June 5 meeting.

Hello everyone. I have booked GS 112 for 6pm for our meeting on June 5.

The text I would like us to discuss is a prose piece known as The Nine Virtues, attached. It was popular throughout Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, both in Latin and the vernacular. Twenty-nine English witnesses survive, in various kinds of religious collections and in commonplace books. There are also six in verse. The copy I want to consider is in Trinity Cambridge 0.2.53, f. 23v (1475-1500), a notebook associated with a Kent family. It contains a miscellany of short pieces in English and Latin, mainly secular, including verses, recipes, prayers against disease and prophecies.

Sarah McNamer discusses the Trinity Nine Virtues in her chapter ‘Resistance to the Middle English Passion Lyric’, attached (Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 174-206). Please don’t read the whole thing closely – the reference to this manuscript and text is on pages 189 and 264-65, n.38. McNamer’s argument in the book is that the eroticized devotion practiced by both male and female laity meant for both sexes ‘feeling like a woman’ (pp. 119-149), and that this was acceptable to men until about the early fifteenth century, when the development of ‘category crisis or anxious masculinity’ (p.177) caused men to become uncomfortable with it.

I’d be interested to know what you think about her reading of the piece, and her take on the late medieval devotional stance.

Ruth