Managing a Literate Laity: The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man in Fifteenth-Century England

Description

The fifteenth-century English translation of Guillaume de Deguileville's Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine opens with the author figure making a strange assertion about the text: "In Frensch I haue set it so þat lewede mowe vnderstande it" [I have set it in French so that ordinary people may understand it]. The cognitive dissonance created by this phrase, written in English but claiming to be written in French, underscores the vexed status of the vernacular in fifteenth-century England. Translating The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man into English expanded the circulation of the text by making it available to a group of "ordinary people" that included English monolinguals. This dissertation argues that the two fifteenth-century English translations of the Pilgrimage, one anonymous and one by John Lydgate, work to regulate this expanded audience because of their unknown educational backgrounds. Many scholars read fifteenth-century concern over the vernacular allowing lay access to religious ideas as tied to the Wycliffite heresy and Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1409. I argue, however, that this concern is part of a conversation with a much wider scope: the debate over the use of religious images in Christianity, under discussion as early as the letters of Pope Gregory the Great (c. 600 CE). This debate questioned the use of images in Christianity, and many arguments over these religious images pointed to the fact that images are empty inside and can fail to signify; the Pilgrimage articulates these same concerns about its allegorical form. The Pilgrimage offers its audience guidance in determining what the allegory signifies, but this dissertation demonstrates how that guidance also regulates the text's audience. The Pilgrimage manages its lay audience by constructing an ideal reader, denigrating the material body, substituting sensory information, and conflating allegorical bodies with the audience's bodies. However, the text continually undermines its own attempts to regulate its audience, drawing attention to both the flexibility of the allegorical form and its inability to signify concretely. The way the Pilgrimage manages—nd fails to manage—he "lewede" audience to whom it claims to appeal points to how visual and textual representations of religious topics undermine ecclesiastical control. The failures of signification in the Pilgrimage's texts and manuscript illustrations demonstrate the interpretive power these representations offer their audiences as well as their resistance to functioning as methods of ecclesiastical control.