Cushions, Kitchens and Christ

Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing

Louise Campion

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786838322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including spiritual guidance texts, Lives of Christ and collections of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts' frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.

1

The Kitchen of the Heart, Spiritual Furniture and Noble Visitors: Mapping the Domestic in The Doctrine of the Hert

In his mid-thirteenth-century life of Lutgard of Aywières, a Cistercian nun from the Low Countries, Thomas of Cantimpré recounts a conversation between Christ and Lutgard. In this exchange, Christ observes that Lutgard is so profoundly moved by the plight of the weak and sick that he gives her the ability to heal any ailment.¹ This divinely bestowed power, however, presents Lutgard with a problem: she is sought out by overwhelming numbers of sickly people, and is therefore unable to devote herself fully to the worship of Christ. In anguish, Lutgard asks for her healing grace to be exchanged for something more beneficial to her personal spirituality, and Christ responds by granting her a deeper understanding of the psalter. This, too, however, is an imperfect fit, and Lutgard laments this particular grace as unsuitable for ‘an unlettered, uncultivated, and uneducated nun’.² In search of a more appropriate spiritual gift, Christ asks Lutgard what she wishes to receive from him:

Then the Lord said to her, ‘What do you want?’ ‘I want your heart.’ ‘No, rather it is I who want your heart’, replied the Lord. ‘So be it, Lord, on condition that you temper your heart’s love to my heart and that I may possess my heart in you. Indeed, with you as my shield, my heart will be secure for all time’.³

Lutgard’s request clarifies where her spiritual priorities lie. What she most desires is to feel intimacy with Christ, and this is best achieved through a connection to the divine heart. This exchange between Lutgard and Christ is hallmarked by several of the salient preoccupations of thirteenth-century spirituality. Perhaps most obvious is its focus on the Sacred Heart as a precious and coveted object synonymous with achieving the ultimate closeness with Christ.⁴ Moreover, the divine heart is not the sole object of desire in this passage. Christ, too, wishes to take possession of Lutgard’s heart, and thereby seal her within the security of his holy love; this reciprocal melding of divine and devout hearts is a further commonplace of the spike in devotion to the Sacred Heart that characterises the spirituality of the period. For the believer to be intimate with Christ is, therefore, to seek the mutual exchange of hearts.

The centralising of the heart is evident in the texts of numerous devotional writers. One such example is The Doctrine of the Hert, a text likely produced in a similar context to the one in which Lutgard received her visions. The Doctrine is a fifteenth-century Middle English translation of a thirteenth-century Latin treatise, De doctrina cordis, which was arguably produced in a Cistercian milieu in the Low Countries and directed primarily towards an audience of enclosed female religious.⁵ As a guidance text, the purpose of the Doctrine is to educate its readers in the proper preparation of the heart for union with God. In order to communicate its lessons on the subject of spiritual union, the Doctrine routinely overlays the familiar trope of the heart with the imagery of the domestic sphere; the intimacy of homely space serves as a metaphor for the closeness that the reader will hopefully eventually enjoy in the chambers of the Sacred Heart. Indeed, domestic space is a favourite image of the Doctrine translator, and readers are routinely encouraged to elide the intimate spaces of heart and home.

The mid-thirteenth-century De doctrina cordis, written in the wake of the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council’s emphasis on clerics’ pastoral duties, instructs its readers in how to prepare the devout heart for spiritual union.⁶ The text is divided into seven books, each of which is further split into chapters, with each section devoted to the explication of a particular gift of the Holy Spirit. These seven spiritual gifts are paired with a different aspect of the preparation of the heart, from guarding it to cutting it.⁷ Over the course of these seven books, the treatise advances from basic advice on confession and penitence to more contemplative ineffability in its later sections. Of De doctrina’s seven books, the first is by far the longest, comprising thirty chapters and accounting for over half of the treatise as a whole. It appears that De doctrina was used in a number of different ways, including as a preaching manual and as a guidance text.⁸

De doctrina was hugely popular in medieval Europe. This widespread appeal is evidenced by 208 surviving manuscripts of the Latin text, with a further 70 recorded in catalogues but not extant.⁹ Alongside these numerous Latin manuscripts, a further indicator of the wide appeal and circulation of De doctrina is its translation into several European vernaculars. Four manuscripts of French versions of the text are extant, along with a further four Dutch manuscripts, seven in German, one codex in Italian and multiple early printed versions in Spanish, which are dateable to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.¹⁰ The Middle English Doctrine survives in four fifteenth-century manuscripts: Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS McClean 132 (M), Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B. 14. 15 (T), Durham, University Library, MS Cosin V. III. 24 (C) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 330 (L).¹¹ In three of these four manuscripts, the Doctrine finds itself in the company of other spiritual texts. In both C and M, the Doctrine travels with two texts intended for a female religious reader, A letter of gouernance sent to a religious woman and A letter sent to a religious womman of þe Holy Gost and first of þe frute of charite.¹² L, meanwhile, puts the Doctrine alongside a short penitential lyric, ‘O Man Unkynde’, which appears in the closing folios of the codex in a different hand from the main text.¹³ The presence of these additional texts alongside the Doctrine offers some useful clues as to the possible uses of the treatise in fifteenth-century England. The fact that L closes with a lyric that offers a reminder of the great sacrifice made by Christ during the Passion draws out the penitential elements of the Doctrine. In the case of M and C, the presence of two auxiliary texts addressed to women is a strong indication that these manuscripts were used by female readers.

The Middle English text was written for a non-Latinate audience of women religious. In a new prologue, the translator offers a detailed indication of how this text should be read by its intended fifteenth-century audience:

I, þerfore, oon of thoo whiche oure lord hath clepid to his servise in religioun, alþogh I be no trew servaunt of his, have compilid this tretice that is clepid ‘the doctrine of the herte’, to the worship of God principally, and to edificacioun of symple soules.¹⁴

This new readership requires the translator to adopt a different approach from his Latin source. In her discussion of the alterations made by the Middle English compiler, Mouron suggests that his purpose is ‘moral and spiritual’.¹⁵ This reading coheres with the conclusion drawn by Whitehead and Renevey, who describe the translator as ‘an ultimately conservative figure, accentuating the basics, backing away from criticism of superiors, talking down to his reader, lowering the intellectual and theological demands of the treatise’.¹⁶ It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that the Middle English Doctrine is a less mystical text than its Latin precursor, with little desire to assist its reader in advancing to the higher echelons of mystical contemplation. The Doctrine translator envisages a reader ‘whose task is to feel, not think’.¹⁷

Like its Latin source, the Middle English text is split into seven books, each of which couples a gift of the Holy Spirit with a method of preparing the heart for spiritual union. In a further point of similarity with De doctrina, the first book of the Doctrine is by far the longest, comprising roughly half of the treatise as a whole. The crucial difference between the Latin and Middle English texts is the fact that the imagery invoked by the Doctrine translator is largely unhooked from its scriptural basis, thereby rendering its potential resonances considerably more ambiguous.¹⁸ Indeed, the Doctrine translator’s scraping away of much of his source imagery’s biblical overlay can make deciphering the spiritual lessons of the text rather more of a challenge. Household images are the structural framework of the long first book of the Doctrine, with the translator first asking his reader to imagine her heart as a small house, which must be carefully cleaned and modestly furnished so as to be ready for the arrival of the wearied soldier-Christ, who is in need of refuge in the wake of his tireless battle against sin. From here, the translator invites his reader to imagine her heart as a busy kitchen, in which she should prepare meat to feed to Christ, her most noble visitor. The metaphors of domestic labour, including sweeping and mopping, represent the expulsion of sin through confession. This prepares the reader for Eucharistic in-dwelling, in which Christ will receive a meal from the believer in reciprocation for the one that he prepared for her. My discussion of the Doctrine’s domestic imagery fits into a body of existing work on the vocabulary of the household in the text. In his essay for the Doctrine companion volume, Gillespie undertakes an extensive analysis of the kitchen imagery in the Doctrine.¹⁹ As part of her discussion of medieval architectural allegory, Whitehead discusses the household images in the first book of the Doctrine, with a particular focus on the spiritual furnishing of the house of the heart,²⁰ while Renevey has also analysed the homely metaphors of the text on more than one occasion.²¹

This chapter builds upon the analysis of the scholars cited above by taking note of a further episode in the text that has not yet been discussed through a domestic lens. Many of the domestic images that I will discuss in this chapter are hallmarked by their incorporation of homiletic commonplaces that were probably originally drawn from twelfth- and thirteenth-century preaching manuals.²² In the second and third chapters of this book, I will show how the fifteenth-century Middle English translations of the works of two women visionaries, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Bridget of Sweden, rework these commonplaces via their visionary authority. The discussion of the imagery in this first chapter is, therefore, a useful referent for the conventions that are later adapted by these hugely popular visionary women. For now, though, my focus is the Doctrine, in which domestic imagery is the dominant organising trope of the text. Moreover, its household metaphors have a particular resonance for its fifteenth-century readers.

Housework, Spiritual Furniture and a Knock at the Door: Welcoming the Noblest Guest of All

The translator begins his extensive engagement with the language of domesticity by asking his reader to imagine her heart as a household, into which she will shortly receive a worthy guest; the well-regulated household is an allegory for the reader’s carefully ordered self. Her visitor is Christ, who seeks a place of refuge in the wake of a bloody and exhausting battle, fought on her behalf:

This worthi gest, whom an hert made redy shuld receyve, is oure lord Jhesu Crist, that sekith amonges his childryn a restyng place, the whiche to here helth hath tenderly yivyn his herte blode, and þerfor he, beyng wery and woundid, axith of hem a restyng place in þeire hertis.²³

The opening of this allegory makes a strong appeal to the reader’s emotional faculties, as they draw the familiar conception of Christ as the wounded lover-knight into the intimate space of the reader’s heart.²⁴ Renevey notes that the yoking of the lover-knight trope with the language of domestic space ‘helps the reader to enter into an introspective mood’.²⁵ The Doctrine’s exhortation to look inward subsequently asks its reader to ready the house of her heart for Christ’s arrival by undertaking a number of domestic chores:

Now sister, yif thou wilt receyve worthily this blissed champioun, first thow must make clene thyn hous of thin hert, and þan þou must aray it, and afterward kepe wel þe yates of þe same hous. The brome wherewith the hous of þin hert shuld be made clene is drede of God, for as Salomon seith: Timor Domini expellit peccatum. ‘Drede of God puttith away synne’, and þat is be confessioun. Seynt Austyn seith: ‘A soule þat knowith here synnes and of that knowleche becometh dredful is anone enduced to be shryvyn’. Cnowleche of the synnes be þe mouthe in confessioun is noþing ellis but puttyng ought filthes of the hous of oure herte be the dore of the mowth with þe brome of the tunge. But first, or thow go to confessioun, thow must serche thi conscience bi bisy examynacioun and afterward swepe it bi diew confessioun.²⁶

Preparation for confession is, here, reconfigured as an act of quotidian domestic labour, with the component parts of the reader’s exterior self, such as her tongue and mouth, repurposed as household tools that must be used in the readying of her interior consciousness.²⁷ This focus on introspection is reflective of what Bryan identifies as the late medieval taste for texts that furnish their reader with the ability to ‘“see themselves”’ in the content of their books.²⁸ For the lay reader, the allegorisation of the consciousness as a household would reflect the literal interior of the domestic sphere in which reading is c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Manuscript Sigla
• Prefatory Notes
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Kitchen of the Heart, Spiritual Furniture and Noble Visitors: Mapping the Domestic in The Doctrine of the Hert
• Chapter 2: The Domesticity of the Sacred Heart in Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Booke of Gostlye Grace
• Chapter 3: Marriage, Storehouses and Celestial Visitors: Domestic Frameworks in Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis
• Chapter 4: From Wanderer to Householder: The Domestication of Jesus, the Disciples and the Holy Family in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back Cover