Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England by Jennifer N. Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England by Jennifer N. Brown Luke Penkett (bio) Fruit of the Orchard: Reading Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. By Jennifer N. Brown. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. xvi, 314 pp. $75.00 Fruit of the Orchard has been a decade in the writing: it was worth waiting for. During this time Jennifer N. Brown, Professor and Chair of English and World Literatures at Marymount Manhattan College, has given papers to fellow medievalists on her subject, received invaluable feedback from a number of other scholars, and thoroughly explored Siena, tracking down Catherine’s landmarks. Brown’s meticulous work shines out on every page and it is a delight to read. In this, her first monograph, Brown builds on the scholarship of the past decade or so, developing the research of Suzanne Noffke’s publication of Catherine’s Dialogo and letters in translation, Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Gabriela Sighnori’s A Companion to Catherine of Siena, and, more specifically, Rebecca Krug’s Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England and Nancy Bradley Warren’s The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. The book opens with four English depictions of Catherine: two from rood screens (at Torbryan and Horsham), and two from Wynkyn de Worde’s 1519 printing, delightful illustrations that help set the scene. Each of the five chapters are structured around an aspect of Catherine’s English textual tradition, a light one in England contrasted with a much fuller one in Continental Europe. An exceptional woman, by the mid-fifteenth century, Catherine was having a significant effect on insular vernacular devotion and Brown’s book teaches us much about English piety at this time and into the early seventeenth century. This effect was even more significant in France and the Low Countries. However, it is by examining these differences of audience, readership, and piety that English religious culture may be more clearly recognised and better understood. Part of the richness of such a study as Fruit of the Orchard lies in the fact that texts on Catherine herself are so varied – hagiographical, instructive, meditational – that the field worked on is a broad one, giving rise to explorations of provenance, production, distribution, and reception. Catherine’s letter-writing career begins around 1370 and there are 400 complete and incomplete examples of her correspondences. In 1374 the anonymous account of her and Raymond of Capua’s narrative appeared, with Le Orazioni, a collection of 26 of Catherine’s [End Page 265] prayers (mainly known in Italy) being composed around 1379. Before the end of that auspicious decade Catherine had begun writing her visionary text, Il Dialogo. This last text was translated into English three times and became known as The Orcherd of Syon. There are also Stephen Maconi’s letter (Maconi, Prior General of the Carthusian Order, along with Raymond and Gano Giudini, were among Catherine’s followers) regarding Catherine, an excerpt from The Orcherd of Syon, eight copies of a testimony of Catherine’s known by its Latin title as the Documento Spirituale and in English as The Cleannesse of Sowle, and three copies of Catherine’s Legenda maior. Wynkyn de Wolrde printed Raymond’s Legenda maior, The Lyf of Catherine, and The Orcherd of Syon between 1492 and 1519, whilst Henry Pepwell published extracts from The Lyf in 1521, and John Fenn issued a new translation of the Legenda maior in 1609. As with Richard Rolle’s English texts translated into Latin, and his Latin texts translated into English, and a number of Continental writers whose work is translated from Latin or one vernacular into another, Catherine’s texts are altered, in their translation according to audience and readership, location, time, and civic and ecclesial pressures. From ordinances and wills it is possible to discover something of the use and transmission of Catherine’s texts. Placing these discoveries alongside manuscripts, inscriptions, illuminations, rood screens, and dedications it is possible to see both the private and public “landscape of devotion to Catherine of Siena throughout England and, indeed, extending even to...