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Chapter 10 - Women and Devotional Compilations

from III - Health, Conduct, and Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2023

Corinne Saunders
Affiliation:
Durham University
Diane Watt
Affiliation:
University of Surrey
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Summary

Some late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century compilations address both men and women, while employing the topos of the female religious reader to depict the exemplary Christian life for all. Other works offer specific connections with female, particularly aristocratic readers, both secular and religious. Book to a Mother explicitly addresses the mother of the author, a widow perhaps interested in joining a religious community while also addressing a lay public. As well as adapting anchoritic material, compilations also took up the spiritual teachings offered by Richard Rolleߣs vernacular writing. Disce mori, for example, both uses Rolleߣs texts and imitates the dynamics of Rolleߣs relations with his female readers, while also including a more general lay readership. Womenߣs writings, such as the Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden, play an important part too in compilations. Though evidence is scant, the example of Eleanor Hull suggests that women also acted as compilers. Compilations, then, demonstrate both the range and complexity of womenߣs involvement in devotional literary culture, and the wider significance of the female subject for devotional writers, male and female, in later medieval England.

Type
Chapter
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Women and Medieval Literary Culture
From the Early Middle Ages to the Fifteenth Century
, pp. 206 - 226
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Bell, David (1995). What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications.Google Scholar
Bryan, Jennifer (2008). Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Cré, Marleen, Denissen, Diana, and Renevey, Denis, eds. (2020). Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England, Medieval Church Series 41, Turnhout: Brepols.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denissen, Diana (2019). Middle English Devotional Compilations: Composing Imaginative Variations in Late Medieval England, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages, Cardiff: University of Wales.Google Scholar
Dutton, Elisabeth (2008). Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late-Medieval Devotional Compilations, Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Erler, Mary C. (2002). Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gillespie, Vincent (2011). Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England, Turnhout: Brepols.Google Scholar
Miles, Laura Saetveit (2020). The Virgin Mary’s Book at the Annunciation, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.Google Scholar
Minnis, Alastair (2010). Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd ed., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Olsen, Linda and Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, eds. (2005). Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.Google Scholar
Parkes, Malcolm (1976). The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book. In Alexander, J. J. G. and Gibson, M. T., eds., Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays Presented to Richard William Hunt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 115–41.Google Scholar

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