Time to Read: Pastoral Care, Vernacular Access and the Case of Angier of St Frideswide

Abstract

The question of whether equipping audiences with an internalized penitential vocabulary and opening up pastoral reading to them does not simultaneously render them independent of their instructors is an area of concern in vernacular pastoralia. As a result, clerical writers, whether anxious to keep their vernacular audiences more dependent or more autonomous, tend to articulate explicitly and copiously the rationale and aims of their work and the common interests, as they see them, of themselves and their audiences. Pastoralia are always potentially texts of writerly as well as readerly self-awareness and often surprisingly innovative. Bella Millett has recently shown, for example, that a group of late twelfth and early thirteenth century English homilies, far from being a dying flicker of Anglo-Saxon tradition, is much more likely to have its true context in response to concern at diocesan level with meeting the need for vernacular pastoralia. These homilies, she argues, use older as well as newer material, but are fundamentally a fresh response and redeployment of existing homiletic tradition. Alongside these developments in English writings, there are a number of francophone writers in the multilingual culture of late twelfth and thirteenth-century England who also seek newly effective ways to present pastoral teaching to those in their spiritual care.