Images of Pity: The Regulatory Aesthetics of John Lydgate’s Religious Lyrics

Abstract

Images of Pity: The Regulatory Aesthetics of John Lydgate’s Religious Lyrics Shannon Gayk Indiana University Late medieval clerics did not underestimate the power of the image. They did, however, differ on how to assess and respond to the laity’s increasing attachment to devotional artifacts.1 In a lyric on the pietà, one of the most popular images of the period, the Benedictine monk and poet John Lydgate offers a brief explanation of the proper use of visual images in religious devotion: To suche entent was ordeynt purtreture And ymages of dyverse resemblaunce, That holsom storyes thus shewyd in fygur May rest with ws with dewe remembraunce.2 Images, for Lydgate, are libri laicorum, books for the laity. This statement might seem like a critical commonplace. What I will suggest in this essay, however, is that Lydgate’s insistence on the mnemonic usefulI am very grateful to Maura Nolan, Jill Mann, James Simpson, Frank Grady, and the anonymous reader for SAC for their many helpful comments and suggestions as I wrote and revised this essay. 1 For example, Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 1, suggests that ‘‘[w]henever images threatened to gain undue influence within the church, theologians have sought to strip them of their power. . . . It was never easy to control images with words because, like saints, they engaged deeper levels of experience and fulfilled desires other than the ones living church authorities were able to address.’’ 2 ‘‘The Image of Pity,’’ lines 37–40, in John Lydgate, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, part 1, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, EETS, o.s. 192 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 297–99. Hereafter cited as MacCracken with line numbers of the lyrics inserted parenthetically after quotations in the text. PAGE 175 175 ................. 16094$ $CH6 11-01-10 14:03:59 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ness of images sets him apart from his contemporaries, who emphasized the affective and emotional content of images. For Lydgate, images are valuable insofar as they help one remember in an intellectual rather than an affective way.3 In another lyric, Lydgate similarly urges the ‘‘folkys all, whyche haue deuocioun’’ when viewing visual signs ‘‘[t]o haue memory of Crystes passioun, / As doctors remembre in theyr doctryne’’ (lines 1, 14–15).4 Of this passage, we might ask: Is it reasonable for Lydgate to expect the unlearned laity to read complex visual figures with the exegetical skill of ‘‘doctors’’? After all, his contemporary, Nicholas Love, explicitly tells his lay readers that he will ‘‘passen ouer’’ those matters ‘‘expownet by holy doctours.’’5 For Love, the omission and suppression of such scholarly detail is an act of regulation. Lay piety, his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ suggests, is best kept ‘‘bodily,’’ affective, and incarnational.6 Indeed, vernacular devotional works of this period typically are affective and incarnational, mirroring and embodying the agendas of emergent forms of lay piety influenced by Franciscan and Bernardine theology that de-emphasized the function of images as libri laicorum and emphasized their ability to effect ‘‘the stirring of emotion rather than the imparting of knowledge.’’7 3 Such an emphasis on relating images and memory is entirely consistent with Lydgate ’s monastic background. ‘‘Monastic art,’’ Mary Carruthers writes, is ‘‘an art for mneme, ‘memory,’ rather than one for mimesis. . . . Mneme produces an art for ‘thinking about’ and for ‘meditating upon’ and for ‘gathering.’ . . . An art of tropes and figures is an art of patterns and pattern-making, and thus an art of mneme or memoria, of cognition, thinking’’ (The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], pp. 3–4). Similarly Miriam Gill examines extant monastic wall paintings to suggest that unlike the libri laicorum found on the walls of parish churches, monastic art is figurally complex and intended to be an extension of monastic lectio; see ‘‘The Role of Images in Monastic Education: The Evidence from Wall Painting in Late Medieval England,’’ in Medieval Monastic Education, ed. George Ferzoco and Carolyn Muessig (London: University...