The Middle English Life of Christ
Academic Discourse, Translation, and Vernacular Theology
By (author) Ian Johnson
This book tells how Middle English lives of Christ translated Latin literary theory and texts, challenging the common modern supposition that vernacular texts and vernacular theology were at odds with Latinate clerical culture.
How much did Latin academic theoretical discourse inform mainstream late medieval English literature? Rather than asking this question of secular poetic fiction (Chaucer, Gower), this book investigates a more central genre, lives of Christ. Any adequate understanding of vernacular textuality, in an age when most literature was translation of some sort, cannot escape the question of the influence of theory on transactions and ideology of mainstream literary culture in negotiating authority. Where better to test this than the life of Christ? Derived from the Gospels, this genre provided the set text for human existence. Too often, however, it has been regarded by modern scholarship as an infantilizing clerical sop to a laity deprived of Scripture and intellectual or contemplative ambition. Inquiry into the translating and the spirituality of Middle English lives of Christ yields, however, eloquent examples not of antagonism and rupture between Latin and vernacular but of of productive compatibility. This challenges the common modern supposition that vernacular texts and vernacular theology are at odds with Latinate clerical culture, and restores the genre’s historic value. Like their dissenting counterparts, lives of Christ, as well as being of interest in their own right, invested in learned literary and theological norms in their textual transactions. Such reliance demands modern (re)consideration.
- By (author) Ian Johnson
Other Titles in this Series
‘God Wants It!’
The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and its Jewish and Christian Background
Volume 6
Inwardness, Individualization, and Religious Agency in the Late Medieval Low Countries
Studies in The 'Devotio Moderna' and its Contexts
Volume 43
Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378-1536
Textual Transmission and Networks of Readership
Volume 27
The Library of the Abbey of La Trappe
A Study of its History from the Twelfth Century to the French Revolution, with an Annotated Edition of the 1752 Catalogue
Volume 32
Patronage, Production, and Transmission of Texts in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Cultures
Volume 34
Perspectives for an Architecture of Solitude
Essays on Cistercians, Art and Architecture in Honour of Peter Fergusson
Volume 11
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