A Revelation of Purgatory ed. by Liz Herbert McAvoy (review)

It has been quite fascinating to witness the increase of scholarly interest shown in A Revelation of Purgatory. Initially published by Carl Horstman in 1895 in Appendix 1 of the first volume of his Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church, and his Followers, the work was noticed in 1910 by Geraldine E. Hodgson in her edition of the prose treatises of Richard Rolle, then in 1927 by Hope Emily Allen, and again in 1967 by Morton Bloomfield. It was this last scholar who, in his book The Seven Deadly Sins, called for more work to be undertaken on it.

In 1985 Marta Powell Harley produced the first critical edition of A Revelation of Purgatory, based on Longleat House MS 29—the earliest extant version of the text, dating from the 1430s—together with a modern English translation, hoping that her edition would bring the work to the attention of a wider readership. It was Harley, too, who pointed out the debt owed by the Winchester visionary to the writer of The Gast of Gy, which influences her writing at many points.

Alexandra Barratt published extracts from Horstman’s appendix in her Women’s Writing in Middle English (1992), and Elizabeth Spearing translated the version included in Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91, known commonly as the Thornton manuscript and the base manuscript for Liz Herbert McAvoy’s publication in her Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality (2002). A Revelation of Purgatory is the subject of two dissertations: one by S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, “An Edition of the English Works of Longleat MS 29” (Oxford, 1980 [ignored by McAvoy]), the other by Michelle Lisa Bayne-Jardine (M.Phil. diss., Birmingham, 2008). The text has also now been discussed in a small handful of journals and books, by Diane Watt (Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England [1997]), Takami Matsuda (Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry [1997], 67–72, 167, 682–83), Mary Erler (Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 38, no. 1 [2007]: 321–83; and in The History of British Women’s Writing, vol. 1, ed. McAvoy and Watt [2012], in which Erler points out the influence of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le pèlerinage de l’âme, especially in its Middle English translation of 1413, on the visionary), McAvoy herself (Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Anchoritic Life [2011], 134–46), and Clarck Drieshen (in Medieval Anchorites and Their Communities, ed. Gunn and McAvoy [2017], 85–100).

Liz Herbert McAvoy’s exemplary edition and translation of A Revelation of Purgatory is offered with the express hope that with “this present, more readily available edition . . . new generations of readers, both from within academia and beyond, [will be able] to consider the text in much more detail and depth” (7). The Revelation was written during 1422—that is, between the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe—in the form of a letter by an anonymous anchoress addressed to her spiritual father, and describes a series of visions experienced by the writer during the course of three successive nights. The date of 1422 also places the text toward the end of a series of visions of the other world that date back to late antiquity. In her visions the writer is visited by the soul of a late friend, a nun named Margaret, who has been condemned to purgatorial suffering. Other folk who are suffering with Margaret are also seen in the visions. The purpose of the experience was to plead with the visionary for the alleviation of the nun’s sufferings. The vision ends with Margaret at the gate of Paradise.

The visions begin when the writer has settled down to sleep at eight o’clock “on the night of St Lawrence’s Day” (73), that is, August 10. The martyrdom of Saint Lawrence himself, according to Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298) in his...