Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama by Eleanor Johnson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama by Eleanor Johnson Luke Penkett Eleanor Johnson, Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 2018 264 pp. Contemplative prayer, at last, is being discovered and utilized by a wider cross-section of people than ever before. No longer regarded as something that is restricted to the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics, there is a plethora of books, teachers, and workshops that we can employ to help us along this particular path of prayer. In this ground-breaking yet accessible book Eleanor Johnson argues convincingly that during the Middle Ages contemplation pervaded allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays alongside devotional prose and disengagement from the business of the world. She also shows how this genre enabled and enhanced literature, especially spiritual and theological literature, in its use of the vernacular. Moreover, Johnson, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, demonstrates that medieval vernacular literature enjoyed a performative character, and that all three types of literature, poetry, prose, and drama, were participatory. Johnson’s boldness shines through in the chosen foci of her study: The Cloud of Unknowing, A Revelation of Love, Piers Plowman, The N-Town Mary Plays, Wisdom, and Mankind. Strange bedfellows one might think, but as she explains in her Introduction, “Middle English Contemplation: Forming Vernacular Participation,” all six foci, understood as contemplative texts, challenge the medieval and our understanding of contemplation. And it is by participatory encounter, she argues, that one arrives and enters the state of contemplation. Since the start of the twenty-first century there have been a number of fine studies—by scholars such as Beckwith, Brantley, Karnes, Despres, Biernoff, and Newman—which have expressed “sense-experience, conveyed through literary form, as a cornerstone of the initial performance of contemplative understanding” (9). Where Johnson breaks new ground is in her shift from the focus on sight, imagery, and visuality to aurality—sounds, rhythms, puns, rhymes, alliterations, and so on. In this shift she demonstrates that in the aurality of the English language, the language of the everyday, specific sensory effects may be enabled for contemplative audiences. Staging Contemplation is divided into three parts: “Participating in Time and Eternity,” “‘Kyndely’ Participation,” and “Vernacular Comedy and Collective Participation.” Part One examines the Cloud and Julian’s Revelation of Love. The Cloud presents union with God as a primary goal of participatory contemplation. Julian shows through her literary expertise how God can participate in both temporality and eternity as a contemplative goal. In both “Middle English becomes a formal structure in which the contemplative can perceive sensibly and thereby participate in the comforting and ever-present nature of God” and neither “could have been achieved in the same way in Latin…Middle English is [End Page 223] a choice with powerful sensory possibilities for producing active textual participation…that can initiate participatory contemplation of the divine” (70). The second part opens with an examination of how Piers culminates in a “formal, poetic staging of how self-knowledge and knowledge of God interrelate” (71). Johnson reflects that there are four ways in which we may know God “kyndely”: through synergy and synthesis; through Trinitarian similetics; by perceiving Christ as Everyman, the Samaritan, and as Piers; and through English. She concludes that “contemplative life must be overlaid with the social world” and suggests that Piers “functions as a quasi-dramatic fulcrum between earlier prose contemplative works and later, fifteenth-century dramatic ones” (107). Accordingly, the other text discussed in this part is the sequence of Marian plays from the East Anglian N-Town cycle of the second half of the fifteenth century. At this stage Nicholas Love’s The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ makes a guest appearance. Johnson argues that this work, of which a number of manuscripts were widely available in East Anglia, was “held up as a standard of orthodox, anti-Lollard, devotional writing despite its being composed in English…[which] bodies forth a theory of why the vernacular is not just a possible language for embodying contemplative truth but indeed a preferable...