Discerning devotional readers: Readers, writers, and the pursuit of God in some late medieval texts.

摘要

This dissertation is concerned with both the way vernacular religious texts were written, and the way they were read, in late medieval England. The context for this discussion is the growth in lay readership and the increasingly ambitious spiritual aspirations of sections of the laity. This dissertation argues that awareness of this wider audience profoundly shaped the way writers presented their texts. Regardless of theological perspective or general intent, medieval writers reveal a common tendency to try and identify "right" readers for their texts, invoking specific interpretive communities, and guiding reader response by establishing parameters for interpretation. The first half of the study draws attention to this engagement with hermeneutics as it is found in Lollard tracts, The Cloud of Unknowing, Nicholas Love's Treatise on the Sacrament, Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love, and the anonymous works, Book to a Mother and The Recluse. Shifting attention on to the reader in its second half, the dissertation uses the evidence of two early fifteenth-century collections of religious texts to demonstrate how lay readers could and did fit their reading material around their own concerns and interests, and that these interests could be extremely diverse. Following Nichols and Wenzel's approach of studying the "whole book," I argue that by choosing to read certain texts together, readers were able to fundamentally alter the interpretation of those texts. Taken as a whole, this study demonstrates connections between contemporaneous works which have rarely been dealt with together because of the tendency to divide medieval religious literature into discrete generic categories ("devotional," "mystic," "pastoral") or discrete doctrinal categories ("Lollard," "orthodox"). Its discussion of religious texts and manuscripts exposes the inadequacy of such categories given the depth, complexity, and range of religious opinion in late medieval England.