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COPYRIGHT 2002 Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature
The topic of medieval female readers has elicited a great deal of scholarly interest since the work of pioneering feminist critics such as Susan Groag Bell and Susan Schibanoff in the 1980s. (1) Part of a greater shift in medieval literary studies towards an emphasis on the broader context of literary production and reception, (2) the study of women readers concerns such critical issues as patronage, book ownership, literacy, and gendered relationships between writers and readers. Scholars such as Felicity Riddy, Carol Meale, Rosalynn Voaden, Anne Clark Bartlett, Denis Renevey, Christiana Whitehead, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne have begun to produce a detailed picture of medieval female readers and their relationships to texts and authors. (3) This work has developed concomitantly with modern theories of reading and reception that also explore the complexities of the relationships between women readers and their texts: following from Judith Fetterley's theories of resisting female readers, they demonstrate that women can inhabit a multiplicity of reading positions. (4)
This idea also finds currency in medieval scholarship. In her study of female readership of Middle English devotional texts, Riddy cautions, `we should not assume that women were merely passive recipients of books, or that they could not have taken the initiative in the process of translating Latin into the vernacular' and that `[i]n the relation between the male clerks and their women readers it must often have been difficult to tell who followed and who led'. (5) Wogan-Browne's recent study of Anglo-Norman virginity literature and its female audience, Saints' Lives and Women's Literary Culture c. 1150-1300, also revises traditional perceptions of the medieval female audience, arguing that the concept of the passive female reader of hagiography is inaccurate and that reading virginity texts can offer sites of negotiation and multiple subject positions: `the politics of writing and authority are complex here, not a straight top-down mediation of Latin authority to vernacular ignorance.' (6) Wogan-Browne supports this contention by offering examples of significant female patrons, writers, and readers in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England who demonstrate diverse and complex relationships with Anglo-Norman texts. Such perspectives, both historical and theoretical, lead to a revaluation of women's more indirect participation in literary production and in creating meaning out of texts as readers, patrons, and translators. These approaches allow scholars to explore the intricacies of readerly stances--from those the text asks readers to assume, to resistant reading strategies, and to tactical or strategic reading practices that allow readers to read for their own purposes. (7)
These approaches open up complex yet fruitful discussions about the diversity of readers and reading practices, a perspective that is very useful for the study of medieval devotional texts for women, which at first glance appear to offer the female audience a rather limiting view of the world and themselves. This essay examines some Middle English devotional texts written for women in order to explore questions about their female readership and the reading models employed in the texts. Middle English vernacular devotional treatises found a likely and eager market in female religious readers, and although this tradition appealed to a wider, more general, devout audience, there are numerous Middle English devotional treatises that address a female readership either explicitly or implicitly; it is this tradition with which this essay is concerned. The Middle English devotional treatises examined here--The Myroure of Oure Ladye, De institutione inclusarum, Formula noviciorum, Disce mori, The Deuout Treatyse of the Tree and XII. Frutes, The Tretyse of Love, and Speculum devotorum--represent a selection of these kinds of treatises, some of which address nuns, some laywomen, and some a more general audience of pious female readers. These texts show a remarkable commonality in the portrayal of their audience--despite surface differences--a commonality that merits further exploration. These Middle English devotional texts also resemble each other in their didactic function and their emphasis on the quotidian life of the pious or religious woman in late-medieval England. The prescriptive nature of much of this type of material results in a surprisingly coherent picture of their female readers: the readers, when they are addressed and depicted in these texts, are depicted as female and feminine. (8) I argue that the late-medieval female reader of devotional texts was a gendered reader, for she came to understand her gendered subjectivity through her reading--reading that enforces cultural norms of gender (and sex, class, and race) and transforms these gendered norms into a kind of empowerment for the reader. The portrait of the female audience presented in these texts appeals to accepted notions of femininity (and class privilege) that idealize and flatter the readers and their gender. Rather than demonize the `fair sex' in order to correct behaviour, these texts ask their readers to strive to uphold certain standards of behaviour; prescription therefore adopts the guise of idealization and admiration. In this way, the female reader is encouraged to see herself in the text and to view this portrait as a powerful icon of her piety, social prestige, and textual authority. (9) This portrait glosses over or substitutes itself for the regulatory measures governing her conduct in order to guarantee her acceptance of the gendering process. I will argue that such texts acted to secure the submission of their female readers, by producing and maintaining the ideologies of gender, personal devotion, and literary production and reception through the naturalization of the ideal female religious reader. The two avenues of enquiry explored in this essay are the explicit addresses to readers that occur in the texts, and the emphasis on virtue, conduct, and femininity implied in the texts as models for their audience. By establishing a direct connection with the audience, through the use of direct addresses such as `my sister', the texts then attempt to shape the behaviour of their readers by producing an idealized model of pious femininity which the readers are encouraged to apply to their own lives and identities.
Some of the texts produce a very clear picture of their audience. For example, The Myroure of Oure Ladye was written expressly for the Syon nuns, who are addressed in the prologue. (10) The nuns of Syon Abbey, a fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century monastery founded by Henry V as a double monastery of the Order of Our Most Blessed Saviour, also known as the Bridgettine order (so named after its founder St Bridget of Sweden, a fourteenth-century visionary), (11) are central to the Myroure because this text is a translation of and commentary on their unique office devoted to the Virgin Mary (received by Bridget in visions). It provides English versions of the mass, explaining and describing the import of the prayers, words, and ceremonies central to the Bridgettine office and rule. Although the text does not purport to be a rule, it is instructional and functional, aimed at a specific audience and purposing to define the attitudes and quotidian behaviour of the nuns. The prologues establish immediately the hortatory function of the text and explain the way in which nuns ought to use this text:
therfore now moste dere and deuoute systres, ye that ar the spouses of oure lord Iesu chryste, and the specyall chosen maydens & doughters of his moste reuerende mother, lyfte up the eyen of your soulles towarde youre souerayne lady, and often & bysely loke and study in this her myrroure, and not lyghtely but contynually, not hastyng to rede moche atones, byt labouryng to know what you rede that ye may se and vnderstonde her holy seruice and how ye may serue her therwyth to her most plesaunce that lyke as it goyth dayly throughe your mouthes so let yt synke & sauoure contynually in your hartes. (12)
The nuns are figured as sisters, wives, virgins, and daughters in this passage, as a means of describing their special status as religious women: in the first case, their relationship to the writer is described as spiritual fraternity; in the second, it is their role as brides of Christ; and, finally, their relationship to the Virgin Mary is detailed: she is their mother and model of virginity and maidenhood. In this way, religious and metaphorical kinship relations refigure the family relationships the nuns leave behind when they take religious vows. As Gilchrist and Riddy have argued in their discussions of the creation of smaller communities, or familia, in nunneries, family relationships were often not left behind entirely by religious women but could still play an important role in their self-perception and their place in a religious house. (13) Nevertheless, religious texts...
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