Table Of ContentThe Middle English
Life of Christ
MEDIEVAL CHURCH STUDIES
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.
Volume 30
The Middle English
Life of Christ
Academic Discourse, Translation,
and Vernacular Theology
by
Ian Johnson
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
© 2013, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2013/0095/80
ISBN: 978-2-503-54748-0
Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Chapter 1. Introduction: Medieval Translatio and Modern Controversy 1
Chapter 2. Medieval Literary Theoretical Discourse and
Translation of Authority in Middle English Lives of Christ 37
Chapter 3. Translating Meditation for ‘Men & Women
& Euery Age & Euery Dignite of this Worlde’:
Nicholas Love’s Sovereign Ymaginacion 95
Chapter 4. ‘Increasing of Love’ in the Speculum devotorum:
The ‘Grounde and the Weye to Alle Trewe Deuocyon’ 147
Conclusion 177
Bibliography 179
Index 191
Acknowledgements
Inasmuch as this book, which has its origins in doctoral research, has taken
some time to appear there are quite a few people I am very happy to thank
for their generosity, academic advice, and encouragement.
I owe so much to the late Malcolm Parkes — a charismatic tutor who got me
started as a medievalist and was always there with his own entertaining brand
of robustly generous expert support and a wittily critical eye. I also thank John
Burrow for generous and constructive comment, and for being so helpful and
encouraging while this book was being written.
I thank especially Alastair Minnis, an inspirational mentor and my original
PhD supervisor on the topic of Latin literary theory’s translatio into the vernac-
ular. I acknowledge here a sustained debt of gratitude not only for the unique
expertise and insight from which I have benefited so much over so many years,
but also for Alastair’s endless personal support and patient kindness.
I have been fortunate in being able to benefit from the scholarly expertise,
advice, and encouragement of Vincent Gillespie, John Thompson, Jeremy
Smith, and Michael Sargent. I would also like to thank for their help or advice at
various stages in the production of this book Kevin Alban, Michael Alexander,
Jeanette Beer, Margaret Connolly, Rita Copeland, Peter Davidson, Roger
Ellis, Kantik Ghosh, Tony Hunt, the late George Jack, Tim Machan, Simon
Mitchell, Derek Pearsall, Alessandra Petrina, Denis Renevey, Neil Rhodes,
Nick Roe, Susan Sellers, Clive Sneddon, and Myra Stokes. I would also like
to acknowledge the practical assistance of the late Patricia Richardson, Sylvia
Halley, and the late Dorothy Black. I am also grateful to James Hogg for access
to his unpublished typescript introduction to Speculum devotorum.
For financial support I am grateful to the University of Bristol for its Hugh
Conway Doctoral Research Scholarship, and the British Academy for a PhD
viii Acknowledgements
studentship. I am also grateful to the British Academy Humanities Research
Board for a research leave award during the preparation of this research. Though
this book was ongoing before the Queen’s University Belfast-University of
St Andrews research project, Geographies of Orthodoxy, was conceived, I would
nevertheless like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for fund-
ing a project that taught me much and inevitably and beneficially influenced
this monograph. I am therefore happy to acknowledge the Geographies pro-
ject team: John Thompson, David Falls, Stephen Kelly, Ryan Perry, and Allan
Westphall.
I am grateful to colleagues at Brepols for their hard work, expertise and
helpfulness in seeing this through the press — Simon Forde, Guy Carney,
Katharine Handel, Lynda Lamb, Erin Dailey, and Martine Maguire-Weltecke.
More personally, I would like to acknowledge for her assistance early on my
grandmother, Kay Johnson, and, for their unshakeable support and loyalty, my
parents and brothers. And then there is the biggest debt of all — to my wife,
Sarah (yes, it is actually finished!), to whom this book is dedicated.
Chapter 1
Introduction: Medieval Translatio
and Modern Controversy
Medieval Translation, Academic Literary Theory,
and Middle English Lives of Christ
This book is obliged to be about several things at once. The initial research
from which it has developed was originally concerned with charting the ver-
nacularization of medieval academic literary theory in late medieval English
literary culture. In dealing with the transmission of Latin literary theory and
ideology into the vernacular it had to come to terms with the role of the trans-
lator and the nature of Middle English translation, for translators naturally
turned to scholastic literary theory to describe what they were doing and to
inform their practice. Then, in alighting on Middle English translations of the
life of Christ as prime repositories of academic literary thought and ideology in
the vernacular, it was required to take some account of this fascinating, under-
valued, and culturally central literary genre. At the same time, this study has
had to accommodate the sharpened modern interest in the medieval vernacu-
lar, in ‘vernacularity’ and its cultural/textual politics. And nowhere in medieval
English studies has the issue of the vernacular had more of an energizing and
transformative impact than in the field of so-called ‘vernacular theology’, a field
in which Middle English lives of Christ (which a decade and a half ago were
blithely ignored) are proving increasingly central and problematic. Vernacular
literary theory; translation and translators; Middle English lives of Christ;
vernacular and vernacularity; vernacular theology: this book moves variously
around these five overlapping and shifting areas. When one area is being dis-
cussed, the other four are often there or thereabouts.
2 Chapter 1
First of all, however, an assertion: there was such a thing as medieval literary
theory. Until the mid-1980s, the notion of an identifiable, let alone substantial,
tradition of medieval literary theory was unthinkable, especially with regard
to vernacular literary culture. Since then, however, there have been several sig-
nificant attempts to recover Latin academic traditions of literary theory and
to assess their significance for such secular English canonical poets as Chaucer
and Gower, most notably by Alastair Minnis, Rita Copeland, and Christopher
Baswell.1 In 1999 the first anthology of theoretical writings in Middle English,
The Idea of the Vernacular, appeared — a useful volume, albeit patchy in cover-
age and insular in scope.2 And only as recently as 2005 was the first reasonably
comprehensive history of medieval literary theory in Latin and the European
vernaculars published.3
Much remains to be done. And one key question remains inadequately
addressed. How much did the Latin tradition of academic literary theory and
commentary on auctores inform the most important part of mainstream late
medieval English literature, that is, religious texts made in the vernacular?4
1 See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and
Translation in the Middle Ages; Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England.
2 Wogan-Browne and others, The Idea of the Vernacular.
3 The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. by H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, 9
vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989–2012), ii: The Middle Ages, ed. by Alastair
J. Minnis and Ian Johnson (2005).
4 By the term ‘vernacular’, I am happy to go with the range of terms and concepts cited by
Minnis, Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature, amongst which, for example,
‘[p]ublic, popular, common, manifest’ (p. 1), are terms of particular usefulness because they
go beyond the merely linguistic. Indeed, as Minnis concludes, ‘the term “vernacular” is far too
potent to be strait-jacketed within the narrow sphere of language transfer. Rather it can, and I
believe should, be recognized as encompassing a vast array of acts of cultural transmission and
negotiation, deviation and/or synthesis, confrontation and/or reconciliation. “Native to a given
community” which may, or may not, be confined within national boundaries; lacking stand-
ardization or at least comprising non-standard versions of words and deeds which are standard-
ized; constituted by practices or “forms used locally or characteristic of non-dominant groups
or classes”, though susceptible to appropriation, authorization, and exploitation by dominant
groups or classes: those are a few of the elements of meaning which such terms as vulgo, vul-
gum, vulgariter, vulgaritas, and vulgatus carried in the later Middle Ages’ (p. 16). Comparable
terms and notions of vernacularity are also discussed in the preface to Watson and Somerset,
The Vulgar Tongue, which attends to notions of ‘popular’, ‘provincial’, ‘rustic’, ‘common tongue’,
‘vulgar’, ‘social underclass’, and ‘natural’. For Watson and Somerset, the vernacular ‘can encode
[…] the prestige of authenticity or integrity conferred upon the subaltern or popular through
their very marginalization, or the more assertive prestige that comes through the displacement
