Reviewed by: Cushions, Kitchens and Christ: Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing by Louise Campion Luke Penkett Louise Campion, Cushions, Kitchens and Christ: Mapping the Domestic in Late Medieval Religious Writing ( Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022), xviii + 190 pp. The Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages series from the University of Wales Press is a notable addition to research on the Middle Ages, bringing to the fore both studies that engage with texts that significantly shaped medieval religion and culture and those that highlight understudied aspects of these two areas. One of their latest publications is Cushions, Kitchens and Christ—the first monograph [End Page 236] by independent scholar Louise Campion, who has a particular interest in religious texts translated from Latin into Middle English during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in their impact on the literary culture of late medieval England. Beginning as a doctoral thesis, Cushions, Kitchens and Christ focuses on four such texts: The Doctrine of the Hert (a thirteenth-century treatise), Nicholas Love's The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (a fifteenth-century translation of a fourteenth-century vita), Bridget of Sweden's Liber Celestis (a translation of over 700 of her visions), and another collection of visions experienced by Mechthild of Hackeborn in her Booke of Ghostlye Grace (written after 1290 and translated into Modern English by 1450). One of the connections between these four texts is their "repeated and consistent recourse to the language and imagery of the domestic sphere as a means of explicating the salient concerns of their authors, from the proper conduct of spiritual practice to the key events of Christ's life, to vociferous criticism of corrupt Church officials" (2). As such, Campion's book contributes to the relatively new and illuminating area of materiality research, studying the place of the domestic in relation to both religion and culture, significant patterns of domestic imagery, and the growing importance attached to the household in the late Middle Ages. After a useful introduction, Campion begins with a chapter titled "The Kitchen of the Heart, Spiritual Furniture and Noble Visitors." The mid-thirteenth-century guidance text and preaching manual De doctrina cordis was a hugely popular text, full of homely vocabulary, read in its Middle English translation by monastics and laypeople alike. Campion highlights the sharing of the Eucharist with Christ in the private household of the recipient's heart as well as the household as a locus to receive divine messages from the Eucharistic visitor. This last point prepares the modern-day reader for Campion's next two chapters. Both Mechthild and Bridget regarded domestic images as central to their visionary vocabulary. Mechthild goes further and allegorizes the heart as a house. Along with Bridget and, also, Catherine of Siena and Elizabeth of Hungary, Mechthild's spirituality—at the same time as her "approuyd wymmen"–—is orthodox; and yet, it is inevitably shaped by circumstance. In Mechthild's case, her "conventual community and her joyous relationship with Christ" (39) is addressed in the second chapter, "The Domesticity of the Sacred Heart." Chapter 3, "Marriage, Storehouses and Celestial Visitors, focuses on Brigid's use of household language, which "facilitates a deep engagement with the religious and political anxieties of the later Middle Ages" (61). Unlike Mechthild, Campion clearly points out that Bridget's domestic vocabulary allows her to sharply comment on "a broad range of ecclesiastical leaders and spiritual ideas" (61). Like Margery Kempe, her fifteenth-century counterpart, Bridget eschews her home in favour of multiple pilgrimages. Bridget's Liber not surprisingly reflects her place in the world, through which she describes her "distinctiveness as a conduit of the divine message" by commenting upon ecclesial corruption, moral apocalypse, spiritual union, the prospect of salvation, her understanding of God, and the proper conduct of bishops (87). In the final chapter, "From Wanderer to Householder: The Domestication of Jesus, the Disciples and the Holy Family," Campion convincingly argues that "the domestic sphere is the primary affective framework through which [End Page 237] [Nicholas] Love invites his reader to identify with Christ" (112). "Domestic space," she reminds us, "is the environment to hear about Christ, listen to his...
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Jun 24, 2024
Antje Elisa Chan 
Open Access