Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400 Emily Steiner Katharine Breen. Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. x, 289. £55.00; $95.00. In this fascinating and deeply learned book, Katharine Breen argues that, beginning in the late twelfth century, English writers began to imagine a lay readership. They did so by experimenting with ways in which laypeople could participate in a clerical habitus, by which Breen means the ingrained habits formed by study or rule, and, more specifically, a life ordered from childhood by Latin grammar. As Breen argues, for medieval writers, a clerical habitus, underwritten by grammatica, was an inherently virtuous activity, in which readers, disciplined in the rules of a grammar not their own, could habituate themselves to an ethical life. By the end of the fourteenth century, and most spectacularly with Piers Plowman, writers schooled in Latin grammar began to figure out ways of conferring a clerical habitus onto lay readers, an ethical framework accessible through vernacular texts and translations. Langland, Breen argues, responding to a “spiritual public health crisis” (174), took it upon himself to invent a new discourse capable of inculcating a “virtuous vernacular habitus” (175). According to Breen, however, this imagined lay reader of fourteenth-century England was anticipated by earlier writers. For centuries, the [End Page 300] idea of habitus had been central to a well-ordered clerical life and something potentially communicable to the laity through pastoral care. For example, the Ormulum, a twelfth-century English biblical commentary with an idiosyncratic spelling system, offered a “form of the vernacular that substitutes for the moral and grammatical regularity of Latin” (83); at the beginning of the next century, the Ancrene Wisse portrayed female enclosure as a kind of disciplined reading and an alternative to Latin grammar; in the mid-thirteenth century, the historian Matthew Paris created a visually enterprising world map, which posits crusading in the Holy Land as a grammar for laypeople (a cartographical habitus). For the last two decades, medievalists have debated the ideological functions of the vernacular, the exclusions performed by clerical Latinity, and the competing versions of piety that writing in English supported (more recently, scholars have introduced French and Welsh into discussions of medieval language culture). Breen offers a fresh approach to these debates by showing that the project of imagining a lay English readership depended on Latinate models of the relationship between order and virtue. Breen also successfully bypasses the critical narrative in which the Fourth Lateran Council, with its stipulation about annual confession, becomes the pivotal event in the history of English letters, leading ultimately to the Wycliffite Bible and the Reformation. By contrast, Breen analyzes several loosely connected projects, the motivation for which was not so much the appropriation of cultural authority from Latin for the vernacular, as the transference of a virtuous self-ordering (i.e., habitus). As Breen cogently shows moreover, the nature of that ethical transfer is dispositional rather than propositional: it has to do not with what one learns but about how one goes about self-consciously acquiring and internalizing something external to oneself. This virtuous acquisition is, importantly, physical, even vigorous: it involves the body, whether in the form of a costume, in the case of a professional religious, or a position in space, as when one uses a map to reorient one's position toward the world. As Breen argues, material textuality works as an extreme case in which non-Latinity meets the ethical requirements of grammatica by privileging disposition over proposition and arrangement and use over content. Breen's approach is very compelling and the examples she gives are generally persuasive. Some readers, however, will find this a difficult book to navigate. For one thing, although the book is long, it seems to be missing chapters. I noticed the absence, for example, of any sustained [End Page 301] discussion of Lollard writing, which would benefit from Breen's approach. I would like to have read more about the relationship between traditional Christian notions of habitus (for example, taking the monastic habit and reordering oneself to a heaven-bound life) and the very different Aristotelian model of habitus, in...