Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature (review)

Everyone would agree that the passage of monastic spirituality into lay possession is one of the great narratives of the later Middle Ages. In 1989, Vincent Gillespie observed: "The fifteenth century witnessed an extensive and consistent process of assimilation by the laity of techniques and materials of spiritual advancement which had historically been the preserve of the clerical and monastic orders." In the essay that followed, he provided a groundbreaking codicological analysis, showing how techniques of ordering and organizing the page facilitated access to these clerical texts by a wider readership ("Vernacular Books of Religion," in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475, ed. J. Griffiths and D. Pearsall, 1989), 317-44 [317]). Since then, research on book ownership and provenance has used predominantly physical evidence to illustrate how widely texts originally monastic in direction were owned by lay people.

Now this cultural shift from monastic to lay has been newly explored from a textual point of view. Nicole Rice's book describes fully and analyzes thoughtfully the gradual shift in spiritual reading, and indeed in the provision of spiritual guidance, from professed religious to laymen or women. She provides a succession of often surprising close readings, readings that juxtapose devotional texts and literary ones, since, as she says, Chaucer and Langland "often ask the very questions that didactic authors seek to answer" (xii).

In this analysis, Rice brings to light what must always have been implicit in this or any account of cultural change: opposition and resistance. Her work makes one wonder why such resistance has not been more widely acknowledged. Of course there must often have been reluctance toward what amounted to transfer of spiritual authority from clerical to lay hands. And of course works of spiritual guidance would have demonstrated different positions with regard to the degree of spiritual authority assigned to lay people.

To illustrate these resistances, Rice examines two different kinds of spiritual works, the first structured around "the requirements of orthodoxy," the second impelled by "the impulses of reform." Abbey of the Holy Ghost and Fervor Amoris fall into the first category (both 1375 to 1400-25). Rice's readings aim to show the essential conservatism of these texts. Particularly striking is her accompanying analysis of Chaucer's The Shipman's Tale, included in order to demonstrate one of her central themes, the closeness of lay and religious estates. She compares the merchant and the monk, alike in their "shared hybridity," their "partial transformation" of their respective ways of life (45), and their "skeptical perspective on the possibility of converting material to spiritual capital" (41). Read in this light as a series of mishaps resulting from lay identification with an imperfect religious figure, the tale makes painfully clear the mixture of contemporary attitudes toward religious life: admiration, emulation, criticism, all simmering together to produce what Rice calls a "fraught period" for the categories of lay and clerical.

The second group of religious texts, those that provide new forms of lay religious authority, Rice labels "dialogic." This category includes Life of Soul (a dialogue proper), Book to a Mother (not a dialogue, but a text that establishes "an intimate rhetorical relationship" between the author and his mother-addressee, which is then extended to a wider lay audience), and Walter Hilton's Epistle on the Mixed Life (displaying an advisory relation between author and addressee). All these works can be described as conversations in which "mutual affection fosters the growth of clerical understanding." All three precede Arundel's constitutions of 1407-9 and hence they illustrate the complexity of the debate on scriptural access and offer relatively open positions on this matter. Importantly, all three are conceived "to reshape traditional relations between learners and teachers" (80).

Working independently, both Rice and Jessica Brantley have identified the dialogue as what seems the central formal mode employed in the late medieval cultural shift from religious to lay reading. Brantley's book Reading in...