Taking as her focus a body of writings in poetic, didactic, and legal modes that circulated in England's capital between the 1380sjust a generation after the Black Deathand the first decade of the ...English reformation in the 1530s, Amy Appleford offers the first full-length study of the Middle English "art of dying" (ars moriendi). An educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of medieval civic culture, she contends, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, the building of institutions, and the good government of the city itself.
In fifteenth-century London in particular, where an increasingly laicized reformist religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal, cultivating a sophisticated attitude toward death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense. The virtuous ordering of self, household, and city rested on a proper attitude toward mortality on the part both of the ruled and of their secular and religious rulers. The intricacies of keeping death constantly in mind informed not only the religious prose of the period, but also literary and visual arts. In London's version of the famous image-text known as the Dance of Death, Thomas Hoccleve's poetic collectionThe Series, and the early sixteenth-century prose treatises of Tudor writers Richard Whitford, Thomas Lupset, and Thomas More, death is understood as an explicitly generative force, one capable (if properly managed) of providing vital personal, social, and literary opportunities.
This article compares aspects of the work of Julian of Norwich and Thomas Hoccleve and argues that they both seek to inhabit the cultural identity of the ascetic. Preoccupied especially with a ...specific instantiation of that identity—the figure of Job as mediated through the Office of the Dead—Julian's A Revelation of Love and Hoccleve's Series think and move within the terms of a single religious discourse, one neither penitential nor affective. Complicating gender identity in quite explicit and direct ways, this common ascetic discourse self-consciously situates author and work alike at the intersection of the sheer materiality of bodily experience and the production of literary form.
Richard Whitford's
constructs a model of household governance organized around the contemplative life of the lay householder and his pastoral command over his
's companion text,
, centers on willed ...self-negation, teaching the householder monastic ascetic practices that emphasize rejection of the world and direct obedience to God. Together the manuals, which circulated widely during England's violent 1530s, work to interrupt the absorption of the Christian pastorate by secular state power. They do this by describing the household as a distinct locus of spiritual counsel, a self-enclosed unit that has only generalized interactions with other sites of religious authority. Lay piety in these texts does not aim to shelter its audience from the turmoil of surrounding events. Instead, the contemplative turn in Whitford's compilation explicitly absorbs the political, using it as fodder for potentially activist and resistant praxes.
Appleford and Watson criticize the writings of William Litchfield, a prominent rector and preacher of the second quarter of the fifteenth century, is a well-known minor figure to historians. They say ...that preliminary study of the writings ascribed to Litchfield suggests that this is where he can be specifically useful. Indeed, a good reason for accepting the common authorship of A Simple Treatise and the "Complaint" is that both are so coherently informative about the relations among works of charity internal spiritual disposition, and merchant salvation. Moreover, the creative engagement with existing models of urban lay and merchant religiosity shared by these works shows the stakes at play far more clearly and less eccentrically than does Pecock.
Appleford demonstrates how one member of the city's governing body, John Carpenter, situates and deploys a specific image of death, the Daunce of Poulys, a series of panel paintings, to create an ...appropriate, though refracted, image of the London polity. She argues that this long-destroyed, but still well-known London wall monument--the result of a collaboration between a poet named John Lydgate and Carpenter--is a striking example of the construction of an image of England's capital city as a diverse yet coherent association of people otherwise fragmented along numerous internal divides. She asserts that Carpenter's and Lydgate's civic wall paintings refurbish the classical choral dance as a Christian monument, emphasizing the vanity and transience of earthly and individual human life while evoking the dance as an image of the enduring nature of the London polity as a whole.
Shakespeare's compassionate presentation of Katherine of Aragon in
is part of a conscious Catholicization of the history of the English Reformation. Neither deliberately inconsistent nor merely a ...representative of one historical tradition presented by a Holinshedian playwright,
points to the possibility of a revitalized and continuous Catholic tradition. The play responds to a militantly Protestant cluster of history plays first acted in the early 1600s and revived in the second decade of the seventeenth century, particularly to their presentation of Elizabeth. Against this Protestantized history, Shakespeare presents Katherine as a figure of the reformist possibility within Catholicism, a figure that resonates with contemporary English Catholic subculture. But Shakespeare's Katherine also alludes sympathetically to a particular royalist agenda of historical and confessional recuperation of the past, recuperation marked by the new entombment of another Catholic queen, Mary Stuart.
So ends the first part of Thomas Wimbledon’s celebratedRedde rationem villicationis tue(give an account of your stewardship: Luke 16:2), a sermon preached in 1388 at Paul’s Cross in the churchyard of ...St. Paul’s Cathedral, one of the largest open spaces within the city walls, before a mixed assemblage of Londoners, setting out the duties of the three estates, chastising them for their failures, and looking forward to the coming judgment.² The kingdom of heaven is like a “housholdynge man.” Christ assigns the work of the household to “þre offices: presthod, kny. thod, and laboreris.” All three estates are
Philology--a methodology which traditionally views the identification of sources as an essential part of understanding a medieval text--has come under critical pressure in the last thirty years for ...historical positivism, a positivism which aesthetic-minded literary critics fear can transform a unique literary monument into an annotated historical document. In the case of Julian of Norwich, the problem of sources has been compounded by the fact of her gender and the lack of concrete evidence as to her identity. Source study in Julian's case has been caught up, since the first half of the last century, in debates regarding her education, in which source identifications are often mustered as evidence for or against her Latinity, her familiarity with traditions of late medieval theology, or the possibility of male clerical participation in the composition or inscription of her works. Here, Appleford examines Julian's complex and often idiosyncratic writing.
Prefacing a collected edition of his Latin works in 1545, Martin Luther, by now one of the most controversial theologians in Europe, describes a crisis, his so-called Tower experience, from some ...twenty-five years earlier. The crisis was personal and theological at once: “Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, indeed I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly . . . I was angry with God.”¹ Weighed down
Dying Generations Appleford, Amy
Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540,
10/2014
Book Chapter
An image of the deathbed of Richard Whittington, wealthy merchant, important creditor to the Crown, and three times mayor of London, forms the frontispiece of the earliest copy of an English ...translation of the ordinances governing the Whittington almshouse, one of the institutions funded by his massive bequest (Figure 1). The ordinances were written in Latin and sealed by three of Whittington’s executors—John Coventry, William Grove, and John Carpenter—in December 1424, twenty months after the merchant’s death in March 1423 and shortly after work had been finished on the building both of the almshouse and of a closely
