause as they moved from the cloister into the secular household. The portrait of the Monk in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales echoes common themes in anti-monastic satire, even as it reflects

3 Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate: A Biobibliography, 25-8.

4 ibid., 29-31.

5 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson [based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. N. F. Robinson, 2nd ed.] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), General Prologue, p. 24, lines 80-2. To facilitate comparison with Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, I will be citing the Canterbury Tales (CT) by Fragment number and line. 71 social reality for outriders like Don Piers.6 Don John in the Shipman’s Tale reflects many common anxieties in late medieval society about the sexuality of monks, as he insinuates himself in his friend’s household to take advantage of his dear “cosyn’s” hospitality.7

Corruption could flow in both directions across religious boundaries. In 1421, Henry V proposed reforms for the Benedictine order, including a provision that sought to prevent women from entering the private cloisters of monks and forbade monks to enter the houses of secular people:

No religious man of the said order may have license to leave or enter into

townships or cities where his monastery is located, and his superiors are

forbidden to license him to eat, drink, or speak in these places (except with

nobles) since from this grave scandals and incentives toward vice can arise.8

This article sought to address many of the concerns raised by critics of the monastic orders, who saw the loosening of strictures as indicative of vice.

However, more was at stake than merely the virtue of the order. The Benedictines saw the reform articles as an infringement on their sovereignty, and tried to preserve their

6 For the most thorough exploration of the Monk’s portrait and its relationship to anti-monastic satire, see Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1973), 17-37. Paul E. Beichner discusses how the portrait of the Monk might be less satirical than usually presented, since he reflects much of what an “outrider” would have been expected to be as part of his official duties, “Daun Piers, Monk and Business Administrator,” Speculum 34 (1959): 611-19.

7 See Peter G. Beidler, “Contrasting Masculinities in the Shipman’s Tale: Monk, Merchant and Wife,” Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998), 131-42.

8 “… nullus religious dicti ordinis in villis seu civitatibus, ubi sua monasteria situantur, licenciam habeat exundi seu ingrediendi, sed quod suis prelatis penitus facultas ipsos licenciandi ad comedendum potandum seu loquendum in ipsis locis preterquam cum multis nobilibus interdicatur, cum ex hoc gravia oriri poterunt scandala et incentiva viciorum.” Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General And Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks 1215-1540, Vol. 2, ed. William Abel Pantin, Camden Third Series, Vol. 47 (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1933), 114.29-115.6. 72 traditional administrative structure with as little outside interference as possible. While

they upheld the monastic ideals on which the reform was based, they balked at limiting

the authority of superiors and other long-held privileges:

Because the [article] seems to take away the prerogative of the superior to license

and allow his subordinates to leave or enter the townships or cities where

their monasteries are … it is not accepted under the form in which it is proposed.9

The Benedictines saw the king’s reforms as a weakening of their independence, and carefully sought to preserve their right to self rule, even as they accepted the criticism of their sovereign, who was their chief patron and protector. The final, revised language of the article agreed to by the chapter takes into account both the monastic ideals that the reforms sought to protect and a more fluid relationship between the cloister and the outside world. As before, the boundaries are placed under the careful control of a house’s superior:

We abjure … that [monks] may not have access to the houses where women or

their brothers live, nor eat, drink, or refresh themselves in any way with them in

these places except with notable cause, and even then only with the express

license and consent of the superior.10

As flexibility was required to give lay patrons access to a religious community, so it was necessary that those living in the cloister be allowed to enter the world outside. Monastic

9 “quia videtur tollere facultatem superioris licenciandi et dispensandi cum suis subditis ad exeundum seu ingrediendum civitates sive cillas, ubi sua monasteria situantur, causa comedendi, potandi seu loquendi, non placet eius admissio sub ea forma qua proponitur …” ibid., 120.26-30; 124.17-21.

10 “ut prius adiuramus in Domino … et ad villas ubi aut mulieres habitant aut ipsi fratres, mutuum inter se accessum nullum penitus habeant, nec cum eis aut aliis quibuscunque nisi in causa dumtaxat notabili in his locis comedant, bibant seu quomodolibet se reficiant, et tunc de superioris expressa licencia et consensu.” ibid., 133.17-24. 73 integrity could be mediated under sufficient—and independent—oversight. In their

version of the reform articles, Benedictine religious communities assert that they can

maintain control over their own boundaries without the intrusive aid of external

authorities. After Henry’s death, the Benedictines were able to have their version of the

reform articles passed with little opposition.11 Whatever success the Benedictines had in

passing their own version of reform, however, they would continue to struggle to define

their relationship with the world that in theory they were forbidden to enter except in

special circumstances. The political give-and-take over the king’s articles was thus as

much about negotiating the relationship between religious and secular authority as it was

about reforming the Benedictine order. The articles of reform were part of Henry’s

campaign to justify and solidify his rule, and secular rulers would continue to assert their

authority over religious communities to bolster their image, whether the religious sought

this intrusion or not.12

Where is the well-traveled Lydgate during this controversy about monks

wandering from their enclosure? While few records attest to Lydgate’s movements

during this period, he chooses to represent himself fictionally outside of the cloister on

pilgrimage—Chaucer’s pilgrimage, in fact, transposed forward in time several decades.

The monk of Bury sets his telling of a “Canterbury Tale,” his Siege of Thebes, on the

return journey of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrimage. The astronomical references in the

11 ibid., 98-100.

12 For a discussion of the role of religious patronage in Henry V’s reign, see Jeremy Catto, “Religious Change under Henry V,” Henry V: The Practice of Kingship, ed. G. L. Harriss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 106-11; See also David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1955), 175-84. Nancy Bradley Warren discusses how noble control over women’s religious communities played a part in aristocratic self-definition, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2001), 111-33, 163-82. 74 prologue suggest a date in or around 1421, the same year that Henry proposed his

Benedictine reforms.13 Lydgate chose to represent himself as a monk traveling outside of

the cloister at a historical moment when such activity was under particular scrutiny and

furthermore in a literary context which takes particular pains to satirize wandering

monks. I would argue that Lydgate thus confronts the issues that Chaucer raises in The

Canterbury Tales and Henry puts forth in his reform articles, and does so at a critical

historical moment for those within his order. In doing so, he demonstrates that he is very

much interested in addressing the political and literary challenges to his identity as a

monk and poet, particularly his relationship to secular authority. In his Siege of Thebes,

Lydgate calls attention to how secular figures often negatively define monks and attempts

to rehabilitate monastic identity. As part of this project, the monk of Bury also calls

attention to the limits of secular codes of conduct, particularly chivalric and aristocratic

ideals. The events of the Siege of Thebes show how self interested chivalric action could

be, and how imprudent martial violence could severely destabilize social order. Lydgate

points to a more prudent alternative mode of governance that is tragically dismissed by

aristocratic figures in the story. I would also argue that Lydgate’s political themes in the

Siege of Thebes anticipate work he would produce later in his career. Having examined

his exploration of monastic and aristocratic identity in the Siege of Thebes, I want to look

at Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund, written for King Henry VI at the

request of Bury St. Edmund’s abbot William Curteys. Lydgate uses his work here to

model a more productive relationship between his house and its royal patron than he

13 Johnstone Parr, “Astronomical Dating for Some of Lydgate’s Poems,” PMLA 67 (1952): 251-8. There is some disagreement about the date of composition for the poem, but, as I will discuss later in this chapter, if we are to take these astronomical references seriously, we can at least state that Lydgate was likely interested in setting the action of the poem in 1421, even if he did not actually compose it in that year. 75 showed in the Siege of Thebes. The monk of Bury portrays his house’s patron saint as both a ruler and a guardian of the region’s interests. In the process, Lydgate shrewdly links the saint’s potential usefulness to the young king and his protection and patronage of Bury and East Anglia, looking to improve the strained relationship between secular and religious spheres in the Siege of Thebes.

Before Lydgate could model an ideal partnership between the secular and religious, he had to confront anti-monastic satirical commonplaces like those in Chaucer.

Until recently, modern critics have not recognized Lydgate’s complex engagement with

Chaucer, characterizing his attempt to imitate his esteemed literary predecessor as awkward and simplistic. For one, they argue, Lydgate clumsily tries to mimic the famous opening lines to the Canterbury Tales, dragging one ungainly clause after another, ultimately failing to reach a main verb. They note that Lydgate also mischaracterizes the pilgrims he recalls, mixing the attributes of several of the pilgrims. Lydgate’s Pardoner, for example, takes up the Summoner’s “face of Cherubyn” as well as his rivalry with the

Friar.14 For Lydgate’s modern critics, the Bury monk’s failure to understand, much less

emulate, his illustrious predecessor goes even deeper. Lee Patterson’s article “Making

Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and Lydgate” perhaps typifies attitudes

toward Lydgate’s flawed Chaucerianism. First of all, Patterson asserts, the monk of Bury

“ignores Chaucer’s final understanding of his pilgrimage as unidirectional” and portrays

the Siege of Thebes as the first tale on the return journey from Canterbury. Rather than

seeing the pilgrimage end with the Parson’s penitential message and Chaucer’s own

14 See, for example, Rosamund S. Allen, “The Siege of Thebes: Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale,” Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), 134; Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), 152-3; Stephan Kohl, “Chaucer’s Pilgrims in Fifteenth-Century Literature,” Fifteenth Century Studies 7 (1983): 230. 76 Retraction, Lydgate almost impenitently restarts the tale-telling contest by looking back to the very first tale of the pilgrimage. Furthermore, rather than mirroring the complexity of Chaucer’s Harry Bailey, “whose treatment of the pilgrims varied from jocular familiarity to gallantry and even obsequiousness” and whose literary tastes included

“sententiousness as well as jollity,” Lydgate represents the host as a “petty tyrant” who insists on “tales of mirth and of gladnesse.”15 For Patterson, Lydgate’s misreading of

Chaucer exemplifies the monk’s “crude semiotics,” as he attempts to reduce “an original complexity to uniformity,” or, as he and other critics scornfully put it, to “medievalize”

Chaucer.16 Patterson argues that Lydgate shares this “medieval” assertion of authoritarian unity with Henry V, who sought to legitimize his reign in England and in

France. Indeed, as a poet, Lydgate is a crucial component of this agenda, providing a

“monastic integrity” for the king “as a monk providing his sovereign with the monastically generated materials to sustain royal authority.”17 The problem with

Patterson’s argument here is its characterization of Lydgate’s literary project as monolithically “monastic,” part of a tradition of religious historiography that allegedly upholds universally “medieval” notions of autocratic authority. The dynamic between secular and religious spheres is more complex than this, as religious authorities seek to mediate their relationship to the secular world in order to preserve their privilege in society. Lydgate, I would argue, brings this complex dynamic to the center of his poem

15 Lee Patterson, “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate,” New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. J .N. Cox and L. J. Reynolds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 76.

16 ibid., 75-6; see also Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), 14-16, 49-68; and his “Chaucer and Lydgate,” Chaucer Traditions, Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 39-53.

17 Patterson, “Making Identities,” 74, 77. 77 and its Theban subject matter. Patterson would argue that Chaucer’s social position

outside of but close to the ruling class allowed him to offer subtle social critique.18

Lydgate’s profession as a monk from an ancient monastery also allows him to offer similarly complex social criticism, if in quite different ways from the poet-civil servant.

Patterson does see a limited “complexity of motive and a resistance to power” in

The Siege of Thebes, and this grudging admission has come to influence more sympathetic critics’ assessments of the Bury monk’s work. According to Patterson, the poem “cannot live up to its disingenuous assertions of transparency and self identity.”

Lydgate’s vision of reality is built upon the opposition between “trouthe and reason” and

“falsehed and tresoun,” oppositions that fall apart as the tragedy of Thebes undoes the true as well as the false.19 Patterson goes on to suggest that Lydgate writes the troubling poem in response to Henry’s Benedictine reform articles: “Just as the pilgrim Lydgate resists the Host’s overbearing directives, so the monastic establishment as a whole needs no political direction in order to perform its traditional functions.”20 Thus, even in his

deference to Henry, Lydgate asserts an independence from monarchical demands. For

Patterson, though, this almost unintentional political subtlety in the Siege of Thebes is

“interestingly unLydgatean,” untypical of the poet’s usually reactionary poetic.21

Critics more generous to the Bury monk have echoed Patterson’s suggestion that

Lydgate is offering a critique of Henry V’s ambitions in the Siege of Thebes, but they

18 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

19 Patterson, “Making Identities,” 95-7.

20 ibid., 95.

21 ibid., 77.

78 have gone further to suggest that Lydgate is more self-aware than dismissive critics like

Patterson think he is. Many have come to see Lydgate’s appropriation of Chaucer’s

pilgrimage as a sly rejoinder to the anti-monasticism in the earlier poet’s work, and to the

wider intrusion of secular authority into religious prerogatives, as with Henry’s reforms.

Scott Straker argues that Lydgate “distances himself from Chaucer’s anti-clericalism and

redeems the monastic voice.” The “mis-remembrance” of Chaucer’s details in the

prologue, he points out, actually could be seen as a deliberate conflation intended as an

“emblem of Chaucer’s degenerate clerics,” revealing a straw man in Chaucer’s anti-

monastic satire that Lydgate’s own uprightness will refute.22 John Bowers notes that

Lydgate rewrites Chaucer’s picture of monastic excess by refuting both the stereotypes

Chaucer drew into his portrait and the charges that Henry V had written into his articles

of reform. Moreover, his seemingly simplistic characterization of Harry Bailey can be

seen as a representation of overbearing secular governance.23 Lydgate’s mode of

representing himself in the prologue to the Siege of Thebes can thus be seen as a form of

resistance to secular criticism and intrusive attempts at reform, rather than as an inept or

simplistic emulation of Chaucer.

In his “Canterbury Tale,” the Bury monk is offering a very complex model of

monastic identity and its relationship to secular authority. In the Prologue to the Siege of

Thebes, Lydgate explores the pitfalls of establishing religious identity in the face of

secular power, and he does so by directly confronting the representation of the Monk in

22 Scott Straker, “Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes,” The Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 2-8.

23 John Bowers, “Controversy and Criticism: Lydgate’s Thebes and the Prologue to Beryn,” Chaucer Yearbook 5 (1998): 93-101, 79 the Canterbury Tales. As several scholars have pointed out, the poet Lydgate brings

forward attributes that specifically contrast with Chaucer’s Monk.24 He lacks a “deyntee

hors” like one from Don Piers’ stable (CT I.168), making due with a “palfrey slender”

(Siege 74).25 His “rusty brydel” (Siege 75) does not “gynglen” (CT I.170) as that of his counterpart. Where Don Piers seems to project an image of rich extravagance, with

“sleves profiled at the hond/ With grys” and a hood fastened with a gold love knot (CT

I.193-7), Lydgate is dressed in nothing but a “cope of blak,” his servant bearing a “male”

“voide” of cash (Siege 73, 76). Beyond the detail with which he introduces himself,

Lydgate’s narrator finds himself defined largely by Harry Bailey against his Chaucerian counterpart. Indeed, the Host seems bent on contrasting the monk of Bury with Don

Piers. Confirming Lydgate’s own characterization of his poor tack, Harry notes that the monk’s bridle has “neither boos ne belle”(Siege 85). While Piers is “ful fat and in good point” (CT I.200), to Harry Lydgate looks “paile, al devoyde of bloode” (Siege 89), like a

“forpyned goost” the narrator of the General Prologue contrasts with Don Piers (CT

I.205).

The contrast between Don John Lydgate and his confrere Don Piers, however, is not so straightforward. Looking at the Prologue to the Monk’s Tale, we can see that like

Lydgate, the Monk finds himself defined by the Host’s materialistic and sexualized portrayal of him. It is there that the Host presents Piers as a “governour,” physically attractive and well built (CT VII.1935-42). Harry contrasts him with a “penant or a

24 John Bowers, “Controversy and Criticism,” 94; Scott Straker, “Deference and Difference,” 6-8.

25 References to the Siege of Thebes are from Robert R. Edwards’ TEAMS edition and will be cited in text by line, John Lydgate: The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). 80 goost” (CT VII.1934), as he would later characterize Lydgate in the monk of Bury’s

poem. Harry mourns that such a specimen as Piers cannot take up a wife and engender

heirs as a “mighty man” (CT VII.1951). He even suggests that, since the religious life has claimed the most desirable mates, the wives of “borel men” like Harry look to lusty religious men like Piers to make “Venus paiementz” (CT VII.1954-61). Harry sees Piers

as coming from a “gentil pasture” (CT VII.1933), and curses whoever “broughte [him] unto religioun” (CT VII.1943-4). The portrayal of the Monk in the Canterbury Tales

reveals that his image there might not be entirely his own, anymore than the pilgrim

Lydgate’s image is his own. Harry’s rant here before the Monk’s Tale perhaps

anticipates the rejection of the ruled life ascribed to the Monk in the General Prologue

more than the attitudes of Piers himself. Michael Sharp suggests that the Host’s lewd

suggestions here reveal less about the Monk than they do about Harry’s own desires and

anxieties. The Prologue to the Monk’s Tale, after all, begins with Harry’s lament that his

wife Goodlief emasculates him. By sexualizing Don Piers, Sharp argues, Harry voices

his anxieties about emasculation, perhaps even looking back to the adulterous monk Don

John from the Shipman’s Tale, which begins the fragment:

While the Host’s “sermon” is in part both tongue-in-cheek and implicitly hostile,

it is at the same time deeply self revelatory, exposing the Host’s own conflicted

ideas about masculinity as well as the complicity of his own gender anxiety in the

perpetuation of monastic sexual stereotypes.26

26 Michael D. Sharp, “Reading Chaucer’s ‘Manly Man’: The Trouble with Masculinity in the Monk’s Prologue and Tale,” Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (London: D.S. Brewer, 1998), 178. 81 Piers does not seem to be comfortable with Harry’s antics. The Monk responds by

turning as far away from sexual topics as he can, offering to tell a Life of St. Edward

before settling on tragedies, tragedies that Sharp suggests challenge secular manhood.27

The Siege of Thebes echoes Harry’s overbearing portrayal of the Monk in the

Prologue to the Monk’s Tale. Just as Harry, unsure of Piers’ name, cycles through appropriately monkish names (“my lord daun John, / Or daun Thomas, or elles daun

Alban” (CT II.1929-30)), in Lydgate’s Prologue he rattles off possible names for the monk of Bury (“Daun Pers, / Daun Domynyk, Daun Godfrey or Clement” (Siege 82-3)).

Lydgate fails to fit the stereotypes of monastic sexual excess he imposed on Piers, and he can only peg the Bury monk as Piers’s opposite. According to Harry, Lydgate is not from “gentil pasture” like Piers (CT VII.1934), but is “fed in feynt pasture” (Siege 104).

The Host also echoes his irreverent hostility to the ruled life from the Monk’s Prologue, telling Lydgate to “leyn aside [his] professioun” and bind himself “to a newe lawe” where he is Lydgate’s “orlager,” calling him to a less penitent “pryme” consisting of eating extravagant food, sleeping, taking laxatives, and farting (Siege 122-32). Stephan

Kohl argues that Harry here becomes an “embodiment of the Evil one, whose speeches are filled with menace, badly hidden under a varnish of joviality.”28 In the midst of this

hostility, Lydgate’s poor but virtuous appearance calls attention to the Host’s role in

caricaturing monastic identity, which Lydgate will attempt to reclaim in the tale he tells.

Just as Piers had resisted Harry’s lascivious suggestions by telling staid tragedies,

Lydgate resists the Host’s demand that he “prech not of non holynesse” and “ginne some

27 ibid., 179-85.

28 Stephan Kohl, “Chaucer’s Pilgrims in Fifteenth-Century Literature,” 232-3 82 tale of myrth or of gladnesse” (Siege 167-8) by telling the grim tale of the siege and eventual destruction of Thebes.

Lydgate’s tale not only responds to Harry Bailey, but also to another secular figure, the Knight, who had scornfully interrupted Piers’ tale, protesting that “it is a greet disese, / Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese, / to heeren of hire sodeyn fal”

(VII.2771-3). Lydgate picks up where Piers left off, and answers the Knight’s challenge by striking directly at his tale. Many critics have noted the connection between

Lydgate’s “Canterbury Tale” and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. The Knight is the first to tell a tale as the pilgrims make their way from London. Lydgate has himself tell the first tale on the group’s return from Canterbury. Both have the events surrounding the tragic fall of Thebes as their subject matter, their stories intersecting at a crucial point. When he reaches the moment when Theseus meets the grieving Argive women on his triumphant return with his conquered wife Hyppolyta, Lydgate briefly defers to Chaucer.

Throughout the poem, Lydgate makes a point to echo lines from the tale and takes up its elevated rhetorical style.29 Taking a cue from Harold Bloom, critics have suggested that

Lydgate Oedipally “misreads” his work, asserting his own political and poetic concerns against his “father” Chaucer’s work.30 James Simpson has suggested that Lydgate is answering the Knight’s objections to Piers’ tragedies by demonstrating the limitations of

29 See A. C. Spearing, “Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale: The Siege of Thebes and Fifteenth-Century Chaucerianism,” Fifteenth-Century Studies, Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), 333-64; and Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 66-88.

30 See, for example, A. C. Spearing, “Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale: The Siege of Thebes and Fifteenth- Century Chaucerianism,” 333, 355-9; and Daniel T. Kline, “Father Chaucer and the Siege of Thebes: Literary Paternity, Aggressive Deference, and the Prologue to Lydgate’s Oedipal Canterbury Tale,” The Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 217-35.

83 the Knight’s idealized picture of aristocratic order imposed by his chivalric hero Theseus.

According to Simpson, Lydgate’s poem “plays out in fully political, military and

historical terms what was presented in a more restricted frame by Chaucer’s Knight,”

calling into question the chivalric ideals the Knight extols within “the larger, malevolent,

Saturnine context of Theban history.”31 The consolation Theseus offers at the end of the

Knight’s Tale, that it is wisdom “to maken vertu of necessitee” and to honor the slain

Arcite as one who has died “when that he is best of name,” seems hopelessly weak in the

face of the wider conflict that has left all but a few nobles from Greece and Thebes dead.

Lydgate, Simpson notes, both “forshadows and forcloses” possibilities for philosophical

consolation in the Knight’s Tale.32

The picture of secular identity and aristocratic power in the Siege of Thebes is decidedly grim, and brings into question both Harry’s boorish governance of the pilgrimage and the Knight’s self-importance in interrupting Piers. Lydgate elaborates on the common source of his poem and the Knight’s Tale, Bocaccio’s Teseida. In particular, he highlights the moral significance of events in classical history, effectively producing a mirror for princes. Dodging Harry’s demands that he tell “some tale of myrth or of gladnesse,” Lydgate puts the “solace” of rhetorical embellishment to the task of illuminating moral “sentaunce,” a concept that is realized in his description of Amphion, the founding king of Thebes, who constructs the city’s walls with song.33 Amphion

31 James Simpson, “‘Dysemol daies and fatal houres’: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale,” The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 23-30.

32 ibid., 25.

33 For a thorough examination of the significance of Amphion in Lydgate’s poetic, see Lois A. Ebin, John Lydgate (Boston: Twayne, 1985), 52-9. 84 represents the constructive power of the “craft of rhetoric,” seen as the practice of virtue in kings:

For humble speche with glad contenaunce

May a prynce sothly mor avaunce

Among his puple hertes forto wynne

Of inward love which that wol not twynne,

Than gold, rychesse, pride, or tyranye,

Oyther disdeyne, daunger, or surquedye (Siege 277-82).

In Lydgate’s work, the civilizing power of poetry and rhetoric is set against the destructive power of violence and war; the “soote sugred harpe” of Mercury is favored over the sword of Mars “with his lokes woode” (Siege 272-6). It is this focus on peaceful, wise political action that sets Lydgate’s tale against the Knight’s, whose tale looks toward more aggressive, violent forms of maintaining order.

In challenging the chivalric ideals of the Knight, Lydgate might be seen as anticipating a recent line of criticism that sees the Knight’s Tale as deeply troubling in its portrayal of chivalric identity. David Aers, for instance, has called attention to the self- interestedness of Theseus and his aristocratic display, as it envisions an order grounded in the Knight’s own commitment to violence and tyrannical authority. Aers notes that in the tale aristocratic figures like Theseus attempt to provide philosophical consolation to efface the violence and death their actions cause, an illusion that is undone as the true human consequences of martial violence becomes clear. The “pseudo-religious cant” of

Egeus declaring that “deeth is an ende of every worldly soore” seems insufficient next to

Arcite’s almost nihilistic questioning of his purpose: “What is this world? What asketh

85 men to have?” (CT I.2777).34 Lee Patterson, giving Chaucer more credit than he gives

Lydgate, argues that Chaucer uses the Knight’s Tale to explore the disconnect between

universalist chivalric codes and the contingent historical reality that the aristocracy

attempted to govern. As a tale teller, the Knight tries to replicate in narrative what his

sovereign figure Theseus attempts to do politically—to provide ordering principles for

wider historical events wracked by disorder. These claims for order, however, are

undone as the Theban brothers’ commitment to courtly love dissolves into deadly rivalry,

revealing the contradictions in late medieval chivalric identity. Theseus’s pseudo-

Boethian claims in his final speech are unsatisfying, as are the Knight’s attempts to put a

happy end to a Theban tale cursed with inevitable tragedy.35

Other critics have suggested that a critique of the Knight can be found in the

Monk’s Tale, a critique that perhaps anticipates Lydgate. Terry Jones has pointed out that

the Monk shows the falls of rulers who very closely resemble the sort of despots under

whom the Knight serves as a mercenary. In fact, the Monk tells of the fall of one

contemporary ruler that we know from the General Prologue the Knight served under:

Peter of Cyprus, who was overthrown by mercenaries like the Knight. Pointing out that

this “modern instance” among others is placed at the end of the Monk’s Tale in many

manuscripts, Jones asserts that the Knight may have interrupted when the Monk’s

34 David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 175-95.

35 Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 165-230.

86 tragedies hit a bit too close to his own experience.36 Michael Sharp notes that the Monk

turns the Knight’s masculinist order on its head by telling the story of Zenobia, whom he

lauds as a chaste female conqueror, a provocative foil to Theseus, who had “conquered

all the regne of Femenye.” Furthermore, Sharp notes that in the other tragic episodes

“military activity [is] repeatedly exposed as a morally bankrupt enterprise.”37

Lydgate likewise frames his critique of the Knight’s Tale to explore the limits of chivalric and aristocratic ideals. He sets these ideals against alternative principles of virtue, particularly “prudence,” and frequently expounds on the success or failure of figures to exemplify these principles. Colin Fewer examines Lydgate’s commitment to the medieval ideals of prudence in his longer work Troy Book, and provides insights that are very much relevant to the Siege of Thebes. Fewer notes that for Lydgate prudence is a form of deliberation, a “principle of self governance” that takes into account the fact that history is “entropic, unpredictable, and contingent.”38 Prudent characters in

Lydgate’s work are able to weather unexpected hazards when they anticipate catastrophe

and avoid action that might incur danger, even when a course of action might be

demanded by dominant codes of behavior like chivalry. Simpson notes that prudence is

often set against the “knightly bluster” of figures that resemble Chaucer’s Knight and

Theseus. What is striking about Lydgate’s presentation of prudence, though, is that even

characters who are on the whole virtuous are capable of imprudent action, often to tragic

36 Terry Jones, “The Monk’s Tale,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000):387-97; for an earlier argument along similar lines, see William C. Strange, “The Monk’s Tale: A Generous View,” Chaucer Review 1 (1967): 167-80.

37 Michael D. Sharp, “Reading Chaucer’s ‘Manly Man’,” 182-5.

38 Colin Fewer, “John Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Ideology of Prudence,” The Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 230. 87 ends.39 While one might expect a vicious character like Etyocles to act imprudently, we

also find that normally virtuous characters like the Argive king Adrastus make or assent

to decisively imprudent choices, particularly when they are rashly acting upon chivalric

ideals against reasoned counsel suggesting the wider consequences of such actions.

In the Siege of Thebes, the struggle between an imprudent chivalric order and more prudent, often non-aristocratic figures can be seen most clearly in several parliamentary episodes preceding military action. For example, at the parliament

Adrastus convenes to determine if the Greeks should attack Thebes on Polymites’s behalf, the sage “bishop” Amphiorax warns that a war with Thebes would bring destruction to the Greeks, particularly the ruling class. He enumerates

Her dysemol daies and her fatal houres,

Her aventurys and her sharpe shoures,

The forward sort and unhappy stoundys,

The compleyntes of her dedly woundys,

The wooful wrath and contrariouste

Of felle Mars in his cruelte,

And howe by mene of his gery mood

Ther shal be shadde al the worthy blood

Of the Grekes – it may not be eschewed,

If her purpoos be execute and swed (Siege 2893-2902).

The parliament responds badly to Amphiorax’s speech, accusing the bishop of being

“untrewe” and “an olde dotard, a coward and aferde” for advising against war (Siege

39 James Simpson: “‘Dysemol Dayes and Fatal Houres’,” 18-21, 27. 88 2924-8). The bishop’s speech had run contrary to chivalric ideals, which demanded that

Etyocles’s “untreweth” to his brother be avenged, whatever consequences there might be to that action. In this case of war, however, prudence demanded that these ideals be put aside for the greater good. Lydgate elaborates on the significance of this confrontation in an expository passage which he adds to his source narrative discussing the follies of youth pitted against the prudence of old age:

But age experte nothing undertaketh

But he toforn be good discrecioun

Make a due examynacioun

How it wil tourne oyther to badde or good.

But youth, as fast as stered is the blood,

Taketh emprises of hasty wilfulnesse:

Joye at the gynnyng; the ende is wrechednesse (Siege 2952-8).

This same sentiment is repeated as Etyocles asks his parliament to recommend a course of action in response to his brother’s siege:

…some gaf a ful blunt sentence,

Which hadde of were non experience,

Seyde it was best, and not ben afferd

To trye his right manly with the swerd.

And some also that wer moor prudent

Spak unto hym by good advisement

And list nat sper but their conseyte tolde

How hit was best his covenaunt forto holde

89 And to parforn his heeste mad toforn

To his brother lich as he was sworn,

So that his word, the wors to mak hym spede,

Be not founde variant fro the dede,

For non hatred, rancour, neyther pryde (Siege 3635-47).

It is not just the virtue of “trowthe” here that is commended, but an avoidance of

overblown chivalric, “manly” aggression. The imprudent youth feel Etyocles can defend

his right by the sword, while the wiser counsel look to a more restrained practice of virtue

and keeping of “covenaunts.” Both Adrastus and Etyocles act to resolve their disputes

according to chivalric martial trials, leading to a tragic end which ultimately overturns the

social order they sought to defend.

The tragic ends of Lydgate’s and the Knight’s Theban tales are interpreted in

radically different ways, pointing to very different conceptions of divine authority and its

connection to worldly order. Theseus’s speech in the Knight’s Tale speaks of the

authority of the “First Movere,” the prince whose “Fair chain of love…hath stablissed in

this wrecced world adoun / Certeyne dayes and duracioun / To al that is engendred in this

place” (I.2987-97). David Aers points out that Theseus brings his theodicy to the

justification of Palamon and Emelye’s marriage and the subjection of Thebes, a

demonstration of his own ability to bring order to his world.40 By contrast, Adrastus’s speech to king Lygurgus, which heavily echoes Theseus’s speech, declares the inadequacy of mortal law in the face of divine providence. Echoing Egeus’ famous lines

40 David Aers, Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination, 187-94. 90 from the Knight’s Tale, Adrastus tells the mourning king that mortal life is “but an exile and a pilgrymage …of whos sojour the pope geveth no bulle” (Siege 3418-24):

Nor kyng is non, duk, nor emperour

That may hym shroude ageyn the fatal shour

Of cruel deth, whan hym list manace

To marke a man with his mortal mace.

Than geyneth nat to his avacioun

Neyther fraunchyse nor proteccioun,

And lit or noght may helpen in this caas

Sauffecondit or supersedyas (Siege 3425-32).

From this picture of mortal authority and law humbled by the reality of death, Adrastus turns to plead for Ysyphile, lest Lygurgus

By hasty rigour nat to do vengeaunce

But thynk aforn in his purvyaunce

Who to wreches doth mercy in her drede

Shall mercy fynde whan he hath most need (Siege 3461-4).

This inclusion of Lygurgus’ pardon is not part of Lydgate’s source. In fact, Lydgate confesses that he has diverged from Boccaccio’s account of the story (Siege 3510), and reveals less redeeming ends for Ysiphyle and Lygurgus. In Boccaccio’s work, Hypsipyle flees Lycurgus’ kingdom, never to be heard from again. He then claims that Lygurgus is among the kings who come with Palamon in his trail against Arcite, mixing (as Chaucer did) Lycurgus of Nemea with Lycurgus of Thrace from Statius’ Thebaid. Finally, citing

Boccaccio’s De Genealogia Deorum, Lydgate tells a story in which Lygurgus is

91 dispatched by Bacchus for being “pompous and elat” enough to insult the god. This final cataloging of Lygurgus calls attention to Lydgate’s role as the moral shaper of the tale, as he picks events from among a range of choices and characterizing figures to fit his purpose, in this case to demonstrate Adrastus’ prudent counseling of Lygurgus. The monk of Bury thus aligns himself with the constructive poetic of Amphion and Mercury, rather than of Mars.

Throughout the Knight’s Tale, Mars is a symbol of aristocratic order. The banner that Theseus as a “flour” of chivalry carries into battle highlights the statue of Mars. The

Athenian hero invokes the god of war twice after he has caught two Thebans (CT I.1708,

1747), threatening to kill them for their trespass. The temple of Mars is among the three temples the Duke of Athens builds in preparation for Palamon and Arcite’s final battle.

The Knight takes particular pains to describe the temple in grisly detail, and does so as if he had seen it himself. Several scholars have pointed out that the images of Mars in the temple are forboding and seem to represent disorder and destructiveness more than order and unity. David Aers notes that while the image of Mars on Theseus’ banner effaces

“attention to the real human motives and consequences” of war, the icons of violence decorating the god’s temple reveal the effects of martial action, bringing into question the values Theseus puts forward as his standard:

Chaucer’s insistent probing of misery is a probing of abstractions such as ‘law’

and ‘order’ to reveal the continuities between official, legal violence and illegal,

between the celebration of Mars and the most grisly particulars of human

destructiveness.41

41 ibid., 178. 92 Terry Jones has noted that the iconography of Mars is strongly suggestive of the regional

Italian tyrants with whom he argues the Knight was associated.42

In the Siege of Thebes, Mars is most clearly a symbol of martial imprudence, a figure of destructive and divisive power. Echoing Virgil’s plea to “bitter Juno” in the

Aeneid, Lydgate beseeches “cruel Mars” to explain his wrath against Thebes. Later, as the destruction of the city plays itself out, Lydgate echoes Chaucer’s lament at the end of

Troilus and Criseyde:

Lo, her the fyn of contek and debat.

Lo, her the might of Mars the forward sterre.

Lo, what it is for to gynne a were (4628-30).

What follows is an excursus on the plagues of war. The ruling class of Greece is all but wiped out and Greece itself is brought to poverty. Amphion’s Thebes is “withoute recur brouht unto ruyne / And with the soyle made pleyn as a lyne” (Siege 4637-8). Lydgate empties war of any human intention and of any role in mediating justice, thus rendering

Theseus’ use of martial trials in the Knight’s Tale all but meaningless. The remedy for war, “pees and quyet, concord and unyte” (often described as Lydgate’s homage to the

Treaty of Troyes), involves the dulling of Mars’s weapons:

But the venym and the violence

Of strif, of werre, of contek, and debat

That maketh londys bare and desolate

Shal be prescript and voyded out of place,

And Martys swerd shall no more manace,

42 Terry Jones, “The Monk’s Tale,” 389-90. 93 Nor his sper grievous to sustene

Shal now no mor whettyd be so kene,

Nor he no mor shal his hauberk shake (4690-97).

The images of martial identity in Lydgate’s poem are deeply troubling, as noblemen pursue war for the sake of their personal honor, not only toward their own demise, but to the detriment of society as a whole. The poem provides a powerful rejoinder to the secular hostility Lydgate represents in the host and looks back as well to the Knight’s rebuke of Piers. Harry had challenged Lydgate and his confrere Piers’ profession and the

Knight had belittled the Monk’s ability to render meaning to tragedy (especially when it confronted his own ideals). Lydgate returns the favor by offering a bleak portrait of a society governed by martial ideologues. Unable to provide the political order they promise, they offer instead the unpredictable and indiscriminate chaos of war.

While there is some disagreement as to the date of this poem’s composition, it is clear that Lydgate is very much interested in engaging the troubled relationship between forms of secular and religious authority in fifteenth-century England. Many have argued that it was written around 1421, since astrological references point to that year. As I have mentioned, Henry’s Benedictine reform articles also date to that year, and critics have suggested that the Siege of Thebes is a response to that reform. While some dispute that date for Lydgate’s composition of the poem, it is clear that Lydgate is very much interested in addressing the challenges of Chaucerian anti-monastic satire, and the astronomical reference to 1421 could very well point to Henry’s reform articles, even if the poem was not composed in that year. Some critics have argued that the political uncertainty of the poem better reflects the period after Henry V’s death, as England was

94 faced with an infant king and was under the protection of the king’s often feuding

brothers.43 The Theban tragedy of Polymite and Etyocles certainly suggests similar

circumstances. The events following Henry’s death would have provoked concerns

among the religious over their standing during uncertain political times, and the poem’s

political pessimism as well as its antagonism toward the monastic profession are just as

likely to have resonated after as before Henry’s death.

Religious institutions like Lydgate’s house of Bury St. Edmund’s were

particularly vulnerable when there was no benevolent monarch to keep the peace and

protect their interests. Toward the end of the 1320s, when Edward II was paralyzed by

political intrigue, the burgesses of Bury rose up against the abbey and virtually razed it to

the ground. It wasn’t until Edward III had firmly established his rule several years later

that the abbey was able to regain its control over the town.44 Just as it had recovered

from those years, Bury St. Edmund’s was again ransacked during the 1381 uprising. The

prior of the monastery was killed along with the king’s justice.45 Lydgate, who would

have been about ten at the time and would become a novice by the end of the decade,

certainly would have seen the effects of the conflict, if he did not witness it directly.

During Henry VI’s minority, houses like Bury St. Edmund’s were vulnerable to the often

violent feuds among the regional nobility. Bury, for instance, had faced particular

harassment from the Duke of Suffolk. In one case, the Duke attempted to pressure one of

the abbey’s tenants into helping him gain control of two manors that had been bequeathed

43 James Simpson, “‘Dysemol Dayes and Fatal Houres’,” 15-6; Scott Straker, “Deference and Difference,” 13-14.

44 Robert S. Gottfried, Bury St. Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290-1539 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 222-31.

45 ibid., 231-35. 95 to Bury St. Edmund’s and the abbey of Walsingham.46 Aggressive nobles and disaffected secular people attacked or harassed religious communities throughout the fifteenth century, and the religious sought political support from its patrons to protect its interests.47 This support was often sought by literary means, as monks composed works that addressed the political circumstances of the day, particularly those that affected their communities. James Clark points out how several learned monks of St. Alban’s produced a significant body of political commentary that criticized the ruling elite for failing to maintain the order necessary to keep them safe.48 As he does in the Siege of

Thebes, Lydgate similarly worried aloud in his poetry about the lack of political order and its effect on the region’s social fabric. Indeed, the strife of politics would be a theme he would return to throughout his career, as he sought to promote a vision of order that his house and the wider commonwealth would benefit from.

When the twelve-year-old king visited Bury St. Edmund’s from Christmas 1433 to Easter 1434, Lydgate’s abbot William Curteys must have seen an opportunity to help shape the young monarch’s relationship with the house, as the poet mentions that his superior commissioned the work “to the kyng for to do pleasaunce … in ful purpos to yeve it to the kyng” (Edmund and Fremund 1.189-92).49 The visit had come at a crucial

46 Calendar of Close Rolls Henry VI, Vol 6 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1933-47), 77-9.

47 Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422-61 (London: Ernest Benn, 1981), 568.

48 James G. Clark, A Monastic Renaissance at St. Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c. 1350-1440 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 258-63.

49 John Lydgate, “S. Edmund und Fremund, ein Legendenepos in 3 Buchern,” Altenglische Legenden Neue Folge, ed. Carl Horstmann (Heilbronn: Verlag Von Gebr. Henninger, 1881), 376-445. I will be citing the work by book and line in-text.

96 moment in the young king’s reign. At the age of twelve, he was approaching the moment

when he would reach his majority and begin to assert his prerogative in rulership, which

had been under the control of his feuding uncles and a dysfunctional council since his

father’s death. His regent council was beginning to recognize his “grete understandyng

and felyng, as evere [the councilors] sawe or knewe in any Prince, or other persone of his

age,” even if they were not yet ready to allow him direct personal rule.50 It was also a

moment when his councilors were struggling among themselves to position themselves to

have greatest influence on the young monarch.51 Curteys and Lydgate must have

understood that with the king at Bury, they could prepare their guest to become a suitable

protector and patron of his house.52

By producing a saint’s life for Henry geared toward improving their house’s relationship to the crown, Curteys and Lydgate are working from a long line of abbots and poets from Bury St. Edmund’s who used their patron saint’s cult to advance their house’s political standing. Just after the Norman conquest, abbot Baldwin did much to establish strong ties of patronage with the new regime, vastly expanding the house’s physical structure and promoting the cult of St. Edmund throughout England and Europe.

Baldwin also contributed to an already rich tradition of hagiography, commissioning a set

50 Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Counsel, Vol. IV, ed. N. H. Nicolas (London: Record Commission, 1834-7), 287-9.

51 Ralph Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, 59-60, 231-2. John Watts challenges the assertions of Griffiths and others that Henry’s youth moved inevitably toward individual “personal rule,” and rightly suggests that competing forms of “personal rule” were behind the maneuverings of the councilors, especially as Henry reached the age of his majority, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123-9.

52 For a slightly different take on Lydgate’s Life of Edmund and its aims for Henry VI, see Katherine J. Lewis, “Edmund of East Anglia, Henry VI and the Ideals of Kingly Masculinity,” Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004), 158-73. 97 of Miracula that would become the foundation for the St. Edmund cult along with the

French monk Abbo of Fleury’s already popular Passio, written a hundred years earlier.53

Toward the end of the twelfth century, Abbot Sampson, another influential superior renowned for his skilful advocacy of the Bury house, produced a new set of Miracula that sought to promote St. Edmund’s cult in competition with the growing cult of St. Thomas of Canterbury.54 Under Abbot Ordung in the mid-twelfth century, Geoffrey of Wells

produced a narrative of Edmund’s heritage and growth as a ruler from infancy,

significantly developing a focus on Edmund’s exemplarity as an earthly ruler as well as a

martyr and spiritual patron.55 Emma Cownie points out that these developments in the

cult helped politically “to defend the abbey’s property and privileges,” and socially to

promote a “sense of community” between the house and its secular patrons and

neighbors.56

As his predecessors did, Lydgate seeks to endorse an image of his house’s patron saint that addresses the political troubles his community faced. In his prologue to the work, Lydgate develops an elaborate connection between the Lancastrian monarch and

53 For an account of his tenure as abbot, see Antonia Grandsen, “Baldwin, abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, 1065-1097,” Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies IV, 1981, ed. R. Allen Brown (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1982), 65-76; For an account of his role in securing patronage for Bury St. Edmunds, see Emma Cownie, “Religious Patronage at Post Conquest Bury St. Edmunds,” The Haskins Society Journal 7 (1995): 1-9; For his role in expanding the cult of St. Edmunds, see Emma Cownie, “The Cult of St. Edmund in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Language and Communication of a Medieval Saint’s Cult,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99 (1998): 177-97; See also Grant Loomis, “The Growth of the Saint Edmund Legend,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 14 (1932): 88.

54 See Emma Cownie, “The Cult of St. Edmund,” 180; also Grant Loomis, “The Growth of the St. Edmund Legend,” 91-2.

55 For a discussion and text of this legend, see R. M. Thomson, “Geoffrey of Wells, De Infantia Sancti Edmundi,” Analecta Bollandiana 95 (1977): 25-42; see also Grant Loomis, “The Growth of the St. Edmund Legend,” 90-1.

56 Emma Cownie, “The Cult of St. Edmund,” 190-1. 98 the legendary East Anglian king. Where he had earlier represented secular figures trying to define him through stereotypes from anti-monastic satire, Lydgate here attempts to put forward an image of kingship more benevolent to the regional monastic order, an image that is derived from the house’s patron saint. The monk of Bury presents a set of regal images that significantly contrast with the destructive imagery he presents for Mars in the

Siege of Thebes. He describes a “hooly standard” and “virtuous baner” that Edmund carried into battle, which can keep England against its enemies and preserve Henry VI’s

“noblesse”:

This virtuous baner shal kepen and conserve

This lond from enmyes, daunt ther cruel pryde;

Off syxte Herry the noblesse to preserve,

It shal be born in werrys be his side;

Tencresse his virtues, Edmund shal been his guyde,

By processe tenhaunce his Royal lyne:

This martir shal bey grace for hym provide

To be registred among the worthy nyne (Edmund and Fremund 1.41-8).

By accepting the symbols of Edmund’s holiness, Henry can receive the protection of the saint and have his reign and lineage endowed with success and prestige. The urgency for protection, however, is notable, as the “cruel pryde” of enemies threatens the region as the Danes had once threatened East Anglia during Edmund’s reign.

Lydgate takes this investiture of Edmund’s symbolic power further. The martyr’s battle standard contains three golden crowns on a field of indigo. These crowns represent

99 Edmund’s status as a “martyr, mayde, and kyng.” Furthermore, they represent three other crowns for Henry VI:

These three crownys historyaly taplye,

By pronostyke notably sovereyne

To sixte Herry in fygur signefye

How he is born to worthy crownys tweyne:

Off France and Ingland, lynealy tatteyne

In this lyff heer: afterward in hevene

The thrydde crowne to receive in certeyne,

For his meritis, above the sterrys sevene (Edmund and Fremund 1.65-72).

There is an odd disconnect between Edmund’s crowns and Henry’s. The roles of

“martyr, mayde, and kyng,” do not necessarily fit the demands placed upon a monarch who inherited the crowns of two kingdoms whose tentative union was breaking apart.

Henry’s father’s conquest of France was on shaky ground by the 1430s, and England was beginning to lose military and diplomatic footholds in several areas of France. Indeed, within a year there would be fear of invasion from Brittany and Valois.57 The image of a martyr whose death opened his kingdom up to ravenous invaders does not seem to fit well with the legacy Henry’s father left him. Furthermore, Edmund’s status as a maid could certainly be a troubling image for a dynasty anxious about its continued legitimacy.

However, Lydgate’s juxtaposition of Henry and Edmund’s crowns is no “crude semiotics.” Henry is not merely asked to become a stand in for the king-turned-martyr.

Rather, Lydgate offers a symbolic regime designed less to offer a practical model of

57 Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI, 178-216. 100 kingship than put forward a spiritual guardian for Henry’s reign. The connection between the two monarchs is conditional and dependent on Henry’s support of Edmund’s legacy in the religious community that bears his name.

In his prologue to the Life’s first book, Lydgate develops this complex association between Henry and Edmund by recounting the particular devotion that the visiting king showed to the martyr. On his departure, the poet notes, Henry established a chapel so that the priests among the community might pray to the martyr king that he might be protected from his enemies, be worthy of the victories of his conquering father, and that he might be a defender and protector of the church like his progenitors. Lydgate describes a “confederacy” between Edmund and Henry that might grant the Lancastrian heir a place among his progenitors:

And sithe the kyng in his roial estat

List be devocioun of his benyvolence

With the holy martir to be confederate,

As kyng with kyng, both of gret excellence:

For whiche the martir be hevenly premynence

To sixte Herry shal his grace dresse,

To make him floure in triumphal prowesse (Edmund and Fremund 1.171-8).

Edmund’s confederacy offers an image of royal identity that might bolster Lancastrian claims in England and in France, yet this royal piety is tied specifically to a religious community. At this point, Lydgate calls attention to the mythmaking process of kingship, mentioning two pairs of English and French monarchs, one chivalric (Arthur and

Charlemagne), the other saintly (Edward and Louis). Lydgate thus skillfully weaves the

101 young Henry’s majestic potential as a ruler of both kingdoms in with the sanctity of his house’s patron saint:

Be influence he fro the hevene doun

Shal in knyhthod make him most marcial,

Yive him with Arhour noblesse and hih renoun,

And with Charlemayn forto been egal;

And he shal grante him in especial

With seint Edward to love god and dreede.

And with seint Lowis, that was of his kynreede (Edmund and Fremund 1.179-85).

The life that follows from this careful elegy is an exploration of kingship on the models of Edmund and his successor/nephew Fremund. But, neither model for Edmund or Fremund is simple or “unified” as Patterson might see it. Edmund and Fremund’s reign and their sanctity offer difficult problems for any ruler who might want to emulate them. Indeed, the saints’ holiness often conflicts with their responsibility to rule.

Lydgate presents a model of prudent governance as he does in his earlier work. As in the

Siege of Thebes, prudent rulers are challenged or even overcome by historical forces beyond their control. Edmund and Fremund both must make difficult choices. Edmund rejects violence and sacrifices himself to the Danes; however, his kingdom is overrun in the process. Fremund leaves a life of ascetic solitude to challenge the occupying Danes; he succeeds, but is martyred like his predecessor. However different their choices are, both Edmund and Fremund reject the trappings of worldly honor and aristocratic prestige that were so destructive for Lydgate in the Knight’s Tale and in the Siege of Thebes. The saints both sacrifice their martial identity to Christian martyrdom. Theirs is a sacrifice to

102 the common welfare of their community, rather than the promotion of their personal

honor. Their usefulness as practical models of rulership ends, but their status as

otherworldly regional custodians becomes central. In this way, Edmund and Fremund

come to stand in for East Anglian interests and the monastery’s interests in particular.

The region and its religious community are the Edmund’s “fraunchise” which he protects

in spite of overwhelming secular intrusion.

At the start, Lydgate presents a kingly St. Edmund who exemplifies both secular

and religious virtue. These virtues manifest themselves first in the description of

Edmund’s early life, his ascent to the East Anglian throne, and the establishment of his

court. Lydgate’s main source for Edmund’s early life is Geoffrey of Well’s De Infantia

Sancti Edmundi. This account is supplemented by details from chronicles and other legends that describe Edmund’s kingly and saintly virtues as he sets up his household and rule in East Anglia.58 In a chapter entitled, “the Roial governance of seynt Edmond aftir

he was crownyd kyng of Estynglond” (Edmund and Fremund, 1.852), Lydgate elaborates on this last source’s description of Edmund’s reign in line with his purpose in providing a model of kingship for Henry VI. Lydgate describes Edmund’s establishment of his reign with more specificity and detail than his sources, which merely listed abstract political virtues, rather than the structure of the saint-king’s rulership.59 Lydgate’s source praised

58 Lydgate’s main source is very likely a manuscript containing a redaction of several accounts of the St. Edmund legend, MS Bodley 240, which agrees with Lydgate’s narrative choices where it diverges from major versions of the legend, such as Geoffrey of Wells. Grant Loomis discusses this manuscript, “The Growth of the Saint Edmund Legend,” 97-100. A transcription of all of the materials in this manuscript pertaining to St. Edmund are contained in Nova Legenda Anglie, Vol. 2, ed. Carl Horstman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 573-688.

59 Nova Legenda Anglia, 578. Katherine J. Lewis rightly reads this episode along with the Mirror for Princes tradition, but in my view overemphasizes Edmund’s status as a model for King Henry, ignoring 103 Edmund for being able to balance the use of arms with an equitable use of justice, and

Lydgate develops this theme. He represents the distinction between arms and justice

metonymically (as he had with the figures of Mars and Mercury) as a balance between

“sword and scepter,” expanding the details of his source to note his equity in establishing

his reign among the various orders of society: “So was he besy the tresour, that men calle

/ Rem publicam, to moren and amende, / in peace taumente it, in were it to defend”

(Edmund and Fremund 1.890-2). Lydgate describes Edmund’s care in establishing justice in all levels of society. Toward the end of the chapter, Lydgate takes particular interest in the habits the saint-king establishes for his household. The activities of

Edmund’s court seem almost as monastic as they do royal, as the king and his knights attend mass every day: “Thus toward hevene he was contemplative, toward the world a good knight of his liff” (Edmund and Fremund 1073-4). His household is well ordered, and each office has its place.

Lydgate in particular elaborates on details that would have concerned monasteries like Bury St. Edmunds. Along with reforming martial, judicial, and economic order,

Lydgate takes care to emphasize the protection Edmund offered the church. He appoints fit pastors to preserve equity and holiness within the church, “heerdis most contemplatiff” who root out “ypocrisie and symylacioun” (Edmund and Fremund 1.907-13). Later, he describes Edmund as preferring prelates who were “folk contemplatiff, / sobre of ther levyng, demur and sad of age, / Expert in kunnyng, benygne of ther language: / lyk ther office, be example and by doctrine …” (Edmund and Fremund 1.958-61). Edmund offers the societal order that Lydgate, Curteys, and their brethren sought from their

passages that make Edmund’s exemplarity problematic, “Edmund of East Anglia, Henry VI and the Ideals of Kingly Masculinity,” 163-4. 104 sovereign. He is “to alle religious protectour and support” (Edmund and Fremund

1.1012). Lydgate even makes a point of criticizing the legal maneuvering of nobles:

His noble lawes that tyme were gouernyd

Wythoute oppression of any meyntenance,

That lyht of trouthe cleerly was discernyd

And nat eclipsed be power nor puissance;

For meede in tho daies peised nat in balance,

Nor fals forsweryng with favour was not meynt

Nor for untrouthe Jurours were not atteynt.

This comment might remind us of the case I noted above, where the Duke of Suffolk bullies a tenant of Bury into claiming to be the heir of manors under control of the

Benedictine house. St. Edmund, according to Lydgate’s vision of the saint, would not approve. In his dealings with the Bury community in this case, the Duke of Suffolk would exemplify much of the excessive noble posturing Lydgate rails against in his work.

Of course, monasteries were most certainly as guilty of such legal maneuvering as nobles—it is quite possible that the tenant in the case above was himself bullied into making the deposition that relates the episode by the monks themselves. Religious communities, being among the most prolific land owners, practiced maintenance themselves.60 It is in Lydgate’s interest, however, to portray his community as the underdogs, victimized by aggressive noble factions.

Lydgate presents a clear distinction between voracious aggressors and wise governors in his account of St. Edmund’s passion. In the next book, Lydgate establishes

60 For an account of maintenance in the early part of Henry VI’s reign, see Ralph A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI, 128-53. 105 a contrast between Edmund’s reign and the vicious rapine of two Danish princes,

Hyngmar and Ubba. The two revel in “willful violence,” bragging about their military prowess to their father:

Ys ther any levyng now these daies,

Kyng or prynce, so myhti of pussiance …

Which rassemblith or is lik in assurance

To us in manhood, yf it be declaryd,

Which to our noblesse of riht may be comparyd? (Edmund and Fremund

2.22-3, 26-8).

The brothers pride their “manhood” on their ability to forcefully establish rule through violence. Their father Lothbrocus, however, is unimpressed, and is scornful of his sons’ pride. He upholds Edmund as a superior model for just kingship:

With his manhood he holden is riht wis,

And with his knyhthod he hath gret providence,

Of governance he hath a sovereyn pris;

Thouh he be large, he doth no violence (Edmund and Fremund 2.50-3).

Again, Edmund’s virtue as a ruler is contrasted with aggressive martial violence.

Lydgate’s characterization of Lothbrocus here follows a very specific narrative, distinct from Geoffrey of Wells, who had introduced the Danish king not as an admirer, but as a foil to Edmund along with three sons: Ingmar, Ubba, and another named Bern. Lydgate chooses a source that amends Geoffrey of Wells’ narrative to represent Lothbrocus as a virtuous pagan who has disdain for his sons’ willful rapine. In this alternative source,

Lothbrocus is taken by accident to East Anglia and to Edmund’s court. Here he is

106 welcomed and housed generously, and his esteem for the East Anglian monarch’s

reputation is confirmed.61 The Danish monarch expresses his admiration of Edmund as a

ruler:

This Lothbrocus considered every thing,

Though he were a paynym in his lyve,

Toknys notable which he sauh in the kyng

Of hih prowesse and knyhtly discipline,

And how he was a merour of doctryne,

And his household was liht and lanterne

To alle veryuous how thei shal hem governe (Edmund and Fremund

2.134-40).

Karen Winstead points out that rather than portray the Danes as an entirely threatening, evil force, Lydgate focuses on establishing political virtue on both sides, in Lothbrocus as well as Edmund. According to Winstead, this allows him to fully explore the ethics of rulership in a way that no vernacular life of Edmund had done before.62

Lydgate’s portrait of Edmund’s household seems idealistic, and to a great extent it

is, especially in the context of Lydgate’s earlier, darker explorations of politics.

Furthermore, Lydgate picks a strain of the Edmund legend that places its focus on the

invasion within matters of the court and chamber as well as the battlefield, and it is in the

chamber that Edmund’s rule is most devastated. The exemplarity of Edmund and his

household will not stand. As assiduous as Edmund was in appointing advisors and

61 See Grant Loomis, “The Growth of the St. Edmund Legend,” 91-5.

62 Karen A. Winstead, “Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Alban: Martyrdom and ‘Prudent Pollicie,” Mediaevalia 17 (1994): 222-31. 107 representatives to carry out his reign, and as carefully as he sets up his household, the

challenge to his reign ultimately comes from within his household as his Danish guest is

betrayed. As an avid hunter, Lothbrocus is assigned to Edmund’s chief hunter Bern (his

third son in Geoffrey of Well’s narrative), who accompanies the Danish king during his

tenure at Edmund’s court. Lothbrocus is such a great hunter, however, that Bern

becomes jealous, deceitfully kills the visiting king, and hides the evidence. After it is

revealed that Bern is responsible for Lothbrocus’s death, the treacherous servant is

banished. He finds his way to Hygmar and Ubba, and fraudulently implicates Edmund in

their father’s death, thus setting in motion the events leading to Edmund’s martyrdom.63

It is at this moment that Edmund’s exemplarity as a ruler becomes most problematic.

A major crux within the hagiographical tradition of St. Edmund that Lydgate must deal with is the issue of violence. Facing a threat to his kingdom from hostile invaders, how can a saint avoid violence to defend his people? If his absence could lead to the brutal oppression of his people, why would Edmund willingly give himself up to martyrdom? How hagiographers throughout the Edmund tradition deal with this crucial issues says much about the political contexts within which they wrote, particularly how they saw the relationship between the political and religious spheres. John Damon gives an illuminating examination of early lives of St. Edmund and their relationship to attitudes about warfare and sanctity. Damon argues that Abbo of Fleury represents

Edmund as a holy, self-sacrificing king who gives his life for his kingdom, contrasting with the French kings of his own day, whose influence was waning in comparison to

England. In his death, Edmund unifies his people and their conquerors. Defeat is

63 Grant Loomis, “The Growth of the Saint Edmund Legend,” 102. 108 reconciled with the eventual conversion of the Danes. As Damon notes, the ruling West

Saxons were resistant to the story, looking for retribution against—and ultimately dominance over—the marauders. He points out that the legend of St. Edmund is more

“appropriate for the conquered, not the conquerors.” Furthermore, the rejection of war is not for the sake of mere pacifism, but self-sacrifice for a greater good. Edmund’s victory is symbolic: he converts the Danes, uniting East Anglian and Danish societies under

Edmund’s cult.64 A translator of Abbo’s work, Aelfric, placed the story in the context of a collection of saints’ lives that included more aggressive warrior-saints like Oswald, demonstrating a range of professions for saints as there were among Aelfric’s readers, which included secular people as well as religious. Some reflect more religious values embrace martyrdom eschewing violence and warfare while others embrace their calling to die in battle defending their people by the sword.65

Winstead points out that Lydgate develops this tradition, attempting to reconcile the conflict between spiritual and temporal endeavors for his fifteenth-century English readers among the laity. The legend of Fremund, she notes, allows Lydgate to grant a level of legitimacy for secular endeavors compared to other vernacular versions of the saints’ legends that privilege religious values over worldly concerns.66 Fremund leaves an ascetic life as a hermit to finish what Edmund had left undone. He comes to liberate

East Anglia from Danish oppression. Lydgate presents the choice to leave his profession as a difficult one. Fremund, in fact, worries over his decision to leave his “proffessioun

64 John Edward Damon, Soldier Saints and Holy Warriors: Warfare and Sanctity in the Literature of Early England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003),167-91.

65 ibid., 192-246.

66 Karen Winstead, “Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Alban,” 229-31. 109 for to lyve solitarye” and the commitment he shared with his uncle “teschewe were and

shedyng eek off blood” (Edmund and Fremund 3.471-2). An angel appears to him in his sleep and absolves his conscience, encouraging him to return to East Anglia and war against the “miscreantis of Denmark” (Edmund and Fremund 3.490). This return to the savage rites of Mars, however, has little to do with upholding chivalric martial identity for its own sake; rather, it ties chivalric identity to the protection of the common societal good, particularly matters of faith. Fremund makes a particular point to explain what his reasons are for confronting the Danish invaders, as well as what they are not. When

Ingwar offers to spare the region if Fremund renounces his Christianity, Fremund refuses

“not for the kingdom to which he hadde ryht, / but for our faith …” (Edmund and

Fremund 3.520-1). When he has defeated the Danes in battle, the narrator makes a point to identify the real source of his victory: “But fro the erthe by mene off spere or shield, / but [God] be grace yeveth conquest in the feeld” (Edmund and Fremund 3.545-6). The legend does not affirm Edmund or Fremund’s individual nobility, but God’s providence in protecting their rule, even after their deaths.

Lydgate explores a similar effacement of worldly honor in his legend of Guy of

Warwick. Just like Fremund, Guy is called to defend his people from a brutal Danish invasion, and Guy reluctantly leaves his life as a pilgrim to face the giant Colbrand. Guy explicitly states his purpose to devote his service “to the comone goode” and to put his

“lyffe in Iuparde this lande to sette in ease.”67 After he defeats the giant, Guy refuses to

accept personal fame and honor, only revealing his identity to King Athelstan in secret.

The king

67 F. N. Robinson, “On Two Manuscripts of Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick,” Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 5 (1896), 207.335-6. 110 Gret proferes made on that other side

Of golde and tresoure and muche rychesse

Withinne his paleys if he wold abyde,

But alle these proffres Guy clene for-soke.68

According to John Shirley, the poem was written for the eldest daughter of the Earl of

Warwick, Richard Beauchamp, who was among Lydgate’s most prominent patrons.69

Lydgate thus molds an image of Guy for the heirs of a man who looked to the legendary

figure as a projection of his own knightly magnificence. The Earl of Warwick during his

lifetime had made much of his legendary ancestor to bolster his image as one of the

central brokers of the young king’s authority. He was Henry VI’s tutor during his

minority. He was also a prominent patron of Bury, admitted to Bury’s confraternity

during Curteys’ abbacy.70 Beauchamp was fully aware of the legendary hero’s religious

significance. At the request of a York anchoress, Beauchamp had established a chantry at

Guy’s Cliff in Warwick, where Guy was said to have spent his last days as a hermit.71

The monk of Bury also calls attention to Guy’s religious heritage, mentioning his order’s

guardianship of the central relic of the battle: “Yit is it called the axe of gret Colbronde /

And kept amonge men of relygyoune / in theyr vestiarye, I understonde.”72 The relic of the hero’s victory was a prominent possession of the Benedictine chapter of monks at

68 ibid., 210.454-7.

69 For commentary on the inscription mentioning the Countess of Shrewsbury’s commission, see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley, 172-3.

70 See Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), 27.

71 See Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 118-23.

72 F. N. Robinson, “On Two Manuscripts of Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick,” 209.414-16. 111 Winchester Cathedral Priory, and Lydgate slips in this detail to remind his prominent patron’s heirs of his order’s role in preserving the champion’s memory.73 Just as he does in his Lives of St. Edmund and Fremund, Lydgate attempts to temper the hero’s chivalric magnificence with his commitment to religious ideals. In his ascetic lifestyle as a pilgrim, Guy modeled religious values more than secular. When Guy does stand as a chivalric hero, he rejects the trappings of worldly honor to return to his eremitical way of life, just as Edmund and Fremund turn aside honor in their own ways.

Lydgate privileges religious principles in his life of St. Edmund at crucial moments in his narrative, and this allows him to present the martyr as standing for Bury as much as for the young king. Edmund represents regional East Anglian religious interests most clearly in Lydgate’s translation of several episodes from the Miracula

Sancti Edmundi. The monk of Bury very carefully picks miracle stories from the several hundred collected at his house since the tenth century.74 From Abbo he takes two episodes where secular figures violate the sanctity of the monastery’s premises.75 In one episode, the thegn Leofstan chases a woman into the church of St. Edmund and brings her up for trial. The monks pray for protection of the saint’s “franchise,” and Leofstan is fatally stricken with demonic possession. Characteristically, Lydgate clearly states his moral: “Thus kan the martir punysshe hem that been rebel; / Folk that truste hym, counforte hem and releve, / Socoure ther pleyntes, supporte ther quarrel, / As this myracle openly doth preve” (Edmund and Fremund 3.1163-66). In the other episode

73 Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick, 69.

74 All of the episodes that Lydgate picks can be found among the miracula included in MS Bodley 240; see Nova Legenda Anglia, 589-688.

75 ibid., 593-6. 112 from Abbo, eight thieves intending to ransack the shrine of the martyr are frozen in the

act, and are promptly caught and summarily hanged by the local bishop Theodred.

Lydgate includes Abbo’s note that Theodred regretted the hastiness of his judgment, re-

acknowledging the liberty Bury St. Edmund’s had from the authority of the local

episcopate.

Lydgate also relates an important episode from Abbot Sampson’s redaction of the

Miracula, contrasting Edward the Confessor’s reverence to the martyr with the Dane

Osgothus, who bore “old hatrede” for the saint.76 Lydgate opens the account with this

lesson: “Whan ffolk off pryde lyst have no reward / To hooly seyntis forto do reverence, /

God punisheth hem” (Edmund and Fremund 3.1240-2). Osgothus casts “his look … of

fals dysdeyn” toward the saint’s shrine, carrying a “brood fawchoun” by his side, boldy

threatening the saint. Like Leofstan, Osgothus falls into a seizure, “mawgre al his pryde”

(Edmund and Fremund 3.1255-60). Unlike Leofstan, however, Osgothus does not die, and Edward, who is holding chapter with the abbot and his monks “t’encresse their fraunchise and ther liberte” (Edmund and Fremund 3.1275-8), hears the commotion, and

beseeches the abbot to hold a procession, asking mercy of the saint on behalf of

Osgothus. Osgoth is cured of his malady, and lives the rest of his life in meek devotion

to the saint. Besides these more well-known miracula associated with St. Edmund,

Lydgate also includes several more obscure, anonymous ones culled from collections of

St. Edmund’s miracles. Each of these miracula stresses the spiritual protection that

Edmund offers to his religious community. In the first, five knights seize horses from the

monastery’s stables “ageyn the ffredam off Edmund” (Edmund and Fremund 3.1171).

76 For the original text of the miracle, see Nova Legenda Anglia, 609-10. 113 They lose their minds, repent, offer up their armor, and thenceforth show veneration for the saint.77 The second episode tells the story of a Flemish “brybor,” who, in kissing the shrine, attempts to bite off a notch, only to be held in place. The convent prays to the saint for pity, and the now repentant briber is freed.78 It is clear that Lydgate wanted to pick episodes from the miracula that demonstrated Edmund’s special relationship with the religious community, and that established that the martyr would protect the community from any threat, even from powerful secular figures.

One episode serves as a centerpiece to Lydgate’s collection of miracula, and, as the first of the series, develops Lydgate’s themes thoroughly. The narrative echoes

Lydgate’s usual condemnation of aggressive secular power, and clearly emphasizes the martyr’s connection to regional interests. During the rule of Etheldredus, the Danish king

Sweyn tyrannically oppresses England and shows particular ruthlessness in his treatment of the church. He “spoiled menstres and holy cherces brent,” scorned the priesthood and held the “religious in disdeyn” (Edmund and Fremund 3.869, 888). Prudence did not govern his rule: “wil was his gyde, collusion his werkyng. / His lawes governed be power and by might” (Edmund and Fremund 3.892-3). Sweyn extorted tribute from the region, recognizing neither “ffredam nor ffranchise” granted to areas by local saints

(Edmund and Fremund 3.903). East Anglia in particular is struck hard, and a procession is made to the shrine of the martyr. All levels of society unite to pray for deliverance.

Edmund answers his people’s prayers, appearing to the “cheef Cubyculer” of the shrine,

Ayllewyn, renowned for his holiness and his special relationship with the martyr.

77 See Nova Legenda Anglia, 665.

78 ibid., 661. 114 Edmund commands the monk to be his messenger to Sweyn, warning the Dane of dire consequences if he does not cease threatening his “franchise” in East Anglia. Sweyn scornfully ejects Ayllewyn from his court and the monk is forced to take refuge in a church yard. Edmund appears to him again, promising to avenge East Anglia. In full armor, Edmund shows himself to the tyrant and runs him through, relieving the region of the threat.

Several times in the narrative, Lydgate emphasizes the idea that East Anglia is

Edmund’s “franchise,” and that the martyr will defend it even from the grave. The East

Anglian people bristle at Sweyn’s demands for tribute, since they “cleymed franchise off

Edmund, ther patroun’ (Edmund and Fremund 3.912). Edmund, in his message to Sweyn through Ayllewyn, claims that the people of East Anglia’s “ffranchise is to stond in avantage / from al trybut and al exaccioun / under the wynges off [his] proteccion … ther fredam stablyshed off antiquite” (Edmund and Fremund 3.971-3, 978). As if this point were not clear enough, Lydgate follows the narrative with a moral that leads into the remaining miracula:

And as myn Auctor in ordre doth devyse,

Never tyrant durste putten assay

Off Seynt Edmund to breke the franchise

But he were punysshed withoute long delay;

Hard is with seyntis for to make affray (Edmund and Fremund 3.1107-12).

Lydgate thus establishes a respect for regional interests as part of prudent governance.

His characterization of Sweyn’s punishment is interesting in this respect, because he makes a particular effort to point out that the Dane was not defeated in battle, but was

115 taken in his sleep, a fate especially humiliating to a warrior. Lydgate frames his reading of Sweyn’s death through an appeal toward the virtue of prudence:

[God’s] victorye with spere, swerd or shield

In chaumbre shewed as weel as in the feeld.

To prudent people and folkis that be sad

Twen ffeeld and chaumbre is no difference;

Lyggyng a-bedde his myth is to be drad,

For cowardis hath non experience

Where he list use his myhty violence,

In bed, in chaumbir, in castel, or in tour.

The swerd al on of his dredful rygour (Edmund and Fremund 3.1049-57).

Lydgate has the figure of Edmund chasten regal power in his defense of the region he represents.

Throughout the Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund, Lydgate is very careful to circumscribe his authorial status. The collection of miracula here thus seems pretty provocative in its rejection of any encroachment on Bury’s interests. However, Lydgate positions himself as a mere, humble representative of the imposing martyr Edmund.

Along these lines, the figure who most represents a model for Lydgate as a poet and as a representative of his order and community is Ayllewyn. In the account of the confrontation with Sweyn, Ayllewyn appears as an authoritative messenger, selected for his religious perfection and his duty to the saint; nonetheless, he is a humble figure, having to seek refuge in a churchyard. Ayllewyn also makes an appearance at the end of the Osgothus episode, as he orders the afflicted but repentant Dane to be taken closer to

116 the martyr’s shrine, where he recovers. Ayllewyn also appears at the end of Lydgate’s collection of miracula, as the story of Edmund’s translation to London and back to Bury at the shrine’s permanent home is recounted. Several miracles occur along the way, and when the procession reaches Cripplegate and a woman is healed, Ayllewyn is told by revelation that the martyr is to be returned to Bury. The bishop of London, however, conspires to have the saint translated to St. Paul’s, and the body is redirected to the church of St. Gregory. However, when the porters are told to move the body to St.

Paul’s, the body of the saint cannot be moved. Ayllewyn intervenes, humbly beseeching his superior the bishop that “the kyng requeryng lowly for Crystes sake / his owyn contre he sholde not forsake” (Edmund and Fremund 3.1364-5). Lydgate then recounts the permanent establishment of the martyr’s shrine at Bury (Beordesworth) through Baldwin and William the Conqueror. The episode is a powerful declaration of the religious community’s connection to St. Edmund, decisively locating the saint’s power in East

Anglia and not in the ecclesiastical and monarchical centers of London. Ayllewyn, however, is resolutely deferent to his superiors, “meekly knelyng” before the bishop of

London to express the martyr’s will. Through the figure of Ayllewyn, Lydgate demonstrates the balance he must make between preserving his house’s religious independence and recognizing the political authority his social betters wielded.

At the end of his work, Lydgate returns to the guiding purpose that his superior

Curteys commissioned him to follow. He invokes the martyr’s spiritual guardianship for the young king Henry approaching his majority. Lydgate ends the work with a prayer, as the refrain of each stanza proclaims, for Edmund to pray for and protect “thenheritour of

Inglond and France.” Within this prayer on Henry’s behalf are appeals to the common

117 good of the whole realm, seeking protection for all of the estates who virtuously work

toward the unity of the commonwealth. He prays that they all be protected as in a castle

and its fortifications so that “noon enemy may breke [the] liberte” (Edmund and Fremund

3.1477). The final lines of the work, addressed Regi, “to the king,” asks the monarch to

consider the majesty of St. Edmund and “beth to his chyrche dyffence and Champioun, /

Be-cause yt us off your fundaccioun” (Edmund and Fremund “Regi”). Like Ayllewyn,

Lydgate humbly presents this request “a-twene hope and dreed,” acknowledging the

authority of his patron and liege. This same double-edged deference can be seen in

Lydgate’s tip-of-the-hat to the conventional “Go, litel book” envoy preceding his direct

appeal to the king. In such envoys, an author gives Polonius-like advice to his work,

explaining how his poem might present itself to a powerful figure such as a king, noble,

prominent patron, or (as Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde) God. Such envoys also appeal to classical literary authorities and fret over a work’s misreception. Lydgate follows suit, noting his poem’s “dyrk apparence” in relation to “Tullius Motles” and admitting that it draws “but small foysoun” from “Elycon welle” (Edmund and Fremund “Lenvoye”).

Such envoys thus keenly reflect the intricacies of social interaction between author and patron, laying bare the anxieties involved in addressing one’s social superiors.79 At the same time, however, these envoys also efface in the guise of humility very powerful claims to authority. As David Lawton points out, “on the immediate social level, [the guise of dullness in the English fifteenth century] is almost always disingenuous, often

79 See Karl Julius Holzknecht’s thorough exploration of the trope in Middle English Literature, Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages, Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvannia (1923), 116- 23. 118 implicated with problematic sociopolitical intervention.”80 We are again reminded of

Lydgate’s striking contribution to the Canterbury Tales in his Siege of Thebes, as he confronts secular power in unassuming garb, ultimately laying bare its deepest shortcomings.

The authors I examine in the following chapters likewise shape their identity through complex appeals to religious and social humility. As Winstead has pointed out,

Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Fremund, along with his Lives of Saints Alban and

Amphibal, commissioned by the abbot of St. Albans, John Wethamstead, just two years after the monk of Bury completed his work for Henry V and Curteys, mark a watershed in the development of vernacular hagiography. Not only are the works “instrumental in transforming the Middle English saint’s legend into a self-consciously ‘literary’ genre,”

Winstead argues, but they also anticipate “legends that were longer, more historically detailed, and more morally complex than those written during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”81 In addition, Lydgate pioneers a mode of authorial presentation

for writers in religious orders that grapples with the social complexity the religious faced.

Members of religious orders were confronted with forms of lay spirituality that

provocatively crossed traditional boundaries between the cloister and secular world like

Margery Kempe. They also weathered the assaults of anti-monastic sentiment such as

that represented in Chaucer’s work and stood trial before self-interested calls for reform

from powerful magnates like King Henry V. And yet figures like Lydgate—including, as

we shall see, Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave—negotiate these challenges with

80 David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” English Literary History 54 (1987), 770.

81 Karen Winstead, “Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Alban,” 223. 119 aplomb and preserve their authoritative religious identity at the same time as they assure their lay patrons and readers of their social standing.

120 CHAPTER 3

“PROTESTATIONS” AND PATRONAGE: OSBERN BOKENHAM’S LIVES OF SAINTS ANNE AND ELIZABETH OF HUNGARY

There is much evidence that lay people were claiming deeper authority over

religious communities, and that the religious, in turn, sought ways of shoring up their

authority by offering lay people a stake in their profession. Some argue that this

interaction had unintended consequences for the religious. Benjamin Thompson has

recently written that powerful patrons increasingly asserted their foundational rights over

communities beyond mere remembrance of deceased founders, and sought special

benefits in the earthly life along with privileges in the life eternal. The religious

responded by granting expanded rights to lay patrons including confraternity, hospitality,

recognition in masses, and pastoral care, ultimately competing with other religious

communities and even secular parishes for a devotional clientele. Thompson argues that

as a result, the religious became more and more like secular churches as they relaxed

regulations that once held them distinct from the church outside.1 James Clark, too, has

1 Benjamin J. Thompson, “Introduction: Monasteries and Medieval Society,” Monasteries and Society: Proceedings of the 1994 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Benjamin J. Thompson (Stamford: Harlaxton Medival Studies, 1999), 4-24; “Monasteries and their Patrons at Foundation and Dissolution,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series 4 (1994): 103-25; “Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England,” The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. James G. Clark (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 165-96.

121 explored the different ways in which the religious sought to regain the ecclesiastical clout

they once had during the early and high Middle Ages, and suggests that their success in

such pursuits was mixed during the centuries before the Reformation. While they were

able to provide for the devotional and even educational needs of lay people, often their

work undercut their status as religious men.2

This symbiotic but potentially troubling relationship between a religious

community and its patrons can be seen in a work often ascribed to the Augustinian friar

Osbern Bokenham, A Dialogue at the Grave of Dame Johan of Acres. In this poem, a

friar of Bokenham’s home priory of Clare in Suffolk and a secular visitor explore the

genealogy of the most prominent patrons of the house from its founding by Richard of

Clare in the thirteenth century. The secular man seeks to learn the lineage of the Clare

family, and the friar obliges, following his patrons’ line from Richard of Clare to Richard

of York, taking careful note of the donations their descendents made to the house. For

example, the friar explains that Richard, inspired by the Augustinian Giles of Rome’s

political treatise De Regimine Principum, “made first frere Augustynes to Ingelonde

cum,” and when his wife Matilda died, “with divers parcels encrecid our fundacion, /

Liche as oure monumentye make declaracion.”3 The friar also mentions the debt the

house has to Richard’s great-granddaughter Elizabeth de Burgh, whose arms were

displayed in their foundations of three buildings, “Dortour, Chapiter hous, and fraitour

2 James G. Clark, “Selling the Holy Places: Monastic Efforts to Win Back the People in Fifteenth Century England,” Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. T. Thornton (Stroud, 2001), 13-32; “The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England,” The Religious Orders in Pre- Reformation England, 3-33.

3 “The Dialogue at the Grave of Dame Johan of Acres reascribed to Osbern Bokenham,” Clare Priory: Seven Centuries of a Suffolk House, ed. Norman Scarfe (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, Ltd., 1962), 66.

122 which she. / Made out the grounde, both planncher and wall…”4 However, the friar’s

concern is not merely for the deceased ancestors of Richard of Clare; he speaks also to

the political interests of Richard’s living heirs, the Yorkist claimants of the English

throne. In return for the patronage of this ancestry, the community prays for the earthly

and spiritual advancement of Richard of York, his wife Cecily Neville, and their living

children. The Dialogue ends with a prayer for the duke and his wife:

Longe mote he liven to goddis plesaunce,

This high and mighty prince in prosperite.

With virtue and victorie god hym avaunce

Of all his enemyes, and graunte that he

And the noble princesse his wife may see

Her childres children or thei hens wende

And aftir this outelary, the joy that nevir shal ende.5

The worldly prosperity of the York claim is under-girded by the devout virtue of the

family and upheld by the prayers of the friars, like the one that ends the poem. The

Dialogue thus presents itself as a pious literary monument to the House of York and its allies, just as the Augustinian house itself. Part of this project involves declaring the house’s debt to its patrons, closely linking its very existence to their own. The friar’s authority is thus based not only on his knowledge of the succession of patrons, but also on his recognition of the line’s foundational importance to his house.

4 ibid., 67.

5 ibid., 69. 123 Clare Priory is dependent on its patrons for its identity as the York line looks to

the Augustinians to strengthen their pious image. Such a relationship could be risky. If

the house were to find itself on the wrong side of England’s dynastic struggles, it could

find itself dependant on those whose succession it opposed. Religious houses whose

patrons were disenfranchised or whose line lapsed found themselves without secular

support and vulnerable to suppression. In the centuries preceding the Dissolution, the

patronage of religious houses fell to a more and more restricted group of aristocrats as the

descendents of patrons were unwilling or unable to continue their support of their

family’s religious communities. By the 1530s, two-thirds of all religious houses were

under the patronage of the crown or the upper nobility. What had once been a perpetual

commitment of support became dependent on the contingencies of genealogical

succession and the uncertain turns of political maneuvering.6 This precarious relationship

between a house’s identity and the political order is reflected in the Dialogue. Almost every time the poem recounts a generation of patrons, it self-consciously reflects on the potential breaks in the line. The secular man regularly asks if patrons were married and had issue, and the friar emphatically, perhaps frantically, points to the continuity of the line, particularly through the women of the lineage, a weaker tactic than tracing a line through primogeniture. At one point, the line potentially breaks when the friar reveals that Edmund, Earl of March (who had been the primary Yorkist claimant against Henry

VI), died without male progeny. After the secular man seeks to know where the “right of the Marches londis” passed, the friar reveals that Edmund’s father Roger had two daughters, one whose issue died, the other one whose son, none other than Richard of

6 Benjamin J. Thompson, “Monasteries and their Patrons at Foundation and Dissolution,” 112-21. 124 York himself, was still living. The March’s lands thus passed to Richard “by right of his

modir.” The friar seems concerned with defending the continuity of the line through

Richard. When the secular man asks if Richard were married or single, the friar seems

taken aback that the man might even consider Richard to be anything but married: “Sole,

God forbade! It were a grete pity.” 7 When the man asks whether there was “frute”

between Richard and his bride Cecily and then asks for their names in order of birth, the

friar obliges, detailing the births of all twelve of their children. Behind this celebratory

document of fecundity is a deep anxiety about barrenness and death. In the course of

listing Richard and Cecily’s children, the friar reveals that five of them have passed. We

also find that the birth of the couple’s first child was preceded by a “tyme of longe

bareynesse,” broken only by the portentous birth of a daughter, Anne, who, as the

namesake of the Virgin Mary’s mother, “signyfieth grace, / in token that al her hertis

hevynesse / [God] as for bareynesse wold fro hem chace.”8 Divine favor grants the house of York abundance that follows the political angst involved with a potentially broken lineage and a period of infertility. Clare Priory becomes a monument to

Richard’s line as its brethren pray for his earthly and heavenly success. The house has a deep interest in that success because it has invested its identity on that memory.

Scholars have connected this poem’s focus on Clare priory’s roster of eminent patrons to the authorial projects of its possible author Osbern Bokenham. In particular, recent work has noted the Augustinian friar’s Yorkist sympathies and his representation of women in other works such as his collection of women’s saints’ lives, known now as

7 “The Dialogue at the Grave of Dame Johan of Acres,” 68.

8 ibid., 69. 125 the Legendys of Hooly Wummen. Sheila Delany points out that the Dialogue voices

support for Richard of York at a moment when his claims to the throne were coming

under intense scrutiny. She notes that the Dialogue focuses on the women in the line of

Clare patrons, reflecting Richard’s right to claim the English throne through his mother

and his great-grandmother when matrilineal succession was controversial.9 The

Dialogue’s focus on matrilineal succession is rare in late medieval England, reflecting a

series of “irregularities, insufficiencies and superfluities” that could “cause difficulties of

succession and rule.”10 In its examination of the role of women in the body politic, the

Clare verses mirror Bokenham’s strategies of representing women and political power in

his collection of women’s saints’ lives. Carol Hilles also connects the Dialogue and the

Legendys’ focus on female patronage, emphasizing the connection between Bokenham’s

Yorkist interests with his house and his authorial persona. In her essay, “Gender and

Politics in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendary,” Hilles writes that

Bokenham deploys his liminal position as the translator of lives of female saints

for an audience of pious women as a means of conflating the historical and textual

communities of women. The links Bokenham establishes between the fertile

bodies of his female patrons and the spiritually generative power of the bodies of

the legendary’s female saints … draw attention to the legitimacy of, and even

confer divine authorization on, Yorkist monarchical ambitions.11

9 Sheila Delany, Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth Century England, The Work of Osbern Bokenham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 127-159, particularly 143-44.

10 ibid., 128.

11 Carol Hilles, “Gender and Politics in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendary,” New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 196. 126 To aid the interests of his patrons, Hilles argues, Bokenham appropriates the dissenting feminine voices of his saints to oppose the courtly Lancastrian political and literary agenda with a simpler, pious rhetoric.

While it is clear that Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen reflects a Yorkist polemic as the Dialogue does, to unproblematically characterize Bokenham and his work as thoroughly “Yorkist” is to miss the difficulties Bokenham faces in constructing his authorial identity as a religious man in relation to prominent secular patrons. As the

Clare Dialogue reveals anxieties about the house’s identity behind its enthusiastic political rhetoric, Bokenham, I will argue, is more uncertain about his association with secular life than he appears on the surface. Although Bokenham includes detailed reflections on the commission of several works, these self-conscious meditations on authorship and patronage belie his cautiousness in too closely tying his religious identity to his secular benefactors. In his writing, Bokenham precariously balances his authorial persona between his profession as an Augustinian friar of Clare and his identity as a protégé indebted to prominent patrons. On the one hand, he must address the worldly interests of his patrons: the demands of social prestige, the exigencies of political activity, the constraints of the household economy, and the demands of married life and childbirth.

At the same time, he must deal with his patrons’ spiritual concerns and assert his authority as a cleric and religious man: praying for their souls’ health, offering them pastoral comfort, and calling them to pious devotion. The tension between these often competing tasks is reflected in the lives of the saints he represents. Of course, these tasks are not mutually exclusive. Carefully constructed displays of piety could promote a

127 household’s worldly prestige.12 But the way certain tensions between a secular and religious lifestyle are resolved--or are left unresolved--says much about Bokenham’s authorial project. This balancing act becomes particularly difficult when he adapts lives of the matron saints Anne and Elizabeth of Hungary. While it might seem that figures like Anne and Elizabeth offer an opportunity for Bokenham to present “mirrors for wives” to his patrons, the sources for those lives present particular difficulties for the

Clare friar. He must turn a nativity of the Virgin reflecting religious values into a more secular portrait of the Virgin’s mother. He must also describe the life of a chaste, poverty-loving, ascetic princess for a noblewoman who could not afford to reject the world in any way. In his translations of these lives, Bokenham calls attention to the inconsistencies involved with constructing his religious identity in tandem with addressing the interests of his secular patrons.

Bokenham’s primary source for his lives of the two matrons, as with his lives of virgin martyrs and the “apostolesse” Mary Magdalene, is the Latin collection of lives written by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine. Though Voragine’s work was the most widely known legenda of the day, Bokenham’s choice to use Voragine as a source for a collection of saints’ lives for lay people presents him with some significant problems.

According to Sherry Reames, Voragine compiled his Legenda Aurea at a moment when the church hierarchy was stiffening the requirements for canonization of saints. The saints in Voragine’s work exhibit extraordinary, even superhuman qualities that lay people could only venerate, not imitate. Furthermore, the collection privileges clerical

12 See Kate Mertes, The English Noble Household 1250-1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 139-82. 128 and religious ideals: exceptional learnedness, aversion to marriage and sex, stark morals, sacramental authority, and a radical rejection of the secular world. The collection became eminently popular among the clergy in the later Middle Ages, and came to be the primary source for lay people’s knowledge of the saints. In sermons, the visual arts, drama, and literary works adapted from Voragine’s text, the clergy presented models of sanctity that often mirrored Voragine’s view of the church. However, Reames suggests that appropriations of the Legenda in the later Middle Ages might also have reflected resistance to Voragine’s “narrow, elitist view of sanctity” or at least a willingness to deemphasize some of his biases.13

As several scholars have pointed out, Bokenham was among those clergy who worked with Voragine’s text to create a product more suitable for his lay audience than the original. Examining Bokenham’s lives of virgin martyrs, Karen Winstead has pointed out that Bokenham turns the “triumphant viragos” of Voragine’s work into

“refined gentlewomen.”14 He emphasizes the “transferable” characteristics of the saints, such as their prayerfulness, patience in suffering, and charity—the kinds of virtue that might be found in conduct manuals for gentle folk. In turn, he de-emphasizes the potentially scandalous aspects of the legends, such as the intensity of their confrontation with male authorities and the radicalism of their rejection of the world. He presents himself as a writer who was a “much admired hagiographer whose friends and acquaintances kept him busy with commissions,” and whose spiritual well-being he kept

13 Sherry Reames, The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 197-209.

14 Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 113. 129 close in mind by incorporating tributes to them into the legends.15 Bokenham has

attracted notice as a poet who reflects thoroughly on his place in poetic tradition and on

his conflicting roles as a poet, translator, and pastoral guide. Many scholars have noted

that Bokenham degrades his own poetic authority before other ancient and medieval

poets, with Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate being notable among the English writers he

mentions.16 Paul Price argues that Bokenham presents his work as a “stern rejoinder to

the religious and aesthetic transgressions of his age,” a rejoinder that is reflected by his

presentation of himself as an author and by his treatment of his sources, Voragine in

particular.17 Bokenham self-consciously creates a less ambitious aesthetic by which his

work might be judged, but along with these lowered poetic expectations comes a sense of

divine purpose. Bokenham pares down the intellectual content in Voragine and

represents his poetic goals as devoutly humble, constructing a plainer and more pious

aesthetic to counteract what he sees as overly ornate and elitist in literary language. Price

notes that in Bokenham’s writing, “notions of intellectual value are dethroned and their

place is occupied by simple common piety.”18 Despite his ingenious changes to

Voragine, however, Bokenham cannot entirely contain the radical differences between

the Legenda’s saints and the lifestyles of his worldly, privileged lay readers. A tension is

15 ibid., 112-46.

16 See, for example, David Lawton, “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century,” English Literary History 54 (1987): 766-7; Ian Johnson, “Tales of a True Translator: Medieval Literary Theory, Anecdote and Autobiography in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen,” The Medieval Translator IV, ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994), 104- 124.

17 Paul Price, “Trumping Chaucer: Osbern Bokenham’s Katherine,” The Chaucer Review 36 (2001): 159. See also Carroll Hilles, “Gender and Politics in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendary,” 189-212.

18 Paul Price, “Trumping Chaucer,” 173.

130 always present in Bokenham’s vitae as Voragine’s radical, blessed elite show through his refined adaptations.

This tension can be seen clearly in his reworking of Voragine’s De Nativitate

beatae Mariae Virginis into his Life of Saint Anne, Mother of Saint Mary. Gail

McMurray Gibson has described Bokenham’s Life of St. Anne as an “undisguised

celebration of family ties and the relationships of human kinship” in line with many other

expressions of the popular cult of St. Anne. She argues that he turns Voragine’s life into

an “incantational text invoking child bearing grace and protection” for his patrons

Katherine and John Denston, who hope for a son to carry on their line. 19 There is much

in Voragine’s text that Bokenham picks up which lends itself to such a focus: the

rehearsal of Anne’s geneology from the line of David, the affection between Anne and

her husband Joachim, and the miraculous conception of Mary after a long period of

barrenness. But, as I will show, there is also much in Voragine’s text which undercuts an

entirely secular focus on the family that Bokenham does not fully efface. Furthermore,

while Bokenham obliges his patron by emphasizing the familial characteristics of the

Virgin’s mother, the bulk of the work is filled with a spiritual anxiety. The grace and joy

that comes with the birth of the Virgin and hoped for in a Denston boy is preceded and

perhaps overshadowed by a stark, contrite piety. Bokenham takes much from Voragine

to create a matronly picture of Anne, but he also subtly undercuts a focus on birth and

lineage. Moreover, he leaves in details from Voragine’s text that reflect the thirteenth

century Dominican’s interest in the less-worldly aspects of the Virgin’s nativity.

19 Gail McMurray Gibson, “Saint Anne and the Religion of the Childbed: Some East Anglian Texts and Talismans,” Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990), 95-111. 131 Voragine’s text does have its familial characteristics. Voragine’s Birth of the

Blessed Virgin Mary begins with an extended reflection on the Virgin’s matrilineal genealogy, establishing her lineage through the line of David according to John of

Damascus. He also includes an explanation of the trinubium, the three marriages of Anne that account for the “brothers” of Jesus and several of the apostles. Voragine’s description of the miraculous conception of the Virgin highlights the grace the formerly barren couple receives in their chaste virtue, foreshadowing the grace of the Incarnation of Christ. An angel tells Joachim that “God punishes not nature but sin, and therefore, when he closes a woman’s womb, he does this in order to open it miraculously later on, and to make it known that what is born is not the fruit of carnal desire but of divine generosity.”20 Voragine’s focus on the family, however, ends there. The rest of the vita, which recounts the young Mary’s early life through her espousal with Joseph directly preceding the Annunciation, emphasizes much more religious values. Mary is dedicated to the temple at the age of three, and lives an exemplary enclosed life of prayer with other virgins, during which she secretly vows perpetual virginity to God. This vow causes problems for the priests of the temple, who by Jewish law must return the maidens to their families at the age of fourteen to be married. They are hesitant to force Mary to break her vow to God, and only give her in marriage to Joseph after a miraculous sign and divine command issues from the Holy of Holies. Mary returns home reluctantly to await marriage with seven other Virgins, continuing her former religious life in the

20 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, Vol. 2, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 152. I will be citing this translation, for the most part, though at times I will be citing the Latin text to make finer distinctions between Voragine’s text and Bokenham’s translation. 132 meantime. It is here that she receives the Annunciation. This religious-oriented narrative

is then followed by a series of miracles of the Virgin, most of which involve clerical

figures or religious themes, including several conversions to the religious life. The few

miracles involving secular people are decidedly unflattering. One involves a woman who

blackmails the Virgin by taking a figure of the Christ from a statue of the Madonna until

her son, who has been kidnapped by bandits, is released. Another involves a woman who

has her son-in-law strangled because of a false rumor that she is seducing him. She is

rescued from punishment by the Virgin because “it was not God’s will that she should

suffer suspicion and disgrace.”21 Attitudes toward marriage and sexuality here are

ambivalent at the very least.

Bokenham’s reworking of Voragine’s Birth of the Virgin is part of an innovative

trend associating Anne with more worldly concerns such as the family and geneaology;

however, it is a trend that had not entirely caught on in England.22 Although by the

fifteenth century the life of Anne was being adapted to reflect secular values, her life was

still used to promote the other-worldly values like those Voragine’s text espoused.

Bokenham is unique among English hagiographers of the Virgin’s mother to cut much of

Mary’s early life, such as her religious discipline in the temple after her dedication. In

contrast, several texts contemporary or near-contemporary to Bokenham’s text reflect a

rejection of the world. The fifteenth century collection of sermons called the Speculum

Sacerdotale, for example, translates much of Voragine’s text, including several of the

21 ibid., 158.

22 Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, “Introduction,” Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990), 1-68; see also Sheingorn’s essay in the collection, “Appropriating the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History,” 169-98. 133 miracles, which Bokenham excludes entirely. Included in the Speculum are two miracles, both of which tell the story of conversion to the religious life. The first involves a young man pressured into marriage who leaves his wife and enters a monastery after being reproved by the virgin in a vision. The second is of a nun who leaves her convent having been seduced by a man. He leaves her and she becomes a prostitute, until she repents and returns to the religious life to discover that the convent has had no knowledge of her absence because it has experienced her fulfilling her duties in an exemplary way.23 Both miracles picture a rejection of marriage and sexuality for the life of the cloister.

Bokenham focuses more on secular issues in his account of the birth of the Virgin by turning its focus on the Virgin’s mother and her father Joachim. But, within this interest in the family, Bokenham subtly reflects on secular anxieties and shores up his religious identity by turning toward a contrite piety. He reverses Voragine’s account of the couple’s responses to Anne’s continued barrenness and Joachim’s self-imposed exile after he is rebuked at the temple for not engendering a child. Voragine had focused on

Joachim’s encounters with an angel announcing the coming birth of Mary, and then only briefly turns to Anne before the couple meets at the Golden Gate in Jerusalem to celebrate their ability to conceive. Bokenham begins with Anne, and supplements

Voragine’s short account with details describing Anne’s reflections in her garden from the early Protoevangelium of James. There, after mourning her husband’s three-month absence, Anne attempts to cope with her infertility. Anne laments her barrenness after seeing a nest of sparrows, characterizing herself as a “curse” before Israel and wretched

23 Speculum Sacerdotale, EETS o.s. 200, ed. Edward H. Weatherly (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 201-203. 134 compared even to baser creatures that can obey God’s command in Genesis to “bring

forth fruit in its season.”24 Bokenham, however, has Anne come to terms with her

inability to give birth. When she sees the sparrows, she thanks God who “… to every

creature … hast grauntyd be kindly engenderrure” and yet to her “Hast don as it is to thy

pleasaunce, / Fro the yefte of thy benygnyte / Me excludynge, swych is my chaunce.”25

At this point an angel appears to announce her impending conception of Mary, revealing that God will grant the couple a daughter. While this miracle certainly fits Bokenham’s plan to appeal to Anne for a Denston son, Anne’s acceptance of her infertility does not.

The matron’s devout recognition and submission to God’s will assuages the anxieties of lineage, but addresses them with an other-worldly piety. This contrasts distinctly with the attempts to maintain genealogical continuity in the Clare Dialogue, where Anne is invoked to demonstrate Richard of York and Cecily Neville’s belated fecundity.

Bokenham is treading a fine line here. On the one hand, he wants to recognize his patron’s desire to maintain their line. On the other, he seems to want to turn their attention to spiritual issues he sees as more important.

Another unique characteristic of Bokenham’s vita is its handling of a long standing controversy involving Mary’s birth. The second-century Protoevangelium of

James was the first narrative to discuss the Virgin’s birth and parentage, and while many traditions of the text suggest that Mary was conceived naturally by Anne and Joachim,

24 “The Protoevangelium of James,” New Testament Apocrypha, Vol. 1, ed. Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, trans. R. McL. Wilson (Philadelphia: The Wesminster Press, 1963), 375-6.

25 Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, ed. Mary S. Sargentson (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), ll. 1764-73. From this point I will be citing this work by line. Another fifteenth-century Life of Anne includes the lament from the Protoevangelium, but does not give it a positive turn as Bokenham does. See The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne, ed. Roscoe E. Parker EETS o.s. 174 (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 4. 135 several manuscripts posit a miraculous birth as an angel announces to Joachim in exile that his wife “has conceived” a child, changing the “will conceive” of other texts. While the Eastern Church adopted as doctrine the idea that Mary was conceived immaculately without the stigma of sexual reproduction, the Western Church into the high Middle Ages maintained that Anne and Joachim conceived her naturally. In the twelfth century, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception became a topic of debate within the Western church.26 Bernard of Clairvaux opposed the doctrine, arguing that it alienated the redemptive power of the Incarnation. Original sin within all of humanity could not be atoned for if the mother of Christ were sinless.27 Defending the institution of Anne’s cult in England against those who saw it as “novel,” the English Benedictine Osbert of Clare asserted that Mary’s immaculate purity is attested to in scripture and Catholic tradition.

Mary is the new Eve (herself immaculately conceived from Adam’s side) who brings a life of resurrection without the stain of natural conception and birth.28 The debate became a matter of contention among the religious orders, particularly the friars. The

Dominicans were opponents of the doctrine. Thomas Aquinas was worried that if Mary were free from sin, she would not need Christ’s salvation, and her son’s status as the universal Redeemer would be diminished.29 Voragine follows his confrere in presenting

26 For accounts of the Immaculate Conception controversy and its relationship to the legends of Anne, see Delany, Impolitic Bodies, 82-5. For a detailed overview of the development of the doctrine up to the nineteenth century, see The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, History and Significance, ed. Edward Dennis O’Connor (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958).

27 Carlo Balic, “The Mediaeval Controversy over the Immaculate Conception up to the Death of Scotus,” The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, ed. O’Connor, 173-4.

28 ibid., 175-6; see also The Letters of Osbert of Clare, Prior of Westminster, ed. E. W. Williamson (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 65-8.

29 Balic, “The Mediaeval Controversy,” 192-6. 136 his Birth of the Virgin as a maculist text. An angel announces to Joachim that his wife

“will conceive” Mary, and the couple rejoices at the Golden Gate that they were to have a child, after which Anne is said to have conceived.30 Many in Bokenham’s order of

Augustinan friars, however, seem to have come to support the immaculist position, even

after their most famous scholar, Giles of Rome, opposed it.31 One of the order’s most

important intellectuals in the fourteenth century, the German Hermann Schild, wrote a

treatise entitled “De Conceptione Gloriosae Virginis Mariae” defending the Immaculate

Conception.32 Many others of his order promoted the doctrine into the sixteenth century.

The debate reached a head at the 1438 Council of Basel, when the Immaculate

Conception was made the doctrine of the church, only to be overturned when the pope

declared the council schismatic. Arguments over the dogma became so heated that in

1483 pope Sixtus IV forbade both sides to accuse the other of heresy on pain of

excommunication.33

Bokenham is in a rather difficult position. On the one hand, he faces the trend toward immaculism in his order. On the other, he faces a patron whose family lacks a male heir, and perhaps optimistically looks to the generative promise of Mary’s birth.

Notably, few positions in the debates among the clerical elite are particularly interested in

30 Jacobi a Voragine Legenda Aurea, ed. Theodore Graesse (Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1969), 588: “Proinde Anna uxor tua pariet tibi filiam … ambo sibi invicem obviantes de mutua visione laetati et de prole promissa … Anna igitur concepit et filiam peperit.”

31 Weneceslaus Sebastian, “The Controversy over the Immaculate Conception from after Scotus to the End of the Eighteenth Century,” The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, ed. O’Connor, 221-3.

32 Monumenta Antiqua Immaculatae Conceptionis Sacratissimae Virginis Mariae, Vol. 1, ed. Petri de Alva & Astorsa (1664; Brussels: Impression Anastaltique Culture et Civilisation, 1967), 139-82.

33 Sebastian, “The Controversy over the Immaculate Conception,” 228-38.

137 Anne and Joachim in their roles as wife and husband, mother and father. Pamela

Sheingorn notes that the focus on the Immaculate Conception effaced interest in the Holy

Kinship, moving Anne and Mary “from the congenial world of female affairs … to place

her instead in the intellectual world of theology.”34 Bokenham tries to have it both ways.

Despite the immaculist tradition in England and in his order, Bokenham presents both

maculist and immaculist positions in his life. When an angel reveals himself to Joachim

to comfort his sorrow in exile, he announces that the exile’s wife has conceived a child:

“a doughter she hath, sothlye.” Bokenham thus appears to advocate an immaculist stance

with the present perfect tense. Later, however, when the couple meets at the Golden

Gate, Anne announces that God has removed her infertility, and is now able to conceive:

“I was also bareyn and repreuable, / But nowe bareynesse is from me gon, / And to conceyuyn I am made able …” Bokenham here suggests a maculist view of Mary’s conception. Both the saving nature of the Virgin birth reflected in an immaculate conception and the generative fecundity of Anne’s conceiving in a maculate one are maintained, though inconsistently. In this ambiguity, Bokenham can claim both the saving nature of the Virgin birth reflected in immaculism and the generative qualities of her nativity available to maculism.

In his prologue to the Life of Anne, Bokenham sets up a frame for his portrait of the holy matron that stresses penitential piety more than it promotes a fecund household.

Its focus is on death and contrition, not birth. This disinterest in genealogy stretches even to his understanding of his own authorial pedigree. Far from connecting himself to a line of prestigious poets, Bokenham denies that he has the skill to connect himself to a

34 Sheingorn, “Appropriating the Holy Kinship,” Interpreting Cultural Symbols, 180-181. 138 genealogy of English writing running through Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. Bokenham complains that he cannot “begyn to translate” the life of Anne into English because he lacks the “cunnyng and eloquens / [his] conceytes craftily to dilate, / Als whilom dede the fyrsh rethoryens Gower, Chauncere, and now Lytgate,” and because he is aging, approaching death. His time would be better spent “to reformyn in [his] lyvynge / For that ys a right sovereyn cunnynge” (1401- 21). Poetic and rhetorical “cunnyng” is thus directly contrasted to the “sovereyn cunnynge” of moral enterprises; Bokenham characterizes his simplicity, then, as virtue. But, rather than abandon literary pursuit entirely, he places it in the context of his moral improvement and the devotion of his readers:

Nevertheless, and the sovereyn goodnesse

Of Ihesu I truste and of Marie

His moder fre, thow I my besynesse

Do diligently to claryfye

Her moderes lyf and hyr genalogye,

To excyten wyth menys devocyoun

Aftyr the’ntent of the storye,

They wyl accepte myn entencyoun (1433-40).

Bokenham justifies his literary enterprise through his devotion to Christ, his mother, and his grandmother, and also his intent to write Anne’s life for the devotional needs of his readers, rather than for the sake of “cunnyng and eloquens” alone.

Bokenham shows Anne as accepting of her infertility, praising God for

“engenderrure,” even if it is her “chaunce” that she cannot participate herself. Similarly, 139 he portrays himself as humble before Anne and her holy daughter, atoning for his limitations by seeking their correction in both his writing and living:

For treuly I make a protestacyoun

To seynt Anne and to hyr dowter Marye,

That yf eythyr errour in myn opynyon

Geyn good maners, or heresye

A-geyn the feyth I cowed aspye

Wyth alle diligence and besynesse

Alle my wyttes I wolde applye

It to reforme and to redresse (1441-8).

Bokenham’s “protestacyoun” here hedges his authority against conflict regarding “good maners” or “heresye.” If he should offend his spiritual (and also, implicitly, his earthly) patrons, he can stand by his simple, well-meaning “entencyoun” to excite devotion in his readers for St. Anne and the Virgin Mary. His writing project, rather than becoming a hindrance to reform at the end of his life, becomes a part of his final contrition. At the end of the Life, Bokenham returns to his penitential concerns, and the prayer for a

Denston son seems only an afterthought. Bokenham asks Anne to “... graunt at my partynge / Be the fatal course from this mutabilyte, / me in blysse eterne stablisshed to be” (2089-91). He prays for a son before his patrons pass, acknowledging the daughter they named in the holy matron’s honor, and ends the poem requesting that the saint “to blysse eterne convey hem alle thre” (2098). His primary concern seems to be the spiritual health of the Denston family rather than the earthly continuance of their line, subtly recognizing, as did the Clare Dialogue, the contingencies of genealogical 140 succession. Unlike the Dialogue, however, he has tied his authorial identity more securely to devotional concerns rather than those of secular lineage. It is important to remember here that the Denstons had only (and would only have) one daughter, Anne.

As their daughter’s matron saint, and furthermore, as he himself, accepts limitations to genealogical or literary fecundity, Bokenham instructs the Denstons to focus on the gifts they do have by the grace of God and look toward the rewards of the life to come.

A similarly qualified picture of married piety can be seen in Bokenham’s Life of

St. Elizabeth of Hungary. In this Life, Bokenham struggles even more openly with the demands of the secular and religious life of the queen saint. On the one hand, Elizabeth is called to a life of prayer, to an ascetic denial of the world, and to a dedication to poverty and contrition. On the other, as a king’s daughter and later Landgravina of

Thuringia, Elizabeth must face the political and social demands of a secular lifestyle, bearing children, maintaining a household, and holding court. In her study of several early lives of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Anja Petrakopoulos traces how Elizabeth’s legend was shaped and reshaped to account for contradictory strains in her life.

Petrakopoulos shows how Elizabeth became a “mirror” for secular women seeking to validate a synthesis of their devotional lives and their expected social roles:

While Elizabeth’s many virtues were held up for imitation to a wide variety of

medieval orders of people, Elizabeth’s example of chastity and humility was

141 specifically deployed in her function as an ideal for women, especially aristocratic

and later rich urban women.35

Adopting many aspects of Elizabeth’s life, however, could be potentially troubling for secular people. Members of households seeking a life of poverty risked disrupting the economy of their home and family. In a society where ostentatious display was a demonstration of power, an expression of poverty potentially undercut both the smooth operation of a household and its symbols of authority. Wives or husbands in search of a life of celibacy threatened to upset the sexual order of the family, whose propagation depended on the birth of heirs who could inherit the family’s property and prestige.36

Among those who sought to use Elizabeth’s life to validate lay piety was Margery

Kempe’s second scribe, who, under pressure to sever his ties with Margery because of her loud weeping, discovered that Elizabeth also had “cryed wyth lowed voys, as is wretyn in hir tretys.”37 The scribe accepts Margery on this authority and returns to her

side. The saint’s practice was thus used to validate one of the most provocative aspects

of Margery’s piety. Many other aspects of Margery’s devotional practice mirror

potentially controversial features of Elizabeth’s life, such as her desire for celibacy within

marriage and her quasi-religious adoption of clothing. Margery’s trial at Leicester is one

episode in the Book of Margery Kempe that particularly demonstrates the difficulties that

35 Anja Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia,” Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (New York: Garland, 1995), 285.

36 See Dyan Elliot, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

37 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 154/13-4. 142 such practices could raise and illustrates how she manages those difficulties. Along with doctrinal errors, she is brought before a tribunal for wearing a white mantle symbolic of her chastity. After Margery impugns his authority through scripture, the mayor of

Leicester suggests that she is wearing white because she seeks to lead away the wives of the town. The fact that Margery travels alone apart from her husband and is wearing a white mantle outside of any official rule of religious practice places her outside of the expected social roles of both wife and religious woman.38 Margery defends herself by reasserting her secular status and recognizing her legal obligation to her husband and children (though this is the only time she mentions her fourteen children). More importantly, however, she places her secular obligations within the demands of her singular piety, noting that “ther is no man in this worlde that I lofe so meche as God, for I lofe hyn abovyn al thynge, and, ser, I telle you trewely I lofe all men in God and for

God.”39 Furthermore, Margery places herself squarely in alliance with the sympathetic clerics present. Margery denies the mayor’s ability to know why she wears a white mantle and appeals to the clerical figures on the tribunal, explaining that only they can know her intention in confession. While she boldly asserts her obedience to God, which the clerics “dare not” move against, the clerics confirm her practices within the bounds of her confessional obedience to her “goostly faderys.”40 Among the clerics who preside

38 For work that explores this episode and others like it in The Book of Margery Kempe involving Margery’s dress, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 143-65.

39 The Book of Margery Kempe, 115/24-35.

40 ibid., 116/1-35.

143 over the trial are the abbot and dean of Leicester, who as I noted above become some of

Margery’s most committed supporters.41

Bokenham certainly does not put Elizabeth’s life toward such provocative ends, though he does manage the relationship between her secular and religious obligations in similar ways. As with his Life of St. Anne, Bokenham presents a fairly restrained form of lay piety that celebrates secular values at the same time it tempers these values with a rigorous quasi-religious discipline. Once again, Bokenham primarily follows Voragine’s

Legenda Aurea, and is forced to confront the earlier hagiographer’s focus on religious over secular concerns. The Dominican traces Elizabeth’s life by following her transition from maid to wife to widow. In his account of Elizabeth’s life, conflict arises as her desire for a chaste, holy life runs against patriarchal expectations that she be a queen, wife and mother. As Elizabeth moves from each of these states, she must confront the tensions between her religious desires and her secular duties. Voragine calls attention to this conflict and, as Elizabeth resolves these conflicts, she witnesses to her holiness and exemplarity to women of each state. Secular and religious authorities regarded women’s roles in each of these states in different ways, particularly regarding sexuality, household responsibility, accountability to male figures, and legal or social flexibility. In general, the secular patriarchy sought to keep women within the social and political economy, answerable to their fathers, husbands, and other kinship demands.42 Religious authorities

41 See Chapter 1 above.

42 For an examination of societal expectations for virginity and widowhood, see Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). For an account of literary representations of these categories, see Ruth Evans, “Virginities;” Dyan Elliott, “Marriage;” and Barbara Hanawalt “Widows,” The Cambridge Companion to 144 saw a hierarchy moving down from maid to widow to wife, reflected in St. Jerome’s

exegesis of Christ’s parable of the sowers in Matthew, where the fruit harvested from the

sown seeds are granted to each class of women, “a hundred fold fruit to virgins, sixty fold

fruit to widows and continent women, and thirty fold fruit to women in the bonds of holy

matrimony.”43 Although Elizabeth’s canonization in the thirteenth century reflects an

expanding role for lay sanctity in the Church, Voragine’s account emphasizes the

singularity of Elizabeth’s achievements, rather than her identity as a model for lay

people.44 Alluding to Jerome’s commentary, he portrays her as bringing forth “fruit” at

each stage of her life. Elizabeth is able to make these transitions gracefully, maintaining

her sanctity and religious discipline even as she fulfills her duties as a king’s daughter

and the wife of a Landgrave. Voragine has Elizabeth strike this balance through the

mediation of two important male figures. The first is her husband, the Landgrave of

Thuringia, who suffers her ascetic practice despite its inconvenience to his marriage to

Elizabeth and their responsibilities as noble figures. Elizabeth graciously accommodates

her religious discipline to her secular duties in gratitude for his patience. The second

male authority in Elizabeth’s life is her confessor, Conrad of Marburg, who strictly and

sometimes forcefully insists on her obedience, even when it runs counter to her secular

duties. Elizabeth meekly submits to the priest, and accepts his punishment when she fails

to obey him. Clearly, even in the context of Elizabeth’s acceptance of her husband’s

Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2003), 21-69.

43 Saint Jerome, Commentaire Sur S. Matthieu, Tome I, ed. Emile Bonnard (Paris: Les Editions Du Cerf, 1977), 2.13.23-24, pp. 272-5: “… centesimum fructum virginibus, sexagesimum viduis et continentibus, tricesimum sancto matrimonio deputantes.”

44 See Reames, The Legenda Aurea, 201-3. 145 secular duties, Conrad’s ascetic demands hold sway. Voragine makes some concessions for Elizabeth’s place as a princess and Langravina, but the pull of his narrative is toward her religious inclinations, culminating in her ascetic widowhood.

Apart from his versification of the prose source, Bokenham changes very little of

Voragine’s narrative. However, at crucial points—often points where the contradictions in Elizabeth’s life are most clear—Bokenham interjects, inserts, or changes details, calling even greater attention to Elizabeth’s transitions from maid to widow. He modifies

Voragine’s account to fit his own perspective on lay piety. The Elizabeth of Voragine is able to balance both secular and religious worlds, but in Bokenham, many of her religious desires seem impractical in the face of secular duties. The fifteenth-century Augustinian friar, however, allows Elizabeth to maintain her inward religious discipline even when her outward duty prevents her from putting that discipline into practice.

One telling difference between Voragine and Bokenham is within their accounts of Elizabeth’s precociously devout childhood. In most of her vitae, Elizabeth is represented as a gravis infans, mirroring the acts of charity and prayer that will distinguish her later in life. Several early versions of Elizabeth’s early childhood recount an episode during a festival where Elizabeth miraculously picks her patron saint John the evangelist from lots, affirming her chaste maidenhood.45 Anticipating the conflict between her avowed virginity and her impending marriage, Voragine amends these early accounts, having Elizabeth pick St. Peter, a saint represented elsewhere in the Legenda as a devoted but authoritative father and husband. Voragine thus attempts to make

Elizabeth’s move from virgin to wife and from ascetic to secular spheres less

45 Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia,” 266. 146 problematic. St. John and the Virgin Mary are still “guardians of her virginity,” but she is willing to submit to a patriarchal figure like St. Peter and embrace married life.

Instead of St. Peter, Bokenham has Elizabeth pick St. John “aftyr the desire in hyr hert secre” (9615), as in earlier accounts of her adolescence. He also makes the lot- picking of patron saints a part of St. Valentine’s Day festivities “after use of that cuntre”

(9610). Her choice of a protector of virginity during a festival recognized as a celebration of mate-choosing seems out of place, especially as Elizabeth reaches a marriageable age. Bokenham has virginity become a secret, inner desire that she devotes herself to instead. This is a sentiment Bokenham will return to several times in his translation. Elizabeth will outwardly submit to marriage, but inwardly she will maintain her devotion to the ideals of virginity. Her preferred virginity lies in greater tension with her coming marriage. The sacrifice she makes in obedience to patriarchal authority is thus intensified. In the Book of Margery Kempe, Christ makes a similar compromise when he consoles Margery, who feels unworthy of divine revelation now that she is again with child:

… I lofe wyfes also, and special tho wyfys whech woldyn levyn chast, yyf thei

mygtyn have her wyl, and don her besynes to plesyn me as thow dost, for, thow

the state of maydenhode be mor parfyte and mor holy than the state of

wedewhode, and the state of wedewhode mor parfyte than the state of wedlake,

yet dowtyr I lofe the as wel as any mayden in the world.46

46 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Meech, 49/2-8.

147 The hierarchy of the states of women stands, but through an inward desire to “have her

wyl,” Margery and other wives can be considered with the maidenly elite, even when

they still need to bear the sins of marital intercourse and childbirth.

Most accounts of Elizabeth’s marriage struggle to deal with her abandonment of

virginity, especially in light of her devotion to virginity as a girl. The move from virgin

maiden to wife is often explained as a move “against her heart,” only assuaged by the

Landgrave’s virtue and respect for his wife’s continence.47 Voragine describes her

reluctant acquiescence to marriage in terms of obedience to her father and to her station

in life. By submitting to her father the king’s commands, she is “keeping the faith of the

Trinity and obeying the Ten Commandments.” She is called to marriage by her “royal

dignity” and is bound to married sex only “by law” in her father’s command and the

command to procreate “for the service of God,” but she is not “bound” by carnal

enjoyment. This devotion to both her duty as a royal wife and God’s commandments

demonstrates her exemplarity as a saint. Voragine notes that through her submission to

marriage she will “lead many to the love of God and give instruction to the ignorant.”

Elizabeth demonstrates her ability to resolve her religious aspirations with her

responsibilities as a married woman.48 Voragine explains that “although she changed her

state of mind [i.e. about how she lived], she did not change the intent of her mind.”49 Her maintenance of religious discipline is almost miraculous, forced as she is to obey secular

47 Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia,” 266-70

48 Legenda Aurea, trans. Granger Ryan, 304.

49 My translation. ““Licet autem mutaverit statum mentis, non tamen mutavit mentis affectum;” Legenda Aurea, ed. Graesse, 754.

148 patriarchy. Her obedience to a religious man, however, allows her to look beyond her married life. She has vowed to Conrad that if her husband is to die before her, she will live the remainder of her life in celibacy.

Bokenham follows Voragine’s account of Elizabeth’s marriage closely, but he subtly adds and recapitulates points he finds particularly important, changing the

Dominican’s focus for his own purposes. For example, Bokenham reworks a coda to the description of Elizabeth’s life as a virgin, noting that

…whan this body innocent thus prudently

Had reulyd the tyme of hyr virgynyte,

And by cours of yerys successyfly

Atteynyd the state of wummans degree,

By hyr fadyr constreynyd to entryn was she

The state wych longyth to weddit men,

Wych stant in the feyth of the trynyte

Wyth kepyng of goddys preceptis ten (9695-72).50

This amplification of Voragine’s text suggests that Elizabeth’s time for virginity, though exemplary, had naturally passed; she was now a woman and was called to her duty to obey her father and follow the demands of her social standing in the “state of wummans degree.” She is not “compelled” or “pushed” into marriage, but reaches a natural point in her life where she is to do what is expected. She “condescendes” to marriage in obedience to patriarchal authority and law: “To the wych astate thow she sothly / Loth

50 Compare Voragine’s Latin text: “At ubi gradum virginalem prudenter rexit et innocenter percurrit, conjugalem gradum intrare compellitur, utpote quae ad hoc paterno imperio urgebatur, fructum perceptura tricesimum, quae fidem trinitatis servavit cum declogo praeceptorum.” Legenda Aurea, ed. Graesse, 754. 149 were, yet she assentyd ther-to, / Neythyr for lust nere lykynge of hir body, / But hyr fadrys wyl for she wold do …” (9673-6). Once again, what preserves her holiness is her inward purity; even though she “loathes” marriage, she assents to it and keeps herself apart from the sins of sexual desire. Bokenham recapitulates this point in his translation of Voragine’s comment that despite the fact Elizabeth was now married, “she did not change her state of mind”:

Wherefore, althow hyr estate dede change

Thys blyssyd Elyzabeth, by hyr fadrys decree,

To swych as to hyre was ful straunge,

I mene to matrimony from virgynyte,

Yet not-for-than in hyr hert secre

Hyr affeccyoun wyth-owtyn chaungabylnesse

Was more leef a maydyn to have be

Than princesse or queen or emperesse (9697-700).51

For Voragine, Elizabeth’s sanctity lies in how she is able to maintain her religious inclinations (“affectus mentis”) even as she changes her outward way of life (“status mentis”). Bokenham gives Elizabeth less control over the change, which she must passively accept. It is only her inner desire in her “hert secre” that allows her to live a chaste life even in marriage. She can maintain her purity inwardly, but she must yield to male authority on the surface. For Voragine, Elizabeth can miraculously be both princess of Hungary and an ascetic. Bokenham has Elizabeth live an outwardly secular life, but

51 Compare the Latin text above, note 35. 150 maintains the inner desire to live a fully religious one, reflecting more realistically on the compromises he feels his patron must make.

In most versions of her Life, Elizabeth’s submission to marriage is made easier by her husband’s acceptance and tolerance of her regime of prayer and ascetic practice.

Like John Kempe, the Landgrave of Thuringia accommodates his wife’s often inconvenient piety. Immediately after his account of Elizabeth and the Landgrave’s marriage, Voragine discusses Elizabeth’s prayer regime. She would have a maidservant wake her for nightly prayers by grabbing her foot at the appointed time. When a servant accidentally grabs the Landgrave’s foot, startling him awake, he bears it and pretends that it didn’t happen. Bokenham underlines the importance of this detail by repeating

Voragine’s commendation of the Landgrave’s tolerance of his wife’s devotional practice:

“So thus, by sufferaunce of this good man, / Conformebylly yche nyght dede ryse / Thys blyssyd Elyzabeth, this holy wumman, / As ye me han herde beforn devyse” (9745-8).

Voragine once more commends the Landgrave in his description of Elizabeth’s habit of turning away what was served at the royal table for more ordinary provisions. Here, however, Voragine adds that the Landgrave would have followed her example himself if he were not afraid of disrupting his household. Bokenham relates the Landgrave’s tolerance and his desire to join his wife in humility by again distinguishing between the outward practice demanded by social expectations and the inward desire to live a more modest lifestyle, a distinction Voragine does not make for him:

Whan Langravye this maner of reule dede here

Of hys wyf, he hyt suffryd pacyently,

And neuere yt gruccyd in wurde and chere, 151 But rather yt approved in his thought prevy.

And ful oftyn he seyd very feythfully

Ne had be in part for the wordys shame

And for trouble also of his meny,

He gladly wold han done the same (9921-8).52

As Elizabeth maintains her desire for virginity in her “hert secre” even in marriage, the

Landgrave is able to assent to religious discipline “in his thought prevy,” even if he

cannot practice it. As a nobleman and active governor, the Landgrave is even more

constrained by duty to limit his devotional practice “for the wordys shame/ And for

trouble also of his meny.” In his Epistle on the Mixed Life, the Augustinian canon Walter

Hilton similarly addresses a secular man who desires to abandon “love and likynge of

wordeli vanite and use of fleschi synnes” and follow more devotional pursuits.53

Although Hilton praises him and encourages him in his pious activity, Hilton warns his reader that he should be very careful to balance his secular responsibilities with his devotion. Hilton sees the secular man as “bounde to the world” by the responsibilities he holds to the members of his household. He cannot leave the business of secular life as a friar or a monk to lead a life of prayer and seclusion. This worldly business, as much as

52 Much of this quote is translated from a comment that precedes the Landgrave’s departure on Crusade: “Inter haec laudanda est devotion viri sui, qui licet negotiis multis esset implicitus, in Dei tamen obsequio erat devotus et quia ipse talibus personaliter intendere non valebat, uxori suae potestatem concesserat agenda omnia, quae Dei honorem respicerent et animae suae salutem afferent.” Legenda Aurea, ed. Graesse, 758.

53 Walter Hilton, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life Edited from Lambeth Palace MS 472, ed. S. J. Ogilvie- Thomson (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1986), l. 64-5.

152 it keeps the secular man from contemplative pursuits, is necessary for him to govern his household, which is entrusted to him by God.54

The mutually respectful relationship between Elizabeth and her husband comes to a head when he chooses to go on Crusade and eventually meets his death. Voragine briefly recounts Elizabeth’s desire to see her husband “to make the use of his arms to the defense of the faith,” as she gives her husband “salutary exhortations” to go to the Holy

Land on crusade. The “faithful prince, devout and renowned for the integrity and sincerity of his faith,” goes on crusade and dies, receiving the “reward of his good work.”55 Bokenham expands on this episode, recounting these “salutary exhortations” in dramatic form and depicting the Landgrave’s departure on crusade. Elizabeth’s affection for her husband is emphasized. She loves her “dear spouse,” whom she loves “next God most tendyrly … and ever have done treuly” (10076-7). She asks him to leave all

“occupacyouns werdly” to “exercysyn [his] courage” to free Jerusalem from the heathen

(10079, 10086). If he were to die on this journey, she explains, he will have a “sykyr weye” to heaven. Bokenham even describes his departure in detail, noting how he presents himself to Elizabeth and his people. All of the Landgrave’s subjects weep at their lord’s departure except Elizabeth, who declares her affection for her husband in spiritual terms:

Wyth what affeccyoun and hou entirely

I the love, dere spouse, and evyr have do.

No man knowyth but God and thou and I,

54 ibid, l. 89-96.

55 Legenda Aurea, trans. Granger Ryan, 307. 153 Wych not oonly in fleshe bodily, lo,

By the knot of spousayle joynyd hath us two,

But in spyryth eek thorgh hys cheryte

So to-gedyr confedryd hath so

That impossible ys ondo the knot to be (10113-20).

Elizabeth explains that she cannot weep because he, her worldly spouse, goes to serve

Him, “whom [she loves] in most soveryn degree.” The Landgrave, “crystys owyn knyht / armyd in vertu and in cheryte” goes to Jerusalem and “in goddys cause quyt him ful manly” and dies (10129-34). It is Elizabeth’s relationship to her husband that allows her to maintain her devotion even after his passing. In life, he had tolerated the inconveniences of her piety, and she returned the favor by holding to her duties as wife and Langravina. In death, he permits Elizabeth to enter into the state of widowhood. In

Voragine’s text, the Landgrave is only a means to an end. But in Bokenham’s translation, he appears as a companion for Elizabeth as they struggle to find spiritual satisfaction in a world where they both face the unavoidable demands of secular life.

The transition from marriage to widowhood for Voragine is important, because it is only as a widow that Elizabeth can live a religious life. But just as Voragine had to account for the difficulties Elizabeth had to face when moving from the state of maidenhood to the state of marriage, so he must account for the transition from marriage to widowhood. For Voragine, this transition becomes a sort of passion for Elizabeth, and she is forced to suffer to obtain the “fruits” of widowhood. She is condemned by her deceased husband’s vassals as a “prodigal wasteful woman,” and is banned from the country. She is forced to take shelter in the house of an enemy, where she is poorly 154 treated. A poor woman whom she had befriended refuses to help her on the road, and she

falls in mud. Finally, she has to face her uncle, the bishop of Bamburg, who seeks to

remarry her. It is at this point that Elizabeth mirrors several accounts of religious saints,

threatening to cut off her nose to turn away any suitors.56 Elizabeth also invokes her

former secular status. As Margery Kempe appeals to her status as a wife and mother

during her trial at Leicester, Elizabeth invokes her marriage to the departed Landgrave,

publicly burying his bones in the presence of her uncle the bishop, who had until this

point shut her up in a castle. She gives a stirring speech in which she declares her

devotion to her departed husband. Voragine’s text does not mention that her uncle

withdrew his attempt to have her remarried, but it does not mention that he pushed it

further. Indeed, at this very moment, Elizabeth is allowed to take on religious dress.57

Bokenham makes an interesting revision to this episode that looks with more sympathy of the circumstances of widows in fifteenth-century England. He does not mention that the Landgrave’s vassals banish her for being a “prodigal, wasteful woman.”58 Instead, the Landgrave’s brother “by very tyrauntrye, / fro her dowarye hyr

drof ful unpytouslye / And from alle that she hadde in ony degree” (10149-51). Barbara

Hanawalt has shown that a widow’s independence in late-medieval London specifically

revolved around her ability to gain control over her dowry after her husband’s death.

This could often be difficult, since widows frequently had to sue family members to

56 Petrakopoulos, “Sanctity and Motherhood,” 268-9.

57 Legenda Aurea, trans. Granger Ryan, 307-8.

58 “Verum cum mores viri sui per totam fuisset Thuringiam divulgata, de patria ipsa tamquam dissipatrix et prodiga a quibusdam vassalis viri sui turpiter et totaliter est ejecta … ” Legenda Aurea, ed. Graesse, 758.

155 obtain their rights over their holdings. They were also under a great amount of pressure

to remarry.59 The patron of the Augustinian house at Clare, Elizabeth de Burgh, who was commended in the Clare Dialogue, faced particular difficulties finding independence in

widowhood. As a member of the royal family, she became a pawn in the political

struggles during the reign of her uncle, Edward II. She barely escaped forced remarriage

by eloping with Theobald de Verdon, a justicar in Ireland. Though this match gave

Elizabeth some political maneuverability, it resulted in alienating her inheritance, since

the king, who was angry that she had not married one of his allies, largely decided how

her father’s legacy would be divided among his three daughters. After another politically

tumultuous marriage to one of Edward’s allies (a social inferior), she faced many

financial and political hardships when her husband fell from grace and later, before his

death soon after a battle against the king’s allies, was convicted of treason. It was only

after the more sympathetic Edward III came to the throne that she managed to enjoy a

long, relatively prosperous and independent widowhood.60 Almost twenty years after

Bokenham wrote his Life of St. Elizabeth for her, Elizabeth de Vere would herself face a

difficult widowhood when her husband the Earl of Oxford and their son were executed

for treason.61 Bokenham recognizes the particular difficulty widows could have in

achieving independence after their husbands’ death. Elizabeth’s refusal to get married

59 Barbara Hanawalt, “The Widow’s Mite: Provisions for Medieval London Widows,” Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe, ed. Louise Mirrer (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1992), 21-45.

60 Frances Underhill, For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth De Burgh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 11-59.

61 Shelia Delaney, “Matronage or Patronage? The Case of Osbern Bokenham’s Women Patrons,” Florilegium 16 (1999): 100-101. 156 even to the point where she would cut off her nose seems all the more heroic when she represents an ideal that might not be feasible for Bokenham’s patrons and readers, given the hazards of widowhood in England at the time. But again, what is important for

Bokenham is not that a virtue is entirely imitable, but that it is an ideal that is at least hoped for in his readers’ “herte secre.”

Elizabeth grounds her secular identity in her husband, who grants her leave to form a religious identity. In turn, she grounds her religious identity in her relationship with the poor priest Conrad of Marburg, submitting to male clerical authority as she submitted to secular patriarchy. Voragine portrays the ascetic as the final arbiter in

Elizabeth’s search for religious discipline. A “very poor man” known for his “knowledge and piety,” he provides a stark counterpoint to the magnificence of courtly life. Elizabeth later declares that she has given her obedience to Conrad as her confessor, “a poor, undistinguished man, rather than some bishop, so that every occasion of worldly consolation may be taken away from me.”62 Conrad has control over virtually every aspect of her devotional life: her diet, her prayer, and when she is to sleep with her husband. Her relationship to him is defined by obedience, even when his commands run counter to her secular duties. As he is introduced, an episode is recounted where

Elizabeth fails to attend a sermon Master Conrad was to preach because the Marchioness of Meissen was visiting. Conrad would not forgive her until she submitted to a flogging naked.

62 “proper Deum tantum timeo hominem mortalem, quantum timere debeo judicem coelestem; ideo autem magistro Conrado pauperi et mendico, non alicui episcopo obedientiam facere voluit, ut omnem occasionem temporalis consolationis a me penitus absicaret;” Legenda Aurea, ed. Graesse, 761. 157 Bokenham includes Conrad as a central force in Elizabeth’s life, but he moderates some of the episodes relating to him, perhaps because he is a bit uncomfortable with the extent of Elizabeth’s obedience. He doesn’t mention Conrad as the priest to whom

Elizabeth swears to maintain celibacy in widowhood; rather, it is an anonymous

“mayster” (9685-8). Instead of commenting that she would rather have the poor Conrad as her confessor “than some bishop,” Elizabeth says that she would rather have him than

“some more rych man” (10321-6). Elizabeth’s obedience to Conrad is not allowed to extend beyond norms acceptable to lay people. However, when Elizabeth does submit to

Conrad’s scourging, Bokenham interjects what seems to be an enthusiastic approval of

Elizabeth’s obedience, mourning the lack of religious discipline among his contemporaries:

O very mekenesse! O blyssyd obedience!

What wumman koude now obeyin to

Swych a commaundement wythoute offence

As dede this myrroure of pacyence, lo!

Unneth ony nunne yt meekly wold do;

And to seyn pleyn treuthe, I trowe yt nolde here

Wyth-owtyn murmur and grucchyng also

Neyther prest ner munk, chanoun ner frere.

For both of men and wummen also

The molde these dayis ys so sore alayde

Wyth forward wyl, that for to do

Swyche obedyencys yf thei were asayide 158 They wolde compleyn and ben evyl apayid.

And this ys o greth cause as I dar wele saye,

That relygyous governaunce ys so sore affrayid,

For dew correccyouns ben al put aweye (9833-48).

Such an outburst seems odd for a writer so concerned with appeasing his audience.

Furthermore, the violent form of penance that Bokenham is responding to—Elizabeth’s acquiescence to Conrad’s scourging—seems extreme in Bokenham’s reserved and accommodating vision of lay piety.

At this point, however, Bokenham stops and backtracks for fear he might offend his audience, as if he were a bit embarrassed with his outburst:

But in this mater I wyl no ferthyr walk

Ner ther-of do make lenger exclamacyoun;

For peraventur, yf I dyde treuly talke,

Sum folk wolde have greth indygncyoun

That fro my mater swych dylatacyoun

I dede make wyth-owtyn need;

Wherfore to cece I make protestacyoun,

An ageyn to Elyzabeth I wyl me spede (9848-56).

As Bokenham’s “protestacyoun” in his Life of St. Anne serves to deflect potential criticism regarding heresy or bad manners by turning his readers’ attention back to the lives of his saints, his “protestacyoun” here serves to temper his uncharacteristically harsh rant on “relygyous governaunce.” His identity as a religious man is at stake, and while he wants to establish his authority, he also recognizes that he is dependent on the 159 consent of his lay readership to sustain this authority. Bokenham knows that his readers will challenge him on this interjection into his narrative of Elizabeth’s life, a

“dylatacyoun” that is unusual for a writer who so frequently “eschews prolixite” in order to maintain their interest. He puts forward a high standard of religious obedience, and yet he also seems to understand the latitude he must ultimately grant to lay people constrained by their demanding secular lives. Their weakness, after all, is parallel to his own. As Bokenham approaches the discussion of Elizabeth’s death, he returns to the same themes of poetic inadequacy he raises in several of his works:

For thow I had kunnyng for to ryme

And eek to endyten as copiously

As had Gower and Chauncers in ther tyme,

Or as now hath the munk of bery,

Ioon Lydgate, yet cowd not I

Thys blyssyd wumman Elyzabeth commende

Aftyr hyr merytys suffycyently,

And therefore to secyn I now intende (10529-36).

In his “protestacyoun” in the Life of St. Anne, Bokenham had asked his readers to accept his “entencyoun” to excite their devotion, despite his shortcomings. Here, he accepts that he is incapable of commending Elizabeth “suffycyently,” as his readers are incapable of fully imitating her rigorous piety. He can console himself, however, that his pure intent and the saint’s benediction will pull him through.

After recounting Elizabeth’s death, Bokenham passes over the long list of post- mortem miracles Voragine appends to her life, which are primarily localized to Mainz 160 and to the Franciscans. Bokenham ends with his usual prayer to the saint for her to be his

“medyatryce” at the Last Judgment, and in his own way localizes the power of the saint

by asking her blessing on his Suffolk patron Elizabeth de Vere:

And finally, lady, to the trew entent

Of hyr attende wych specyally

Thy lyf to make me yaf comaundement,

And the in hert lovyth ful affectuously,

I mene Dame Elyzabeth ver, sothly.

A chartyr hyr purchase here of pardoun,

And whan she shal passyn from this owtlaury,

Of god hyr brynge to the contemplacyoun (10609-16).

As in the Life of St. Anne, Bokenham’s poetic redemption and his patron’s spiritual

redemption are tied together, one dependent on the other. This interdependence between

Bokenham and de Vere is even more pronounced in the Prolocutorye to Marye

Mawdelyns Lyf, where Bokenham lists his “dyvers legendys … of hooly wummen,” including the Life of St. Elizabeth for de Vere. He declares that he will write at de Vere’s

request so that St. Elizabeth’s life “to alle wyvys myth a merour be” (5047). We also

find that the friar has begun the work to submit to the authority of his powerful patron:

“at request of hyr to whom sey nay / I nethyr kan, ne wyl, ne may, / So mych am I

boundon to hyr goodnesse” (5051-3). He ends the account of the commissioning of St.

Elizabeth’s life with a prayer for de Vere:

whom god evere kepe from syn and shame,

And of good lyf so hyr avaunce 161 Here in this werd with perseveraunce,

That, when she chaungyth hir mortal fate,

Of lyf eterne she may entryn the gate,

Ther-ynne to dwellyn wythowten endyng (5056-61).

Bokenham cannot resist the Duchess of Oxford’s authority to commission him, yet his

project, however humbly couched, ultimately can grant her spiritual benefit in this life

and the next.

The Dialogue at the Grave of Joan of Acres, even in its exultation of the Clare lineage and its sympathy with the Yorkist regime, expresses an anxiety about the stability of secular geneology, an anxiety that is clearest in its recognition of the Augustinian house’s utter dependence on the succession of the Clare family and the success of Yorkist ambitions. The house is beholden to precarious forces that the house cannot “sey nay” to, though it must fear its vulnerabilities. I have shown that Osbern Bokenham shares a very similar doubt about secular ambitions in his Legendys of Hooly Wummen. Instead of

making his work a votive for a Denston son, the Clare friar turns his Life of St. Anne into

a contrite meditation on death. Rather than portray St. Elizabeth of Hungary as a pious

courtesan who can miraculously balance the demands of both God and the world, he

presents a princess who is too encumbered by her earthly responsibilities to fully realize

her heavenly desires. Within this picture of the limited possibilities of lay devotion,

however, Bokenham is able to fulfill the requests of his powerful patrons. He constructs

his authority by commiserating with the spiritual limitations of his patrons’ lifestyles. He

makes his “protestacyouns” to them to mirror their shortcomings in his own. His self-

described weaknesses as a devotional author models a simple form of piety that asserts 162 his status as a religious man, even as it shows deference to his social superiors.

Bokenham claims that by the grace of God imparted through the saints, simple devotion, even if it is mediated by a poor, aging friar, can perhaps provide a spiritual bulwark against the changes and chances of this world. As we shall see, Bokenham’s fellow

Augustinian John Capgrave similarly invokes simplicity as a virtue to which his patrons and readers can aspire. However, Capgrave creates a model of simplicity that looks beyond the contingencies of secular life toward more expansive forms of devotion.

163 CHAPTER 4

ACCOMMODATING HOUSEHOLDS: JOHN CAPGRAVE AND HIS LIFE OF SAINT AUGUSTINE

In my chapter on the Book of Margery Kempe I noted the strategies that Margery uses to foster relationships with members of religious orders. Although it cannot be said with certainty that writers in religious orders would have been familiar with Margery

Kempe or her Book, they would have been familiar with many of these strategies that she uses to gain support for her public brand of lay piety. Several East Anglian religious communities were supportive of lay devotion, offering letters of confraternity to interested patrons, and even perhaps sponsoring informal lay religious communities.1 At least one mendicant writer from Margery’s hometown of Lynn would certainly have been sympathetic to her collaborative devotion, had he known her. John Capgrave was associated with the Augustinian house in Lynn during Margery’s lifetime, and became its prior around 1440. The house was an important spiritual and social center of the city.

Henry VI visited the house on his royal progress in 1446, while Capgrave was at its

1 For letters of confraternity, see Francis Roth, O.S.A., The English Austin Friars, 1248-1538 Vol. 1 (New York: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1966), 212-14; for an analysis of wills in the city of Norwich, see Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370-1532 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), 119-25. For possible mendicant support of informal religious communities of women see Roberta Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism (New York: Leicester University Press, 1995), 148-51. 164 head.2 I have already mentioned an episode where the Book notes a positive response to

Margery from a brother of Capgrave’s order in Lynn. Margery’s weeping interrupts the friar’s sermon, and when the congregation listening begins to complain, the friar tells them to “be stille,” since they “know not what she feels.”3 As Karen Winstead has pointed out, Capgrave’s vernacular literary works explore many of the same struggles with traditional social norms as Margery’s Book. Capgrave draws from many of the same devotional traditions as the Book, such as affective meditation on the humanity of

Christ. Often, both figures push the boundaries of conventional devotional practice.

Winstead notes that both Capgrave and Margery Kempe “value an intellectual, yet intensely affective religious experience; both, though essentially orthodox, flirt with heterodox ideas.”4

But, however cutting edge his devotional writing was, Capgrave was accountable to the rules and regulations of his order. I pointed out earlier how religious reactions to

Margery’s devotional practice were informed by policies that dictated an order’s relationship with secular people. An order’s protocols for receiving guests into houses reveals much about its connection to the world outside the cloister. Like the Carmelites and Benedictines, the Augustinian friars, or Hermits of St. Augustine, as Capgrave’s

2 William Richards, in his History of Lynn, suggests that the Augustinian friary must have been the best equipped to provide for prominent visitors, since it housed visiting royalty on at least two occasions (Henry VI in 1446, and Henry VII in 1498), The History of Lynn, Civil, Ecclesiastical, Political, Commercial, Biographical, Municipal, and Military, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time (King’s Lynn, Norfolk: W. G. Whittingham, 1812). For Capgrave's account of Henry's visit and its significance for his house, see Johannes Capgrave, De Illustribus Henricis, RS 7 ed. Francis Charles Hingeston (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 137-9

3 For a discussion of this passage, see Chapter 1 above.

4 Karen Winstead, “John Capgrave and Margery Kempe,” Mapping Margery Kempe, ed. Sarah Stanbury. 2001. 24 September 2005. . 165 order was officially known, had strict regulations for receiving secular guests into their houses. On the one hand, the order’s Ratisbon Constitutions command that houses are to welcome visitors warmly and graciously provide for their needs. Brothers who were assigned to guests and failed to adequately minister to them were severely punished.5 On the other hand, visiting secular clerics and lay people were not to be allowed to invade the privacy of the cloister and disturb the community’s spiritual exercises. Secular people might have access to a secondary cloister or gardens, but were not permitted to enter the primary cloisters or gardens.6 The gatekeeper of the house was to keep visitors away from the entrance of the cloister, lest a hapless brother on his way to prayer might have to turn away a guest. He was to occupy them by “speaking of God with them.”7

The Ratisbon Constitutions are thus very careful to balance obligations to care for visitors and to preserve the sanctity of the cloister:

We do not wish, however, that those following the habit of just any religion be led

into the interior, or any familiarity shown to just anyone. If you cannot serve

everyone equally, do so as far as the honor of the order and the faculties of the

5 Francis Roth notes that an offending brother was forbidden to participate in services and wear the habit of the order for fifteen days. During this time, as well, he was to be served last at meals, and given only stale bread and water to be eaten at a bare table. Finally, he was also to lie prostrate at the entrance of the church during canonical hours while his brethren (who were forbidden to speak to him) were at prayer together. Thus a lack of hospitality was paid in kind. See Roth, The English Austin Friars, 234n525.

6 For a description of excavations of guesthouses at two Cistercian houses, Kirkstall and Tintern Abbeys, see J. Patrick Greene, Medieval Monasteries (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992), 154-57.

7 "Sed debet illos ostiarius in porticu, qui iuxta portam exteriorem est, etinere et cum eis de Deo loqui, ne intrantes Fratres, qui forsitan in claustro ipso alicui occupationi vacaverint, inquietant. Propter quod clausum manebit ostium, quo ad claustrum ipsum intratur, ne, si pateat, non posit, nisi verbis interpositis, ingressus, sine causa utili intrare volentibus, interdici.” Las primitives Constituciones de los Agustinos, ed. Ignacio Aramburu Cendoya, O.S.A. (Valladolid: Archivo Agustiniano, 1966), 63. 166 house permit with love and joy.8

In these regulations, Augustinian friars reveal themselves to be concerned about

maintaining their identity and way of life, even as they recognize their call to serve all

Christians. Above all, the “honor of the order” must be preserved. Augustinian friars,

however, are encouraged to find ways of accommodating their guests’ needs by

providing alternatives to the cloister. As the prior of the house at Lynn, and later as the

prior provincial for the Augustinian friars in England, John Capgrave would have been

very familiar with these regulations and what they imply about the relationship between

his order and the world outside the cloister.9

In fact, Capgrave works creatively within these regulations to construct a diverse local religious community. As a writer, Capgrave used his authorship to bolster a public presence for his order in England and to solidify social and political connections with patrons and members of other religious orders.10 Within his localized literary output,

Capgrave makes connections among his fellow Augustinian friars, prominent heads of

other religious houses nearby, and influential laypeople. In this chapter, I will

demonstrate how Capgrave accommodated lay readers within this Augustinian religious

community. In particular, I will examine how Capgrave adapts a Vita Sancti Augustini

8 "Non autem cuiuscumque Religionis habitum deferentes ad interiora deduci volumes, nec parem familiaritatem quibuslibet exhiberi; cunctis tamen, etsi non aequaliter, secundum quod honestas Ordinis et facultas Domus permiserit, caritative et hilariter serviatur." ibid.

9 For an account of Capgrave’s tenure as prior of the house of Lynn, see M.C. Seymour, John Capgrave Authors of the Middle Ages 11 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996), 219-21.

10 For discussions of Capgrave and his patrons, see Samuel Moore, "Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk," Part II, PMLA 28 (1913): 97-100; Peter J. Lucas, "The Growth and Development of English Literary Patronage in the Later Middle Ages and Early Renaissance," The Library 6th ser. 4 (1982): 228- 230, 234-8 (essay reprinted in Peter J. Lucas, From Author to Audience: John Capgrave and Medieval Publication (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1997), 249-80); M.C. Seymour, John Capgrave, 249-50. 167 important to his order at the request of an anonymous “gentil woman.” Capgrave’s source recounts the life of the great doctor of the Church, including the supposed origins of the Augustinian hermit friars in the first ascetic community that Augustine founds. In this work, Capgrave constructs a relationship between himself, his order, and his patron through his representation of the complex familial relationship between Augustine and his mother Monica. Augustine becomes rooted in a provincial, vernacular middle class background, nurtured by his devoted mother, whom Capgrave fashions as a devout

“gentil woman” reflecting the social ideologies he imagines his patron might have daily faced. However, for both Augustine and Capgrave, Monica is more than just a doting housewife; rather, she is a “handmaid of God” whose pious living, prayer, and visionary zeal bring Augustine to a spiritual birth in his conversion. Monica embodies Augustine’s ambivalence for intellectual pursuits apart from Christian ethics; though unlearned, she demonstrates an unwavering faith while her highly educated son languishes in doubt.

Capgrave uses this ambivalence to create a space for vernacular lay piety. Monica can not only demonstrate conventional devotional practice in her dedication to the

Sacraments and a life of good works, but also can experience contemplative visions and discuss matters of theology with her son. Capgrave subtly adapts his source to emphasize

Monica’s significant spiritual authority within her son’s life.

Yet, Capgrave is also careful to manage his reader’s access to Augustine’s more advanced theological writings. While he does recount much of the Church Father’s voluminous theological corpus, summarizing the major works of Augustine his source mentions, Capgrave often pares down passages addressing topics that might be contentious in the highly charged environment sparked by Lollard controversy. 168 Capgrave offers surprisingly detailed descriptions of deep theological matters—

occasionally expansions of his source—that might have disturbed more conservative

critics of vernacular theology in late-medieval England. Nevertheless, Capgrave’s bent is

always orthodox. Capgrave, in fact, makes a particular point to focus on Augustine’s

identity as an active opponent of heresy, recounting his conflicts with several sects

confronting the fourth-century Church. The Lynn friar explicitly turns Augustine’s anti-

heretical project against the Lollards, painting them as an aberrant community that stands

in contrast to the Catholic religious community of Augustine, his mother, and his ascetic

companions. Like Margery Kempe, Capgrave fashions a religious community that works

within conventional forms of piety, but finds ways of redefining devotional practice in

surprisingly innovative ways. As a gatekeeper might occupy secular visitors to an

Augustinian priory, Capgrave finds ways of “speaking of God” with his lay readership,

giving them opportunities to engage with the religious life of Augustinian friars, yet

preserving his order’s identity as an eremitic community set apart from the secular world.

Capgrave’s source for his Life of St. Augustine is the Vita St. Augustini of

Jordanus of Quedlinberg, an Augustinian friar writing in the early fourteenth century.11

Jordanus had included his Vita within a collection of biographical materials and letters

11 Jordanus is also referred to as “Jordanus of Saxony,” which can cause some confusion with a Jordanus of Saxony who was an early Prior General of the Dominicans. Eric L. Saak gives the first detailed study of de Quedlinburg and his importance to the Augustinian Hermits in his recent book, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform Between Reform and Reformation, 1292-1524 (Boston: Brill, 2002), 235-344. For accounts of Capgrave's use of his source, see Life of Saint Augustine, ed. Cyril Lawrence Smetana (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2001), 9-12; Rudolph Arbesmann, "Jordan of Saxony's Vita s. Augustini, the Source of John Capgrave's Life of St. Augustine," Traditio 1 (1943): 341-53; George Sanderlin, "John Capgrave Speaks Up for the Hermits," Speculum 18 (1943):358-62. Two texts of Jordanus’s Vita S. Augustini have been published recently: Life of St. Augustine, ed. Cyril Lawrence Smetana, 77-111; and Eric Saak, High Way to Heaven, 774-810. 169 reputed at the time to be by Augustine.12 The Vita presents the Order of the Hermit friars of St. Augustine as the direct descendent of Augustine’s post-conversion religious community under the direction of the hermit Simplicianus. In focusing his Vita in this way, Jordanus is contributing to a longstanding controversy between the Augustinian friars and Augustinian canons over which order could claim a direct connection to the religious life that Augustine favored. The controversy had begun almost seventy-five years after the incorporation of the Hermit friars in 1256, when the pope gave them stewardship of their patron saint’s relics in Pavia, encroaching on a house of Augustinian canons, which had guarded the relics for several centuries.13 In his Vita, Jordanus dates the foundation of the Hermits to the moment when Augustine returns home to Africa after his conversion to Christianity. The order was thus founded before Augustine was ordained a priest and consecrated bishop of Hippo, when Augustine still had the leisure to pursue an ascetic life within a community of hermits, studying and praying apart from the world. According to Jordanus, it is not until after Augustine becomes a bishop, when his pastoral duties force him to make a less-than-ideal balance between the active and contemplative lives, that an order of canons was founded to assist him. Jordanus’s main source for this perspective on Augustine’s form of living was a collection of letters

12 See Jordan of Saxony, Liber Vitasfratrum, ed. Rudolph Arbesmann and Winfrid Humpfner (New York: Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service Co., 1943), xxiv-xxix. For a discussion of de Quedlinburg’s Collectanea Augustiniana, including his Vita St. Augustini, see Saak, High Way to Heaven, 218-32.

13 For this controversy, see Rudolph Arbesmann, "Henry of Friemar's Treatise on the Origin and Development of the Hermit Friars and its True and Real Title" Augustiniana 6 (1956): 37-145; Kaspar Elm, "Augustinus Canonicus-Augustinus Eremita: A Quattrocento Cause Celebre," Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 83-107. See also Saak, High Way to Heaven, 163-75. 170 known as the Sermones ad fratres in eremo, later found to be spurious.14 Among these is a set of letters in which Augustine addresses a group of canons who are complaining that the bishop shows more affection to his hermits than to them. In these letters, Augustine explains his preference for the eremitical life, noting that the canons’ service to the bishop’s court allows him to spend more time at his beloved hermitage. At the time, these letters, along with Augustine’s genuine works, provided the foundation for the order’s literary tradition. Both Jordanus and, in turn, Capgrave quote from these letters extensively. Jordanus’s work polemically focuses on the origins and the identity of his order by rooting its privilege in the esteem of its supposed patristic founder.

To stress Augustine’s role as the founder of the Hermit friars, Capgrave brings out

Jordanus’s more polemical points. For example, Jordanus mentions that Augustine

“accepted the habit and form of living” of Simplicianus after his conversion, suggesting that Augustine was adopting the clothing and ascetic practice of a hermit.15 Jordanus, however, is not so specific as to describe the habit Augustine clothes himself with as the very habit Augustinian friars currently wore, as Capgrave does:

The forme of this habite is touched in his bokes, where is seid that the habite was

schape lich a crosse and girt above with a girdil which had no barres. And alle

was of blak coloure, that he schuld nevyr forgete who that he was hethen

14 These letters were published as part of Augustine’s corpus in J. P. Migne’s Patrologia Latina, 40: 1233- 1358. See Saak, High Way to Heaven, 218-26, for a discussion of these letters and their possible origins.

15 "ab ipso sancto Simpliciani sancta conversacionis habitum formamque vivendi accepit," Life of St. Augustine, 89, lines 400-401.

171 sumtyme and lyved in the blaknesse of synne.16

Capgrave thus delves more deeply into Jordanus’s sources to bring out a point that the

writer of his source had chosen to leave implicit. In another place, when Augustine

founds a monastery at Hippo, Capgrave drives home a point that Jordanus had left

implicit, that Augustine “her began that ordre wheche we clepe at this day, and the

church of Rome clepith hem the same in alle the bullis of here privylegis, the Ordre of the

Heremites of Seynt Augustyn” (29.5-8). Capgrave here not only claims historical

authority for his order, but papal authorization as well. As if this point were not explicit

enough, Capgrave adds yet another description of the order’s habit in this same chapter.

He also does not refrain from making clear Jordanus’s points about the founding of his

order’s rivals, the Augustinian canons. Jordanus describes the founding of Augustine’s

third monastery, which his order considered to be the foundation of the canons, and

Capgrave belabors a point that Jordanus does not: “owt of this college cam these

chanones that are called at this day of Ordre of Seint Augustin.” (34.10-22).

Of course, in making these points Capgrave risks alienating any religious people

who might read his book, further exacerbating tense relations among members of

different orders. Capgrave, however, carefully attributes the potentially chauvinistic

focus of his Life of St. Augustine to his patron. He mentions that she had picked him to

translate Augustine’s Life because he was “of his profession,” and would treat the work

“with the bettir wil” than members of other orders (Prologue.17-19). He stresses the urgency with which his patron presses her suit. She “desires” it of him “with ful grete

16 John Capgrave, Life of St. Augustine, Chapter 20, lines 8-12. From this point, I will refer to the text parenthetically according to chapter and line numbers. 172 instaunce.” She has “so willed [him] with sundry retribuciounes that [he] coude not

disobeye hir desire” (Prologue.15, 23-4). Capgrave’s patron, then, is the one who seeks

this focus on Augustine as the founder of the Hermit friars, who follow the Church

Father’s “profession.” Capgrave is merely meeting her demands. The focus did

apparently receive comment from members of other orders. In the prologue of

Capgrave’s Life of St. Gilbert of Sempringham, the founder of an English order of canons

following the Rule of St. Augustine, we find that Nicholas Reysby, the abbot of the

Gilbertine motherhouse in Sempringham, had read Capgrave’s Life of St. Augustine and

wished that he had “adde therto alle thoo relygyous that lyve undyr his reule.”17 In the

prologue to that work, Capgrave protests that “it was not [his charge]” to include other

founders of orders, and promises to send along a Life of St. Gilbert. He also promises to

include a translation of a sermon that he had given at his bachelor’s opposition in

Cambridge during 1422. In this sermon, which is included in the sole manuscript

containing the Life of St. Gilbert and the Life of St. Augustine, he catalogs “tho orderes

that be undyr the reule of oure fader Seynt Augustin” according to the twelve sons of

Jacob, creating a “family” of Augustinian orders headed by the eldest brother Judas (i.e.

Judah) who represents the Hermit friars.18 Just as Margery Kempe defined and redefined

her spiritual authority through certain familial relationships with Christ and the Holy

Family, Capgrave uses the language of familial relation in his sermon to define his

17 John Capgrave's Lives of St. Augustine and St. Gilbert of Sempringham, and a Sermon, EETS o.s. 140, ed. J. J. Monro (London: Kegan Paul, 1910), 61.5-10.

18 Ibid. 145. 173 religious community, making particular use of the hierarchy implicit in family to boost

the prestige of his order.

As crucial as it is for Capgrave to establish the prestige of his order, it is also

important for him to construct productive relationships with those outside the order and

to create a local community of Augustinians. While the Hermit friars for him best

represent the religious life Augustine preferred, he recognized that other forms of

religious life might be compatible with the church father’s ideals and could be

accommodated as part of a wider Augustinian community. Indeed, Capgrave attempts to

accommodate those from other religious orders in several of his works. One lost Latin

work called the Concordia, which Capgrave mentions in two other texts, specifically

addresses the controversy between the Hermit friars and Augustinian canons, trying to

moderate “in the maner of a concord” the contentiousness of the debate between the two

orders.19 Around 1440, Capgrave wrote a Life of St. Norbert, the founder of the order of

Premonstratensian canons, another order that followed the Rule of St. Augustine.20 He did so for the abbot of a house of Premonstratensians at West Dereham in Norfolk.

Lay people like his patron would seem to have an important place in this

Augustinian community that Capgrave envisions. It was the Life of St. Augustine written for the “gentil woman,” after all, that led to Capgrave’s commission to write the Life of

St. Gilbert. But, his patron’s demand that he “translate hir treuly oute of Latyn, the lif of

Seynt Augustyn, grete doctoure of the church” (Prologue.16-17) raises certain problems

19 See John Capgrave, Ye Solace of Pilgrimes, ed. C.A. Mills (Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 1911), 92; also John Capgrave's Lives of St. Augustine and St. Gilbert of Sempringham, and a Sermon, 146-7.

20 The Life of St. Norbert by John Capgrave, O.E.S.A. (1393-1464), Studies and Texts 40, ed. Cyril L. Smetana, O.S.A. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1977). 174 for him. Jordanus had focused on Augustine as an ascetic and theologian. As a layperson, Capgrave’s “gentil woman” can neither claim the privilege of living a ruled life nor have full access to Latinate learning. Nevertheless, despite the social distance his patron might have had from a clerical and religious “family” of Augustinians, Capgrave finds several ways to bring her into a community that reveres the esteemed doctor of theology, bishop, and father of the Church. One way is by contextualizing Augustine’s story within the milieu of fifteenth-century provincial English gentry culture. Capgrave appends a five-chapter summary of Augustine’s early life and parentage to Jordanus’s text. This introductory material serves to portray the Church Father as coming from a provincial, vernacular, middle class background.

In his first chapter, for example, Capgrave situates Augustine according to Roman provincial geography, describing where Africa is in relation to Europe and Asia Minor.

Despite the foreignness of Augustine’s home continent, Capgrave positions the future bishop of Hippo’s roots so that they resemble the social environment of provincial East

Anglia. He is born far from the center of Roman culture, just as East Anglia in many ways is distant from metropolitan London and from Rome. Furthermore, Capgrave vernacularizes Augustine’s native tongue, distinguishing his roots from a more learned culture of Latin or Greek: “Thus have I schewid you in what partie of the world he was bore, nowt in the Greke tongue, ne in the Latyn tongue, but in the Barbare tongue,” explaining a few lines later that “the Barbare tongue is every tongue in the world whech is fer from the iii principall tongis, Hebrew, Grek, and Latin” (1.21-2, 31-2). However foreign Augustine’s native tongue might be to the English language, it shares its status as a vernacular, subordinate to the authoritative languages of late-antique Christendom as 175 English was to Latin and French. Capgrave then roots Augustine’s pedigree in a “gentil”

middle-class lifestyle. His parents were “not of the despect labourers in the puple, but

born of good and rich kynrod aftir the fame of the world” (2.2-4.) This comment actually

misrepresents what Augustine reveals about his background—although his parents were

free citizens, they could not afford to finance their son’s education, and had to find a

wealthy patron.21 Capgrave thus recasts Augustine’s geographic, social, and linguistic

background to put him on more familiar terms for his lay readership. The “grete doctoure

of the cherche” becomes less imposing. His later success is tempered by his vernacular

middle class roots: he is a local boy who does well by his parents.

In these first five chapters, Capgrave also introduces his most significant

contribution to Jordanus’s work in an increased role for Augustine’s mother Monica. In

his Vita, Jordanus had represented Monica as an ascetic whose prayers and visions lead

Augustine to his conversion and nurture him in his religious profession. For Jordanus,

Monica is an example for those in his order; her identity as a laywoman is mentioned

only in passing. In his later work, the Liber Vitasfratrum, Jordanus explicitly fashions

Monica as an example for his brothers in contemplative prayer and fasting.22 Monica’s

identity becomes more multilayered as Capgrave explores her secular as well as religious

life. On one level, Capgrave’s representation of Monica neatly fits into social roles

within late-medieval gentry culture, as she is portrayed as a docile but shrewd housewife

and intrepid widow. On another level, however, Monica transcends her cultural roles in

21 See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 21.

22 See Jordan of Saxony, The Life of the Brethren: Liber Vitasfratrum, trans. Gerard Deighan (Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1993), 204-5, 371. 176 her spiritual life. Juxtaposed with Capgrave’s dutiful housewife is a spiritual maverick

who has a deep influence on her son’s conversion and his future career as a Christian

ascetic, apologist and administrator. Like Margery Kempe, Monica becomes a

“handmaid” of God whose roles can shift in startling ways to grant her flexible spiritual

authority.23

In her social role as housewife, however, Capgrave’s Monica is quite different

from Margery Kempe. Margery ultimately convinces her husband to relinquish his

sexual claims on her by asserting a divinely ordained chastity.24 Monica is a bit more

reserved. In his description of the “condiciounes of his fadere and his modir,” Capgrave

recounts a passage from Book Nine of the Confessions, where Monica is described as

being able to control her husband’s hot temper and maintain peace in her household:

“sche had swech governauns in her dedis and swech moderacioun in hir wordes that he

coude nevyr cache no hold to be wroth with hir in alle his lyf” (3.7-9). She is able to

reason with her angry husband, but she only makes her case in a dispute after she lets him

calm down. Monica is said to have advised this strategy to a group of beaten wives. She

asks the wives to consider their matrimonial contract as a legally binding document that

makes them servants to their husband:

Iff ye haue mynde of youre tables matrimonial that were mad betwixt you and

23 For Margery Kempe’s flexibility in social roles, see in particular Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 83-88; and Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 141-6. For a discussion of Margery as “handmaid” to the holy family, see Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), Chapter 3. In the Confessions, particularly in book 9, Augustine refers to his mother as God’s “ancilla” or “famula.” See, for example, 9.8.17 and 18, 9.13.34 and 37.

24 See, for example, Chapters 11 and 15 of The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 23/9-25/27 and 32/1-36/3. 177 youre husbandis at youre weddyng, ye wold not than haue maruayle whi that I

suffir my husband though that I haue wrong. For there is it writyn that though

wyuys and husbandis be o flesch and o blood, yet ar wyuys put in swech manere

of subieccioun that thei be bounde to do dew seruyse onto men; wherfor as me

thinkith the best seruyse that thei may doo is to kepe pes in household and suffir

wrong rather than pes schuld be broke (3.19-26).

Unlike Margery Kempe, whose claims to spiritual authority allow her at times to step out

of her secular role as wife and mother, Monica’s holiness derives from her ability to

maintain order and stability in her household through her submission to such a potentially

violent husband.

Capgrave also presents Monica as being compliant to ecclesiastical authority. To

emphasize Monica’s matronly piety, Capgrave expands Jordanus’s account of her

obedience to the bishop Ambrose after her arrival in Milan. Jordanus recounts how

Monica humbly obeys Ambrose’s command to distribute alms to the poor rather than

leave them at the shrines of martyrs, as she was accustomed to do in Africa. Capgrave

adds that she also obeys the bishop’s command to cease fasting on Saturday, since it was

not the custom in Milan and might offend her new community. Capgrave has Ambrose

give her as a rule “that wheresoevyr cam sche schuld do aftir the custom of the felawchip

whech sche dwelt in” (11.38-9). The recognition of devotional flexibility in this episode

resembles moments in The Book of Margery Kempe where Christ gives Margery permission to cease fasting, first when her husband confronts her on Midsummer's Night demanding that she either give up fasting and pay his debts, or resume sexual relations with him, and then after Margery's mystical marriage to Christ, when Christ 178 acknowledges that Margery's holy lifestyle "plesyth [him] mor than weryng of the haburjon or of the hayr or fasting of bred and watyr."25 But Margery's advice comes from

Christ himself, and echoes teachings of the Lollards that challenge the customs of the established church.26 Rather than coming directly from Christ, Monica’s advice comes from a bishop of the Church. When the Bishop of Lincoln declines to allow Margery to wear a white mantle and ring Margery openly rebukes him.27 Capgrave’s more restrained

Monica would not be so bold.

Nevertheless, for Augustine, and, as we shall see, for Capgrave as well, Monica is more than a submissive wife and mother. While on the one hand she is just an uneducated, meek housewife, on the other she is morally and spiritually superior to the men in her life. Her husband Patricius is baptized only on his deathbed, and Augustine is seduced at a young age by the Manichean heresy. In the Confessions, Monica calls the young wandering scholar from his misguided intellectual pursuits and his association with heretical groups. On several occasions, Augustine praises his mother as much for her spiritual birthing of his soul as for her “fleshy” birthing of his body.28 Monica’s zealous commitment to raising him as a Catholic Christian from the very beginning lays a foundation for Augustine’s conversion. As a teenager inspired to the pursuit of philosophy by Cicero’s lost work Hortensius, Augustine is unable to fully accept any

25 The Book of Margery Kempe, 89/19-25.

26 See Lynn Staley's reading of the episode in Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 62-4.

27 See my reading of this episode in the Chapter 1 above.

28 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 83 (5.9.16) and 166 (9.8.17). 179 book that does not “contain the name of Christ,” because his “… infant heart had piously drunk this name … in [his] mother’s milk.”29 Through Monica’s prayers and tears,

Augustine is called from the Manichean heresy. Though for a time the future bishop of

Hippo ignores his mother’s pleas for him to rejoin the Catholic faith, he eventually is moved by her persistence and unwavering commitment to the faith of the Church.

In Augustine’s accounts of her life, Monica becomes an ideal for a Christian living. She is virtuous despite being unlearned. She comes to manifest Augustine’s ambivalence toward intellectual pursuits outside a simple life of Christian virtue. Brian

Stock explains that

She is, by his standards at least, uneducated, and that is her advantage: she can

teach him by example rather than by argument. She becomes his first model of

saintliness. She stands for inspired wisdom, while he represents those who learn

in slow painful stages. She does not need to read; he can only learn by reading.

She has no need of interpretive theory.30

Any intellectual pursuit for Augustine—reading, speaking, writing, teaching—is empty without a foundation in Christian ethics. Membership in the Christian community involves being part of an interpretive community focused on the text of the Bible, but the ability to read is not as important as one’s commitment to shaping one’s life according to

Christian charity. In the Confessions, Augustine’s reluctance to become a Catholic

Christian is primarily a result of his intellectual pride. This conflictedness toward

29 ibid., 40 (3.4.8).

30 Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 116. 180 learning perhaps receives its most poignant expression when Augustine expresses

frustration to his friend Alypius just before his conversion: “Uneducated people are rising

up and capturing heaven, and we with our high culture without any heart—see where we

roll in the mud of flesh and blood.”31

For Augustine, Monica demonstrates this principle, which is central to much of

his thinking, with particular clarity. Long before Augustine wrote the Confessions, he

wrote a work entitled De Beata Vita, a Socratic dialogue on the origins of true happiness.

In this dialogue, Augustine and his companions tend to be limited to worldly conceptions

of joy and goodness, but Monica often jumps into the conversation to stretch them

beyond worldly matters to define bliss in divine terms. Monica’s insight steps beyond

the limited expectations of her gender, and at one point, Augustine notes the surprise of

the group at her perceptiveness, and reflects on her significance:

… she so spoke out that, unmindful of her sex, we might think that some great

man was seated with us, I in the meantime, understanding from what source, and

from how divine a source these things flowed.32

Monica almost effortlessly becomes a vessel for the divine wisdom and grace, which her learned son and his companions have to struggle to grasp through books.

31 Confessions, 146 (8.8.19).

32 St. Augustine, De Beata Vita: Happiness—A Study, ed. and trans. Francis Tourscher (Philadelphia: The Peter Reilly Company, 1937), 29. At one point of the Confessions, Augustine calls his mother’s faith “virile,” despite the fact she is in “woman’s clothing,” Confessions, 160 (9.4.8). Capgrave picks up on this passage when describing her confidence during a storm on her way to Italy: her faith in her son’s impending conversion “mad the wommanes hert bold and in a maner turned it to a mannes hert.” 181 The tentative connection between Christian ethics, books, and interpretation in

Augustine’s thought became a part of late-medieval English conflicts over biblical hermeneutics. Kantik Ghosh has argued that

Augustine’s exegesis incorporates various, often conflicting elements; most

important for our purpose is his equal emphasis on the study of the biblical text

for a proper understanding of it (and the associated valorization of rhetoric and

dialectic), and on the importance of a correct ordering of one’s inner life for the

right apprehension of biblical meanings. The biblical text, in Augustinian

hermeneutics, is both centrally important and displaced.33

Wyclif and his opponents argued for the centrality of biblical reading for all Christians.

However, the Augustinian notion that proper biblical reading can only take place in the context of a well-lived Christian life, and further that reading per se is not essential to a

Christian life, offered orthodox opponents of Lollardy an opportunity to counter

Wycliffite arguments about lay biblical interpretation. Critics of Wyclif and his followers could argue from Augustine that by not living within the faith of the Catholic

Church, heretics were separating themselves from the community of Christian charity, outside of which the Bible could not be interpreted properly. The theological issues that

Augustine characterizes through his mother also allow Capgrave to recast Jordanus’s life to address the problems involved with writing theology in the vernacular and, in particular, with translating a text written for religious men for a lay woman.

33 Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10. 182 This spiritual virtue within the “simple” will become crucial to Capgrave’s portrayal of Augustine’s mother Monica. Capgrave can manage his lay readers’ access to theological discourse while at the same time he can validate certain forms of lay devotion and challenge laypeople to develop a relationship with his order. His translation of crucial passages from Jordanus’s life calls attention to Monica’s dual status as laywoman and contemplative. Capgrave carefully adapts episodes from Jordanus’s Vita, sometimes following his source closely, sometimes expanding his predecessor’s text with details or passages from the Confessions, and other times significantly truncating Jordanus’s text.

In Capgrave’s adaptation, Monica is as capable as or even more capable of profound spiritual insight than her son, but she also remains obedient to ecclesiastical authority and faithful to conventional forms of lay piety.

Capgrave sets these issues up before he even introduces Monica. Capgrave opens his Life of St. Augustine with a prologue that constructs a cooperative dynamic between himself and his patron, simultaneously asserting his authority as a literate cleric and the

“gentil” woman’s standing as his lay patron. He begins this prologue by articulating his pastoral responsibilities to his readership, citing Paul’s recognition of his vocational debt in his letter to the Romans. In this passage, Paul says that he is a “dettoure onto wise men and unwise” (Prol.3-4). Capgrave glosses the passage by saying that “wise men clepid he men gretly lerned and onwise simple ydiotis” (Prol.4-5). Capgrave further says that illiterate lay people, as “simple ydiotis,” are those “to whom longith the blisse of hevene,” citing the gospel of Matthew where Christ states that the angels of children “see evyr the face of the fadir whech is in hevene” (Prol.5-7). Capgrave thus invokes the distinction between clerical literati and lay illiterati commonly evoked in late medieval 183 English vernacular texts.34 However, the relationship between literate cleric and non- literate layperson that Capgrave conveys here appears to be a bit more accommodating than in many orthodox Middle English religious texts. Rita Copeland has argued that in medieval pedagogy, the laity were often considered to be children, dependent on “adult” teachers within the learned clergy. As children, the laity are too “rude” and “simple” to understand the complexities of scriptural exegesis and doctrinal thought; they can only be nourished with the “milk” of elementary matters.35 Capgrave seems to reverse this paradigm with his reference to Paul’s “debt” to the “unwise.” Rather than having

“simple” laypeople beholden to him as a cleric, he is beholden to them. Furthermore, far from being incapable of “higher” understanding, lay people as “simple idyotis” can experience the bliss of heaven. Capgrave thus grants significant spiritual authority to his audience: despite their child-like need for “adult” clerical supervision in instruction, lay people are capable of profound religious experience. Their very simplicity gives them an innocence that is not clouded by the difficulties of high theology. Of course, Capgrave is also in some ways re-inscribing the pedagogical hierarchy that Copeland describes, infantilizing the access lay people have to theological education, but rhetorically he is careful to recognize his obligations to those he is called to serve. Capgrave maintains his importance as a learned cleric, but his status as a learned man includes an obligation that at least on the surface makes him subject to his lay audience.

34 For a recent overview of scholarship on medieval conceptions of literacy as reflected in vernacular texts, see The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520, ed. Wogan- Browne et al. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 1999); See also Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

35 Rita Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22-24, 71-88. 184 Part of Capgrave’s presentation of himself as a pastoral writer involves humbly

tempering his own clerical authority. Capgrave notes that while he is “somewhat

endowed in lettirure,” he does not “dare” become a “debtor” to those more learned than

himself (Prol.9-11). Capgrave sounds here as if he is reluctant to write works of Latinate

theology. This is despite the fact that he did indeed make himself a “debtor” to learned

men many times over, writing Latin commentaries and tracts for figures like Humphrey,

Duke of Gloucester, and bishops John Lowe and William Gray: all three were scholars

dedicated to an emerging humanist scholarship. 36 In these works, Capgrave often

presents himself as “least among doctors,” offering something meager in praise of his

learned patrons’ dedication to Latin scholarship.37 Here, in a vernacular work, Capgrave

distances himself from his Latin learning and dedicates himself to a project that he

considers to be more appropriate to his station of learning, creating something for “othir

simple creatures” more like himself than his colleagues among the learned (Prol.11-2).

Capgrave carries these themes into his narrative by looking back to the

Confessions. At one point in the Confessions, Monica is so distraught at Augustine’s association with the Manicheans that she considers sending him away from her household. God sends her a dream in which she stands on a wooden rule. A young man approaches and asks her why she is so troubled, and when she tells him of her son’s error, he comforts her and tells her to look beside her to see that “where she is, her son was

36 For a recent discussion of Duke Humphrey’s learning and his connection to Italian Humanists, see Susanne Saygin, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447) and the Italian Humanists (Boston: Brill, 2002).

37 For the text of several of these prologues, see Seymour, John Capgrave, 239-46.

185 there as well.”38 Augustine notes that he had tried to twist the meaning of the vision

when his mother tells him about it, suggesting that where he was as a Manichean, she

would be also. Monica, however, firmly and confidently insists that she properly

understood the dream. In the context of the Confessions, this episode contrasts

Augustine’s youthful theological error with Monica’s sure faith under God’s divine providence. Monica is more able to interpret her dream properly than her son, despite her status as an unlearned woman; Augustine attempts to cast interpretive doubt on her vision, and expresses his surprise at her conviction. In fact, he notes that he was more moved by his mother’s interpretive confidence than by the dream itself.39 Jordanus

recounts this vision, paraphrasing Augustine’s account closely, but Capgrave makes

several additions to Jordanus’s summary that stress Monica’s visionary authority and her

interpretive confidence. He notes that Monica is a “wise woman … used to swech

revelaciouns” (7.14). When Augustine misinterprets the vision, Monica purposefully

corrects him, noting that he “understands amys” and that she will not be “let fro trewe

believe with no sophisticacioun” (7.21, 25).

Monica’s self-assurance here brings into play many of the arguments about

textual interpretation raised by Lollards and their accusers. Kantik Ghosh has pointed out

that Wyclif and his followers based much of their hermeneutics on the idea that corrupt

human glossing of Scripture, particularly academic glossing, had led the church astray,

and that only a strict faithfulness to the literal sense of Scripture could be valid.40 Ghosh

38 Confessions, 50 (3.11.19).

39 ibid. (3.11.20).

40 See Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, Introduction and Chapter 1. 186 has also argued that orthodox polemicists eventually turned these hermeneutic

assumptions against Wycliffitism. Thomas Netter, for instance, often faults Wyclif or his

followers for perverting the “true” sense of Scripture. The heresiarch’s claim to

revelation is false, since he misinterprets his textual authorities. According to Netter,

interpretation can only be grounded in the tradition of the Church.41 This is precisely the

authority that Monica invokes against her son. She will not be “let fro trewe believe with

no sophisticacioun” by a heretic outside the Catholic Church. Augustine’s heresy

predisposes him to misconstrue his mother’s dream, while Monica’s sure faith in the

Church prevents her from being deceived by his false hermeneutic trickery.

Monica’s trust in ecclesiastical authority is bolstered in the episode immediately

following the account of her dream in the Confessions, where she franticly pesters a local bishop to debate her son. The bishop refuses, noting that the young scholar is not ready to properly learn, since he is excited by the novelty of his heresy. After reading more, the bishop insists, Augustine will mature and find the true faith. Monica is not reassured, and insistently petitions the bishop until he becomes annoyed and sarcastically blurts out that a “son of these tears” could not be lost. Monica takes these words to be a sign from heaven.42 Monica’s persistence with the bishop in the Confessions mirrors Margery

Kempe’s self-confidence in the face of episcopal authority, revealing her striking independence. She is able to wheedle a satisfying response out of the ecclesiast, and then stamp it with divine authority. In his account of this episode, Jordanus genders the

41 ibid., Chapter 6.

42 Confessions, 51 (3.12.21): “He was now irritated and a little vexed and said ‘Go away from me: as you live, it cannot be that the son of these tears should perish.’”

187 indecorum of Monica’s pleas, noting that she is able to provoke a response from the bishop with “feminine importunity” and an “effusion of tears.”43 Capgrave, however, de- emphasizes both the intensity of Monica’s pleading and the frustration of the bishop in response. The bishop merely dismisses (“voyds”) her, assuring her that she can leave with the “sikyrnesse” that “it is impossible that a child whech hath so many teres wept for him schuld perisch” (7.43-5). Capgrave thus passes over Augustine’s amusement at his mother’s potentially inappropriate doggedness before the bishop and ignores his immediate source’s gendering of the episode, maintaining an image of Monica as a docile housewife respectful of ecclesiastical patriarchy. How different Monica’s audience with the bishop here is from Margery Kempe’s bold confrontations with the bishops of

Lincoln, Canterbury, and York.

One of the most significant episodes from the Confessions that Jordanus and

Capgrave include in their Vitae is Augustine’s account of the events leading up to his mother’s death. After Augustine and his budding religious community decide to return to

Africa, the group rests in Ostia before the long sea journey home. Augustine tells of an intimate conversation that he has with his mother overlooking a garden in the hostel where they were staying.44 As the conversation progresses, they are granted a brief vision of heaven. Augustine here reaches the spiritual insight that he had failed to find while studying pagan neo-Platonist thought before his conversion. Now, as a Christian,

Augustine is able to step beyond the limits of human language and knowledge with his

43 “importunitate feminea cum nimia lacrimarum effusione instaret.” Capgrave, Life of St. Augustine, 81.

44 For in-depth commentary on this episode, see Augustine, Confessions, Vol. 3, ed. James O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 122-37. 188 faithful mother, however briefly. His account of the conversation with his mother socratically reasons through the nature of heaven, even as he attempts to step beyond the bounds of reason and language with his rich scriptural imagery to find a Christian divinity. Many have pointed out how Augustine’s language in these passages appears on some levels to echo images of spiritual ascent found in the pagan Plotinus’s writing:45

We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your

works, and we entered into our own minds. We moved up beyond them so as to

attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel with truth

for food. There life is the wisdom by which all creatures come into being, both

things which were and which will be. But wisdom itself is not brought into being

but is as it was and always will be. Furthermore, in this wisdom there is no past

and future, but only being, since it is eternal. For to exist in the past or in the

future is no property of the eternal. And while we talked and panted after it, we

touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of the heart.46

Though not formally educated in philosophical and contemplative theory, Monica is able to participate in a dialogue about heaven and even experience eternity by revelation, just

45 James O’Donnell expresses skepticism about the depth of Augustine’s debt to Plotinus and other pagan neo-Platonists that earlier scholars have asserted: “We must not believe, much less try to demonstrate, that the ‘experience’ [at Ostia] was either really neo-Platonic or really Christian … The experience was shared by one very Christinan, half-educated, middle-aged woman, and by one enthusiastically Christian (but well read in Plotinus), over-educated young man. M[onica] herself would undoubtedly have said that her experience of it was Christian; A[ugustine] of 397 would say essentially the same thing, making allowances for Platonic insight; A[ugustine] of 387 did not record his testimony. Much in the narrative is Platonic (with distinct parallels to Book 7), but the capstone is Christian and scriptural.” Confessions, Vol. 3, 128.

46 Confessions, 171 (9.10.24). The passage in Latin is as follows: “et adhuc ascendebamus interius cogitando et loquendo et mirando opera tua. Et venimus in mentes nostras et transcendimus eas, ut attingeremus regionem ubertatis indeficientis, ubi pascis Israhel in aeternum veritate pabulo, et ibi vita sapientia est, per quam fiunt omnia ista, et quae fuerunt et quae future sunt, et ipsa non fit, et sic erit semper. Quin potius fuisse et futurum esse non est aeternum. Et dum loquimur et inhiamus illi, attingimus eam modice toto ictu cordis” Confessions, Vol. I, ed. O’Donnell, 113. 189 as she does in De Beata Vita, which was written not too long before this event would

have taken place. Here at Ostia she helps her son resolve obstacles to religious

experience that had frustrated him when he was poring over pagan neo-Platonist tracts

before his conversion.

Jordanus’s account of this episode echoes much of Augustine’s scriptural imagery

and introspective wording.47 Capgrave, however, excises much of Augustine’s language:

Thus alone thei talked ful sobirly of the euyrlestyn lif whech is ordeyned for

blessed soules. They talked so long therof, and lyft up her hertis in contemplacion

of that holy place, that thei had forgete in maner this world and alle erdly thing, so

were thei rauyschid with her holy wordis. Thei stood stille both a grete while and

thought swech thingis as thei coude not uttyr and eke ageyn in her holy

comunicacioun thei felle (23.10-15).

Capgrave’s description of the shared vision at Ostia thus passes over much of the

theologically reflective content from the Confessions, particularly its rich scriptural references and its attempt to intellectually as well as spiritually grasp the infinite. In place of theological reflection is a brief description of their contempt for worldly matters and a vague comment that they are “ravyschid” in their contemplation. What they experience and think “cannot be uttered.”

It might seem at first glance that Capgrave is censoring Augustine and Monica’s contemplative experience, but Capgrave’s wording here does have strong contemplative

47 Compare the following passage with the text from n.47 above: “colloquebantur soli ualde dulciter de vita eternal sanctorum et inhyabant ore cordis in superna fluenta fontis vite, erigentes se ardenciore affectu in idipsum et gradatim transcendentes cuncta corporalia, attingerunt raptim toto ictu cordis regionem ubertatis indeficientis, fontem vite eterne,” Capgrave, Life of St. Augustine, 91. 190 resonances, albeit quite different from Augustine’s original passage or Jordanus’s paraphrase. The term that Capgrave uses here to signal Augustine and Monica’s experience, that they were “ravychid,” is frequently used to describe meditative

“rapture,” that is, where someone in contemplation is taken into a state of mind to experience divinity. The term in this sense is often, in fact, used to translate the experience of being taken up to the “third heaven” that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 12

(Vulgate: “raptum huiusmodi usque ad tertium caelum.”).48 Paul notes, as Capgrave does, that aspects of this experience “cannot be spoken of by men” (“non licet homini loqui”). Allusion to this passage in Paul is absent from Augustine’s description of the event, but Jordanus perhaps suggests it in his addition of the adverb “raptim” (“suddenly, violently”) in his summary, replacing Augustine’s more cautious “modice” (“moderately, to some extent”), prompting Capgrave to make the allusion more explicit in his version of the episode. Capgrave uses the same term elsewhere to describe a visionary experience beyond description. In his Life of St. Katherine, Capgrave describes a vision of presumably angelic beings shared by St. Katherine and her hermit guide Adrian as she approaches a heavenly castle where she will be baptized:

But whan thei were come at the gatys wyde,

There where thei received on every side

With swech manere of face and of clothing

We cannot speke it. I trowe thei told it nowte,

For thei that are lyfte to sweche mysty thing,

48 “ravishen,” Middle English Dictionary, ed. Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 177-81. 191 Thei telle what thei sey whan thei were thedyr broute,

But thei cannot expresse her wyll ne her thowte

In whech thei hade that manere solace –

It is anothyr langage that longyth to that place.

But these too persones, as many other moo,

Were lyft up in soule swech sytes for to see.

Seynte Poule hymselve was thus i-raveched, yet dowted he

Wheythyr his body or nowte were in that secree.49

Capgrave makes his reference to Paul’s “rapture” explicit here, and notes that experiences like it cannot be described—“anothyr langage longyth to that place.” In this passage, Capgrave uses the unspeakability topos to explain why he perhaps might not be giving details his audience might expect. The two who experienced the vision did not relate certain elements of the phenomena, Capgrave explains, and thus he is absolved of the responsibility to report such detail. Likewise, in his Life of St. Augustine, Capgrave gives little detail to the experience at Ostia and emphasizes its indescribability, releasing him from having to bring in content from Augustine’s text that might be perceived as unsuitable for laypeople, even while he is granting a laywoman access to contemplative devotion.

Many contemplative writers in late medieval England might have considered the theological reflection contained in Augustine’s account of the vision as inappropriate for lay people. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing, for example, proscribes high

49 John Capgrave, The Life of St. Katherine TEAMS, ed. Karen A. Winstead (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999), Book 5.916-29. 192 contemplative meditation to a spiritual elite (that is, monastic or eremitic) and lays out a

hierarchy of spiritual lifestyles and levels of devotional service appropriate to each

station:

The lower party of aciue liif stondeth in good & honeste bodily werkes of mercy

& of charite. The hier party of actiue liif & the lower party of contemplatiue liif

lith in goodly goostly meditacions, & besy beholding vnto a mans owne

wrechidnes, with sorrow & contricion, vnto the Passion of Crist & of his

seruauntes with pite & compassion, & vnto the wonderful yeftes, kyndnes, &

wekes of God in alle his creatures, bodily & goostly, with thankyng & preising.

Bot the hiyer partye of contemplacion (as it may be had here) hongeth al holy in

this derknes & in this cloude of vnknowyng, with a louyng steryng & a blinde

beholding vnto the naked being of God him-self only.50

The author of the Cloud thus proscribes the devotion of those who live active lives to

charitable living and limited affective meditative practice. In fact, for the Cloud author, the mere fact that Capgrave allows Monica access to contemplative experience would be suspect. The Cloud author forbids that his book either be read or heard by those who live an active life: “I wolde not that thei herde it, neither thei ne none of thees corious lettrid ne lewid men, ye! Al-thof thei be ful good men in actyue leuyng; for it acordeth not to hem.”51 Capgrave is a bit more open about granting contemplative experience to lay

people. He does, however, truncate his discussion of such experiences, hiding behind a

50 The Cloud of Unknowning and the Book of Privy Counselling, EETS 218, ed. Phyllis Hodgson (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 31/21-32/8.

51 ibid., 130/20-3. 193 trope of the unspeakability of divine ecstasy. Furthermore, in order to shore up his

restrained picture of Monica, Capgrave follows this episode with a more conventional

picture of lay piety in his account of Monica’s death, as he had followed Monica’s dream

of the rule with her respectful audience before the bishop of Thagaste. The devotion

Capgrave describes in Monica’s death would certainly have mollified the Cloud-author,

as it includes “goodly goostly meditacions, & besy beholding vnto a mans owne

wrechidnes, with sorrow & contricion” such as he commended for pious men and women

living an active life.

In the Confessions, after their shared vision, Monica tells her son that she “finds

no pleasure in this life,” especially now that her one hope, that Augustine become a

Catholic Christian, is fulfilled. Within a few days, she falls ill, and after waking from a

fever-induced coma, she expresses her desire to be buried in Ostia. This request surprises

her two sons who were present, since she had once been adamant that she should be

buried next to her husband in Africa. Her only request now is that her sons “remember

[her] at the altar of the Lord, wherever [they] may be.”52 Augustine follows the account

of his mother’s death by describing how he overcame his grief before her funeral, and

ends Book Nine of the Confessions with a petition to God for her sins, including an appeal to his readers to remember his mother and father at the Eucharist. Jordanus recounts Monica’s conversation with Augustine after their vision, her request during her illness to be remembered at the altar by her sons, and her funeral. Capgrave follows

Jordanus closely on these matters, but adds an entire chapter on “the comendacioun and the orison of Augustin for his mother” (24.1-2). In this chapter, Capgrave summarizes

52 Confessions, 173 (9.11.27). 194 Augustine’s elegy at the end of Book Nine of the Confessions, selectively piecing

together several passages. Sticking to his portrayal of Monica as a reserved housewife,

he includes, for example, Augustine’s comment about her social restraint, noting that “no

lesings were founde in hir tonge, no slaunder, no vice whech longith to that member”

(24.9-19). The passages also emphasize the penitential aspects of Augustine’s elegy,

asking God to “forgif hir alle the trespass with whech sche offendid [Him] in thout word

or werk” (24.14-15). Finally, Capgrave includes Augustine’s exhortation to his readers

to have “devoute mynde” for the souls of his parents “in presens of the sacrament of the

aucter” (24.21-3).

Capgrave’s inclusion of these passages exemplifies the popularity of prayers for

the dead and penitential meditations on death among the laity, such as those reflected in

the ars moriendi tradition. Post-mortem remembrances of the departed became

especially popular during the late Middle Ages. Arrangements calling for prayers and

masses for the dead, in fact, became an important way to express public piety to

demonstrate one’s place within a community. Artes moriendi called for the dying to not only reconcile themselves to God, but also to their neighbor and the Church. As Eamon

Duffy points out, devotional practices preparing for death placed a “distinctive emphasis on repentance and reconciliation, trust in the Passion, and doctrinal orthodoxy.”53 Far from illustrating a growing morbidity in late-medieval English culture, the cult of the dead demonstrated a “practical and pragmatic sense of the continuing value of life and the social relations of the living.” Remembering the dead was not intended “to call

53 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 323. 195 people away from social involvement but to promote virtue and sociability in this world.”54 In the process of setting up chantries, masses for the dead and other memorials, laymen and women made material gifts to parishes and religious communities that often demonstrated the social commitments they valued in life, and that encouraged their progeny to remember and continue those commitments. In Capgrave’s Life of St.

Augustine, Monica becomes a model for penitential dying. While her request to be buried in Ostia and not Africa might seem to be a rejection of her social commitments, her desire to be remembered by her sons at the Eucharist certainly comes to exemplify them. The passages that Capgrave chooses to include from Augustine’s elegy specially commend her wifely and motherly virtues: he offers his “good wil … as a deute of hir child” (24.17-18).

Capgrave uses Monica’s request to be remembered at the altar to frame his Life within common forms of lay piety, especially those that were becoming popular forms of patronage to religious orders such as his own. Norman Tanner notes that while there were no new foundations of religious houses in Norwich after the first quarter of the fourteenth century, perpetual chantries became a lucrative act of patronage for well- established institutions.55 The mendicant orders benefited in particular from this development, as they did from requests to be buried on priory grounds.56 Capgrave uses

Augustine’s elegy as a way of drawing his patron into a relationship not only with the departed Augustine and his mother, but also with his order and the wider Augustinian

54 ibid., 303.

55 Norman Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), 92

56 R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 298-9. 196 community. In addition to including Augustine’s exhortation to remember his parents at

the altar, Capgrave ends his Life of St. Augustine with an admonishment for his patron to

visit Augustine’s “place onys in a yere” to remember the dead saint, even if she has to

“make retribucioun in other party” for missing a day of labor during harvest (45.41-3).

Capgrave’s attempt to recognize innovative possibilities for lay piety while he

encourages more conventional, restrained forms of devotion can also be seen in his

attitude toward Augustine’s writing and reading. One might expect that a focus on

Monica as a non-literate laywoman—however spiritually inclined—might lead Capgrave

to de-emphasize Jordanus’s focus on Augustine’s literary output, especially during a

period when heresy was associated with improper reading in lay households.57 But

Capgrave not only includes most of Jordanus’s descriptions of Augustine’s major works,

but also adds to or recasts some material. Furthermore, he describes Augustine’s reading

habits in a way that encourages lay people to engage with religious texts. He expresses a

remarkably open view toward lay literacy. Nevertheless, while he does not refrain from

describing Augustine’s theological writing or his reading habits, he limits his discussions

of these topics as he limited his presentation of Monica’s piety. Karen Winstead has

pointed out how Capgrave expresses a “troubled view of reading” in his Life of St.

Katherine, responding to the politics of lay literacy in England during the fifteenth

century.58 The young scholar-queen Katherine’s devotion to books and learning,

although it would become important to her effectiveness as a Christian witness and

57 See Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), Chapter 3.

58 Karen Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 167-77. 197 martyr, is a threat to the social and political stability of her kingdom as she neglects her

rule for her studies. Even so, Capgrave does not hesitate to praise Katherine’s piety or to

expound in detail about complex matters of theology that might have made some more

conservative ecclesiasts uneasy. There are several moments in the Life of St. Katherine,

for instance, where Capgrave encourages his readers, whom he designates as any “man,

mayde, and wyffe,” to consult Scripture on various topics.59 Capgrave was more flexible

on the matter of lay reading than many of his contemporaries, but at the same time he was

very careful to maintain his allegiance to orthodoxy. Capgrave’s Life of St. Augustine

presents Augustine’s corpus of theology for a lay audience, giving lay people a taste of

the “grete doctoure of the cherch’s” foundational importance to theological tradition.

However, the work also emphasizes Augustine’s importance as a defender of orthodoxy

and a scourge of heretical thought. Augustine is a “hard hambyr” against heretics, “evyr

knokkyng upon hem” (40.3-4).

Jordanus’s summaries of Augustine’s works seem intended to create a kind of

curriculum for budding Augustinian scholars. Sometimes Capgrave adds details to

Jordanus that give a new significance to certain works when presented in English to a lay

audience. In a description of De Beata Vita, Jordanus notes that the book recounts a dialogue between friends about what constitutes a blessed life, which ultimately concludes that it consists of the knowledge of God. He does not mention who these

“friends” are, or suggest Monica’s role in the dialogue. Capgrave gives a fuller description of the fictional context of the dialogue, including the fact that Monica was

59 For Capgrave’s audience for the Life of St. Katherine see John Capgrave, The Life of St. Katherine, Prologue.66. For suggestions that lay people consult scripture, see The Life of St. Katherine, 3.369-70, 4.2280-81. 198 present. He points out that while most of the company declares that “he hath a blessed lif

whech hath al that he desirith,” Monica argues that this is only true when “he desire

nothing but good thing” (16.37-40). Capgrave thus pulls in a relevant passage from De

Beata Vita to recognize Monica’s place in Augustine’s work and thought.60

In another place, Capgrave includes Jordanus’s description of Augustine’s De

Musica, which deals with matters that might have been considered inappropriate for lay readers. The work, he notes, discusses

who we may ascende in owre undirstanding fro bodely and chaungable noumbres

onto goostly and permanent, which permanent noumbres be in that treuth which is

God. So he concludeth that thoo invisibil thingis which be in heuene ar

undirstand the bettir for knowlech of bodily thingis which God mad in erde (26.8-

12).

This description of numerological theology might be seen as stepping beyond the bounds of what lay people could be taught. Nevertheless, Capgrave incorporates a consolation

Jordanus had given for those who might not understand the work, and a caveat for those who would, but would not read the work in good faith:

though ther be certeyn men here in erde that have so dul wit that thei cannot

understand this matere, yet if thei kepe treuly the Christian faith thei schul

sumtyme se alle these thingis, & fele hem in swech sikirnesse that thei may not

fayle. He seith eke that summe men that have sotil wittis and understand this wel

inow, if it be so that thei despise Crist, for al her sotil kunning thei schal be

60 See De Beata Vita, 29; this comment provokes the response I noted above from Augustine as narrator that she was “unmindful of her sex.” 199 dampned in helle (26.12-18).

Here, where the contemplative subject matter presented in De Musica might be potentially out of the reach of lay people, Capgrave once again invokes Augustinian ambivalence to learning; lay people living a true Christian faith like Monica can eventually come to a vision of the Godhead as contemplatives. In contrast, those with enough training to comprehend the complexities of high theology might fall into empty pride by their “subtlety,” seduced by heretical ideas.

Care for orthodox reading also becomes central when Capgrave gives detail about

Augustine’s reading habits. Capgrave notes that Augustine had “grete sweetness . . . in thes lessons whech kyndeled the fyre of his hert,” lamenting the time he had “barked against” holy scripture before his conversion (17.4-7). Capgrave’s translation of

Jordanus’s text stresses Augustine’s affective response to scripture, explaining that

Augustine read the Psalms “with gret sobbyng of hert, with wepyng and lamentable voys” (17.11-12). He also notes Augustine’s caution in his early reading of scripture, expressing his concern about unsupervised lay scriptural reading. Jordanus tells of

Augustine’s letters to Ambrose renouncing his errors, asking him which books of the

Bible would be appropriate to read as a new Christian. Ambrose commends Isaiah, but

Augustine, having trouble understanding the text, “leyd this book aside as for a tyme tyll he were more used in study of scripture” (17.36-7). This cautiousness about reading

Scripture might have pleased Nicholas Love, who advocated affective response to scriptural passages over learned exegesis. Attempts to tackle scripture in places where it is not clear lead to heresy. Books such as Love’s translation of the Pseudo-

Bonaventurean Meditationes Vitae Christi present “devoute meditacions of christes lyfe 200 more pleyne in certeyne parties than is expressed in the gospel of the foure evangelists,” so that there might be something “sovereynly edifying to simple creatures the whiche as childryn haven need to be fedde with mylke of lyghte doctrine and not with sadde mete of grete clargye and of [hye contemplacion].”61

Capgrave is aware of the danger of writing heretical ideas, even if he merely reports them for the purpose of refuting them. When recounting Augustine’s early fall into the Manichean heresy, Capgrave follows Jordanus in briefly describing the basic tenets of the Manichean faith:

They saide that Goddis son of heuene was not bore of a mayde, ne he had not very

flesch and blood as othir men have, but rather a fantastical body mad of the eyr

whech he semed for to deye (6.39-41).

While he suggests that Augustine fell “in this fals heresie whech avoideth the most subsauns of oure faith,” Capgrave stops short of going into further detail that Jordanus provides, and explains that “many mo heresies held thei which were ful perilous to be rehersed specially in oure tonge” (6.42-4). Nevertheless, Capgrave does not always follow this sentiment, and sometimes even expands on Jordanus’s accounts of the heresies Augustine confronts. For example, when narrating the Arian Empress Justina’s persecution of Ambrose, Capgrave adds an explanation of the Arian heresy where

Jordanus had none:

[The Arians] held that the Fadere and the Son and the Holy Gost be not of o

substauns. For the Son calle thei a creature mad of the Fadere, and the Holy Gost

61 Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael Sargent (New York: Garland, 1992), (10.7-17). 201 clepe thei a creature made of a creature, that is to sey, of the Son. Thei sey

furthermore that Crist took flesch and blod withoute ony soule (19.16-20).

When describing Augustine’s debate with the Manichean Fortunatus, where Jordanus explains that the heretic believed that “evel was a nature coeterne with God,” Capgrave adds that this means “evene as God hath be euyr, so hath that nature evele euyr be”

(32.22-3). In another chapter, where he adds descriptions of several heresies, including the Donatists and Pelagians, Capgrave once again describes the heresies of the

Manicheans:

Thei said that Crist was no very man but lich a man, and that he took no flesch ne

blood of the mayde as we beleve; but he took, I wot not verily what thei mene, a

body thei sey of the eyr, in whech he ded alle thoo miracles and in whech he

suffered passioun (40.27-31).

Though Capgrave shows no qualms about elaborating “mo heresies” of the Manicheans that might be “ful perilous to be rehersed” in English, he does so in a way that makes his allegiance clear. The Manicheans do not believe in Christ’s incarnation as Capgrave insists he and his readers believe. His sarcasm in the last passage is palpable. Much of their doctrine, he suggests, is incoherent. He cannot fully understand a “fantastical” theology that imagines that Christ’s body was made of “eyr.” As Capgrave pointed out earlier, the Manichean heresy, by denying the substance of Christ’s body, denies the

“most substance” of the Christian faith. Though he does not make the connection explicit, perhaps lurking under this condemnation of Manichean beliefs about Christ’s substance is a condemnation of Lollard denials of the substance of Christ’s body in the

Eucharist. 202 Capgrave does make an explicit connection between the beliefs of the

Manicheans and Wycliffites at one point in his narrative. In a chapter describing

Augustine and his company’s sojourn in Rome before heading to Ostia, Capgrave follows

Jordanus in mentioning the tracts that Augustine writes to confront the Manicheans in

Rome, De moribus Manicheorum, and De moribus ecclesie catholice, sticking to his usual practice of glossing the Latin titles for his English reader: “Of the maneris of

Manicheis, and Of the maneris of hem that be in the Cristen feith” (22.15-16). But then

Capgrave proceeds with detail not in Jordanus’s text (nor indeed in any of Augustine’s works) to explain exactly what the “maneris” of the Manicheans were:

the Manicheis held here skoles be nyth and thedir cam both men and women.

And alle sodeynly aftir the lesson the lith schuld be blow owt; and than schuld

thei pley, as Wiclif disciples played, ‘Sistir me nedith’ (22.17-19).

This description of the alleged perversions of Manichean and Wycliffite communities is in a chapter that begins with a description of the faithful community of ascetic men who are about to follow Augustine and his mother to Africa to found a religious community of hermits there, that is, the community to which Capgrave’s order traced its origins. Capgrave retains Jordanus’s homely description of Monica’s relationship to the community of Hermits and this seems all the more poignant in light of

Monica’s status as a secular wife and mother: “to all this felauchip thus gadered in fere was Monicha a very moder, as goodly and as friendly to hem alle as though sche had be modere to hem alle, and eke as seruyseable onto hem as though sche had be doutir unto

203 hem” (22.3-6).62 Monica’s devout, familial dedication to Augustine’s community contrasts markedly with the perverted “sisterly” bonds of Manichean and Wycliffite secret societies.

Monica’s dual identity here as both an authoritative, nurturing mother and docile, submissive daughter is illustrative of Capgrave’s vision of his patron’s relationship to the wider Augustinian community he cultivates in his East Anglian literary corpus. Through his portrait of Monica, the friar of Lynn recognizes innovative possibilities for lay engagement in the religious life. Even as an uncloistered layperson, Monica can experience contemplative rapture. Though unlearned, she can more easily and faithfully understand the divine than her son with all of his rhetorical and philosophical training.

Her simplicity becomes a model of Christian living for the “grete doctoure of the cherche.” She is able to become a vital member of her son’s hermit community. The depth of engagement with Augustinian life and theology that Capgrave offers to his lay patron here rivals Margery Kempe’s cooperative association with religious figures. At the same time, Capgrave is also careful to contain lay piety within the context of conventional devotional practices. He encourages deference to the hierarchy of the established Church and to patriarchal authority. Capgrave becomes a gatekeeper of sorts for his order’s literary tradition. He graciously welcomes his lay readership, and offers them an intimate glimpse of Augustinian life. He “speaks of God” with them even to the ecstasy of divine contemplation. He displays monuments to the foundations of Christian

62 Jordanus’s text includes Augustine’s light puns on “gero” (to bear, carry) and “gigno” (to beget): “Predictis autem omnibus fratribus et amicis sancto Augustino consociatis illa pia mater ita curam gessit quasi omnes genuisset, ita servivit quasi ab omnibus genita fuisset” Capgrave, Life of St. Augustine, 90. Compare the passage in Confessions 9.10.22. 204 orthodoxy in describing his founder’s theological corpus. Yet he is also careful not to allow his readership access to the inner cloisters of Augustine’s high theology. However pure and simple their living in the world might be, the depth and complexity of the

Church Father’s thought offered too many opportunities for untrained and undisciplined laypeople to be led into the pride of heresy. Under Capgrave’s guidance, a layperson’s household devotion could become an entryway into Augustinian life; if a lay person were to press arrogantly beyond what the friar offers, she would risk turning her household into a den of proud, depraved heresy of the likes of Manichean and Lollard conventicles.

205 CONCLUSION

WRITING ACROSS THE CLOISTER

A 2003 ad for America Online Broadband features the “Carpathian brothers,”

who, the ad states, have taken a vow of silence since 1211. The ad shows the monks in

procession as they enter their cells, shutting their doors to enjoy the serene quiet of the

monastery. The silence is then intermittently broken by isolated typing, and before long

the cloister is flooded with the sound of fingers on keys. “Luckily,” the voiceover says,

the vow of silence “only pertains to offline.” We then see monks instant messaging each

other jokes (“munksterman2: ok, 2 monks walk into a bar, and …”), sharing photos (one

of a monk in front of the Alamo, another of a brother sunning himself on the beach),

downloading music (Thelonious Monk and, for some reason, TLC’s “Damaged”), and

viewing streaming video (three monks cavorting in the nave of a church). With all of

these tools, the voiceover asks, “who needs talking?” We then see the monks in

procession again, until called, not by a bell, but by the familiar AOL trademark line

“You’ve Got Mail.” They frantically break up so that, we presume, they can race back to

their computers to continue their online activities. One monk even vaults the cloister rail

into the central court to get to his cell.1

1 “Monks (2003),” America Online Broadband Advisement, Ad-rag.com Blog, 28 April 2003, 5 November 2005, . 206 This twenty-first century parodic glimpse into the effect of communication technology on a hypothetical religious community nicely illustrates many of the issues

I’ve tried to explore through the fifteenth-century writers I have studied. As the ad suggests, broadband internet access allows the monks to access the world outside the cloister without violating their vows. This technology, furthermore, presumably allows them to reach those in the outside world that might not have access to their community and minister to them. Many orders, in fact, have recently expanded their communities to the web. I have, for example, taken advantage of online religious texts, such as the text of the Rule of St. Benedict, hosted by the Hungarian monks at Pannonhalma on St.

Martin’s Hill. Sites like these, like the works of the East Anglian authors I have studied, allow the religious to reach new audiences and grant access to their communities’ traditions. The home page of the Pannonhalma monks states this purpose explicitly:

Hereby we present a sense of [our] rich heritage via the World Wide Web. It

would please us if reading these pages enriched both your spirit and soul, and

filled your heart with happiness, freedom and the inspiration of the Mystery,

before you return to your occupation, or any other activity temporarily suspended

for our sake.2

Visitors to Pannonhalma’s website can visit the community, leaving the business of their secular lives for a time and take solace in its walls, even if these walls are in this case virtual.

As there were difficulties for fifteenth-century religious writers of vernacular devotional literature, the AOL Broadband commercial suggests perils for twenty-first-

2 Archabbey of Pannonhalma, Homepage (English), 6 November 2005, . 207 century religious people online. There is something transgressive about the Carpathian monks’ connection to the World Wide Web. Their typing, for example, seems to disrupt the silence of the community. The new medium seems to be a way of getting around the restrictions of their vows, if only on a technicality. The monks can represent themselves in ways their ruled life might not otherwise let them. The boundaries of their religious professions can be crossed as they enter a virtual medium. One wonders, for example, whether the pictures of the monks at the beach and before the Alamo were simply doctored in Photoshop. The response of the processing monks toward the end of the commercial, suggests the new medium has loosened discipline within the community.

The commercial itself, furthermore, harkens back to the satirical commonplaces that

Chaucer worked within. Stepping outside of their profession, the monks imagine themselves enjoying the amenities of a twenty-first century middle class lifestyle, just as

Don John of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale enters his “cousin’s” household to disastrous results. One wonders, for instance, what the punch line to munksterman2’s “2 monks walk into a bar” joke might be. The medium, while opening new possibilities for engagement outside of the cloister, offers opportunities for misrepresentation.

By working in the medium of the vernacular, John Lydgate, Osbern Bokenham,

John Capgrave, and the author of the Book of Margery Kempe were each able to shape new relationships between the secular and religious that stretched the traditional ideological bounds between those who lived a ruled life and those who were beholden to the business of the world outside the cloister. Operating in that medium offered new possibilities to strengthen political, social, economic, and spiritual bonds with patrons.

However, the growth of vernacular devotional writing signaled wider social changes that

208 challenged the religious to rethink their connections with the secular world. Each of the writers I have studied show an awareness of these challenges, and they demonstrate a willingness to carefully preserve their profession while meeting the demands of their patrons. Writing across the cloister to the secular world outside opened the cloister to changes that were perhaps unwelcome for some. But it also allowed demonstrated the flexibility of the rich traditions that these writers were working within, and the creative power that these writers had to maintain these traditions in the face of change.

209 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Archabbey of Pannonhalma. Homepage (English). 6 November 2005. .

St. Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

_____. Confessions. 3 Vols. Ed. James O’Donnell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

_____. De Beata Vita: Happiness—A Study. Ed. and Trans. Francis Tourscher. Philadelphia: The Peter Reilly Company, 1937.

Pseudo-Augustine. Sermones ad Fratres in Eremo. Patrologia Cursus Completus: Series Latina 40. Ed. J. P. Migne. Paris, 1841-64. 1233-1358.

St. Benedict of Nursia. Regula Sancti Benedicti. Order of Saint Benedict Website. 2002. 24 October 2005. .

Bokenham, Osbern. Legendys of Hooly Wummen. Ed. Mary S. Sargentson. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.

The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Sanford Brown Meech. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.

Calendar of the Close Rolls, Henry VI. Vol. 6. London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1933- 1947.

Capgrave, John. Johannes Capgrave, De Illustribus Henricis. Rolls Series 7. Ed. Francis Charles Hingeston. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858.

_____. John Capgrave's Lives of St. Augustine and St. Gilbert of Sempringham, and a Sermon. EETS o.s. 140. Ed. J. J. Monro. London: Kegan Paul, 1910.

_____. Life of St. Augustine by John Capgrave. Studies and Texts 138. Ed. Cyril Lawrence Smetana. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2001.

210 _____. The Life of St. Katherine. TEAMS. Ed. Karen A. Winstead. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999.

_____. The Life of St. Norbert by John Capgrave, O.E.S.A. (1393-1464). Studies and Texts 40. Ed. Cyril L. Smetana, O.S.A Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1977.

_____. Ye Solace of Pilgrimes. Ed. C.A. Mills. Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 1911.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson [based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. N. F. Robinson, 2nd ed.]. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987.

The Cloud of Unknowning and the Book of Privy Counselling. EETS 218. Ed. Phyllis Hodgson. London: Oxford University Press, 1944.

“Dialogue at the Grave of Dame Johan of Acres reascribed to Osbern Bokenham.” Clare Priory: Seven Centuries of a Suffolk House. Ed. Norman Scarfe. Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, Ltd., 1962. 63-9.

Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks 1215-1540, Vol. 2. Ed. William Abel Pantin. Camden Third Series, Vol. 47. London: The Royal Historical Society, 1933.

English Wycliffite Sermons. 4 Vols. Ed. Anne Hudson and Pamela Gradon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983-1996.

Geoffrey of Wells. “Geoffrey of Wells, De Infantia Sancti Edmundi.” Ed. R. M. Thompson. Analecta Bollandiana 95 (1977): 25-42.

Hilton, Walter. Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life Edited from Lambeth Palace MS 472. Ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1986.

Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints. 2 Vols. Trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Jacobi a Voragine Legenda Aurea. Ed. Theodore Graesse. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 1969.

St. Jerome. Commentaire Sur S. Matthieu, Tome I. Ed. Emile Bonnard. Paris: Les Editions Du Cerf, 1977.

211 Iohannis de Caulibus Meditaciones Vite Christi, Olim S. Bonaventuro Attributiae, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CLIII. Ed. M. Stallings-Taney Turnholt: Brepols, 1997.

Jordan of Saxony (Quedlinburg). Liber Vitasfratrum. Ed. Rudolph Arbesmann and Winfrid Humpfner. New York: Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service Co., 1943.

_____. The Life of the Brethren: Liber Vitasfratrum. Trans. Gerard Deighan. Villanova, PA: Augustinian Press, 1993.

Las primitives Constituciones de los Agustinos. Ed. Ignacio Aramburu Cendoya, O.S.A. Valladolid: Archivo Agustiniano, 1966.

The Letters of Osbert of Clare, Prior of Westminster. Ed. E. W. Williamson. London: Oxford University Press, 1929.

Love, Nicholas. Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. Ed. Michael Sargent. New York: Garland, 1992.

Lydgate, John. John Lydgate: The Siege of Thebes. Ed. Robert R. Edwards. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001.

_____. “S. Edmund und Fremund, ein Legendenepos in 3 Buchern.” Altenglische Legenden Neue Folge. Ed. Carl Horstmann. Heilbronn: Verlag Von Gebr. Henninger, 1881. 376-445.

The Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne. EETS o.s. 174. Ed. Roscoe E. Parker. London: Oxford University Press, 1928.

“Monks (2003).” America Online Broadband Advisement. Ad-rag.com Blog. 28 April 2003. 5 November 2005. .

Monumenta Historica Carmelitana. Vol. 1. Ed. Benedict Zimmerman. Lirinae: Ex typis abbatae, 1905.

Netter, Thomas. Docrinale Antiquitatem Fidei Catholicae Ecclesiae. Ed. B. Blanciotti. Venice, 1759.

Nova Legenda Anglia. Vol. 2. Ed. Carl Horstman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901.

Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Counsel. Vol. IV. Ed. N. H. Nicolas. London: Record Commission, 1834-7.

212 “The Protoevangelium of James.” New Testament Apocrypha. Vol. 1. Ed. Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher. Trans. R. McL. Wilson. Philadelphia: The Wesminster Press, 1963. 375-6.

Robinson, F. N. “On Two Manuscripts of Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick.” Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 5 (1896): 177-220..

Schild, Hermann. “De Conceptione Gloriosae Virginis Mariae.” Monumenta Antiqua Immaculatae Conceptionis Sacratissimae Virginis Mariae. Vol. 1. Ed. Petri de Alva & Astorsa. 1664; Brussels: Impression Anastaltique Culture et Civilisation, 1967. 139-82.

Two Wycliffite Texts. EETS 301. Ed. Anne Hudson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Secondary Sources

Aers, David. Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

_____. Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360-1430. London: Routledge, 1988.

Arbesmann, Rudolph. "Henry of Friemar's Treatise on the Origin and Development of the Hermit Friars and its True and Real Title." Augustiniana 6 (1956): 37-145.

_____. "Jordan of Saxony's Vita s. Augustini, the Source of John Capgrave's Life of St. Augustine." Traditio 1 (1943): 341-53.

Allen, Rosamund. “The Siege of Thebes: Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale.” Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry. Ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen. London: Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991. 122-42.

Ashley, Kathleen. “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 371-88.

Ashley, Kathleen and Pamela Sheingorn. “Introduction.” Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society. Ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990. 1-68.

Aston, Margaret. “‘Caim’s Castles’: Poverty, Politics and Disendowment.” The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century. Ed. Barrie Dobson. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. 45-81.

213 _____. “Lollard Women Priests?” Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion. London: The Hambledon Press, 1984. 49-70.

Balic, Carlo. “The Mediaeval Controversy over the Immaculate Conception up to the Death of Scotus.” The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, History and Significance. Ed. Edward Dennis O’Connor. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958. 161-212.

Beckwith, Sarah. Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Beichner, Paul E. “Daun Piers, Monk and Business Administrator.” Speculum 34 (1959): 611-19.

Beidler, Peter G. “Contrasting Masculinities in the Shipman’s Tale: Monk, Merchant and Wife.” Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. 131-42.

Bowers, John. “Controversy and Criticism: Lydgate’s Thebes and the Prologue to Beryn.” Chaucer Yearbook 5 (1998): 91-115.

Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967.

Cannon, Christopher. "Monastic Productions." Cambridge Guide to Middle English Literature. Ed. David Wallace. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 316-48.

Catto, Jeremy. “Religious Change under Henry V.” Henry V: The Practice of Kingship. Ed. G. L. Harriss. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. 97-115.

Cavanaugh, Susan. “A Study of Books Privately Owned in England 1300-1450.” Diss. University of Pennsylvannia, 1980.

Clark, James G. A Monastic Renaissance at St. Albans: Thomas Walsingham and his Circle c. 1350-1440. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004.

_____. “The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England,” The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England. Ed. James G. Clark. Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2002. 3-33.

_____. “Selling the Holy Places: Monastic Efforts to Win Back the People in Fifteenth Century England.” Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century. Ed. T. Thornton. Stroud, 2001. 13-32.

214 Connolly, Margaret. John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth Century England. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998.

Constable, Giles. Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages. Ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Copeland, Rita. Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Cownie, Emma. “The Cult of St. Edmund in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Language and Communication of a Medieval Saint’s Cult.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 99 (1998): 177-97.

_____. “Religious Patronage at Post Conquest Bury St. Edmunds.” The Haskins Society Journal 7 (1995): 1-9.

Cross, Claire. “‘Great Reasoners in Scripture’: The Activities of Women Lollards.” Medieval Women: Essays Dedicated and Presented to Professor Rosalind M. T. Hill. Ed. Derek Baker. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. 359-80

Damon, John Edward. Soldier Saints and Holy Warriors: Warfare and Sanctity in the Literature of Early England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003.

Delany, Sheila. Impolitic Bodies: Poetry, Saints, and Society in Fifteenth Century England, The Work of Osbern Bokenham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

_____. “Matronage or Patronage? The Case of Osbern Bokenham’s Women Patrons.” Florelegium 16 (1999): 97-105.

_____. “Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe.” Minnesota Review 5 (1975): 104-15.

Dickman, Susan. “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England. Ed. Marion Glasscoe (1984). 150-68. 150-68.

Dillon, Janette. “Holy Women and their Confessors or Confessors and their Holy Women? Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition.” Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England. Ed. Rosalynn Voaden. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer Inc., 1996. 115-140.

215 Dimmok, Spencer. “English Small Towns and the Emergence of Capitalist Relations, c. 1450-1550.” Urban History 28 (2001): 5-24.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post- Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

Doyle, I. R.. "Publication by Members of the Religious Orders.” Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475. Ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 109-124.

_____. “A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the 14th, 15th, and Early 16th Centuries With Special Consideration of the Part of the Clergy Therein.” Vol I. Diss. Cambridge University, 1953.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Dutton, Anne M. “Passing the Book: Testementary Transmission of Religious Literature to and by Women in England 1350-1500.” Women, the Book, and the Godly. Ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor. London: D. S. Brewer, 1995. 41-54.

Ebin, Lois A. John Lydgate. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

Elliot, Dyan. “Marriage.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2003. 40-57.

_____. Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Elm, Kaspar. "Augustinus Canonicus-Augustinus Eremita: A Quattrocento Cause Celebre." Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento. Ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. 83-107.

Erler, Mary C. Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Evans, Ruth. “Virginities.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2003. 21-39.

Fewer, Colin. “John Lydgate’s Troy Book and the Ideology of Prudence.” The Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 229-45.

216 Fredell, Joel. “Margery Kempe: Spectacle and Spiritual Governance.” Philological Quarterly 75.2 (1996): 137-66.

Ghosh, Kantik. The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Gibson, Gail McMurray. “Saint Anne and the Religion of the Childbed: Some East Anglian Texts and Talismans.” Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society. Ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990. 95-111.

_____. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Gilchrist, Roberta. Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism. New York: Leicester University Press, 1995.

_____. Gender and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Religious Women. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Gillespie, Vincent. “Vernacular Books of Religion.” Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475. Ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 317-44.

Goldberg, P. J. P. “Lay Book Ownership in Late Medieval York: The Evidence of Wills.” The Library, 6th Series 16 (1994): 181-89.

Goodman, Anthony. “The Piety of John Brunham’s Daughter, of Lynn.” Medieval Women: Essays Dedicated and Presented to Rosalind M. T. Hill. Ed. Derek Baker. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978. 347-58

Gottfried, Robert S. Bury St. Edmunds and the Urban Crisis: 1290-1539. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Grandsen, Antonia. “Baldwin, abbot of Bury St. Edmunds, 1065-1097.” Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies IV, 1981. Ed. R. Allen Brown Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1982. 65-76.

Greene, J. Patrick. Medieval Monasteries. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992.

Griffiths, Ralph A. The Reign of King Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422- 61. London: Ernest Benn, 1981.

217 Hanawalt, Barbara. “Widows.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing. Ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2003. 58-69.

_____. “The Widow’s Mite: Provisions for Medieval London Widows.” Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe. Ed. Louise Mirrer. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1992. 21- 45.

Hanna, Ralph III. “Augustinian Canons and Middle English Literature.” The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths. Ed. A. S. G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna. London: The British Library, 2000. 27-42.

Hilles, Carol. “Gender and Politics in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendary.” New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 189-212

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Margery Kempe and Wynkyn de Worde.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England. Ed. Marion Glasscoe. London: D. S. Brewer, 1987. 27- 46.

Holzknecht, Karl Julius. Literary Patronage in the Middle Ages. Diss. University of Pennsylvannia, 1923.

Hudson, Anne. “Lollard Book Production.” Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475. Ed. Derek Pearsall and Jeremy Griffiths. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 125-42

_____. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Hutchinson, Ann M. "Devotional Reading in the Monastery and in the Late Medieval Household." De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England. Ed. Michael G. Sargent. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989. 215-27.

Hussey, S. S. “The Audience for the Middle English Mystics.” De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England. Ed. Michael G. Sargent. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989. 109-22.

The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520. Ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans. University Park, PA: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 1999.

218 Johnson, Ian. “Tales of a True Translator: Medieval Literary Theory, Anecdote and Autobiography in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen.” The Medieval Translator IV. Ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994. 104-124

Jones, Sarah Rees. “ ‘A Peler of Holy Cherch’: Margery Kempe and the Bishops.” Medieval Women: Text and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy. Ed. Jocelyn Wogan Brown et al. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000. 376-91.

Jones, Terry. “The Monk’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 22 (2000): 387-97.

Justice, Stephen. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Keiser, George. “The Mystics and the Early English Printers: The Economics of Devotionalism.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England. Ed. Marion Glasscoe. London: D. S. Brewer, 1987. 9-26.

Kline, Daniel T. “Father Chaucer and the Siege of Thebes: Literary Paternity, Aggressive Deference, and the Prologue to Lydgate’s Oedipal Canterbury Tale.” The Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 217-35.

Knowles, David. The Religious Orders in England. Vol. II. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1955.

Kohl, Stephen. “Chaucer’s Pilgrims in Fifteenth-Century Literature.” Fifteenth Century Studies 7 (1983): 221-36.

Krug, Rebecca. Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Ladd, Roger A. “Margery Kempe and her Mercantile Mysticism.” Fifteenth Century Studies 26 (2000): 121-41.

Lawton, David. “Dullness and the Fifteenth Century.” English Literary History 54 (1987): 761-99.

Lewis, Katherine J. “Edmund of East Anglia, Henry VI and the Ideals of Kingly Masculinity,” Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages. Ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004. 158-73

Lochrie, Karma. Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

219 _____. Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Loomis, Grant. “The Growth of the Saint Edmund Legend.” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 14 (1932): 83-113.

Lucas, Peter J. From Author to Audience: John Capgrave and Medieval Publication. Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1997.

_____. "The Growth and Development of English Literary Patronage in the Later Middle Ages and Early Renaissance." The Library, 6th series 4 (1982): 219-48.

Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Meale, Carole M. “‘This is a Deed Bok, the Tother a Quick’: Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in the Book of Margery Kempe.” Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain. 29-67.

Medieval Monastic Education. Ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig. New York: Leicester University Press, 2000.

Mertes, Kate. The English Noble Household 1250-1600: Good Governance and Politic Rule. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Minnis, A. J. “De impedimento sexus: Women’s Bodies and Medieval Impediments to Female Ordination.” Medieval Theology and the Natural Body. Ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis. Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 1997. 109-39.

Moore, Samuel. "Patrons of Letters in Norfolk and Suffolk." PMLA 28 (1913): 97-100.

Morrison, Susan Signe. Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety and Public Performance. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Myers, Michael D. “A Fictional-True Self: Margery Kempe and the Social Reality of the Merchant Elite of King’s Lynn.” Albion 31 (1999): 377-94.

Parr, Johnstone. “Astronomical Dating for Some of Lydgate’s Poems.” PMLA 67 (1952): 251-8.

220 Parsons, Kelly. “The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience.” The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower. Ed. Kathryn Kirby- Fulton and Madie Hilmo. Victoria, B.C., Canada: English Literary Studies, The University of Victoria, 2001. 143-216.

Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison, WI: The Wisconsin University Press, 1991.

_____. “Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England: Henry V and John Lydgate.” New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History. Ed. J .N. Cox and L. J. Reynolds. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. 69-107.

Pearsall, Derek. “Chaucer and Lydgate.” Chaucer Traditions, Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 39-53.

_____. John Lydgate. London: Routledge & Keagan Paul, 1970.

_____. John Lydgate (1371-1449): A Bio-bibliography. English Literary Studies Monograph Series 71. Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1997.

Petrakopoulos, Anja. “Sanctity and Motherhood: Elizabeth of Thuringia.” Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages. Ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker. New York: Garland, 1995. 259-95.

Price, Paul. “Trumping Chaucer: Osbern Bokenham’s Katherine.” The Chaucer Review 36 (2001): 158-83.

“ravishen.” Middle English Dictionary. Ed. Robert. E. Lewis. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1984. 177-81.

Reames, Sherry. The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Renevey, Denis. “Margery’s Performing Body: The Translation of Late Medieval Discursive Religious Practices.” Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England. Ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 197-216.

Renna, Thomas. “Wyclif’s Attacks on the Monks,” From Ockham to Wyclif. Ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. 267-80

221 Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. The Legend of Guy of Warwick. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Roth, Francis, O.S.A. The English Austin Friars, 1248-1538. 2 Vols. New York: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1966.

Saak, Eric L. High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform Between Reform and Reformation, 1292-1524. Boston: Brill, 2002.

Sanderlin, George. "John Capgrave Speaks Up for the Hermits." Speculum 18 (1943): 358-62.

Sargent, Michael. "The Transmission by the English Carthusians of Some Late Medieval Spiritual Writings." Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 225-40.

Saygin, Susanne. Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (1390-1447) and the Italian Humanists. Boston: Brill, 2002.

Sebastian, Weneceslaus. “The Controversy over the Immaculate Conception from after Scotus to the End of the Eighteenth Century.” The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, History and Significance. Ed. Edward Dennis O’Connor. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958. 213-70.

Seymour, M.C. John Capgrave. Authors of the Middle Ages 11. Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996.

Sharp, Michael D. “Reading Chaucer’s ‘Manly Man’: The Trouble with Masculinity in the Monk’s Prologue and Tale.” Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Ed. Peter G.Beidler. London: D.S. Brewer, 1998. 173-85.

Sheingorn, Pamela, “Appropriating the Holy Kinship: Gender and Family History.” Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society. Ed. Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1990. 169-98

Simpson, James. “‘Dysemol daies and fatal houres’: Lydgate’s Destruction of Thebes and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.” The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray. Ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 15-33.

Skhlar, Ruth. “Cobham’s Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking.” Modern Language Quarterly 56 (1995): 277-304.

222 Somerset, Fiona. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Spearing, A. C. “Lydgate’s Canterbury Tale: The Siege of Thebes and Fifteenth-Century Chaucerianism.” Fifteenth-Century Studies, Recent Essays. Ed. Robert F. Yeager. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984. 333-64

_____. Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Spencer, H. Leith. English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Staley, Lynn. Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

_____. “The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.” Speculum 66 (1991): 820-38.

Straker, Scott. “Deference and Difference: Lydgate, Chaucer, and the Siege of Thebes.” The Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 1-21.

Strange, William C. “The Monk’s Tale: A Generous View.” Chaucer Review 1 (1967): 167-80.

Summit, Jennifer. Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Swanson, R. N. Church and Society in Late Medieval England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Tanner, Norman P. The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370-1532. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984.

Thompson, Benjamin J. “Introduction: Monasteries and Medieval Society.” Monasteries and Society: Proceedings of the 1994 Harlaxton Symposium. Ed. Benjamin J. Thompson. Stamford: Harlaxton Medival Studies, 1999. 4-24.

_____. “Monasteries and their Patrons at Foundation and Dissolution.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series 4, 1994: 103-25.

_____. “Monasteries, Society and Reform in Late Medieval England.” The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England. Ed. James G. Clark. Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2002. 165-96.

223 Underhill, Frances. For Her Good Estate: The Life of Elizabeth De Burgh. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Voaden, Rosalynn. God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries. Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, Inc., 1999.

Wallace, David. “Mystics and Followers in Siena and East Anglia: A Study in Taxonomy, Class and Cultural Mediation.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1984. Ed. Marion Glasscoe. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydel and Brewer, 1984. 169-91.

Warren, Nancy Bradley. Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2001.

Watts, John. Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Wilson, Janet. “Communities of Dissent: The Secular and Ecclesiastical Communities of Margery Kempe’s Book.” Medieval Women in their Communities. Ed. Diane Watt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 155-85.

Karen Winstead. “John Capgrave and Margery Kempe.” Mapping Margery Kempe. Ed. Sarah Stanbury. 2001. 25 October 2005. .

_____. “Lydgate’s Lives of Saints Edmund and Alban: Martyrdom and ‘Prudent Pollicie,” Mediaevalia 17 (1994): 222-31.

_____. Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

224