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Lewd Imaginings: Pedagogy, Piety, and Performance in Late Medieval East Anglia

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Lewd Imaginings: Pedagogy, Piety, and Performance in Late Medieval East Anglia LEWD IMAGININGS: PEDAGOGY, PIETY, AND PERFORMANCE IN LATE MEDIEVAL EAST ANGLIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by John Thomas Sebastian August 2004 © 2004 John Thomas Sebastian LEWD IMAGININGS: PEDAGOGY, PIETY, AND PERFORMANCE IN LATE MEDIEVAL EAST ANGLIA John Thomas Sebastian, Ph.D. Cornell University 2004 This dissertation explores clerical and lay desires for spiritual teaching and learning at the end of the Middle Ages in England, desires that, while ostensibly contemplative, carried crucial ecclesiological, political, and literary implications. Where these desires met stood the image of the unlearned lay person. This image has a history of its own; tracing it reveals many of the discourses and identities structuring late medieval society. The iconic lay person was a creature of imagination, feeling, and desire, not desire for theological proposition and dispute, but for a palpable relationship to God. Addressing that desire led in late medieval England to an astonishing increase in clerical awareness of the laity’s spiritual needs and clerical activism in addressing those. Learned writers invented a discourse of “lewdness” (after the technical term for the unlettered medieval laity) according to which the pious laity were supposed to learn by reading images as the learned did by reading books. Derived from an early pope’s rebuke of an iconoclastic bishop, this assumption maintained its authority throughout the Middle Ages, regularly resurfacing in a variety of contexts, although not always in immediately recognizable forms. The pervasive authority of this dictum led late medieval theologians to expound a system of participatory meditation on events from the life of Christ as particularly suitable for the laity on account of its imaginative methods. These trappings of “lewdness” obscured, however, the much broader clerical origins of such mystical practice, from monastic and other learned traditions, that paradoxically were adapted to how the “lewd” laity were instructed to pursue their own uniquely intimate kind of contemplation. This discourse of “lewdness” assumed peculiar force within the region of East Anglia (the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk along with parts of Cambridgeshire and Kent), as evidenced by its refraction in the spiritual biography of a remarkable lay woman from Bishops Lynn, Margery Kempe, and its manifestation as the common dramaturgical foundation for a collection of plays otherwise notable for their formal and generic differences. Ultimately it coalesced, ironically, with the goals of later Reformers. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH John T. Sebastian grew up in Nutley, New Jersey, where he attended Nutley High School and was the valedictorian of his graduating class. John received his A.B. magna cum laude in 1998 from Georgetown University having completed a double major in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a concentration in Medieval Studies, and in English. He also earned a master’s degree from Georgetown’s Department of English in medieval and Renaissance literature in 1999, after which he began further graduate work in the Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University. He received his second M.A. in 2002 and was awarded the Stephen and Margery Russell Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2003 by the College of Arts and Sciences. During the 2003-2004 academic year, he was an inaugural Mellon Graduate Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. John completed his Ph.D. in the summer of 2004, and has been appointed assistant professor of medieval literature in the Department of English at Loyola University, New Orleans. iii To my leue dere moder for þe grete godenesse þat I haue recyued þorow þe of oure Lord Ihesus Crist iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Of the many formalities attendant upon the completion of a dissertation, few are discharged as eagerly as the performance of acknowledging the many debts of gratitude that one has accumulated. The lifestyle that is graduate study cannot, I suspect, be pursued successfully in the absence of a substantial network of cheerleaders. And so it is with tremendous enthusiasm that I finally extend my sincere thanks to the community of intellectual, psychological, and emotional supporters whose generosity of many kinds not only facilitated the completion of this project but created the conditions necessary for its inception and continuation at so many different stages of its life and my own. Most immediately, I must thank my Cornell family whose enthusiasm for my academic pursuits has never flagged, even when my own has. Andy Galloway, my Special Committee Chair and advisor since my arrival at Cornell, has been a constant source of inspiration. He has pointed out many a forest that I would otherwise have missed in my sometimes overly narrow quest for trees. My Special Committee members, Tom Hill, Judith Peraino, and Masha Raskolnikov, have extended much advice and encouragement without which I would be a much less sensitive student of literature, music, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have also benefited from the visionary leadership of Danuta Shanzer and the abiding friendship of Paul Hyams, the directors of the Medieval Studies Program during my time at Cornell. Dianne Ferriss, our graduate field assistant, has been a boundless repository of information and good cheer. I would also be hard pressed to ask for a more nearly perfect community of graduate student colleagues than those friends I have found here. Three in particular stand out: Ross Leasure, Curtis Jirsa, and especially Johanna Kramer, who has been v my steadfast companion throughout graduate school, and for whose husband I was often mistaken during our early years on campus. I would be severely remiss if I did not also acknowledge the generous financial support that enabled me to conduct research in Europe for this project. The Mellon Foundation in conjunction with the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London provided a dissertation research fellowship to England during the summer of 2003 that allowed me to consult numerous manuscripts at the British Library and the University Library at Cambridge and to explore the physical and cultural spaces once inhabited by Margery Kempe in King’s Lynn and Norwich. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Professor Miri Rubin, who kindly acted as my mentor in England, and to Dr. Michelle Brown, Curator of the Department of Western Manuscripts at the British Library, who, with what I came to recognize as characteristic and genuine enthusiasm, expended far more of her sought-after time with an unknown graduate student form the States—both during and following my visit—than was ever necessary. My research in England was further enhanced by a William B. Schallek Memorial Graduate Fellowship Award granted by the Richard III Society in 2002. At Cornell, the Mellon Foundation continued to sustain my work during the spring of 2004 with a Graduate Fellowship to Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. The Society Fellows offered invaluable suggestions and wonderful friendship during a year-long intellectual conversation about the secular and the sacred, punctuated with a healthy dose of levity. I must also acknowledge the support of the Cornell University Graduate School, which provided funds for travel to professional conferences as well as a research travel grant to Dublin so that I could examine the sole surviving manuscript of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament in the spring of 2004. I would have no one to thank at Cornell if the truly outstanding medievalists at Georgetown University had not made me realize (thankfully) that Medieval Studies vi was something one could actually do for a living. Of the many superb teachers who generously gave of themselves during my time in DC, two deserve special mention. Jo Ann Moran Cruz has helped me ground my forays into imaginative literature in an appreciation and respect for history, most recently through her trenchant response to material from the first three chapters of this dissertation presented at the 79th Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in Seattle. Penn Szittya has been so many things to me at some many times and in so many places, that I can only hope to be half the teacher and friend to my students that he as been to me during the last decade. Finally, these pages would never have been written without the unconditional support of my parents and my fiancée, nor without their patience with what must have seemed a quirky preoccupation with really old stuff. Without them and their love, I could never have written the words that fill the pages to come. Mom, Dad, and Christy: I thank you and I love you. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iii DEDICATION iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v TABLE OF CONTENTS viii INTRODUCTION 1 PART I CHAPTER ONE 9 “A book to þe lewyd peple”: Redefining the Gregorian Illitterati at the End of the Middle Ages CHAPTER TWO 44 Inventing Lay Meditation: Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love, and John Wyclif CHAPTER THREE 73 Learning to be Lewd: Ghostly Readings and Collaborative Visions viii PART II CHAPTER FOUR 100 Embodying Pedagogy: The Book of Margery Kempe CHAPTER FIVE 127 Performing Pedagogy: The Book of Margery Kempe PART III CHAPTER SIX 151 Staging Pedagogy EPILOGUE 206 BIBLIOGRAPHY 209 ix INTRODUCTION This dissertation explores clerical and lay desires as these intersected within peculiar forms of teaching and learning that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages, desires ostensibly spiritual but which nevertheless had implications ecclesiological, political, literary, and dramatic. At the point where these desires meet stands the image of the unlearned English lay person. This image, and the desires it speaks to, has a history of its own, and tracing that history reveals an unfolding of the discourses and identities that structured late-medieval society and its most basic foundations.
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