Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama by Eleanor Johnson (review)

Eleanor Johnson grapples with the practices of meditation and participation in three late medieval plays from East Anglia—the so-called Mary Play embedded in the N-Town manuscript (British Library Cotton MS. Vespasian D.8, fols. 37v–74), Wisdom, and Mankind (both of them included in the Macro Manuscript, Folger Shakespeare Library MS. 5031, fols. 38–121, 122–34)—as well as in the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love, and Langland's Piers Plowman, the latter more extensively studied recently by Curtis A. Gruenler (Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma, 2017). With regard to the plays under discussion, Johnson chooses a "shift of focus" in arguing for them as contemplative and participatory so far as they "in part perform that contemplation in the formal apparatuses of the literary field" (6). In this she makes the choice of turning away from consideration of "visuality" to "aural experience," thus challenging the dominant view of main-line fifteenth-century culture in England as being notably of the eye as a channel for devotion and "truth."

In her analysis of the Mary Play, Johnson calls attention to Nicholas Love's defense of meditative texts in his early fifteenth-century Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, an adaptation for "symple soules" of the Latin Meditatione Vitae Christi formerly attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love's goal was to "make present" (i.e., visible to "devoute ymaginacions") the scenes of Jesus's life and to encourage participation in them, to be "rauyshede to loue" of God (quoting from Michael Sargent's best-text edition). To participate imaginatively in these scenes (as if in a play) involved meditation on them as refashioned from the Bible and other sources. (For the Mary Play the sources are identified in the notes in Stephen Spector's standard edition of the N-Town Play, a crucial reference not cited in Johnson's bibliography.) Love encouraged a method close to the practice of monastic reading, which must have been familiar to him since he was a Carthusian prior whose semi-eremetical contemplative order was particularly devoted to contemplation and the production of devotional texts. This way of reading is well described by Jean Leclercq (Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 1961), who specifies pronouncing the words slowly, weighing "words in order to sound the depths of their full meaning," then "assimilating the contents of a text by means of a kind of mastication which releases its full flavor." I find neither this process nor St. Bonaventure's concept of the "repose of contemplation" particularly consistent with staged drama, which demands audible, usually rapid speech, but in the case of The Mary Play there may be an argument made, with the introduction of an onstage director named Contemplacio—and, along with the spoken dialogue, very considerable use of liturgical music (e.g., the Sarum hymn Jesu Corona Virginum for the Coronation of the Virgin sung by a choir of angels in heaven). The music may have been chanted slowly and meditatively as still is the practice at certain monasteries. Nevertheless, keeping in mind that East Anglia was a center of devotion to Mary as well as to her mother St. Anne, instead of proposing the play from this region as "contemplative," it seems to me it is more credibly identified simply as devotional. Such a looser categorization still would recognize the role of audience engagement, as of course participatory. To be sure, by the twentieth century such categories, along with "mysticism," had become muddled so far as definition is concerned.

The next play under discussion, contained in its complete form only in the Macro manuscript, is deeply indebted for its form to Wisdom literature. The first sixty-five lines are essentially borrowed from of the mystic Heinrich Suso's Orologium Sapientiae and are introduced first by a stage description of "Everlastyng Wisdom...