Abstract
This chapter explores built space as metaphorical means of ‘placing’ the self. Focusing on the late-medieval English religious texts Abbey of the Holy Ghost, The Doctrine of the Hert and The Book of Margery Kempe, Chaudhuri analyses the use of home and household as metaphors for the pious heart, or as the imaginary backdrop of the soul’s encounter with God. These household metaphors have conventionally been seen as a means of configuring the domestic environment as a legitimate devotional space, anticipating Bachelard’s association of the home with the inmost recesses of the psyche. Chaudhuri, however, argues instead that a principal objective of domestic metaphors in these texts is to reimagine the religious environment as a domestic one, thus extending and revising Bachelard’s concept of the ‘housed’ imagination.
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Notes
- 1.
Vincent Gillespie analyses these developments in ‘1412–1534: Culture and History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, ed. by Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 163–194.
- 2.
‘hous-hold’, n., Middle English Dictionary (MED). See also Sarah Rees Jones, ‘The Public Household and Political Power: Preface’, in The Medieval Household in Christian Europe c.850–c.1550: Managing Power, Wealth and the Body, ed. by Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic, and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 11–18.
- 3.
Walter Hilton, Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life Edited from Lambeth Palace MS 472, ed. by S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen, 1985), p. 9.
- 4.
Maryanne Kowaleski and P. J. P. Goldberg (eds.), Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 4, referring to Felicity Riddy, ‘“Burgeis” Domesticity in Late-Medieval England’, in Medieval Domesticity, pp. 14–36.
- 5.
The Abbey of the Holy Ghost in Middle English Religious Prose, ed. by N. F. Blake (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), pp. 88–102; The Doctrine of the Hert, ed. by Christiania Whitehead, Denis Renevey, and Anne Mouron (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010). I examine only the first part of Book I of the Doctrine as most illustrative of the allegorisation of household spaces, objects and activities. On the remainder, see Vincent Gillespie in ‘Meat, Metaphor and Mysticism: Cooking the Books in The Doctrine of the Hert’, in A Companion to the Doctrine of the Hert, ed. by Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2010), pp. 131–58.
- 6.
On architectural mnemonics, see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 238.
- 7.
The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. by Barry Windeatt (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000). Page references for all three primary texts are given parenthetically.
- 8.
An illuminating account of the same shift, based on Bridget of Sweden’s Liber Celestis, is found in Catherine Batt, Denis Renevey, and Christiania Whitehead, ‘Domesticity and Medieval Devotional Literature’, Leeds Studies in English, 36 (2005), 195–250.
- 9.
D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 46.
- 10.
Book to a Mother, ed. by Adrian James McCarthy (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1981), pp. 48–49.
- 11.
Book to a Mother, pp. 48–49.
- 12.
Christiania Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister of the Soul in Medieval Religious Treatises’, Medium Aevum, 67 (1998), 1–29 (p. 14).
- 13.
Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’, 4.
- 14.
On the domesticity of claustral space, see Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’, 23; Marilyn Olivia, ‘Nuns at Home: the Domesticity of Sacred Space’, in Medieval Domesticity, pp. 145–61.
- 15.
See Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’, 17.
- 16.
The term ‘representational space’ is drawn from Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 33, 39, 50–51.
- 17.
These modifications bring the Abbey into proximity with late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century texts such as Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman and The Holy Book Gratia Dei, which reinterpret secular spaces and activities as opportunities for meditation and prayer.
- 18.
See further Nicole R. Rice, ‘Spiritual Ambition and the Translation of the Cloister: The Abbey and Charter of the Holy Ghost’, Viator, 33 (2002), 222–60.
- 19.
For the comparable case of French beguines, see Tanya Stabler Miller, ‘Love Is Beguine: Labelling Lay Religiosity in Thirteenth-Century Paris’, in Labels and Libels: Naming Beguines in Northern Medieval Europe, ed. by Letha Böhringer, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Hildo van Engen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 135–50.
- 20.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. xxxvi.
- 21.
See Whitehead, ‘De Doctrina Cordis: Catechesis or Contemplation’, in A Companion to the Doctrine, pp. 57–82; Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 76.
- 22.
Several writers refer to the bitter drink given to Christ on the cross as ‘aisel and galle.’ See ‘aisel’, n, MED.
- 23.
Ancrene Wisse, ed. by Robert Hasenfratz (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000) offers a striking instance of this trope in Book 7. See also Christopher Cannon, ‘The Form of the Self: Ancrene Wisse and Romance’, Medium Aevum, 70 (2001), 47–65; Sarah Mary Chewning, ‘Intersections of Courtly Romance and the Anchoritic Tradition: Chevelere Assigne and Ancrene Wisse’, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures, 42 (2016), 79–101.
- 24.
On the authorship, genre and theology of The Book, see among others Sarah Beckwith, ‘A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe’, in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. by David Aers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 34–57; John C. Hirsch, ‘Author and Scribe in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Medium Aevum, 44 (1975), 145–50; Susan Dickman, ‘Margery Kempe and the English Devotional Tradition’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at the Exeter Symposium, July 1980, ed. by Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1980), pp. 156–72; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); and Nicholas Watson, ‘The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 395–434.
- 25.
On the negative value of literal domesticity in Margery’s life, see Sarah Salih, ‘At Home; Out of the House’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. by Caroline Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 124–140.
- 26.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 3, On the Song of Songs, trans. Killian Walsh, 4 vols. (Spenser, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971–80), I (1971), pp. 16–24.
- 27.
Smith, Arts of Possession, p. xvi.
- 28.
See Rice, ‘Spiritual Ambition’; Whitehead, ‘Making a Cloister’; and Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘The Doctrine of the Hert and Its Manuscript Context’, in A Companion to the Doctrine, pp. 159–81.
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Chaudhuri, A. (2020). Domestic Devotion: Representing Household Space in Late Medieval Religious Writing. In: Griffiths, J., Hanna, A. (eds) Architectural Space and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36067-2_7
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