Download PDF | Jessica Brantley - Reading in the Wilderness_ Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England- (2007).
491 Pages
Introduction
The Performance of Reading
The only exact knowledge there is, is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books. anatole france If we accept the conservative epistemology of Anatole France, then in the highly speculative business of literary criticism medievalists are especially far from exactitude.1 “Date of publication” does not apply conceptually to the literature of a manuscript culture, in which a rough date of composition is often hard enough to come by. Students of the Middle Ages are left, then, with “the format of books” as our only potential access to “exact knowledge.” But here we are fortunate in having recourse to a rich array of evidence, for medieval manuscripts exalt format, demonstrating in the differences among realizations of the same work the importance of physical circumstance for the creation of literary meaning. Each handwritten codex is a unique object, wedding the text it presents to the form of its presentation less transparently, and more meaningfully, than do the mass productions of print culture.2
I shall explore here the format of one fi fteenth- century English book, not in the real hope of France’s “exact knowledge,” but in recognition of the uniquely authoritative position of manuscripts as the material remains of medieval literary production and reception. Study of texts in the absence of contexts gives an artifi cial and ultimately misleading impression of the experience of reading in the Middle Ages.3 Attending broadly to manuscript format, however, can reveal in the medieval codex not only the meanings of texts, but also habits of thought. In this study, I will investigate the late-medieval habits of thought that link reading with performance.
The pairing may seem counterintuitive as a description of literary culture in the fi fteenth century, a period when the rise of silent, individual reading is customarily thought to have supplanted the oral and aural modes of reception associated with an earlier time.4 Although recent scholarship has amply challenged the simple story of ancient bards and mumbling monks who give way to modern bibliophiles, still the emergence of the private reader—a solitary person silently contemplating a codex—is a standard feature of the narrative by which we understand the literary history of the late Middle Ages.5 The increase in private reading signals a movement away from settings more easily characterized as performative, whether the particular mechanism of performance is oral composition, oral recitation, or simply reading à haute voix. In the fi fteenth century, however, it is not authorial processes of composition or even recitation that show the greatest affi liation with performance, but readerly processes of understanding.6
Late-medieval devotional readers, in particular, brought the idea of public recitals into the surprising private space of vernacular manuscripts, not as an atavistic remnant, but as a vibrant means of making spiritual meaning. Their literary activities enlivened the silent page with the imagination of noisy scenes, enriched individual prayer through association with liturgical celebration, and made the individual’s quiet encounter with the static book itself a species of sacred performance. Books that enjoin such a mode of performative private reading offer a new paradigm for the complicated and enduring interactions of literacy and orality in late-medieval culture. The vigorous activities of late-medieval devotional reading might be described in terms other than performative ones. Monastic reading, in particular, from the lectio divina to the arts of memory, has been described as a cognitive exercise that calls upon the creative energies of the solitary reader in ways that often overlap with what I am calling performative.7 Nonetheless, the vocabulary of performance offers new ways of understanding the particularities of late-medieval vernacular literary culture.
The format of some late-medieval books reveals that the performative mechanisms of individual reading were signifi cantly infl uenced by the social literary structures of the drama. Tellingly, critics have often gravitated toward theatrical metaphors in studies of meditative reading and the memorial arts. Jeffrey Hamburger, for example, describes the iconographic program of the Rothschild Canticles as “an extended drama acted out by the reader in a visionary language derived from Scripture and the liturgy.” 8 Louis Martz uses still more vivid images to sum up the methods of emblematic visualization central to a seventeenth-century poetics derived from medieval models: “Perhaps it is enough to say that the central meditative action consists of an interior drama, in which a man projects a self upon a mental stage, and there comes to understand that self in the light of a divine presence.” 9
Paul Zumthor turns to the same dramatic metaphor to mourn the inaccessibility of medieval texts to modern readers: “Now, in our case quite obviously it is a matter of dialogue with ancient texts that are masked walk-on character parts in a drama at which we are no longer spectators, and carriers of a discourse that we no longer hear.” 10 Examples could be multiplied.11 But although the dramatic qualities of nondramatic literature in the Middle Ages have been widely noticed, and have been honored in metaphor, my aim in this study is to approach the conjunction of reading and performance in more literal terms. Not only loosely dramatic, but also actual theatrical practices informed the habits of private meditational reading in the period. Through a variety of allusions to the conditions of performance, certain late-medieval devotional texts call upon their readers to imagine public spectacles as a way of creating individual ones. Such medieval texts pose basic questions about how we might understand an alliance between the read and the performed, when the connection will never be enacted in a literal sense. How does it matter that a work is marked as theatrical, if it is never to be experienced in a theater, or in any manner more spectacular than a private reading? If a bookish text is never to be staged, what is gained by calling it a play?
These are problems fundamental to the genre of closet drama, though we do not often use that term to describe any medieval text.12 The Senecan version of the unperformed play is generally understood to re-emerge in the vernacular only in the seventeenth century, and to fl ourish especially in the nineteenth.13 Assuredly, late-medieval closet dramas do not follow the Senecan pattern; they are neither highly rhetorical nor marked by a lack of “dramatic” action. Rather than employing literate tropes to ennoble the text of a play, these works invoke performed spectacles to animate the lifeless word. But even though the generic term may be unfamiliar when applied to medieval literature, the performative dynamics of a dramatic literature designed for “closet” consumption were familiar to a fi fteenth-century audience, and something is to be gained by naming them directly. The title of drama enforces a useful recognition of the generic slippage between what is read and what is enacted, a slippage that does not reduce the achievements of unperformed plays, but rather suggests the new possibilities available to those poems, privately read, that affi liate themselves with the stage.14
I will argue in the following chapters that imagining these texts as a variety of closet drama clarifi es both our understanding of the nature of theatrical performance, and our sense of the procedures involved in devotional reading. The connections I seek to trace between private reading and public performance in the fi fteenth century emerge most plainly in the format of one small and roughly made book: British Library MS Additional 37049.15 The British Library purchased the manuscript on 13 May 1905 from the bookseller L. M. Rosenthal, in Munich; beyond this, its provenance is unclear.
Linguistic and paleographical evidence suggests that the volume was produced in the north of England in the third quarter of the fi fteenth century, and it contains fairly certain indications of Carthusian ownership.17 Apart from these scant facts, nothing of the original context of the manuscript can be known for certain. Although its origins are obscure, however, the book is signifi cant as a rich artifact of medieval literary culture. Additional 37049 assembles Middle English prose and verse of a wide variety—some pieces elsewhere unattested, but others that can be counted among the most popular late-medieval devotional and didactic works.18 Moreover, almost every one of these texts is accompanied by abundant colored drawings—rough images that do not so much ornament the text, as help to generate its meaning. It is a primary argument of this study that the complex format of this book, particularly its systematic combination of words and pictures, testifi es with unusual clarity to the performative culture of latemedieval devotional reading.
It has not always been easy to see the ways in which this bibliographic artifact engages its reader in devotional performances. Often cited but little studied, Additional 37049 has always been considered in ancillary terms. Francis Wormald long ago studied some of the manuscript’s pictures, but only in order to discover “connections between them and more important works of art or artistic expression.” 19 Recognizing the importance of the manuscript’s images on their own, James Hogg published a volume that reproduces most of the illustrated pages of the manuscript, but without interpretation.20 The product of informal rather than liturgical devotion, these drawings are too coarse even to be included in standard catalogues of manuscript illumination.21 If the pictures are drawn “in the crudest style,” however, as the British Library catalogue has it, it would be wrong to think them therefore uninteresting or unimportant to the history of art.22 Their sheer number, and the enormous illustrative project that they represent, testify to the signifi cance of devotional images in late-medieval private piety.23
The miscellany is more familiar to scholars of Middle English, who have long acknowledged the value of its literary records. Yet the manu script’s texts have not entirely escaped the disdain heaped upon its images, for where other versions exist, these pieces can seem by comparison disappointingly fragmentary and corrupt. Critical editions have tended to rely on testimony from other sources, obscuring the contributions this manuscript can make to our understanding of the texts it contains.24 And although the importance of the collection is acknowledged en passant in many studies, literary historians have not considered the signifi cance of the book’s textual juxtapositions, or the shape of the miscellaneous collection as a whole.25 The book has been used almost exclusively for incidental and illustrative purposes, never studied in its own right or in its entirety.
If neither the texts nor the drawings collected in this manuscript have received the individual attention they merit, the intersection of word and picture has received less attention still. No one has fully accounted for the striking fact that every reader notices: these texts depend so heavily on the images that accompany them—the two are so closely linked in the structure of the page—that neither can be said to exist in fullness of meaning outside of this particular context. Taking account of these close connections between the visual and the verbal, Karl Josef Höltgen has pointed to later developments in emblematics as the progeny of this illustrated book.26 But this miscellany does not anticipate the emblem-book so much as it illuminates contemporary ways of reading, and its combinations of media, taken together, are most valuable for what they reveal about devotional culture in the fi fteenth century. The close connections frequently adduced between late-medieval art and literature manifest themselves materially in an object like this, and as a result the book allows for an investigation of the commonplace in concrete terms.27
Because this codex so squarely addresses the intersection of the visual and the verbal, offering the ideational conjunction of text and image through the physical juxtaposition of word and picture, it has largely fallen through the cracks that separate modern academic disciplines. But the interdisciplinary format of this book, so thoroughly miscellaneous in structure as well as in content, in fact presents its most compelling questions. Not only varieties of text, but varieties of representation, make it up. The miscellaneous format of Additional 37049 suggests ways in which the whole book might be signifi cantly greater than the sum of its parts.28 The insistent combination of words and pictures here, a form that W. J. T. Mitchell has suggestively called “imagetext,” picks up most explicitly the book’s connection to performative modes.29 The combination of the visual and the verbal that is central to this manuscript’s art mimics the quintessential experience of theater-goers, who are equally audience and spectators.
The similarity is structural, for of all literary forms, only performed drama and illustrated books join the visual with the verbal so explicitly, materially, and indissolubly.30 Although Additional 37049 is singular in its heavy use of this sort of imagetext, similar imbrications of the two representational modes in other contexts suggest more wide- ranging connections between reading and performance. The two fi fteenth- century German “spiritual encyclopedias” discussed by F. Saxl might be considered the nearest analogues, though with signifi cant differences of language, style, and substance.31 They are mainly Latin books, but they offer their monastic readers equally copious compendia of both devotional and scientifi c ideas, illustrated with diagrams as well as iconic meditative images—some of the very ones also found in Additional 37049.32 Some late-medieval vernacular books more clearly develop the dynamics of performance brought by images into written texts, as Kathryn Starkey has noted in such secular German manuscripts as the Sachsenspiegel, Thomasin von Zerclaere’s Der Welche Gast, and especially Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Willehalm. 33 Closer to home, a vernacular book like Bodleian MS Douce 104, an illustrated copy of Piers Plowman, shows the ways in which even simple illustrations can affect our readings of English devotional poems, as fi gures in the margins indicate how a reader might privately voice—that is, perform—its words.34
None of these manuscript analogues operates in precisely the same way as this Carthusian miscellany; they represent different devotional cultures, or indeed secular ones, and are in general much less heavily illustrated. Still, all of them together help to sketch broadly a fi fteenth-century reading culture that depends upon the mixing of media, upon interactive methods of apprehending both pictures and words, and upon the performative effects of such imagetexts. Additional 37049 is unusual among late-medieval vernacular books in its comprehensive and deliberate use of mixed media, but the text-image combinations that are so pervasive here also help to indicate the fundamental role of performance in devotional reading generally. Even books with fewer or no pictures can be imagined to offer reading material for private performance—a connection more suggestive for late-medieval England than any similarity the manuscript might show to other illustrated volumes. The imagetexts in this manuscript encourage readers of the words (modern, as well as medieval) to think of their private reading as a performance, and they can teach us mechanisms for reading other devotional books of the period, even when there are no images on the page. Most broadly, these illustrated texts clarify the important relationship between meditative devotional literature and drama itself. Although scholars of medieval drama have noted the ways in which certain plays draw on meditative traditions, fewer have considered the dependence of meditative reading on modes of performance.35 Even though they did not form part of staged performances, multitudes of Middle English devotional lyrics, and many Middle English pedagogical dialogues, draw from the dynamics of plays.
Likewise, the kinds of connections that link Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ and the Book of Margery Kempe to the theater helped shape both these devotional books and medieval readers’ responses to them.36 The imagetexts in Additional 37049 show that some medieval literature— whether lyrics, dialogues, play texts, or narrative meditations—was meant to be privately enacted in the experience of reading. Critics have long recognized the kinship between the visual and verbal arts in the medieval period, and have traced out the connections between images and drama in both iconographic and formal terms. Following the lead of Emile Mâle, some scholars have derived artistic imagery from mystery plays, imagining that the memory of dramatic spectacles infl uenced artists’ iconographic choices.37
Such studies use the drama as explanatory background for visual production of all kinds, quoting cycle plays when they pertain to and can help explain stained glass and monumental sculpture, as well as manuscript illumination. In a corollary development, art has been used as evidence of dramatic practice—a complex kind of evidence, to be sure, but nonetheless useful.38 Arguments have equally well been made in the other direction, however, claiming that the substance of the plays draws on artistic topoi and conventions.39 According to this reasoning, visual culture forms a background for medieval authors composing plays and designing tableaux that will be realized as visual spectacles on the stage. Recent research has provided increased local specifi city for such arguments, recognizing that in its iconography (as in so much else) the English dramatic tradition is far from monolithic.40 Connections between this Carthusian miscellany and fi fteenth-century theatrical culture on similar iconographic grounds have not gone entirely unnoticed. Some studies have used the manuscript, and reproduced its images, to illustrate plays, contextualizing them in terms of general late-medieval devotional concerns.41
M. D. Anderson begins her study of connections between drama and church art, for example, by explaining the odd iconography of an angel in Lincoln Cathedral through reference to Additional 37049.42 Anderson cites the example only to argue for the importance of interdisciplinary thinking for solving iconographical puzzles; her book is otherwise unconcerned with manuscripts. But even though the connection between this manuscript and staged plays is anomalous in the context of the rest of Anderson’s study (and even incidental to it), the comparison is telling. Whichever way the infl uence worked in any particular case, the common dependence of both art forms on visual modes of communication argues for the general value of such iconographic comparison.43 It is not the general themes of the drama, which are widespread in art and in other kinds of late Middle English literature, that fi nd their strongest refl ection in this Carthusian miscellany. Nor is it even particular visual or verbal echoes that might be used to localize a manuscript or a play geographically or temporally. Instead, it is the textual and visual structures of the drama, and the way it achieves aesthetic and devotional purposes.
The combination of dialogue and vision, so clearly reminiscent of dramatic situations, not only presents texts visually but makes possible their animation in a viewer’s mind. I do not imagine that the experience of reading Additional 37049 depends upon the memory of any specifi c dramatic experience, any more than I would argue that a play was produced following its particular scripts. Instead, the repeated reading of an imagetext like this replicates the experience of dramatic spectacle, the performance of a text before a group in the combined media of sight and sound. This manuscript is not merely a conveniently illustrated representative of late-medieval devotion, in all its visual aspects—although that is the way it has generally been treated by modern readers. Its model particularity is more revealing than its thematic connections to other artifacts of medieval devotion, and its interest in the formal capacities of the drama more revealing than its iconographic similarities to specifi c plays. It seeks to reproduce the experiential effects of dramatic performance, not just the spiritual and moral message. Long before Mâle, some medieval theatrical discourses linked painting with theater in just these experiential terms. Most famously, the antitheatrical, potentially Lollard Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge uses the metaphor of a play as a “living book” to discuss both the possibilities and the hazards of dramatic representation.44 The author fi rst rehearses arguments in favor of the theater, arguments that he considers specious. As “thei” say: “Also sithen it is leveful to han þe myraclis of God peyntid, why is not as wel leveful to han þe myraclis of God played, sithen men mowen bettere redden the wille of God and his marvelous werkis in the pleyinge of hem than in the peintinge?
And betere they ben holden in mennes minde and oftere reherside by the pleyinge of hem than be the peintinge, for þis is a deed bok, þe toþer a quick.” 45 The analogy here between theater and visual art seeks to recuperate what might seem dangerous on the stage, since both are merely means to increase the viewer’s exposure to, and memorial retention of, “the wille of God and his marvelous werkis.” Although the analogy does not connect drama with illustrated books precisely, but rather with any kind of painting, the particular correlation is more than implicit in the description of that painting as a “deed bok.”
The author of the Tretise, however, quickly counters the apologetic arguments he has summarized by reviewing instead what “we seyn”: “We seyn that peinture, yif it be verry withoute minging of lesingis and not to curious, to myche fedinge mennis wittis, and not occasion of maumetrie to the puple, they ben but as nakyd lettris to a clerk to ridden the treuthe. Bot so ben not miracles pleyinge that ben made more to deliten men bodily than to ben bokis to lewid men. And therefore yif they ben quike bookis, they ben quicke bookis to shrewidnesse more than to goodnesse.” 46 The author refl ects contemporary iconoclastic controversies, worrying about the potential of even painting itself for “lesingis” and “maumetrie,” but he saves his ammunition for dramatic representation; paintings might sometimes serve as letters wherein the truth can be read, but plays never resemble them in that.47 If plays are imagined to be “books” just as paintings are, they operate in the service of “shrewidnesse” and should be avoided. But even in this critique, the Tretise nonetheless opens a small positive space for one kind of constructive play in the implied category of “quicke bookis to goodnesse”—even while denying its existence.48 This antitheatrical author cannot really imagine such a play, or perhaps even such a “quicke” book, but an illustrated manuscript like Additional 37049, which brings together didactic paintings and plays in the performative act of devotional reading, would seem to be an ideal representative of this phantom class. The connections between books and enacted spectacles described in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleying are encapsulated in the complex associations of the word pageant in the late Middle Ages.
The Middle English word has long been known to encompass meanings beyond what its modern equivalent suggests; although the term most often meant “a play in a mystery play cycle,” or “a wheeled moveable platform on which a mystery play is presented,” its range of meaning extended beyond the vocabulary of medieval drama. Royal welcomes and civic processions often included pageantry called by that name.49 Furthermore, in the fi fteenth century the word seems to have represented either the verbal or the visual aspects of the drama alone, as well as their conjunction in a public show, for it is recorded by the Middle English Dictionary in the senses both of “a story, tale” and of “an ornamental hanging in a room.” 50 More recently, A. S. G. Edwards has argued for expansion of the latter defi nition to include any picture or illustration, whether executed in tapestry or other medium.51 All of Edwards’s examples of this broader usage come from the arena of manuscript painting in particular, suggesting that such illuminations, at least, as well as tapestries and mystery plays, were sometimes thought of as “pagents.” 52
The most extreme example (although omitted in Edwards’s account) might be British Library MS Cotton Julius E.iv, art. 6, a manuscript composed entirely of what it explicitly calls “pagents”: nearly full-page drawings that recount the life of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in pictorial narrative, each drawing combined with a caption of several lines that explains the progress of events.53 As the rubrics explain, each pageant is conceived as part of a narrative unfolding “in processe of tyme” but also as a spectacle that works along visual lines: “In this pagent is pleynly shewed . . .” 54 That a simple word could encompass stories and imagery, forms both animated and static, implies a link between both kinds of pageantry in the texts and images of this Carthusian miscellany. Etymological as well as lexicographical evidence enriches this complex of relations, for pageant shares a common derivation with page, both from Latin pagina. 55 In fact, some forms of the Middle English word pagine are indistinguishable from forms of pagent: pagent, pageant, and pageaunte all mean “a page or leaf of a book.” 56 Conversely, page sometimes means “a scene in a mystery play.” 57 The morphological congruence here must suggest a semantic overlap in fi fteenth-century usage of these words, which so neatly combine the pageantry of mystery plays, spectacular illuminations, and the pages of manuscript books.
Like the theories of drama repeated in the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, the history of this word brings together words and pictures, paintings and plays, books and performances, in a conjunction familiar to late-medieval audiences of all kinds. The pages of Additional 37049, though they do not speak explicitly of “pagents,” offer devotional pageantry in that fuller sense that encompasses imagery both static and performed, linking dramatic performance with what we might call bibliographic performance in verbal and visual artistic constructions.58 In reading the manuscript’s combination of text and image through the lens of pageantry and performance, I am arguing implicitly for a certain unity in the miscellany.59 I do not mean, however, to fl atten the differences among the various texts and images it presents. Although most of the items in the manuscript concern the primary subjects of late-medieval affective piety—the passion of Christ, human sin and redemption, the Virgin and the saints—the contents of Additional 37049 are not unifi ed by theme. Nor can any coherent principle explain the sequence of items. The manuscript opens with a mappa mundi and universal histories that could be considered to inaugurate an encyclopedic project, but as the compilation proceeds it comes to resemble more closely a diverse fl orilegium, in which neither comprehensive scope nor rational ordering is the primary goal.60 Still, in spite of its lack of evident design, there are grounds for considering this miscellany as an entirety. In spite of occasional intrusions by several hands, the bulk of Additional 37049 seems to have been written by the same scribe and illustrated by the same artist.61 The physical connections between word and picture are such that it is even probable that artist and scribe were one.62 An identical watermark links all the manuscript’s paper leaves, suggesting that even if the leaves were not always bound in their current order, they were written and ornamented at the same time.63 With such material evidence to suggest one idea at work in the making of this book, it is surely right to consider the artistic achievement of the whole.
This is a medieval miscellany of extraordinary unity in its variety, a deeply heterogeneous book that seems to have been produced at once and to one devotional end. The intensely personal nature of this compilation suggests more than that the scribe and artist were the same. In a revealing confl ation of production and reception, it also suggests that the creator of the manuscript was at least one of its initial readers.64 Even if the miscellany was not created coherently, it was encountered by this reader (and many subsequent ones) as a singular object, and the reading experience establishes crucial relationships among its disparate parts. This is particularly true if, as I think we must imagine in this case, the typical late- medieval reader worked through the book more than once and with the care and intensity appropriate to devotional reading and seeing.65 Of course, the kind of scholarly attention I pay to this book does not attempt to mimic the experience of medieval reading, which would be impossible for a modern person educated in the culture of print to reclaim. But I hope that the kinds of sustained scrutiny that modern scholars can turn toward such medieval books can reveal, if not replicate, the kinds of literary and visionary attention paid by fi fteenthcentury readers.66 A miscellany is most meaningful, not because it was designed to work in a particular way, but simply because it does. 67 What unifi es this book most powerfully is not any intention of its maker, even though certain continuities are visible in his choices. Instead, the manuscript is unifi ed by the mode of reading it requires; the performative effects of its texts and images, more than anything else, link the disparate parts of this miscellaneous volume.
The nature of any reading experience is determined to a large degree by the identity of the reader, which leads to a fundamental question about this book: what medieval community are we to imagine using it? Most modern scholars have assumed that Additional 37049 was associated with a Carthusian monastery in the north of England, even though no one can confi dently identify the particular foundation.68 The reasons for locating Additional 37049 in a Carthusian setting are numerous, some textual and some visual. The visual evidence is compelling: numerous pictures of Carthusians illustrate the manuscript, always wearing their white habits with distinctive side-bands.69 To be sure, the miscellany also includes pictures of laypeople, indeterminate monastic fi gures, and even religious of other orders.70 But the Carthusians are by far the most numerous as a single group, and because their style of dress marks them in a specifi c way, they constitute the most conspicuous members of the manuscript’s population.
The textual evidence for a Carthusian connection is still more suggestive, for the manuscript includes a unique verse history of the origins of the Carthusian Order, “At þe begynyng of þe chartirhows god dyd schewe.” The case for internal composition and consumption here seems strong, especially since the poem refers approvingly to the hierarchy of asceticism by which the pope permitted monks of other (ostensibly lower) orders to enlist in the life of the charterhouse without breaking their original vows:71 þis holy ordir Carthusiens standes in grace of the court of Rome, For it grauntes al oþir ordirs lycence þider for to come Ordynatly for hele of saule and more perfeccioun To lyfe contemplatyfe lyfe and of þair maners correcioun.72
No texts in Additional 37049 point in such direct ways to other orders or to the lay population. In the absence of more defi nitive evidence (such as a colophon linking the manuscript to a particular charterhouse), we can be reasonably sure that Additional 37049 has its origin in the Carthusian Order. Although the miscellany cannot be tied to any specifi c community, its brand of performative reading clearly emerges from this particular monastic wilderness. It is important to consider in what ways this manuscript might refl ect its monastic milieu, for late-medieval English Carthusians boasted a distinctive literary culture that shaped the audiences and uses of their books. Monastic life in the charterhouse was ordered in a uniquely solitary manner, taking inspiration from Egyptian hermits as much as from Benedictine cenobites. Carthusian austerity extended even to the most social aspect of monastic religious life, for chartermonks performed liturgical celebrations as a community only rarely, and always according to their especially sober rite. Profound solitude and silence structured life in the Carthusian wilderness, but—particularly in fi fteenth-century England—neither was absolute. What might have proved isolating in fact produced a lively literary community, for the anchoritic monks directed their individual energies toward the making of books.
From the earliest days of the order, Carthusians dedicated themselves explicitly to “preaching with their hands”—that is, to copying manuscripts.73 Late-medieval Carthusians in England were no exception, translating and transcribing large numbers of the orthodox vernacular devotional texts that have interested Middle English scholars in recent years.74 The books of the solitary Carthusians ironically enabled a lively textual community, and this rich and infl uential readerly environment shaped the devotional performances of Additional 37049. The fundamental paradox of the charterhouse as a community of solitaries illuminates the complex relations between the categories of private and public in this miscellany, for these most “private” of fi fteenth-century encounters between people and books depended nonetheless upon social and communal practices.75 Recognizing charterhouse connections, however, does not clarify what it might mean for this manuscript to be Carthusian, or precisely how it might illuminate a culture of performative reading at large.
The miscellany’s exclusive praise of Carthusian spirituality and its abundant images of charter monks might most obviously suggest a monastic readership, as well as a monastic provenance. The inclusion of the clearly monastic “Of þe State of Religion,” and the plainly eremitic Desert of Religion—a poem about, if not certainly by or for, hermits—shows that the creator and readers of this manuscript were broadly concerned with the imaginative life of the cell.
The Carthusian Order was so popular in the fi fteenth century, however, that lay readers might almost as readily have sought out these monastic subjects. Alternatively, it is possible that Additional 37049 refl ects pastoral duties, either of the anchoritic monks toward novices or lay brethren, or of the Carthusians generally toward lay people external to the charterhouse.76 The rather basic level of the book’s meditational reading and its rudimentary instruction in the faith, especially when measured against the spiritual scales outlined in contemporary contemplative treatises, might argue for an unlearned readership.
The manuscript’s use of the vernacular alone, it has been claimed, could indicate that it was used with or by the laity.77 But although the manuscript’s devotional pageants clearly serve an instructive function, monks read in English, and they also occasionally took instruction of a very basic kind.78 The preponderance of structures such as scalae celi demonstrates that medieval piety was conceptually hierarchical and progressive, but contemplative treatises point also to the category of the “mixed life” between the active and the contemplative, a middle category “of such plasticity that almost all could regard themselves as sharing in its rather uncertain prestige.” 79 A Middle English treatise called A Ladder of Foure Ronges by the Which Men Mowe Wele Clyme to Heven, translated from Carthusian prior Guigo II’s Scala claustralium, emphasizes not the distinction but the interconnections among its four “rungs”: reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.
The translator, perhaps anticipating an audience wider than Carthusians alone, writes:80 “Thes foure degres be so bounde togedir, and ich of hem seuyth so togedere to other, that the fi rst as lesson & meditacion helpith litel or noute without tho that be folwyng as prayer & contemplacion. Also withoute the two former [men] wynne late the two latter.” 81 Additional 37049 contains many degrees of medieval spirituality “so bounde togedir” that it is impossible to distinguish them clearly. Yet in the very opacity of its provenance, this miscellany testifi es to the deep connections between reading in the monastic wilderness and wider trends in devotional literature outside the charterhouse walls.82 Although Additional 37049 is a personal and idiosyncratic Carthusian book, it bears a surprisingly strong relation to its fi fteenth-century English community, and though it shows close ties to the world outside the cell, the collection is marked nonetheless with a deep and indelible stamp of charterhouse spirituality. If the pages of Additional 37049 do not reveal precisely who its fi fteenth-century readers were, they do suggest something of how those readers imagined themselves, and how the format of the miscellaneous book served their private devotional performances. On fol. 67v, for example, a small Carthusian fi gure kneels below and behind a large image of Christ crucifi ed on the “tre of lyf” (pl. 1).
The monk prays in silence, while Christ speaks the Middle English lyric written on the left side of the page, verses derived from the O vos omnes theme of Lamentations 1:12:83 þou synful man þt by me gase a while to me turne þu þi face Behold & se in ilk a place how I am dyght Al to rent & al to schent Man for þi plyght This text calls upon its reader to perform certain actions—turn, behold, see—and also implies certain spiritual effects deriving from them, feelings of sorrow, responsibility, and guilt. The small monastic fi gure models the actions and embodies the consequent feelings. Such representations of Carthusian monks at prayer, scattered repeatedly throughout the margins of the manuscript, refl ect to its readers their own proper devotional posture. Whether the readerly identifi cation is concrete or metaphorical, whether the fi rst medieval reader was a monk himself or a lay person with an admiration for the cloistered life, the pictures stand for his prayerful activity.
The reader thus seeing himself in the book approaches his devotional reading with a heightened self-consciousness about his activity, both contemplation of what he is doing and careful consideration of how he is doing it. Like the owner-portraits commonly found in late-medieval art of all kinds, this image of a monk at prayer represents the viewer to himself, folding the subject of the gaze into the object of the gaze, and joining representation with practice. Part of the way in which this manuscript encourages devotional performances is by requiring its readers to imagine themselves repeatedly in the act. But what, precisely, is this act of performative reading? The readerly performances facilitated by Additional 37049 constitute Carthusian identity, refl ecting both Christian and monastic beliefs, but they also trouble that Carthusian identity, which in its austerity and solitude most obviously stands against any kind of common devotional pageantry. As Sarah Beckwith has argued, “Ritual does not so much assert a set of monolithic beliefs as construct a series of tensions.” 84 The rituals of reading that this manuscript stimulates work productively around the tensions between secular and religious life, between speeches and visions, and between the human realm and the divine. But instead of establishing (or contesting) the identity of a group through shared practice, as dramatic acts do, performative private reading shapes the individual identity of each reader in relationship with God. The devotional matter of these imagetexts is crucial to the performative dynamic I am describing; the imitation of Christ’s Passion is an activity that seeks, though it never fully manages, to break down distinctions between observing subject and divine object.85 In this counterintuitive paradigm, devotional performance becomes an individual and private activity that nonetheless draws upon communal and public ones, and this becomes the primary tension around which the performative reading of the book is constructed. To understand the fundamental relation here between individual reading and communal spectacle, we must consider the ways in which the miscellaneous manuscript engages the slippery category of performance.
In the most general terms, what does it mean to call this medieval book, or its solitary method of reading, “performative”?86 Modern performance theory, taking its origins from the lectures of J. L. Austin, collected in the posthumous How to Do Things with Words, began with a philosophical and linguistic consideration of how performative utterances differ from constative or descriptive ones.87 The language of legal contract, such as the “I do” of the marriage ceremony, not only mimics or describes reality, but actively and directly creates a new reality, every time it is felicitously uttered. Austin ultimately shows that all utterances have “illocutionary force,” and later theorists of performativity have sought to broaden its scope still further, investigating not only this particular aspect of language, but a wide variety of linguistic and spectacular practices that can be understood to enact social, cultural, and aesthetic meaning.88 Anthropologists and sociologists, for example, have taught us how social realities are constituted and contested by ritual and repetition.89 Building upon anthropological ideas, theoreticians of practice have explored “the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations”—Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus—that structures the practice of everyday life.90
Deconstructive theorists have emphasized the radical discontinuity between the performance and the meaning of any text, the iteration that defi nes a performance, and yet can never be precisely achieved.91 Gender studies have been particularly energized by the concept of the performative as “a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning,” as the work of Judith Butler, among others, can attest.92 Not least, the concept of “performance” in the visual arts has sparked ephemeral happenings in which the artist becomes the artwork, the distinction between creating subject and created object completely elided.93 The post-Austinian discourses of performance theory have been memorably characterized as a “carnivalesque echolalia of what might be described as extraordinarily productive crosspurposes.” 94 In all of the voluminous critical discussion—which would be impossible to summarize adequately here—one question that has remained particularly vexed is the relation between performative language in the Austinian sense and what might more casually be called “performance” itself.95
What does language that performs in a legal or contractual sense, for example, have to do with the performances of gender identity that interest Butler? And what does either of these have to do with the actual staging of dramatic literature?96 The texts and images in Additional 37049 evoke precisely these questions, and they suggest some answers as well—at least for the late-medieval devotional reader.97 The range of bibliographic performances in this miscellany encompasses visual and verbal performances both theoretical and concrete, and constructs the category of devotional performance in its broadest terms. The medieval vocabulary of performance offers new ways of understanding the particularities of late- medieval literary culture, and the continuities among the textual activities of composing, translating, copying, correcting, reading, imagining, and enacting. Although it does not map exactly onto modern usage, the history of the word itself begins to suggest the many ways in which we can understand the activity of “performing the text.”
Victor Turner based his understanding of ritual performance in part on the origins of perform in the Old French word parfournir, with its meanings of “fi nish, complete,” or “achieve, carry out.” 98 But precisely in the late Middle Ages, the meaning of Middle English performen was changing from these earliest senses to incorporate also something more like a modern usage—“play a musical instrument, act, sing.” (The still more modern senses of economic performance, “to be profi table,” or sexual performance, “to copulate or have sexual intercourse (esp. satisfactorily),” were also perhaps newly available.)99 The word moved from describing an activity that was entirely fi nished, or completely achieved, to one that emphasized an ongoing process. The complexity of the matter is revealed by Chaucer’s repeated use of the word in the devotional context of the Prioress’s Prologue: For noght oonly thy laude precious Parfourned is by men of dignitee, But by the mouth of children thy bountee Parfourned is, for on the brest soukynge Somtyme shewen they thyn heriynge. (VII.455–59) Later, in the tale, it is God who “performs” through the music of a child: O grete God, that parfournest thy laude By mouth of innocentz, lo, heere thy might! This gemme of chastite, this emeraude, And eek of martirdom the ruby bright, Ther he with throte ykorven lay upright, He Alma redemptoris gan to synge So loude that al the place gan to rynge. (VII.607–13) Although the Middle English Dictionary cites these lines to illustrate the defi nition: “to perfect (sb. or sth.), make perfect, make whole; dedicate (a house), consecrate,” The Oxford English Dictionary defi nes Chaucer’s usage here as: “To do, go through, or execute formally or solemnly (a duty, public function, ceremony, or rite; a piece of music, a play, etc.).” 100 God’s praise is perfected by dignifi ed men and the infant sucking on the breast, but is also surely executed by them as a solemn duty.
The performance of the Virgin’s praise not only by God, but also through the mouth of a “litel clergeoun” who is quite explicitly singing, makes the contiguities between such consecration and musical performance clear. Moreover, the Prioress links her own literary performance to the clergeoun’s song, comparing herself to a “child of twelf month oold, or lesse” (VII.484), and bringing her own (and Chaucer’s) poetic activity into the same multi-layered performative realm. Within this shifting complexity of usage, late-medieval authors sometimes explicitly saw themselves as “performing” their devotional books. By way of introduction, the Carthusian author of the Speculum Devotorum describes in apologetic tones the long genesis of his passion-meditation: “Gostly syster in Jhesu Cryste I trowe hyt be not yytt fro youre mynde that whenne we spake laste togyderys I behette yow a meditacyon of the Passyon of oure Lorde, the whyche promysse I have not putte fro my mynde but be diverse tymys by the grace of God I have parformyd hyt as I mygthte.” 101 Looking forward, rather than back toward an action completed, the author of the Orchard of Syon promises in his preface that he writes “in purpose to parforme this fruytefull and ghostly orcharde”: “Therfore nowe deuote sustren helpe me to prayers, for I lacke cunnynge; agaynste my greate feblenesse, strengthe me with youre pyte.
Also haue me recommended in your ghostly exercyse to our blessyd lady and salute her in my name with deuote aues, hauynge mynde somtyme on her fyue ioyes, and sometyme on her fyue sorowes, whiche she had in erthe. With this labour I charge you not, but as youre charyte styrteth you, with that vertu help me forthe, for hastely I go to labour in purpose to parforme this fruytefull and ghostly orcharde.” 102 He turns the standard modesty topos into a request for readerly engagement with his literary labors, a plea for formal prayers—the reader’s “ghostly exercyse”—that is inextricably bound up with the writing of his book. Only an active, pious interplay between readers and author, the parallel “labour” of both in charity, can accomplish and fulfi ll this text; the performance that had been in the Speculum Devotorum entirely the author’s becomes here, at least in part, also the reader’s.
Julian of Norwich alludes still more directly to the ways in which ongoing readerly performances can create devotional meaning when she concludes the long text of her Showings: “This boke is begonne by goddys gyfte and his grace, but it is nott yett performyd, as to my syght.” 103 Some have seen traces of oral performance in the language of Julian’s short text.104 For Julian herself, here in the long text, that sort of authorial performance is but a beginning. She is most interested in a “performance” of her book that is a completion of it after its creation, its total realization in its most comprehensive, abundant, and perfect form.
Both the initiation of the literary work and the complete achievement of it will require God’s intervention, but the ultimate “performance” of the book demands also, as Julian implies here, a particular kind of readerly activity.105 As Edmund Colledge and James Walsh understand this paradox, “The ‘performance’ of which she now writes is the continuous life-long expression of a Christian’s relationship with all the aspects of the person of Christ.” 106 Importantly, Julian imagines that this unending Christian performance is at least potentially effected—achieved and completed—through her reader’s continuing interaction with her devotional book. Returning to “þou synful man þt by me gase” with all of these contexts in mind, one can see the many resonances of the devotional performances encouraged by Additional 37049.
The identifi cation of subject and object, effected twice through the connection of the reader with the pictured Carthusian, and the empathy of both with Christ’s suffering, collapses the distinctions as performance art might be said to do. That these identifi cations are imperfect—that an unqualifi ed imitatio Christi is impossible—refl ects the contingency of any performance, and the distance of the copy from the original, or the happening from the script. Both text and image demand the reader’s active participation in the devotional exercise, just as Julian of Norwich looks toward future readerly activity to complete her book. But while these theoretical performances emerge from the process of considering the book, allusions to more concrete spectacles both reinforce and complicate the dynamics of performative reading here. In the devotional experience represented on fol. 67v, a kneeling Carthusian monk is pictured as the “audience” for a lyric utterance by the huge fi gure on the cross above him, and as the witness to his suffering. Even though it would seem to represent a private moment of monastic prayer, this lyric also points directly to the sights and sounds of the liturgy. In its vernacular imitation of the reproaches of Good Friday, the poem refers to liturgical performances that Carthusian monks would know well—though they would experience them in community relatively rarely.107 By contemplating these words of complaint spoken through an image on the page, the reader—whether monastic or lay—re-creates in solitude the liturgical celebrations that reenact and commemorate the events of Christ’s crucifi xion. More intriguing still, this meditative text, though it is presented here as a (liturgical) lyric, suggests also a familiar dramatic situation, a recognizable scene often realized on the stages of late-medieval England. In the spectacle of the liturgy, either celebrant or choir may speak Christ’s words, but no one hangs upon a cross; the ceremonial re-creation of the scene on Calvary occurs in language alone.
In the drama, however, similar words are spoken by an actor, “someone standing in” for Christ, just as, in the theology of redemption, Christ himself stands in the place of human sinners.108 The illustrated page represents that event, offering a pageantry that comprises both voiced words and the embodied fi gures who speak them. Moreover, the similarity between this lyric and the drama is more than casual, for these very English words are elsewhere incorporated into the Towneley cycle, as Christ’s speech from the cross.109 What was consumed in the most private of circumstances in this Carthusian miscellany was also spoken publicly from the platforms of a medieval stage. If, in the terms of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, we can imagine a religious play as a “quicke book,” we can just as easily imagine this “quicke book” as a play—indeed, some medieval reader seems to have done just that, for the lyric found its way from the manuscript page into the mouth of an actor.110 Because the lyric reproduced and illustrated here does actually “come to life” in the Towneley Resurrection pageant, Additional 37049 makes the familiar metaphor concrete. This correspondence between poem and play clarifi es the interconnections among various performative genres, for the silent reading of this imagetext approximates the effects of both liturgy and drama. The “sacramental theater” of late-medieval drama brings plays together with liturgical ritual in an experiential, rather than an evolutionary, mode.111 Additional 37049, too, connects liturgy and theater in a “sacramental” experience of private reading that depends upon more public, spectacular, forms.
The solitary reader, like the actor, “stands in” for divine speaker of these words, taking the parts of both audience and player in his private devotional performance. Literary scholarship has until now focused mostly on the meditative lyrics in the manuscript, and indeed the relation between the lyrics and their pictures is especially close.112 These short prayerful poems, consumed in the silence of the cell, confi rm our most familiar ideas about the private devotional reading of late-medieval monks, and the associated pictures provide a way of imagining their meditative substance. For all the interest of the short poems in this book, however, it is not exclusively a lyric collection. Like the famous lyrics in the miscellaneous British Library MS Harley 2253, the short poems in this Carthusian miscellany have overwhelmed its other contents, ultimately misrepresenting the experience of reading the whole. When we ask what other genres are included in the volume, we can investigate how they all might be related through their common use of text and image as their mixed medium of representation, and through their reliance on performative modes of reading. The “Towneley lyric” is not an isolated example of the performative dynamic to be found in Additional 30749: the manuscript animates all of its contents, not only the lyrics that sometimes are recorded elsewhere in a dramatic context. As representations of performance—crowds, movement, noise, spectacle, and voices in dialogue—are folded into the codex, all the somatic experiences of a public performance are enabled in the imagination. The pages of the miscellany join effective, incantatory language with self-portraits that construct a readerly identity, spoken dialogues with visual spectacle, and pictorial representations of theatrical acts with play scripts.
The book represents and alludes to performances, but it also mimics in itself the modes and effects of performances, as the reader constructs a Christian identity through repeated actions that have actual felicitous salvifi c effects (at least in hope). The conjunction of genres in Additional 37049 exposes a distinctive material interaction between the lyric and the dramatic. Others have recognized that the lyric and the drama are affi liated in thematic ways, particularly through such subjects as the complaints of Mary by the cross, but this manuscript provides a revealing site for an investigation of deeper kinds of experiential connection.113 The scene “Of þe seuen ages,” for example, which could be called a dialogue, demonstrates a kinship with contemporary morality plays—and also anticipates the “seven ages” of Jacques’ famous speech in As You Like It. This text stages the “lines” spoken by a man, an angel, and a fi end, offering its readers both speeches and speakers, combining literary art with visual spectacle, as a play does in performance. It has been briefl y noted that this text may have infl uenced the development of the drama, but it remains to account for its presence here, in a monastic manuscript meant for private contemplation. With such references to public spectacle outside the bounds of the codex, the texts and images enclosed in Additional 37049 bring a variety of devotional performances into the book, assembling works that allude to the stage but are meant for private reading. These “closet dramas,” by making performance the subject of private reading, also make performance the manner of private reading— since only that reading can respond to the performative elements in the text. The public, dramatic imagery in Additional 37049 is not anomalous, despite the interest the manuscript also demonstrates in private meditations.
The book carefully negotiates the distance between one mode and the other, bringing public pageantry into the privacy of its pages in the service of contemplative experience. This study investigates what such generic fl uidity may have meant for readers of the devotional texts in this manuscript, and explores how the book animates the devotional imagery that appears on its pages, staging private dramas for eremitic meditation. Though Additional 37049 engages the performative in a range of senses so wide that it might threaten to escape the bounds of any category, medieval or modern, all of its offerings refl ect that fundamental “consciousness of consciousness” that Richard Bauman has seen as constitutive.114 The repetition of reading and viewing that the devotional book calls for, and that the medieval reader undoubtedly experienced, constitutes the kind of “restored” or “twice-behaved” behavior of which (as Richard Schechner has shown) both ritual and aesthetic performances are made.115 The small Carthusian fi gures that fi ll the manuscript evince a heightened self- consciousness about the repeated activity of devotional reading that makes it, even apart from its theatrical subjects or its spiritual effects, a species of performance. The reader mirrored in the page is both performer and spectator, refl ecting the importance of someone looking, whether that person is the reader scrutinizing the book’s performances, or God watching the reader’s.
The image of Christ in the book “looks back,” for devotional performances in the cell always have an audience in the person of an omniscient, omnipresent, divine spectator. Through its representation of the reader looking at himself looking at the Christ he means to imitate, and the thorough-going confl ation of subject and object that results, this book “acts” on its reader, as surely as the reader acts on it. Here, in these self-portraits designed for self-viewing, the gap between artwork and viewer is questioned, even if never entirely erased. I will have more to say about these qualities of the performative in what follows, as Additional 37049 offers a concrete site for the exploration of the variety of devotional performances involved in late- medieval reading and seeing. Although spiritual collections such as this were most often read by one person, privately and silently, some depend upon performances extrinsic to them to shape that solitary reader’s experience. In its remarkable range, this manuscript can train us to understand the breadth of ways and contexts in which latemedieval readers encountered performative texts.
The fi fteenth-century reader of Additional 37049 may have encountered its texts and images in sequence, beginning at the start and reading meticulously through to the end. More likely, the medieval consumer of this devotional miscellany moved around and through it in unpredictable and varied ways, dwelling fi rst upon one imagetext, backtracking to another, fi nally jumping ahead, omitting some, often repeating one or more. I, too, will treat the manuscript as a diverse fl orilegium rather than as a cohesive sequence, analyzing its contents according to their performative mechanisms rather than their physical place in the codex. Although its purposes are didactic, the book should not be understood to advance a progressive moral education as it is read in sequence from start to fi nish.116 Rather, the miscellany groups widely disparate texts and images that nonetheless participate in a cohesive project, so that in spite of their differences they collectively train the reader in performative methods of devotional reading. Understanding the book in this way can reveal how radically different kinds of texts nonetheless participate jointly in the dynamics of readerly performance. I will begin my investigation of devotional performance in this miscellany by examining the monastic order that most likely both produced and used it, asking how the book’s Carthusian context matters for the performative reading it encourages. The Carthusian Order has been characterized from its origins by a powerful theological and practical commitment to solitude, a commitment that undergirds every aspect of the monks’ spiritual life. But in the late Middle Ages, especially, the Carthusian celebration of solitude acknowledged also the necessity of human communities—communities both within and without the bounds of the charterhouse.
This oscillation between the most private of eremitic devotions and a demonstrated engagement with more public, pastoral concerns is a hallmark of late-medieval Carthusian piety, and it fi nds refl ection both in the verbal and in the visual arts. The distinctive symbiosis between public and private devotional experience in Carthusian life mirrors the dynamics of readerly performances, for an illustrated book like Additional 37049, which certainly formed an element of one reader’s private devotions, also drew upon aspects of monastic, and even lay, community for its methods and meaning. To understand the relations between reading and performance in this manuscript, we must ask what it means to remove display and spectacle from the common liturgical life of the monastery, and insert them into a book designed for solitary consumption. To what extent does the solitude of the cell foster devotional performances through books, and how can reading in the Carthusian wilderness promote the performance of reading among the laity? Chapter 2 seeks to answer these questions by examining the interaction between private and public experience in Carthusian devotion as it is preserved in books and art from the early days of the order through the late-medieval period.
Chapter 3 considers the construction of the private devotional reader though the most extended imagetext in Additional 37049. The Desert of Re- ligion, a long poem concerning life in the monastic wilderness, takes up explicitly the subject of “wilderness books.” Conceived as a necessary admixture of words and pictures, the Desert of Religion is one of very few poems in Middle English to have been invariably illustrated; all three known copies include a complex program of pictures, as well as captions and other sorts of ancillary texts. The implication that reading in the wilderness should have required illustration is particularly explanatory for the textual and pictorial dynamic of Additional 37049; this poem thus forms the center of the Carthusian manuscript both literally and metaphorically. A detailed comparison of variations among the three extant versions—found in British Library MSS Cotton Faustina B.VI (Pt. II) and Stowe 39, as well as Additional 37049—reveals the particular implications of its visual format for readers of the Carthusian miscellany. The Carthusian Desert celebrates eremitic existence through community, in a paradoxical visual and verbal profusion that signals the importance of public spectacles and readerly performance to wilderness books. This eremitic brand of performative reading has literary consequences for Additional 37049 that reach well beyond the texts that take monks as their subject. The manuscript contains an important collection of Middle English meditative lyrics that depend as obviously upon the combination of text and image.
These lyrics, which have received more scholarly attention than other parts of the codex, suggest a special connection between such meditative texts and the Carthusian Order. Chapter 4 evaluates the ways in which lyrical poems invoke both sights and sounds to create private devotional performances in the cell. Many of the lyrics are in some way associated with the legacy of Richard Rolle, from poems that replicate the sweetness of the famous hermit’s “luf-longing,” to excerpts from his Middle English epistle Ego Dormio. Both Passion-meditation and emblems of Marian worship are also prominent here, and this study investigates the ways in which these poems and pictures work, realizing on the manuscript page the imaginative recreation of Passion-events that was so often enjoined by other Middle English lyrics and prose meditations. Since the manuscript depicts not only the events of Christ’s crucifi xion, but also the Carthusian monks who contemplate them, these self-conscious pages can teach us about the performative mechanisms, as well as the meditative subjects, of such devotional reading. Even these most private meditations point to communal kinds of devotion, but the manuscript’s most telling imagetexts make the performative connections explicit. Chapter 5 considers the question of hermits in the world by examining the inclusion in the manuscript of a complex of popular prayers that use liturgical texts and images to enact piety. Within this vernacular manuscript, a private reader fi nds unexpected representations of both liturgical and para-liturgical performance that range from religious processions, to celebration of the sacraments, to singing of the hours. Prayers invoking the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary are especially important, for in them words become emblematic pictures, and Christ hangs on a cross fashioned from the h in his sacred monogram (ihs). Furthermore, these combinations of text and image do not merely represent, but also actually perform, acts of piety; tales of miracles testify to their power. Such devotions are meant for monastic consumption here, but they gesture outward from the confi nes of this book (and of the Carthusian monastery) toward scenes of civic pageantry, for example, the processions of the Holy Name sponsored by Bernardino of Siena.
These imagetexts both represent liturgical piety and also reproduce its performative mechanisms, making such celebrations possible even for a solitary devotional reader. Ultimately the devotional effect of these manuscript pages is based on the peculiar performative power with which the combination of text and image is invested. Finally, the performances intimated by the texts and images in Additional 37049 are not only liturgical. The insistent visual performance of words throughout the manuscript can also affect the way we understand literary genre in the Middle Ages, for the book and its images push private lyric utterance not only into a public, but even into a dramatic mode. Of course, medieval devotional lyrics often took the form of “dramatic” monologues, and some even found their way into play texts, but the combination here of lyric and dramatic texts and imageries within the context of a single book is of a persistent and revealing kind. The manuscript confi rms its interest in dramatic genres by including numerous dialogues that exist only here; it even transforms tracts that are not elsewhere dialogic into this “voiced” and animated form. Additional 37049 shows a pronounced interest in the dialogue as a genre, preserving approximately twelve, of which several are unique to its pages. Some of these dialogues derive from scholastic traditions, but some of them are more properly and unmistakably dramatic. Indeed, rhetorical debate and drama can be linked as allied “performance genres,” a connection that is reinforced in the pages of Additional 37049 by the speaking fi gures that model both debate and dialogue. Chapter 6 explores these dialogic transformations as the book joins vision and conversation in its explorations of the performance of devotional reading. Some of the texts and images in Additional 37049 gesture toward performative modes of reading through their suggestion of communal rather than individual literary experience, their inclusion of visual experience along with words as a part of the aesthetics of reading, and their involvement of the reader as a participant in, and even creator of, the textual situation. Other texts intimate performance through their representation of public pageantry, their replication of liturgical ritual, or their addition of dialogue to otherwise static scenes. But still more explicitly theatrical meditations also surface throughout this book. The imagetexts in this miscellany encourage private acts of devotion by mimicking public ones, complicating the intensely solitary nature of Carthusian meditation by their overt imitation of theatrical spectacle.
Chapter 7 explores the animation of the manuscript’s dramatic texts and images in the mind of its monastic reader. For if the Carthusian ties to the lyric are strong, Carthusian ties to the drama are unusually telling. In their surprising affi liations with plays, some monastic manuscripts give evidence of the range of performative uses to which they were put and demonstrate the fl uidity of the dramatic genre in the late Middle Ages. By placing Additional 37049 within a range of dramatic manuscripts designed for private consumption, this chapter examines the connections between solitary reading and the actual theatrical practices of the medieval stage. This is a study of a single codex.
But the manuscript that is my subject has its origins in what was probably the single most important milieu for the circulation of Middle English devotional writings in the fi fteenth century. Even though it is a one-off production without obvious ties to identifi able scribes, artists, or even readers, it illuminates a broad expanse of late-medieval literary history. Monastic reading and civic spectacle, individual meditation and communal worship, lyric and dramatic poetry are all contained within the covers of this compendious book of imagetexts. From the universal histories with which it opens to the eremitical admonitions with which it concludes, the manuscript addresses concerns fundamental to reading and imagining both within the cell and without. In this book, I begin to suggest ways in which the performative reading of this individual miscellany might refl ect devotional practices at large, and I hope that this study will encourage further refl ection on the connections between reading and performance in the period. For the late-medieval codex is a site where the meanings of words and images are performed, both publicly and privately, in the act of reading.
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