ON NOT MELTING INTO TEARS: MANAGING MEDITATIVE READING IN MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, MS 1 AND CAMBRIDGE, MAGDALENE COLLEGE, MS PEPYS 2125

Abstract

IntroductionThis article makes a contribution to the lively field of research into late medieval English religious writing, and it looks specifically at writing on Christ's life and Passion in the fifteenth century. In the abundant texts of Christ's life we find an important expression of mainstream religious sensibility and perhaps the best example of what the German religious historian Berndt Hamm has termed a 'normative centring' in the piety of the time, in which the omnipresent image of Christ in his Passion, together with the exemplary compassion of his grieving mother, come to function as the all-important locus of people's devotion and religious creativity.1The single most important tradition of writing on Christ's life is that of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi (Meditationes), dating probably to the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and traditionally thought to have been composed by St Bonaventure, but now commonly attributed to Johannes de Caulibus, a Franciscan of San Gimignano in Tuscany.2 This Latin meditative treatise, which soon came to be available in proliferating vernacular adaptations, presents scenes from the Gospels, with an emphasis on the theme of Christ's human suffering in his Passion and the cultivation of pity, contrition, and compunction among pious audiences. In the tradition of the affective devotional image, this elaborate textual account of the Passion wraps the viewer in a world of vivid phenomenal detail, often of a bloody and macabre sort, in order to realize the religious imperative of compassion and empathie identification with the tormented Christ. Being constantly exhorted to 'behold' with intensely compassionate eyes, the reader is coaxed into a meditative immersion, central to which is the imaginative re-experiencing of the culminating events of sacred history and a concomitant agitation towards internal feelings of compassion and remorse.The Middle English tradition of pseudo-Bonaventuran writing has been expertly examined by Elizabeth Salter, Michael Sargent, and others, while the broader field of medieval Passion meditation and the development of compassion has been examined in two recent and important diachronic studies by Michelle Karnes and Sarah McNamer.3 Also recendy, the research project Geographies of Orthodoxy: Mapping the English Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, ?-.1350-15 50 has surveyed and contextualized the rich pseudoBonaventuran corpus of texts in late medieval England.4 What these investigative undertakings have characterized is a particularly resourceful text tradition and a literature of quantity and repetition: today the English material comprises approximately ten distinct texts preserved in just over one hundred manuscripts; all are translations and adaptations (part or whole) of the Meditationes vitae Christi. This Middle English text tradition constitutes a distinct mode of vernacular theology that witnesses to the considerable appeal and inherent adaptability of powerful emotive discourses, and it comprises the texts knows as The Privity of the Passion, The Mirror to Devout People, Meditations on the Supper and the Hours of the Passion, and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, this last text was written by the Carthusian prior Nicholas Love around the year 1410 and has clearly attracted the lion's share of modern scholarly attention.5This article argues for the importance of two neglected texts to a scholarship that continues to identify the English pseudo-Bonaventuran tradition overwhelmingly with Nicholas Love's Mirror. Where the Mirror occupies a special place in the Middle English tradition as the only text that translates the full narrative scope of the Meditationes (with minor modification), the two adaptations discussed here - those existing in the single copies found in Michigan State University Library, MS 1 and Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125 - are more representative of the corpus as they translate only the Passion sequence of the Latin source. …