10 - How Canon Lawyers Read the Bible: Hilton’s Scale II and the Wordes of Poule

Summary

Recent work on late medieval spirituality in England has focused on tracing out similarities between texts that have rarely been considered alongside one another because they have been thought of as belonging to different schools of thought or confessional affiliation. Michael Sargent has been among those advocating for more close-grained analysis of the varieties of late medieval English spirituality, and in this chapter I respond to an invitation toward comparison that he first issued in the form of a conference session in which four scholars engaged in conversation over texts they suggested to one another. I will trace what might seem a surprising sympathy in method and expository style between two works of spiritual advice, probably both composed in the late fourteenth century but circulated mainly in the fifteenth. Both were written in Middle English and aimed at lay as well as clerical readers, but perhaps especially at the burgeoning audience of spiritually ambitious lay persons attracted to ideas of reform. The first is the law scholar turned religious solitary turned Augustinian canon Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection Book 2, or Scale II, a work Sargent has recently edited; the second is the anonymous and probably lollard Wordes of Poule.

Both Scale II and the Wordes of Poule offer advice on how to attain a very difficult kind of spiritual detachment, a ‘reformation in feeling’ to use Hilton's phrase, that depends on moving beyond bodily sensation and emotional engagement to attain spiritual insight. Both texts insist repeatedly that the advanced student who progresses in virtue by this means and achieves detachment will attain to direct apprehension of the meaning of scripture. Neither text offers instruction in biblical interpretation, but both engage in extended exegesis of passages from Paul's letters as they instruct their readers in the attainment of virtue. Their methods of exposition bear striking similarities that are closely echoed in lollard writings, and might profitably be traced more broadly among spiritual writings of this period.

In analysing the similarities of method and overall purpose between these texts I do not by any means aim to suggest that Hilton was a covert lollard.