Souvent me souviens

Lady Margaret's motto speaks most powerfully to me when ‘souvent je me souviens’ of my many encounters with Vincent Gillespie, from my first supervision in his St Anne's College's office (quite a daunting experience for the very inexperienced Swiss doctoral student that I was then) to our recent participation in a joint plenary session which brought us back to St Anne's several decades later. But Vincent's professorial career is of course strongly linked to Lady Margaret Hall, so it is a great pleasure for me to honour him by exploring as part of this chapter aspects of the devotional life of Lady Margaret Beaufort, after whom Lady Margaret Hall is named.

The devotion to the Name of Jesus has a long history in the West. Although one can trace significant moments before the beginning of the second millennium, textual witnesses testifying to the importance given to the Name gain in significance from the eleventh century onwards. The meditation Ad excitandum timorem by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, Bernard of Clairvaux's sermon fifteen from his Sermons on the Song of Songs, as well as the twelfth-century sequence Dulcis Iesu Memoria, probably written by an English Cistercian, provide ample evidence for the practice of the devotion to the Name within monastic circles. Thirteenth-century textual manifestations in the form of Latin sermons and meditations, and Anglo-Norman and Middle English lyrics, also participate in the growing corpus devoted to this religious tradition. While it is powerfully alive by that time, the way in which the Yorkshire hermit Richard Rolle places the devotion at the core of his own spiritual experience, and the care with which he encourages his followers or trainees to use it as part of their own spiritual progress, give an undisputable new lease of energy to the devotion. Walter Hilton also recognizes the need for material devoted to the Name of Jesus, and supplies it in a revised version of The Scale of Perfection, possibly following requests by his readership. Its inclusion in the writings of two of the most successful Middle English mystical writers of the fourteenth century gives the devotion a high degree of credibility as a significant tool within an ambitious spiritual practice.