Reading lyric before lyric : English religious poetry among its late medieval readers [thesis]

226 Pages·2014·4.68 MB·English

by  Katy Wright-Bushman

READING LYRIC BEFORE LYRIC:
ENGLISH RELIGIOUS POETRY AMONG ITS LATE MEDIEVAL READERS

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School
of the University of Notre Dame
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

by

Katy Michelle Wright-Bushman

_________________________________
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Director

Graduate Program in English
Notre Dame, Indiana
July 2014
ProQuest Number: 3731628
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READING LYRIC BEFORE LYRIC:
ENGLISH RELIGIOUS POETRY AMONG ITS LATE MEDIEVAL READERS

Abstract

by

Katy Michelle Wright-Bushman

The late medieval English religious lyric, immensely popular in its time but neglected
in contemporary literary scholarship, offers an under-explored site for examining the ties
between evolving religious and textual practices. This study challenges scholarly
understandings of the entanglement of literary and religious history by examining the late
medieval English religious lyric through the lens of reading practices. By integrating two
previously isolated approaches to the medieval religious lyric, I address a gap in scholarly
understanding of the place of these texts in early English reading cultures: my project draws
textual and literary scholarship on the early English religious lyric together with recent
scholarship that searches out correlations between developments in late medieval religious
culture and textual culture (e. g., through increasing literacy and the laicization of devotional
culture). I argue that through both the reading practices in which these texts engage their
readers and the construction of the imagined reader within them, as much as through their
Katy Michelle Wright-Bushman
content, religious lyrics were read to effect ethical, affective, volitional, and epistemic change
in a growing array of medieval readers. Lyrics like the widely-proliferated “Nou goth sonne
under wod” (DIMEV 3742) and “Let fal downe thyn ne and lift up thy hart” (DIMEV
3054), carved across a fifteenth-century rood screen rail in a Yorkshire church, were believed
to properly serve these formative functions by their authors, advocates, and readers. In
narratives like The Storie of Asneth, we see this understanding of the place of verse within
religious practice confirmed through the literary construction of a lay, female penitential
subject performing religious lyric. The particular and functional cultural vitality of the late
medieval English religious lyric illustrates the interconnectedness of literary and religious
history across the period. By taking an approach to the lyric centered on its reading, my
project re-examines the genre in a justly historicized manner and joins it to the concerns of
the contemporary study of lyric. Analysis of Middle English religious lyric poetry as it was
read and transmitted across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveals its centrality to late
medieval religious and reading cultures and how these texts reshape our understanding of
the age’s complex forms of socio-religious change.
For Brian Wright-Bushman and Deborah and William Wright.
“They tell us why, and teach us how to sing.” –John Donne, “Upon the Translation of the Psalms”

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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................iv
Introduction: The Troublesome Lyric, Reading, and Religious History......................................1
Chapter One: The Lyric in the Manuscript: Locating the Religious Lyric in Late Medieval
England...................................................................................................................................44
Chapter Two: The Reader in the Lyric: Reconstructing the Reading of the Medieval
Religious Lyric........................................................................................................................95
Chapter Three: The Lyric in Narrative: The Storie of Asneth, Penitential Prayer, and Religious
Poetry....................................................................................................................................158
Conclusion.........................................................................................................................................193
Index of Manuscripts........................................................................................................................198
Works Cited.......................................................................................................................................201

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My adventures in planning, researching, writing, and revising this dissertation would
have been fruitless apart from the unflagging support, wisdom, and generosity of spirit
extended to me by my director, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, throughout my years in the Ph.D.
program at the University of Notre Dame. I would like to thank my committee members,
Susannah Monta and Julia Marvin, for their gracious engagement with my project, their keen
insight, and their energy in helping me to strengthen my work. With gratitude, I remember
the contributions of Katherine Zieman and Jesse Lander to the formation of my project in
its early days. I also want to thank Notre Dame’s Graduate School and the Graduate Student
Union for their generous funding, which facilitated my research. For all of my teachers and
all of my students, who have left their indelible marks on my understanding, memory, and
imagination, I give thanks. And of course, from the title page to the last bibliographical
entry, this dissertation is born up by the encouragement, insight, patience, compassion, and
good cheer lavished on me by my husband and my family.
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INTRODUCTION

THE TROUBLESOME LYRIC, READING, AND RELIGIOUS HISTORY

“Þat þai songen newe songes bitokneþ þe heriȝing þat þai maden to Iesu crist.”
– Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 2498, an English Apocalypse of St. John, chapter 5 (Fridner
43)

In this line from the Middle English Apocalypse of St. John, the singing of new
songs—songs proclaiming the worthiness of Christ, the lamb, who had wrought redemption
through his blood1—betokens the honor given to Jesus’s call on the lives of the singers.
New songs, says the text, are the lyrical response befitting meditation on and praise of the
things of God. In the age of this Middle English work, we find these “newe songes”
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1 Cf. Revelation 5:9 and 14:3: “et cantabant canticum novum, dicentes: Dignus es, Domine…quoniam occisus es, et
redemisti nos Deo…” (“And they sung a new canticle, saying: Thou are worthy, O Lord…because thou wast slain,
and hast redeemed us to God…”); “Et cantabant quasi canticum novum ante sedem” (“And they sung as it were a
new canticle, before the throne…,” Douay-Rheims). The canticum novum of the Apocalypse repeats the language
of Psalm 96:1: “Cantate Domino canticum novum, quia mirabilia fecit” (“Sing ye to the Lord a new canticle: because
he hath done wonderful things,” Douay-Rheims). It echoes, too, the proclamation to sing new songs to God in
Psalms 33:3, 40:3, 98:1, 144:9, 149:1, and the hymn of praise beginning with Isaiah 42:10. The identification of
the singing of Psalm 96 with medieval choral psalmody, and thus, with the singing of “new songs” by
Christians, is supported by the frequent illustration of the text in medieval English Psalters by monks singing
together from a liturgical book, for example, in the “Derby Psalter” of Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson G.185,
f. 81v (Katherine Zieman 44-45). As Zieman notes, those associations link “choral psalmody to the ‘new song’
and ultimately to Christian exegesis in general”—to “clerical hermeneutics” (44). The repetition of the psalmic
phrase “cantabant canticum novum” in Revelation itself performs the kind of Christian exegesis suggested in those
associations, interpreting the psalm’s “new songs” into the apocalyptic vision of Christ’s redemption. As
Clement of Alexandria would describe it in the late second century, through his redemptive work, Christ becomes
the new song (Bruce Holsinger 34; see also 31-35). Here and throughout, the psalms are designated by the
Hebrew (Masoretic) numbering.
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proliferating in the form of the religious lyric—a genre historically bound to song, to
memory, then to the page—scattered throughout the manuscripts and marking surfaces of
stone, wood, metal, and textile throughout medieval England. Religious lyrics survive by the
thousands, laid out beautifully across lavish pages, scratched into margins, interrupting Latin
sermons in preachers’ books, penned on flyleaves, and intermixed with recipes, riddles, and
romances. The huge numbers of these poems in medieval English manuscripts, especially
relative to what are usually described as secular lyrics, is not an accident of manuscript
survival: as Peter Dronke notes, “in medieval European vernacular lyric England alone
shows a striking preponderance of sacred lyrics over profane” (65). Though peripheral in
current literary scholarship, they play a fundamental part in insular textual and religious
cultures in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, right up to and across the Henrician
Reformation.
The line opening the present study comes from an English Apocalypse of St. John
which survives in a dozen or so mid-fourteenth- to fifteenth-century English manuscripts.
The text preferred by modern editors appears in two manuscripts written by a single scribe,
Cambridge, Magdalene College MS Pepys 2498, and London, British Library MS Harley 874.
The Pepys 2498 manuscript, dated to the later decades of the fourteenth century, illustrates
well the neglected but persistent presence of the religious lyric in English manuscripts.2 The
collection, deemed “Devotional Treatises” in the Magdalene College catalogue (86), includes
an array of important Middle English devotional texts, all in a single hand: a harmony of the
gospels, The Mirror (a translation of Robert de Gretham’s Anglo-Norman collection of
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2 This same scribe is responsible, as well, for Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622; all three
are made up of religious texts, though not all prose. The Magdalene College catalogue cites N. R. Ker’s dating
of the Pepys manuscript to the middle of the second half of the fourteenth century based on the scribe’s hand
(88, in Zettersten xix, n. 1). Earlier, M. R. James and Anna Paues (in her 1902 edition of the Apocalypse) dated
Pepys 2498 to “around 1400” (Fridner xi), but scholars generally rely on Ker and place it somewhere between
1360 and 1390.
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homilies, Miroir), the Ten Commandments with explication, the English Apocalypse with
commentary (translated from a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman version), a prose Psalter
with English glosses of the Latin text, Ancrene Riwle, The Complaint of Our Lady, The Gospel of
Nicodemus, and a set of five short prayers. The texts bound together suggest a somewhat or
presumably trilingual audience with interests in eschatology (in the Apocalypse and The
Gospel of Nicodemus), and in instruction in doctrine and the reading of scripture (the gospel
harmony, the Apocalypse, the Psalter, the Ten Commandments, everything variously glossed
or explicated).
All are almost fully in prose (even, of all things, the Englished Psalter), but all except
the framing pieces are concluded or introduced in verse—in the briefest of religious poetry.
It is as though the manuscript and its texts, deeply entangled within the world of the late
fourteenth century, cannot escape lyric. The Mirror ends, “Of þe holy omelies now I wil
blynne; God bringe vs to þat blisse; þere ioye is euere inne” (The Digital Index of Middle English
Verse, hereafter DIMEV, 4220); the explicated Ten Commandments conclude, “here enden I
ȝou seie, vnto þe blis of heuene; god vs wisse þe weie” (DIMEV 5237).3 The Apocalypse
itself is headed, “þapocalips on englissh; makeþ here gynnyng / After þis synful lyf; god
graunt vs good wonyng” (DIMEV 5194), and it ends, “þe Apocalips on englissh; here now
makeþ ende, / Vnto þe blis of heuen; god graunte vs grace to wende” (DIMEV 5195). Each
subsequent text mirrors this pattern, beginning or ending or settling within framing couplets
like these.4 This collection of prose devotional treatises, such as it is, then, is deliberately
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3 Here and throughout, insofar as it is possible, I indicate the line breaks as they appear in the
manuscript from which the text is quoted. However, where I follow the editions of others, I retain any line
breaks there inserted. I follow the punctuation of those editions and where transcription is my own or where
useful, I introduce minimal additional punctuation.

4 Similarly to the preceding texts, the prose Psalter begins, “Of þe sautere on englisch; here is þe
gynnynge / Wiþ þe latyn bifore; and Gregories expounynge” (DIMEV 4221). The Ancrene Riwle ends, “þis
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