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

In her second book, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama, Eleanor Johnson once again demonstrates the power of new formalism as an illuminating approach to Middle English literature. This ambitious study reads across genres and critical traditions to locate a distinct theological impetus within late medieval English literature, from the devotional prose texts The Cloud of Unknowing and A Revelation of Love to the visionary verse Piers Plowman and drama including the N-Town Mary plays, Wisdom, and Mankind. Arguing for these works as a coherent body of “contemplative literature” that both enables and reveals audience participation, Johnson makes a case for an accessible and inclusive model of contemplation which encourages a turn toward the world rather than a retreat from it. She defines contemplation as the “cultivation of a sense of participation between oneself and God,” and she argues that Middle English religious texts both “express that experiential sense of participation discursively” as well as “perform that contemplation in the formal apparatuses of the literary field” (p. 6). A theoretical introduction orients six subsequent chapters, divided into three sections of two chapters each. Each chapter analyzes the formal and sensory elements of a central text and argues for the ability of those elements to create linguistic fluency and disfluency. These different states of fluency, Johnson claims, facilitate contemplative participation and the reader’s or spectator’s awareness of it. Each section increasingly focuses on the communal experience of contemplative participation, ultimately concluding that by the fifteenth century, for Middle English texts “the life of participatory contemplation and the life of active participation in the social world are and should be one life” (p. 195).

“Part I: Participating in Time and Eternity” focuses on fourteenth-century devotional prose: in chapter 1, “Feeling Time, Will, and Words: Vernacular Devotion in The Cloud of Unknowing,” and in chapter 2, “Julian of Norwich and the Comfort of Eternity.” Chapter 1 argues that the Cloud enables self-aware contemplation as a means of union with God, explaining that “through its artful prose style, the Cloud creates for its readership a sensory simulacrum of the experience of spiritual contemplation itself” (p. 26). It shows how the Cloud encourages monosyllabic prayer and devotion grounded in linguistic rhythm that makes time sensible, and also how it fosters an atomic understanding of time correlating to an understanding of divine eternity. Both reveal to readers their own linguistic, temporal, and theological participation in divinity. Moreover, they create both fluency and disfluency, evoking readers’ awareness of their imbrication in the participatory contemplation described and embodied by the text. The first chapter thus posits a vernacular logic of formal possibility and expectation as a Middle English mode of reading that facilitates “a feeling or sense of participation between the reading contemplative and the ever-present in God” (p. 47).

Chapter 2 argues for a temporal Christology expressed through the structure, style, and form of Julian’s texts. It offers a linguistic analogue of an Augustinian theory of participation in divine mentality, specifically through what Johnson terms “temporal prose,” or the reminder of participation in human temporality: “ever ylike prose,” or linguistic participation in divine eternity through Julian’s verbal revelations, and “continual prose,” the interpenetration of human and divine temporalities through a prose style of perpetuity (pp. 57, 60, 67). Whereas the Cloud’s atomic prayer and style can reveal to readers their likeness in God, A Revelation manifests the appositive coexistence of three different temporal modes that show readers their temporal participation in the divine. Chapters 1 and 2 thus argue for the contemplative potential of Middle English prose in particular as a mode able to facilitate readers’ recognition of temporal participation in the divine. They propose an insular literary theology moving slowly toward a more communal understanding of contemplation’s goal. That goal emerges forcefully in the texts under consideration...