Managing a Literate Laity: The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man in Fifteenth-Century England

204 Pages·2014·1.724 MB·English

by  Kristen Louise Aldebol

Managing a Literate Laity: The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man in Fifteenth-Century
England

By

KRISTEN LOUISE ALDEBOL
B.A. (Duke University) 2005

DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

English

in the

OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

of the

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

DAVIS

Approved:

Dr. Seeta Chaganti, Chair

Dr. Noah Guynn

Dr. Jeffrey Ruda

Committee in Charge

2014

i
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Constructing a Devotional Reader: Regulating Circulation and 25
Access to Grace
Chapter 2: Figuring the Body as Text: Instruction in Allegorical Reading 71
Chapter 3: The Senses: Gateways to Regulation 117
Chapter 4: Empty Bodies: Dangers of the Allegorical Text and Image 151
Bibliography 191
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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my committee, Seeta Chaganti, Noah Guynn, and Jeffrey
Ruda, for their patient guidance and encouragement throughout the development of this
project. They have supported me throughout the many incarnations of this project and
have suggested areas of inquiry that helped it grow from an idea into a dissertation. In
particular, I would like to thank Seeta Chaganti for sticking with me from this project’s
inception, through all of the office visits, e-mails, and moments of doubt. As my
dissertation advisor, she challenged what I thought were my limitations and displayed an
unwavering confidence that I would exceed my own expectations. I am so thankful for
the many ways she has helped me grow as a scholar. I would also like to thank Emily
Albu and Claire Waters for their support, intellectual rigor, and suggestions during and in
preparation for my qualifying examination.

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Abstract

The fifteenth-century English translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le
Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine opens with the author figure making a strange assertion
about the text: “In Frensch I haue set it so þat lewede mowe vnderstande it” [I have set it
in French so that ordinary people may understand it]. The cognitive dissonance created
by this phrase, written in English but claiming to be written in French, underscores the
vexed status of the vernacular in fifteenth-century England. Translating The Pilgrimage
of the Life of Man into English expanded the circulation of the text by making it available
to a group of “ordinary people” that included English monolinguals. This dissertation
argues that the two fifteenth-century English translations of the Pilgrimage, one
anonymous and one by John Lydgate, work to regulate this expanded audience because
of their unknown educational backgrounds. Many scholars read fifteenth-century concern
over the vernacular allowing lay access to religious ideas as tied to the Wycliffite heresy
and Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409. I argue, however, that this concern is
part of a conversation with a much wider scope: the debate over the use of religious
images in Christianity, under discussion as early as the letters of Pope Gregory the Great
(c. 600 CE). This debate questioned the use of images in Christianity, and many
arguments over these religious images pointed to the fact that images are empty inside
and can fail to signify; the Pilgrimage articulates these same concerns about its
allegorical form. The Pilgrimage offers its audience guidance in determining what the
allegory signifies, but this dissertation demonstrates how that guidance also regulates the
text’s audience. The Pilgrimage manages its lay audience by constructing an ideal reader,
denigrating the material body, substituting sensory information, and conflating allegorical
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bodies with the audience’s bodies. However, the text continually undermines its own
attempts to regulate its audience, drawing attention to both the flexibility of the
allegorical form and its inability to signify concretely. The way the Pilgrimage
manages—and fails to manage—the “lewede” audience to whom it claims to appeal
points to how visual and textual representations of religious topics undermine
ecclesiastical control. The failures of signification in the Pilgrimage’s texts and
manuscript illustrations demonstrate the interpretive power these representations offer
their audiences as well as their resistance to functioning as methods of ecclesiastical
control.
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Introduction

Though writing an extended case study on one of the lesser-known works of the
fifteenth-century—the English translations of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le Pèlerinage
de la vie Humaine—may seem like an arbitrary project, these translations can provide
insight into the connections between concerns about the use of the vernacular in religious
writing and concerns about the use of images in religious devotion. This dissertation will
argue that the Pilgrimage’s consistently expressed desire to control its literate lay
audience—as well as the methods by which it attempts to enact that control—
demonstrates that the debates over the use of the English vernacular in fifteenth-century
England are an outgrowth of the centuries-old debate about the proper use of images in
western Christianity.
I narrow my focus to fifteenth-century England for two reasons. First, though
Deguileville composed his Pèlerinage in 1331 and then completed a revision of it in 1355
(referred to as the first and second recension, respectively), it was not translated into
English until it appeared in an anonymous prose translation of the first recension, dated to
the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and in John Lydgate’s poetic translation of the
second recension, which Lydgate dates within the text as 1426.1 Second, the timing of
these English translations means that they moved from a language with a relatively
known audience—the learned nobility and clergy (Kibbee 37)—to a language with an
unknown audience. The unpredictability of this unknown audience, capable of reading

1 In her edition of the anonymous Middle English Pilgrimage, Avril Henry dates all the hands of the
surviving manuscripts of the anonymous prose Middle English translation to the fifteenth century, placing
most in the first half of the fifteenth century. See “Description of the Manuscripts”, The Pilgrimage of the
Lyfe of the Manhode. Vol. 1, Introduction and Text (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. xxxi-xlix.
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texts in the English vernacular, led to an environment in which Archbishop Arundel
published his Constitutions, part of a move to regulate the production and use of texts in
the English vernacular, particularly texts treating religious subjects. Ownership of texts
…making heavy use of scriptural quotation...was now forbidden
for those who failed to obtain due permission. More significant
still, the composition of any similar texts became, in principle,
directly illegal: given their use of biblical quotation and their
extensive treatment of an array of theological subjects, none of
these works [Pearl, The Scale of Perfection, Piers Plowman,
etc.] could have been written after the publication of the
Constitutions without contravening several of the articles therein.
(Watson 829-30)
These Constitutions responded to ways that the English vernacular had been used
subversively in religious matters: in the Wycliffite movement and in secular matters, in
the Rising of 1381 (Breen 174). Arundel’s Constitutions had appeared by 1409, and so
both English translations of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage were published in an environment
where the very act of translating this religious allegory into English was potentially
suspect. I suggest that both translations demonstrate an awareness of how appearing in
the English vernacular has opened the text up for misuse from its unknown lay audiences.
What, then, might motivate two different translators to translate the Pilgrimage
from its French original into the English vernacular under the potentially perilous
conditions created by the Constitutions? Nicole Rice has noted that some prefaces to
Middle English texts on religious subjects address
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a wid[e] group of lay readers who “al day askin how þei schul
loue God, and in what maner þei schul liue to his plesaunce for
his endless goodnes.” In response to this perceived demand, each
of the guides proposes techniques for transforming lay existence
into…a dedicated religious life in which the reading subject
might “serve” and “love” God without undermining priestly
intellectual, pastoral, and penitential power. (Rice x)
Rice’s estimation grants these lay readers a nicely orthodox view in which they actively
desire not to subvert any “priestly intellectual, pastoral, and penitential power,” but the
Pilgrimage has no such confidence in its lay audience.
In spite of differences between the versions, the two translations (representing
different styles and translating different versions of Deguileville’s Pèlerinage) do in fact
translate the same story. For this reason, I will refer to both versions, the anonymous
prose translation titled Þe Pilgrimage of þe Lyfe of þe Manhode and John Lydgate’s
poetic translation titled The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, collectively as the Pilgrimage.
When details are unique to one of these versions, I will indicate the version to which I
refer. A brief overview of the story of the Pilgrimage will help orient the specific
portions of the text to which I turn in the following chapters. The Pilgrimage opens with
a figure asking for attention as he tells of a dream he had. In this dream he saw the
Heavenly Jerusalem, enclosed by a wall, and he saw many figures trying to enter the city
through various means. Upon waking from the dream, the speaker decides to go on a
pilgrimage to try to reach the city he saw. Now a pilgrim, the figure immediately
encounters Grace Dieu, who shows him through her house, introduces him to the
sacraments, and prepares him for his journey. The pilgrim departs Grace’s house and
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begins his journey towards the Heavenly Jerusalem; on the way he is beset by many vices
and frequently rescued by Grace. After surviving the vices, the pilgrim enters the Ship of
Religion, chooses an order, and is afflicted with Old Age. As Death stands over him with
scythe ready to strike, the pilgrim awakens to the bells of Matins, safe in his monastic
cell.
When I speak of the audience of the Pilgrimage, I refer to anyone able to interact
with the manuscripts of the Pilgrimage translated and circulating in England in the early
fifteenth century. This audience includes those learned in Latin, such as the clergy, as
well as those learned in French, such as the nobility, but my primary focus is on the
portions of the Pilgrimage’s audience that was relatively unknowable: the monolingual
literate laity. The Pilgrimage itself articulates the audience it imagines as “lewede” and
identifies the unlearned audience as its reason for its composition in the vernacular: “so
þat lewed mowe vnderstande it” (Henry Vol. 1 1, l. 13); this explicit attention to its
unlearned audience invites further examination of how the Pilgrimage interacts with and
instructs that audience. In his historical overview of the use of the French language in
England throughout the medieval period, Douglas A. Kibbee notes an increased
translation of French devotional texts into the English vernacular by clergy members like
Robert Mannyng, a Gilbertine canon, and Dan Michael, a monk (Kibbee 37). This
increased production of English devotional texts seems to cater to a new population of
clergy in light of Kibbee’s other observation about the effect of the drastic population
reduction caused by the plagues: “[i]n the Church, the plague depleted the educated
population of the monasteries and convents, opening the door to poorer, less well-
educated English monolinguals” (Kibbee 59). Of course, even if the increased production
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