Looking Inward

Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England

Jennifer Bryan

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780812240481, 9780812240481
• eBook ISBN: 9780812201499
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"You must see yourself." The exhortation was increasingly familiar to English men and women in the two centuries before the Reformation. They encountered it repeatedly in their devotional books, the popular guides to spiritual self-improvement that were reaching an ever-growing readership at the end of the Middle Ages. But what did it mean to see oneself? What was the nature of the self to be envisioned, and what eyes and mirrors were needed to see and know it properly? Looking Inward traces a complex network of answers to such questions, exploring how English readers between 1350 and 1550 learned to envision, examine, and change themselves in the mirrors of devotional literature. By all accounts, it was the most popular literature of the period. With literacy on the rise, an outpouring of translations and adaptations flowed across traditional boundaries between religious and lay, and between female and male, audiences. As forms of piety changed, as social categories became increasingly porous, and as the heart became an increasingly privileged and contested location, the growth of devotional reading created a crucial arena for the making of literate subjectivities. The models of private reading and self-reflection constructed therein would have important implications, not only for English spirituality, but for social, political, and poetic identities, up to the Reformation and beyond.In Looking Inward, Bryan examines a wide range of devotional and secular texts, from works by Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas Hoccleve to neglected translations like The Chastising of God's Children and The Pricking of Love. She explores the models of identification and imitation through which they sought to reach the inmost selves of their readers, and the scripts for spiritual desire that they offered for the cultivation of the heart. Illuminating the psychological paradigms at the heart of the genre, Bryan provides fresh insights into how late medieval men and women sought to know, labor in, and profit themselves by means of books.

Chapter 1

A Very Inward Man

Though our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

—Paul, 2 Corinthians 4:16

What does it mean to have an “inward man”? If one wishes to live an inner life, search oneself within, or see with an inner eye, how exactly does one go about it? Where and how do we cross the boundaries from the outside to the inside? According to the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, most fourteenth-century Englishmen had not the slightest idea. Warning his readers against common pitfalls of contemplative practice, the Cloud-author complained that hapless cultivators of the inner life, responding eagerly to popular devotional rhetoric, were reversing the course of nature and driving themselves mad:

Thei reden & heren wel sey that thei schuld leve utward worching with theire wittes, & worche inwardes; & forthe that thei knowe not whiche is inward worchyng, ther-fore thei worche wronge. For thei turne theire bodily wittes inwardes to theire body agens the cours of kynde [nature]; & streynyn hem, as thei wolde see inwardes with theire bodily ighen, & heren inwardes with theire eren, & so forthe of all theire wittes, smellen taasten, & felen inwardes. & thus thei reverse hem agens the course of kynde, & with this coriouste thei travayle theire ymaginacioun so undiscreetly, that at the laste thei turne here brayne in here hedes.¹

The Cloud-author was not the only English writer to suggest a connection between madness and the misguided or unqualified pursuit of interiority. (Indeed, the link between inwardness and insanity recurs from Hoccleve to Hamlet.) The author of the early sixteenth-century Pomander of Prayer advises laypeople to pray vocally rather than mentally—not because they are in danger of mistaking spiritual for bodily coordinates, but because mental prayer “is so laborous and so vyolente that within shorte space it wyll brynge a man unto such debilitacion and wykenes of brayne that it wyll cast hym in great danger of seckness or some other inconveyence.”² Only the safely cloistered contemplative elite, he cautions, should practice this higher and more inward, if more intense and dangerous, form of address to God.

These two authors’ warnings bracket more than a century of serious concern over the meaning, possession, and pursuit of interiority in England. The difference between inner and outer, as many of the spiritual writers of the day agreed, was the difference not only between corruption and renewal (as Paul had written), but between the active and contemplative lives, or sometimes between the lower and higher stages of contemplation. Richard Rolle—whose followers were probably the target of the Cloud-author’s satire—assures readers of his popular Form of Living that while “Actife lyfe es mykel owteward…. Contemplatyfe lyfe is mykel inwarde.”³ Similarly, Walter Hilton begins his Scale of Perfection by explaining that active life consists “in love and charité schewyd outward in good bodili werkes,” while contemplative life “is in perfight love and charité feelid inwardli bi goostli virtues.”⁴ And though Richard Whytford claims to be unable to describe the active and contemplative lives so clearly, after much hemming and hawing he still defines contemplation “in playne englyshe” as a “diligent beholdyng or inward lokyng with a desyre of hert.”⁵

Indeed, as the boundaries between the active and contemplative lives blurred and became more difficult to define, the Middle English texts that were such a crucial factor in that blurring spoke habitually and insistently of inward affections and inward understanding, inward lovers and inward labor, inward devotion and especially inward beholding. Bridgettine nuns at Syon were advised to “laboure in your selfe inwardly. to sturre up your affeccyons” when reading in the library.⁶ The English Imitatio Christi explained that “the inwarde man … nevere pourith himself holy to outwarde thinges.”⁷ In a particularly hyperbolic passage from Mechtild of Hackborne’s Booke of Gostlye Grace, Christ tells the nun that she contains him “in the moste inwarde parties of thy sawle so that y be more inwarde to the[e] be my beynge with the[e] than alle thyne inwardness.”⁸ One of the most striking features of English devotional translations is their translators’ tendency to insert the word “inward” at every opportunity (as in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Crist, the English Stimulus Amoris, and Mechtild’s Booke, for example). Surely the fifteenth-century translator of The Doctrine of the Heart was disingenuous to lament that so many devotional texts “speken to the bodi outward but fewe to the hert inward of simple soules”—a deficit his own work would of course remedy.⁹ Few advertisements could have recommended his work more effectively to late medieval English readers. Just as surely, the Lollard writer who complained in a treatise against miracle plays that “the weeping that falleth to men and women by the sight of such miracles-playing … is not principally for their own sins, ne of their good faith withinforth, but more of their sight without forth” was making an accusation that would resonate not only with confirmed Lollards, but with a broad spectrum of readers.¹⁰

Yet for all their valorization of the interior—Rolle assured readers it was “lastandar and sykerar, restfuller, delitabiler, luflyer, and mare medeful”—it is not always clear what English writers actually mean by the term. We might assume that “inward” comprises thoughts and feelings as opposed to actions, the mind as opposed to the body: thus Hilton’s assertion that active life is about performing charity through works, while contemplative life is about feeling it through virtues. And there are many other texts in which “inward” does seem to conjur a relatively straightforward mind-body split. Lollard attitudes toward penitence, for example, emphasize inner contrition—contrition in the heart, before God alone—over formal confession and bodily penance. What, though, are we to make of writers who speak of “inward affections” or “inward understandings”? Is “inward” in such cases merely an emphatic, a habit of usage?

In some cases the term does seem to mean simply devout, or spiritual, or inclined toward God. In others it indicates sincerity or intensity—”depth” of emotion, we might say. But inwardness could evoke a flesh-spirit dichotomy without relying on a mind-body one, since for many medieval thinkers the flesh was not precisely the same as the body. Rather, the flesh extended into the heart and mind through sensory perception and sensual imagination—the internalized forms of outward things. For Augustine as for the Neoplatonists, thoughts became more inward as they became less dependent on these sensory images and bodily forms. (It is worth noting that Augustine’s works were enjoying something of a renaissance in fourteenth-century England, a point to which we will return.) According to Augustinian hermeneutics, the abstract, spiritual meaning is the “inner” kernel of truth, while figurative language is the outer, fleshly husk that conceals it. The outer is sensual, while the inner is rational. The human soul works the same way: its outer levels correspond to—and respond to—the outer level of the text, while its inner reason penetrates to the hidden, spiritual meaning of things. Fifteenth-century bishop Reginald Pecock follows the Augustinian paradigm in asserting that Reason is “the seid inward preciose book … buried in mannis soule.”¹¹ The author of The Chastising of God’s Children relies on it as well, declaring that more inward visions have fewer sensory components and are thus more trustworthy than their more outward counterparts. Imagistic, sensual visions may be misleading; abstract, rational visions are the likelier results of divine inspiration. Yet this text’s version of inwardness encompasses another dichotomy, that between private and public. More inward visions pertain more exclusively to the self and to the reader’s personal pursuit of virtues and are less likely to be shared. Between private spiritual progress and public teaching, between what is proper to oneself and what might pertain to others, “inwardness” traces a multivalent and powerful boundary.

To further complicate matters, if inner affections and understandings could be understood to be less dependent on fleshly, sensory imaginings, they could also be understood to be more so. Intensity of affection was thought to be most effectively stimulated by intense sensory experience. As Thomas Usk writes, “rude wordes & boystous percen the herte … to the in-rest poynte.”¹² Thus in many devotional texts, “inward beholding” requires a concentrated and colorful imagination—as in Nicholas Love’s vivid, see-it-as-if-you-were-there pictures of the life of Christ, which owe so much to the Franciscan tradition of visual meditation.¹³ “Inward” here is more concrete and lifelike, piercing the reader’s heart and drawing him or her further into a universe of imaginative experience. But like the author of the Chastising of God’s Children, Love implies a private/public dimension to interiority as well. Inward beholding creates personal and intimate knowledge, knowledge that pertains to the reader’s soul alone.

The hapless targets of the Cloud-author’s satire, then, might be forgiven for some confusion about “worching inward.” Although the Christian thematics of inner and outer stretch back to Paul and Augustine, receive extensive development in Gregory’s works, and figure importantly in major intellectual currents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries,¹⁴ in the vernacular culture of late medieval England they seem to spin out of control, taking on a puzzling range of significance and becoming the focus of varied attempts at restructuring, redefining, re-imagining. As the sine qua non of superior devotion and spiritual truth, the inner life might be more rational or more affective, more imaginative or more introspective, less bodily or less literal, more intense, more devout, or just more private. It might be less orthodox or more so. In the early sixteenth century, James Grenehalgh drew Joanna Sewell’s attention to a passage in her copy of The Scale of Perfection, writing triumphantly in the margins, “Quid sit interior oculus / diffinitive” (“what the interior eye is—definitively”).¹⁵ Whether Sewell’s interest or his own motivated this Carthusian’s marginal nota bene, he was not the only reader in England looking for authoritative definitions of inwardness, or formulating them. The Oxford English Dictionary registers a proliferation of semantics during this period, listing “coming from the inmost heart” as a new usage circa 1402, “devout” circa 1450, and “intimate” circa 1475. (It does not list the first instance of “secret or private” until circa 1548, though the Middle English Dictionary illustrates that meaning with Lydgate’s 1420 Troy Book.)¹⁶

But the meaning of inwardness is not only a question of semantics. Depending on how inwardness was understood and pursued, it could have important implications for many of the most hotly contested issues of the age: issues of understanding and faith, public ritual and private conscience, the nature of images, the right way to pray, the role of reading, even the proper attitude toward the sacraments. It mattered to the way men and women thought about the borders and makeup of their proper selves, and how they aspired to certain privileged ways of perceiving and being. The Middle English devotional texts of the period bear witness to a serious contest over the practical applications of this vague but crucial concept.

Such vagueness is not entirely surprising. Forms of human consciousness, while often central to claims of prestige and value, are notoriously difficult to define. Take, for example, the more recent scholarly controversy over the origins of the “modern self.” As Eric Jager writes, “The whole controversy depends, of course, on what exactly is meant by the ‘self’ and what precisely are the criteria of ‘modernity.’ In many cases, ‘modernity’ and ‘selfhood’ turn out to be largely honorary titles conferred on whatever a certain critic happens to admire or approve of.”¹⁷ Medieval writers were not immune to such enthusiastic imprecision. In many cases, “inwardness” turns out to be largely a fashionable term conferred on whatever a certain devotional writer happens to admire or approve of, whether that be understanding or obedience, spiritual autonomy or silence in church. In its purported inwardness or its purported modernity, the self is an easier thing to gesture toward than to pin down. But just as the term “modern” has real power as a label—even its careless use participates in a serious argument about our place in the world and in time—so too the term “inward” acts as a kind of touchstone for late medieval devotional culture, whether it means the same thing, or indeed anything, across disparate contexts. Even its careless use can alert us to the power of the idea, its centrality to narratives of medieval selfhood in relation to God, the church, and the world.

Of course, “modern” and “inward” and even “selves” are often assumed to be coterminous, particularly in early modernist scholarship. The English Renaissance, it is said, witnesses the rise of an interiorized religion (Protestantism), an interiorized lyric tradition (Petrarchan), and a widening gap between inner and outer selves influenced by a popular, secular dramatic tradition (Shakespearean)—among other cultural trends by which the English self becomes at once more inward, more exquisitely self-conscious, and of course more modern.¹⁸

Recently, however, some early modernists have begun to complicate this powerful narrative. Ramie Targoff, for example, has revisited the relationship between interior and exterior that “lies at the heart of early modern debates about devotional performance.”¹⁹ Revising accounts that insist on the radical separation of inner and outer selves fostered by Reformation theology and the Elizabethan settlement, Targoff demonstrates that prominent Tudor churchmen sought to strengthen the link between exterior behavior and interior devotion—partly, of course, in response to nonconformists who denied the outward readability of inner emotion and belief. Looking past Bacon’s famous assertion that Elizabeth did not “make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts,”²⁰ Targoff finds not “a triumphant embrace of the individual’s private and invisible self,” but a Protestant mainstream committed to the reliable correspondence between spiritual states and behavioral signs, and an ecclesiastical establishment eager “to shape personal faith through public and standardized forms.”²¹

Targoff’s provocative analysis suggests that the “inwardness” that was the focus of so much negotiation and concern in late medieval England continued to be a source of conflict after the Reformation. Like medieval churchmen a hundred or more years before them, Protestant authorities in Elizabethan England sought to reassert the transparency of the self and the efficacy of public prayer. But like earlier Lollard dissenters, Elizabethan recusants and nonconformists had a tremendous stake in asserting the hidden autonomy of the devotional subject. Meanwhile, ordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on Spelling and Punctuation
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: A Very Inward Man
• Chapter 2: Seeing a Difference: Mirrors and Texts
• Chapter 3: Private Passions
• Chapter 4: Profitable Sights: The Showings of Julian of Norwich
• Chapter 5: Hoccleve's Glasses
• Afterward
• Notes
• Workscited
• Index
• Acknowledgement