Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature (review)

From its radical fringe to more orthodox forms of devotion, lay piety in late medieval England has recently been garnering increased attention. Yet much of this attention has focused on poetry rather than prose and canonical works rather than anonymous and lesser known ones. Indeed, generally missing from recent conversations is sustained consideration of the many vernacular prose guides to lay spirituality produced and widely circulated from the late fourteenth century onward. Nicole R. Rice’s recent monograph offers an important contribution to emerging conversations about lay piety insofar as it brings precisely this corpus of texts into the discussion. Rice demonstrates that positioning these texts at the center of our considerations of late medieval piety provides new perspectives on a set of important questions: What were the spiritual aspirations of medieval laypeople? How did they achieve them? How did the clergy respond to the laity’s interest in religious life? How did vernacular texts contribute to the formation of lay piety? What is the relationship between religious manuals and contemporary poetry? In short, what can didactic texts tell us about how laypeople understood the possibility of living a “perfect” or contemplative life in the world?

Although the “perfect” life may have been accessible primarily to the cloistered, contemplative, or professional religious throughout much of the Middle Ages, by the late fourteenth century, laypeople evidently desired to understand how a holy life might be led outside of the cloister and began to seek out models of spiritual self-improvement. An impressive array of options were available to those with spiritual aspirations, ranging from contemplative life in the cloister to clerical life in the world, from pious lay life to cloistered lay life. Rice’s book explores some of these options, as they are presented by late fourteenth-century vernacular religious manuals, focusing on the anonymous Abbey of the Holy Ghost, Fervor Amoris, Life of the Soul, and Book to a Mother and Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, with special attention given to the final two works of this list. Throughout her study, Rice pairs these prose manuals with more canonical Middle English poetry, including Chaucer’s “Shipman’s Tale” and “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” and Langland’s Piers Plowman. She also addresses Wycliffite writings and ideas, which frequently serve as the radical other against which Rice measures and explores the theological stances of these devotional guides. In doing so, she argues that these prose guides address lay piety in two central ways. First, some of the manuals establish the cloister as the norm and translate claustral rules and enclosure into a model of regulating lay piety in the world outside of the cloister. Second, other texts seek to valorize life in the world over the enclosed, religious life and emphasize the clerical life and practices as an ideal model for the spiritually ambitious laity. Both sets of texts are concerned with spiritual self-improvement and require a series of translations: from the cloister to the world, from Latin to English, from religious discipline to secular regulation.

In the introduction, Rice examines the larger cultural contexts— including the plague, the Wycliffite controversy, and increasing lay literacy—that gave rise to lay interest in religious education and spiritual discipline. Rice first examines late medieval models of the “perfect” life, looking primarily at the concept of monastic disciplina and its rejection by Wyclif (who saw secular clerical life as the highest form of living). Having outlined these two options, Rice examines some of the practical ways in which lay-people sought to live spiritual lives, including membership in guilds, investment in their local parish, chantry foundation, confraternity at religious houses, and, importantly for this study, reading vernacular religious manuals for spiritual instruction. These texts and the multiple modes of living they explore are the subjects of the book’s subsequent chapters. Rice’s first chapter, “Translations of the Cloister: Regulating Spiritual Aspiration,” pairs The Abbey of the Holy Ghost...