The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe: The Issue of Discretio Spirituum Reconsidered
Devotion to the Holy Spirit was a fundamental aspect of the Christian faith in the late Middle Ages and discretio spirituum was understood as a prerequisite for fully embracing the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The problem of discretio spirituum is embedded in the entirety of Margery's Book, which bears witness to the way the ideological political struggles in which clerical authority increasingly cast doubt upon female spiritual experience. Lying behind Margery's Book, and undoubtedly influencing her treatment of the issue of discretio spirituum, are the two Church Councils in her lifetime. On her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Margery passed through Constance as the city was preparing for the forthcoming Council (1414–18). One of the major issues of the Council was the authenticity of St Bridget's revelations. Even after her canonization and its subsequent confirmation, many delegates questioned the divine origin of her visions and connected the issue with schism and heresy. The tension continued into the Council of Basle (1431–49), which was in progress when Margery revised the first version of her Book. Following the chronological development of the controversy over Bridget's revelations, this article contextualizes the Book within the specific international climate of the early fifteenth century and makes links to then evolving thinking about discretio spirituum in order to illuminate its impact on the creation of Margery Kempe's spiritual autobiography.
The liber celestis of St. Bridget of Sweden : the Middle English version in British Library ms Claudius B i, together with a life of the saint from the same manuscript
St Bridget of Sweden (1303-73) began to experience supernatural revelations as a lady-in-waiting at the Swedish court in 1335. After her husband's death she left the court and founded a monastery for nuns and monks which became the basis of the Brigettine Order. Her visions continued after she left Sweden for Italy in 1349, and she spent the rest of her life in pilgrimage and religious activities. The visions, some of the Passion and others concerned with political and religious events of her day, were recorded in Latin by her spiritual directors, as the "Liber Celestis". The mystical equivalent of a medieval manual for preachers, the work points to what was best and worst in late medieval spirituality. It was several times translated into Middle English but the only translation hitherto available has been the partial and truncated version published in 1929. The present work is a critical edition of one of the two complete Middle English translations of the "Liber", contained in British Library MS Claudius BI. This first volume consists of the text and a brief introduction to the "Liber".
Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England
From its creation in the early fourteenth century to its dissolution in the sixteenth, the nunnery at Dartford was among the richest in England. Although obliged to support not only its own community but also a priory of Dominican friars at King's Langley, Dartford prospered. Records attest to the business skill of the Dartford nuns, as they managed the house's numerous holdings of land and property, together with the rents and services owed them. That the Dartford nuns were capable businesswomen is not surprising, since the house was also a center of female education. For Nancy Bradley Warren, the story of Dartford exemplifies the vibrancy of nuns' material and spiritual lives in later medieval England. Revising the long-held view that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English nunneries were impoverished both financially and religiously, Warren clarifies that the women in female monastic communities like Dartford were not woefully incompetent at managing their affairs. Instead, she reveals the complex role of female monasticism in diverse systems of production and exchange. Like the nuns at Dartford, women religious in late medieval England were enmeshed in material, symbolic, political, and spiritual economies that were at times in harmony and at other times in conflict with each other. Building on emerging cross-disciplinary trends in feminist scholarship on medieval religion, Warren extends ongoing debates about textual and economic constructions of women's identities to the rarely considered evidence of monastic theory and practice. To this end, Spiritual Economies emphasizes that the cloister was not impermeable. As worldly forces such as economic trends and political conflicts affected life in the nunneries, so too did religious practices have political impact. In breaking down the convent wall, Warren also succeeds in breaching the boundaries separating the material and the symbolic, the religious and the secular, the literary and the historical. She turns to a wide range of sources-from legislative texts, court records, and financial accounts to devotional treatises and political propaganda-to explore the centrality of female monasticism to the flowering of female spirituality and to the later Middle Ages at large.