Lines of Relation: Devotional Verse and Active Reading in Late Medieval English Books

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2023

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Abstract

This study locates a medieval poetics of lineation in the manuscript and early print reception of fifteenth-century Middle English penitential poems. I investigate three exemplary poems of penitential devotion alongside modern theories of the poetic line, combining approaches from cultural studies, reception theory, and material poetics to show how the poetic line shaped medieval readers’ perception of reality and orientation within social networks. When played to full effect, the poetic line, I contend, is like light: both particle (complete in itself) and wave (moving toward transfer). In Lines of Relation I argue that the energetic shimmer of the poetic line presented medieval readers with a way to face their own limits as well as their ongoing responsibilities to and for others.

In my introduction chapter, I excavate Middle English discourses of line and relation in the context of penitential practice and the explosive vernacularization of Latin writings in late medieval England. I then draw on my archival research of devotional poems in fifteenth-century manuscripts and early print books to analyze the linear workings of three poems for penitential introspection and ethical sensitization: John Lydgate’s Kalendare (which I discuss in chapter 2), Thomas Brampton’s Penitential Psalm paraphrase (chapter 3), and the anonymous Passion complaint “Wyth scharpe thornes,” (chapter 4). These are rhyming Middle English prayers, psalms, and meditations that were popular enough to appear, collectively, in in approximately thirty surviving late medieval English books. Rather than viewing these texts as mere scripts or instructional aids, we can understand them first and foremost as poems inviting active interpretive engagement on the part of the reader. What unites these texts under the banner of penitential labor, I show, is their use of the poetic line as a form prompting readers to explore, at once, personal limit and limitless social responsibility. As I argue in the Coda, these considerations of line, limit, and conscience continue in poems by present-day writers of color in the United States. Like the poetic forms of penance in the medieval texts I examine, poems by Lucille Clifton and Thomas Sayers Ellis entangle the reader in linear interactions that insist on literary reception as a site for moral awareness and action.

Lines of Relation aims to increase appreciation for the basic scope for conceptual, expressive, and ethical work that medieval poetic forms made available to their audiences—and as a result to enrich and refine responses to the ethical demands these forms’ continuance make in literary reception today.

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Murdoch, Joanna Epling (2023). Lines of Relation: Devotional Verse and Active Reading in Late Medieval English Books. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/27586.

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