Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations ed. by Nicole R. Rice (review)

This focused collection of essays explores the interlocking and overlapping monastic, pastoral, and lay uses of religious works appearing in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English books. It contributes to the heady sense that we might one day have a coherent, if necessarily incomplete, cultural map of the transmission and intertextual conversations of such works. Nicole Rice’s informative Introduction makes clear the volume’s interest in active reception—activity that is visible in the works’ composition (or compilation, or translation, or combination of these); in contemporary readers’ varied engagements with these texts; and in the reworkings and later responses that continue the creative use of tradition.

The effort to trace back through layered receptions gives some of the most engaging essays in the collection the feel of academic detective stories. Michael Sargent considers early reception of Marguerite Porete’s Mirouer des simples âmes anienties, especially though not exclusively among English Carthusians, and the ways in which modern scholars’ attitudes have shaped—and, he argues, at times seriously misrepresented—its cultural role. Digging into both the manuscript and early print traditions and twentieth-century scholarship, he traces lines of affiliation and argument to suggest that the Mirouer was received as an esoteric but orthodox text by most of its early readers and should not be taken, as it sometimes has been in our own time, to represent part of a widespread heresy of the Free Spirit or “an ongoing ‘tradition’ of heretical thought” (p. 77). Mary Agnes Edsall, in her essay on Huntington HM 744 (the Fyler Manuscript), moves backward rather than forward in time, providing a careful “excavation” of the “strata” (p. 117) of manuscripts—Middle English, French, and Latin—that shaped the structure of this codex compiled for or by a fifteenth-century merchant family and containing, among other pieces, a number of works by Thomas Hoccleve in his own hand. She traces back through these layers to the monastic genre she calls “companions to the novitiate,” which aimed to train new monks and lay brothers in the practical, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of regular life, and which gave rise to a particular type of devotional compilation, characterized by the use of “architectural allegory,” that brought monastic models to a lay audience (p. 116). Edsall’s nuanced combination of this deep history with a careful close reading of the Fyler manuscript’s peculiarities helps us to see the evolution of these introductory monastic handbooks into a book that offered a blend of conduct literature and spiritual guidance to a mercantile household. In her essay, Margaret Connolly’s point of entry is not a single codex or a single author but rather several books that bear traces of ownership by “an English family of local importance,” the Robertses of Willesden, beginning around the 1540s. She traces the marks of use on these books (particularly those of Edmund Roberts, an avid annotator), from reading notes to inscriptions of names to family records, using them both as a window onto sixteenth-century readers’ reception of fifteenth-century texts and as evidence for the possibility that these books may have entered this secular household context as a result of the Dissolution—the dispersal of monastic books into lay hands being one unintended consequence of Henry VIII’s actions.

Moira Fitzgibbons’s engagingly clear and lively essay directs our attention to another motif that recurs in a number of essays, that of dialogue. She makes a persuasive case for Dives and Pauper as a response to rather than a source for Pore Caitif, giving an impressively full account of both texts in brief space and demonstrating the ways in which Dives makes “ongoing dialogue and debate” (p. 208) not only part of its internal dialogic form but a mode of engagement with its predecessor. This opens into a discussion of what Fitzgibbons sees as the Dives-writer’s engagement...