7 - Some Codicological Observations on Manuscripts of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection

Summary

When Linne Mooney and I studied Latin paleography and codicology with Fr. Boyle in the Pontifical Institute of Mediaval Studies in Toronto (in the same class, although Linne is younger than I), Malcolm Parkes's revolutionary study of ‘The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book’ had not yet been published. Particularly remarkable about this article was Parkes's focus of attention on the change in mentalité in the makers and users of late medieval books that manifested itself especially in scholastic forms of compiling, ordering and accessing of materials. This article, and further studies by Parkes and a growing list of other scholars – including, of course, Linne Mooney – have established the examination of the codicological aspects of manuscripts of late medieval literary works as an indispensable source of information about the making and circulation of texts, complementary to the evidence of textual affiliation and patterns of provenance, patronage, ownership and gift. My purpose here is to draw out some of the textual critical implications of codicological aspects of the manuscripts of Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection.

Hilton was probably born in the Huntingdonshire village of Hilton in the early 1340s, and began to write his Latin and English works of spiritual advice as a secular cleric attached to the consistory court of Ely, which met in Cambridge, when he was some thirty years old. The Scale was written in two parts: Scale I, directed to a woman enclosed as an anchoress, was probably begun at the same time as the Latin letter De Imagine peccati and the English letter On Mixed Life, which was written to guide a man with lands, children and tenants, who wished to lead a life of contemplation without evading his secular obligations. Scale I and the Mixed Life begin with similar taxonomic discussions of the parts of the active and contemplative lives; the Scale proceeds to deal with the eradication of the image of sin in the soul, particularly in a long section on the seven deadly sins. Written a decade or so later, Scale II opens with a response to his reader's request for a further explanation of the idea of reformation of the image of God in the soul. It explains the theology of justification according to the reasoning of Anselm of Canterbury's Cur Deus homo and sacramental theology – reformation in faith – and proceeds in the latter half of the work to describe a further reformation in faith and in feeling – an affective theology of contemplation.