Abstract
Scholars including Noël Carroll have placed the terminus post quem of the horror genre at the eighteenth century. The exclusion of the medieval period persists for two central reasons: first, if horror literature is taken as arising from a set of recognizable tropes, then these tropes largely originate within Gothic literature; second, the fear of the supernatural exploited in horror literature is particularly calibrated to a post-1750 world in which monsters are considered a figment of the imagination. Whereas Carroll excludes the Middle Ages, H.P. Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) offers an avenue for interrogating the fashioning of horror within the Middle Ages. This chapter uses Supernatural Horror in Literature to bring modern theories of horror into conversation with medieval literature, particularly The Prick of Conscience (1350), a poetic treatise produced in high numbers in England, which uses memorable fragments of suffering and monstrosity to encourage penitence.
An early version of this chapter was presented at the 36th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts held in Orlando, March 18–22, 2015. Both the research for this chapter and travel to the conferences were made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for which I am extremely grateful.
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- 1.
H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap Long, 22 February 1931 in Selected Letters III (1929–1931), edited by August Derleth and James Turner (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1971), 293; quoted in S. T. Joshi, A Dreamer and a Visionary: H.P. Lovecraft in His Time Joshi (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 298. Bryant Brantley studies both Lovecraft’s aversion to the Middle Ages and his links with it in “H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘Unnameable’ Middle Ages” in Medieval Afterlives in Popular Culture, edited by Gail Ashton, and Daniel T. Kline (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 113–127.
- 2.
James H. Morey, ed., Prik of Conscience (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2012), 3:499–591. All modern translations of the original Middle English are my own.
- 3.
“Lothli (adj.).” Middle English Dictionary. Accessed April 14, 2015. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED26162
- 4.
H. P. Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu” in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, edited by S. T. Joshi (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 165.
- 5.
Ibid., 139.
- 6.
H. P. Lovecraft, The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature, edited by S. T. Joshi (New York: Hippocampus Press, 2000), 29.
- 7.
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 29–30. This rather outmoded idea, which S. T. Joshi offhandedly remarks “is no longer accepted by anthropologists” (103, n. 5), likely came from Margaret A. Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921).
- 8.
Ken Gelder, “Introduction” in The Horror Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 3.
- 9.
Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art” (1949). “L’Art, exercise de la cruauté” was originally published in Médicine de France 4 (1949): 21–7 and reprinted in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. XI (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). This translation first appeared on the CD-ROM BLAM! 1 (1993) and was revised for supervert.com
- 10.
Andrew Joynes, ed., Medieval Ghost Stories (Woodbridge, England: Boydell Press, 2001), xii
- 11.
Bataille.
- 12.
Morey, 3:125–27.
- 13.
Ibid., 3:125–31.
- 14.
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 24.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), xi.
- 17.
Barbara W Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (New York: Knopf, 1978), xiii.
- 18.
Lewis and McIntosh identified 120 manuscripts and fragments in A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1982). Ralph Hanna III has recently suggested the number may be as high as 170 in “Two New Manuscript Fragments of Speculum Vitae,” Journal of the Early Book Society 16 (2013): 193–98. These numbers can be compared to the 81 manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales identified by Michael Sargent in “What Do the Numbers Mean? A Textual Critic’s Observations on Some Patterns of Middle English Manuscript Transmission” which appears in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, edited by Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 206. The Prick of Conscience has begun to undergo a re-evaluation, in part because of the publication of two new editions, the first by James H. Morey which I have cited from throughout, and the second by Hanna and Sarah Woods: Richard Morris’s Prick of Conscience: A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Contributing to this, Moira Fitzgibbons has produced two articles which address The Prick of Conscience as a literary text, rather than focusing on the linguistic data it might provide: “Enabled and Disabled ‘Myndes’ in The Prick of Conscience” in Medieval Poetics and Social Practice: Responding to the Work of Penn R. Szittya, edited by Seeta Chaganti (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 72–94 and “Critical Pleasure, Visceral Literacy, and the Prik of Conscience,” Pedagogy 13 (2013): 245–266. Daniel Sawyer has also identified fragments of another Conscience manuscript in “Rediscovered Manuscript Fragments of The Prick of Conscience in the Library of Queens’ College, Cambridge,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society (forthcoming).
- 19.
Jean Jost remarks that its emphasis on “excruciatingly detailed physical pain … plays an excessive role” in “Afterlife in the Southern Recension,” typescript 10; quoted in Howell Chickering, “Rhetorical Stimulus in the Prick of Conscience” in Medieval Paradigms, edited by Jeremy duQuesnay Adams and Stephanie A Hayes-Healy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 209. Derek Pearsall’s quotation appears in Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1977), 139.
- 20.
Anne Clark Bartlett and Thomas Howard Bestul, “Introduction” in Cultures of Piety: Medieval English Devotional Literature in Translation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 3–4.
- 21.
Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al., eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, PA.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 241.
- 22.
See Alexandra Barratt’s description of the ownership of Conscience manuscripts in “Spiritual Writings and Religious Instruction,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. II: 1100–1400, edited by Nigel Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 358–359.
- 23.
Mary Elizabeth O’Carroll, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook: Studies in MS Laud Misc. 511 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, 1997), 1.
- 24.
Morey, Entre: 282–286.
- 25.
Ibid., Entre: 320–21.
- 26.
Ibid., Entre: 331.
- 27.
Ibid., 3:226–243.
- 28.
Chickering, 212.
- 29.
Morey, 7: 1807–1815.
- 30.
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 27.
- 31.
Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 110.
- 32.
William F. Hodapp, “Richard Rolle’s Passion Meditations in the Context of His English Epistles: Imitatio Christi and the Three Degrees of Love,” Mystics Quarterly 20 (1994), pp. 96–104 (100).
- 33.
Richard Rolle, “Meditation B” in Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, edited by S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 377–38.
- 34.
The Latin reads: “Sed melius est, securius est, suavius contemplatorem esse, eternam suivitatem presentire, delicias canere eterni amoris et in laudem rapi Conditoris per infusionem conoris iubilei” from Melos Amoris: 152.6–154.19. Qtd in Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, 183.
- 35.
Richard Rolle, Incendium Amoris, 145.1–147.32 (need proper citation); qtd in Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle, 114.
- 36.
Cf. The Book of Margery Kempe, edited by Lynn Staley (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996).
- 37.
Santha Bhattacharji examines the Western medieval tradition of religious weeping, and its controversial nature, in “Tears and Screaming: Weeping in the Spirituality of Margery Kempe” in Holy Tears: Weeping in the Religious Imagination edited by Kimberley Christine Patton and John Stratton Hawley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005): 229–240.
- 38.
Margaret Connolly, ed., Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1993), 7.
- 39.
Margaret Connolly, “Mapping Manuscripts and Readers of Contemplations of Dread and Love of God” in Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, edited by Margaret Connolly and Linne Mooney (York: York Medieval Press, 2008), 262.
- 40.
Morey, Entre:330–332.
- 41.
The Conscience manuscripts which attribute authorship to Richard Rolle are BodL, MS Ashmole 60, BL, MS Egerton 3245, London, Lambeth Palace, MS 260, Camb., Gonville and Caius College, MS 386, and Oxford, Merton College, MS 68. These are discussed in Robert Lewis and Angus McIntosh, A Descriptive Guide to the Manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1982).
- 42.
Morey, 6: 436–482.
- 43.
Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 6.
- 44.
Kimberly Rivers, “The Fear of Divine Vengeance: Mnemonic Images as a Guide to Conscience in the Late Middle Ages” in Fear and its Representations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Anne Scott and Cynthia Kosso (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002).
- 45.
Rivers, 77–9. See also Roger A. Pack, “Artes memorativae in a Venetian manuscript,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 50 (1983): 257–300.
- 46.
J. F. Worthen, “Adam of Dryburgh and the Augustinian Tradition,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 43 (1997), 343–344.
- 47.
The Latin reads: “Video haec, Domine Deus meus. Video haec, inquam, et timeo. Considero haec et pavea. Cerno haec et in manibus tuis trepido, O Deus juste et occulte: occulte et juste!” qtd in Worthen, 344.
- 48.
Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 153 (Paris: s.l., 1864)0.834–35; translated and qtd in Rivers, 82.
- 49.
Morey, 5: 845–860.
- 50.
See Sue Powell, “The Fifteen Signs of Doom in Image and Text: the Pricke of Conscience Window at All Saints, North Street, York” in Harlaxton Medieval Studies XII (New Series) Proceedings of the 2000 Symposium: Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom, edited by Nigel J. Morgan (Donington, Lincs: Shaun Tyas/Paul Watkins Publications, 2004), 292–316.
- 51.
Ed S. Tan introduces the term in Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine (New York: Routledge, 2011).
- 52.
Scholars such as Noël Carroll and John Clute among others have traditionally placed the beginning of the horror genre in the eighteenth century, finding its roots in Gothic novels such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) or “monster stories” including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). For examples of this approach, see Carroll, The Philosophy Of Horror, Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 14 and Clute, “The Darkening Garden” in Stay (Essex: Beccon Publications, 2014), 269–343.
- 53.
Carroll, 56.
- 54.
Joynes, xii.
- 55.
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 24.
- 56.
Matt Hills, The Pleasures of Horror (London: Continuum, 2005), 3.
- 57.
Robert C. Solomon, “Real Horror” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 230–31.
- 58.
Ibid., 251.
- 59.
Jonathan Hughes, “The Administration of Confession in the Diocese of York in the Fourteenth Century” in Studies in Clergy and Ministry in Medieval England, edited by David M. Smith, Purvis Seminar Studies, Borthwick Studies in History I (York: University of York Press, 1991), 112.
- 60.
Lewis and McIntosh’s early estimate was about 1350 on the basis that many of the manuscripts appear just after this date, but Hanna and Wood more recently have placed the date some 20 years earlier in Ralph Hanna III and Sarah Wood, eds., Richard Morris’s Prick of Conscience: A Corrected and Amplified Reading Text (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), vii.
- 61.
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 26.
- 62.
Carroll, 171.
- 63.
Ibid., 35.
- 64.
Ibid., 57.
- 65.
For criticisms and revisions, see Berys Gaut, “The Paradox of Horror,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 33 (1993): 333–45; Mark Verobej, “Monsters and the Paradox of Horror,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review XXXVI (1997): 219–46; Robert C. Solomon, “The Philosophy of Horror, or, Why Did Godzilla Cross the Road?” in Entertaining Ideas – Popular Philosophical Essays: 1970–1990 (New York, Prometheus Books), 119–30); and Matt Hills, “An Event-Based Definition of Art-Horror” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror, 138–157.
- 66.
Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2.
- 67.
Morey, Entre: 175–180.
- 68.
Hills, The Pleasures of Horror, 5.
- 69.
Ibid., 28.
- 70.
Ibid.
- 71.
Yvonne Leffler, Horror as Pleasure: The Aesthetics of Horror Fiction (Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2000), 183–4.
- 72.
Hills, The Pleasures of Horror, 31.
- 73.
Morey, 6:432–443.
- 74.
Hughes, “The Administration of Confession,” 112.
- 75.
Pinedo, “Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film” in The Horror Film, edited by Stephen Prince (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 99.
- 76.
Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror, 26.
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Marshall, H. (2018). “Lothly Thinges Thai Weren Alle”: Imagining Horror in the Late Middle Ages. In: Moreland, S. (eds) New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95477-6_6
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