Middle English Devotional Compilations: Composing Imaginative Variations in Late Medieval England

By Diana Denissen

Middle English devotional compilations – consisting of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute new and unified devotional texts – have often been approached as complex collections of source texts that need to be linked with their originals. This book argues that the study of compilations should move beyond the disentanglement of their sources. It approaches compiling as a literary activity and an active way of shaping the medieval text, with the aim to nuance scholarly discussion about compiling by putting greater emphasis on the literary instead of the technical aspects of compiling activity. In addition to describing the additions, omissions and other types of adaptations that compilers made to their source texts, Middle English Devotional Compilations highlights the nature and function of compiling activity in late medieval England, and examines three major but understudied Middle English devotional compilations in depth: The Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781786834782

Diana Denissen

Diana Denissen completed her PhD in Medieval English Literature at the University of Lausanne (2017), and was a project member of the Swiss National Science Foundation Project, ‘Late Medieval Religiosity in England: The Evidence of Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Devotional Compilations’. She is the recent recipient of a postdoctoral mobility fellowship funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Book preview

RELIGION AND CULTURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Middle English Devotional Compilations

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

Middle English Devotional Compilations

COMPOSING IMAGINATIVE VARIATIONS IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

DIANA DENISSEN

© Diana Denissen, 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 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 978-1-78683-476-8

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-478-2

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

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: Add. MS 22283 (folio 172v), fragment of A Talkyng of the Love of God (IPMEP 749) © The British Library Board (Add. 22283, f.172v).

Cover design: Olwen Fowler

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

Volume Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Tables

Abbreviations

1  Compiling Styles and Strategies

2  The Pore Caitif

3  The Tretyse of Love

4  A Talkyng of the Love of God

5  Afterword: Without the Multiplication of Many Books?

Bibliography

Appendix: A transcription of ‘ȝe þat wollen lerne to loue god rede þis litill scripte’

Notes

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.

VOLUME PREFACE

My most special creative experience was one I had with a friend when I was seventeen years old and we wrote a composition for the oboe and the clarinet together.¹ The two of us created something together in many free hours, a lot of evenings and some weekends. It was an experience that I had never had before. I am still proud of the result, but maybe even happier with the shared creative process. This process got for the most part detached from the school project it originally was and became significant for us on its own. We did not really care any more what our music teacher thought about the sometimes very strange harmonies we wrote, which I think was, as well as our stubbornness, a sign that things were going really well. When it comes to creativity, this kind of shared experience is not valued very highly in our modern society. ‘Real’ composers or ‘real’ authors should write their works on their own, or at least pretend that they isolate themselves from others to be able to write what we – according to modern standards – consider to be an original work.

I thought about this attitude to originality – an attitude that has also shaped me – often while I was writing this book. Medieval compilers were involved readers who, by compiling, but also by adapting, selecting, translating and adding to the texts of others, worked ‘together’ with the authors of their source texts (even if these authors did not know anything about it), to create something new across boundaries of space and time. Just because medieval compilers did not work in isolation, but used the work of others, does not mean that their texts are not original or creative. I think that it is our modern-day attitude to originality and creativity that often leads to our considering medieval compilations as ‘second best’. Devotional texts by, for instance, Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton are considered interesting in their compiled form, but not as important as (what we consider to be) the ‘original’ texts of these medieval authors. Yet, in the late medieval devotional compilations that will be examined in this book, the voices of these authors join a polyvocal and rich textual field in which they transform into something new and surprising.

My friend and I finished our composition for the oboe and the clarinet – a composition about two musical voices, both melting together and creating dissonance – and we passed our school project as well as our other final exams. After the graduation ceremony we sneaked through the dark corridors of the school down to the music room where we had spent all those hours composing. While we could still faintly hear the voices of the others, we secretly left our initials on the wall of the music room. I wonder, now that it is thirteen years later, if our initials are still there. Wiped out, or perhaps still visible, these initials represent the joy of shared creativity. Middle English Devotional Compilations also celebrates shared inspiration and creation: in texts, in the arts, and far beyond.

Note

An early and shorter version of this ‘preface’ was published as a blogpost on the website of the ‘Late Medieval Religiosity in England: The Evidence of Late Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Devotional Compilations’ project on 2 April 2014, under the title ‘Originality’, http://wp.unil.ch/devotionalcompliations/blog/. Accessed 26 April 2019.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Compilations are made up of a multiplicity of voices and so is, of course, this book. The voices incorporated into Middle English Devotional Compilations are the voices of the many inspiring texts that I read in manuscript and printed form. Resonating in this book are also the thought-provoking conversations I had with my academic friends and the kind, supportive voices of my loved ones (and my lovely one). Singing in a choir taught me how beautiful and interesting things can get when many voices join together, searching for unity and harmony as well as difference and polyvocality. If I had been a medieval compiler, I would have added names, places and other references to the margins of my text: Lausanne medievalists (old and new), Chemin de Mornex (‘Chez Ours’), La Couronne d’Or (where a big part of this book was written), PhD-sister, theetantes, Maartje, Jen, Paul, Ellen, Eddie Jones, Annie Sutherland, Margaret Connolly (the best three PhD examiners one could wish for), Christiania Whitehead (for meticulously reading the first draft of this book), UWP and the anonymous peer reviewer for a thoughtful and helpful review, Swiss Science Foundation doctoral funding (2013–17), Lendrum Priory Library postdoctoral fellowship (2018).

The names ‘Denis Renevey’, ‘Marleen Cré’, ‘Marlies’, ‘Kees’ and ‘Nora’ I would even write down in the main text of my book, just like the compiler of the devotional compilation A Talkyng of the Love of God, who added the name ‘Anselmus’ (referring to Anselm of Canterbury) in the middle of the text to refer to Anselm as a major source of inspiration and motivation. Just like Anselm for the compiler of A Talkyng, the voices of these people, and the way they continue to inspire me, resonate with the written words on the page. Unfortunately, inserting these five names in the middle of the text of Middle English Devotional Compilations is not appropriate in academic publishing any longer, so the acknowledgements will have to do. This book is for you.

Lausanne, February 2019

Note on Translations

Unless noted otherwise, the translations into modern English are my own. For reasons of readability, quotations in Middle English shorter than twenty-five words have generally not been translated.

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1 The Tretyse of Love print, overview.

Table 4.1 A Talkyng of the Love of God, overview.

ABBREVIATIONS

A Talkyng Maria Salvina Westra (ed.), A Talkyng of Þe Loue of God. Tekst-Uitgave Met Commentaar (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950)

AW Bella Millett (ed.), Ancrene Wisse. A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts , EETS o.s. 325, 326 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–6)

Bodl. Bodleian Library

BL British Library

Chastising Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (eds), The Chastising of God’s Children and The Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957)

Contemplations Margaret Connolly (ed.), Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God , EETS o.s. 303 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

CUL Cambridge University Library

e.s. Extra Series (of EETS)

EETS Early English Text Society

ELH English Literary History

Form Richard Rolle, The Form of Living , in Sarah Ogilvie-Thompson (ed.), Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse , EETS o.s. 293 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)

JRL John Rylands Library

MED Middle English Dictionary

MLR The Modern Language Review

MS manuscript

On Ureisun On wel swuðe God Ureisun of God Almihti , in Catherine Innes-Parker (ed. and trans.), The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2015)

o.s. Original Series (of EETS)

PC Mary Teresa Brady (ed.), ‘The Pore Caitif . Edited from MS. Harley 2336. With Introduction and Notes’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Fordham University, New York, 1954)

PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association

RES The Review of English Studies

The Tretyse John Fisher (ed.), The Tretyse of Love , EETS o.s. 223 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951)

Vernon The Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet. a. 1.)

Wohunge The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd , in Catherine Innes-Parker (ed. and trans.), The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2015)

1

Compiling Styles and Strategies

We make love and we make texts, and we make both in a seemingly endless series of imaginative variations.¹

According to Jerome McGann, making love and making texts are two of our most fundamental social acts. Even though this monograph is not about editing – the topic of McGann’s book – medieval compiling activity is also about making, as McGann describes them in the quotation above, ‘imaginative variations’. Medieval compilers made texts, not by writing them from scratch, but by infusing extracts borrowed from existing texts with new meaning and making them available in a new context for a particular audience. Compilations do not simply repeat what has been said before, but they imaginatively rewrite materials instead. There were different ways of creating ‘imaginative variations’ in late medieval compilations, and Middle English Devotional Compilations: Composing Imaginative Variations in Late Medieval England will discuss the variety of these compiling styles and strategies. More specifically, this book will focus on compiling activity in the field of Middle English devotional literature. The term ‘devotional’ is taken here inclusively to refer to, as Michael Sargent has defined it, ‘the entire range of piety from simple, affective prayer to works describing or inciting to contemplative union’. ²

Medieval compilations are predominantly based on other source texts and they are usually composed by anonymous compilers. Therefore, these texts are often approached by scholars as complex puzzles of source texts that need to be ‘solved’ by linking them with their originals.³ Although this type of ‘source hunting’ is a necessary starting point in any investigation of compiling activity, the study of compilations is so much more than the disentanglement of their sources. As Sargent has put it: ‘If Chaucer’s poetry can be likened to a gothic cathedral, then these works can be compared to a Van Eyck polyptych, in which symmetrically arranged discrete sections can be viewed either separately, as related groups, or as part of a larger whole’.⁴ In this book, I will propose a way of examining late medieval devotional compilations that moves beyond the focus on their sources alone. Medieval compilations have sometimes been described in negative terms because compilers adapted their sources significantly. Benedicta Ward has, for instance, commented about the compiler’s use of Anselmian source material in the devotional compilation A Talkyng of the Love of God: ‘In A Talkyng only one element of Anselm’s prayer has been selected and the result is an intense and self-concerned monologue in which the person praying dwells at depressing length on his own sins and condemnation’.⁵ At the end of her article, Ward, furthermore, calls the use of Anselmian source material in A Talkyng a ‘betrayal’, which caused Anselm’s name to be linked ‘with a tradition very far from his own understanding and faith’.⁶ It is true that the compiler of A Talkyng at times uses Anselm’s texts in such a way that they become very different from Anselm’s well-balanced and meditative prayers. Yet, the process in which a compilation and the texts within it take on an identity of their own is worth exploring in more depth.

The compiling styles and strategies of three late medieval devotional texts will be examined in particular in this book: the Pore Caitif (chapter 2), The Tretyse of Love (chapter 3) and A Talkyng of the Love of God (chapter 4).⁷ These three texts have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve, partly – especially in the case of the Pore Caitif – because of the lack of an accessible and up-to-date edition.⁸ Even though the Pore Caitif, The Tretyse and A Talkyng are defined and grouped together as Middle English ‘devotional compilations’ – devotional texts that are composed of older source texts to form a new text – they are in fact three different types of compiled texts that employ a variety of compiling styles and strategies.⁹ Middle English Devotional Compilations will explore the richness of compiling activity in the late medieval period by examining the different compiling styles that were used in the composition of these three texts, which function as case studies.

A compilation consists of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute a new single and unified text. Or, as Elisabeth Dutton puts it, in a compilation ‘extracts from a source or sources are woven together into a text which is presented as a single, distinct work, and the sources are rarely acknowledged’.¹⁰ Arthur Bahr in turn defines a compilation as: ‘The assemblage of multiple discrete works into a larger structure whose formal interplay of textual and material parts creates a form of literary effect’.¹¹ My own approach to compilations combines the definitions of Dutton and Bahr and, moreover, focuses on three main elements. First, the different source texts (or extracts of source texts) of a compilation form a unified whole – although, as the following chapters illustrate, what exactly constitutes a ‘unified whole’ can be fuzzy and can develop or change over time. Second, there is a certain rationale behind a compilation, although again this rationale might change or develop over time. Third, a compilation has a literary effect that might be different (but not less interesting or relevant) than the literary effect of the compilation’s source texts. Furthermore, I will argue that although the source texts of a compilation form the foundations of such a text – and these sources function not merely as citations, but are the starting point of any research to compiling activity – it is the precise way in which these sources are included into a compilation, the activity or style of compiling, that needs further attention.

In practice, the distinctions between compilations and several other literary categories such as manuscript anthologies or miscellanies are not always so clear. I will follow Margaret Connolly’s definitions of an ‘anthology’ as ‘a collection of texts within which some organising principles can be observed’ and of a ‘miscellany’ as ‘a manuscript book bringing together texts which do not present a coherent set of organising principles, among which one might find disparate, incomplete or jumbled notes of a personal nature alongside full-length texts’.¹² Bahr’s definition of a miscellany as ‘a complex assemblage of textual parts that does not obligingly present readers with a clear programme or straightforward purpose, and which different readers are therefore likely to perceive in meaningfully different ways’ is also insightful.¹³ In other words, miscellaneous texts can be read and understood in miscellaneous ways. Nevertheless, the classification into three types of interrelated literary categories defined by level of ‘organisation’ – from compilation as the most organised to miscellany as the least organised – often sits uncomfortably with the texts as we find them in their manuscript contexts, where the distinctions between these categories are often blurred. As Steven Nichols has noted, the – what he names – ‘manuscript matrix’ is ‘a place of radical contingencies: of chronology, of anachronism, of conflicting subjects of representation’.¹⁴ Moreover, even though a compilation can be defined as a ‘unified whole’ composed by an active and creative compiler, it is at the same time a fluid and changeable entity in its transmission.¹⁵ This paradoxical reality has an important impact on this book.

Next to an investigation of the relationship between the form in which a compilation is composed, and the form in which it is transmitted into different manuscripts and early prints, I will also focus on the internal structure of the compilations, which sometimes displays a comparable relationship – or perhaps even tension – between unity and fluidity. Compilations are inherently plural texts with different possible functions within the same text. The plural nature of the compilation does not indicate the limits of compiling activity, but rather its full potential. Arthur Bahr describes these texts as ‘interpretatively exciting precisely because they resist our attempts to reduce them to a single meaning, cause or effect’.¹⁶ Similarly, Nicholas Watson notes: ‘There is also a sense in which those of us who study late medieval vernacular compilations have reason to resist hermeneutic pressure to seek unity of theme, design, or purpose as exerted by our training’.¹⁷ The resistance of compilations to fit any neat categories means that one can delight in their gaps and dissonances.

Mouvance and the choices of the compiler

In his article, ‘The Choices of the Compiler: Vernacular Hermeneutics in A Talkyng of the Love of God’, Denis Renevey outlines the seven choices of the medieval compiler.¹⁸ These choices were originally used by Roger Ellis to describe translation activity.¹⁹ Renevey argues that the practices of the medieval compiler rely on a set of choices similar to that of translation activity.²⁰ He outlines the seven choices of the medieval compiler as follows:

First, he has to choose a base text. This choice depends on the number of copies available to him. The second point concerns the form of the compilation: are the changes to the original text going to be slight, or major? Such changes may be decided in the light of the compiler’s understanding of the needs of his or her readers, who may need something slightly other than, or additional to, the original. If the compiler chooses to make major cuts, or major additions, to the original, this activity approximates the compilation to that of an original, authored text. The third choice concerns the internal translation of the details of the original, which most often touches upon the translation of individual words. Here, the compiler may decide to produce an explanatory gloss for a word, or may choose to transliterate. The fourth choice deals with the rendering of the original’s grammatical relations, which may also produce a version of the original either literal, close, or free. The fifth choice, which Ellis believes to be very limited when discussing translation, concerns the style of the compilation. It is followed by the choice of medium. The final choice concerns subsequent revision(s) of the compilation.²¹

While the seven parts of compiling (and translating) activity used by Ellis and Renevey are fundamental for the study of compilations, this subdivision is still relatively broad and has a strong focus on the compilation’s relation to the source text. Moreover, as Renevey also notes, this approach to compiling activity emphasises technical characteristics, undervaluing perhaps the more literary aspects of compilations.²²

The activities of medieval compilers reveal that they saw their source texts as ‘open’ and themselves as participants in the creation of new meaning, contrary to scribes, whose (primary) role it was to reproduce a text. The selection of the different extracts that would make up the compilations was a sophisticated process. For each source text (which was sometimes already a compilation), it needed to be decided which elements were included, excluded and adapted. The texts in compilations are therefore part of a dynamic process of – drawing on Zumthor’s conceptualisation of mouvance – textual mobility and textual variousness.²³ The variants of the texts that occur in medieval compilations can be viewed as intermittent stages in a constant process of textual transmission.²⁴ Nevertheless, examining compiling activity can nuance the concept of mouvance in its broadest sense. Compiling activity also centres on the compiler as an active agent, instead of solely focusing on the changes that occur to the text. Moreover, compiling activity generally involves a certain amount of planning and structuring, and it is therefore not a completely free and fluid process. Furthermore, compilers did not just see their texts as vehicles for textual transmission, but meant their compilations to stand on their own as independent treatises. In line with this, Eric Reiter points to the fact that textual transmission in a manuscript culture was often invisible to later readers. Based on the