'Thy body is like a boke': New English audiences and late Medieval passion literature

The goal of this project is to suggest a historically informed hermeneutical program for reading certain groups of late Medieval English texts that focus insistently on the representation, in prose or poetry, of the crucifixion and death of Jesus. All the texts under consideration in this project date to a time (ca. 1370--1420) of controversy surrounding the role of English reading and writing in late Medieval England. The representations of the Passion with metaphors of reading and writing bespeak a general concern over a number of potentially unsettling social phenomena in the culture: English-only and primary-English readers who form a growing audience for such imaginative and didactic texts, the expansion of lay literacy and education, and the growth of (and reaction against) the Wycliffite movement with its emphasis on Scripturalism, Biblical translation, lay-activism, and anti-eucharistic and iconoclastic belief. The confluence of these movements fostered a climate of anxiety over authority in reading and writing, and this anxiety played out in literary productions as a recurrent metaphorization of the body of Christ crucified as a book or ABC. I conclude that the very lability of the medieval Passion in English literature made it a cultural symbol that could be used to explore, among other things, the nature of the process of reading, the psychology of reading, writing and identity, and the problems of authority for English writers at a time of uncertainty over the vernacular's role in ecclesiastical culture.;The first Chapter explores the construction of authoritative 'reading' voice for new audiences in Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, and the anonymous Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ. Chapter 2 examines the problems of authorization faced by Medieval England's two foremost female writers, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Chapter 3 reads some of the lyric tradition on the Passion with particular emphasis on the linkages of love, writing, and torture. The fourth Chapter reads the English sermons of the Worcester manuscript which employ the Christ-as-text metaphor for anti-heretic polemic.