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Maria Mediatrix: Mediating the Divine in the Devotional Literature of Late Medieval England

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Maria Mediatrix: Mediating the Divine in the Devotional Literature of Late Medieval England Maria Mediatrix: Mediating the Divine in the Devotional Literature of Late Medieval England by Clare Marie Snow A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Clare Marie Snow 2012 Maria Mediatrix: Mediating the Divine in the Devotional Literature of Late Medieval and Early Modern England Clare Marie Snow Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto 2012 Abstract Christianity, as a religion centered on the Incarnation of a spiritual being, is always necessarily a religion of embodiment, but its attitude toward that embodiment has always been one of distrust. The juxtaposition of seemingly opposing forces—flesh and spirit, affect and intellect—results in problematic but inevitable troubling of binary oppositions. Late medieval devotion is replete with mediators that serve to focus meditation and prayer in order to bring the individual closer to God, but they can also represent the physical presence of God and bring God closer to the individual. A study of these various modes of mediation will reveal how the connections between spiritual and physical were conceived. Mediation—whether of language, the senses and emotions, texts and objects, or saints—reveals and reestablishes our connection to the divine. Using the depictions of the Virgin Mary, the Mediatrix, found in the devotional literature of medieval England as a starting point, this study explores the mechanism of mediation in medieval Christian thought. The first two chapters examine the problem of the erotic in religious discourse, focusing primarily on architectural allegory and imagery and language borrowed from the Song of Songs. Architectural allegories representing the female body of the Virgin Mary and the female religious draw on both spiritual allegories and allegories found in secular love poetry ii and romance. The use of eros in devotional discourse creates a tension between the prescribed chastity and sensory restriction and the highly sensual, sexual language and heightens the emotional effect of the text. The second two chapters focus on compassion, first looking at planctus Mariae, or Marian laments, to examine how a meditating reader is drawn into the scene of the passion through dialogue with Mary and through Mary‘s control of the meditative gaze. The final chapter examines how devotional images can be used as mediators because of their ability to represent (and in some sense be) an invisible, divine reality. iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisory committee—Suzanne Akbari, Alexandra Gillespie, and David Townsend—for their guidance and encouragement. I am particularly grateful to Professor Akbari for challenging me to take my ideas further than I ever thought possible. I would also like to thank Will Robbins and Ruth Harvey, my internal examiners, for their attentive reading and thought-provoking feedback on my work. Particular thanks are due to my external examiner, Professor Sarah Stanbury, whose generous remarks and insightful and stimulating criticisms have already given me many ideas for further research. I am eternally grateful to my ―Thesis Support Group‖ for always being there for me along the way. Jennifer Konieczny, Eileen Kim, Giselle Gos, and Susannah Brower deserve special mention for reading drafts and translations, helping me find citations after I left Toronto, getting physical copies to advisors, listening to me think out loud, and offering opinions and advice on everything from formatting to phrasing. I would like to thank my family, especially my parents Ron and Mary Snow, for their continued support and love. Above all, I must thank Richard Orf for always encouraging me, for sticking with me through years of long-distance, and for always having more faith in me than I do in myself. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents .............................................................................................................................v Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................ vii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Architectural Allegory and the Marian Body ................................................................18 The Château d’Amour in Context .............................................................................................20 Architecture and Spiritual Eros .................................................................................................34 Body and Flesh ..........................................................................................................................50 Conclusions ...............................................................................................................................61 Chapter 2 Eros and the Anchoritic Body .......................................................................................66 The Ancrene Wisse and the Anchoritic Body ...........................................................................69 Christ as Lover and the Song of Songs .....................................................................................91 The Anchoress as Marian Bride ..............................................................................................104 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................115 Chapter 3 Mourning and Compassion .........................................................................................120 Affective Piety and Marian Devotion .....................................................................................124 The ―Quis dabit‖ and the Lamentation of Mary to St. Bernard ..............................................131 Dialogue and Point of View in Middle English Planctus Mariae ..........................................152 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................164 Chapter 4 Living Images ..............................................................................................................168 The Justification of Images .....................................................................................................173 The Visuality and Physicality of Devotion .............................................................................189 Interacting with Images ...........................................................................................................201 Conclusions .............................................................................................................................210 v Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................213 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................220 vi Abbreviations BMK The Book of Margery Kempe CCCM Corpus Christianorum CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina EETS Early English Text Society o.s. original series s.s. supplementary series Glossa Ordinaria Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria IMEV Index of Middle English Verse MWME A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050-1500. PL Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 1844-1855. vii Introduction Christianity, as a religion centered on the Incarnation of a spiritual being, is always necessarily a religion of embodiment, but its attitude toward that embodiment has always been one of distrust. In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul defines two opposing forces in the human individual, the flesh and the spirit. He writes: ―caro enim concupiscit adversus spiritum spiritus autem adversus carnem haec enim invicem adversantur ut non quaecumque vultis illa faciatis‖ [For the flesh lusts against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh; for these are adverse to one another so that you do not do those things which you want.].1 The flesh is the source of weakness, lusts and sin; it leads the willing soul away from God. But in the Incarnation of Christ, God joined divine spirit with human flesh. The juxtaposition of seemingly opposing forces—flesh and spirit, affect and intellect—results in problematic but inevitable troubling of binary oppositions. In medieval theology, Mary‘s body, as the physical site of the Incarnation, provided an opportunity for speculation about the relationship between divinity and humanity. The paradoxical nature of Mary‘s simultaneously virginal and maternal body and her unique relationship with Christ are used to create a personally meaningful image for the reader of devotional texts. An examination of how Marian imagery is used as a rhetorical and meditative device in devotional texts will shed light on the way the relationship between human body and divine spirit was experienced. From the early Christian era, through the Middle Ages, and into the present, theological speculation about the Virgin Mary typically has centered on her virginity and maternity. These aspects of Mary‘s physical, human, and specifically female body raise 1
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