The Art of Arts: Theorising Pastoral Power in the English Middle Ages

Faculty of English The Art of Arts: Theorising Pastoral Power in the English Middle Ages Johannes Wolf King’s College University of Cambridge This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2017 Johannes Wolf The Art of Arts: Theorising Pastoral Power in the English Middle Ages Gregory the Great described the government of souls as ‘the art of arts,’ a sentiment that the Fourth Lateran Council would echo in 1215. This thesis takes as its fundamental proposition that this ‘art’ can be understood as a ‘craft’, one that is responsible for producing and maintaining a Christian subjectivity marked by introspection, inwardness, and a strong distrust of externalities. Using a theoretical framework influenced by Michel Foucault I suggest a tradition of administering and producing these subjects through ‘pastoral power.’ Charting the trajectory of these ideas from the ascetics of the early church through to fifteenth-century Middle English texts, I explore the dynamics produced by texts invested in producing this specific form of subjectivity as they expand their reach from a specialised audience of monks to an increasingly laicised vernacular sphere. This investigation is broken into two halves. The thesis begins with a re-reading of Michel Foucault’s theories of power and subjection. Here I suggest that there are important conceptual connections between Foucault’s concept of ‘discipline’ and medieval approaches to the care of the soul. The first half of the thesis stresses the longue durée development of pastoral power, focussing on two particular historical moments. The first of these chapters engages with the pastoral and monastic thinkers of the early church, who developed two overlapping regimes – that of body and spirit. The second turns to the Ancrene Wisse, arguing that the it responds to the developments of twelfth-century spirituality by suggesting a form of spiritual engagement that is increasingly imbricated in the mundane world. The second half of the thesis focuses on a number of texts produced in Middle English during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Two chapters focus on a collection of pastoral texts produced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The first focuses on the hermeneutic dynamics of these texts whilst second chapter assesses the use of documentary imagery and theories of legal accountability in the same texts. The final chapter suggests that certain proto-autobiographical i texts, represented by the work of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are conditioned by the concerns and dynamics of pastoral power, which also affects the practices modern readers bring to bear on them. ii Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is not the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. This dissertation does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the English Degree Committee. Including all footnotes but excluding the bibliography, it runs to 80,000 words. iii List of Abbreviations EETS OS Early English Text Society SEP Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy OED Oxford English Dictionary OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary MED Middle English Dictionary PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association of America NOTE All biblical references are to The Holy Bible: Douay version, translated from the Latin Vulgate, trans. Richard Challoner (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1956). iv CONTENTS i Abstract iii Declaration iv List of Abbreviations vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1 INTRODUCTION Ars artium and the technologies of pastoral power 12 1: SHEPHERD AND FLOCK Genealogy, discipline, and the pastoral subject 45 2: SECRET SELVES Governing the self in the early church 72 3: DISCIPLINARY PLACES Transforming structures in the Ancrene Wisse 113 4: BEING-IN-SIN Epistemological trauma and the sins of everyday life 145 5: WRITING POWER Accounting for pastoral power 178 6: PERSONAL DOOMSDAY Autobiography and the strategical elaboration of confession 221 CONCLUSION Forwards into the past 223 BIBLIOGRAPHY v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It seems appropriate in the context of such a work to use this opportunity to suggest a brief genealogy of my own. Thanks, then, are due to James Durran; Jon Phelan; Anna Baldwin; Laura Varnam; Vincent Gillespie; Kantik Ghosh; and Annie Sutherland, all of whose influences on this current work are substantial, if not always immediately obvious. More recently and specifically, I would like to thank Alexandra da Costa for her incisive readings and comments at key moments during my progress; Mary Carruthers, for sharing with me characteristically erudite insights on medieval monasticism; and, of course, my supervisor, Nicolette Zeeman, without whose unfailing critical and creative attention – to say nothing of the warmth and constancy of her friendship – this thesis would be indescribably lesser. An equal debt is owed to my friends and family, whose wisdom and support have sustained me through what has, at times, been an exhausting and arduous process. In non-exhaustive and no particular order, I have appreciated the love and strength of Jutta and Thomas Wolf, my parents; Kati Silverberg; Chloe Szebrat; Mathilde Zeeman; Jenny Shurville; Sarah Pine; Robert Corbyn-Smith; Luke Freeman Mills; Hugo Sugden; Jacob Grant; Laurence Gawthrop-Vinden; Ben Platt; Amelia Sylvia; and Joscha Thiele. Finally, I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to all those radicals and activists I have met – often briefly, sometimes anonymously – over the past four years, who have taught me time and time again the importance of living out to the fullest the conclusions of our intellectual labour. vi INTRODUCTION Ars artium and the technologies of pastoral power The opening to Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care assertively analogises medical and spiritual care, declaring in the process that ‘the government of souls is the art of arts [‘ars est artium’].’1 This refrain would be repeated nearly a millennium later, in the twenty-seventh Canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, held in November 1215: ‘To guide souls is a supreme art [ars artium regimen animarum].’2 In both cases, the phrase is used to mobilise support for a programme of teaching designed to create priests capable of tending effectively and carefully to the spiritual welfare of their flocks. In the case of Gregory, the Pastoral Care is designed to be exactly this programme, and to teach those in positions of responsibility how best to execute their pastoral powers. In the case of Lateran IV, Canon 27 is outshone by its famous sibling, Canon 21, which standardised annual auricular confession as a necessity across the medieval church. Both are grand gestures – and both are heavily invested in a sense of the pastoral role of the church as the ars artium. It is this role that produced throughout the middle ages a plethora of texts intended to structure and guide experts and laypeople alike in the disciplines of examination, communication, and absolution that make up the pastoral experience, commonly referred to as pastoralia.3 The use of the term ars – variously, ‘professional, artistic or technical skill’, ‘skilled work, craftsmanship’, ‘stratagem […] a tactical device’, ‘behaviour’, ‘a 1 Saint Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care, trans. Henry Davis (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950), Preface, p.21. The Latin of the Pastoral Care is taken from Grégoire le Grand, Règle pastorale, ed. Floribert Rommel, trans. Charles Morel, 2 vols, Sources Chrétiennes 381 (Paris: Editions du cerf, 1992). 2 ‘The Fourth Lateran Council – 1215’, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), pp.226-271 (27, p.248). 3 For a breakdown and genealogy of the different forms of texts produced and disseminated from the late twelfth century onwards, see Leonard E. Boyle, ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in The Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, TN.: The University of Tennessee Press, 1985), pp.30-43. Particularly helpful is his well-known tree diagram, originally part of his thesis, and reproduced in this article on p.30. profession, art, craft, trade, occupation’, and ‘a systematic body of knowledge and practical techniques, an art or science’4 – immediately opens the discursive field to a whole range of uses and applications. Practice implies the possibility of malpractice; both of these concepts require an institutional framework within which the limits of acceptable practice are established. Further, the term ars – elevating, as it does, the care of souls (‘regimen animarum’) to the level of a craft or what twenty-first century English speakers might tellingly call a profession – suggests an entire framework of significance, a constellation of practices, epistemic and ontological assumptions, knowledge-relations and, frequently, morals. Another term we might use for ars is the Greek technê, that is, a set of techniques or a craft grounded in a particular worldview, a particular way of prioritising and organising the existence of ourselves and our surroundings at large. This term is distinct (to various extents according to various thinkers) from episteme, a term closer to ‘purely theoretical’ knowledge.5 Understood in this manner, the term ars implies that pastoral work was always understand as work, as embodied in the material, historically-contingent practices that took place in day-to-day encounters with Christian subjects. That these subjects might themselves be conditioned not only by ideas of the self but practices – or an ars – of the self is a small leap indeed: [I]t is not enough to say that the subject is constituted in a symbolic system.

Load more