1. The standard biography is Kenneth Fowler, The King's Lieutenant
(London, 1969). On Lancaster's role in the formation of the Order of the Garter, see also N. H.
Nicolas, "Observations on the Institution of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, illustrated by the
Accounts of the Great Wardrobe of King Edward the Third," Archaeologia 31 (1846),
1-163, esp. 109, 113, 115-18, and on the Order in general, Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New
Haven, 1984), pp. 179-85.
2. E. J. Arnould, ed., Le Livre de Seyntz Medecines, Anglo Norman Texts 2
(Oxford, 1940) and, for notes and commentary, Étude sur Le Livre des Saintes
Médecines du Duc Henri de Lancastre (Paris, 1948). The title is provided just before
the explicit in both manuscripts. Further references are given in the text; the translations are my
own.
3. See V. A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five
Canterbury Tales (Stanford, 1984), ch. 1, drawing on Frances A. Yates, The Art of
Memory (London, 1966).
4. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval
Culture (Cambridge, England, 1990); see p. 71 for the term "architectural mnemonic."
5. See, for example, the injunction in The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu
Christ, Nicholas Love's early fifteenth-century translation of the pseudo-Bonaventurean
Meditationes Vitae Christi, to "make þe in þy soule present to þoo
þynges þat ben here writen seyd or done of oure lord Jesu; & þat bisily,
likyngly & abidyngly, as þei þou herdest hem with þi bodily eres, or sey
þaim with þin eyen don" (Michael G. Sargent, ed., Nicholas Love's Mirror of the
Blessed Life of Jesus Christ [New York, 1992], p. 13).
6. Raymond of Capua, The Life of Saint Catherine of Sienna, trans. G.
Lamb (London, 1960), p. 71. See further Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in
Fifteenth Century Italy, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1988), p. 46 and the introduction to James H.
Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European
page 116
Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, Belgium, 1979). I echo here
points I have raised in "Into His Secret Chamber: Reading and Privacy in Late Medieval
England," in The Practice and Representation of Reading in Britain, ed. James Raven,
Helen Small, and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge, forthcoming).
7. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture
(Cambridge, England, 1991), pp. 302, 303.
8. See Douglas Gray, "The Five Wounds of Our Lord," Notes and Queries
208 (February-May, 1963), 50-51, 82-89, 127-34, 163-68, and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping
of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c.1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp.
238-48.
9. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, p. 244. On the association of the wounds
of Christ with the sins of man, see Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins; An
Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept (East Lansing, Michigan, 1952), pp.
167-68, et passim.
10. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious
Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), especially pp.
245-59.
11. Sarah Beckwith, Christ's Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late
Medieval Writings (London, 1993), p. 41.
12. On the manuscript, see Thomas W. Ross, "Five Fifteenth-Century 'Emblem'
Verses from Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 37049," Speculum 32 (1957), 274-82; Rosemary
Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1968), pp. 185-86, and
Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London, 1977), pp. 138-39. On
Carthusian meditative practice and its influence on the laity, see in particular G. R. Keiser,
"'Noght How Lang Man Lifs; Bot How Wele': The Laity and the Ladder of Perfection," in De
Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed.
Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge, England,1989), pp. 145-59 and Duffy, Stripping of the
Altars, pp. 296-97.
13. Ross provides complete transcriptions of all the poems in "Five
Fifteenth-Century 'Emblem' Verses."
14. Woolf, Religious Lyric, p. 185.
15. Such a pattern of use is made explicit in some of the Arma Christi rolls,
where icons of the Passion accompany prayers which confer spiritual benefits depending on the
number of times they are repeated. See Gray, "The Five Wounds of Our Lord."
16. Arnould (Étude, p. lxxix) finds no direct antecedent, but rather a
general debt to didactic literature. The closest single parallel is to Robert Grosseteste's
Château d'Amour.
17. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender
and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), p. 77.
18. A striking exception is offered by the collection of essays edited by Clare A.
Lees, Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1994),
essays which draw on the approaches developed by feminism and
page
117
gender studies to explore a range of masculine identities. On women's devotional
reading, see, in particular, Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay
Piety and Ambassadors of Culture," Signs 7 (1982), 742-68, rpt. in Women and Power
in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryane Kowaleski (Athens, Georgia and London,
1988) and Ann Hutchinson, "Devotional Reading in the Monastery and in the Late Medieval
Household," in De Cella in Seculum, ed. Sargent, pp. 215-18. Some of the more
comprehensive studies include Carol Meale, ed., Women and Literature in Britian,
1150-1500 (Cambridge, England, 1933), and the proceedings of the conference "Women and
the
Book" held at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, 1993 (forthcoming).
19. On the erotics of the tournament and male display, see Helen Solterer, "Figures
of Female Militancy in Medieval France," Signs 16 (1991), 522-49, especially 526-31, and
Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval
Scotland (Madison, 1991), ch. 11, "Soft and Silken War," especially pp. 209-12. On
homoerotic themes in Renaissance devotional literature, see Richard Rambuss, "Pleasure and
Devotion: The Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Lyrics," in Queering the
Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham and London, 1994), pp. 253-79, especially pp.
260-64, where Rambuss challenges Bynum's claim that Christ's body was not perceived sexually.
20. I draw here on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, notably Outline of a Theory of
Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, England, 1977) and Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). The "habitus" is "a system of
dispositions" governing virtually all socially conditioned habitual activities, e.g. eating, shopping,
or any number of recreations, including reading or the appreciation of "high culture." The habitus
is "the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations" (Outline, p. 78)
which explains how these dispositions are "collectively orchestrated without being the product of
the orchestrating action of a conductor" (Outline, p. 72), i.e., why people of the same
social class shop, read, or eat in such remarkably similar ways. The habitus is socially conditioned
and in turn socially defining: it acts as a mark of class distinction and internalizes the perception of
class distinction (Distinction, p. 170) through such notions as "good taste," which
Bourdieu would categorize as a class distinction masquerading as an aesthetic one. The habitus is
physically embodied in systems of characteristic gestures, postures, and facial expressions, or
bodily hexis (Outline, p. 87), which are further related to the social formation of
physical space, e.g. the symbolic divisions of space within a house (Outline, p. 89 ff.).
21. See Marion Glasscoe, "Time of Passion: Latent Relationships between Liturgy
and Meditation in Two Middle English Mystics," in Langland, The Mystics and the Medieval
English Religious Tradition: Essays In Honour of S. S. Hussey, ed. Helen Phillips
(Cambridge, England, 1990), pp. 141-60.
22. Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston,
1987),
page 118
"The General Prologue," The Canterbury
Tales, I (A), 1761 et passim. As Benson notes, this is Chaucer's favorite line.
23. K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford,
1972), p. 204.
24. An early instance may be the two Dominicans depicted in the margins of the
de Brailles Hours, who may have assisted the book's owner, an anonymous laywoman
from Oxford, in the use of this, the earliest extant English book of hours. See Claire Donovan,
The de Brailles Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford
(Toronto, 1991).
25. The suggestion that Lancaster's confessor set him the task is attributed to
Dominica Legge by Fowler, King's Lieutenant, p. 289, n. 18.
26. For a harsh critique of this tendency, see David Aers, "A Whisper in the Ear of
Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the 'History of the Subject'," in
Culture and History, 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing,
ed. David Aers (Detroit, 1992), pp. 177-202.
27. Angèle Kremer-Marietti, Foucault et l'archéologie du
savoir (Paris, 1974), cited in J. G. Merquior, Foucault (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1985), p. 141.
28. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), p. 29.
29. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 202-203.
30. Frank Lentricchia, "Michel Foucault's Fantasy for Humanists," in Ariel and
the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens (Madison, 1988), pp. 69 ff.
Similar criticisms of cultural poetics and its emphasis on the social construction of the subject are
raised by Nancy Partner, "No Sex, No Gender," Speculum 68 (1993), 427; Gabrielle M.
Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,"
Speculum 65 (1990), 74; and Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical
Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison, 1987), pp. 64-67.
31. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F.
Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), p. 176, pointing to the misappropriation
("braconnage" or "poaching") of texts as a form of local resistance.
