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Mayumi Taguchi
Osaka Sangyo University
Email: tmt153 at u01 dot gate01 dot com
Given that one of the predominant features of late medieval spirituality is the heavy emphasis on ‘feeling’ and that Nicholas Love presented the Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ as a meditative alternative for vernacular bibles in line with the Oxford Constitutions, I would argue that affective approaches, which contributed to the growth of individuality in lay spirituality, had been in the background of the Lollard movement. That is to say, we could see the Lollardy not simply opposed to but also as an extension of the affective devotion. The affective method was popular both among the religious and the lay, and eventually ‘blurr[ed] the boundaries of clerical and lay worship’. (Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body [ London and New York, 1993 ], p. 67) The Church was, of course, scared of the phenomena, but apparently they were not aware of the true threat to their authority; so they blamed Wyclif and his followers, and encouraged meditative devotion. The consequence of the interplay between the affective piety and the Lollard contention as to the absolute authenticity of Scripture is recognizable in the subtle alterations Love made to his translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi, which both reflected and advanced the changes in late medieval lay devotion.
Recent scholarship has shed some new light on this probably unintended nature of Love’s Mirror. Michelle Karnes, for example, observes that Love ‘significantly reconceptualizes’ the value of gospel meditations, (M. A. Karnes, ‘The “School of Devotion”: Imagination and Cognition in Medieval Meditations on Christ’ [Doctoral dissertation, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 2004], p. 227) while Kantik Ghosh suggests that ‘the Mirror bears witness to orthodox recognition of an important Lollard achievement: the breaking-down of the barrier between an enclosed academic milieu with its own rules and conventions of written communication, and a wider, comparatively unlearned world of lay devotion’.’ (Kantik Ghosh, The Wycliffite Heresy: Authority and the Interpretation of Texts [Cambridge, 2002] , p. 173)
In this paper I would like to examine in detail the use of some technical devotional terms such as ‘stir’, ‘feel’ and ‘imagination’ in the Mirror, and compare this text with other contemporary vernacular devotional texts. The term ‘stir’, for example, is repeatedly used in his Proem, apparently to present his translation as a vehicle for affective devotional practices, but the term does not occur in the text as often and in the way as his Proem invites us to anticipate. As a consequence, the events of the life of Christ look more like a verbally represented picture bible. The comparison with other texts will reveal more about the nature of Love’s text.