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Love and Drede: Religious Fear in Middle English

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Love and Drede: Religious Fear in Middle English Faculty of English Love and Drede: Religious Fear in Middle English Arabella Mary Milbank Emmanuel College University of Cambridge This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2017 This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is 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 except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. 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 except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text This dissertation does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the English Degree Committee, including footnotes, references and appendices but excluding the bibliography It has been prepared using the MHRA Style Guide (2013) ——— ABSTRACT Several earlier generations of historians described the later Middle Ages as an ‘age of fear’. This account was especially applied to accounts of the presumed mentality of the later medieval layperson, seen as at the mercy of the currents of plague, violence and dramatic social, economic and political change and, above all, a religiosity characterised as primitive or even pathological. This ‘great fear theory’ remains influential in public perception. However, recent scholarship has done much to restitute a more positive, affective, incarnational and even soteriologically optimistic late-medieval vernacular piety. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the positive and recuperative approach of this scholarship, it did not attend to the treatment of fear in devotional and literary texts of the period. This thesis responds to this gap in current scholarship, and the continued pull of this account of later-medieval piety, by building an account of fear’s place in the rich vernacular theology available in the Middle English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It takes as its starting point accounts of the role of fear in religious experience, devotion and practice within vernacular and lay contexts, as opposed to texts written by and for clerical audiences. The account of drede in Middle English strikingly integrates humbler aspects of fear into the relationship to God. The theological and indeed material circumstances of the later fourteenth century may have intensified fear’s role: this thesis suggests that they also fostered an intensified engagement with the inherited tradition, generating fresh theological accounts of the place of fear. Chapter One begins with a triad of broadly pastoral texts which might be seen to disseminate a top-down agenda but which, this analysis discovers, articulate diverse ways in which the humble place of fear is elevated as part of a vernacular agenda. Here love and fear are always seen in a complex, varying dialectic or symbiosis. Chapter Two explores how this reaches a particular apex in the foundational and final place of fear in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, and is not incompatible even with her celebratedly ‘optimistic’ theology. Chapter Three turns to a more broadly accessed generic context, that of later medieval cycle drama, to engage in readings of Christ’s Gethsemane fear in the ‘Agony in the Garden’ episodes. The N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York plays articulate complex and variant theological ideas about Christ’s fearful affectivity as a site of imitation and participation for the medieval layperson. Chapter Four is a reading of Piers Plowman that argues a right fear is essential to Langland’s espousal of a poetics of crisis and a crucial element in the questing corrective he applies to self and society. It executes new readings of key episodes in the poem, including the Prologue, Pardon, Crucifixion and the final apocalyptic passus, in the light of its theology of fear. CONTENTS PAGE Acknowledgements 2 Abbreviations 4 Introduction 5 Chapter One: Fear in Speculum vitae, Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God and Jacob’s Well 41 Chapter Two: Fear in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations 99 Chapter Three: Christ’s Fear in the Cycle Plays 135 Figures 221 Chapter Four: Fear in Piers Plowman 227 Conclusion 303 Bibliography 310 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe the most part of my thanks to Nicolette Zeeman, doctoral supervisor nonpareil, without whom this thesis would not have come to be. Her intellectual discernment, scholarly acumen, faith in my work and unflagging kindness have been foundation, walls and roof to this project. Amongst medievalists in the Faculty of English at Cambridge I am very grateful to Barry Windeatt, my advisor, who has supported my career thus far, and contributed to this project, as well as to Richard Beadle and James Wade, both of whom read early forms of my work. I also wish to acknowledge all the participants of the fruitful context of the Middle English Seminar and the Medieval Reading Group from 2012–2016 who inspired and aided me at various points including commenting on papers given. Also to Dr Neil Wright for his efforts to train me in Medieval Latin. The AHRC are due acknowledgement for funding both my years of study, the running of a confererence and my maternity leave. I wish also to thank Emmanuel College, Cambridge for its continued support in so many ways, financial and more effervescent. Thanks are due especially to my chaplain and graduate tutor, Jeremy Caddick, who has kept me afloat in a number of ways, and enabled the founding and continuance of the Whichcote Society and its Plato Reading Group in 2012. To my co-founder, Simone Kotva, and the participants of this I owe a great number of sympathetic symposia. A number of other collaborative contexts aided me over the course of this thesis, including the Aquinas Reading Group, where Andrew Davison and John 3 Hughes (1979–2014) are due especial tribute and, latterly Silvianne Aspray. The Theology and Poetics Reading Group, and its afterlife, was also a crucial context, and here Laura Kilbride must be named. Amongst innumerable names that could be cited here for contributing support and exchange of all kinds over the course of my doctorate, I would like to thank Kate Crowcroft, Helen Cooper, Christopher Page, Hugh Reid, Rosalind Lintott, Alexander Gabrovsky, Mary-Ann Middelkoop, Isabella Sanders, Eleanor Rushton, Maddie Geddes-Barton, Ruth Jackson, Melissa Guiliano, Hanna Weibye, Zachary Guiliano, Phillip Krinks, Samuel Kimbriel, Alex Wong, David Parry, Clare Gardom, Nevsky Everett, John Milbank, Alison Milbank, Sebastian Milbank, Robin Kirkpatrick, Isidoros Katsos, Lucy McKitterick, Richard Stanton, Adrian Pabst, Stephen Coleman, Fr. Robert Mackley, Fr. Mark Bishop and Giles Waller. I also owe thanks to a number of pieds-à-terre and convivial tables in Cambridge: 10 Adams Road, home of the magnificent Friedrike and Christopher Jeans; 9 Aylestone Road; 83 Hazlewood Close; 11 Cosin Court; Dr Kotva’s Rooms, Emmanuel College. Also to the Breakfast Club and all the many times it failed to meet for breakfast. As it transpires, a thesis on fear cannot be written without a great deal of love. This thesis would truly have been implausible without my family and inconceivable without my darling Jim. Aubrey John Wulfram came as an unexpected addition to the project halfway through its completion, which he both delayed and enhanced immensely. Michaelmas Day, 2017 4 ABBREVIATIONS ST Summa Theologiae PL Patrologia Latina MED Middle English Dictionary OED Oxford English Dictionary YLS Yearbook of Langland Studies MLR Modern Language Review ELN English Language Notes 5 INTRODUCTION I. LOVE AND DREDE For ƿe right way ƿat lyggys til blys And ƿat ledys a man theder es thys Ƿe wey of mekenes principaly And of drede and luf of God almyghty, Ƿat may be cald ƿe way of wysdom.1 This collocation, ‘love and drede’ is extremely widespread in Medieval English literature to describe the dual aspects of a single ‘emotional posture’ in the relation of the Christian person to God.2 We find it here near to the opening of the Prick of Conscience, the Middle English pastoral poem that exists in vastly more manuscripts than any other.3 In the Prick the forming of a right drede comes to be synonymous 1 Richard Morris’s Prick of Conscience: a corrected and amplified reading text, prepared by Ralph Hanna and Sarah Wood, EETS 342 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ‘Entre’, ll.139–43, p.6. 2 Paul Megna, ‘Dread, Love, and the Bodies of Piers Plowman A.10, B.9 and C.10’, YLS 29 (2015), 61–88 (p.61). For example, Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, ch.74 in The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p.357; Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’, Canterbury Tales in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987; repr. 2008), pp.264–69, l.155 (p.264). 3 See Introduction, Prik of Conscience, ed. by James H. Morey (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012), p.1. 6 with the poem’s didactic and penitential enterprise. The way of loving and fearing God in harmony is the via (road) to blessedness. In this text’s ‘entre’ or gateway, love is swiftly dealt with: creedally inspired as proper adoration due to the creator and the redeemer, it is only ‘kynde’ or natural for man who has wit and will, reason and volition, to love God as a response to these gifts.
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