Our first sequence of prayers is among the most remarkable specimens of the form in medieval English. It offers both an introduction to its chosen genre and an interesting and unusual composition in its own right. On the one hand, the text provides a snapshot of the richness and complexity of late medieval religious discourse in English. It deftly weaves together several overlapping traditions, sources, and lines of thought, and spotlights the dense accretion of material that had built up around the gospel accounts by the later Middle Ages. At the same time, however, it also stands as a comparatively uncommon example of its genre, taking a markedly innovative, even idiosyncratic approach to the framework it has inherited from Pseudo-Bonaventure and his imitators.

The Text’s Manuscript and Scope

The text is a rarity in a more literal sense too, since it only survives in a single copy. Its lone manuscript, MS Holkham Misc. 41, is currently held at the Bodleian, which acquired it from the Coke family in 1956 as part of a longer-term purchase of volumes from the Cokes’s collection at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, beginning with a sale of early printed books in 1953. Its current bindings are embossed with the family’s curious insignia, featuring an ostrich devouring a horseshoe, and are inscribed with the signature of Thomas William Coke, first Earl of Leicester (1754–1842). It had apparently been in the possession of the Cokes since at least the early seventeenth century, catalogued under the old reference Holkham Hall 675. The prayer sequence is the first of three texts in the manuscript. It is followed by a brief devotional quatrain, and an English version of the Remediis contra temptaciones [Remedy Against Temptations] (here given the title “Consolacio animae,” or “Comfort of the soul”), originally written in Latin by William Flete in ca. 1357. Jessica Lamothe suggests a likely date of ca. 1430–1450 on the strength of its patterned borders. The prayer sequence itself seems to date from the late fourteenth century or early fifteenth century, perhaps a little after 1415. In its current form, it consists of fifty-four brief prayers ranging from fifty to over five hundred words in length. It was clearly more extensive in its original version; the condition of the manuscript makes obvious that only a partial text has come down to us. While much of the manuscript is badly deteriorated by mold and damp, more serious damage occurs during prayer 36, where an indeterminable number of leaves is missing, perhaps as many as a full quire. The text breaks off when describing the Last Supper and only resumes midway through the formula “I thanke and magnifie yow,” effectively jumping to the opening line of an entirely new section (37.1).

In terms of their content, the prayers follow a structure that is immediately familiar from the larger Pseudo-Bonaventurean tradition. Each focuses on a particular episode from the life of Christ, or a set of thematically linked episodes, and asks its reader to reflect on a group of concerns or give thanks for a specific blessing as they contemplate the events in question. The driving principle is much the same as that which guides Pseudo-Bonaventure’s work, as the text uses richly descriptive and emotive language in order to restage sacred history in the imagination of the meditator: in the words of Michelle Karnes, its policy is to move Christ’s life and passion from “its historical occurrence” into the here and now, directing the reader “to suffer with Christ in order to glory with him” in a state of “spiritual intimacy.” The text itself sets out such an approach in its first prayer, describing its wish to stimulate “reverence and remembraunce” by fixing “in mende the grete dedes” that Jesus performed. This aim is made clearer still by one of the text’s most distinctive rhetorical features, its heavy use of the interjections “o” and “a.” These exclamations appear over eighty and twenty times, respectively, across the sequence; they serve not only to strengthen the emotional punch of the descriptions, but also to fix contemplation to particular ideas or images, in a manner reminiscent of the popular passion-prayers The Fifteen Oes. The cycle in fact seems to be responding to Pseudo-Bonaventure in more than its general approach. While the text is by no means a slavish imitation, direct knowledge of the Meditationes vitae Christi can be inferred at several points: prayers 4, 8, 12, 20, 29, and 47 make extensive use of Pseudo-Bonaventurean motifs, and the closing instruction “bindith not yow self to seye al ovir the preieres every day” might be a tacit rebuttal of the more regimented scheme he sets out in his concluding chapter. Although it is entirely possible that the author might have met this information elsewhere, given Pseudo-Bonaventure’s hold over the medieval literary and artistic imagination, the quantity of shared detail suggests some familiarity with this founding meditative cycle.

The Author and Her Reader

While the sequence might draw from the main wellspring of its tradition, it is set apart from it in one crucial respect. What gives the text particular interest, not to say value, is the identity of its author. It is likely the work of a female writer, fulfilling the request of a second woman either in or about to enter religious orders. The first few lines of the prologue point to both of these circumstances. Not only is the reader addressed as a “religious sustir” and described as commissioner of the cycle, having supposedly “desirid” its production, but the author makes apparent reference to her own gender: after asking that her reader “takith me with yow in yowre preieres,” she pleads “o myn sustir, preie my lord God the Trinité . . . have mercy and pité on me, sinful, and make me a good woman.” While this last claim might be dismissed as a narratorial device, akin to the ambiguous personae used in the Floure and the Leafe or Findern lyrics, there is little reason not to take the prologue at its word; after all, ironic literary games would be out of place in a practical and instructive text such as this, which presupposes a familiar, mentoring relationship between its author and reader.

The text therefore seems part of a relatively select group of medieval vernacular texts composed both by and for women. It is not completely without parallel, of course. Female readers provided a vital and avid audience for vernacular advisory literature throughout the medieval period. From the early examples Sawles Warde [Custody of the Soul], Hali Meithad [Holy Maidenhood], and the Ancrene Wisse [Instructions to Anchoresses], through to Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection, Richard Rolle’s Form of Living, and the Book for a Simple and Devout Woman, educational material for women comprises a major channel in Middle English writing. Along the same lines, other prayers from the period were also demonstrably composed by women, such as the brief texts written at the convent of St. Mary in Chester in the fifteenth century; as Jennifer Summit notes, prayer can in fact be seen as “a privileged literary genre for women,” one in which women’s traditional lack of authority could be turned into self-effacement before God. Indeed, meditative cycles caught the eye of other female translators and adapters, no doubt encouraged by the fact that the Meditationes itself evolved out of the practices of the Poor Clares. In the mid sixteenth century, Henry VIII’s sixth queen Katherine Parr composed her own sequence in the same vein, under the title Prayers Stirryng the Mynd unto Heavenlye Medytacions. Nevertheless, none of this diminishes the significance of the Holkham text. While the possibility that its voice is a fictive persona cannot be ruled out entirely, it appears to be an exceptional example of a medieval woman producing a full-scale and largely original work; it is also written with vividness and self-assurance as well as clarity and skill. It is not too much of a stretch to place it alongside the Shewings of Julian of Norwich and the Book of Margery Kempe. Like those works, it serves to deepen our appreciation of medieval female authorship and the potential forms it might assume.

Nor is the gender of the cycle’s author a cosmetic or negligible issue; it colors the text and its contents across a range of fronts. In many ways, it might be said that the text represents a customization of religious experience for women. The author often reconfigures her material to reflect a distinctly feminine standpoint, or to make it particularly suitable for women’s usage. In the first place, as scholarship has been quick to recognize, her selection of biblical and other material seems designed to reflect female concerns above all. For the most part, she is content to follow the chronology established by Pseudo-Bonaventure, albeit omitting several sections and compressing and combining others. Yet the presence of women during Christ’s ministry is noticeably foregrounded: as Pollard observes, “throughout there is an emphasis on women: Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, the woman of Canaan, the Samaritan woman, and any event in which Christ responds to the wishes of his mother.” Some of these topics attract the most sustained prayers in the sequence. By far the longest section — and the only prayer to exceed five hundred words in length — is prayer 25, which is dedicated to Christ’s interactions with Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha. Comparably extensive is prayer 29, at just under four hundred words, dealing with the woman accused before the Pharisees. Tellingly, both are longer than the prayer that might be expected to form the centerpiece of the sequence, number 40, dealing with Christ’s agonies on the cross. Slightly shorter, although still exceeding the average length, are prayer 22 on the Samaritan woman and prayer 30 on the woman of Canaan’s daughter, which weigh in at nearly two hundred and three hundred words respectively. Almost as substantial are prayers that present Christ engaging in traditionally “feminine” domestic duties: prayer 26 on feeding the multitudes is the second longest piece in the collection, and prayer 34 on the cleansing of the temple is around the same length as prayer 22. While the author may have had many reasons to single out these particular episodes, especially given the traditional prominence of Mary and Martha in discussions of the contemplative life, they provide a fair indication of where the author’s interests fell.

But the emphasis on these figures and events has still greater resonance. As Catherine Innes-Parker has shown in two important interlinked essays, the author is invariably using them as a means of signalling qualities or actions her reader should imitate in her own spiritual life. Such a purpose can be seen in the first biblical example we encounter, the woman of Canaan from Matthew 15:22–28, who asks Jesus to exorcise her daughter and is granted her request as a reward for “great faith.” She appears to signpost the general effectiveness of sincere prayer, embodying Christ’s amenability to “alle sinful that wole forsake here sinnes.” The same is true of the Samaritan woman, St. Veronica, and above all the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, who each provide a different model for interaction with the divine. At the same time, as Innes-Parker also stresses, male figures tend not to be evoked in the same terms; there are only a few, anomalous cases of men playing exemplary roles, such as Longinus in prayer 44. Indeed, when men are mentioned positively, they usually stand for “the church in general” rather than representing actions individual Christians should perform, a pattern visible in the treatment of the three kings, shepherds, and apostles; moreover, when the author is looking for figures to embody “traits which the individual soul should strive to avoid,” she tends to call on men such as Hezekiah, Lucifer, and the Pharisees, who stand for the dangers of pride or spite. Even Peter attracts this second application, as he is twice made to figure cowardice before trials of faith, in prayers 27 and 31. In other words, when the text seeks out examples of proper conduct or belief for the reader to emulate, it almost invariably turns to the women of the New Testament.

This intent does not only dictate the selection of material, but also creeps into the vocabulary the author employs. A key example is the use of the word “magnify” to introduce many of the prayers, a term that appears some sixty-two times in various forms throughout the text. Although reasonably common in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English, as the Middle English Dictionary can attest, in this context it seems to carry a particular resonance. The term is no doubt designed to recall Mary’s prayer in Luke 1:46, which begins “my soul doth magnify the lord” [“Magnificat anima mea Dominum”]. This text is one of the most central and recognizable in medieval piety, since it forms the basis of the Magnificat, the hymn customarily recited at the daily hour of vespers; the author herself signals its importance by dedicating prayer 4 to Mary’s composition of this “psalme.” The point is that by evoking this passage, Mary effectively becomes a model for all the acts of worship the author prescribes; the prayers ask that the reader commemorate, even ventriloquize, Mary as she carries out her own devotions. Although the prologue makes the Lord’s Prayer the template of all worship, issued by Christ himself as “the most principal preire of alle other prieris,” the author’s vocabulary awards the “psalme” of his mother near-equal status. Again, the same central point asserts itself: the text represents a thorough and thoughtful adaptation of the biblical narrative to draw out the presence of women for the reader to imitate.

The Author’s Reading and Sources

Similar cherry-picking can be seen in the text’s approach to other cultural materials. The author is relatively demure about her reading: in her epilogue she notes that she has consulted “the passion of the gospel” alongside a further undisclosed source “be revelacion of God schewid to a religious persone.” Nonetheless, it is clear that she has impressive knowledge of a wide range of religious discourses. In Edmund Colledge and Noel Chadwick’s assessment, she is evidently “well versed in Scripture, able in pastoral theology,” and “interested in the techniques and the theory of prayer”; Pollard has likewise detected deep familiarity with English mysticism, especially the work of Hilton and Rolle. In fact, her work is so profoundly entangled in the various threads of contemporary religious thought that it can be difficult to know where she might have encountered a particular concept or motif. This is especially true of her treatment of the Crucifixion in prayers 39–42, where she is able to draw on a long and complex tradition of embellishment and amplification. As Thomas Bestul notes, when visualizing the Passion, vernacular culture took to heart Pseudo-Bonaventure’s advice to “enlarge on the scenes more fully” and built up a large body of “details that have no warrant in the biblical text,” many of which are freely utilized by the author. However, even with this in mind, her choice of material often seems slanted by her larger preoccupations. At points she shows herself particularly attuned to styles of devotion developed and deployed by her female predecessors and contemporaries. A key instance is prayer 53 on the Sacred Heart. This is notable not only for the intensity of its language but also for its pronounced debt to a particular strand of visionary literature: it is rooted in the impassioned writing that emanated out of the Benedictine convent of Helfta in the late thirteenth century and replicates many of its characteristic images and idioms. Likewise, it is not difficult to find examples of the embodied forms of faith often associated with female religious writers. Although the author does not reach the same spectacular heights as Julian of Norwich, the body and “experiential bodily effect” are noticeably present throughout her reflections and advice, as Liz Herbert MacAvoy has observed; they leave particularly heavy traces in prayers 35, 44, and 46, which are constructed around images of the weeping, bleeding, and enclosed body.

Even when the author borrows from larger traditions, the same sympathies often assert themselves. Of particular interest is the symbolic vocabulary she employs, which frequently draws on the stock of phrases and metaphors found in penitential and sermon literature. Prayers 19 and 4 make particularly conspicuous use of this material, as does the discussion of Lucifer in the epilogue, while the language of prayers 31 and 2 might also call on it. In many of these selections, there is again a clear preference for imagery with relevance to the feminine sphere. The most obvious example is her striking comparison between confession and house-cleaning. As well as forming a major component of the prologue, this idea resurfaces in prayer 34, in which Christ is depicted as both inhabitant and habitation, cleaning and demanding cleanliness from the soul. The image is a common one in penitential literature, especially in texts originating with the Dominican order: for instance, the Ancrene Wisse includes an account of a “povre widewe, hwen ha wule hire hus cleansin” [poor widow, when she wishes to clean her house] in its chapter on confession, and it forms the basis of the first chapters of Liber de doctrina cordis [Book on the teaching of the heart], composed by either Gerard of Liège or Hugh of St. Cher in the mid-thirteenth century, and probably known to the author. Similar selectiveness is at work in prayer 3. Here the author picks up on a further commonplace comparing Mary’s pregnancy to the operation of grace within the Christian. Yet the important point to stress, as Innes-Parker again points out, is that in many cases she gives her imported material new inflections. In particular, she tends to sidestep “the stress on sexual sin and the dangers of the female body” often found in such imagery, disregarding its “fear and mistrust of women’s sexuality.” Hence there is a conspicuous lack of reference to the female body as a site of corruptibility or permeability at special risk of temptation. Even when dealing with figures such as Mary Magdalene and the woman taken in adultery, the author nowhere uses them to reflect on the supposed carnality of women or their greater vulnerability to sin. Granted, there are limits to this stance. The sequence is by no means a unilateral endorsement of women’s agency, since it is still by necessity rooted in late medieval social and religious norms. There are several points at which conventional patterns of authority shine through: when she stresses the importance of auricular over general confession, for instance, the writer is also reminding her reader of the importance of submitting to the judgment of an appointed male confessor; prayer 12 likewise emphasizes obedience to paternal authority even when it is purely nominal, praising Jesus for his deference “to hym that was clepid yowre fadir, Joseph” and identifying Joseph with the “soveraynes” to whom the reader must also defer. Yet the fact remains that the author is manifestly working from — and in the service of — a female viewpoint. She not only picks up conducive strands from medieval religious culture but eliminates much of the engrained misogyny implicit in her material.

Perhaps more interesting still is the position the author establishes for herself in relation to her reader. It is generally true that advisory work written by medieval men for women cultivates a strictly hierarchic dynamic: as Susanna Fein writes, “the spiritual guidance found in these works is shaped by gender; that is, it is literature for women, and often it is specifically a learned man’s counsel going to a woman positioned as being in need of his tutelage and as gladly, passively accepting of his higher wisdom.” However, the prayers follow a recognizably different course. While the writer’s apologies for her “lewde techinges” (HPM Prologue.1) are largely conventional, and comparable to Pseudo-Bonaventure’s own proclamations of “inadequacy” and “inexperience,” she shows a general tendency to disavow rather than affirm her own authority. Her use of Latin is a case in point. It is obvious that the author knew the Vulgate well and probably had access to a glossed version of the Bible, most likely some form of the twelfth-century Glossa ordinaria [Standard Gloss]. There are several points at which the language is simply too close to the Vulgate for the Latin not to have been consulted: examples include the Eight Beatitudes in prayer 23 or Jesus’s words to the woman of Canaan in prayer 30, which are close, skillful, and apparently original translations of Matthew 5:3–10 and Matthew 15:26–28 respectively. Alongside these moments of direct rendering there is a fluent and often highly subtle incorporation of idioms from scripture, something that can be seen in the references to “gostli fruytes” and a “wikkid worm” in prayer 26 or the “wepyng valeie” and the “woful valeye” in prayers 20 and 35, which reapply phrases from as far afield as the Psalms and Pauline epistles. Yet, despite her facility with Latin, the author uses the language relatively sparingly, preferring to paraphrase or translate rather than quote biblical verses directly. The result of this approach is to avoid the technique found in other pieces of instructional literature, such as the Ancrene Wisse, Abbey of the Holy Ghost, or even Langland’s Piers Plowman; she does not install herself as an interpretive gatekeeper between her reader and the knowledge she imparts but conveys the information more immediately and invisibly. As a matter of fact, when Latin is used, the author restricts her quotation to texts likely to be known to the reader. The Latin passages that appear in eight of the prayers draw from biblical texts that had themselves been incorporated into liturgy by the time the author was writing: almost all can be found among the established forms of the mass or daily hours. This point is clear from prayers 6 and 34, which give the liturgical rather than scriptural wording of their respective texts. In short, these snippets of Latin would have already been well known to a “religious sustir”; although they retain sufficient weight to be rubricated throughout the manuscript, they are not presented as gnomic utterances that require special and authoritative explication.

Along the same lines, the author also forsakes the quasi-scholastic framework other meditative cycles often adopt, with their systematic marshalling and discussion of patristic sources. This precedent begins with Pseudo-Bonaventure, whose work is threaded with references to Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, Jerome, and other authorities, despite its clear desire to override “the claims of traditional authorities with the claims of the heart”; the same approach is taken up enthusiastically by Nicholas Love in his English adaptation. The author of the prayers, however, shows much greater restraint. The closest she comes to namedropping is in the epilogue, where she gestures vaguely to an undisclosed “religious persone” as the source of “mo peynes . . . than I finde in the passion of the gospel.” By not reproducing these learned elements, the author again shows further reluctance to claim auctoritas for her work. Such unwillingness may be a response to contemporary advice on prayer and the optimal forms it should take, especially if Pollard is correct about the writer’s familiarity with vernacular mysticism; but it also serves to narrow the gap between author and reader, placing them on close if not quite equal footing.

Prayer and Community

This rapport between reader and writer also finds its way into the remarks on prayer itself, where it gains even greater weight. In several respects the author’s approach to prayer simply reflects contemporary advice. Her insistence on confession as a prelude to prayer, on the necessity of memorization, and the overall brevity of the prayers themselves, with the majority being around a hundred words or fewer, all reflect the preceding century’s sense of “how thou schalt reule thin hert in tyme of thi preier.” The pervasive tone of self-abnegation, as the reader is asked to cultivate “a sense of utter worthlessness, not just sinfulness,” mirrors a common stance perceptible in Richard Rolle’s Fire of Love and in Margery Kempe’s Book among other sources, even though it is finally revealed as a rhetorical posture akin to the “goostli sleightes” and “privé sotiltees” of The Cloud of Unknowing. What is relatively unusual, however is the author’s view of prayer as a distinctly communal enterprise. The text does not see devotion in merely personal or private terms but as a collective experience that involves and enriches multiple souls in concert. This thinking effectively frames the collection. It first appears in the prologue, where the author requests that the reader “takith me with yow in yowre preieres,” and recurs in prayer 41 with its demand that “my tunge” be used “to my even Cristen soules profiting”; it is in the epilogue, however, that it is most fully fleshed out. Here the author reiterates and elaborates her position, reflecting that “I write in divers places ‘us’ and ‘we,’ for ye schulde at swich places take youre even Cristen with yow in youre preieres.” She even attaches special efficacy to this collective worship: “whan we preie for us self, it plesith God gretli that we take oure even Cristen with us. And treuli, sustir, yef we do so he of his gret goodnesse wole thanne here oure preiere the sonere.” Her point is clear. Prayer and contemplation, and the “inner grace” they inspire, might be interior processes but they are not isolated in their effects. They take place within a community of believers and are for the benefit of that community as a whole. They are a cooperative project much like the “good cumpanie and holi comunicacion” pictured between Mary and Elizabeth in prayer 4, and a world away from the “individualistic . . . self-centredness” some commentators have seen in late medieval private worship.

As comments such as these make clear, what lies behind the text’s renunciation of authority is a full-blooded model of reading and writing, one that stresses the importance of collaboration between equal partners, in which each assists the other; it sees author and reader as participants in a mutually beneficial project, rather than assuming a one-sided transmission of knowledge. It is perhaps for this reason that the author allows her voice to merge with that of the reader, bidding the reader to echo her own plea to “make me a good woman” in prayer 14 in a manner that is self-consciously “ventriloquial.” In fact, even the reader she has in mind seems to be a corporate entity. Although the tone throughout is highly personal, even intimate, there are occasional hints that the author envisages a wider audience for her work than a single “sustir.” In her prologue she asks for prayers from “yow and othere of his special children” and her epilogue refers broadly to “man or womman,” stating that the author intends “to remembre bothe yow and othir” in her lessons. It is true that other medieval texts follow the same tack, also addressing a readership that is simultaneously localized and general. The text might be compared here to the Ancrene Wisse, which also fluctuates between advising “mine leove sustren” and “alle men i-liche,” or to the Book of Privy Counselling, whose dedication to a “goostly freende in God . . . in specyal to thiself” does not prevent the expectation that others “this writyng scholen here in general.” But in this instance, it seems to be part of a general blurring of the lines between the individual “Cristen” and her “even Cristen.” Much as the author exhibits a collective sensibility when discussing the effects and effectiveness of prayer, she also sees her reader as intrinsically multiple and communal. She is above all an element in a larger society of fellow believers, and this state extends even to her emotions and her “famulier speche” with Christ (Prologue.3).

Provenance of the Text and Manuscript

Of course, a piece such as this, with its teasing glimpses into its creator’s identity and worldview, only raises further questions about who exactly might have composed it. Unfortunately, text and manuscript alike offer few definite clues about the writer and her background. While they allow some information to be deduced and reasonable conjectures to be formed, they just as readily prevent definite conclusions from being reached. One point the Holkham manuscript makes obvious is that it was once a prestigious object. Not only is it carefully copied in a clear textura hand, with colored ink picking out passages of importance, especially the Lord’s Prayer, Ave Maria, and any direct quotation from the Vulgate, but each of its three main sections opens with a lavishly decorated initial. The prologue, the author’s “general confession,” and the copy of Flete’s Remediis are all introduced with delicate, ornamented capitals partly finished with gold leaf. These illuminations are also complemented by delicate rinceaux borders in the same style. The presence of such features suggests that the text was intended as a gift or presentation copy to a patron or other benefactor; it is also obvious that the copyist has taken a great deal of care with the text, since only a very small number of transcription errors have crept in, mostly consisting of skipped or repeated words. Unfortunately, however, there is no indication who may have been the recipient. The manuscript lacks a flyleaf or any preliminary material, launching directly into the author’s prologue and her address to her “religious sustir”: it is probable that the manuscript has always lacked a protective covering, since much of the damage, rubbing, and discoloration is concentrated on its first page. As a result, there is no surface on which a dedicatory inscription might be recorded, or where any other traces of ownership might appear, such as signatures, notes, or other annotations; cropping has eliminated similar spaces at the edges of the pages, and the only written addition is a single minor correction to prayer 46. Nonetheless, whoever the manuscript was prepared for, it was “clearly intended for her private devotion.” Its dimensions are ideal for such usage. Although it was trimmed down slightly by its Regency-era bookbinder, its original size would have been similar to that of a modern-day paperback: at 10.3 cm by 16.7 cm (or 4 inches by 6.2 inches), it is ideal for handling and consulting “as ye have leyser,” just as the author directs in her epilogue. Other features of the manuscript also seem tailored with this end in mind. The fact that the Lord’s Prayer invariably appears in red ink does not merely signal its importance but allows it to double as an identifiable boundary between prayers, enabling each one to be picked out for reading “summe on oon day and summe on anothir day” as the reader desires (Epilogue.5).

At this point, however, any further inquiry into the origin of text or manuscript can only rest on guesswork. The fullest and perhaps most appealing hypothesis is Pollard’s. He associates the text with England’s single Bridgettine convent at Syon Abbey in Middlesex; he even nominates Syon’s second abbess Joanna North as its potential author, suggesting that she may have composed the piece at some stage in the 1420s. The connection to Syon certainly has much to recommend it. From its institution in 1415 to its (temporary) dissolution in 1539, Syon was one of the wealthiest foundations in England and an important center for female literacy and learning. It was also a notable site for textual production, forming an effective “axis” with the neighboring Carthusian monastery of Sheen, dedicated to the “production, circulation and transmission” of vernacular texts “primarily serving the needs of Brigittine nuns.” The abbey could also boast close ties to wealth and power of a kind that might generate literary gifts or patronage. Its founder was no less a figure than Henry V, who personally laid its first stone on February 22, 1415, and it continued to enjoy contact with noble benefactors throughout its early history.

The prayers seem to connect themselves to Syon and Sheen at a number of points. In the first place, there are definite overlaps between the author’s reading and the books at the disposal of the Syon sisters. The contents of the abbey’s two libraries can be reconstructed thanks to the efforts of the fifteenth-century deacon Thomas Betson, who prepared an extensive series of booklists in ca. 1500. Time and again works known to the author turn up in these catalogues, such as the Glossa ordinaria, the Doctrina cordis, and especially the Meditationes vitae Christi. Pseudo-Bonaventure’s work was in fact at Syon from the first, since a copy was owned by the priest-brother Symon Wynter, one of the earliest members of the brethren. Also represented are the visions of Mechthild of Hackeborn, chief architect of devotion to the Sacred Heart: a volume called “Maud’s Book” is recorded at Syon from at least 1438. Sheen and Syon have also long been recognized for their instrumental role in disseminating the work of Rolle and Hilton. The prayers, in short, might be expected to take shape somewhere like the abbey, which can be aptly called “a crucible” in which “the intelligence of European spirituality blended with the native mystical tradition.”

There are other hints besides that might place Syon in the picture. The author’s collaborative sense of spirituality would certainly be most appropriate for “women living together in a community,” and prayer 37 is clearly intended for usage by an enclosed woman, with its plea “to been contemplatif as my degre askyth.” Likewise, Barratt and Innes-Parker see royal associations in prayer 9, reading its lengthy appeal for God to “reule and counseile oure kyng” as a set of “special supplications for the welfare of the King.” Further links can also be inferred at a more practical, physical level. The decorations in the Holkham manuscript are similar in style to those found in other products of the Sheen scriptorium. Its initials resemble the Hours of the Holy Trinity, now held at Exeter University Library, which even conclude with a final prayer for “the soul of King Henry our founder”; although this volume is much more ornate, with copious illumination and gold leaf, its floriated red and blue capitals are highly reminiscent of the Holkham volume. Vincent Gillespie also suggests that a small device of four dots in cross formation that precedes the author’s general confession might be an example of a “distinctive Syon monogram.”

Nevertheless, feasible though the Syon link might be, there are a couple of points that count against it. Perhaps most problematic is a surprising lack of literary composition among the Bridgettines. There is no doubt that the sisters were enthusiastic readers, owners, and commissioners of books, who made engagement with text a cornerstone of their devotional practices. Virginia Bainbridge estimates that at least 13% of the nuns “owned books in English, French or Latin” and adaptations were produced at Syon throughout its history, from the Orchard of Syon and Myroure of Oure Lady in its first decades to John Fewterer’s translation of Ulrich Pinder a little before the community was expelled from England in 1539. Nevertheless, as Tyanna Lee Yonkers reflects, there is little indication that the nuns undertook any large-scale literary projects of their own; by and large, “the pen lay dormant” at the abbey. In fact, if we can decisively link the prayers with Syon, it would be the lone substantial piece emanating from the sisters, whose writing is otherwise restricted to more fragmentary samples, such as the inscriptions left by “Elynor ffeteplace” and “Elisabeth Crycheley” in their books, or the corrections “Dorothe Coderynton” made to a copy of The Tree and Twelve Frutes of the Holy Goost. Put simply, the prayers would be an anomaly in this context, if not quite an impossibility.

Along the same lines, there is also a striking lack of material from St. Bridget herself in the prayers. Despite her unfaltering emphasis on the presence of women in the New Testament, the author makes little use of Bridget’s revelations: she does not even refer to Bridget’s lengthy spiritual biography of Mary, a vision that left a deep impression on other meditative works of the period, including Appulby’s Fruyte. One possible point of influence is the Bridgettine Fifteen Oes, a set of brief prayers that may be the model for its apostrophic interjections “o” and “a.” However, even this text is problematic. Its attribution to Bridget is doubtful, and its declarative technique not uncommon: similar interjections are also found in the thirteenth-century Wooing of Our Lord, for example. The dialect of the prayers is a further potential issue. Generally, the text shows a broad mixture of East and West Midlands forms (and, in the term “beer-lepis” in prayer 26, at least one lexical item otherwise attested only in northern sources), making it difficult to identify a linguistic region with any precision. Nevertheless, the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English places many of its preferred word-forms further north than Middlesex or London, associating its morphology with Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, or Northamptonshire. While none of these factors rule out Syon absolutely, they at least give pause. Collectively, they might suggest that the sisters should be downgraded to commissioners and transmitters of the sequence rather than its composers: the prayers may in fact have been written for one of the early sisters by an experienced meditator based elsewhere, and subsequently recopied into the Holkham miscellany during the 1430s or 40s.

A further measure of this uncertainty is that other, alternative theories have been proposed, albeit more tentatively. Hence, Josephine Koster infers some link to anchorism, arguing that “it is not . . . beyond the realm of possibility that a woman like Julian of Norwich could have written these prayers.” She goes on to offer the Benedictine convent at Polesworth, Warwickshire as a likelier venue for composition, owing to its possession of a continuously occupied anchor-hold from the thirteenth century, and the fact that at least one volume from its library made its way to Holkham Hall after the Reformation. This theory also has several points in its favor. For instance, it is telling that prayer 19 places “ancres” firmly at the top of its list of “alle estatis reclusid.” There was also a clear expectation that anchoresses should serve as spiritual counselors, providing that they neither “turnen ancre-hus to childrene scole” nor cease to “yemen bute Godd ane” [heed but God alone]; the famous conference between Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich shows how greatly their counsel could be esteemed. However, all told, the anchoritic hypothesis is no less speculative than the Syon link. While both lines of conjecture are suggestive and attractive, the evidence must ultimately — and unfortunately — be judged inconclusive.

Date and Title

The origin of the text, however, is just one of many questions it poses. Equally difficult to ascertain is the exact date at which it might have been written. If we accept that the author or the “religious sustir” she addresses were indeed Bridgettine, it can only have been written after Syon’s foundation in 1415; but even this only fixes the earliest possible date, and any greater precision is not possible. The nature of the text means that it contains few allusions to the period in which it was composed: to echo Bruce Holsinger, it concerns itself more with a timeless “sacred history” than with “the history of kings, royalist politics, civic rule, gender relations, diplomatic exchange, [or] rural revolt” by which we usually map out the past. Even the seemingly topical references that appear sporadically are difficult to interpret with any confidence. There is no hint which king prayer 9 has in mind, for instance, since its appeal on his behalf for “good lif and longe” could apply to more or less any medieval monarch. Likewise, if Barratt is correct to see prayer 28 as anti-Wycliffite, this fact does little to narrow the date; it simply confirms that the prayers must have been written after 1382, when the so-called Earthquake Synod formally hereticated Wyclif’s teachings.

Yet the text presents still greater interpretive challenges besides. Foremost among them is the simple question of what to call it. The manuscript itself supplies no name for the prayer cycle as a whole. This might well reflect a deliberate choice on the part of the author. The epilogue suggests that she designed her text to be read not as a single coherent piece but as a series of discrete exercises, rather like an anthology of lyrics: she actively counsels selective, discontinuous reading, advising the reader not to “seye al ovir the preieres every day” but to dip in and out at her “leyser.” The lack of title also differs from the treatment Flete’s Remediis receives later in the manuscript. The Flete text is in fact named twice by the copyist: a brief incipit simultaneously translates its usual Latin title and supplies a new one, stating “these remedies of temptacions that folwen is named Consolacio animae.” But attempts to furnish the prayers with a title, if only for reference, have proven surprisingly contentious. When the manuscript was rebound for Lord Coke in the early nineteenth century, its binder John Jones of Liverpool chose the title Passion of Christ, stamping it boldly on the spine; this is obviously inadequate as a summary of the text, since the description of the Passion, while a key point of focus, comprises less than a fifth of its total length. Later titles have usually been based on a passage at the beginning of the prologue, in which the author describes being asked to write the “festis and the passion of oure lord Jhesu Crist”; most scholarship has used some variant of this phrase to refer to the text as a whole, and Barratt published her selections under this heading.

Nevertheless, understanding this statement has proven tricky, owing in no small part to the condition of the manuscript. While the prayers are not as badly deteriorated as the copy of Flete’s Remediis, where mold and water damage have bored coin-sized holes through the parchment and erased entire sections of text, a key letter is still obscured here. The first word of this assumed title has developed into a particular hinge of debate. Patching makes it difficult to know whether it should read “feitis” or “festis.” Colledge and Chadwick, and Barratt after them, favor the former, a rare spelling of “fet” or “fait” which is the root of the modern English “feat.” Koster and Pollard propose the latter, which means “holy days,” and Innes-Parker supports their reading. On balance “festis” seems the likelier of the two options: the author uses the term “festes” later in her cycle to describe Christ’s ministry, and a number of prayers do evoke particular feast days in the medieval ritual year, such as Candlemas in prayer 10, Maundy Thursday in prayer 36, Ascension Day in prayer 51, and so on. Nevertheless, as a name for the cycle, neither choice adequately reflects the full scope of the text. Perhaps a more suitable title is provided by the general description the author gives of her work in both prologue and epilogue, where she refers to her “preyeres and meditacions” or “these meditaciones and preieres.” A similar title is also penciled faintly into the modern bindings, presumably by one of the nineteenth-century librarians at Holkham Hall. Although somewhat generic, this designation does at least fit the author’s apparent sense of her work. Not only does it firmly situate her text in the tradition Pseudo-Bonaventure began, but it also captures its overriding concern with the humanity of Christ, which is often seen as a central function of meditation as a devotional practice.

The Afterlife of the Prayers

While the manuscript’s disrepair multiplies the questions that surround it, it also throws light on some other issues. In particular, its current state carries some suggestive hints about the readership of the prayers after the Middle Ages. Nothing concrete is known about the text’s whereabouts before its acquisition by the Cokes. It was apparently already in the collection of the family by the time of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), the Jacobean legal writer and attorney general who prosecuted Sir Walter Raleigh, Roderigo Lopez, and the Gunpowder Plotters among other early modern causes celebres. Although it is not named on the library roll Edward compiled shortly before his death, it is probably one of the “manie Breviaries, ladies psalters, and manuells” dismissively lumped together under the heading “Popish MSS.” Perhaps the strongest candidate for ownership before this point is Dr. Matthew Knightley, parson of Cossington in Leicestershire and maternal uncle to Sir Edward’s mother, Winifred. Knightley owned a library that was extremely impressive, not to say expensive, and had a clear interest in contemplative literature. At the time of his death in 1561 his collection was valued at £20 (over £7000 or nearly $9000 in 2022 money) and his will lists a copy of Ludolph of Saxony’s Pseudo-Bonaventurean meditation De vita christi among “my bookes.” At least some of these “bookes” made their way into the hands of the Cokes, and those that did show suggestive contacts with female recluses. Still at Holkham is the so-called Knightley Psalter, which not only declares unequivocally that “thys boke ys doctor knyghtleyes” but describes how it was put at the disposal of “dame Bennet Burton, anchores off Pollesworth,” referring to Benedicta Burton, the last enclosed sister at the abbey before its dissolution in 1536. Other texts at Holkham hint further at this connection: the signature “Dame Burton” also appears on an anthology of educational treatises that may also have been owned by Knightley before coming into the possession of the Cokes.

Needless to say, it is not possible to prove whether the prayer cycle was ever in Knightley’s collection, let alone whether he made it available to any enclosed women, no matter how persuasive his candidacy might be. However, we can find more concrete signs of early modern engagement in the damage the text has sustained. Amongst the general degradation of the manuscript are a few blemishes that seem to be the work of human rather than natural agencies. These are especially conspicuous in prayer 7 during the author’s commendation of “alle yowre schepherdes of holi chirche” where she salutes various levels of clergy. What is notable here is that the first few ranks have been purposefully scraped from the parchment, although they are still faintly visible: “the pope, and alle the cardinalis” have been neatly obliterated so that the list is now reduced to “archibisschopes, bisschopes, prelates, and curates.” Since “cardinalis” extends over the end of the line, the erasure is unlikely to be the result of natural weathering. It also follows patterns of defacement found in other medieval texts. It might be compared, for instance, to an edition of the St. Alban’s Chronicle at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where the word “pope” has been systematically scored through on the contents page, or the early printed copy of John Mirk’s Festial now held at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in which terms such as “pope,” “paynes of purgatory,” “an hondred dayes of pardon,” and “abbottes, pryours, monkes, chanones, freres” have all been blacked over. Even the famous Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was not immune from such disfigurement: references to “popes,” “bulles of popes,” and the name of “seint Thomas” Becket were scraped away from its copies of the Pardoner’s and Miller’s Tales by a Tudor reader.

What makes this vandalism significant is that it allows two further questions to be addressed. On the one hand, it makes clear that the prayers attracted some level of interest in the sixteenth century, even despite the ideological sea changes of the Reformation. These deletions are perhaps best seen as attempts to make the text consistent with sixteenth-century religious norms: in their crude and haphazard way, they are attempts to update the prayers, to render them acceptable to the new culture by eliminating aspects it deemed intolerable. They may even indicate that the prayers had some particular value attached to them, since the same process is not applied to the copy of Flete’s Remediis later in the manuscript. At least, when Flete evokes the authority of Leo the Great to corroborate his warnings against despair, the pontiff is permitted to retain the title “Leo the pope” without molestation: the text still records that “Leo the pope seith that it fallith sumtyme that goode and rithful soules been sterid be the fend to angris, troubles, tariynges, and dredis . . . and Leo the pope seith that the fend espieth in every man in what wise his is disposid in complexion.” The deletions therefore show that someone had read the prayers in the Tudor period, and with sufficient attentiveness to try and “reform” their contents.

On the other hand, and more important still, this modification offers a solution to one of the most pressing questions raised by the manuscript — how much text is now missing. The current condition of the manuscript makes it impossible to know for certain how many folia are absent. Its rebinding has succeeded in eliminating any telltale gaps from the spine, and the modern pagination simply ignores any interruptions, passing continuously from page 64 to page 65. Pollard lays blame at the door of John Jones, the Liverpool bookbinder who was commissioned to clean and remount the volume in 1814–1822, and whose lengthy retention of the manuscript might indicate that he had some trouble repairing parts of it. Yet it is equally possible that the missing portion might have been removed by a sixteenth-century reader. It is certainly suspicious that the absent part of the text relates to the Last Supper, the gospel episode most likely to inflame Protestant sensibilities. The remaining text appears to be veering into provocative territory by Elizabethan standards. Its final words before the lacuna address Jesus feeding his disciples “with youre precious body,” suggesting that what follows must touch on the role of transubstantiation in the mass. If the author of the prayers follows the same course as other reflective prayer cycles in the vernacular, such as Love’s Mirrour or Appulby’s Fruyte, then her remarks may well have evoked the power of the appointed priesthood to bring about these results, or a statement of the orthodox doctrine that “verrey cristies body that suffrede deth upon the crosse is there in that sacrament bodily.” Indeed, given her overall emphasis on communing with Christ “presentli” and “bodili,” it seems more than probable that the prayer assumed such a trajectory. It scarcely needs pointing out that this thinking was anathema to sixteenth-century culture, in which transubstantiation and the ability of the clergy to effect it were central hubs of controversy: the Convocation of 1563 squarely ranks the doctrine among other “superstitions . . . repugnant to the plain words of Scripture.” In short, a medieval prayer on the mass would be a natural lightning-rod for Protestant hostility, and the missing section may have fallen foul of the same treatment given to “the pope” and “cardinalis” in prayer 7. Unfortunately, even if we accept this theory, it still does not allow us to estimate how much text might be lost. Assuming that the intention was to remove the offending portion alone, it may be as little as two hundred words, the average amount of text on each leaf in the manuscript; then again, Pollard may be correct when he sees a full quire of eight leaves missing, which would raise the total to sixteen hundred words. It is equally difficult to convert this figure into a number of separate prayers, however, given how variable in length they prove; it is still harder to deduce what their contents might have been. The Agony in the Garden, the Buffeting, and Scourging are obvious possibilities, especially if the author has kept up Pseudo-Bonaventure’s sequencing of the material; Innes-Parker suggests “the Last Supper, betrayal and arrest, scourging and trial” and Pollard “prayers for matins and prime and most of terce.”

Ultimately, the Holkham prayer cycle leaves many key questions unanswered and, in all probability, unanswerable. The identities of its author and reader are difficult to determine with any confidence, and its origin and the date at which it was composed are equally obscure. The same uncertainty surrounds its title, its ownership before it entered the possession of the Cokes, and the nature of the sections now missing from its bindings. However, none of this detracts from the value or significance of the text. What the prayers reveal about themselves far outweighs the information they withhold. The text offers a vital insight into the world of late medieval female devotion, a world that often proves frustratingly remote; it also stands as a lively and moving piece in its own right, self-confidently reimagining the gospel narrative in ways that rival the lyric tradition for power and vivacity.