Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (review)

How did medieval men and women understand their inner lives? In what ways did vernacular religious writings help them see themselves? A number of recent books have taken up these questions, but Jennifer Bryan’s Looking Inward will further enrich our understanding of the complex associations between late medieval vernacular reading, the tropes of seeing and mirroring, and interiority. While other studies have explored questions of interiority in relation to confessional discourses and meditative visual images, Bryan importantly directs our attention back to an understudied set of texts: vernacular devotional writings. Spanning two centuries and ranging from studies of canonical figures and texts (including Julian of Norwich, The Cloud of Unknowing, Nicholas Love, and Thomas Hoccleve) to less-discussed works (including The Chastising of God’s Children, The Prickynge of Love, and A Talkynge of the Love of God), Bryan’s monograph considers the ways in which late medieval vernacular devotional literature helped lay readers negotiate public and private selves by learning to “see” themselves in the mirroring structures of devotional writings.

After a lengthy introduction that provides the basic cultural context for the study, focusing on the rise of literacy and devotional interest among lay people (and women in particular) and the growing literatures addressed to those living the mixed life, the first chapter explores what “inwardness” means to the late medieval reader. As Bryan shows, there was no one way that inwardness was represented in the period. Rather, there are multiple models of interiority just as there are multiple types of spiritual identities that might be assumed. The chapter surveys seven models of inwardness, beginning with Richard Rolle’s solitary and highly affective interiority and ending with the Augustinian representation of self-knowledge as derived from the labor of reading and self-examination exemplified by such texts as Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and Julian of Norwich’s Shewings. This last model will govern the remainder of the book. In the following chapter, Bryan addresses the Augustinian influence even more directly, focusing on the notion of the text as mirror and thinking at more length about the relationship between notions of inwardness, reading, and vision. To do so, she first traces the Augustinian roots of the mirror-trope, next explores the relationship between rhetorics of sight and interiority in monastic spirituality as exemplified by The Myroure of Oure Ladye (written for the nuns at Syon), and finally concludes by juxtaposing two religious tracts, The Cloud of Unknowing and The Chastising of God’s Children, that offer divergent representations of the role of sight and self-knowledge in contemplation.

The third chapter, “Private Passions,” turns to vernacular passion meditations, an extraordinarily popular genre of religious writing in late medieval England, famously exemplified by Nicholas Love’s early fifteenth-century translation of the Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi. When these texts helped their readers imagine the suffering of Christ, Bryan argues, they encouraged those readers “to transform narratives of frenzied emotion into the grounds of more routine self-awareness and practical imitation” (112)—a lesson that, she notes, Margery Kempe evidently failed to understand. The chapter opens with an analysis of John Lydgate’s Testament, which Bryan reads (somewhat surprisingly) as the poet’s deeply personal though still exemplary response to a passion image. But the heart of the chapter offers close readings of The Talkynge of the Love of God and The Prickynge of Love, which use passion imagery and the language of suffering, longing, and beholding to produce readerly response, affective identification, and, ultimately, self-examination.

The final two chapters are single-author studies and examine how discourses of vision, reading, and interiority influence the writings of Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve. Although Bryan’s readings of anonymous and understudied religious writing in the opening chapters are excellent, this pair of author-studies shows her at her best; these fresh readings give us new ways of thinking about both authors...