Abstract
In the late Middle Ages, visual art was often considered a vehicle of the divine, infused with transformative power. As Sarah Stanbury describes in The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England, ‘[s]eeing has the extraordinary and transformative power of witnessing: to look on the beloved, to look on the grail, to see the elevation of the host, to stand face to face with God.’1 Visual images were not simply signs or aesthetic objects, but, as Carolly Erikson has argued, they were believed capable of cleansing one’s inner self, warding off evil spirits and securing the acquisition of spiritual capital.2 The eye was specially venerated as the organ through which humans ‘might ascend through comprehension of the corporeal world to perceive insubstantial beings, and finally to understand formless ideas and God himself’.3
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Notes
Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) 6.
Carolly Erikson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) 20, 89.
Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 2.
The term ‘image-text’ was first coined by W. J. T. Mitchell in his 1994 Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 89.
Jill Stevenson, ‘The Material Bodies of Medieval Religious Performance in England’, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 2.2 (2006): 204–33 (215).
Pamela Sheingorn, ‘Performing the Illustrated Manuscript: Great Reckonings in Little Books’, in Elina Gertsman (ed.), Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008) 57–82 (57). Also see Suzannah Biernoff’s Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages, which examines the relationship between flesh and vision, and claims that ‘looking in the Middle Ages entailed a physical encounter between bodies’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) 4.
Aleksandra Wolska, ‘Rabbits, Machines, and the Ontology of Performance’, Theatre Journal 57.1 (2005): 83–95 (85, 92).
See Curt Ferdinand Bühler’s ‘The First Edition of The Abbey of the Holy Ghost’, Studies in Bibliography 6 (1953): 101–6. Space restrictions prevent me from recounting the manuscripts here. The most accurate account appears in P. S. Jolliffe, A Check-List of Middle English Prose Writings of Spiritual Guidance (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974); Subsidia Mediaevalia II. H.9 and H.16 (94–5; 98–9).
For a few corrections to this list, see Julia Boffey’s ‘The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost and Its Role in Manuscript Anthologies’, Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 120–30 (120 n.3).
Boffey, ‘Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost’, 122. The Charter survives independently in a further six manuscripts, listed in Boffey (123 n.10). For a critical edition of The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, see Clara Elizabeth Fanning’s ‘The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost: A Critical Edition from All Known Extant Manuscripts with Introduction, Notes and Glossary’ (Diss. Fordham University, 1975).
Kathleen Scott, ‘The Unique Pictorial “Afterpiece” to the Abbey of the Holy Ghost in BL Stowe MS 39’, Tradition and Innovation in Later Medieval English Manuscripts (London: British Library, 2007) 64. The only other image in an Abbey manuscript is a sparsely detailed, shaded outline of a nunnery, which appears at the end of The Abbey in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 323.
Peter Kidd, ‘Codicological Clues to the Patronage of Stowe MS. 39: A Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Nun’s Book in Middle English’, Electronic British Library Journal (2009): 1–12 (7). The illustrated Desert of Religion also appears in two other medieval manuscripts, the Carthusian Miscellany (London, British Library Additional 37049, fols. 46r-67r) and London, British Library Cotton Faustina B.VI, part II (fols 2r-23v). For more on this text, see Anne McGovern-Mouron, ‘The Desert of Religion in British Library Cotton Faustina B VI, part II’, The Mystical Tradition and the Carthusians (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1997) 148–62. AC 130; and Anne McGovern-Mouron, ‘An Edition of The Desert of Religion and Its Theological Background’ (Diss. Oxford University, 1996). To date, W[alter] Hübner’s 1911 version — which excludes the illustrations — remains the only published text: ‘The Desert of Religion’, Archive fur das Stadium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 126 (1911): 55–74.
Nicole Rice, ‘Spiritual Ambition and the Translation of the Cloister: The Abbey and Charter of the Holy Ghost’, Viator 33 (2002): 222–60 (224).
Christiania Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister of the Soul in Medieval Religious Treatises’, Medium Ævum 67.1 (1998): 1–29 (16). Also see Whitehead’s book, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003).
See George Keiser, ‘“To Knawe God Almyghtyn”: Robert Thornton’s Devotional Book’, Spätmittelalterliche Geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache, vol. 2 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984) 103–29. AC 106; and No. 316, ‘Inventory of Books’, The Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 516–18. As Consacro comments, the quantity of manuscripts in which The Abbey survives, as well as their ‘generally work-a-day nature’, allows us to assume that it was a popular text amongst the English middle- to upper-middle classes (‘A Critical Edition’, 20).
Kathryn A. Smith, Art, Identity and Devotion in Fourteenth-Century England: Three Women and their Books of Hours (London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003) 32–47.
Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 28.
Felicity Riddy, ‘“Women talking about the things of God”: A Late Medieval Sub-culture’, in Carol M. Meale (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 110.
Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) 3.
Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985) 9.
See Kathryn A. Smith, The Taymouth Hours: Stories and the Construction of the Self in Late Medieval England (London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
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Johnstone, B. (2014). Reading Images, Drawing Texts: The Illustrated Abbey of the Holy Ghost in British Library MS Stowe 39. In: Jenkins, J., Sanders, J. (eds) Editing, Performance, Texts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137320117_3
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