Writers in Religious Orders and Their Lay Patrons in Late Medieval England

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,

Load more