Saturday 18th March 11:15—12:45, Session 1
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Religious Didactic 2 |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 1 |
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Moderator: |
David Wallace |
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Paper 1: |
Predestination in Middle English Religious Writings for the Laity |
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Paper 2: |
Reading the Audience: Translation, Readers, and Adaptation |
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Paper 3: |
Pleasurable Reading and the Imagination of Paradise: From Les Peines de Purgatorie to The Prick of Conscience |
Predestination in Middle English Religious Writings for the Laity
Takami Matsuda
The doctrine of predestination is a recurring issue in medieval Christianity and is also one of key elements of the Wycliffite ecclesiology as Anne Hudson has demonstrated. At the same time, it is also one of the most difficult doctrines to be explained to the laity because it may easily be misunderstood as contradicting the free will bestowed on human being. Even among English Wycliffite writings, including the Lantern of Light, there is a deliberate shift of focus to a varying degree, in accordance with the function and readership of the text, so as not to undermine the importance of free will which is the didactically central element in lay teaching. This tendency is more noticeable outside the Wycliffite writings. I will argue that among the Middle English religious writings for the laity, there is a conscious effort to simplify the discussion to avoid coming into conflict with free will and unwittingly promoting presumption or despair.
Vernacular versions of the extremely popular Elucidarium, often attributed to Honorius Augustodunensis, provide one example of this tendency, especially in the so-called Second Lucidaire, the Old French version heavily revised for lay readers, as well as in the late Middle English translation of it. The reviser introduces an entirely new metaphor to channel the doctrine more clearly into the support of free will. The 15th-century compilation for the laity, the Chastising of God’s Children, also has a section on predestination, but the compiler expresses reluctance to discuss its doctrinal aspect, and simplifies the issue to serve a plainer didactic purpose. These and other Middle English examples, along with the corresponding passages in Latin or Old French, will be analyzed and compared to support my argument.
Reading the Audience: Translation, Readers, and Adaptation
Catherine Innes-Parker
Bonaventure's mystical treatise, Lignum Vitae, was translated into nearly every European vernacular. Many translations remained close to the original Latin; the Middle English translation, however, did not. Rather, the translator, or more accurately, the adaptor, altered and expanded the text for a specifically lay audience.
In a previous paper, I explored the Middle English text as translation and adaptation, looking at the adaptor's specific changes for a new, lay audience. However, the adaptation of the text did not end with the translation. The Middle English text survives in two manuscripts: Cambridge University St. John's College MS G.20 and Columbia University Plimpton MS 256. Neither manuscript gives any firm indication of its medieval provenance, although the scribe of Plimpton 256 is known to have been active at the court of Edward IV.
However, the scribal practices reflected in the two manuscripts are vastly different, suggesting very different audiences and uses. St. John's G.20 is a small manuscript, to be held in the hand or on the lap; it is punctuated and decorated for meditative use, with clear divisions indicated by coloured paraphs and the punctus psalterus. Plimption 256, on the other hand, is a large manuscript that would have been read on a table or a lectern; it is punctuated for reading aloud, with virgules placed where it would be natural to draw a breath. St. John's G.20 contains a certain amount of repetition and retracing of ideas; this repetition is eliminated in Plimpton 256, where the text is simplified and clarified.
The scribe of Plimpton 256 also provides some clues as to the manuscript's provenance. This scribe copied many Latin manuscripts, including some for Edward IV's personal physician. However, he only copied three manuscripts in English: Plimpton 256; British Library Harley 326, containing The Romance of the Three Kings' Sons (translated by David Aubert, active in the court of Margaret of York) and, in a different hand, Edward's IV's Descent from Rollo (ff. 1-7); and British Library Cotton Vespasian B.ix, containing The Book of the Foundation of St Bartholomew’s Church, London in Latin and English (of which our scribe copied only the English). Harley 326 was also illuminated by the same hand as Plimpton 256, suggesting that the manuscript might well be placed at the Yorkist court.
The connections between the court of Edward IV and that of is sister, Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy, are wide-ranging, and include the exchange of books. This, combined with the very different scribal practices of the copiers of St John's G..20 and Plimpton 256, suggests that the manuscripts were copied in different contexts for different purposes.
Drawing on the theoretical lens of textual mouvance and variance, this paper will explore how translation and adaptation continue throughout the life of this text, suggesting possible historical contexts as well as cultural trends in evidence through a close study of these two manuscripts.
Pleasurable Reading and the Imagination of Paradise: From Les Peines de Purgatorie to The Prick of Conscience
Alastair Minnis
My paper will focus on the way in which The Prick of Conscience – that most popular of all Middle English poems - translates and substantially expands the account of the pleasures of heaven which its poet found in Les Peines de Purgatorie (a prose treatise composed in the late thirteenth century). The Prick-poet’s expansion of his Anglo-Norman source makes for considerable awkwardness, not least because no clear distinction is drawn between the paradise of disembodied souls (which exists now) and the paradise of re-embodied souls (which will exist following the resurrection). Further, a straightforward account of the post-resurrection pleasures of holy bodies and souls (which follows the model associated with St Anselm) is disrupted by a richly imaginative account of Jerusalem the Golden and a justification of how heaven may be imagined thus, in our present life, with reference to precious metals and stones. No actual description is possible because there are no material referents in heaven. And yet, the poet (as he enthusiastically declares) can imagine the Heavenly City in his own head, without painful effort; indeed, he takes great pleasure in so doing (Prick, 8870-7), The emphasis placed here on his own mental activity is remarkable (the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ are repeated over nine lines). Evidently, the poet has taken possession of the imaginative process. But, as he freely admits, his imagery is based on that offered by God’s ‘derlyng dere’, St John, the putative author of the Apocalypse. According to medieval literary theory, St John’s images were intended to stimulate imaginative activity of an appropriately devotional kind in his readers. One such reader, the Prick poet, has thus been stimulated, and in turn he seeks to stimulate his own readers, thereby perpetuating what might be termed a chain-reaction of mental image-making in the service of a high Christian purpose.
This affirmation of personal participation will be placed in the general context of late-medieval imagination of heaven, and of the intellectual challenges presented by the fact that, when resurrected bodies rejoin their souls following the Last Judgment, imagination of joy will give way to actual joy (both spiritual and corporeal), and prophetic metaphor will be replaced with materiality. Of course, there will be no city streets paved with gold – but, even better, the glorified bodies of the blessed will shine with a brightness far surpassing that of the sun. They will live in a habitat from which all the natural beauty that once formed the basis of imagination of paradise has been stripped. However, the beauty of that final homeland will – the schoolmen argued – excel and perfect nature as we know it in the present world. The Prick poet delivers this doctrine with apparent conviction and occasional elegance of style, whilst remaining positive about the ‘full gret affeccyon, / And gret comforth and solace’ he experiences when imagining heaven in his ‘awen hede’. For him, such readerly pleasure, as stimulated by St John’s Apocalypse, seems to be a worthy adumbration of the pleasures of heaven.