Wisdom's Journey: Continental Mysticism and Popular Devotion in England, 1350-1650

by Steven Rozenski

Overview

Steven Rozenski reopens old discussions and addresses new ones concerning late medieval devotional texts, particularly those showing continental and German influences.

For many, Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German has come to define the spirit of the Protestant Reformation. But there existed a host of devotional and mystical writings translated into the vernacular that had more profound impacts upon lay religious practices and experiences well into the seventeenth century. Steven Rozenski explores this devotional and mystical literature in his focused study of English translations and adaptations of the works of Henry Suso, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas à Kempis, and the common devotional culture manifested in the work of Richard Rolle.

In Wisdom’s Journey, Rozenski examines the forms and strategies of late medieval translation, of early modern engagement with Continental medieval devotion, and of the latter’s literary afterlives in English-speaking communities. Suso’s Rhineland mysticism, the book shows, found initial widespread influence, translation, and adaptation followed by a gradual decline; Catherine of Siena’s Italian spirituality saw continued use and retranslation in post-Reformation recusant communities paralleled by vehement denunciation by English Protestants; and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ attained a remarkably consistent expansion of popularity, translation, and acceptance among both Catholic and Protestant readers well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wisdom’s Journey traces this path as it reshapes our understanding of English devotional and mystical literature from the 1400s to the 1600s, illuminating its wider European context before and after the Reformations of the sixteenth century. Written primarily for scholars in medieval mysticism, Reformation studies, and translation studies, the book will also appeal to readers interested in medieval studies and English literature more broadly.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268202750
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	07/15/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	344
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Steven Rozenski is an assistant professor of English at the University of Rochester. He is co-editor of Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and Its Afterlives.

Read an Excerpt

From three different half-centuries and three different regions in continental Europe, Suso, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas à Kempis demonstrate three considerably different paths towards the transmission of piety and the process of translating devotional theology in trans-Reformation England. Yet far more connects them than divides them, united as they are in their popularity, whether in manuscript or in early print – and united, too, by their relative exclusion in so many venues of contemporary canonicity. What, then, do canonicity and popularity mean for the study of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? How can texts such as these be reincorporated into contemporary literary studies? While translation studies and interest in female authorship have brought some of the texts in this book to the attention of wider scholarly communities in recent decades (particularly Catherine of Siena) broader studies of the interaction between devotion, translation, and literature are still rare. By looking at devotional culture and devotional mobility in England and the Continent from this perspective, as well examining the history of the books that were most widely read across Western Europe, this study has demonstrated what we might consider a new canon of “popular” literature that deserves a central position in our understanding of literary history. From this perspective, England is neither marginal nor insular, but was a thriving part of a textual culture which incorporated Continental mysticism into a broader discourse concerning the role of reading in shaping ethical behavior, the status and authority of revelatory visions, and, ultimately, the salvation of souls.

In all these cases, the status of the “author” is not a one-dimensional march from mind to page, from medieval manuscript to contemporary monograph. Neither pages, nor minds, nor languages are that straightforward – in any time period. And, as is entirely unsurprising for any medieval text, the layers of compiling, translating, copying, reporting, and editing all variously contribute to the intermingled, hybrid spiritual text as it was experienced then, and as it is read today – all these interconnected facets of what Sarah Poor calls “cloaking the body in text.” Just as medievalists have, for the better part of a half-century, been able to recognize the forces at work in limiting medieval literature by employing post-Romantic ideals of authorship, so too do the barriers between source text and translation, life and Life, Latin and vernacular, medieval and “Renaissance,” seem increasingly restrictive to me. There is far, far more to be gained by looking across languages, genres, types of textual production, and the boundaries of periodization than there is to be lost.

By studying the transreformation history of the translation of the texts in this study, and recalibrating our understanding of how translation functions as a positive form of intellectual production, we encounter an otherwise missing link between the visionaries and prophets of high and late medieval Europe and, for instance, the seventeenth-century prophetic figures of Quakerism, Methodist spirituality in the eighteenth, and New World visionaries from the late sixteenth century onwards. Similarly, the extraordinary diversity of gender imagery in representations of Jesus in the texts studied here evince an understanding of divine gender that is far closer to contemporary ideals of genderfluidity and performativity than one might otherwise have expected. In reconsidering canonicity, popularity, and mobility in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we might also see a turn away from the affective and the vernacular in the study of devotion. While these have undoubtedly proved rifts laden with ore in recent decades, yet they too often reinforce existing canons and notions of popularity, excluding lesser-known texts and non-insular literary traditions. By instead focusing on aurality, gender, and translation across regions and across time periods, I hope this book can reframe discussion of what Rolle, Suso, Catherine, and Kempis meant to readers in England and across Europe for centuries – and what they might mean to us today.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Devotional Theology and Devotional Mobility

Chapter 1: Devotional Mobility in Fourteenth-Century England and Germany

Chapter 2: Henry Suso in England: Rhineland Mysticism and Middle English Literature

Chapter 3: Catherine of Siena in Trans-Reformation England: Translations of Female Visionary

Chapter 4: Thomas à Kempis and The Imitation of Christ: The Devotion of the Fifteenth- Century Low Countries and the Birth of Confessional Textual Criticism

Conclusion: Authorship, Canon, and Popularity

Editorial Reviews

Wisdom’s Journey crosses the medieval/early modern divide in an accomplished fashion [and] makes a very convincing case for the importance of recognizing the European context of medieval English devotional literature and culture.” —Annie Sutherland, author of English Psalms in the Middle Ages, 1300–1450

“A major contribution to our knowledge of the transmission and transformation of crucial medieval devotional writings in later centuries.” —Alastair Minnis, author of Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature

"Steven Rozenski explores devotional and mystical literature in his focused study of English translations and adaptations of the works of Henry Suso, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas à Kempis, and the common devotional culture manifested in the work of Richard Rolle. Written primarily for scholars in medieval mysticism, Reformation studies, and translation studies, Wisdom's Journey will also appeal to readers interested in medieval studies and English literature more broadly." —Church History

"Rozenski is to be commended for his extensive research and refreshing insight into the literary function of these well-known religious texts." —Anglican Theological Review

"[T]he most powerful aspect of this book is its insistence on seeing translation itself as an act of creation and meaning-making, rather than regarding a translated text simply as an altered or, worse, reductive form of its source." —The Review of English Studies

"Rozenski's fine book fulfills its claim that focusing on 'aurality, gender, and translation across regions and across time periods' provides new insight into many aspects of Late Medieval and Early Modern mysticism." —Church History

"Rozenski offers an illuminating account of the long life of Continental devotional theologies translated in Middle and early modern English, one that invites further consideration of other existing Continental translations circulating in medieval England. It also decompartmentalizes insular England from the continent by showing the extent to which continental literature found its way into Middle English devotional treatises through the work of theologically and textually sophisticated translators. Wisdom’s Journey’s departitioning of the medieval from the early modern is also a boon that proves to be extremely productive. Rozenski’s insightful reflections are well supported by his detailed close readings and multiple references to a vast number of secondary sources."—The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures

"The scope of this book is capacious and gathers together rich material for scholars wishing to step outside traditional frameworks of studying literature by considering the text’s movement across national, linguistic, cultural, and confessional frontiers." —Journal of English and Germanic Philology

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