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Dame Gertrude More and the English Mystical Tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Marion Norman
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Extract

In 1701, William Nicholls, an Anglican clergyman of Salsey in Sussex, published his English translation, ‘purged of Popish errors’, of Francis de Sales’ Introduction to a Devout Life. He prefaced it by an essay on ‘The Rise and Progress of Spiritual Books’, in which he wrote:

The good reception of devotional books for some years past in England has caused more practical devotional books to be read in this nation than were ever known in like space of time before. Not only greater numbers of treatises by our own divines have been published and bought but many others wrote abroad have been translated into English and, not withstanding the great and deserved aversion of this Nation to Popery, yet books of their Divines upon Devotional and Practical Subjects have met with as favourable reception amongst us as if authors of a better religion.… And maybe they do receive Advantage from their Spiritual Books (as they call these books of Devotion). They are very free in lending them to Protestants, bidding them see if their Religion can be so bad in which such excellent Rules of a Holy Life are taught, in which Men have Advantage of such Devout Prayers and Contemplation, wherein their Clergy speak so feelingly to the Conscience and with such an extraordinary concern for the souls of Man.… For it must be confessed that some of their books in this way are well wrote with a great deal of Warmth and Affection and are excellently fitted to raise Devotion in the Readers.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , April 1976 , pp. 196 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1976

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References

Notes

1 Nicholls, William, Introduction to a Devout Life by Francis Sales (London, 1701)Google Scholar, author’s preface.

2 White, Helen C., English Devotional Literature (Madison, 1931)Google Scholar; ‘Some Continuing Traditions in English Devotional Literature’, P.M.L.A. 57 (1942), pp. 967 ff.; Southern, A.C., Elizabethan Recusant Prose (London, 1950)Google Scholar.

3 Chambers, R.W., On the Continuity of English Prose (London, 1932)Google Scholar; Cope, Jackson I., ‘Seventeenth Century Quaker Style’, P.M.L.A. 71 (1956), pp. 725 ff.Google Scholar; Bielby, M.R., ‘Works of Devotion as Literature’, Land Hol. Review 181, pp. 260-4Google Scholar.

4 David Crane, ‘English Translations of the Imitatio Christi, Recusant History, October 1975, pp. 79-100.

5 Low, A., Augustine Baker (N.Y., Twayne, 1973), pp. 132-3Google Scholar.

6 Wright, Louis B., ‘The Significance of Religious Writings of the English Renaissance’, J.H.I. (1940), 1, pp. 59–68 Google Scholar; motz, Edith, ‘A Subject Analysis of Printing, 1480-1640’, H.L.Q. 1 (1937-38), pp. 417-19Google Scholar. Wright and Klotz show that 43.7% of books published in English from Caxton to the Civil War were religious in theme, the majority of them non-controversial and intended for the general reader.

7 Cf. Thompson, Margaret, The Carthusian Order in England (London, 1930), pp. 312-53Google Scholar. For the Cambrai library, see Ampleforth 228; C.R.S. 17, no. 6 (for Bakeriana listed by Justin McCann); and Spearritt, Placid, ‘The Survival of Mediaeval Spirituality among the Exiled Black Monks’, American Benedictine Review 25 (1974), pp. 287–316 Google Scholar.

8 British Museum, MS Cotton Julius CIII, f. 1.

9 Downside MS 22; Ampleforth Microfilm 44; Owen, H.W., ‘Another Augustine Baker MS’, in Dr L. Reypens-Album, ed. Ampe, A. S.J., (Antwerp, 1964), pp. 269-80Google Scholar. Owen traces the MSS in which Baker included his translations of various mediaeval mystics (including Julian) to Cambrai and its indefatigable copyist, Dame Barbara Constable. The Julian extracts are 26-30, 32: interesting refutations of Baker’s and More’s alleged indifference to the person of Christ.

10 Downside MS 22; Ampleforth Microfilm 44.

11 Stanbrook III, 58-59.

12 Memorial submitted for Papal approval of the I.B.V.M., 1612.

13 Apostolic Constitution of Paul VI (Laudis Canticum, 1970) on the Liturgy of the Hours, section 8.

14 Actually, even mediaeval writers had warned against excessive use of imagination and senses in prayer and too much self-examination: cf. Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Wolters, Clifton (London, Penguin, 1961), p. 137 Google Scholar.

15 Cf. ‘Prayer and the Ignatian Exercises’, The Way, Supplement 176 (1972).

16 Confessiones, pp. 63-64.

17 Stanbrook III, 102.

18 Confessiones, preface, p. 91.

19 Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Wolters, p. 135 (chap. 69).

20 Confessiones, preface p. 91.

21 Quatres Mystiques Anglaises (Paris, 1945), p. 160.

22 Stanbrook III, 26.

23 Confessiones, p. 163.

24 Stanbrook III, 130-3.

25 Ibid., 148.

26 Ibid., 160; Confessiones, 63.

27 Colwich Abbey MS 20.

28 Ibid., Prologue to Part 1.

29 Stanbrook III, 26. There is, in fact, an English translation by Dom Anselm Touchet, done in 1657 and now at Ampleforth.

30 Stanbrook III, 26.

31 Stanbrook XVII, 55.

32 Ibid., 47.

33 Ibid., 55.

34 Ibid., 55, 38.

35 The word idiot derives from the Greek for an uninitiated or unlearned person. Cf. Baker, Newport MS 120/012 (c. 1640), preface: ‘The terme Ideot in the title & I use in the same sense that it is used in the Acts of the Apostles’ [4: 13] of Peter and John.

36 Letters to the Chapter by Dames Catherine Gascoigne, Gertrude More and others. Cf, Downside MS 40 for part of Gertrude’s defence; also Bodleian MS Rawlinson C.460, pp. 14 ff. and 219-29.

37 Confessiones, p. 89.

38 Confessiones, p. 234.

39 Confessiones, p. 237.

40 Confessiones, p. 276.

41 Some years ago I discovered that the students’ meditation book when Gother was at Lisbon Seminary had been written by one Edward Pickford, who was President there from 1642 to 1648, when he became Vice-President of Douai, whence he had led the attack on Baker’s influence and was refuted by Francis Gascoigne, the students’ confessor, in An Apologie for Myself about Fr Baker’s Doctrine (A. 48, c. 1653).

42 Bodleian MS. Rawlinson C. 36, p. 62.

43 Stanbrook III, 105.

44 Confessiones, VII, p. 41.

45 Stanbrook III, 121-2.

46 Confessiones, preface, pp. 14-15.

47 Confessiones, XXXIV, 164-5.

48 Confessiones, XLII, p. 196.

49 Confessiones, p. 227.

50 Walsh, James S.J., Pre-Reformation English Spirituality (London, 1968)Google Scholar, introduction.

51 Hodgson, Geraldine, English Mystics (London, 1922)Google Scholar; Gardner, Helen, ‘Walter Hilton and the Mystical Tradition in England’, E.S.E.A. 22 (1937), pp. 103-27Google Scholar.

52 Merton, Thomas, Mystics and Zen Masters (N.Y., Dell, 1967), p. 128 Google Scholar.

53 Confessiones, preface, pp. 35-40.

54 Confessiones, X, p. 75.

55 Confessiones, XXIX.

56 Confessiones, VII, p. 33.

57 Confessiones, IX, p. 66.

58 Knox, Ronald, Enthusiasm (Oxford, 1949), p. 359 Google Scholar.

59 Confessiones, VII, pp. 33-39.

60 Stanbrook XVII, 37.

61 Merton, op. cit., pp. 154-62.

62 Baker, , Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia, 4 vols. ed. Reymer, Clement (Douai, 1629): transcript, Jesus College, Oxford, MSS 75–78 Google Scholar. The English Congregation, because it alone had heeded the twelfth-century Papal injunctions for reform, was, in the seventeenth, in a position to reconstitute itself, through the sole survivor of Westminster, the aged Dom Sigebert Buckley. Cf. Lunn, David, ‘William Rudesind Barlow’, Downside Review 86 (1968), pp. 137-54, 234-49Google Scholar.

63 Confessiones, XLVI, pp. 196-9.

64 Confessiones, preface, p. 18.

65 Confessiones, VII, p. 38.

66 Confessiones, preface, p. 14.

67 Stanbrook XVII, 39.

68 Confessiones, LIII, pp. 234-6.

69 This paper was given to the Eighteenth Oxford Conference on Post-Reformation Catholic History on 25 July 1975.