NICOLE R. RICE, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature.

Abstract

EVER since the Nicholas Watson’s pioneering work some fifteen years ago, the role of devotional literature in late medieval English culture has been a subject of growing critical attention. However, recent interest in this field has tended to focus on poetic formations of lay piety and to over-simplify the complex intersections between orthodox and heterodox belief. Placing largely overlooked works of religious guidance in conversation with more familiar reformist discourses and contemporary poetry, Nicole R. Rice’s Lay Piety and Religious Devotion in Late Medieval England is a significant addition to critical discussions about the ways that texts shaped and were shaped by late medieval religious practice and thought. In the Preface, Rice asks ‘What is the best life for a layperson in the world? How might that life take textual shape’ (xiv). However, rather than attempt a comprehensive overview of the manifest ways late medieval devotional writing responds to such enquiries, the book unfolds as a series of case studies which exemplify some of the ways that texts construct modes of lay spiritual discipline. Chapter 1 focuses on The Abbey of the Holy Ghost and Fervor Amoris, two late-fourteenth-century anonymous texts that imagine cloistered modes of discipline to regulate potentially disruptive lay spiritual aspirations and reinsert readers into existing ecclesiastical hierarchies. Chapter 2 examines The Life of the Soul, Book to a Mother, and Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life as examples of guides that operate dialogically; that is to say, that unlike the guides studied in Chapter 1, which promote awareness of and obedience to clerical mediation and authority, the guides that are the subject of Chapter 2 use dialogue and other forms of dialogic discourse ‘to model strategies for readers to engage with the world on clerical terms’ (49).