Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (review)

This is a book that does both more and less than its subtitle portends. Perhaps reassuringly, given that this is her first book, Jessica Brantley does not attempt a full conspectus of “private devotion and public performance in late medieval England.” What she does offer is a very detailed, rich, and stimulating discussion of a single fifteenth-century manuscript, British Library MS Add. 37049—a well-known miscellany of vernacular lyrics and other shorter texts, of north Midland and almost certainly Carthusian provenance. Douglas Gray (in an essay cited but oddly under-used by Brantley) has characterized it as a “spiritual encyclopedia.” The book is of note for its pictures as much as for its texts: although neither is especially distinguished in itself, it is their combination that fascinates Brantley. The manuscript’s many complexes of image and text produce an effect more like a Web page than the page of a printed book. There is not necessarily a single linear route through or around these pages: instead the reader must immerse himself in it, experiencing it differently on different occasions, in a kind of meditative or (though Brantley does not use what would have been a useful term) ruminative engagement. For this mutual enfolding of word and picture (where terms like caption or illustration are inappropriate because of the hierarchy they imply) Brantley adopts W. J. T. Mitchell’s term imagetext, and the kind of reading that these imagetexts require is “performative.” Both terms enable a powerful and often illuminating argument. The performative reading that the manuscript demands can take a variety of forms, ranging from the reader’s insertion of himself into a lyric’s first-person subject position, or seeing himself represented as spectator/reader of an imagetext (there are numerous depictions of attentive Carthusians on the fringes of the manuscript’s pictures), through participation in (quasi-)liturgical performance, to engagement in animated dialogues and texts that verge on (and thereby blur) the boundaries of the Drama.

Reading in the Wilderness is very generously illustrated with many black-and-white figures from MS Add.37049 and a good range of analogues and eight color plates. No indication is given of the actual size of the images that the figures reproduce, and this seems to me symptomatic of a shortcoming in Brantley’s study—that is, the omission from consideration of some of the material aspects of this manuscript as a book. Although there is (as an appendix) a detailed and helpful listing of the manuscript’s contents, there is no formal description of it as codex. Tantalizing hints of booklet production and possible rebinding remain undocumented and underexplored; the manuscript’s several hands (at least four), and its careful correction and annotation—clearly visible in many of the figures and plates and a familiar and characteristic feature of Carthusian books—do not come under discussion. Brilliant as Brantley often is in her analysis of individual imagetexts, it is sometimes possible to forget that these pages are bound up into a book.

A sometimes oversimplified conception of Carthusians as isolated and isolationist, rather than as members of an order of solitaries, can be regarded as questionable; other key terms such as wilderness and hermit also tend to be used in a rather unexamined way. For Carthusian reading practices Marleen Cré’s Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse (Brepols, 2006)—which presumably came out too late to inform Brantley’s work—remains the indispensable study. But for its thoughtful exploration of varieties of performative reading, its revaluation of playtexts as texts to be read, and above all, its thoroughly persuasive and sure-to-be-influential invocation of imagetext, Reading in the Wilderness is a valuable book.