Exemplary Penance: The Franciscan "Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord"

EXEMPLARY PENANCE: THE FRANCISCAN "MEDITATIONS ON THE SUPPER OF OUR LORD" In his recent study "Bonaventura English," Michael G. Sargent diligently sets forth the vernacular manuscript traditions of major English medieval works identified with the Franciscan Order and asserts, as did John Fleming some years earlier, the need for caution in labelling any particular work or genre of religious and didactic literature specifically "Franciscan." Sargent claims that "the determination of the role of any religious order in the composition and transmission of such literature must depend upon the evidence of the manuscript in which the literature survives, and not merely upon its perceived compatibility with the spirituality of the order."1 Still, a recognition of the integral role of the Friars Minor upon the psychic, social, and spiritual life of the medieval layperson has compelled determined scholars to persist in the task of reconstructing a Franciscan literary heritage, albeit conforming to these cautious precepts. D. L. D'Avray's The Preaching of the Friars presents a convincing case for the painstaking scholar's ability to affirm Franciscan origins for thirteenth-century sermon collections through the paleographer's mysterious spectrum, simultaneously returning the literary scholar's attention back to those central issues of focus and interpretation that continue to raise interesting literary discussion .2 D'Avray's masterful work reminds us, that the Friars Minor had a unique penitential mission, clearly outlined for them in Chapter Nine of the Regula Bullata of 1223 by Saint Francis himself : Moreover, I advise and admonish the friars that in their preaching their words should be examined and chaste. They should aim only 1 Michael G. Sargent, "Bonaventura English: A Survey of the Middle English Prose Translation of Early Franciscan Literature," Analecta Cartusiana 106 (1984): 147. 8 D. L. D'Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 124DENISE L. DESPRES at the advantage and spiritual good of their listeners, telling them briefly about vice and virtue, punishment and glory, because our Lord himself kept his words short on earth.3 Penance was the practical aim of Franciscan preachers, and in keeping with the Franciscan spirit of imitatio Christi, the Minorites should fashion their lives after Christ's, even in their sermonmaking . It is this exemplary didacticism that David Jeffrey and John Fleming claim as a major Franciscan influence upon the practice and psychology of Penance in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries , particularly in relation to shaping of the popular literary imagination .4 Both scholars have done much to establish the stylistic foundations for further exploration of Franciscanism as a distinctive spirituality and its dissemination through English penitential works inspired by affective devotion to Christ's humanity. Both agree that the various types of literature that we commonly associate with the Franciscan evangelical movement—the lyric, the gospel harmony, and even those celebrated fourteenth-century texts like the Confessio Amantis of the Canterbury Tales, which share a penitential framework—emerged from a meditative tradition primarily popularized by the Franciscans in thirteenth-and fourteenth-century England. It is no coincidence that the evangelical movement in England was instigated by Franciscans like John Pecham, Archbishop of Canterbury, who committed the Friars Minor once more to their evangelical mission in the Lambeth Constitutions of 1281. * In this study I will explore some of the connections between visual meditation, taught to laypeople in gospel harmonies like the early fourteenth-century Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord, and the process of scriptural embellishment which I believe resulted naturally from imaginative penitential exercises taught to the laity 8 Marion A. Habig, ed., St. Francis of Assisi, Writings and Early Biographies : English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St. Francis (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1973) 63. 4 John V. Fleming, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature ofthe Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977) 15; David L. Jeffrey, The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, !975) 58· Exemplary Penance: Meditations on the Lord's Supper125 by the Franciscans. I am hopeful that my preliminary discussion of the manuscript tradition of the Meditations on the Life of Christ will be of some interest to scholars of...