1. Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature
and Medieval Society (Philadelphia, 1996), p. 51, characterizes this
and other Passion texts, especially the Latin texts, as "products of a
productive and complex textual community built upon mutual relationship
and interdependence in which many works reveal the textual traces of many
other works, and in which the texts themselves are not static, but, attributed
to various authors, subject to revision, recension, and modification."
2. Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ,
ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York, 1992). All references to this edition
are given by page number within the text. See also Elizabeth Salter,
Nicholas Love's "Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ," Analecta
Cartusiana 10 (Salzburg, 1974); Salter, "The Manuscripts of Nicholas
Love's Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ and Related Texts," in
Middle English Prose: Essays on Bibliographical Problems, ed. A.
S. G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall (New York, 1981), pp. 115-28.
3. Norman N. Holland, "Unity Identity Text Self," in Reader Response
Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane P. Tompkins
(Baltimore, 1980), p. 123.
4. Such classifications range from their simple use as visual metaphors
for meditation, as in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown
Meech (Oxford, 1940), to more theologically complex treatments of different
types of interior sight, such as that found in Hugh and Richard of St Victor.
As Alastair Minnis points out in "Affection and Imagination in ‘The Cloud
of Unknowing' and Hilton's ‘Scale of Perfection,'" Traditio 39 (1983),
323-66, at 348 n. 85, Hugh and Richard identify "the eye of bodily sense,
the eye of reason, and the eye of the understanding." Visual metaphors
are often closely connected with discussions of meditation and contemplation.
Margery Kempe refers continuously to seeing Christ "in †e syght of hir
s[owle] as yf Crist had hangyn befor hir bodily eye in hys manhode" (70),
conflating and embellishing her spiritual vision with an intensely visual
manifestation of Jesus's suffering.
5. However, on the acknowledged dangers of trusting the sense of sight,
see Susan Warrener Smith, "Bernard of Clairvaux and the Nature of the Human
Being: The Special Senses," Cistercian Studies 30 (1995), 3-13.
6. On support for the use of images as didactic tools, see Bonaventure,
Commentaria in tertium librum sententiarum M. Petri Lombardi 9.1.2,
in Doctoris Seraphici S. Bonaventurae Opera Omnia, ed. Collegium
S. Bonaventurae, 10 vols. in 11 (Rome, 1882-1902), 4:203: "Dicendum
quod imaginum introductio in Ecclesia non fuit absque rationabili causa.
Introductae enim fuerunt propter triplicem causam, videlicet propter simplicium
ruditatem, propter affectuum tarditatem, et propter memoriae labilitatem."
The first purpose of constructing images follows on Gregory's comparison
of images to books, primarily used to instruct the unlearned. The
third purpose, to keep the memory from "slipping," serves to further internalize
the image-and-response and contribute to long-term re-enacting of a visual,
experiential state which is inherently didactic. The second purpose,
to excite the emotions (affectuum) because they are tarditatem, delayed
or impeded, is of special interest because the association of images with
emotional "triggers" could be manipulated, and either external or imaginary
pictures could be used to elicit empathy and compassion. In the later
Middle Ages, when this empathy was focused toward Christ's humanity and
suffering, not only affective but didactic aims as well were being met.
Gregory's three reasons were derived from John of Damascus (d.
749), De fide orthodoxa 86: "Quia vero non omnes noscunt litteras,
neque lectioni vacant, patres excogitaverunt velut quosdam triumphos in
imaginibus haec scribere, ad velocem memoriam. Quapropter multoties
non secundum mentem habentes Domini passionem, imaginem Christi crucifixionis
videntes et salutaris passionis in rememorationem venientes, procidentes
adoramus" (cited by E. Ruth Harvey, "The Image of Love," in The Complete
Works of St. Thomas More, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain Marc'Hadour
and Richard C. Marius, 15 vols. in 19 [New Haven, 1981], 6:727-60 [Appendix
A], at 751 n. 2).
There is also much literature concerning Gregory's statements
in support of images. See for instance Celia M. Chazelle, "Pictures,
Books, and the Illiterate: Pope Gregory I's Letters to Serenus of Marseilles,"
Word & Image 6 (1990), 138-53; Lawrence G. Duggan, "Was Art
Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate'?" Word & Image 5 (1989),
227-51.
The theory of the efficacy of images was challenged not only
by the Lollard controversy, but by reformers as well. See the Tretise
of Miraclis Pleyinge, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, 1993); William
R. Jones, "Art and Christian Piety: Iconoclasm in Medieval Europe," in
The Image and the Word: Confrontations in Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, ed. Joseph Gutmann (Missoula, 1977), pp. 75-105; and Cynthia
Hahn, "Purification, Sacred Action, and the Vision of God: Viewing Medieval
Narratives," Word & Image 5 (1989), 71-84.
7. As a caveat, the presumptuousness of assuming that the "affective"
qualities of these texts had a similar effect on everyone, or even that
the majority of believers pursued this sort of religious practice, must
be acknowledged. But consider Hugh of St Victor, De modo orandi
(PL 176:978-79); and Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum:
Two English Versions, ed. John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS o.s.
287 (London, 1984).
8. Margaret Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western
Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston, 1985), p. 70. See also
Hans Belting, The Image and Its Public in the Middle Ages: Form and
Function of Early Paintings of the Passion, trans. Mark Bartusis and
Raymond Meyer (New York, 1981), esp. pp. 54-57; Michael Baxandall, Painting
and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History
of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1972).
9. Such works include Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies
in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982); Bynum,
Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval
Women (Berkeley, 1987); David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of
the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture
(Pennsylvania, 1996).
10. Wolfgang Iser, "The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,"
in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London,
1993), pp. 212-28, at 225, describes "identification" as "the establishment
of affinities between oneself and someone outside oneself—a familiar ground
on which we are able to experience the unfamiliar . . . a stratagem by
means of which the author stimulates attitudes in the reader."
11. The Myroure of Our Lady, ed. J. H. Blunt, EETS e.s. 19 (London,
1873), p. 68. Further references to this text are given by page number
in the text.
12. Leonard Boyle, O.P., "The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of
Popular Theology," in The Popular Literature of Medieval England,
ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, 1985), pp. 30-43.
13. Moralia in Job 1.33, ed. M. Adriaen, CCSL 143 (Turnhout,
1979), p. 43 (PL 75:542C): "In nobismetipsis namque debemus transformare
quod legimus; ut cum per auditum se animus excitat, ad operandum quod audierit
vita concurrat."
14. Denise Despres, Ghostly Sights: Visual Meditation in Late-Medieval
Literature (Norman, OK, 1989), p. 20.
15. Iser, "The Reading Process," p. 218. As with any "literary"
text, the reader must picture the invisible: "the written part of
the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives
us the opportunity to picture things," to fill the gaps.
16. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval
Culture (Cambridge, 1990), p. 60.
17. Despres, Ghostly Sights, p. 37.
18. Margaret R. Miles, The Image and Practice of Holiness: A Critique
of the Classic Manuals of Devotion (London, 1989), p. 127.
19. The term "imagining" is to distinguish it from the philosophical
and medical theories of imagination and the bodily senses. See E.
Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, ed. E. H. Gombrich and J. P. Trapp, Warburg Institute
Surveys (London, 1976). I am here concerned with the "inner eye"
and the spiritual imagination as a literary metaphor for the vehicle of
response.
20. De modo dicendi et meditandi (PL 176:878A): "Meditatio
est frequens cogitatio cum consilio, quae causam et originem, modum et
utilitatem uniuscujusque rei prudenter investigat. Meditatio principium
sumit a lectione, nullis tamen struitur regulis aut praeceptis lectionis.
Delectatur enim quodam aperto discurrere spatio, ubi liberam contemplandae
veritati aciem affigat, et nunc has, nunc illas rerum causas perstringere,
nunc autem profunda quaeque penetrare, nihil anceps, nihil obscurum relinquere.
Principium ergo doctrinae est in lectione, consummatio in meditatione."
21. See Carruthers, Book of Memory, pp. 162-63.
22. Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation
and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca, 1995),
p. 17. See also Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire
for God, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York, 1982).
23. Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, p. 122.
24. Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, p. 123.
25. Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, p. 124.
26. See Bestul, Texts of the Passion, esp. pp. 26-68.
27. Iser, "The Reading Process," p. 215.
28. See Stanley E. Fish, "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics,"
in Reader Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism,
ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 70-100.
