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Resurrection and reconstruction of the Meditationes Vitae Christi in early modern England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 November 2023
Abstract
This article traces the deployment of the 14th century devotional treatise, The Meditationes Vitae Christi, in late medieval and early modern England. Beginning with a discussion of Nicholas Love’s 1409 translation of the treatise, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, the article examines how later editors and redactors reshape the treatise for new audiences. Not only does Love’s treatise have a lively print history after the introduction of the printing press, but the later editions by Caxton, de Worde, and Richard Pynson were faithful reproductions of Love’s translation. By the seventeenth century, however, the treatise underwent some drastic revisions under the hands of Charles Boscard and John Heigham. This article presents some much-needed attention to Heigham’s 1622 re-presentation of the text as The Life of Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. In reworking this treatise for a much later audience, Heigham deftly combines material from both the Meditationes Vitae Christi and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, while also making some interesting additions of his own.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Trustees of the Catholic Record Society
Footnotes
*
I am deeply indebted to Holly Crocker, who not only introduced me to the work of Nicholas Love, but also Walter Hilton, Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich. Her support for my scholarship extended well beyond the completion of my dissertation in 2012, and she continued to offer great advice as I revised my chapter on Nicholas Love into the version that appears in this publication. Likewise, I am thankful to the anonymous reviewers and Dr. Katy Gibbons, editor of British Catholic History. Final thanks to the librarians at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Library, Christ Church, and the Jesuits at Britain with their help at obtaining permission for the images in this article. David Stumpp, Alina Nachescu, and Rebecca Somerset, your friendliness and assistance was invaluable to me during this process.
References
1 Michael G. Sargent contends, ‘the only convincing hypothesis is that the Meditationes Vitae Christi were written in Latin, in Tuscany, by a Franciscan author of the mid-to late fourteenth century… The “long” version of the text was the original, and the various shorter forms … all derive from it’. Michael G. Sargent, ed. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2005), 15. Nevertheless, the issues surrounding the text’s origins and authorship are still controversial. Sarah McNamer dates the treatise’s composition to sometime between 1336 and 1364, and she proposes an intriguing argument in favour of female authorship. She claims that an ‘earlier, livelier, and more radically “incarnational” recension [was] almost certainly [written by] a nun; probably, but not necessarily, a Poor Clare’. Sarah McNamer, ‘The Origins of the Meditationes Vitae Christi’, Speculum 84 (October 2009): 905-55, at 907. McNamer builds upon this argument in her recent translation of Meditations on the Life of Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), stating: ‘a Poor Clare was the original literary artist who created the MVC, and a Franciscan friar actively censored her authorial role and altered her text’, cxviii. She claims the original MS is not the Latin edition recognized by Stallings-Taney, but rather the shorter Italian text of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Canon Ital. 174.
2 Hereafter I will refer to the Meditationes Vitae Christi as the Meditationes and The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ as the Mirror.
3 Sargent, Mirror, 10:6-7. All citations throughout will be listed by page and line number.
4 Caxton printed his editions in 1484 (STC 3259) and 1490 (STC 3260). De Worde’s editions were printed in 1494 (STC 3261), 1507 (STC 3263.5), 1517 (STC 3264), 1525 (STC 3266), and 1530 (STC 3267). Pynson’s editions were from 1494 (STC 3262) and 1506 (STC 3263). For more information about these editions of the Mirror, see Lotte Hellinga, ‘Nicholas Love in Print’, in Shoichi Oguro, Richard Beadle, and Michael G. Sargent, eds. Nicholas Love at Waseda: Proceedings of the International Conference 20-22 July, 1995 (Cambridge: Brewer, 1997), 143-162.
5 A. I. Doyle, ‘The Study of Nicholas Love’s Mirror, Retrospect and Prospect’, in Nicholas Love at Waseda, 163-174, at 164.
6 Ibid., 164-165.
7 This edition is catalogued as STC 3268.
8 A.F. Allison, ‘John Heigham of S. Omer (c.1568-2632)’, Recusant History (hereafter RH) 4.6 (1958): 226-242, at 232. The 1622 edition is catalogued as STC 13034.
9 Paul Arblaster, ‘Heigham, John [alias Roger Heigham]’, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. online edn September 2004 [https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/12868 Accessed 07.03.23]
10 The 1634 edition is catalogued as STC 13035.
11 ‘Attende lector huius libri prout sequitur in Anglico scripti, quod vbicumque in margine ponitur litera N. verba sunt translatoris siue compilatoris in Anglicis preter illa que inseruntur in libro scripto secundum communem opinionem a venerabili doctore Bonauentura in Latino de meditacione vite Jesu Christi.’ Both the Latin original and the English translation are from Sargent, Mirror, intro 38.
12 Michael G. Sargent, ‘A Survey of the Middle English Prose Translations of Early Franciscan Literature’, Spättmittelalterliche Geistliche Literatur in den Nationalsprache 106 (1983): 145-176, at 149. In the essay, Sargent takes care to warn how ‘the determination of the role of any religious order in the composition and transmission of such literature must depend upon the evidence of the manuscripts in which the literature survives, and not merely upon its perceived compatibility with the spirituality of the order’, 147. Sarah McNamer dedicates an entire chapter to Franciscan literature in Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
13 Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online or TAMO (1570 edition), Book 5. The Digital Humanities Institute, Sheffield, 2011. Available from: http//www.dhi.ac.uk/foxe [Accessed: 07.03.23]. A concise version of the Constitutions can be found at https://www.bible-researcher.com/arundel.html. For more information on Arundel’s Constitutions and Love’s Mirror, see Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70.4 (October 1995): 822-864. Though many scholars still find flaws in Watson’s argument concerning vernacular theology, Arundel’s lasting presence cannot be overlooked.
14 Memorandum quod circa annum domini Millesimum quadringentesimum decimum, originalis copia huius libri, scilicet Speculi vite Christi in Anglicis. presentabatur Londoniis per compilatorem eiusdem.N. Reuerendissimo in Christo patri & domino, Domino Thome Arundell, Cantuarie Archiepiscopo, ad inspiciendum & debite examinandum antequam fuerat libere communicata. Mirror, intro 36. Michael G. Sargent discusses the importance of Arundel’s approbatio in ‘Versions of the Life of Christ: Nicholas Love’s Mirror and Related Works’, Poetica 42 (1994): 39-70. According to him, ‘the wording of the Memorandum […] makes it clear that this was a face-to-face exchange between the two men, which occupied several days’, 59. Fiona Somerset refers to the Arundelian approbatio as ‘an exercise in self-promotion’ in ‘Censorship’, in Alexandra Gillespie and Daniel Wakelin, eds. The Production of Books in England, 1350-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 239-258, at 249. Michael G. Sargent asserts that the Mirror and The Mirror of Our Lady are the only two fifteenth century treatises that ‘describe themselves as having been submitted to ecclesiastical authority in conformity with the stipulations of the Lambeth Constitutions’, Mirror, intro 75. Sargent also details how Malcolm Parkes believes the memorandum was not appended to manuscripts of the Mirror until ‘the archiepiscopate of Henry Chichele, [Arundel’s] successor in the see of Canterbury (1414-43)’, Mirror, intro 76.
15 Edward Hodnett, English Woodcuts, 1480-1535 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), 141. Hodnett’s description of this woodblock links it to eight different texts. These texts he cites are as follows: the 1486 edition of St. Bonaventura’s Speculum vitae Christi; the 1490 second edition of St. Bonaventura’s Speculum vitae Christi, printed by William Caxton (STC 3260); de Worde’s 1494 edition of St. Bonaventura’s Speculum vitae Christi; the 1502 second edition of Ordynarye of Crystyanyte, printed by de Worde (STC 5198); the 1507 edition of Boke named the Royall, printed by de Worde (STC 21430); a second 1507 edition of Boke named the Royall, printed by de Worde, with Pynson’s imprint (STC 21430a); the 1525 edition of St. Bonaventura’s Vita Christi, printed by de Worde (STC 3266); and the 1530 edition of St. Bonaventura’s Vita Christi, printed by de Worde (STC 3267). Hodnett’s reference to the 1486 edition of St. Bonaventura’s Speculum vitae Christi might be the second edition, printed by Caxton in 1484 (STC 3259).
16 David Rogers, ‘The English Recusant: Medieval Literary Links’, RH 23 (1993): 483-507, at 484.
17 ‘puplice communicandum fore decreuit & mandauit, ad fidelium edificacionem, & hereticorum siue lollardorum confutacionem’. Mirror, intro 36-37. Vincent Gillespie notes how there was ‘a wider concern in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century religious writing about issues of authorship, attribution, and orthodoxy’: Vincent Gillespie, ‘Fatherless Books: Authorship, Attribution, and Orthodoxy in Later Medieval England’, in Ian Johnson and Allan F. Westphall, eds. The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ: Exploring the Middle English Translation (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 151-196, at 152.
18 Acknowledging Catholic detractors was still a concern for seventeenth-century readers, and Boscard’s redactor softened Love’s harsh anti-Lollard rhetoric by referring to religious detractors as ‘men […] who are of the contrary opinion to so many Catholikes’, 240.
19 Mirror, 10:6-7.
20 Both treatises are presumed to have been written in the late 1380s. The Scale of Perfection is composed of two separate books, Scale I and Scale II. Initially, Scale I was written to provide religious guidance for a woman who had recently entered an anchorhold, but in Scale II, the intimacy between an anchoress and her spiritual advisor is broadened to welcome new readers. Hilton’s willingness to include the laity in his spiritual vision is substantiated by his later spiritual treatise, The Mixed Life. Despite the fact that ‘only three manuscripts attribute’ The Mixed Life to Hilton, his authorship is accepted on the basis that ‘doctrinally it echoes or complements much of the Scale’s teaching’ in S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, ed. Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, Edited from Lambeth Palace MS 472 (Salzburg, Austria: Institüte Für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität, 1986), viii.
21 Mirror, 122:38-42. Much like the Meditationes, Scale I was written to provide religious guidance for a woman who had recently entered an anchorhold. By the time he wrote Scale II, Hilton broadened the intimacy between an anchoress and her spiritual advisor to welcome readers outside the environs of the cloister. De Worde appended a copy of the Mixed Life to his Scale edition of 1494, STC 14042, leading it to become overwhelmingly known and marketed as a third installment of the Scale.
22 Helen Gardner, ‘Walter Hilton and the Mystical Tradition in England’, Essays and Studies 22 (1937): 103-127, at 124. In all, there are seven printed editions of the Scale of Perfection, ranging in dates from 1494 to 1659. By far, Wynkyn de Worde is the most regular printer of the text, with four editions released between 1494 and 1533. His editions are listed as follows: STC 14042, printed in 1494; STC 14043.5, printed in 1519; STC 14044, printed in 1525; and STC 14045, printed in 1533. The only other sixteenth-century printer of the Scale is Julian Notary, and his 1507 edition, STC 14043, is derived from de Worde’s. Similar to the Mirror’s trajectory, the Scale’s last sixteenth-century printing was in 1533, but it was back in the bookstalls in 1659 (Wing 3882), when it was printed by T.R. for T. Garthwait, a London bookseller.
23 Hereafter referred to as Life.
24 The Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus (Saint-Omer, J. Heigham: 1622), STC 13034, title page. This edition is at the Jesuits in Britain Library, shelfmark ALBSI/A/24.
25 Ian Johnson, ‘From Nicholas Love’s Mirror to John Heigham’s Life: Paratextual Displacements and Displaced Readers’, in Sabrina Corbellini and Margriet Hoogvliet, eds. Discovering the Riches of the Word: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 190-212, at 204-205. Scholarship on the Meditationes and the Mirror has established that both authors borrow rather extensively from the Psalms, Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Gregory, and William of St. Thierry, to name a few. Michael G. Sargent explains how Love incorporate ideas from The Treatise on the Seven Points of True Love and Everlasting Wisdom, The Meditationes de Passione, and The Privity of the Passion in ‘Versions of the Life of Christ’.
26 Heigham, Life, title page.
27 Johnson, ‘Paratextual Displacements’, 204.
28 A.I. Doyle comes to the same conclusion in ‘Recusant Versions of The Meditationes Vitae Christi’, The Bodleian Library Record 15.5-6 (October 1996): 411-413, at 412.
29 Allison, ‘John Heigham’, 228. Allison notes that while Heigham is known today as John Heigham, he went by the name Roger ‘in his earlier years at Douai,’ 229. Soetaert claims Heigham continued the work of Richard Verstegen, who ‘had been the main agent for shipping Catholic books into England’ in the 1590s. Alexander Soetaert, ‘Catholic Refuge and the Printing Press: Catholic Exiles from England, France, and the Low Countries in the Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai’, British Catholic History (hereafter BCH) 34.4 (2019): 532-561, at 555-556.
30 The list of books confiscated by John Wolstenholme can be found in P.R. Harris, ‘The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605-1612 [pt.2]’, RH 8 (April 1966): 252-284. For a complete list of Heigham’s works, consult The Contemporary Printed Literature of the Counter-Reformation Between 1558 and 1640, ed. by A.F. Allison and D.M. Rogers (Brookfield, VT: Gower Publishing Company, 1989). One of the earliest printings ascribed to Heigham is a 1612 2nd edition of A Memoriall of a Christian Life, printed at Douai (STC 16905). One of Heigham’s earliest compositions is A Devout Exposition of the Holie Masse, with an ample declaration of all the rites and ceremonies belonging to the same, published in 1614 in Douai (STC 13032). Soetaert explains that while Heigham ‘did not operate a press himself [he] issued 85 editions in the period 1604-34’, ‘Catholic Refuge’, 558. Allison claims ‘there are over sixty books in existence today, printed between 1609 and 1631, that bear [Heigham’s] imprint’, Allison, ‘John Heigham’, 226.
31 Sargent, Mirror, 10:14-15.
32 Ibid., 23:38-39.
33 For more information about this particular audience and the history of the printing press in Douai, see Soetaert, ‘Catholic Refuge’. As Soetaert notes, ‘the overall number of English Catholic texts rose significantly, increasing from less than fifty between 1596 and 1600 to almost ninety in the following five years. This increase would continue until the mid 1620s, dates that apply to the first early 17th century reprinting of the Mirror by Boscard, 552. Soetaert further maintains, ‘presses in Douai and Saint-Omer produced over 450 Catholic texts in English in the period 1601-40, covering nearly eighty percent of the total production in these years’, Soetaert, ‘Catholic Refuge’, 552-553.
34 Ibid., 553.
35 Heigham, Life, A2.
36 Ibid., A2. I have changed all the long s in Heigham’s edition to regular forms, along with replacing the letter u with v and j for i where needed. I have also silently transcribed Heigham’s superscript macrons that abbreviate the letters m or n. All other spelling variations have been maintained.
37 ‘Sed uellem quod hoc a magis experto magisque docto acciperes, quia talibus maxime insufficiens sum’. C. Mary Stallings-Taney, ed. Meditaciones Vitae Christi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997), 9:78-79. Translated passages provided here and throughout are from Francis Taney, Sr, Anne Miller, O.S.F., and C. Mary Stallings-Taney, eds. Meditations on the Life of Christ (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1999), 3. Further references to these editions will use Stallings-Taney ed., Meditaciones and Taney, Sr., et. al. Meditations.
38 Alexandra Walsham, Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (New York: Routledge, 2014), 273.
39 Heigham, Life, 4.
40 Ibid., 6.
41 Stallings-Taney, Meditaciones, 7:4-6; Taney, Sr., Meditations, 1.
42 Heigham, Life, 6.
43 Ibid., 5.
44 ‘propterea sic ardenter afficiebatur ad ipsam, ut quasi sua similitudo fuerit. Nam in cunctis uirtutibus quam perfeccius poterat innitebatur eundum, et tandem ipso compellente et perficiente Iesu per impressionem sacrorum stigmatum, fuit in eum totaliter transformatus.’ Stallings-Taney, Meditaciones, 9:67-72; Taney, Sr., Meditations, 3.
45 ‘deliberauerunt ipsum agnum innocentissimum occidere. O prauum concilium! O pessimi duces populi et consiliarii nequissimi! Quid agitis miseri? Quid uos furor exagitat tantus? Que ordinacio hec? Que proposicio? Que causa occisionis Domini nostri? Nonne ipse in medio uestrum est quem tamen nescitis et intelligit omnia uerba uestra et corda?’. Stallings-Taney, Meditaciones, 234:10-16; Taney, Sr., Meditations, 220.
46 Heigham, Life, 482-483.
47 Sargent, Mirror, 134:21-23.
48 Allan F. Westphall, ‘Walter Hilton’s The Prickynge of Love and the Construction of Vernacular “Sikerness”’, in The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ, 457-502; see footnote 27, at 473. Most critics date The Prickynge of Love to the late fourteenth century. The treatise was printed in 1642 in Douai by the widow of Mark Wyon, not too long after Heigham’s final edition of the Life.
49 Sargent, Mirror, 122:39-40.
50 Heigham, Life, 521-522.
51 Harold Kane, ed. The Prickynge of Love (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1983), 15:22-24. As with my other citations, passages are identified by page and line numbers.
52 Kane, Prickynge, 16:2-4.
53 Heigham, Life, 522.
54 Richard Rolle was a religious recluse whose teachings appeared in the 1340s and quickly gained popularity among the laity. Most of Rolle’s earlier works were written in Latin, and it was not until later in his career that he began to write in the vernacular, addressing a significant corpus of work to women solitaries. His Mediations on the Passion is found in nine manuscripts, though early modern printers did not look to this treatise with regularity. There are two different versions of Julian of Norwich’s work—the shorter version, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, and the longer A Revelation of Love. Julian’s Vision is the earliest English treatise written by a woman, sometime in the mid 1380s, fifteen years after the near-death experience that produced her vision. She is thought to have begun expanding her Vision into its longer, theological form in the 1390s. Interestingly, Margery Kempe’s treatise documents how she once sought the counsel of Julian of Norwich after being accused of Lollardy and false visions. There is only one extant manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe, which is believed to have been transcribed in the middle of the fifteenth century. Margery’s treatise was printed two times in the early sixteenth century—once by Wynkyn de Worde in 1501, and then by Henry Pepwell, who formatted it as a spiritual anthology, in 1521. For more information about the history of Margery Kempe’s treatise in early modern print, see Melissa Crofton, ‘From Medieval Mystic to Early Modern Anchoress: Rewriting The Book of Margery Kempe’, Journal of the Early Book Society 16 (Fall 2013): 89-110.
55 Heigham, Life, 584-585.
56 ‘Ipse autem sine rebellione et contradiccione humiliter facit quidquid uolunt. Cum igitur in superiori gradu illius scale parue peruenit ad crucem, renes uoluit; et aperit illa regalia brachia, et expandit manus pulcherimas, et excelsas eas porrigens crucifixoribus suis.’ Stallings-Taney ed., Meditaciones, 271:26-30; Taney, sr et. al eds. Meditations, 252. For more information on the sources of these two crucifixion versions, see footnote number one in Meditaciones, 253.
57 Sargent, Mirror, 171:1-2, italics mine.
58 Heigham, Life, 591-592, italics mine.
59 Ibid., 611-612.
60 Kane, Prickynge, 9:14-25.
61 Heigham, Life, 613.
62 Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, and James P. Lusardi, eds. The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More: Volume 8, Parts I-III, The Confutations of Tyndale’s Answer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 37:26-33.