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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY of AMERICA Thirteenth-Century

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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY of AMERICA Thirteenth-Century THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Thirteenth-Century English Religious Lyrics, Religious Women, And the Cistercian Imagination A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the Center for Medieval and Byzantine Studies School of Arts & Sciences Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Charlotte Allen Washington, D.C. 2011 Thirteenth-Century English Religious Lyrics, Religious Women, And the Cistercian Imagination Charlotte Allen, Ph.D. Director: Stephen K. Wright, Ph.D. Nearly all of the brief Middle English lyric poems that began to appear in manuscripts during the first half of the thirteenth century are religious in nature, and nearly all either concern the passion of Christ or are prayers to his mother, Mary. Very often the two motifs appear in tandem, in poems that place both speaker and audience at the foot of Christ's cross where Mary is engulfed in a sorrow that the reader is asked to experience empathetically. This dissertation argues that the lyrics grew out of a prose meditative genre, in particular a Cistercian meditative genre related to twelfth-century exegesis of the Song of Songs, that offered readers a series of visual tableaux of events in the life of Christ to experience imaginatively. The passion of Christ was a central focus of this sort of meditation. The English Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx's De institutione inclusarum, a treatise addressed to his anchoress-sister, offered a model of this genre that was widely copied and imitated, and some of the earliest English religious lyrics appear either as part of those prose meditative texts or as appendices thereto. Eventually both the prose texts and the lyrics became devotional reading for laypeople. This dissertation examines the literary relationship between the lyrics and the prose texts and some of the manuscripts where the earliest Middle English religious lyrics appear. This dissertation by Charlotte Allen fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in medieval and Byzantine studies approved by Stephen K. Wright, Ph.D., as Director, and by Katherine L. Jansen, Ph.D., and Joan Tasker Grimbert, Ph.D., as Readers. __________________________________________ Stephen K. Wright, Ph.D., Director ___________________________________________ Katherine L. Jansen, Ph.D., Reader ___________________________________________ Joan Tasker Grimbert, Ph.D., Reader ii In loving memory of my father, Elmer Carlton Low (1907-2000), and to my husband, Donald Fraser Allen, "Till a' the seas gang dry" iii CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS v INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter 1. Aelred's Sister and the Birth of a New Devotional Genre 42 Chapter 2. What Aelred Wrought: Meditative Literature in England 145 Chapter 3. Anchoritic Literature as Devotional Literature 218 Chapter 4. Thirteenth-Century Religious Lyrics in Their Meditative Context 297 Chapter 5. The Birth of the English Passion-Lyric Miscellany 346 CONCLUSION 413 BIBLIOGRAPHY 419 iv ABBREVIATIONS ANT Anglo-Norman Texts Brown XIII Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century Brown XIV Carleton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century Brown XV Carleton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century CCCM Corpus christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis CCSL Corpus christianorum scriptorum latinorum CSEL Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum EETS Early English Text Society Index Carleton Brown, The Index of Middle English Verse PL Patrologia latina SC Sources chrétiennes v Introdu ction The year 1982 witnessed the posthumous publication of the last book by Jack A.W. (J.A.W.) Bennett, a towering mid-twentieth-century scholar who had taught Middle English literature at Oxford and Cambridge for nearly thirty years before his death in 1981. Bennett's book was titled Poetry of the Passion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse.1 It was, as its title indicated, a survey of poems whose theme was the passion of Christ, beginning with the Old English Dream of the Rood, probably written during the early eighth century, and ending with the fragmentary Anathemata by the Welsh Catholic poet-painter David Jones (1895-1974), a literary work that is now mostly forgotten but in its day was praised as a masterpiece by T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and William Carlos Williams, among others. Bennett's book was informed by his lifetime of scholarship as a medievalist and accompanied by detailed and erudite endnotes, but it also reflected a personal and even polemical concern on Bennett's part. In a brief preface he explained that his purpose in writing the book had been to combat what he considered the crude and anachronistic reductionism of "modern theology," with its tendency to dismiss traditional Christian preoccupation with Christ's passion and the violence done to Jesus' body as an endorsement of either violence in general or passivity in the face of violence. Bennett declared that "poems created in the so-called Ages of Faith can still speak to our condition"—that is, that the suffering of Christ, interpreted through literature of power and beauty, could provide a 1 Jack A.W. Bennett, Poetry of the Passion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 1 2 way of understanding all human suffering, even in a post-Christian age that tends to view suffering as meaningless and unnecessary.2 The second chapter of Poetry of the Passion, dealing with the very earliest of Middle English passion lyrics dating to the beginning of the thirteenth century, lyrics that are the subject of this dissertation, was titled "The Meditative Moment." Its opening paragraph began as follows: i Nou goth sonne under wod, Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode. Nou goth sonne under tre, Me reweth, Marie, thi sone and the. ii Whyt was his nakede brest and red of blode hys syde, Bleyc was his fair andled, his wnde dop and wide, And his armes ystreit hey upon the rode; on fif studes on his body the stremes ran o blode. These two simple thirteenth-century quatrains, wholly English in idiom and vocabulary, illustrate one of the greatest revolutions in feeling that Europe has ever witnessed, and each line holds in embryo seeds that will burgeon richly in devotional verse for four hundred years and more. Beside this phenomenon the emergence of 'courtly love', so called, is a mere ripple on the surface of literature, though, as the setting of the first stanza will show, the two developments are not 3 entirely unrelated. 2 Ibid., Preface. 3 Ibid., 32 and 210, n. 1. For the texts of the two quatrains, both of which are preserved in numerous manuscripts that bespoke the lyrics' wide circulation during the later Middle Ages, Bennett used the versions found in Douglas Gray's Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London and Boston: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1972) and A Selection of Religious Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). (Bennett translated via footnotes archaic words in the lyrics that are now in disuse, but those footnotes are not included here.) This dissertation uses versions of the texts found in Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932) and Carleton Brown, ed. Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), together with variants found by later scholars. The two quatrains that Bennett quoted are translated as follows: "Now the sun goes under the wood. / I pity, Mary, your fair face. / Now the sun goes under the tree. / I pity, Mary, your son and you." "White was his naked breast, and red with blood his side, / Pale was his fair face, his wound deep and wide, / and his arms stretched high upon the cross. / On five places on his side ran the streams of blood." 3 These opening lines of Bennett's second chapter are remarkable in two ways. The first is that Bennett clearly selected the two quatrains for his headpiece because they provided the most literarily powerful examples of the point he was arguing: that the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries marked a sea-change in Western Christian devotional practice centering around the passion: from reflection on the crucifixion's theological meaning as victory over Satan and rectification of Adam's fall to an unabashed focus on the physical sufferings of Christ as generators of pity ("me reweth") and empathy that would draw the reader into an emotional appreciation of the sheer love that the sinless son of God displayed for human beings by becoming human himself and undergoing an excruciating death in order to expiate human sin. It is the aim of this dissertation to explore exactly how and why the above two English lyrics and others like them, all dating from the first half of the thirteenth century, encapsulated and furthered "one of the greatest revolutions in feeling," as Bennett described it: an explosion of intensely affective devotional writing during the later Middle Ages centered around the passion of Christ and the mourning figure of his mother, Mary, as she suffered with her son at the foot of the cross. This dissertation argues that the lyrics grew out of a prose meditative genre focused on the life, and especially, the passion of Christ that flourished in monasteries beginning in the late eleventh century and became devotional reading for laypeople during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This meditative genre in turn largely grew out of twelfth-century exegesis of the biblical Song of Songs, itself a flourishing genre that treated the Song as a love-poem in which Christ was the chief actor and supreme lover who had laid down his life for his beloved, and his bride was 4 the human soul, although sometimes a consecrated virgin or even Mary herself. Both of the above lyrics, for example, can be directly traced both textually and contextually to prose meditative texts dating from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries that were widely copied, translated, and imitated during the later Middle Ages.
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