12 - Holy Fictions: Another Approach to the Middle English Mystics

Summary

THE module I taught on the Middle English mystics, called ‘Medieval Ways to God’, was usually taken by nine to ten students, a mix of second- and third-year undergraduates who attended ten lectures and ten optional seminars, could write a practice assessment midway through the module, and submitted for their assessment a portfolio essay at the end of the module. The texts, mostly in translation, were The Cloud of Unknowing and the Long Text of the Revelations of Julian of Norwich, now available in the admirable Spearing translations; Margery Kempe, translated by Windeatt; and Ogilvie-Thompson's edition of Hilton's Mixed Life. Sometimes, as an alternative to the Cloud, I used Discerning of Spirits from Blake's anthology of religious prose. In the past, though not in the module under discussion, I taught Rolle, using both the English epistles and the Wolters translation of the Incendium Amoris (Fire of Love). Recently I added Wycliffite material, in particular the debate between Archbishop Arundel and the Lollard William Thorpe, rather as R. S. Allen's contribution to this volume shows her to have done. The Scale I hardly attempted, not only because of the difficulty of checking translations against a Middle English text – though now, thankfully, we have Bestul's edition to work from – nor simply because of the size of the work, but also because I do not find it the best text to use in an introductory module. Hilton presupposes much greater familiarity with Christian doctrine and understandings than most students have. The other writers appear easier of access: they either present themselves, or can be seen, as appealing directly to personal experience.

I also tried to give students a taster of the difference between monastic and mendicant spiritualities, which, in one way or another, informed every text they were going to study. I did this, in part, by supplying the introduction to Sargent's edition of Love's Mirror. The Mirror has the very considerable bonus, for studies of late-medieval English spirituality, of drawing together most of the threads of any such course. It is the reworking of a text variously dated at the end of the thirteenth century and sometime in the fourteenth century, which was written in Latin by an anonymous Franciscan (the Pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes Vitae Christi).