Textually Enclosed and Marginally Open: Medieval Revelations and Early Modern Readers

Serenus Cressy’s XVI Revelations of Divine Love, his 1670 imprint of Julian’s Long Text, is a curious text, maintaining much of the slightly modernized Middle English of the Long Text tradition. Throughout, Cressy includes glosses for the Middle English, and his choices, far from accidental or obvious, present a view of what the reader might know or not. More important, as an editor, Cressy re-creates Julian’s own role, as her expansion of the Short Text into the Long involves both added material and added explanation, a kind of in-text glossing. Cressy’s editorial activities not only follow Julian’s example but also anticipate a modern scholarly agenda that reads and interprets many of the same topics and portions of her textual tradition. This essay explores the connection between Cressy’s glossing of the servant-Lord exemplum, found in chapter 51, and his two prefaces to readers.