Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Nancy Bradley Warren

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268105839
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras adopts a comparative, boundary-crossing approach to consider one of the most canonical of literary figures, Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea that Chaucer is an international writer raises no eyebrows. Similarly, a claim that Chaucer's writings participate in English confessional controversies in his own day and afterward provokes no surprise. This book breaks new ground by considering Chaucer's Continental interests as they inform his participation in religious debates concerning such subjects as female spirituality and Lollardy. Similarly, this project explores the little-studied ways in which those who took religious vows, especially nuns, engaged with works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Furthermore, while the early modern "Protestant Chaucer" is a familiar figure, this book explores the creation and circulation of an early modern "Catholic Chaucer" that has not received much attention. This study seeks to fill gaps in Chaucer scholarship by situating Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition in an international textual environment of religious controversy spanning four centuries and crossing both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This book presents a nuanced analysis of the high stakes religiopolitical struggle inherent in the creation of the canon of English literature, a struggle that participates in the complex processes of national identity formation in Europe and the New World alike.

CHAPTER 1

Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales

In the later fourteenth century, female spirituality was rife with controversy. Debates about the legitimacy of female mystical experiences and about the authority accorded to holy women as well as to the textual records of their experiences proliferated. While Chaucer’s cognizance of the emergence of Lollardy, the greatest religious controversy of his day in England, is firmly established, few scholars have examined Chaucer’s engagement with the modes of spirituality and traditions of religious writing that flourished among Continental holy women and made their way into England in the later fourteenth century.¹ Significantly, some of these developments in female piety have resonances with Lollardy, a convergence underscored not long after Chaucer’s lifetime by the case of the fifteenth-century East Anglian mystic Margery Kempe. As is well known, Margery’s piety was shaped by Continental holy women, and, importantly for my purposes, as I shall demonstrate shortly, she was particularly influenced by St. Birgitta of Sweden.² She was also repeatedly accused of Lollardy as a result of her devotional practices, especially her public religious discourse as well as her adoption of quasiclerical postures of authority.

The female pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales—the Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the Second Nun—all suggest ways in which Chaucer engaged with female spirituality as a vibrant, contentious cultural phenomenon within which the innovatively orthodox and the emergently heretical merge. As I discuss in the introduction, the Wife of Bath calls to mind the figure of the Lollard female preacher, even as her Prologue and Tale blend the orthodox and the unorthodox. The Second Nun and the Prioress, too, combine the orthodox and the at least potentially heterodox in their Prologues and Tales as they make manifest aspects of female spirituality that resonate simultaneously with both the Lollard movement and emergent developments in Continental female piety.³

Chaucer was ideally situated to be aware of the development of such multivalent forms of spirituality. Religiosity of a mixed nature was present in the Ricardian court circle, with which Chaucer was connected; some members of this group embraced ideas somewhat paradoxically shared by Lollards and Carthusian monks.⁴ The aforementioned Margery Kempe provides a representative, albeit particularly flamboyant, example of the sort of fluidity characteristic of the religious culture of East Anglia, a region in which interest in Continental mystics and new forms of devotion flourished alongside an active, long-lived Lollard community.⁵ This is the area from which Chaucer’s family originally hailed, and it is also a region with which Chaucer had many dealings in his role as controller of customs for the wool trade, since Norwich was an important center of that trade.⁶

In this chapter, I explore the interplay of female speech, forms of female spiritual power, and the status of the mother tongue in the Prologues and Tales of Chaucer’s two female monastic pilgrims, the Prioress and the Second Nun. The ways in which these issues feature in the Prologues and Tales of both of these characters grant these texts, like the Book of Margery Kempe, shared affinities with the Brigittine tradition and the Lollard movement. The Brigittine tradition emphasizes maternal intercessory and didactic power, the authority of the Virgin Mary (authority particularly associated with her participation in both Christ’s Nativity and his Passion), and positive presentations of the vernacular as well as of female religious speech, much as do the Prologues and Tales of the Second Nun and the Prioress. Additionally, both the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale and the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale present quasi-clerical roles for women reminiscent of those at least theoretically available to women in the Lollard movement, and, like Lollard texts, they promote the value of making religious knowledge available in the vernacular. I would emphasize I am not arguing that either Lollard or Brigittine writings are a direct source for anything in the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale or in the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale.⁷ Rather, I am suggesting that Chaucer was likely to have been familiar with, and his work on religious subjects accordingly shaped by, strikingly convergent heterodox developments in English religious culture and innovative yet orthodox developments in Continental female spirituality of which St. Birgitta was an important exemplar accessible to him at home and abroad.

ST. CECILIA, ST. BIRGITTA, AND “QUITING” THE CLERICS: THE SECOND NUN’S PROLOGUE AND TALE

Chaucer’s ecclesiastical satire exemplified by his portraits of the wellfed, hunting Monk and the greedy, fake-relic-peddling Pardoner have long been considered in relation to the Lollard movement. As we saw in the introduction, the portrait of the Pardoner prompted the early modern reader of the Ransom Center’s copy of Thynne’s 1532 edition of Chaucer’s works to inscribe enthusiastic marginalia concerning Chaucer’s proto-Protestant proclivities. Similarly, critics have for some time remarked on aspects of the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale that have Lollard associations. As I will discuss shortly, for a start, the Prologue emphasizes translation and the vernacular, subjects that took on Lollard coloring in England from the 1380s through the early fifteenth century. Not only is the St. Cecilia of the Tale a woman who speaks publicly and authoritatively on theological matters, but this saint also figures in Wycliffe’s writings concerning lay celebrants: Wycliffe argues that St. Cecilia’s turning her house into a church suggests that lay celebration—including that done by women—is possible.⁸ William Kamowski notes that the Second Nun’s positive images of the early church and its true miraculous powers resemble Wycliffe’s perspectives on the purity of the early church in contrast to “its decadent fourteenth century descendent,” especially when the Second Nun’s Tale is set against the clerical corruption and abuses of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.⁹ Lynn Staley Johnson has also persuasively argued that the Second Nun’s life of St. Cecilia intersects with many key aspects of Lollardy. She says that the tale perhaps ought to make Harry Bailey smell a “Lollere in the wynd” (II 1173), though ultimately in Johnson’s interpretation of the Second Nun’s Tale, St. Cecilia’s gender, virginity, and sanctity, as well as Chaucer’s claim that “he translated the work of another,” all tone down the potentially heterodox dimensions of the tale.¹⁰

Critics generally have not, however, considered the relevance to the Chaucerian corpus of the Brigittine tradition, which emerged nearly contemporaneously with the Lollard movement and which also incorporates significant imperatives for ecclesiastical reform.¹¹ This lacuna is not particularly surprising, since the character in The Canterbury Tales who is perhaps most suggestive of Brigittine texts and spirituality, the Second Nun, does not have a portrait in the General Prologue or even a proper name. Just as Chaucer’s European travels exposed him to such important Continental writers as Boccaccio, encounters that helped to shape his literary career, so too his journeys likely brought him into contact with texts and ideas that shaped his thinking about religion. Chaucer was particularly well placed to learn of the career and writings of St. Birgitta of Sweden. St. Birgitta spent the last twenty-four years of her life (1349–73) in Rome. During her years there, she lived adjacent to the English Hospice in the Campo dei Fiori, and it seems at least possible that word of her sanctity and her revelations circulated among English people traveling and working in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Indeed, we know that “William de Guellesis, scutifer Anglie, met her in Cyprus, joined in her pilgrimages to the Holy Land and later came to Italy to testify to the fulfillment of her prophecies of punishment for the sins of the Cypriots.”¹² The possibility that Chaucer, who, like William de Guellesis, was an Englishman abroad in the later fourteenth century, came to know of St. Birgitta and her writings in the course of his voyages is made even more likely by the fact that Birgitta’s clerical supporters themselves traveled fairly widely in Italy, including to Genoa. In 1373, the year of Birgitta’s death and the same year in which her extended canonization process was begun, Chaucer traveled to both Genoa and Florence.¹³ He returned to Italy, this time to Milan, in 1378, the same year in which Pope Urban VI began official investigations of Birgitta’s sanctity.¹⁴

Even if Chaucer did not learn of St. Birgitta and her revelations in Italy, he was well situated to get word of them in England. From 1374 to 1385 in his post as controller of customs, Chaucer was, as David Wallace has observed, in “daily contact with Italians.”¹⁵ These Italian merchants could easily have brought word of Birgitta’s revelations and of the ongoing process of her canonization proceedings. Though it is probably less likely than his having acquired knowledge of the Brigittine tradition on the Continent, Chaucer might even have encountered written copies of Birgitta’s revelations at home. At least one copy was in England before the end of the fourteenth century, used by Geoffrey, abbot of Byland, who wrote in the 1390s a defense of St. Birgitta’s revelations (London, British Library MS Harley 612).¹⁶ Chaucer was rather unlikely to have had the opportunity to see the copy used by Byland, who seems to have been at Oxford in 1393 and abbot by 1397, but its presence in England suggests at least the possibility that others circulated there as well.

Furthermore, a web of associations surrounding the circumstances of composition and circulation of the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale suggests connections not only to St. Birgitta but also to East Anglia, where Lollardy found an early following and where devotion to the Swedish holy woman was established soon after her death, and perhaps even before it. Mary Giffin argued many years ago that Chaucer initially wrote the life of St. Cecilia early in the 1380s for Richard II to give to the Benedictines of Norwich. Adam Easton, who was educated and professed at Norwich Cathedral Priory, was cardinal priest of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a position that he acquired perhaps as early as 1380. Giffin observes that a poem written to honor Easton’s title of Santa Cecilia might have helped to secure his assistance in a thorny dispute with the papacy.¹⁷ Easton was also one of the doctors selected in 1382 or 1383 (the exact moment to which Giffin dates the composition of the Second Nun’s Tale) to examine the orthodoxy of St. Birgitta’s writings. Easton had a particular attachment to St. Birgitta because he attributed his survival of imprisonment and torture by Urban VI to her intercession. By early 1390, he had completed the Defensorium of St. Birgitta as part of the canonization process, which was successfully concluded in October 1391.

Strikingly, many of the very charges against which Adam Easton had to defend Birgitta in her canonization proceedings mirror accusations regarding religious use of the vernacular and the acceptance of female preaching or teaching leveled at Lollards in England. Anxieties about vernacular translation of religious texts as well as about female religious authority emerged early and strongly as the Lollard movement became established in England. After 1382 the possession of English books was recognized as a primary sign of Lollard sympathies, and possession of a vernacular translation of the Bible was the most damning indication of heresy.¹⁸ Whether or not Lollard women priests actually existed, some Lollards thought, as did Walter Brut, that women priests could or should exist, while orthodox clerics strongly feared they did exist. Walter Brut claimed in October 1393 that “women have power and authority to preach and make the body of Christ, and they have the power of the keys of the Church, of binding and loosing.”¹⁹ Furthermore, opponents of the Lollards like Thomas Netter had no doubt that Lollard women took up at the very least the office of preaching, a view to which cases of such women as Margery Baxter and Hawise Moon lend some credibility.²⁰

Much as in debates about Lollardy, in St. Birgitta’s canonization process the question of the legitimacy of the vernacular as a medium to convey religious content is at stake. The adversarius in the canonization process objects to Birgitta’s claim that Christ, through an angelic intermediary, dictated the nuns’ lessons to her “in lingua materna,”²¹ saying that God would not make use of a vernacular tongue. In his defense of St. Birgitta, Adam Easton denounces this argument as “improbable,”²² and elsewhere he defends Birgitta by presenting documented cases of Christ’s speech to women. He particularly emphasizes the “dictamen Christi mulieribus de sua propria resurrexione eciam proprio ore suo” ([the] . . . utterance of Christ to the women by his own mouth concerning his own resurrection),²³ speech that presumably made use of the women’s own mother tongues. Significantly, Easton compares Birgitta to St. Cecilia as a woman to whom Christ spoke:²⁴

Et ista domina Birgitta fuit devotissima Domino Ihesu Christo elongando se ab omnibus delectacionibus huius mundi et perseverabat usque in finem in oracionibus peregrinacionibus et aliis operibus caritatis, abstinens se a viciis et peccatis, ergo est verisimile quod Christus sibi ore suo proprio loquebatur et dictavit eidem regulam monialium antedictam, et quod illam promulgaverit per eandem sicu loquebatur cum sancte Agnete, Agata, cum Cecilie et aliis sponsis suis ut in vita earum plenius continetur.

———

(And [because] Birgitta was most devout to Christ, and removed herself from all the pleasures of this world, and persevered to the end in prayers, pilgrimages and other works of love, absenting herself from faults and sins; it is probable that Christ, by his own mouth, spoke and dictated the rule to her, and that he promulgated it by her, just as he spoke with saints Agnes, Agatha, and with Cecilia and other of his brides as is fully contained in their lives.)²⁵

Similarly, as in texts by Lollards and their opponents, the propriety of women’s religious speech ...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales
• CHAPTER 2 Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers
• CHAPTER 3 Competing Chaucers: The Development of Religious Traditions of Reception
• CHAPTER 4 “Let Chaucer Also Look to Himself”: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Canon Formation in Seventeenth-Century England
• CHAPTER 5 “Flying from the Depravities of Europe, to the American Strand”: Chaucer and the Chaucerian Tradition in Early America
• Notes
• Index