Vernacular Accounts of the Parables in Late Medieval England

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Rendering the Word: Vernacular Accounts of the Parables in Late Medieval England Mary Raschko A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: Joseph Wittig Fiona Somerset E. Donald Kennedy Patrick O’Neill Peter Kaufman Abstract Mary Raschko: Rendering the Word: Vernacular Accounts of the Parables in Late Medieval England (Under the direction of Joseph Wittig and Fiona Somerset) This study examines Middle English translations of particularly ambiguous, yet culturally relevant biblical narratives: the parables of the Wedding Feast, the Laborers in the Vineyard, the Good Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son. Crossing conventional boundaries of genre and ideology, it features renditions of parables in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from the Wycliffite Bible to lives of Christ, homilies, and poetic literary works. To focus the diverse interpretations found in these materials, each chapter highlights one prominent Middle English poem or devotional work and discusses other vernacular accounts in relation to the more familiar text. Chapter one features the Parable of the Wedding Feast in Cleanness and emphasizes the difference between the poet’s parabolic writing and moral exempla, while chapter two examines the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard in Pearl and shows how the explication therein differs dramatically from those in Middle English sermons. Chapter three places the Parable of the Good Samaritan in Langland’s Piers Plowman in conversation with other Middle English, rather than Latin, interpretations of the story, and chapter four considers the characterization of penance in the Parable of the Prodigal Son in devotional works like Book to a Mother. Collectively, the four parables show the complex relationship between narrative and religious edification and provide evidence of dynamic engagement with vernacular scripture in late medieval England. ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank my two co-directors, professors Joseph Wittig and Fiona Somerset, for their enthusiasm for this project and for their guidance throughout my time in graduate school. I learned a tremendous amount not only from their comments on my writing but also from observation of their work as teachers and scholars. I also wish to thank the rest of my dissertation committee, professors Don Kennedy, Patrick O’Neill, and Peter Kaufman, for their attentive reading, constructive feedback, and thought-provoking conversation. Informal, yet influential conversations with professors outside my committee, Siegfried Wenzel and Ian Johnson, helped me to develop a systematic approach to investigating this broad range of sources, and I greatly appreciate their interest in my scholarship. I am also grateful for the feedback and moral support that Elizabeth Keim Harper and Sarah Lindsay offered in writing group over the past several years. This research would not have been possible without grants provided by the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and by the program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, which helped facilitate the manuscript research included in the dissertation. Finally, I particularly wish to thank the Medieval Academy and the Richard III Society for their generous support of my final year of dissertation writing in the form of the Schallek Fellowship. iii Table of Contents Introduction................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter I. “Fele arn to called”: The Parable of the Wedding Feast in Cleanness.............................................................................................. 26 Extensive invitation: “Laþeз hem alle luflyly to lenge at my fest”..................................................................................................... 32 Festive hospitality: “And зet þe symplest in þat sale watз serued to þe fulle”..................................................................................... 46 Exclusion from the feast: “þise oþer wrecheз iwysse worþy noзt wern”................................................................................................. 50 Reforming punishment: “Stik hym stifly in stokeз...to teche hym be quoynt”......................................................................................... 65 II. Teaching an Unreasonable Tale: Pearl and the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard................................................................ 73 III. “Go þou, and do þou in lyk manere:” Piers Plowman and the Challenge of the Good Samaritan.................................................... 122 IV. Penitential Revision: The Parable of the Prodigal Son in Book to a Mother......................................................................................173 Bibliography.............................................................................................................. 213 iv Introduction Judging from the rhetoric of conservative medieval clerics, and even from the predominant scholarly discussions of biblical literature in late medieval England, one might expect a study of gospel parables in Middle English to have limited scope and significance. Parables do not belong to the body of simple biblical texts that clerics recommended conveying to the laity; likewise, the association of vernacular scripture with John Wyclif and his followers may have rendered it dangerous and consequently restricted its circulation. Whether out of interest in medieval precursors to the Reformation or inattention to under-studied and often unpublished Middle English devotional and exegetical texts, discussion of vernacular scripture is largely restricted to discussion of Lollardy and its opponents, most often as exemplified in the Wycliffite Bible and conscientiously “orthodox” texts like Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. This study looks beyond the rhetoric of medieval debates about translation of the bible and beyond the traditional ideological and generic boundaries that shape modern discussion of vernacular translation. Setting aside conventional expectations of which texts the laity would read and which authors would translate more complex biblical passages, it features Middle English translation of and commentary on particularly ambiguous, yet culturally relevant biblical narratives: the parables of the Wedding Feast, the Laborers in the Vineyard, the Good Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son. Our current conceptions of lay engagement with scripture in late medieval England are heavily influenced by the voices of conservative clerics, who discouraged vernacular translation in Latin treatises, outlawed unapproved translation in ecclesiastical legislation, and passed over difficult passages of the gospels in meditative devotional texts on the life of Christ. Scholars frequently cite the polemical treatises of Oxford friars William Butler and Thomas Palmer to describe clerical opposition to vernacular translation at the turn of the fifteenth century.1 In a treatise written in 1401, Butler argues that to prevent the spread of heresy the laity should only read scripture with supervision and advocates restricting scripture to Latin as a means of ensuring that readers will receive clerical guidance. He endorses a hierarchical model of learning in which those of higher intellectual abilities, i.e., clerics, convey appropriate levels of biblical knowledge to the less learned laity. Butler ultimately concludes that the laity should read neither the plain text of scripture nor vernacular scripture with glosses “because of the subtlety of the learned artistry of this sacred scripture.”2 Writing a few years later, Palmer similarly contends that the laity should learn scripture only from clerics, who can teach them proper interpretations.3 Yet he also questions the very capacity of the English language to adequately convey the content of scripture and cites 2 Corinthians 3:6 (the letter kills but the spirit gives life), as evidence that lay access to the literal text of 4 scripture would beget false belief. In their arguments against vernacular translation, 1 See, for example, Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6-21; Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),86-111; and Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, The Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409.” Speculum 70, no. 4 (October 1995): 822-864. 2 Qtd. in Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy, 98. For the Latin, see Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 414. 3 On the dating of Palmer’s treatise between 1401 and 1407, see Anne Hudson, “The Debate on Bible Translation, Oxford 1401,” in Lollards and their Books (London: Hambledon Press, 1985), 67-69. 4 Following his quotation of 2 Cor. 3:6, Palmer asks “Quomodo, igitur, simplices illiterati, vel sola grammatica instructi, illos pullos trium sensuum ignorantes, non errarent habentes magistrum, scilicet 2 both Butler and Palmer

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