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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Whatever criticism may justly be levelled against the church in the later Middle Ages there is no doubt that it succeeded in stirring up, in the minds of many lay people, a deep and vivid sense of the real presence of God in the context of ordinary affairs. Church congregations behaved, according to our standards, with considerable freedom and restlessness, but only the heretical and the excessively careless stayed away, and even those who were fairly uneducated could be connoisseurs of popular preaching. Drama was religious drama with a strong topical flavour—the soldiers who crucified Christ were real ‘ribalds’ such as you might have feared to meet in the course of the Hundred Years’ War, and the Angel Gabriel addresses the Blessed Virgin as ‘turtle’ in much the same way as a modern postman might call her ‘love’. Julian of Norwich, a great mystic whose communion with God passed, as she says, the limit of human expression, was yet concerned by the love which she felt towards her fellow-Christians to try to explain in the simplest terms the truth which came to her in her revelations. She saw, as she says, the whole of creation in the form of ‘a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut’ which, but for the sustaining love of its Creator, would have perished ‘for sheer littleness’.
1 Butler-Bowdon, W., The Book of Margery Kempe (London 1936) pp 185 Google Scholar, 224.
2 Purvis, J. S., The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (London 1962) pp 282-9Google Scholar.
3 In the Coventry Nativity Play, ed Rhys, E., Everyman with other Interludes (London 1909) p 83 Google Scholar.
4 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, the first revelation.
5 Butler-Bowdon, op cit p 281.
6 ed Wailly, N. de, oeuvres de Jean, Sire de Joinville, (Paris 1867) p 515 Google Scholar.
7 i.e. brought.
8 i.e. simple or innocent.
9 ed Brown, Carleton, Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century (Oxford 1924)Google Scholar. Spelling modernised.
10 ed Arnould, E. J., Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines of Henry of Lancaster (Anglo-Norman Text Society, vol. 11, Oxford, 1940)Google Scholar. See ako Bulletin of the John Rylands Library vol. 21 (1937), pp 352-86.
11 Henry of Knighton, Chronicon (R.S., London 1895) vol. II, pp 78-9Google Scholar.
12 L.S.M., p 239.
13 ibid, p 98
14 Ibid, p 244.
15 L.S.M., p 46.
16 ibid, pp 72, 77-8.
17 ibid, p 23.
18 ibid, p 48.
19 ibid, p 20.
20 ibid, p 115.
21 L.S.M., pp 13 and 179.
22 ibid, p 47.
23 ibid, p 13.
24 ibid, pp 207 seq.
25 ibid, p 233.
26 ibid, p 93.
27 ibid, p 93-4.
28 L.S.M., pp 99 seq.
29 ibid, p 59.
30 ibid, p 63.
31 ibid, p 106.
32 ibid, p 105.
33 ibid, p 111.
34 ibid, p 106.
35 L.S.M., p 164.
36 ibid, p 171.
37 ibid, p 196.
38 ibid, p 194.
39 ibid, p 199.
40 ibid, p 202.
41 ibid, p 149.
42 Cal. Close Rolls, 1237-42, p 363.
43 Cal. Pat. Rolls., 1266-72, p 440.
44 Chaucer, The Book of the Duchesse, lines 285-93.