The Texts and Their Tradition

This book brings together two striking but neglected specimens of late medieval devotion, the Holkham Prayers and Meditations (ca. 1400–ca. 1420) and Simon Appulby’s The Fruyte of Redempcyon (1514), hereafter HPM and 1514. Although written roughly a century apart, under differing circumstances and for different audiences, together they represent one of the most vital and idiosyncratic strands in medieval religious culture. At root, both consist of a series of prayers based around the ministry and passion of Christ. Each leads its readers through the central narrative at the heart of the Christian faith — at least as it was understood by the later Middle Ages — and asks them to offer praise for the various benefits or sacrifices described, or to reflect on the moral or doctrinal lessons imparted. But aside from this simple structure, both are equally marked by the active, not to say interactive, position they ask their audience to assume. Rather than simply reiterating the events recorded by the evangelists, they ask readers to insert themselves into the scenes as though they are living and ongoing episodes. Their rhetorical intensity, which is designed to appeal to the full range of sensory and imaginative faculties, effectively replays the gospel episodes in the mind of the reader; the point is to make biblical history vividly present in the imagination and emotions of the meditator, and in turn to make the meditator present in the events portrayed. Both texts therefore stand on the boundary between prayer and sacred history, and between artistry and practical instruction. They use the gospel accounts not only as the basis of their own intense reimagining, but in order to stimulate the reader’s own creativity and piety. Rather than being mere formulas for thanksgiving, in short, they conceive prayer as a complex psychological, emotional, and aesthetic process.

Before addressing the texts themselves, however, a little needs to be said about the tradition to which they belong. Their approach to prayer is the fruit of at least a century of contemplative activity, thought, and writing. Both cycles take their lead from the earlier Latin sequence Meditationes vitae Christi [Meditations on the Life of Christ], hereafter MLC, conventionally dated to the turn of fourteenth century, although more recently placed in the period ca. 1336–ca. 1360 or ca. 1325–ca. 1340. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Meditationes and the hold it exerted over medieval culture. Although it owes a clear debt to Cistercian practice in the preceding two centuries, it can be fairly judged “the single most influential devotional text written in the later Middle Ages.” Most of the usual metrics for assessing the importance of texts confirm its immense and widespread popularity. It survives in over two hundred manuscripts, around twenty of which are deluxe illuminated copies, and it was translated into several vernacular languages across Europe, in some cases multiple times. In the centuries following its composition, versions appeared in French, Spanish, and Italian, as well as Swedish, Irish, and Catalan. It found a particularly receptive audience in medieval England. Not only were its passages on the Passion and the early life of Mary disaggregated and recompiled into separate texts, thereby extending its reach further still, but it also gave rise to at least six Middle English adaptations. The most important of these is also one of the most widely read and copied texts in fifteenth-century England, the Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ (ca. 1409) by Nicholas Love, prior of the Carthusian charterhouse of Mount Grace in North Yorkshire. Beyond these larger monuments to the text, it also leaves numerous smaller traces throughout the culture of the period. Its influence can be seen in a wide variety of contexts across a formidable range of media, from drama to graphic art, from lyric poetry to penitential handbooks, and from sculpture to homily.

Yet for all its popularity as a repository of images and ideas, the Meditationes had greatest impact as a blueprint, stimulating further work in the same contemplative vein. Within a few decades of its composition, it had already begun to inspire similar visionary reimaginings of Christ’s life and death. Leading the pack is the Speculum vitae Christi [Mirror of the Life of Christ] (1374) by the Carthusian theologian Ludolph of Saxony, a text that attained a high degree of influence in its own right, and at several points directly replicates portions of Pseudo-Bonaventure’s sequence. Bridget of Sweden, a further major force in the development of fourteenth-century mysticism, also shows some familiarity with the work. Its influence continues to be felt, both directly and indirectly, on many key mystical writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries working in both Latin and the vernacular, including Thomas à Kempis, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, and Ignatius Loyola, among many others. The text, in short, quickly served as the spur for a considerable body of emotive, speculative engagements with Christian history, one which scholarship has come to regard as a fully-fledged Pseudo-Bonaventurean tradition.

In many respects, the rapid and far-reaching popularity of the text is curious, given that its origins are almost completely obscure. Its precise authorship and the circumstances of its composition are both unknown. From an early period it circulated under the name of Bonaventure, later St. Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century Franciscan theologian and cardinal-bishop of Albano. The attribution is almost certainly fanciful or erroneous: while the Meditationes takes a few cues from Bonaventure’s devotional writing, and shows a clear foundation in peculiarly Franciscan forms of spirituality, it seems to date from at least two decades after his death. It is more likely to have originated with the Poor Clares, or Order of Poor Ladies, the female religious community founded at San Damiano by St. Clare of Assisi, an early follower of St. Francis. The text itself is usually preceded by a prologue that explicitly singles out “blessed Francis” and “your sweetest mother, blessed Clare the virgin” for praise. What this means for the origins of the work continues to be subject to debate, however. In the eighteenth century, Bonaventure’s editor Benedetto Bonelli proposed another candidate as author: citing a note written by Bartholomeo da Rinonico in the 1370s, Bonelli put forward Giovanni de Cauli or Johannes de Caulibus, a friar from San Gimignano who apparently served as confessor and advisor to the Poor Clares. Giovanni’s authorship has been further endorsed by the nineteenth-century editor A. C. Peltier and the twentieth-century translators Francis X. Taney, Anne Miller, and C. Mary Stallings-Taney. More recently, however, Sarah McNamer has offered a more persuasive possibility, arguing that the work evolved in a piecemeal and cooperative way out of the contemplative practices of the sisters themselves. She sees a shorter Italian version not as a vernacular redaction of the text but its original kernel, which was later augmented into the more academic and sustained Latin sequence. Neither hypothesis has been accepted without reservation, however, and the precise nature of its composition seems likely to remain elusive. For this reason, scholarship refers to its composer as Pseudo-Bonaventure, to reflect its place among other attributed works, rather than designate an individual author in the modern sense.

The Meditationes contains over a hundred chapters, most of which pick up on specific episodes or moments from the gospel narrative. However, it is not the straightforward digest or retelling of Christ’s life that its accepted title might imply. The gospel narratives have been reformulated to carry a particular set of emphases. Even a casual glance makes clear that the length of sections, and the attention they are given, is very uneven: many of the miracles and parables, such as the restoration of the widow’s son (Luke 7:11–15) and parable of the wicked vine-dressers (Matthew 21:33–46), are dispatched fairly briefly while others, such as the reply to the Pharisees after the disciples picked corn on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1–8), receive far lengthier treatment. As might be expected, the two most exhaustive sections are the Passion and the visitation to Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38–42); the former is stretched out over seven chapters, and the latter episode triggers a thirteen-chapter digression on the distinction between the active and contemplative lives, one that reads more like a self-contained treatise than a segment of a larger sequence. Given that the collection probably originated with an enclosed female order, these insertions are not as invasive as they might first appear, despite their departure from the stated design of the text.

But looking beyond this occasional inconsistency, what unites the sections is the characteristic approach they assume. The text has a theoretical and demonstrative slant from the first, offering not only a sustained example of its psychological model of prayer but setting it out as a self-conscious methodology. In the prologue, Pseudo-Bonaventure directs the reader to see his or her meditative devotion as something akin to role-play: he urges the reader to suspend their own “extraneous cares and concerns” and instead to “place yourself in the presence of whatever is related as having been said or done by the Lord Jesus, as if you were hearing it with your own ears and seeing it with your own eyes.” This intention is not confined to the prologue, but explicitly informs the contemplations that follow; reminders are scattered through the chapters that the reader should see the collection as a demonstration and a prompt for their own exercises. In a meditation on the Incarnation and Annunciation, for example, the reader is again advised to insert themselves into the scenes they are contemplating: he or she is told to “bring your attention into play here and . . . place yourself in the presence of everything that is said and done” and asked to “watch closely, as if you were actually present, and take in mentally everything said and done.” This program is reiterated in the final chapter, where it is extended into a full cycle of devotions. After telling the reader once again to “make yourself present in the very place where, before your eyes, it occurs to your mind that events were taking place,” Pseudo-Bonaventure divides his contemplations into seven smaller sequences, to be parceled out day-by-day over the course of a week, no doubt to reflect the seven days of Creation.

This emphasis on individual engagement gives rise to one of the most striking features of the text, one that might seem surprising to modern eyes. At several points Pseudo-Bonaventure gives the reader license to revisualize as well as visualize the events of the New Testament. In his prologue he takes pains to point out that the gospels seldom record circumstantial details, and that these background elements can be made accessible through careful meditation: as he writes, “you should not think that all his words and deeds that we can meditate on, were actually written down. But to make them actually stand out, I will tell you about these unwritten things just as if they had actually happened, at least insofar as they can piously be believed to be occurring or to have occurred.” The same point is frequently reiterated in the chapters that follow, which often instruct readers to “enlarge on the scenes more fully” while taking care to “notice every detail.” Pseudo-Bonaventure fleshes out the scenes himself at multiple points; in the process he popularizes several supplementary narratives that became cornerstones of medieval devotion, most notably the conference between Jesus and the Virgin Mary after the Resurrection. Of course, this does not mean that the meditator is free to abandon or contradict the evangelists, or to project their own inventions into the biblical narrative with complete impunity: he also stresses that meditation must at all times be trained on facts “recorded in the Gospel” and makes clear that these extra details will only crystallize in the mind “as the Lord will grant it to you.” Nonetheless, the work’s overall attitude towards scripture is not a fundamentalist one; it might better be called generative, since it treats the imagination as a viable resource for understanding the mystery of the Incarnation to its fullest extent.

The Middle English Prayer Cycles

It is therefore no accident that Meditationes produced such a strong flow of adaptation and imitation. It actively invites such a response, not only presenting itself as a record of contemplative experiences but as a practical manual for readers to develop their own engagements with Christian history, and gives a powerful incentive for unearthing otherwise “unwritten things.” It was composed, in effect, with the full intention that readers should take up its example and engage in their own exercises. Both of the texts included here are attempts to put this program into action. Neither is a straightforward translation of Pseudo-Bonaventure in the manner of Nicholas Love, although their richly descriptive, emotionally affective language sticks closely to his recommendations; at times both pick up on specific details from the Meditationes, although it is sometimes unclear whether this is the result of direct contact or a consequence of inhabiting the same tradition. But they also serve to foreground the vibrancy and flexibility of the form of prayer Pseudo-Bonaventure codified. The two plot their own distinct paths, each attempting to adapt meditative worship to meet the needs of a different public and to serve distinct ends.

Although in some respects the most conventional of the two texts, the Fruyte of Redempcyon embodies this malleability. Written by the London anchorite Simon Appulby at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Fruyte was evidently designed for a lay, middle-class readership. Although the work of a recluse, in fact one of the last practitioners of anchorism in medieval England, it is a work attuned to the needs of the urban, commercial environment in which its author lived and worked. It was obviously successful in meeting this remit: it was issued in at least five distinct editions over the course of two decades and even seems to have sparked competition between rival printers.

The Prayers and Meditations, on the other hand, is tailored to a different, more intimate context, one that scholarship has often found difficult to access. According to its own prologue, it was written at the behest of a “religious sustir” seeking advice and guidance from another, more experienced woman, perhaps a senior member of her order. The text is therefore not merely a rare example of medieval female authorship, but an even rarer witness to a mentoring relationship between two women, of a kind only hinted at elsewhere. It is also a skillful and sympathetic composition, one that leads its reader through the rigors of meditative worship with a high degree of patience, compassion, and care.

This Edition

Despite their value for scholars and general readers, this is the first time that either text has been fully edited for publication. Although each text has occasionally caught the eye of commentators, editors, and anthologists, the Prayers and Meditations has never been published in its entirety. As far back as the mid-1980s an edition was under preparation by William Pollard; although it was advertised in a few contemporary journals, the project sadly never seems to have reached completion. Readers interested in the text have had to content themselves with the extracts included by Alexandra Barratt in her useful anthology Women’s Writing in Middle English (1992, revised 2010). Although Barratt gives an interesting and representative selection of excerpts, the nature of her compilation obviously precludes more comprehensive coverage; only a relatively small proportion of the total work is included, running to four of the fifty-four prayers and the author’s concluding remarks. The Fruyte of Redempcyon has fared a little better, but has also been unavailable in a fully-edited version until now. It has been appended to two valuable studies of Appulby, his world, and his text: a facsimile of the 1514 edition was included in Charles Welch’s Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Parish of Allhallows (1912), and a transcription of the 1530 imprint was attached to Claire Dowding’s 2014 Ph.D. dissertation. Many of the surviving copies of the Fruyte were also photographed in the 1930s and 40s as part of Eugene Power’s efforts to create a record of early printed books on microfilm, a project which evolved into the EEBO database in the late 1990s. While these projects have made the text accessible in its entirety, none seeks or claims to be a scholarly edition. Some in fact present severe hurdles for general or student readers wishing to engage with Appulby; the OCR transcription on EEBO is especially rife with errors and unreadable passages, some of which even make their way into the title of the book itself.

Each of the texts has necessitated a slightly different editorial methodology. In the case of the Prayers and Meditations, options for editing are limited by the fact that the text has only survived in a single manuscript. It must have circulated in multiple versions at some stage in its history: its manuscript is plainly not the author’s own holograph text but a presentation copy, and shows faint signs of having been corrected against a second copy. Nonetheless, the cycle is now only known as part of MS Holkham Misc. 41. Fortunately, the Holkham manuscript appears to be a reliable witness. It seems to have been produced by a careful and attentive copyist, judging from the relatively small number of scribal errors it contains. Yet its very uniqueness raises problems of its own. Most pressing of these is the fact that there is no way to retrieve text lost through physical damage; in the absence of further copies, even surmising how much of the cycle is now missing proves difficult, if not impossible.

The Fruyte of Redempcyon presents a somewhat different case. Although no manuscript copy has survived, perhaps because it was written expressly for circulation in print, it exists in no fewer than five distinct editions produced across two decades. In substance, these imprints vary much less than might be expected: the basic text they preserve is remarkably consistent, a fact that is especially impressive given that each must have been reset from scratch ahead of publication. Nevertheless, they still differ from one another in a number of key details. In the first place, they were obviously prepared with differing levels of care. The 1517 and 1531 texts are especially hurried and error-prone, with the former managing to misspell both its year of publication and the name of its printer; at the other extreme, the 1530 edition is unusually assiduous, even amending a number of irregularities from the earlier versions (although occasionally introducing fresh mistakes in the process). They also show the effects of wider shifts in early modern spelling and orthography. The period in which the Fruyte was published saw considerable flux in writing conventions, and the later versions show an unsystematic but perceptible movement away from older Middle English forms, especially after the thirteen-year interval that separates the 1517 and 1530 texts. Owing to these factors, I have based my edition on the 1514 version; since this is the earliest imprint, it lacks the editorial modifications found in later copies. However, where subsequent editions offer plausible emendations, I have not hesitated to incorporate them or at least flag them in the Textual Notes. Since the Fruyte is a translation, I have also used the notes to track when and how Appulby draws on his major sources. This should give a clear sense of his practices as translator on the one hand, and mark out where he interpolates original material on the other.

In terms of presentation of the texts, punctuation and capitalization have been modernized throughout, following the general editorial principles of the Middle English Texts Series. Orthography has been similarly adapted: in the Prayers and Meditations, the Middle English letter-forms thorn and yogh have been replaced by their modern-day sound equivalents. Along similar lines, all i/j and u/v spellings have been regularized, and I have silently expanded the scribal and printer’s abbreviations found in both texts. Where the second-person pronoun thee is spelled the, I have spelled it with a double e in order to differentiate it from the definite article; I have also added an acute accent to any terminal -e that should be treated as a syllable in its own right (i.e., pité, Trinité, gloteiné, charyté). Roman numerals have been retained and glossed in the case of larger figures, and spelled out for numbers below one hundred, using the preferred spellings of the base texts where possible; the only exceptions are Appulby’s chapter divisions, where I have replaced the original Roman numeration with Arabic numbers throughout. The only other substantive modification is the introduction of exclamation points in the Holkham Prayers after the interjection “a” in order to distinguish it from the indefinite article.

In addition, I have also made a handful of smaller adjustments, generally for ease of reference or reading. The most extensive of these interventions is the series of headings I have added to the individual sections of the Prayers and Meditations. In the manuscript, the individual prayers are unnumbered and untitled: however, its scribe takes considerable pains to differentiate between sections. Primarily this is achieved by rubrication, as the concluding formulas of the prayers are systematically rendered in red ink throughout, effectively signaling where each one ends. The start of each prayer is also marked by a large colored initial in blue set on a patterned red background, usually two lines in height; the prologue and “general confession” are preceded by even larger illuminated capitals made up of multicolored vine-and-leaf designs, in the first case partly finished with gold leaf. Blue or red pilcrows sometimes appear to pick out particular sections within the prayers, and Latin quotations are also rubricated. I have not attempted to reproduce any of this visual apparatus in the current edition, but have sought to preserve its overall function. In its place, I have allocated each prayer a number and a brief title based on the biblical episode (or episodes) with which it deals, following Barratt’s precedent. If nothing else, such a system should allow individual sections of the Prayers and Meditations to be identified, and the scope and content of the work as a whole to be compared with similar sequences. On occasion, I have also thought it necessary to break up some of the longer sections into thematic paragraphs of the kind familiar to modern readers, but have tried to do so sparingly. Lastly, I have quoted folio numbers throughout both texts. This is not merely in accordance with standard practice in the Middle English Texts Series, but for purposes of consistency. My two base texts employ different types of numeration: page numbers have been penciled into the manuscript that contains Prayers and Meditations by a modern reader or librarian, and the Fruyte of Redempcyon contains the usual erratic signature marks used by early printers. Converting both to foliation eliminates the discrepancies that naturally arise from toggling between two different systems.

Witnesses and Editions

Holkham Prayers and Meditations

• Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Holkham Misc. 41. Fols. 1r–49v.
• Barratt, Alexandra, ed. The Faits and Passion of Our Lord Jesu Christ. In Women’s Writing in Middle English. London: Longman, 1992. Pp. 205–18. [2nd ed. 2010. Pp. 211–20.] [Includes the author’s conclusion and a selection of her prayers, under the title The Faits and Passion of Our Lord Jesu Christ.]

Simon Appulby, The Fruyte of Redempcyon

• The fruyte of redempcyon. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1514. STC 22557. Cambridge, University Library, Sel 5.31.
• The fruyte of redempcyon. London: Wynkyn [de] Worde, [1517]. STC 22558.
• The fruyte of redempcyon. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1530. STC 22559.
• The Fruite of Redempcion: very profitable and moche necessary for every Christen man. London: Roberte Redman, 1531. STC 22559.5.
• The fruyte of redempcyon. London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1532. STC 22560.
• Welch, Charles, ed. The Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Parish of Allhallows, London Wall, in the City of London, 33 Henry VI to 27 Henry VIII (AD 1455–1536). London: Private Print, 1912. [Appends a facsimile of the 1514 edition.]
• Dowding, Clare M. “‘For your ghostly conforte that vnderstande no Latyn’: A Study of The Fruyte of Redempcyon by Symon Appulby.” Ph.D. Dissertation: King’s College London, 2014. Pp. 348–74. Online at https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.677149(Opens in a new tab or window). [Transcribes the 1530 edition and reproduces its woodcuts.]