Abstract
Much medieval devotional and visionary literature is concerned with directing its audience’s meditative practices toward gaining a deeper understanding of Christ’s suffering and salvation history as a whole. Some such texts, however, make use of the text’s materiality—as book and as language—to generate knowledge of God. This chapter argues that Rolle’s Meditations and The Book of Margery Kempe strove to bring their readers to deeper knowledge of God through the reading experience itself. Rolle employs a poetics of presence that both models and generates an affective response, whereas Kempe’s references to books model a literate response for her readers. Both works thus present the text in itself as a means of producing experience. The centrality of the text’s materiality in these reading practices—not only as a vehicle for devotion but as an object that manifests devotion in its own right—indicates the importance of the act of reading in emerging spiritual praxes, which is particularly significant in an era of growing vernacular textual production and broader access to works of spiritual guidance.
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Notes
- 1.
Richard Rolle, English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931) 36. I have used Allen’s edition where possible, and C. Horstman, ed., Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church and His Followers, 2 vols. (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1895) when referring portions of the Meditations that it does not contain.
- 2.
D. H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 6. Laurel Amtower likewise invokes the breadth of meanings that “to read” could encompass, specifically in late fourteenth-century Middle English, including “to understand,” “to study,” “to interpret,” and “to advise.” Laurel Amtower, Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages, The New Middle Ages Series (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 149.
- 3.
Green, Women Readers 6.
- 4.
“Quid enim prodest lectione continua tempus occupare, sanctorum gesta et scripta transcurrere, nisi ea. masticando et ruminando succum eliciamus et transglutiendo usque ad cordis intima transmittamus, ut ex his consideremus diligenter statum nostrum et studeamus eorum opera agere quorum facta cupimus lectitare?” Guigo II, Epistola de Vita Contemplativa (Scala claustralium), XIII, ed. E. Colledge and J. Walsh, Sources Chrétiennes 164 (Paris, 1970) 108; quoted in Ineke Van ‘t Spijker, “Model Reading: Saints’ Lives and Literature of Religious Formation,” in “Scribere sanctorum gesta”: Recuiel d’études d’hagiographie médiévale offert à Guy Philippart, ed. Étienne Renard, Michel Trigalet, Xavier Hermand, and Paul Bertrand, Hagiologia vol. 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005) 140. Hugh of St. Victor remarks on the importance, in reading Scripture, of “deeper understanding” through exposition (Didascalicon 3.8) and the use of text-based meditation to penetrate divine mysteries (Didascalicon 3.10); The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 92–93.
- 5.
Green, Women Readers 43.
- 6.
On intellegere and the intellectus, see Jessica Barr, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010) 9–23 and 99–102. On sapientia and, especially, its difference from scientia, see Gillian Rudd, Managing Language in Piers Plowman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994) 19, Anthony Kenny Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005) 168–69, and Gordon Leff, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook: An Essay on Intellectual and Spiritual Change in the Fourteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1976) 59.
- 7.
Amtower, Engaging Words 79.
- 8.
Alexandra Barratt, “‘Take a Book and Read’: Advice for Religious Women,” in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker Cate (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2009) 203–204.
- 9.
Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700, Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) 7.
- 10.
Warren, The Embodied Word 4.
- 11.
Maria Cristina Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) 3.
- 12.
Emily Holmes, Flesh Made Word: Medieval Mystics, Writing, and the Incarnation (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013).
- 13.
For an exploration of how Middle English mystics attempted to negotiate this difficulty, see Rick McDonald, “The Perils of Language in the Mysticism of Late Medieval England,” Mystics Quarterly 34.3/4 (2008): 45–70.
- 14.
Claire Elizabeth McIlroy, The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle, Studies in Medieval Mysticism (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2004) 30.
- 15.
McIlroy, English Prose Treatises 28.
- 16.
Allen, English Prose Writings 23; Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 89 and 91.
- 17.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 89.
- 18.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 90.
- 19.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 91.
- 20.
Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) 1.
- 21.
Ayoush Lazikani, “Remembrance and Time in the Wooing Group,” in Reconsidering Gender, Time and Memory in Medieval Culture, ed. Elizabeth Cox, Liz Herbert McAvoy, and Roberta Magnani, Gender in the Middle Ages 10 (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2015) 80.
- 22.
Lazikani, “Remembrance” 82.
- 23.
Lazikani, “Remembrance” 83.
- 24.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 89.
- 25.
Rita Copeland, “Richard Rolle and the Rhetorical Theory of the Levels of Style,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1984, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1984) 71.
- 26.
Copeland, “Richard Rolle” 76.
- 27.
Copeland, “Richard Rolle” 76. Copeland also points out the ways in which tenor and vehicle merge in Rolle’s metaphors for the divine (71); as she puts it, “There are linguistic signs, denoting sensual experience, by which we are brought towards an understanding of spiritual experience; but these same terms, when removed from a sensual sphere and placed in a transcendent sphere, constitute the experience itself. The domain of such linguistic manipulation, in which the dual terms of metaphor unite and the verbal image assumes literal force, is exclusively that of the highest degree of love” (72).
- 28.
Allen, English Writings 24.
- 29.
Allen, English Writings 24.
- 30.
Allen, English Writings 24. On the general agreement that the Meditations are Rolle’s work, see Hope Emily Allen, “Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole,” Philosophical Review 38.6 (1929) 281; Mary Felicitas Madigan, The Passio Domini Theme in the Works of Richard Rolle: His Personal Contribution in its Religious, Cultural, and Literary Context (Salzburg: Institut für englische Sprache und Literature, 1978) 278–281; Richard Rolle, Prose and Verse: From MS Longleat 29 and Related Manuscripts, ed. Sarah J. Ogilvie-Thomson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) xcii–xciv, and McIlroy, English Prose Treatises 43–44, n77.
- 31.
All of the quotations in this paragraph are from Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 91.
- 32.
Spatial and temporal dislocations are characteristics of medieval devotional contemplation. Carolyn Dinshaw touches on this form of queer time in, especially, the third chapter of How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Pertinent explorations of spatial and temporal dislocation and its manifestation in medieval literature can also be found in Laura Saetveit Miles, “Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008) 154–165, and in McAvoy’s introduction to the same collection, “Introduction: In principio: The Queer Matrix of Gender, Time and Memory in the Middle Ages” 1–16.
- 33.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 102.
- 34.
Richard Rolle: The English Writings, trans. Rosamund S. Allen (New York: Paulist Press, 1988) 122.
- 35.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 103.
- 36.
McIlroy, English Prose Treatises 43.
- 37.
McIlroy, English Prose Treatises 43.
- 38.
McIlroy, English Prose Treatises 45.
- 39.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 98.
- 40.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 98.
- 41.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 99.
- 42.
Horstman, Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle 91.
- 43.
David Lavinsky, “‘Speke to me be thowt’: Affectivity, Incendium Amoris, and the Book of Margery Kempe,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 112.3 (2013): 345. Lavinsky also points out the frequency with which variants of the Rollean phrase “fire of love” is used in the Book (345–47).
- 44.
Lavinsky, “‘Speke to me’” 341.
- 45.
Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, eds., The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS 212 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940) 18–19. All references to the Book are from this edition.
- 46.
The Book of Margery Kempe 19.
- 47.
The Book of Margery Kempe 135.
- 48.
Kempe’s privileged knowledge gets her in trouble with non-learned interlocutors, as well, who cannot understand her revealed wisdom. One somewhat amusing example of this is the popular response to her remarks on how “It is ful mery in Hevyn”: “Why speke зe so of þe myrth þat is in Heuyn; зe know it not & зe haue not be þer no mor þan we” (11).
- 49.
On the tension between orality and writing in the Book and their relationship to embodiment and authority, see also Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), esp. 97–126. In Lochrie’s words, the Book is “a parable of the relation between the oral and written texts” (100).
- 50.
Françoise Le Saux, “‘Hir not lettyrd: Margery Kempe and Writing,” Writing & Culture, ed. Balz Engler, SPELL: Swiss papers in English language and literature 6 (1992): 53–68.
- 51.
Diana R. Uhlman, “The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script: Orality and Literacy in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Studies in Philology 91.1 (1994): 60; the quoted passage is from The Book of Margery Kempe 218.
- 52.
Barbara Zimbalist, “Christ, Creature, and Reader: Verbal Devotion in The Book of Margery Kempe,” The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 41.1 (2015): 1–23. Importantly, Zimbalist sees this exemplarity as necessitating textual transmission; she does not argue for a hierarchy of the oral over the literate. In her words, “it is her textual representation of speech … that constitutes the text’s literary and spiritual innovations” (3).
- 53.
The Book of Margery Kempe 214.
- 54.
This complexity is evident in studies of the writing of the Book. Numerous scholars argue for Kempe’s control over the written text; see, for example, Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Alysia Kolentsis, “Telling the Grace That She Felt: Linguistic Strategies in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 20.3 (2008): 225–43; and Liz Herbert McAvoy, “‘After Hyr Owyn Tunge’: Body, Voice and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Women’s Writing: The Elizabethan to Victorian Period 9.2 (2002): 159–76. Denis Renevey also discusses the stages of translation from Kempe’s experience to the text, starting with the writing of God’s work on her body, in “Margery’s Performing Body: The Translation of Late Medieval Discursive Religious Practices,” in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000) 197–216.
- 55.
The Book of Margery Kempe 216.
- 56.
Kathleen Ashley, “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.2 (1998): 375.
- 57.
The Book of Margery Kempe 142.
- 58.
The Book of Margery Kempe 143.
- 59.
The Book of Margery Kempe 94.
- 60.
The Book of Margery Kempe 143.
- 61.
The Book of Margery Kempe 152–53.
- 62.
The Book of Margery Kempe 153.
- 63.
The Book of Margery Kempe 153–54.
- 64.
One desired effect of this passage is, of course, the further authorization of Margery’s weeping. By showing how his attitude changed, the priest-amanuensis demonstrates his initial skepticism and conversion; further, as Diane Watt notes, “[h]is ‘masculine’ objectifying voice confirms the veracity of her revelations and the orthodoxy of her piety and authorizes the text itself.” Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997) 18. Watt also points out that this is one of only three substantial passages in the Book in which “it is not only possible to distinguish the voice of Kempe’s principal scribe, but where he also appears as a character in his own narrative.” These three passages all focus on the resolution of the priest’s doubts about Kempe’s legitimacy as a holy woman (Watt, Secretaries 17). See also Janet Wilson, “Communities of Dissent: the Secular and Ecclesiastical Communities of Margery Kempe’s Book,” in Medieval Women in Their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997) 155–185. In addition, Levinsky argues that Rolle’s work may have been included in this list to legitimate Kempe’s practices: “The scribe calls upon Rolle to assist in the larger cultural project of consolidating a standard of religious observance for devout women, one centered on weeping and other tropes of the body.” Levinsky, “Speke to me” 355.
- 65.
The Book of Margery Kempe 165–66.
- 66.
The Book of Margery Kempe 166.
- 67.
The Book of Margery Kempe 166.
- 68.
Although I have not discussed it in this chapter, the very fact that the Book illuminates the wrongheadedness of Margery’s hostile interlocutors and presents a privileged understanding of the origins and nuances of her graces illustrates the potential for texts to provide knowledge that cannot be obtained through witnessing.
- 69.
Lavinsky, “Speke to me” 356–58.
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Barr, J. (2019). Read It and Weep: Affective and Literate Engagement in Richard Rolle’s Meditations and The Book of Margery Kempe. In: Jager, K. (eds) Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18334-9_10
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