Encounters with Christ in later Middle English pastoral and catechetic texts

Thesis

This thesis explores believers’ encounters with Christ in the first half of the fifteenth- century, as portrayed in Middle English pastoral and catechetic writings circulating at the time. Scholarship to date has examined the christological nature of lyrics, eucharistic devotion, passion meditations, and mystical writings, while overlooking important pastoral and catechetic texts. This approach has propounded a religious landscape in England marked by personal and privatised piety, and results in an impoverished account of the fundamental locus of encounters with Christ: public worship.

This thesis addresses this inaccurate perception of fifteenth-century religious culture in England, and demonstrates that pastoral and catechetic texts—grassroot textual witnesses mostly neglected for their supposed lack of ‘literary merit’—were predominantly popular and common as variants indicate, thus shedding light on religious practices and beliefs centred on Christ and taking place within the social body of the Church. This thesis examines more than 250 manuscripts and contributes to scholarship by offering new taxonomies of three corpora of texts: Virtues of the Mass treatises, levation prayers, and creeds. It uses a substantial number of mostly unknown and unpublished archival material, indexes and classifies the texts, while also analysing their content, manuscript contexts, and affiliation to textual networks.

This taxonomic work is supplemented by an effort in contextualisation, so as to understand the writings in their historical, political, and cultural context. A significant argument of the thesis, supported by evidence in Chapters One, Three, and Four, is that encounters with Christ promoted within public worship resonated with and advanced the reformist agenda of Archbishop Henry Chichele’s church. Chichele’s agenda was implemented throughout and after the Council of Constance (1414–1418), and promoted unity and pastoral care, while advocating for a ‘wide’ church, in which diverging theological and ideological views could coexist through the unifying nature of public worship. The three corpora under scrutiny are very much embedded within the religious landscape of the Chichelean church. The thesis argues that these corpora demonstrate a symbiosis between Latin and vernacular writings, and between intellectual and parochial milieux, that reflect a pervasive and porous theological discourse across a religious ecosystem particular to the years 1420s to 1440s in England, centred upon encounters with Christ in public worship.

Authors: Chan, AE

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: pastoral literature; lay spirituality; catechism; Middle English literature; manuscript studies
• Subjects: Devotional literature, English (Middle); Religious poetry, English (Middle); Didactic literature, English (Middle); Manuscripts, English (Middle)