Vernacular Theology Research Articles

Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice ed. by Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice ed. by Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel Albrecht Classen Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel, ed. Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2012. ix, 305 pp. The topic of 'authority in the Middle Ages' has recently attracted considerable interest, as reflected by several international conference, such as the Thirty-Fourth Medieval Workshop at Green College, the University of British Columbia, in 2004, and the symposium Seeing, Hearing, Reading and Believing: Authorities in the Middle Ages, Helsinki, Finland, Sept. 2010. While the papers of the former have now appeared in print, the papers of the latter are currently prepared for publication (with De Gruyter). We all think we know what authority might be, but it always becomes a serious matter of negotiations, both today and in the Middle Ages. As Stephen Partridge explains in the introduction to Author, Reader, Book, his research group was deeply inspired by the work published by Alastair Minnis (Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd ed. 1988) and by numerous other research projects focused on the same topic. Furthermore, 'authority' cannot be fully grasped if studied in disciplinary isolation, hence the editors' great effort to bring together scholars from a variety of fields addressing the issue at hand. It remains unclear, however, what specific approach carries this book, apart from the overarching theme. After all, authority was vested in the Church, the king, the aristocracy, university teachers, mayors, etc. All structures and hegemonies are predicated on the acceptance of authority. Minnis begins the volume with an article in which he basically summarizes his previous findings, emphasizing, above all, the accessus ad auctores as discussed by Thomas Walsingham (d. ca. 1422) and by a variety of other philosophers in the Middle Ages. Sebastian Coxon follows the lead with an analysis of Walter Map's strategy to establish his authority as a learned writer in his De nugis curialium (Courtiers' Trifles) by way of utilizing satire and irony to ridicule the courtly life of his time (late twelfth-early thirteenth centuries). Erik Kwakkel offers a very different approach, studying how medieval scribes assumed and gained authority simply by putting together their manuscripts, which specifically directed their readers' perceptions and understanding of the texts. Kwakkel particularly examines how the individual parts of a manuscript were put together, and whether a scribe worked by himself or in tandem with others. [End Page 237] From here we turn to Chaucer's self-reflections on his role as an author in the Manciple's Tale as Ovidian metaphor, as Anita Obermeier explains. She returns to her remarkable monograph on the history of literary retractions (The History and Anatomy of Auctorial Self-Criticism, 1999) in order to illustrate how much self-deprecation could be used as a strategy of gaining in authority by making sure that he had, like Ovid and then also Gower, the last laugh in the public discourse. Stephen Partridge continues this line of argument, relying heavily on Obermeier's previous research, emphasizing how much Chaucer regarded himself as an authority and as the producer of his own books, especially through addressing his own scribe. This provides a good segue to the next article by Deborah McGrady who investigates how Christine de Pizan quickly gained public authority not only because of her writings, but also because of a strong 'media campaign' making her well known through the numerous manuscript portraits. As McGrady emphasizes, through her self-presentation as a reader Christine succeeded in establishing her authority in late-medieval French society, especially because her works were then also read, meaning that she was a highly esteemed author at the peak of medieval society. Kirsty Campbell ruminates on the extensive vernacular writings by Bishop Reginald Peacock (d. 1460) in comparison with the famous Constitutiones by Bishop Arundel (in Latin), a set of legal documents enacted in 1409. Peacock's 'vernacular theology' obviously achieved its desired effect and was regarded with great respect since his claims on authority were met with full approval. We can here see already, which Campbell strangely ignores, forerunners of the Protestant Reformation, both in England and on the Continent. Iain Macleod Higgins introduces Robert...

Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. Brian Cummings and James Simpson

With more than thirty contributors drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, nearly 700 pages and well over 300,000 words, this volume is undoubtedly heavyweight. The intention of the enterprise, as explained by the editors in their introduction, is to take ‘a dynamically diachronic approach to cultural history’ (p. 4), problematising concepts of periodisation of ‘medieval’, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘early modern’, by centring on the concepts of reformation, Reformation—and the unreformed. The contents list reads like a run of All Souls Prize Exams sat by the most illustrious English literary historians at work: most of the chapters set their distinguished authors a one-word challenge, from ‘Anachronism’ (Margaret de Grazia) to ‘Travel’ (Andrew Hadfield) via topics such as ‘Community’ (Cathy Shrank), ‘Persona’ (John Parker), and ‘Place’ (James Simpson, considering ecclesiology through the debates over relics), ‘Folly’ (Greg Walker on fine form) and even ‘Despair’ (Nicholas Watson). The contributors employ a range of stratagems to fill their brief. Some choose to compare and contrast—with less emphasis on contrast—two episodes in the history of their subject (Hadfield, and also Thomas Betteridge on ‘Vernacular Theology’, a chapter which was originally to be titled ‘Mysticism’); others concentrate on a moment of change (Paul Strohm in an ambitious essay on ‘Conscience’); yet others give a vignette or a case-study (for instance, Helen Cooper with a very useful survey of the ‘Poetic Fame’ of Chaucer in the sixteenth century). The result is a work which has the appearance of a shared agenda but in which the differences—and the absences—are most noticeable.

Gower's vulgar tongue: Ovid, lay religion, and English poetry in the Confessio amantis

Gower's vulgar tongue: Ovid, lay religion, and English poetry in the Confessio amantis

Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages

Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages

Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England

Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England

A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MIDDLE ENGLISH SERMON ON THE DECLINE OF THE WORLD AND THE AGE OF STONE

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)TWs is an edition of a Middle English sermon preserved in London, British Library, Royal MS 8 F.vii.1 The text is not part of any longer cycle or collection of sermons, and seems in fact to have been a late addition to this manuscript, being bound in at the end with an incomplete copy of the Oculus sacerdotis, Veronica O'Mara includes this sermon in her 'Checklist of unedited late Middle English sermons that occur singly or in small groups', and it has also been described in the Repertonum of Late Middle English Prose Sermons compiled by O'Mara and Suzanne Paul, but the text has never been edited before, and has received very little critical attention.2 The sermon deserves to be better known, however, not least for its detailed accounts of materials derived from the first book of Ovid's Metamorphoses and from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. While Ovid and Isidore were often cited in medieval sermons, this text devotes an unusual amount of space to paraphrasing and explicating them, presenting a detailed account of Latinate learning in a semi-popular, vernacular context. For the most part, the sermon discusses Ovid and Isidore with comparatively Kttle concern for moral instruction, being at least as interested in the specialized information that these texts contain as it is in what they might be made to say by analogy about Scripture or pastoraKa. As a result, the Royal 8 F.vii sermon invites us to ask new questions about the kinds of material that were thought useful or appropriate for dissemination in fifteenth-century preaching, and to look again at the possibilities for education that were available in the controversial arena of vernacular writing.The protheme of the sermon describes the decline of the world using material attributed to Ovid, dividing prehistory into ages of gold, silver, brass, and iron on the model of Metamorphoses, book I, lines 89-150. Extending the logic of this narrative, the preacher extrapolates a fifth age, an age of stone, which encompasses the present day and is worse than any previous historical period. Finally, he compares the seven sins in this age of stone to the properties of seven different types of stone, citing the entries for diamond, beloculus, magnetite, coral, selenite, tombstone, and pyrite from Isidore's Etymologies, As such, the sermon amounts to a digest of materials from the core curriculum of Latin education, presented in the vernacular and accessible to a lay audience.Fifteenth-century preaching in Middle English has been characterized in terms of its self-conscious orthodoxy, primarily in response to WycHfism. Examining the evidence of late medieval English sermon texts, Helen Spencer concludes that 'there had been a conscious attempt, which lasted about twenty years, c1390- c.1410, by at least some secular priests to encourage preaching, followed by a period of successful repression, which in turn gave way to moderate promotion of sermon collections, often of a self-consciously orthodox kind'.3 Fifteenth-century sermons habitually avoid the exposition of Scripture, and focus instead on pastoraua, suggesting a studied effort to avoid those things that Wyclifism made controversial. This account of English preaching is the more persuasive because it accords with two important narratives about the role of English texts in late medieval religious life. The first of these describes how parish priests, obliged by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century pastoral legislation to provide their congregations with an elementary education in the faith, looked increasingly to the pulpit as a place to deliver it, and to English as the language to deliver it in.4 The second describes the rise and fall of Vernacular theology', the increasing sophistication of religious writing in English in the fourteenth century, and the suppression of this genre by legislation designed to limit the spread of Wyclifism in the fifteenth. …

Can You Serve? The Theology of Service from Langland to Luther

In setting the apologia of Piers Plowman in passus 5 of the C-text alongside Martin Luther's 1525 text De servo arbitrio and his earlier lectures on the Psalms, this essay moves across the Reformation divide to argue for continuities between these writers' treatments of the theological grammar of “serve and deserve.” The article argues that when Langland has his narrator questioned by Reason and asked, “Can you serve?” Langland understands the question, like Luther, in the broadest theological and ethical sense. The article attends in detail to conventional readings that see the apologia as referring to Langland's putative clerical status, to his status as a laboring body under the terms of the 1388 labor statutes, or to his own vocation as a poet and maker of vernacular theology. Establishing significant parallels between Langland and Luther allows the picture of the “Lutheran moment” painted by recent literary historians to be questioned and challenged.

Reginald Pecock and the Religious Education of the Laity in Fifteenth-Century England

Reginald Pecock and the Religious Education of the Laity in Fifteenth-Century England Kirsty Campbell In late medieval England, the production of religious literature in the vernacular constitutes a massive transfer of clergie—of knowledge and learning—from the clergy to the laity. Vincent Gillespie writes, “the fifteenth century witnessed an extensive and consistent process of assimilation by the laity of techniques and materials of spiritual advancement, which had historically been the preserve of the clerical and monastic orders.”1 Over 250 copies of the Wycliffite Bible, mostly in fragments, are produced during this period. This is a time when, as Sarah Beckwith notes, “the mechanisms for the transmission of ‘theology’ were expanding, and conventionally theological questions, or questions hitherto restricted to a clerical milieu, were being disseminated beyond the clergy in the vernacular, and hence understood and received in different ways.”2 The significance and the extent of this transmission of religious culture are witnessed by the term vernacular theology, used by Nicholas Watson to characterize ambitious works like Piers Plowman, which grapple with complicated questions about salvation, divine justice, and divine mercy in a language that was accessible to lay readers.3 [End Page 48] Works of religious instruction, like manuals of pastoral theology, commentaries on the Decalogue, the deadly sins, and the Pater Noster, and other didactic compilations form a large part of these “materials of spiritual advancement” that moved freely between clergy and laity in the fifteenth century. Scholars such as Vincent Gillespie argue that these kinds of works—particularly pastoral handbooks and manuals like John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests, and the Speculum Christiani, a work that “enjoyed enormous popularity in the fifteenth century”— provide us with an important source of information about the religious education of the laity in late medieval England.4 Indeed, Gillespie suggests that though “there has been an understandable tendency to concentrate on the pulpit as the cornerstone of the didactic edifice,” it is just as important to pay attention to the “developing lay taste for manuals” of religious instruction and to the “increasingly varied demands made upon their resources.”5 Alexandra Barratt concurs that much more work can be done (particularly on questions of audience, purposes, and uses) on didactic poems and prose works that “in their various ways, cover— fully or partly—the official teaching curriculum for the laity of the medieval Church,” which included the Lord’s Prayer and Creed, the fourteen articles of faith, the Decalogue, the two evangelical commandments, the seven works of mercy, the deadly sins, the principal virtues, and the sacraments.6 In his study of medieval education, Nicholas Orme has suggested that religious instruction in the late Middle Ages was imparted through the religious and moral literature that “gave knowledge of God, narrated Christian history, taught virtues, and censored sins,” as well as through sermons and any other public opportunity at which the priest gave public instruction, and through the informal education of young children in the principles of morality and the basic Christian prayers and precepts.7 Didactic works that modeled themselves in various ways on the “standard instructional programme” of the Church helped readers—both clerical and lay—to learn and memorize basic [End Page 49] doctrine, perhaps providing a resource for teaching others as well as a tool for private meditation.8 The writings of Reginald Pecock are an important part of this picture, because he made it his task to expand mechanisms for the transmission of theology to the laity by writing books of religious instruction and by devising innovative plans for lay education. Indeed, what is extraordinary about Pecock’s involvement in the transmission of religious culture to a lay milieu is both his participation in this transmission—i.e., the production of sophisticated, challenging religious writings in the vernacular—and his ideas about the need for this transmission to be more regulated, systematic, and universal. In short, Pecock envisioned the religious education of the lay members of the Christian community in ways that had never been imagined before. In this article, I examine this vision of Christian pedagogy; elsewhere, I investigate the tools— Pecock’s books—and what they can tell us about Pecock’s...

<i>Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century Steven Rozenski Jr. Geert Warnar. Ruusbroec: Literature and Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century. Trans. Diane Webb. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Pp. 370. ISBN: 9789004158696. US $148.00 (cloth). Geert Warnar’s monograph attempts to yoke together the methodologies of literary and religious history, two disciplines he sees as having drifted increasingly apart since the religious turn in medieval literary studies. In more precise terms, he aims to reclaim a central figure of Dutch-language vernacular theology for the canon of Dutch literature—“in the firm conviction that this is the only way to do justice to a great name in the literature of the Low Countries” (9). With a subject as resolutely mystical as Jan van Ruusbroec (1293–1381, beatified 1908), however, Warnar has set himself a rather Herculean—if not quite Sisyphean—task. Nonetheless, the study succeeds admirably in examining Ruusbroec’s cultural and literary as well as theological influences; its translation (from Ruusbroec. Literatuur en mystiek in de veertiende eeuw, published in Amsterdam in 2003) into an elegant and highly readable English by Diane Webb is to be celebrated. Ruusbroec’s oeuvre has been appreciated since Evelyn Underhill as a cornerstone of the medieval mystical tradition; in his own lifetime his reputation extended far enough south that Johannes Tauler traveled from Basel to visit him in his priory of Groenendaal, just outside Brussels (after which his texts became quite popular among the Upper Rhine Gottesfreunde). In the years following Ruusbroec’s death, his most influential text, The Spiritual Espousals (Die geestelike brulocht), was denounced by the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean Gerson—a move that, like John XXII’s 1329 condemnation of Meister Eckhart, did relatively little to stanch his growing popularity in the Low Countries and beyond. At around the same time—the close of the fourteenth century—sections of The Spiritual Espousals were translated into English, via a Latin intermediary, as part of The Chastising of God’s Children (a compilation surviving in twelve manuscripts and subsequently published by Wynkyn de Worde around 1493). A unique English translation of On the Sparkling Stone (Vanden blinkenden steen) survives as The Treatise of the Perfection of the Sons of God immediately following the only extant copy of Julian of Norwich’s Short Text in the astonishingly rich devotional compilation known as [End Page 265] the Amherst Manuscript (MS Add 37790, on which see Marleen Cré’s Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse; for modern English translations of both Dutch texts, see the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality volume on Ruusbroec). As a Continental influence on late medieval English devotion, he is surpassed only by Henry Suso. Warnar begins in Brussels, where Ruusbroec was educated in the chapter school of the Collegiate Church, St. Gudula, a formation markedly different from the Dominican upbringing of the great Rhineland mystics of the same period: Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler (although it remains possible that Ruusbroec received some education from the Brussels Franciscan convent). The second chapter examines Ruusbroec’s sources in the composition of The Spiritual Espousals, generally considered his capolavoro—especially fine is Warnar’s discussion of Ruusbroec’s debt to Hadewijch and his relationship to beguine spirituality (72–77). Chapter 3 explores Ruusbroec’s identity as an auctor. Between Marguerite Porete’s 1310 execution in Paris and Meister Eckhart’s 1329 condemnation, Ruusbroec had every reason to be cautious about his vernacular authorship: like his near-contemporary Henry Suso, he took pains to create “authorized” manuscripts of his work and discourage its premature circulation and prohibited the copying of what he might have considered his juvenilia. Careful about his own orthodoxy, he was equally swift to point out possible heterodoxy in his contemporaries: in On the Spiritual Tabernacle, for instance, “he interpreted the characteristics of twenty species of birds in terms of heretical phenomena” (149). Finally, in chapter 4, we reach Groenendaal, the wooded retreat just outside Brussels that Ruusbroec founded in 1345, where he would spend the rest of his life (the primary source for biographical information about Ruusbroec, the De origine of Pomerius, relates that this in part resulted from the loud, out-of-tune singing of...

Kingdom to commune: Protestant pacifist culture between World War I and the Vietnam era

American religious pacifism is usually explained in terms of its practitioners' ethical and philosophical commitments. Patricia Appelbaum argues that Protestant pacifism, which constituted the religious center of the large-scale peace movement in the United States after World War I, is best understood as a culture that developed dynamically in the broader context of American religious, historical, and social currents. Exploring piety, practice, and material religion, Appelbaum describes a surprisingly complex culture of Protestant pacifism expressed through social networks, iconography, vernacular theology, individual spiritual practice, storytelling, identity rituals, and cooperative living. Between World War I and the Vietnam War, she contends, a paradigm shift took place in the Protestant pacifist movement. Pacifism moved from a mainstream position to a sectarian and marginal one, from an embrace of modernity to skepticism about it, and from a Christian center to a purely pacifist one, with an informal, flexible theology. The book begins and ends with biographical profiles of two very different pacifists, Harold Gray and Marjorie Swann. Their stories distill the changing religious culture of American pacifism revealed in Kingdom to Commune.

The Idea of Universal Salvation in Piers Plowman B and C

This essay takes up Nicholas Watson's important and influential article, “Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England,” and argues that, for William Langland at least, the promise of universal salvation is at best ambiguous. The essay examines in detail Christ's speech after he has harrowed hell, the principal locus for the expression of Langland's views on the matter, but attempts to place this speech in the context of and as the climactic statement of Langland's salvation theology as it develops through the poem. Important variations between the B and C texts in their treatment of the subject are given special attention. The emphasis is always on the continuously evolving drama of Piers Plowman as a poem searching for the truth of belief rather than as a poem that expounds a system of already-existing belief.

Vernacular Ecumenism and Transcultural Unity Rethinking Ecumenical Theology after the Cultural Turn

Vernacular Ecumenism and Transcultural Unity Rethinking Ecumenical Theology after the Cultural Turn

MORAL AMBITIONS OF GRACE: The Paradox of Compassion and Accountability in Evangelical Faith-Based Activism

Based on fieldwork in Knoxville, Tennessee, I analyze the ethical dilemmas of conservative evangelical Protestants engaged in faith-based activism and social outreach, especially dilemmas stemming from the theological paradox of compassion and accountability. Evangelicals who minister to the poor and distressed must reconcile romanticized notions of pure sacrificial giving with an ideology of personal responsibility inherent in their concept of accountability. Socially engaged evangelicals struggle with competing moral ambitions and religious imperatives that derive meaning from an overarching rubric of Christian evangelism, in which gifts of divine grace are seen as creating reciprocal obligations as well as insurmountable debt on the part of recipients. The outreach efforts of suburban churchgoers are further complicated by unequal power dynamics between charitable givers and charity recipients. While exploring the complexities of a vernacular theology through which socially engaged evangelicals wrestle with these issues, I discuss theoretical and political implications of the case study, including the role of activism in shaping religious identities and the resurgence of religious conservatism in U.S. civil society and public culture.

“Terrible Laughing God”: Challenging Divine Justice in African American Antilynching Plays, 1916–1945

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, African Americans waged a propaganda war against the scourge of lynching. Theater was a vital element of this effort, and over two dozen plays were written with the intent of depicting the horror that accompanied these brutal acts of violence. These plays, though largely neglected by historians, have been studied as elements of an effort to promote antilynching legislation. Until now, however, their testimony to important religious currents in African American culture has been ignored. A closer look at these texts reveals them to be engaged in theological discourse that examines the role of God and the church in the face of evil. These plays reflect a burgeoning humanism in African American culture, particularly among the intelligentsia. By creating characters and constructing plot lines that explicitly challenged the goodness of God in light of African American suffering, or by exposing the hypocrisy and impotence of the church to bring about an end to violence and oppression, these playwrights were engaged in a form of vernacular theology. By observing their efforts, we add a fresh layer to our understanding of African American life during this time period.

The Criteria for Scribal Attribution: Dublin, Trinity College, MS 244, Some Early Copies of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Canon of Adam Pynkhurst Manuscripts

Fletcher sets himself multi-pronged task here. He seeks to show 1) that the Dublin, Trinity College MS 244, comparatively little studied, evinces the same hand as that identified by Linne R. Mooney as scribe, Pynkhurst--or, alternatively, that sort of school of scribes existed headed by Pynkhurst, all of whom practiced in Pynkhurst's shadow and in accord with his hand; 2) that Pynkhurst (or member or members of his school) copied the Wyclifite prose tracts in Dublin, Trinity College MS 244; and that therefore 3) this manuscript not without its implications for the understanding of Chaucer's relation to the textual culture of late-fourteenth century religious radicalism (p. 597). The argument is only tangentially related to Gower, in that (as Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes showed conclusively) the same scribe--Pynkhurst?--copied major manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis. The inferences are that if Chaucer knew Pynkhurst well enough to write Adam Scriveyn in mock reprimand, then Gower must have known him also, since the same hand shows up in number of important manuscripts of CA; and this in turn opens various possibilities such as a scribe actively providing the poet who employed him with reading material, as well as simply being the passive recipient of that poet's copying commissions . . . . Thus this milieu, that saw the copying of some of the major literary works of the late fourteenth century, would also now need to be seen as possible context for some of that period's radical vernacular theology (pg. 629). It should be noted that, for all that Fletcher attempts to stretch these suggestions to embrace Chaucer, he does not venture the same for Gower. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. JGN 28.2]

John Capgrave's fifteenth century

Britain of the fifteenth century was rife with social change, religious dissent, and political upheaval. Amid this ferment lived John Capgrave-Austin friar, doctor of theology, leading figure in East Anglian society, and noted author. Nowhere are the tensions and anxieties of this critical period, spanning the close of the medieval and the dawn of early modern eras, more eloquently conveyed than in Capgrave's works. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century is the first book to explore the major themes of Capgrave's writings and to relate those themes to fifteenth-century political and cultural debates. Focusing on Capgrave's later works, especially those in English and addressed to lay audiences, it teases out thematic threads that are closely interwoven in Capgrave's Middle English oeuvre: piety, intellectualism, gender, and social responsibility. It refutes the still-prevalent view of Capgrave as a religious and political reactionary and shows, rather, that he used traditional genres to promote his own independent viewpoint on some of the most pressing controversies of his day, including debates over vernacular theology, orthodoxy and dissent, lay (and particularly female) spirituality, and the state of the kingdom under Henry VI. The book situates Capgrave as a figure both in the vibrant literary culture of East Anglia and in European intellectual history. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in late medieval England and will interest students of hagiography, religious and cultural history, and Lancastrian politics and society.

The Bardic Search for God: Vernacular Theology in Gaelic Ireland, 1200-1400

The Bardic Search for God: Vernacular Theology in Gaelic Ireland, 1200-1400

Future Perfect: The Augustinian Theology of Perfection and the Canterbury Tales

Future Perfect: The Augustinian Theology of Perfection and the Canterbury Tales R. James Goldstein Auburn University Ageneration ago the most vigorous scholarly debates among Chaucerians in North America pitted the neo-Augustinian or exegetical critics, represented by D. W. Robertson and his followers, against New Critical formalist critics, represented most influentially by E. Talbot Donaldson.1 In recent years, as older controversies over exegetical criticism recede into the ever more distant past, there have been signs that resistance to thinking seriously about the relation of Chaucer’s writing to medieval theological discourses is waning. Indeed, current scholarship in the rapidly growing field of vernacular theology suggests that the time may be ripe to reexamine such a fundamental question as how the pervasive influence of Augustinian thought in the fourteenth century might matter to our reading of Chaucer, though such lines of questioning have long been taboo lest one be accused of harboring a reactionary Robertsonian agenda. By focusing on the theology of Christian perfection in The Canterbury Tales, the present essay aims to situate Chaucer’s work within an Augustinian framework to offer an alternative I would like to thank the College of Liberal Arts and Auburn University for summer grants in 2001 and 2002 that helped support research for this essay. Early versions of portions of this essay were read to the Chaucer Division of the Modern Language Association at the 2000 meeting in Washington, D.C., and at the New Chaucer Society Congress in Boulder, Colorado, in 2002; my thanks to the organizers and audiences. For helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Nicholas Watson, Britton J. Harwood, V. A. Kolve, and especially to the anonymous reviewers for SAC and to its editor. 1 See Lee Patterson’s still indispensable analysis of this debate in Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 1–39; for a contrasting account, see Alan Gaylord, ‘‘Reflections on D. W. Robertson, Jr., and ‘Exegetical Criticism,’’’ ChauR 40.3 (2006): 311–33. PAGE 87 87 ................. 16596$ $CH4 11-01-10 14:06:37 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER to suggestions in recent scholarship that locates convergences between The Canterbury Tales and reformist thought, sometimes of a radical or Wycliffite tendency.2 By focusing on the theology of perfection, this essay seeks to remedy the relative neglect of that topic by scholars who have generally not sought to appraise the cultural work performed by Chaucer’s writing in terms of medieval ideas of perfection.3 A notable exception is a recent essay by Nicholas Watson, who argues that Chaucer’s self-consciously lay stance in The Canterbury Tales is best understood as ‘‘anti-perfectionist ,’’ or what he identifies as a ‘‘mediocrist’’ position.4 The ‘‘public Christianity ’’ that Chaucer displays in The Canterbury Tales, as Watson understands it, ‘‘is dismissive of the ideals of the professional religious orders,’’ the religious who in the Church’s traditional hierarchical thinking about personhood had claimed the privilege of being the perfecti, in contrast to the mediocri, those ‘‘virtuous lay Christians in active life.’’5 While it is far from my intention to recuperate a Robertsonian herme2 For examples, see Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest (New York: Routledge, 1990); Paul Strohm, ‘‘Chaucer’s Lollard Joke: History and the Textual Unconscious ,’’ SAC 17 (1995): 23–42; David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Alan J. Fletcher, ‘‘Chaucer the Heretic,’’ SAC 25 (2003): 53–121. The list is by no means complete. 3 Robertson barely mentions Christian perfection in his major work, though the idea received some attention in the work of his followers; see D. W. Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 350; Bernard F. Huppé, A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (Albany: SUNY, 1964), pp. 39, 113–17, 142–47, 228–29; Paul A. Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), who concludes that Chaucer ‘‘is preeminently the poet of perfection and discipline not only of the mind but...

The Penitential Psalms and Vernacular Theology

The Penitential Psalms and Vernacular Theology

Performance Anxiety and Watson's Vernacular Theology

Performance Anxiety and Watson's Vernacular Theology