Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England

250 Pages·2016·1.31 MB·English

Marquette University
e-Publications@Marquette
Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects
Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England
Steven A. Hackbarth
Marquette University
Recommended Citation
Hackbarth, Steven A., "Apocalyptic Mentalities in Late-Medieval England" (2014).Dissertations (2009 -).Paper 411.
http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/411
APOCALYPTIC MENTALITIES IN LATE-MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

by

Steven A. Hackbarth

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School,
Marquette University,
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

December 2014
ABSTRACT
APOCALYPTIC MENTALITIES IN LATE-MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Steven A. Hackbarth
Marquette University, 2014

Apocalypticism, defined by expectation of an imminent End, assumes many
forms and proves influential in the second half of the Fourteenth Century in England.
Throughout my study, I demonstrate that a rich apocalyptic environment emerges in
works of the period, including those of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Pearl-poet.
In this period, apocalypticism has provided explanations for plague, narratives that make
evil more vivid, and arguments for urgent action. It gives contemporary phenomena
special meaning. My study is organized around conspicuous centers of meaning that
work reciprocally with the apocalyptic, simultaneously defining the End and defined by it.
First, I center on death, which as a theological “last thing” in itself necessarily shares a
sense of anxiety with the apocalypse. In connection with both death and apocalypse, fear
and hope are often invoked. And as forms of death are tied to the apocalyptic, this means
that data from the late-medieval world are used to tell a vivid story with implications for
the future of daily life. My second chapter deals with how the meaning of the
apocalyptic is interrelated with ecclesiastical authority. In an apocalyptic context,
authority delineates not only power but also the important matters of good and evil. In
this period in which notions of power and evil are intensely debated, apocalypticism
proves adaptable to different circumstances and different perspectives while still
remaining grounded in predictive ancient prophecy. Third, I maintain that the period’s
still-developing practices of confession (which claim to regulate all human activity) are
given a special urgency by the sense of impending doom. Then I close my study with an
examination of how writing embodies a curious tension with the apocalyptic in mind:
writing is confined to time, but it also must serve as a witness to eternal matters. The
apocalypse, while it argues for ephemerality of earthly things, requires a qualified
permanence of texts that spread its explanations and stories. Overall, I maintain that the
richness and variety of apocalyptic meaning in this period is best understood through the
apocalyptic’s interaction with key cultural terms, including mortality, authority,
confession, and textual permanence.
i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Steven A. Hackbarth

I am deeply appreciative of the support offered by Marquette University’s
Department of English and the Graduate School throughout my doctoral work. In
particular, I am grateful for the advice and guidance of my dissertation director, M.C.
Bodden, and of my committee members, John Curran and Angela Sorby. I also wish to
thank Tim William Machan for his years of service on the dissertation committee. And I
must express my gratitude to the organizers, advisers, and participants of Marquette’s
Dissertation Boot Camp, as that initiative by the Graduate School helped me immensely
throughout the writing stage of this dissertation.
I am also indebted to the many professors who have encouraged me in the years
prior to my doctoral work, including Lorna Wiedmann, Peter Fraser, Martin Moldenhauer,
Cathy Tonnacliff, Mary Jo Brown, John D. Niles, Michelle Bolduc, Kristin Pitt, and
Gabriel Rei-Doval. I am also grateful to Rebecca Parker Fedewa, David Weaver, and
Christian Williams, friends who have been deeply supportive since our undergraduate
years. I also thank my colleagues at Wisconsin Lutheran College for their support and
collegiality as I have taught there. Finally, special thanks go to my wife, Erin, for her
support throughout the majority of my graduate career and to my parents, Allen and Lyn,
for encouraging me to pursue all of my educational and professional goals.
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………..i

INTRODUCTION…………………………………...........................................................1

CHAPTER ONE: THE PRIMACY OF DEATH………………........................................7

CHAPTER TWO: PENULTIMATE THINGS”: ECCLESIASTICAL
AUTHORITY AT THE WORLD’S NEAR-END………………………………………47

CHAPTER THREE: CONFESSION AND THE END.........……………………………97

CHAPTER FOUR: THE END THROUGH TEXTUAL
PERMANENCE AND EPHEMERALITY………………………………...…………..154

BIBLIOGRAPHY..………………………………………………………..……………220
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INTRODUCTION

The notion of an apocalypse can put the fear of God and the fear of death in us.
And everyone fears death. In this project I set out to complicate the way by which we
understand apocalypticism in the later Middle Ages. Throughout this study I continue to
ask what the apocalypse—an unstable term—looks like. I focus on England in the later
fourteenth century, and my approach incorporates cultural and textual phenomena evident
in texts that we hold up as literary but whose apocalyptic meaning is still being debated.
These works include those of Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Pearl-poet. I use these
texts to draw out apocalyptic meaning that has been consistently overlooked in previous
scholarship, while I also connect their work with other discourses from which they draw
and which had deep effects on religious discourse in the period.
I structure my study around four rich centers of meaning—mortality, authority,
confession, and textual permanence. As I do this, I show how the apocalyptic affects and
is affected by these qualities. My study begins with death because, I maintain, death is a
necessary first cognitive step in understanding the apocalypse. And the logical move
from death to the apocalypse shows the apocalypse to approximate the semantic puzzle
“the death of death,” a term on which my chapter hinges. Thus, as my project is
concerned with how individuals in this period process the apocalypse, the primal
experience of death is an important reference point. In the next chapter, the very social
yet deeply religious implications of religious authority show another rich center of
apocalyptic meaning. Religious authority is widely contested in this period that
encounters the Papal Schism, interclerical conflict, and Wycliffism. One important
component of this developing apocalyptic thread in the later Middle Ages is how the
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necessary social exposure required by church work enables others to construe a person’s
claims to authority and patterns of behavior as apocalyptically evil. More broadly, this
chapter presents a story of how in the apocalyptic moment clergy, laity, and those with
claims in between use apocalyptic urgency to exercise their own kind of decisive
judgment on matters of truth, power, good, and evil.
As language harnesses tremendous power in those first two major centers of
meaning, so does it prove powerful in the final two that I examine, which are defined in
terms of communication. I will show that confession, an increasingly important and
contested religious practice in the late Middle Ages, is especially powerful as it shares
concerns with the apocalyptic. These concerns include exposure (which I considered in
the previous chapter) and also secrecy, vulnerability, and revelation. My final chapter
considers the implications for posterity communicated by these texts. Writing, within an
apocalyptic scheme, is limited to time, to the human activity worked out before the End.
But it allows individual writers to transcend death as well as social and geographic
separation from their audiences. Furthermore, texts may, given an apocalyptic imperative
to revise and supersede what has been written before, seek (and occasionally achieve) a
new sense of stability. The ambitious and deeply culturally engaged narrative projects of
Chaucer and Gower illustrate this most clearly. As Chaucer and Gower assume their
readers to be engaged with apocalyptic discourse, they invite readers textually to make
more sense of the End.
All of these centers of meaning prove especially rich and complicated in this
period. In order to tell this story of shifting and intensifying meaning, this study
necessarily draws on a wide range of works and approaches that have traced significant
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portions of the rich network of apocalyptic meaning available in the late Middle Ages.
This study will seek to avoid key missteps that have been cited in studies of
apocalypticism in recent decades. Among these missteps, those brought about by
overapplication of sociological models have proven most controversial and have been
countered. As Curtis Bostick rightly observes, various sociological approaches to late-
medieval apocalypticism have not appreciated fully the deep religious meaning
communicated from various factions within late-medieval Christianity.1
Bostick’s emphasis on differences of apocalyptic aims helps us begin to
understand the diverse forms that apocalypticism can take in the late Middle Ages. He
offers the terms “accommodative,” “reformist,” and “subversive” as categories for three
general orientations toward ecclesiastical power (15-16).2 Even so, apocalypticism is
observable for its interaction with various phenomena, and in some cases the orientations
posited by Bostick are less pronounced than in others. A many-faceted apocalypticism
emerges through the preparation instilled in all of us through death and mourning,
through Church practices that address death and other problems of meaning, through
confessional culture, and through the implications of texts for posterity. As I am so
deeply concerned with apocalyptic arguments and discourse, the seminal work of Stephen
O’Leary on apocalyptic rhetoric has proven valuable, even as his focus is on later cultural
phenomena. In my ultimate discussion of apocalyptic discourse I draw out those qualities
that make the apocalyptic possible: narrative shape, secrecy, readers’ permissiveness
and/or suppression, writerly caution, and the need for posterity endemic to all writing but
invoked uniquely in medieval Christian apocalypticism. And the wide-ranging

1 See Bostick’s analysis of “the sociological model” (3-4, 18).
2 I consider these terms especially in my second and third chapters, given these terms’ applicability to
ecclesiastical authority and to the authority-dependent practices related to confession.
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scholarship on medieval apocalypticism done by scholars including Bernard McGinn and
Richard Emmerson has furthermore been foundational to the field and necessary for this
study. The apocalypse deals with the sequence of events at the end of the age, including
the ascent of Antichrist, the Second Coming, and the New Earth. Beyond the scholars
already mentioned, scholars including Anne Hudson, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, and Fiona
Somerset have discussed the late fourteenth century as a moment of profound concern
with such matters.
Furthermore, a variety of recent textual work has helped to refine our
understanding of Wycliffism and to conceive of late-medieval England as more dynamic
than scholars ascribing all significant conflict to Wycliffites would have it. Kathryn
Kerby-Fulton reminds us that “Wycliffism by itself…, as has become increasingly
apparent, cannot sustain such a massive burden of literary, social, and political agency”
(Books under Suspicion 3). Considering John Hall’s recent concern with apocalypticism
that has social consequences, I will argue that the apocalyptic meaning evident in
literature from his period in fact cannot be divorced from the social changes of the
period.3
The necessary foundational scholarship to which I am indebted on death,
authority, confession, and on the possibilities of texts will emerge in the respective
chapters and is too numerous to cite here. However, it should be noted that much modern
scholarship on England in this period has drawn from the work of W. A. Pantin who

3 To be sure, his period gets short shrift in Hall’s study, as is apparent in his list of social “shifts” (204-5).
See in particular pages 49 and 200 in Hall for an indication of his emphasis on the consequential.
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fruitfully sketched the fourteenth century as “an age of continuous controversies” (123).4
Taking into account those scholars who have sketched out fascinating histories of the
transmission of apocalyptic traditions and that of those who emphasize the possibility of
original or creative uses of apocalyptic thought, I may be seen to negotiate a middle
ground between those fields of work. As I see my work, however, my approach is
necessarily eclectic and makes use of a wide variety of deeply productive studies. As it is
worth revisiting and considering the implications of apocalyptic rhetoric for power (those
implications first studied at length by Norman Cohn), I will also suggest that
apocalypticism can become a beast of its own will, feeding off a complex of already-
existing images. It may serve self-interest or some stated purpose, but it may (due to the
power of its images) also resist such interests.
In my study I focus on fields of meaning that lend themselves to the
intensification and the continuation of such tension in spite of what we see in hindsight as
disappointment, frustration, an End that never comes. As I approach the apocalypticism
evident in late-fourteenth-century texts, I center on the subjects of death (which never
comes), church authority (which is constantly chipped away at), and writing (which in
spite of its pretensions is always incomplete). In this way I locate the apocalyptic in
anticipation, in uncertainty, and often in miscommunication. Most importantly, this
multifaceted apocalyptic environment presents apocalyptic views that are difficult to
resist. Individuals have tremendous difficulty resisting the narrative patterns and social
dynamics suggested by the apocalyptic.

4 Pantin’s masterfully compressed yet sufficiently vivid treatment of controversy includes such topics as
apostolic poverty, ecclesiastical endowment, issues of the state’s and church’s powers, monasticism,
scholasticism, and anti-intellectualism (123-35).