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John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century
Karen A. Winstead reappraises John Capgrave, routinely either patronized or ignored by modern criticism, as a thoughtful writer with a consistent focus on the major issues of his day. Capgrave, an Augustinian friar from Lynn, was a prolific writer in Latin and English. Though his Life of St. Katherine and his Solace of Pilgrims, a guidebook to the sights of Rome, have attracted some attention in recent years, the canon of Capgrave studies is still very small, and his reputation lags behind those of his contemporaries Lydgate, Hoccleve, and Bokenham. M. C. Seymour's 1996 biography dismissed Capgrave as dull, conservative, and insufficiently attuned to the onward march of literary history. Winstead's analysis, reading Capgrave in close textual detail in order to outline his positions on four key points, shows this assessment to be inadequate not only to the author, but to the complexity of what constituted conservatism and orthodoxy in the fifteenth century.
Winstead reads Capgrave's Lives of Saint Augustine and Saint Katherine as negative and positive exempla of the responsibilities of scholarly Christians. In hagiography, apparently minor variations on the received narratives may be significant, and Capgrave's variations are not minor. His Life of Augustine, the (supposed) founder of Capgrave's order, is unique among English Lives of the saint in its praise of public activity. Capgrave's Augustine is a model of the mixed life who resists the temptation of reclusive contemplation in order to carry out his duties as preacher, bishop, and public intellectual. Conversely, Katherine withdraws into private study and thereby loses the confidence of her nobles, her realm, and her life. Though this narrative is common to all versions of her life, Winstead argues that Capgrave's emphases and alterations add up to an implicit criticism of the saint's neglect of her secular responsibilities. For Augustinian friars, just as for modern academics, a good life balanced scholarship, teaching, and pastoral care.
Winstead elucidates the gray areas of fifteenth-century ecclesiastical politics in order to make sense of Capgrave's nuanced position (similar to that of Reginald Pecock) on heresy and the Church's reaction to it. Capgrave, as might be expected of a long-serving member of a religious order, was orthodox in his beliefs and loyal to the institutional Church. However, he had some sympathy for certain positions that modern readers [End Page 417] might assume were the property of Lollards: he discussed theological issues in the vernacular and hinted that an intellectual crackdown on heresy might be counterproductive. His ideal was of a "rational, intellectualized faith grounded in the study of Scripture" (p. 78). Capgrave was not a Lollard sympathizer, but Winstead shows that in the mid-fifteenth century there was more to orthodoxy than Arundel's Constitutions—and that apparently bland genres such as hagiography might be vehicles for vernacular theological enquiry.
Oddly enough, Capgrave, the author of one of the longest virgin martyr legends in Middle English, seems not to have been very interested in virginity. The argument relies in part on the negative evidence of opportunities to expand on virginity that Capgrave neglected, and in part on evidence for his engagement with pious matrons. Winstead acknowledges that there is no specific record of Capgrave having contact with his contemporary and neighbor Margery Kempe (who found Lynn's Augustinian friars tolerant of her crying in sermons), but draws attention to similarities between her Book and Capgrave's representation of pious women. The analysis returns to the Life of St. Katherine (evidently Winstead's favorite of Capgrave's works) with a perceptive reading of Katherine's mother as a fifteenth-century noblewoman, managing family interests.
Finally, Capgrave is placed within the tradition that David Lawton describes as the "dullness" of the fifteenth century. Like contemporaries such as Lydgate and Hoccleve, Capgrave found conventionality a convenient vehicle for comment on unsettled times. Winstead compares the St. Katherine with Lydgate's St. Edmund, a text generally accepted to have offered instruction on kingship to the young Henry VI. Katherine again features as a negative example, a monarch whose reluctance to rule—expressed in terms very similar to hostile descriptions of Henry VI's ineffective rule—led to the invasion of her capital and her own death. In both instances, as Winstead acknowledges, the poets have to wrestle with the generic norms of hagiography in order to expand its remit, with the surprising result that Capgrave represents the pagan emperor Maxentius as, at least initially, a more competent ruler that the Christian queen Katherine.
Although these arguments produce a coherent account of Capgrave's thought and works, some details of the analysis may be questioned. It is possible that the emphasis on authorial intention and coherence understates the effects of patronage and genre, and Capgrave's political [End Page 418] personality seems curiously static for a man who lived through seventy-one turbulent years. Winstead supports the claim that St. Katherine encoded anxieties over Henry VI's rule by referring to its limited circulation: its content, she implies, made it a risky text. However, none of Capgrave's works circulated widely: indeed, St. Katherine, with four extant manuscripts, was probably (then as now) the most popular. Capgrave's extant, but unedited biblical commentaries are barely mentioned: it would be interesting to know whether they bear out the identification of his "dissident orthodoxy," or whether he thought differently in Latin scholarship. However, these are minor quibbles. This book is a persuasive and subtle analysis of a neglected writer in his historical, political, and regional contexts, which enriches the fields of vernacular theology, East Anglian culture, and fifteenth-century literature. [End Page 419]