In her conclusion, Louise Campion notes that “the household represented far more than a simple and convenient metaphor” (119). This claim is amply demonstrated through the four close readings that make up the body of her monograph, which track the variety of ways in which domestic imagery is integrated into fifteenth-century English devotional literature. Reading her sources against the backdrop of a growing interest in the household as a private sphere and a space for consumer display, Campion contextualizes these images and attends to how different reading audiences—from monastic and enclosed to middle-class and urban—plausibly would have responded to images that emphasize domestic life and its comforts.
Cushions, Kitchens and Christ adds to a growing body of work on materiality in medieval Christian devotion; among others, see, for example, Sara Ritchey's Holy Matter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014) and Caroline Walker Bynum's Christian Materiality (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2011). By focusing not simply on materiality but on domestic materiality, however, Campion calls attention to a set of metaphors that are often assumed to have appealed exclusively to women, and which are, perhaps in consequence, overlooked. Using four fifteenth-century English devotional texts, Campion explores the relationship between the households imagined in this literature and the literal households inhabited (or, in some cases, abandoned) by their readers. Where monastic readers may be invited to feel a dissonance between the sumptuous domestic interior a text describes and their own living situations, or to recall a homelife that they have abandoned, aristocratic and wealthy urban audiences may identify the imagined household of the text with their own homes and thus find ways of spiritualizing their domestic lives. Drawing from Nicole Rice's conception of “spiritual poverty,” Campion argues that wealthy readers could have used these images to reinterpret their own luxurious lives as internally consistent with the poverty called for in Christian doctrine. Her approach yields a deeply nuanced account of how metaphors that contemporary readers may pass over as mundane may in fact have engaged the medieval reader's imagination in spiritually productive ways.
Campion's introduction lays out the historical and cultural context for her study. Describing how the private domestic sphere received increased attention in fifteenth-century England, it focuses on five areas of change: “changes to household design; a growing concern for privacy; a burgeoning market of goods that could be used to adorn the domestic sphere; . . . a rapidly expanding urban, mercantile culture; and the increasing overlap between devotional practice and domestic space” (4). The introduction convincingly argues for the cultural shift regarding the household in later medieval England that will be crucial for her subsequent chapters.
Each chapter focuses on a single text that shows a particular facet of how domestic images were spiritually useful in devotional literature. Chapter 1 concerns The Doctrine of the Hert, a translation of the thirteenth-century De doctrina cordis, which draws heavily on imagery of household chores and of the kitchen. The translation, Campion argues, largely strips the domestic images in the Latin version of their Scriptural explanations, rendering it less clearly didactic and bringing the “domestic resonances of the allegory . . . into far sharper relief” (27). For example, readers are invited to compare the spiritual “kitchen” in which Christ's Eucharistic body is flayed and served to their own kitchens, making this image at once unsettlingly vivid and oddly quotidian. Chapter 2 takes up the Middle English translation of Mechthild of Hackeborn's Liber Specialis Gratiae, The Booke of Gostlye Grace, to explore the “household” of the Sacred Heart. Mechthild's domestic images are strongly imbued with a courtly vocabulary and tend toward unapologetic luxury; their tone is joyful and celebratory rather than didactic. Chapter 3, on the English reception of Bridget of Sweden's Liber Celestis, argues that tracing the deployment of domestic imagery can help critics to recuperate Bridget's own voice in a work that is highly mediated by visionary interlocutors, clerics, confessors, and editors. The virgin Saint Agnes's affirmation of married domesticity in Bridget's text, for instance, validates Bridget's roles as a wife and mother. Chapter 4 tracks the changes between the Meditationes Vitae Christi and Nicholas Love's English translation, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, to argue that Love makes the “domestic sphere . . . the primary affective framework” through which the reader can identify with Christ (112), a change that reflects the Carthusian context in which Love reinterprets his Franciscan source. Finally, a brief Afterword returns to the issue of gender, remarking that domestic imagery does indeed seem to have “held a particular appeal to the spiritual imaginary of women” (118), serving as “a testament to vibrancy of female literary culture in the fifteenth century” (119).
As noted, each chapter focuses on a fifteenth-century English translation of an earlier Latin work. This raises the question of how these works would have been read in their original contexts. Campion's argument is particularly strong when she engages directly with the differences between the Latin and the English redactions of her texts, as when she analyzes how Love's changes to the Meditationes shift the emphasis in Jesus's early life from mendicancy to domestic space. It makes sense that Campion does not explore the resonance of these images for their earlier audiences—doing so would have doubled the length of this book, and an important part of her argument is that domestic images simply were not as meaningful in these earlier contexts—but the question lingers: How did Mechthild's kitchen imagery, for example, work among her monastic sisters? Ultimately, this gap is not an omission from Campion's study but an invitation to future scholars to return to these images and critically reassess their role in the medieval devotional imagination. Campion's book lays the groundwork for such reassessment and reminds us that even the most seemingly quotidian of metaphors can be deeply meaningful and complex.
