Table Of ContentDevotional Literature and
Practice in Medieval England
DISPUTATIO
Editorial Board
Dallas G. Denery II, Bowdoin College
Holly Johnson, Mississippi State University
Clare Monagle, Macquarie University
Cary J. Nederman, Texas A&M University
Founding Editors
Georgiana Donovin, Westminster College
Richard Utz, Western Michigan University
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.
Volume 29
Devotional Literature and
Practice in Medieval England
Readers, Reading, and Reception
Edited by
Kathryn Vulić, Susan Uselmann,
and C. Annette Grisé
H
BREPOLS
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2016 Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
The image on the front cover of this book, British Library MS. Royal 14 E V f. 357,
is made available under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain
Dedication, and can be found online at:
http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.
ASP?Size=mid&IllID=37433.
D/2016/0095/64
ISBN: 978-2-503-53029-1
e-ISBN: 978-2-503-54009-2
DOI 10.1484/M.DISPUT-EB.5.105976
Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
Introduction: Devotional Reading in Late Medieval England:
Problems of Definition
SUSAN USELMANN 1
‘Þe lettere sleeþ’: Lollards, Literalism, and the
Definition of Bad Readers
ANNA LEwIS 35
Speculum vitae and ‘Lewed’ Reading
KATHRyN VULIć 61
Representing Reading in Dives and Pauper
ELIzABETH SCHIRMER 85
Meditative Reading and the Vespers Antiphon in the
Monastic Office for Saint Cuthbert
KARMEN LENz 119
Lectio divina and Scriptural Reading in
Syon’s Vernacular Printed Books
C. ANNETTE GRISé 137
A Matter of Convenience: Nicholas Love’s Mirror of
Private Devotional Reading
SUSAN USELMANN 159
vi Contents
Printing, Propaganda, and Profit:
Richard Pynson and the Life of St Radegund
CHRISTINA M. CARLSON 195
‘For the prouffyte of other’: Lady Margaret Beaufort and the
Female Reader as Translator in The Mirrour of Golde to the
Synfull Soule
STEPHANIE MORLEy 217
Bodleian Library MS Holkham Miscellany 41 and the
Modelling of women’s Devotion
CATHERINE INNES-PARKER 237
Afterword: Adaptation, Negotiation, and Transformation
C. ANNETTE GRISé 267
Introduction
Devotional Reading in Late Medieval
England: Problems of Definition
Susan Uselmann
I pray almyty God that this booke com not but to the hands of them that will
be his faithfull lovers, and to those that will submitt them to the feith of Holy
Church and obey the holesom understondyng and teching of the men that
be of vertuous wisdam; wherfore it may not dwelle with him that is thrall to
synne and to the devill. And beware thu take not on thing after thy affection
and liking and leve another, for that is the condition of an heretique. But take
everything with other. And trewely understonden, all is according to Holy
Scripture and growndid in the same.
Explicit to Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, c. 1415
This volume of the Disputatio series focuses on changing conceptions of
medi eval readers and devotional reading in late medieval England. As
a contribution to the history of reading, it also seeks to reconsider or
expand some of the dichotomies that often characterize analyses of devo tional
readers and reading, such as author/reader, literate/illiterate, learned/’lewd’,
Latin/vernacular, or clerical/lay. The famous scribal explicit to Julian of Norwich’s
Revelations highlights the dynamic and often unstable categories of author,
text, and reader which relate to this subject. Late medieval England, in par-
ti cular, witnessed extraordinary change and growth in these categories, as an
Susan Uselmann ([email protected]) is an Assistant Professor in the
Humani ties Department at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.
Devotional Literature and Practice in Medieval England: Readers, Reading, and Reception, ed. by
Kathryn Vulić, Susan Uselmann, and C. Annette Grisé, DISPUT 29 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016),
pp. 1–33 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.DISPUT.5.110385
2 Susan Uselmann
efflorescence in devotional writing converged with a burgeoning book market
and an increasing number of the laity who could be considered literate. with
vernacular texts likely to reach a wider audience, devotional writers increasingly
sought to control the ways readers interacted with text and to represent readers
as idealized, pious members of the church. The scribal explicit thus constructs
a humble reader who will ‘obey the holesom understondyng and teching of the
men that be of vertuous wisdam’ and ‘take everything with other’ as s/he reads.
The depiction of an obedient reader highlights an important premise of this
volume and of reader studies in general: that representations of reading and
readers are often idealized as they are shaped to suit the needs of particular
historical circumstances.
Moreover, because he is not in fact the author of ‘this booke’, the scribe also
belies the wide range of practices that can constitute even a specific rhetori-
cal circumstance. Like many devotional writers, the scribe imagines an obedi-
ent and pious reader, but he is also deeply aware of the multiplicity of histori-
cal audiences, and the textual instability inherent in a culture in which works
that have been initially created for one audience could be adapted, abbreviated
or revised to serve another.1 He cautions the audience to ‘beware’ of certain
reading practices that ‘take […] on thing after thy affection and likyng and leve
another’. In his dual function as writer and reader, he mediates between the fic-
tionalized audience and the meditative tradition that informs this contempla-
tive work, making a rhetorical move that would be familiar to modern reader
and reception theorists. Michel de Certeau asserts that a ‘text has meaning only
through its readers; it changes along with them; it is ordered in accord with
codes of perception that it does not control. It becomes a text only in its relation
to the exteriority of the reader’.2 As witness to the potency of the ‘exteriority of
the reader’ and the changing ‘codes of perception’ in late medieval England, the
extant manuscripts of Julian’s text reveal a surprisingly wide range of devotional
and literate practices. whether it is the late fourteenth-century contemplative
tradition evidenced in the Short Version, or the outgrowth of ‘vernacular the-
ology’ reflected in the Long Version, or the excerpts selected and placed along-
side walter Hilton in a sixteenth-century florilegium, the Revelations cannot
1 As Alexandra Gillespie reminds us, ‘English texts produced in or for religious contexts do
not reflect a static or stable culture. They reveal the unfixed boundaries of lay and clerical worlds
and deal in both orthodoxy and dissent. They retained their capacity to change, as well as rein-
force, the attitudes of those who encountered them’ (‘Production and Dissemination’, p. 110).
2 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 170–71, quoted in Chartier, The Order of
Books, p. 2.
