Mediated Piety: Eucharistic Theology and Lay Devotion in Robert Mannyng'sHandlyng Synne

Abstract

Handlyng Synne, Robert Mannyng of Brunne's early-fourteenth-century penitential manual, continues to be a poem better known than read. Although frequently excerpted in undergraduate anthologies, the poem has attracted very little scholarship, and most of that is descriptive rather than analytic and interpretive. Ironically, most scholars have missed the complexity of its engagement with theology precisely because they have accepted D. W. Robertson, Jr.'s demonstration of its dependence on theological convention. Some scholars have implicitly acknowledged Handlyng Synne's textual complexity but have limited their discussions to Mannyng's seven “original” exempla, that is, the exempla that do not appear in Mannyng's source, the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Manuel des pechiez. Yet Joyce Coleman has recently recovered an important devotional and ecclesiological context for the poem. On the basis of the work's interest in the Eucharist, she argues that Mannyng, a Gilbertine canon, used it as an attempt to g...