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Proquest Dissertations u Ottawa I .'University canadienne Cfinadn's university FACULTE DES ETUDES SUPERIEURES '™ FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND ET POSTOCTORALES U Ottawa POSDOCTORAL STUDIES ?,'University eamuJienne Canada's universitv Anna Louise Lewis AUTEUR DE LA THESE / AUTHOR OF THESIS Ph.D. (English) GRADE/DEGREE Department of English "FACUlTE";ic6LlVDlPATTfE¥fNt7FX^^^ Discerning Devotional Readers: Readers, Writers, and the Pursuit of God in Some Late Medieval Texts TITRE DE LA THESE / TITLE OF THESIS Andrew Taylor DIRECTEUR (DIRECTRICE) DE LA THESE / THESIS SUPERVISOR EXAMINATEURS (EXAMINATRICES) DE LA THESE / THESIS EXAMINERS Nicholas Watson Dominic Manganiello Victoria Burke Geoff Rector Gary W. Slater Le Doyen de la Faculte des eludes superieures et postdoctorales / Dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies DISCERNING DEVOTIONAL READERS: READERS, WRITERS. AND THE PURSUIT OF GOD IN SOME LATE MEDIEVAL TEXTS Anna Lewis English Department Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Anna Lewis, Ottawa, Canada, 2008 Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-49376-2 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-49376-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non­ sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract i Note on the Treatment of Texts ii Introduction. Addressing Your Readers 1 Chapter One. "The Lettere Sleeth": Identifying Bad Readers 30 Chapter Two. "By me alone is understonde alle": Creating the Ideal Interpretive Community in Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love 89 Chapter Three. Re-creating Orders, Rules, and Textual Communities: The Case of Book to a Mother and The Recluse 138 Chapter Four. "Glossing" the Gloss: The Lollard Pater Noster 189 Commentary and British Library MS Harley 2398 Chapter Five. Seeking Answers at the End: Reconciling Apocalyptic Visions in St John's College, Cambridge MS G.25 229 Conclusion: Discerning Devotional Writers 270 Works Cited and Bibliography. 277 i ABSTRACT This dissertation is concerned with both the way vernacular religious texts were written, and the way they were read, in late medieval England. The context for this discussion is the growth in lay readership and the increasingly ambitious spiritual aspirations of sections of the laity. This dissertation argues that awareness of this wider audience profoundly shaped the way writers presented their texts. Regardless of theological perspective or general intent, medieval writers reveal a common tendency to try and identify "right" readers for their texts, invoking specific interpretive communities, and guiding reader response by establishing parameters for interpretation. The first half of the study draws attention to this engagement with hermeneutics as it is found in Lollard tracts, The Cloud of Unknowing, Nicholas Love's Treatise on the Sacrament, Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love, and the anonymous works, Book to a Mother and The Recluse. Shifting attention on to the reader in its second half, the dissertation uses the evidence of two early fifteenth-century collections of religious texts to demonstrate how lay readers could and did fit their reading material around their own concerns and interests, and that these interests could be extremely diverse. Following Nichols and Wenzel's approach of studying the "whole book," I argue that by choosing to read certain texts together, readers were able to fundamentally alter the interpretation of those texts. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates connections between contemporaneous works which have rarely been dealt with together because of the tendency to divide medieval religious literature into discrete generic categories ("devotional," "mystic," "pastoral") or discrete doctrinal categories ("Lollard," "orthodox"). Its discussion of religious texts and manuscripts exposes the inadequacy of such categories given the depth, complexity, and range of religious opinion in late medieval England. 11 NOTE ON THE TREATMENT OF TEXTS Quotations from the Middle English texts featured in this dissertation contain minor alterations for the ease of the modern reader. These include the addition of modernised punctuation, changes in capitalisation, and expansions of abbreviated words. I have also replaced thorn with th and yogh with y, g, s, z,or gh as appropriate. The consonantal i has been replaced with;'. Words which may be unfamiliar to the reader are explained in square brackets. 1 INTRODUCTION: ADDRESSING YOUR READERS The phrase that forms the title of this dissertation, "discerning devotional readers," contains within it three different but connected contentions. The first is that writers of vernacular religious texts, aware of the growing distance between themselves and their readers, and the increasing number of those readers, sought to identify, or discern, the truly devotional readers, those who would grasp the writer's true intention and preserve the meaning of the text. This desire shaped the way they wrote. The second is that the medieval laity were, in fact, becoming increasingly discerning readers, something which was both cause and consequence of the fact that they were also becoming increasingly discerning in matters related to their religious beliefs. Growing in confidence in their spiritual capabilities and becoming more ambitious in their spiritual aspirations, lay readers could and did fit their reading material around their own concerns and interests. The third contention is that a great deal of modern scholarship has been driven by a determination to identify or discern the "devotional" readers, and alongside them, the "heretical" readers, and then, perhaps, the "reformist" or "mystic" readers. In other words, to arrange medieval readers, and medieval reading material, into discrete categories. In fact, the range of opinion expressed within some texts and the variety of material found within some manuscripts resists easy categorisation and shows us that one medieval reader could fall into all of these groupings at once. Consequently, the term "devotional" is used here in its broadest sense reflecting the desire, expressed by both writers and readers, that the written text should foster greater intimacy with God; to this extent, almost all works of vernacular theology - be they meditative, instructional or even 2 polemical - are essentially devotional.1 The first three chapters of this dissertation focus on the first contention by considering how writers probe and/or provide hermeneutic guidelines or "glosses" designed to define the "right" readership for their work. Their aim is, to a greater or lesser extent, to actually shape reader response, and pre-determine (or, in the case of the texts in Chapter 3, re-determine) meaning. The variety of texts explored here - Lollard tracts, two mystical texts, an ultra-orthodox text, and two pre-Lollard reformist texts - reveals how this aim manifests itself with surprising consistency across a range of otherwise diverse texts. Shifting to the treatment of specific manuscripts, the last two chapters focus on the second contention and demonstrate how readers, able to commission the production of texts they want to read, create from them specific, unique, and often varied collections of religious material, thereby exerting a power capable of affecting and altering the way texts are read. The study as a whole supports the third contention by revealing the vastly rich and complex range of religious and devotional thinking in late medieval England which blurs artificial generic, and even doctrinal, boundaries. New Readers "thorw [through] the heryng of holy bokys and thorw heryng of holy 1 The term "vernacular theology," popularised by the work of Nicholas Watson in the mid-1990s, is a particularly helpful one in this regard. Watson originally used the term in order to counter generic boundaries and
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