Revisiting the Medieval North of England: Interdisciplinary Approaches

By Anita Auer and Denis Renevey

The medieval north of England has been underexplored to date, and this volume may be seen as an invitation for further exploration. It brings together scholars with shared interests in language, literature, culture, history and manuscript studies, viewed from different disciplinary perspectives such as English philology, historical linguistics and medieval literature. While many scholars have thus far been debating the dividing lines between north and south as well as between north, Midlands and south, the contributors to this volume are interested in texts produced in the north, the providence of which has been determined by way of affiliation to religious and civic writing centres including the important monastic houses in the north (such as Durham, York and the Yorkshire Cistercian houses). Most of the contributions grow out of recent and ongoing research projects that touch upon different aspects of the north of England in the medieval period. Concentrating on the north as a centre of manuscript production, dissemination and reception, this volume aims also at illustrating the fluidity of boundaries and communication, and the resulting links to different geographical regions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786833969

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RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Revisiting the Medieval North of England

Series Editors

Denis Renevey (Université de Lausanne)

Diane Watt (University of Surrey)

Editorial Board

Miri Rubin (Queen Mary University of London)

Jean-Claude Schmitt (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)

Fiona Somerset (Duke University)

Christiania Whitehead (University of Warwick)

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Revisiting the Medieval

North of England

INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES

edited by

ANITA AUER, DENIS RENEVEY, CAMILLE MARSHALL

AND TINO OUDESLUIJS

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2019

© The Contributors, 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN     978-1-78683-394-5

e-ISBN  978-1-78683-396-9

The right of the Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Publié avec un subside de la Commission des publications de la Faculté des lettres de l’Université de Lausanne

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Christopher Saxton, ‘Humber Mouth’, from Lord Burghley’s Atlas (1579) © The British Library Board.

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors

Introduction:

Setting the Scene: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Medieval North of England

Anita Auer, Denis Renevey, Camille Marshall and Tino Oudesluijs

1  Northern Spirituality Travels South: Rolle’s Middle English Encomium Oleum Effusum Nomen Tuum in Lincoln College Library, MS 91, and Dublin, Trinity College, MS 155

Denis Renevey

2  Mechtild of Hackeborn and Cecily Neville’s Devotional Reading: Images of the Heart in Fifteenth-Century England

Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa

3  Langage o northrin lede: Northern Middle English as a Written Medium

Merja Stenroos

4  A Pystille Made to a Cristene Frende: A Translation of Walter Hilton’s Epistola ad Quemdam Seculo Renunciare Volentem in a Northern Anthology, London, British Library, MS Additional 33971

Marleen Cré

5  ‘So to interpose a little ease’: Northern Hermit-lit

Ralph Hanna

6  The Children of the York Plays

Richard Beadle

7  Linguistic Regionalism in the York Corpus Christi Plays

Anita Auer

8  The Hermit and the Sailor: Readings of Scandinavia in North-East English Hagiography

Christiania Whitehead

9  Towards a Nuanced History of Early English Spelling: Old Northumbrian Witnesses and Northern Orthography

Marcelle Cole

Notes

Appendix

Bibliography

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages aims to explore the interface between medieval religion and culture, with as broad an understanding of those terms as possible. It puts to the forefront studies which engage with works that significantly contributed to the shaping of medieval culture. However, it also gives attention to studies dealing with works that reflect and highlight aspects of medieval culture that have been neglected in the past by scholars of the medieval disciplines. For example, devotional works and the practice they infer illuminate our understanding of the medieval subject and its culture in remarkable ways, while studies of the material space designed and inhabited by medieval subjects yield new evidence on the period and the people who shaped it and lived in it. In the larger field of religion and culture, we also want to explore further the roles played by women as authors, readers and owners of books, thereby defining them more precisely as actors in the cultural field. The series as a whole investigates the European Middle Ages, from c.500 to c.1500. Our aim is to explore medieval religion and culture with the tools belonging to such disciplines as, among others, art history, philosophy, theology, history, musicology, the history of medicine, and literature. In particular, we would like to promote interdisciplinary studies, as we believe strongly that our modern understanding of the term applies fascinatingly well to a cultural period marked by a less tight confinement and categorization of its disciplines than the modern period. However, our only criterion is academic excellence, with the belief that the use of a large diversity of critical tools and theoretical approaches enables a deeper understanding of medieval culture. We want the series to reflect this diversity, as we believe that, as a collection of outstanding contributions, it offers a more subtle representation of a period that is marked by paradoxes and contradictions and which necessarily reflects diversity and difference, however difficult it may sometimes have proved for medieval culture to accept these notions.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present volume originates from the international workshop ‘Interdisciplinary perspectives on the North of England in the later Middle Ages’, which took place on 7–8 September 2015 at the University of Lausanne. The aim of this event was to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines who all carried out seminal research on the North of England in the Middle Ages and to have them start a dialogue on this specific topic from their different angles of expertise. The workshop was financially supported by an Agora grant (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)).

We would like to thank all colleagues who attended and contributed to the workshop in 2015 for the fruitful cross-disciplinary discussions. Our gratitude extends to Sarah Lewis (University of Wales Press) for her continued support throughout the production process of this volume. We would also like to thank the Commission des publications (Faculté des Lettres, UNIL) for their financial support in the production of this volume. Finally, we want to thank the authors for their invaluable contributions to this volume, as well as the reviewers. Without you and your expertise in the field, this volume would not exist.

Anita Auer, Denis Renevey, Camille Marshall and Tino Oudesluijs Université de Lausanne

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1  Northern texts in LALME: genre distribution

Figure 3.2  The chronological development of sal(l), -lk and q- in which, -and in the present participle and spellings of both

Figure 3.3  The chronological development of present 3 sg indicative -s, spellings of they and spellings of know and hold

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Anita Auer is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She is co-editor of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. Anita Auer has published widely in the fields of language variation and change, and language standardisation and corpus linguistics. She has a keen interest in interdisciplinary research, notably the correlation between language variation and change, and socio-economic history and textual history. In recent years, she has co-edited a number of books as for instance the volume Letter Writing and Language Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) with Daniel Schreier and Richard J. Watts; the volume Linguistics and Literary History: In Honour of Sylvia Adamson (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016) with Victorina González-Díaz, Jane Hodson and Violeta Sotirova; and the volume Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017) with Tanja Säily, Arja Nurmi and Minna Palander-Collin.

Richard Beadle is Professor of Medieval English Language and Palaeography, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. He is the Early English Text Society editor of the York plays, The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, Vol. 1, The Text; Vol. 2, Introduction, Commentary, Glossary; Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series 23, 26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009–13). He is co-editor of Manuscript Miscellanies c. 1450–1700, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, vol. 16 (London: The British Library, 2011), and The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Marcelle Cole is Assistant Professor in English Historical Linguistics at Utrecht University. She has participated in several research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology that focus on Old Northumbrian including ‘The Lindisfarne Gloss in its Dialectal Context: A Comparison between Lindisfarne and the Gloss to the Durham Collectar’ and ‘The Lindisfarne Gospels Gloss: New Perspectives on the Morphosyntax and Lexis of Old Northumbrian’. Selected important publications include ‘A native origin for present-day English they, their, them’, Diachronica 35:2 (2018); ‘Pronominal anaphoric strategies in the West Saxon dialect of Old English’, English Language and Linguistics, 21:2 (2017); and the monograph Old Northumbrian Verbal Morphosyntax and the (Northern) Subject Rule (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014).

Marleen Cré teaches English at the Université Saint-Louis in Brussels. Her research focuses on late medieval religious and contemplative writings in Middle English in their manuscript context, and on compilation and translation (from Latin, Dutch and French and into Middle English) as authorial activities. Her publications include Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse: A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) as well as various articles on the translations of the works of John Ruusbroec and Marguerite Porète in Middle English. More recently, she has been working on late medieval devotional compilations in England, in particular The Chastising of God’s Children. This Tretice, by me Compiled: Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, a volume of essays co-edited with Diana Denissen and Denis Renevey, will be published by Brepols in the Medieval Church Studies Series.

Ralph Hanna is Emeritus Professor of Palaeography at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Keble College. His recent publications include Editing Medieval Texts, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015); Introducing English Medieval Book History: Manuscripts, Their Producers and Their Readers, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014); The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2010); and Speculum Vitae: A Reading Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). He has been awarded the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize 2015 for his contribution to medieval book history and palaeography.

Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa is Professor of English in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Shizuoka University. Her recent publications include Medicine, Religion and Gender in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015); Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages Series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013); Convergence/ Divergence: The Politics of Late Medieval English Devotional and Medical Discourses, Poetica 72, Special Issue (Tokyo: Yushudo Press, 2009); and Margery Kempe’s Meditations: The Context of Medieval Devotional Literature, Liturgy and Iconography, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages Series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007).

Camille Marshall is graduate assistant in medieval English literature at the University of Lausanne. She is currently pursuing doctoral research on the Towneley collection of scriptural drama, focusing on the plays’ relevance for the mid-sixteenth century, the period in which the single manuscript was produced, and seeking to highlight the artificiality of both period and confessional divides.

Tino Oudesluijs is currently a PhD student in historical sociolinguistics in the English department at the University of Lausanne. His doctoral thesis focuses on the urban vernacular of Coventry in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, which is a subproject in the Emerging Standards project (www.emergingstandards.eu). For his PhD thesis, Tino Oudesluijs compiled a new corpus based on manuscripts and documents from Coventry’s local archives, through which he examines the effects of the local vernacular on the origin and spread of formal written English. Furthermore, he was part of the Power of Words in Medieval Ireland project at the University of Amsterdam; has published on illuminated and decorated medieval manuscripts in the Utrecht University Library (A supplement to Koert van der Horst, Illuminated and decorated medieval manuscripts in the Utrecht University Library, Utrecht (1989). Vol. manuscripts acquired 1989–2011; loose manuscript fragments, Utrecht: Utrecht University Library, Special Collections, 2011); and he currently works as the assistant editor of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics.

Denis Renevey is Professor of Medieval English Language and Literature at the University of Lausanne. He has published in the fields of vernacular theology, medieval translation, Anglo-French literary exchanges, lyric poetry, and the convergence of medieval and religious discourses. He is completing and co-editing a collection of essays based on a Swiss national foundation research project on late medieval devotional compilations, forthcoming with Brepols. He is currently directing a Swiss National Foundation research project on the persistence of devotion to Anglo-Saxon saints in late medieval England. He has co-edited The Doctrine of the Heart: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010); A Companion to the Doctrine of the Heart: The Middle English Translation and its Latin and European Contexts (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), both with Christiania Whitehead; Convergence/Divergence: The Politics of Late Medieval English Devotional and Medical Discourses, Poetica 72, Special Issue (Tokyo: Yushudo Press, 2009), with Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa; and Medieval and Early Modern Literature, Science and Medicine (Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 2013), with Rachel Falconer.

Merja Stenroos is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Stavanger. Her research interests include the following areas: The history of English; Middle English dialectology; historical sociolinguistics and pragmatics; late medieval text production and literacy; writing systems and orthography; historical corpus compilation. She is the principal investigator of the project ‘The Middle English Scribal Texts Programme’, as part of which the following two corpora have been compiled: the Middle English Local Documents corpus (MELD), and the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C). Recent publications include ‘Fugitive voices: personal involvement in Middle English letters of defence’, in K. E. Haugland, K. McCafferty and K. A. Rusten (eds), ‘Ye whom the Charms of Grammar Please’: Studies in English Language History in Honour of Leiv Egil Breivik. Studies in Historical Linguistics 4 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014); ‘Identity and intelligibility in late Middle English scribal transmission: local dialect as an active choice in fifteenth-century texts’, in E-M. Wagner, B. Outhwaite and B. Beinhoff (eds), Scribes as Agents of Language Change. Studies in Language Change 10 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013); and – with Kjetil Thengs – ‘Two Staffordshires: real and linguistic space in the study of Late Middle English dialects’, in J. Tyrkkö, M. Kilpiö, T. Nevalainen and M. Rissanen (eds), Outposts of Historical Corpus Linguistics: From the Helsinki Corpus to a Proliferation of Resources, Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, 10 (Helsinki: VARIENG, 2012).

Christiania Whitehead is Professor of Middle English Literature at the University of Warwick, and is also currently seconded to the University of Lausanne for a three year Swiss National Foundation project investigating late medieval devotion to northern English saints. Her recent publications include Saints of North East England 600–1500, co-edited with Margaret Coombe and Anne Mouron (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017); The Doctrine of the Hert: A Critical Edition with Introduction and Commentary (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010); and A Companion to The Doctrine of the Hert: The Middle English Translation and its Latin and European Contexts (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), both co-edited with Denis Renevey. She has a book of essays on Middle English lyrics forthcoming: Middle English Lyrics: New Readings of Short Poems, co-edited with Julia Boffey (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), and is currently completing a book on the textual afterlife of St Cuthbert.

Setting the Scene: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Medieval North of England

ANITA AUER, DENIS RENEVEY, CAMILLE MARSHALL AND TINO OUDESLUIJS

In his translation and ‘elaboration’ of Ranulph Higden of Chester’s Latin Polychronicon (1327),¹ the Cornishman John Trevisa (1385) describes the linguistic and economic ‘north–south divide’ at the time. Discussions about this divide and associated stereotypes are still being encountered today:²

Alle the langages of the northumbres & specially at york is so sharp slitting frotyng & vnshappe / that we sothern men may vnneth vnderstande that langage / I suppose the cause be that they be nygh to the aliens that speke strangely / And also by cause that the kyngis of englond abyde and duelle more in the south contrey than in ye north contre / is by cause that ther is better corn londe more peple / moo noble Citees / & moo prouffytable hauenes in the south contrey than in the north.³

This early perception and construction of north–south differences, which was later reproduced by Caxton in his Description of England (1480), not only depicts the northern linguistic variety and the economy in rather negative terms, but it also clearly highlights the southern perspective of the author. In fact, while it is difficult to verify the contemporary account of the differences and the difficulties that southerners may have had with the language, ‘it is certainly a fact that many manuscripts in the Middle English period were translated from northern English into other dialects for ease of reading, and vice versa, although such reverse translation appears not to have been so common’ (Jewell 1994: 189), e.g. The Informacion of Richard the Ermyte, The Prick of Conscience and the Cursor Mundi (c.1300), as Katie Wales notes in her book Northern English: A Social and Cultural History (2006).⁴ Today, even as scholarly a book as Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, which aims to cover the whole of Britain, is biased towards the south and the Midlands in general, and London in particular, with reference to only 21 northern manuscripts out of a total of 918.⁵

The southern perspective on medieval history, language, literature and culture has for a long time permeated scholarship in the different disciplines. While this is not surprising considering that empirical sources which have survived from the Middle Ages were often produced in the south, by southerners or, as indicated above, translated for southerners; this may have led to an unconscious bias. Moreover, it has for a long time been assumed that what is still commonly referred to as ‘Standard written English’ has developed out of Midland/southern-based varieties and/or the so-called Chancery Standard, and from there it has spread to the rest of the country.⁶ While the south has undoubtedly played an important role in the uniformisation of written English, other geographical regions – and in particular the north – also need to be considered when trying to understand the processes involved in this uniformisation process, i.e. the levelling of different dialectal features. Similarly, despite the works of pioneers such as Carl Horstmann, Hope Emily Allen, and, more recently, Richard Beadle and Ralph Hanna, medieval literary studies as offered in the classroom over-represent southern texts in general, and London-based ones in particular, so much so that the importance given to the south as the most prominent area of textual production in the late medieval period is inflated.⁷ However, possibly under current interest of European regions in self-determination and the affirmation of their cultural specificities, we can observe a shift in perspective towards the importance of ‘region’ by scholars working in different disciplines concerned with medieval Europe in general, and England in particular. David Wallace’s A Literary History of Europe, 1348–1418 contributes a perspective that considers sequences between regions and the way in which literary and linguistic concepts, together with goods, people and disease, circulate between them.⁸

The north of England and its regions in the late medieval period is the focus of this volume. It brings together scholars with shared interests in language, literature, culture, history and manuscript studies, viewed from different disciplinary perspectives, such as English philology, historical linguistics and medieval literature. Most of the contributions grow out of recent and ongoing research projects that touch upon different aspects of the north of England in the medieval period. For instance, Marcelle Cole’s contribution is linked to the Seville Corpus of Northern English⁹ and the project ‘Aproximación a la Glosa de Lindisfarne: Nuevos Enfoques Sobre la Morfosintaxis y el Léxico del Dialecto Nortumbrio’ (led by Julia María Fernández Cuesta).¹⁰ The contributions by Christiania Whitehead and Denis Renevey present evidence gathered from the ongoing project ‘Region and Nation in Late Medieval Devotion to Northern English Saints’,¹¹ while Marleen Cré’s contribution is linked to the project ‘Late Medieval Religiosity in England: The Evidence of Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century Devotional Compilations’, whose corpus included northern texts. Merja Stenroos’s contribution is strongly associated with the Middle English scribal texts projects, and in particular with the Middle English Grammar Corpus (MEG-C) and A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD).¹² Anita Auer’s contribution is also situated in the context of a historical linguistic project, i.e. the project ‘Emerging Standards: Urbanisation and the Development of Standard English, c.1400–1700’.¹³ Both Ralph Hanna and Richard Beadle have long-standing research expertise in northern English manuscript and literary studies. Ralph Hanna’s recent book, Patient Reading/Reading Patience, offers several seminal chapters on texts and scribes from the north of England, attesting to his enduring interest in the north and regional productions.¹⁴ Richard Beadle’s focus on northern Middle English and the north of England is attested by his work on the York Plays, as well as by his interest (shared with Hanna and present in Cré, Renevey and Kukita’s contributions) in the circulation of Yorkshire productions outside of its locale, towards the south.¹⁵

Considering the temporal focus of this volume, notably the Old and the Middle English period, the material basis for investigation is limited due to low literacy levels at the time, the existence of few writing centres as well as limited textual material in the vernacular. Moreover, not all manuscripts produced at the time survived until today, notably for reasons of different kinds of destruction or loss. As for the textual evidence that did survive, it clearly reflects the cultural and religious contexts at the time in that religious and administrative texts clearly dominate the material basis to be investigated. It is thus not surprising that the majority of the contributions in this volume – whatever disciplinary perspective they take – are based on religious texts.

The available textual material plays therefore a significant role in shaping our understanding of ‘the north’ in medieval England. While many scholars until today have been debating the dividing lines between north and south as well as north, Midlands and the south,¹⁶ the contributors to this volume are concerned with texts produced in the north whose providence has been determined by way of affiliation to religious and civic writing centres including the important monastic houses in the north, as for instance Durham, York and the Yorkshire Cistercian houses. While the focus of this volume is on the north as a centre of manuscript production, dissemination and reception, it also aims at illustrating the fluidity of boundaries and communication, and therewith the links to different geographical regions. The following case studies of British Library, MS Additional 37049 and the Thornton manuscripts, Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91, as well as British Library, MS Additional 31042 offer interesting evidence about production of textual material from a northern secular household and a monastic house. The material found in these manuscripts is representative of reading interests in northern England, with circulation beyond its original northern locale for some of them at a later stage in the late medieval period. It provides valuable clues as to various modes of production and circulation for the material covered in our volume, as well as demonstrating further the vitality of textual composition and production in the north.

British Library, MS Additional 37049 is a miscellany produced in the north of England in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. It contains poems, chronicles and treatises, some of them unrecorded anywhere else, others extant in many other manuscripts. Produced in the most rigorously enclosed order in the West, the Carthusian order, the vernacular material of the manuscript, in conjunction with extensive visual aids, may have primarily served the needs of monks, novices or lay brothers. As we shall see later, most of the texts and images are devotional in nature, even if some items push the boundary between the secular and the sacred. For instance, the Mappa Mundi (fol. 2v) and the synopsis of Mandeville’s Travels associate themselves with sacred characters (the division of the world in three parts, by the three sons of Noah) and a sacred place (Jerusalem); however, they also blur the secular/sacred divide and invite a perception of creation that is wide-ranging. Extracts from the Chronicon pontificum et imperatorum by the thirteenth-century Dominican Martinus Polonus offer a glimpse of Martinus’s interests in the two most important powers of his time, the papacy and the empire.¹⁷

The four texts that follow the Chronicon deal with eschatology in the form of revelations, prayers, prose notes and verses.¹⁸ Despite the inclusion of continental bestsellers, such as the Chronicon pontificum et imperatorum and Suso’s Horologium sapientiae,¹⁹ the manuscript shows a predilection for texts, writers and devotional practices that flourished in the north, more specifically in the diocese of York. The Prick of Conscience, included in the manuscript, is one among several instructional texts written in the north in the second quarter of the fourteenth century.²⁰ The other texts include The Northern Homily Cycle, Cursor Mundi, The Surtees Psalter, and the Speculum Vitae, whose excerpts are found on folios 36r, 69r and 72r.²¹ The Desert of Religion, which is found complete in Additional 37039, is another northern production, formerly attributed to the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle.²² Although not exclusively made up of texts composed in the north of England (some extracts from The Pilgrimage of the Soul attributed to Thomas Hoccleve occur from folio 70v onwards), BL, MS Additional 37049 offers an interesting window into the religious culture of the north in late medieval England. This culture is characterized by the production of substantial works of an instructional nature, and by the development of Christocentric devotions, in particular the devotion to the Name of Jesus to which the name of Richard Rolle gives authority.

The manuscripts of Robert Thornton (fl. 1418–56), Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91, and British Library, MS Additional 31042, offer additional information about the composition, preservation and circulation of texts in the north of England.²³ Robert Thornton, a landowner based at the manor of East Newton, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, compiled works for his own use and that of his family. His collection of texts, as found in the manuscripts above, offer useful evidence of the bookish tastes and interests of educated laypeople from the north