Abstract
Throughout this study, I have attempted to understand erotic discourse within the context of the religious institutions that specifically shape its forms and functions. In the case of Christ I, monastic liturgical practice demands an erotics that supports communal participation in the sacred events marked by the monastic calendar. The isolating spatial practices of anchorites, in contrast, give rise to an erotic identification with the cell that is privatized, and perceived as both dangerous and necessary. In the monastic and anchoritic works discussed so far, then, an understanding of institutionally specific practices—practices that comprise a material tradition of worship— illumines the ends of eroticism. It suggests, that is, how erotic discourses are played out in the world of the texts’ readers.
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Notes
Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953), p. 170.
The lyric is included in An Old English Miscellany, ed. Richard Morris, EETS o.s. 49 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969)
English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932)
and the following general anthologies: Middle English Literature, ed. Charles Dunn and Edward Byrnes (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973)
Early Middle English Texts, ed. Bruce Dickins and R. Wilson (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1951)
and Middle English Verse and Prose, ed. Roger Sherman Loomis and Rudolph Willard (New York: Appleton Century Croft, 1948).
It also receives brief mention in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999)
Michael Swanton, English Literature Before Chaucer (London: Longman, 1987)
J. Bennett, Middle English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986)
Douglas Gray, Themes and Images in the Medieval English Religious Lyric (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972)
and Rosemary Woolf, An Introduction to the Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968).
Two studies, in particular, attempt a reassessment of the poem: William Rogers, Image and Abstraction: Six Medieval Religious Lyrics (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1972)
and James Earl, “The ‘Luue-Ron’ of Thomas de Hales,” in Magister Regis: Studies in Honor of Robert Earl Kaske, ed. Arthur Groos et al. (New York: Fordham UP, 1986).
Betty Hill, “The ‘Luue-Ron’ and Thomas de Hales,” Modern Language Review 59 (1964), p. 329 [321–330].
Sarah Horrall, Introduction to Lyf of Oure Lady: The ME translation of Thomas of Hales’ Vita Sanete Marie, ed. Horrall (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitatsverlag, 1985), p. 8.
See M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 179–82, on the development of new indexing systems by the English Franciscans and also the Oxford Franciscans’ Registrum Anglie de Libris Doctorum et Auctorum Veterum, ed. Richard Rouse and Mary Rouses (London: British Library, 1991), a massive survey of book-holdings in English monastic and cathedral libraries.
see Jennifer Ward, Women of the English Nobility and Gentry: 1066–1500 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995).
The Anglo-Norman Chasteau d’Amour (alternately Chateau d’Amour) has been edited by J. Murray, Le Chateau d’Amour (Paris: Librairie Champion, 1918), and by
M. Cooke, Robert Grosseteste’s Chasteau d’Amour (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967 rpt.).
See also Kari Sajavaara, The Middle English Translations of Robert Grosseteste’s Chateau d’Amour (Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique, 1967) for a diplomatic edition of The Castle of Love, a fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the Chasteau.
See also, Roberta Cornelius’s broader study, The Figurative Castle: A Study in the Medieval Allegory of the Edifice with Especial Reference to Religious Writings, Diss., Bryn Mawr, 1930, pp. 44–46.
For the Latin text, see Cassiodorus Senator, Institutiones, ed. R.A.B. Mynors (London: Oxford UP, 1937).
For an English translation, see Cassian, The Conferences, ed. Ramsay (New York: Paulist Press, 1997).
On Fontevrault and its approach to female piety see Penny Gold, “Male/Female Cooperation: The Example of Fontevrault,” in Medieval Religious Women, Vol. I: Distant Echoes, ed. John Nichols and Lillian Shank (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publication, 1984) and
Gold’s The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985), pp. 93–113.
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© 2006 Lara Farina
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Farina, L. (2006). The “Popularization” of the Affective?: Friar Thomas of Hales and His Audience. In: Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04931-5_5
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