Ancren Riwle Research Articles

Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space

Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space E. L. Risden The focused, confined narrative form of Marie de France's late-twelfth century Lais allows for interesting concentration on a limited number of spaces. We might expect a medieval author to direct attention pretty clearly to a thematic purpose and to use spatiality to enhance that purpose; Marie did exactly that. Each lai/story uses space, especially a comparison of open and confined spaces, to enhance a moral purpose, and the collection as a whole exploits space to take a specifically spiritual turn at its conclusion. The medieval context of spatiality is interesting in itself. The imaginary Middle Ages often relies on dungeons and castles as common motifs, but the most significant "spaces" historically may instead be cathedrals, architectural marvels and normally centers of their community. Frederick Artz notes in The Mind of the Middle Ages that "[t]o support the vaulting above, the [Romanesque] walls had to be heavy . . . and the isles had to be narrow" yielding "dark interiors . . . pierced only with small windows."1 Artz adds that the "great churches" had attached monasteries that were "great centers of learning and craftsmanship" and "exchanged with other monastic centers": enclosed spaces in themselves, they opened connections in the larger world. The Gothic approach that followed, however, finding more means for expansiveness and the introduction of light to the interior, modified "the whole structure and feeling of [a] church."2 The movement from the darker and more enclosed Romanesque architecture to the brighter, more airy and expansive Gothic style echoes the time's growing cosmology. While Dante used an earth-centered universe, the Commedia at least has a global earth with an expansive Empyrean (though of course it focuses on God); Dante's world offered growing opportunities for individuals to travel imaginatively and in fact beyond the environs of their own birthplace. [End Page 65] Medieval literature kept also an interest in small places—see for instance Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle), accounts of or for anchoresses, where the hermetic cell represents an ideal of detachment from the world and absorption in prayer and devotion. In such cases the spatial limitation comes from a religious choice, not from someone else's imposition, with a goal of reaching the ultimate spiritual expansion in Salvation. We can contrast hermetic works with Margery Kempe's religious pilgrimages—at once worldly and sacred—and the spiritual expansiveness of The Cloud of Unknowing, but also with The Travels of Sir John Mandeville—in the latter case, while the story is expansive, the author or compiler probably wasn't John Mandeville, and he probably didn't undertake any of the travels elaborated in the collection. John Mandeville, Englishman from St. Albans, was perhaps a Frenchman or a Fleming, deriving his sense of places and spaces from books rather than actual travels. The stories provide alternatives—pretty spectacular ones—to spiritual enclosure, choices for or descriptions of an active rather than enclosed life. Consideration of how medieval authors use spatiality requires yielding to allegorical as well as literal readings: broader application of narrative layering comprises an essential part of their narrative landscape and its expansiveness. Marie's spatial context entered the medieval world long before Dante's and Chaucer's. While all three at one time or another used courtly love, the Lais centralize it, turning secular or profane space toward spiritual space.3 The temporary ascending spiral of Dante's Purgatory with its periods of waiting modulates the permanent spirals of Inferno (descending) and Paradise (ascending), and movement through space brings attention to memorable—from terrifying to illuminating—individual places. Chaucer's social space contracts within the Tabard Inn, expands along the road to Canterbury, and contracts repeatedly around the individual pilgrims for their storytelling. The Old English "Wanderer" and "Seafarer" poems open up the world to the nearly endless space of loss and exile, while riddling poems such as "The Wife's Lament" and "Wulf and Eadwacer" seem to contract it around enclosures. Christine de Pizan metaphorizes her "City of Ladies" as the book in which the accounts of the ladies appear: the book encloses...

<i>Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts Robert Hasenfratz Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts. Edited by Bella Millett, with Glossary and Additional Notes by Richard Dance. 2 vols. Early English Text Society, o.s. 325–326. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–6. Vol. 1: pp. lxxiv + 254. £65. Vol. 2: pp. lvii + 477. £65. With the publication of Bella Millett's remarkable edition of Ancrene Wisse, one of the most ambitious projects of the Early English Text Society has finally come full circle. Due to the positively devilish complexity of its textual relations, Ancrene Wisse demanded special handling from the beginning. Between 1944 and 2000, the EETS produced a series of diplomatic and quasi-diplomatic editions of the various versions in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin of the Ancrene Riwle / Wisse to serve as raw material for a critical edition originally begun by E. J. Dobson, and now re-collated, thoroughly re-edited, and introduced by Millett, with a glossary and additional notes by Richard Dance. The first volume contains an introduction to the manuscripts, an in-depth discussion of their affiliation, a laying out of editorial principles, and the actual text of Ancrene Wisse, with an apparatus criticus, while the second provides a general historical introduction (including discussions of date, localization, authorship, and institutional context), an extensive textual commentary, bibliography, and a full glossary. Ancrene Wisse's textual tradition is gloriously messy, and volume one describes and analyzes its textual development methodically. Millett's full and meticulous collation has led her to modify Dobson's original stemma, adjusting some of the sub-groupings but confirming his main conclusion that the Corpus version represents a separate branch of development. But genetics are not the entire story, by a very long stretch. Millett demonstrates convincingly that the textual culture in which the versions of Ancrene Wisse were copied was one that prized a high degree of adaptability and collaborative crosscomparison of manuscripts, and one in which the activities of scribes, correctors, adaptors, and author often blur together, making them next to impossible to sort out with confidence. Given this daunting web of complexity and the varieties of cross-"contamination" between branches of the stemma, she rejects the idea of a traditional critical edition, one that attempts to reconstruct the authorial text, scraping away the accretions, additions, and mistakes of scribes. Instead, the Corpus base text (siglum A) is "treated not as a separate and self-contained 'version' of Ancrene Wisse, but as a single state in a multi-layered and sometimes multi-stranded process of revision; the edited text of A is used as a point of entry to the textual history of the work as a whole" (I, lx). The result is a text, though based on A, that weaves in elements of the other versions where they contain fuller or better versions of A's text. One might object that the resulting edition produces an Ancrene Wisse that never existed in this configuration but instead an ideal form of the work brought to life by the virtuosity of the editor. This objection, though, is relatively easy to dismiss, on four counts: 1) with the series of EETS editions readily available, any interested reader has full access to the individual versions; 2) all interventions in the text are clearly signaled with boldfacing, brackets, and different typefaces; 3) thanks to Millett's care and sound judgment, with editorial decisions laid out clearly in the apparatus and notes, the text is anything but a stitched-together monster; and 4) the Corpus version, Millett argues convincingly, cannot be viewed as the author's holograph, [End Page 126] and is itself an amalgamation of sorts. She modifies Dobson's original conclusion that A was "'the author's own final and definitive revision of the work,'" arguing instead that the "form of the work in A seems to be less a new version of Ancrene Wisse . . . in its own right, than a modified and updated form of the original version, retaining distinct and sometimes...

Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Riwle: Two Rhetorical Configurations of Mysticism

Many medieval women mystics undermined misogyny with persuasive eloquence. This essay does a comparative rhetorical analysis of Julian of Norwich's Showings and the Ancrene Riwle, positing that the fourteenth-century English mystic knew the twelfth-century text and developed her theology, in part, as a corrective to its Augustinian dogma.

The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: The 'Vernon' Text (review)

Short Notices 303 estimation. Yet Yates's account of the formation of Dee's ideas again assumes his wholesale acceptance of a ready-formed occult philosophy, rather than the complex, hesitant intellectual odyssey by which he travelled from exhausted Aristotelian orthodoxy, through selective responses to occult signs, towards a new world order. The methodological problems raised by her impatience with contextualising these ideas, in favour of obsessively reiterating their components, appear in the strongest parts ofthis book, where momentarily Yates places both the occult philosophy and its manifestations in Elizabethan literature into political context. Then even the most innocent student reader might become aware ofthe historical crudity in drawing a rhumb line from Pico della Mirandola to The Tempest, without considering the wide ocean of events in which all those strange creatures swam. Glyn Parry Department ofHistory Victoria University of Wellington Zettersten, Arne, and Bernhard Diensberg, eds., The English Text of the Ancren Riwle: The 'Vernon'Text (Early English Text Society O.S. 310), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xxx, 130; R R P £30.00; ISBN 0197223141. In 1976, Arne Zettersten edited the text of Ancrene Riwle from Cambridge, Magdalen College M S Pepys 2498 for the Early English Text Society, as part of a series ofdiplomatic transcriptions of the text in English, French and Latin. This edition of the text as it appears in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library M S Eng. poet. a. I) is thefinalvolume ofthe sequence. In the introduction to this edition, based on materials supplied by the editors, H. L. Spencer discusses the context for the inclusion of the thirteenthcentury Ancrene Riwle in the manuscript, produced in the second half of the fourteenth century in the West Midlands, along with other religious texts in the vernacular. Spencer argues that the presence ofthe text is witness to the continued popularity of Ancrene Riwle in the fourteenth century and its status as a safe and orthodox text, suitable for audiences that included female religious. Spencer also briefly introduces the complex question of the relationship ofthe Vernon recension of the Ancrene Riwle to other versions. The Vemon text 304 Short Notices represents a scribal attempt to collate a text similar to that recorded in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College M S 402, known in the E E T S editions as Ancrene Wisse, with the other branch of the textual tradition, which exists in more numerous versions. Vernon is the only text to incorporate a Latin Marian hymn by Marbod of Rennes (16-18). Following the editorial method used in earlier editions in the series, errors in the manuscript are reproduced in the text and corrected in the footnotes. Most abbreviations have been silently expanded. Collation has been provided with the Corpus text and the text of London, British Library, M S Cotton Nero A. xiv, which are closely linked to Vernon, and at times with other manuscripts. The publication of this volume completes part of a significant project, which will be of lasting importance for scholars both of the Ancrene Riwle and the Vemon manuscript. The current volume also forms a useful accompaniment to the Vemon facsimile published in 1987 by D. S. Brewer, with an introduction by A. I. Doyle. The next step for Ancrene Riwle textual scholarship will be the appearance ofBella Millett and George Jack's critical edition, also for the Society. Rebecca Hayward Department ofEnglish University ofAuckland ...

Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (review)

Reviews 175 beginnings or experiences. They invariably present a linear, causal development, which invokes a 'narcissistic bond with an assumedly rational cosmos' (p. 171). In repeatedly showing the fragility ofthis bond, Davis concludes, that 'The poem, or Milton, has thoroughly accepted the challenge to restricted conceptions of rationality which thought of Chaos poses' (p. 184). Stories of Chaos is a thought-provoking study of the tensions between rationality and disorder in the years prior to the consolidation of Enlightenment models of uniform process and practice. Davis situates his readings of these literary works within changing philosophical, ethical and scientific contexts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet he is, in closing, careful to emphasise the importance of tales of chaos and order to 'political-historical and ethicalpsychological ' experience (p. 189). These works recount 'a poetic cosmology . . . whose proper sense is action, suffering and desire on the human scene' (p. 189). Lloyd Davis School ofEnglish, Media Studies & Art History University of Queensland Dean, Ruth J., with the collaboration of Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (Anglo-Norman Text Society, Occasional Publications Series 3), London, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999; cloth; pp. xviii, 553; R.R.P. £35.00 members, £49.00 non-members; ISBN 0905474384. Anglo-Norman literature refuses to go away. Those of us who work in medieval English studies, unnerved by dim memories of our struggles with the vagaries ofFrench grammar and pronunciation when w e were about 16, are often reluctant to come to grips with it. But wherever w e turn, there it is, whether w e work on Middle English secular, scientific or religious texts. For one cannot balk the fact that medieval England was a tri-lingual society, its socio-linguistic pecking order for centuries Latinfirst,Anglo-Norman second, and English trailing somewhere in the distance. And yet modern scholarly attention exactly reverses this medieval state ofaffairs. To be fair, the study ofAnglo-Norman has not been made any easier by the lack of accessible reference books. There have been no equivalents of the Index of Middle English Verse, Index of Middle English Prose, or Hartung's 176 Reviews Manual of Writings in Middle English. But brace yourselves. You won't have that excuse any longer, now that the long-awaited revision of Johan Vising's slim but pioneering 1923 volume, Anglo-Norman Language and Literature, has finally appeared. (The last copy of Vising to pass through m y hands was falling apart from the use it had received over the last three-quarters of a century by four generations of students.) With the same title, but refined by its subtitle 'A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts', Professor Dean's revision is more thanfivetimes the length of its original: over 500 pages, with 986 entries and six indices. A m o n g these alone indices of manuscripts, incipits, titles (in French, English and Latin), medieval authors, sources, and patrons - one could happily amuse oneself for days. Looking through the entries themselves, one is struck by just how much detailed scholarly work has been done in this area. But it seems to have made little cumulative impact on wider Middle English studies and Anglo-Norman studies continue to be perceived as a scholarly terra nullius. This book has been long in the making: Dean has devoted her life to this project. One is awed and astonished to read that she studied under Mildred K. Pope and corresponded with Vising himself She was already publishing in the 1930s and this volume is a monument to scholarly selflessness and persistence. But as she modestly says in her Introduction, 'Thefieldis not exhausted, nor is the need for additions, corrections and new approaches'. And in response I should like to offer a few supplementary notes to those entries where I have some direct knowledge of the texts. Other readers will surely want to make their own contributions and perhaps this book could become the foundation of a database. W e do not want to wait another 75 years to benefit from new work in this field. No. 643: Ancrene Riwle is no longer dated as early as 'the end of the twelfth century...

Ancrene Riwle: Introduction and Part I ed. by Robert W. Ackerman, Roger Dahood

REVIEWS ROBERT W ACKERMAN and ROGER DAHOOD, ed. and trans. Ancrene Riwle: Introduction andPart I. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 31. Binghamton, N.Y.: University Center at Bingham­ ton, 1984. Pp. x, 110. $12.00. The ReverendJames Morton first edited and translated the Nero manu­ script ofAncrene Riwle in 1853. It took a number of years before the full linguistic, textual, literary, and religious significance of the work was recognized, but the past fifty years have seen a great number of important studies and articles on all aspects ofAncreneRiwle, either under this title or under the title Ancrene Wisse (found in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 402). It istheaimandjustification ofthepresentedition ofthe Introduction and part 1 to present "an often neglected portion ofAncrene Riwle in a form demonstrably close to that which was actually known and used in the thirteenth century" (p. 3). These sections ofthe text lay out in detail the prescribed regimen ofworshipthat governed the daily lives ofthe three noble anchoresses for whom the rule was written, and its relative severity dispels the notion fostered by anthologized extracts that its writer was "a kindly old cleric, mildly concerned lest his anchoresses keep more than one cat or indulge in gossip or painful mortification ofthe flesh." The General Introduction to the edition and the bulk ofthe explanatory notes were the work of the late Robert W Ackerman; the edited text and the translation are the work of Roger Dahood, who has also, with appropriate personal identification, added to and revised the notes for publication. The General Introduction begins with a brief section entitled "The Manuscripts and Early Scholarship" (pp. 4-6). This section could, perhaps, have been strengthened, for the remarks on previous (not just early) scholarship tend to note rather than discuss the results ofscholarly investi­ gation. Relevant references are given in the endnotes, and the editors express themselves skeptical ofE.J. Dobson's suggestion that corrector B of British Library Cotton Cleopatra C.VI is the original author of Ancrene Riwle. Further critical discussion of Dobson's proposed identification in The Origins ofAncrene Wisse of the author as Brian of Lingen and the location of his sisters' anchorhold at Limebrook Priory would have been welcome. The individual manuscripts, especially Cleopatra, have been well de­ scribed in the respective EETS editions; the present editors content them109 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER selves, therefore, with characterizing the original scribe and the correctors of Cleopatra, largely on the basis of the analysis in Dobson's painstaking edition. Dobson considered the text in Corpus to be a fair copy of the rule as corrected by B; the present editors note correctly that Cleopatra never­ theless preserves some better readings in the text and sensible marginal emendations by B that are not found in Corpus. Partly for these reasons, partly because of probable primacy of date of writing, and partly because Cleopatra was clearly in use over a considerable period of time, the editors have chosen Cleopatra as their base text. The three succeeding sections that form the bulk of the General Intro­ duction set the text in context. "The Medieval Anchorite" is a succinct yet informative essay on the anchoritic life and the various rules that governed it from the Desert Fathers to the thirteenth century. The concluding paragraphs of this section focus particularly on England and on the physical surroundings and living conditions of the anchoresses for whom Ancrene Riwle was written. It is a measure of the success of this unpedantic account that one wishes for more examples drawn from medieval descriptions and from surviving architectural remains, such as those noted on p. 14. The "Abstract of Ancrene Riwle," useful in itself, demonstrates the importance of the Introduction and part 1 of the work in relation to the whole and in relation to other rules that assume previous familiarity with the nuts-and-bolts elements of daily devotional life. The editors point out the innovations present in Ancrene Riwle, such as "the inclusion ofmore or less popular discourses on the sins and confession" that anticipate later doctrinal treatises but warn us salutarily that the original features, the author's skill, and "the note of personal warmth he was...

DESIGN IN PART I OF "ANCRENE RIWLE"

DESIGN IN PART I OF "ANCRENE RIWLE"

The English Text of the 'Ancrene Riwle'

The English Text of the 'Ancrene Riwle'

The Liturgical Day in Ancrene Riwle

THE purpose here is to suggest that for too long Ancrene Riwlel has been read and evaluated mainly as a linguistic, historical, and literary monument, to the virtual neglect of its true nature as a religious rule. The great value of AR to our knowledge of Early Middle English and medieval religious life is beyond question, as is its literary merit. But we must remind ourselves that the raison d'etre of the anchoress, as is true of all religious, was the life of prayer, and therefore that to Part I of the Rule, the devotional handbook, special importance must be assigned. A full elucidation of that brief opening chapter, in fact, may provide a new key to understanding the content, ordering, and structure of the much longer chapters that follow. The scant attention paid Part I by editors and commentators may be largely ascribed to the unavailability of a satisfactory study of the rubrics, incipits, and devotional recommendations of which it consists. Such a study, one result of which might be the discovery of a text close to the exemplar from which the original anchoresses copied their office, could be carried out only by an historian of medieval liturgy, and thus is beyond the competence of the present writer. To date, apart from an unpublished dissertation concerned with the whole of Part I by Sister Josephine Cooper,2 only scattered elements of the anchoress's devotional program have engaged the interest of such scholars. Here, no more is attempted than a brief discussion of the horarium, the daily routine set forth principally in Part I, including comments on several incipits not heretofore clarified, and a rough assessment of the amount of

Some Difficult Words in the Ancrene Riwle

Some Difficult Words in the Ancrene Riwle

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, edited from B.M. Cotton MS. Cleopatra C.vi. Edited by E J. DOBSON Pp clxxiv+332 (Early English Text Society) London Oxford University Press, 1972 £3.50 net P J FRANKIS P J FRANKIS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXVI, Issue 102, May 1975, Pages 196–198, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXVI.102.196 Published: 01 May 1975

Studies in the Dialect and Vocabulary of the Ancrene Riwle

Studies in the Dialect and Vocabulary of the Ancrene Riwle

The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Edited from Cotton MS Titus D. XVIII

The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Edited from Cotton MS Titus D. XVIII

A NOTE ON THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANCRENE RIWLE

A NOTE ON THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANCRENE RIWLE Get access C. A. LADD C. A. LADD St. Andrews, Fife Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 8, Issue 8, August 1961, Pages 288–290, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/8-8-288 Published: 01 August 1961

The French Text of the Ancrene Riwle.

The French Text of the Ancrene Riwle.

The French Text of the Ancrene Riwle. W. H. Trethewey

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsThe French Text of the Ancrene Riwle. W. H. Trethewey Albert C. BaughAlbert C. Baugh Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 35, Number 1Jan., 1960 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2850211 Copyright 1960 The Mediaeval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

SHORT NOTICES

Journal Article SHORT NOTICES Get access The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Edited from British Museum MS. Royal 8 C. I by A. C BAUGH, Pp. xii+58 (Early English Text Society 232). London: Cumberlege for the Society, 1956. 20s. net. SUSIE I. TUCKER SUSIE I. TUCKER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume IX, Issue 33, 1958, Pages 116-a–116, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/IX.33.116-a Published: 01 January 1958

Two notes on the Augustinian and possibly West Midland origin of the Ancren Riwle

Two notes on the Augustinian and possibly West Midland origin of the Ancren Riwle

"All the Wealth of Croesus...": A Topic in the "Ancren Riwle"

"All the Wealth of Croesus...": A Topic in the "Ancren Riwle"

The Ancrene Riwle. Translated by M. B. Salu. (Burns Oates; 15s.) - Deonise Hid Diuinite. Edited by P. Hodgson. (Oxford University Press; 30s.)

The Ancrene Riwle. Translated by M. B. Salu. (Burns Oates; 15s.) - Deonise Hid Diuinite. Edited by P. Hodgson. (Oxford University Press; 30s.)