Nicole R. Rice, Ed.: Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations

NICOLE R. RICE, ED. Middle English Religious Writing in Practice: Texts, Readers, and Transformations. Late and Early Modern Studies, 21. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. 278 pp. 2 illus. Several important texts and interesting manuscripts are considered in this meticulously edited volume, and the essays on them are correspondingly detailed and thorough. Each essay is provided with its own works cited, which comprises not only primary sources and secondary works, but also list of manuscripts and archival documents. These lists form the index of manuscripts at the end of the volume. After comprehensive introduction by Rice, the book is divided into three parts: Continental Religious Women in English Practice, Manuscript Compilation and the Adaptation of Religious Practice, and (an awkward and not entirely apposite title) Negotiating Orthodoxy: Revision, Circulation, Annotation. The continental religious women of Part I are Catherine of Siena, Marguerite Porete, and St Bridget of Sweden. In From the Charterhouse to the Printing House: Catherine of Siena in England, Jennifer N. Brown looks at the transmission and circulation of three of Catherine s works among the Carthusians and Bridgettines and then into the seventeenth century, and in Poetry as Prayer: John Audelay's 'Salutation to St Bridget,' Martha W. Driver looks at Audelay's verse and imagery in the context of salutation poetry. Between these two essays, Michael G. Sargent considers Medieval and Modern Readership of Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des Simples Ames Anienties: The French and English Traditions. Sargent tackles Marguerite Porete and her modern critics head-on, arguing that the Free Spiritism she is said to have promoted is more an academic construct than reality: of the Mirror read what they saw as a compelling, esoteric, but fundamentally orthodox (63). His analysis of the Middle English transmission is particularly interesting, drawing as it does on his work with Father Edmund Colledge in the 1970s, and showing deep familiarity and understanding of the historiography of the Mirror. As with Brown's texts of Catherine, all three extant Middle English manuscripts, as well as the Latin translation, have strong Carthusian connections--and there is no evidence that either text had any other readers (77). In other words, it was not orthodox but it was read by the orthodox, and there was no Free Spiritism in England. The essay is furnished with an appendix of textual agreements among the French and Latin translations. Part II consists of just two essays, both weighty. In From 'Companion to the Novitiate' to 'Companion to the Devout Life': San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 744 and Monastic Anthologies of the Twelfth-Century Reform, Mary Agnes Edsall seeks to relate this mercantile family anthology (the Fyler MS) to tradition of companions to the noviate and to show how such works developed into companions to the devout life. …