References to the material text in late medieval English religious literature
Keywords: immateriality
religion
material text
medieval
literature

Medieval material texts had a variety of functions: they were containers of texts and images, material objects, and symbolic entities. As a result of this multivalency, the material text was often used as a metaphor to figuratively represent a range of subjects, including memory, receptivity, cognitive and emotional understanding, conception, and creation. This was fully realised in the later medieval period, when higher rates of vernacular literacy, the increased production of affordable books, and the prevailing documentary culture resulted in a greater familiarity with the written word and the kinds of materials on which they were recorded. Concurrently, the devotional practices of this period were uniquely material in kind, with a distinctive focus on the tools of the crucifixion, relic efficacy, and eucharistic transformation. As complicated and ubiquitous items, material texts proved valuable metaphorical vehicles through which to elucidate Christ’s sacrifice and power, and how one might worship him best. The overarching aim of this thesis is to unravel the metaphors and images of textual materiality used in religious texts in order to better understand how material texts were perceived in the late medieval cultural imagination.
Each chapter provides a close reading of a particular religious text or genre of texts by examining their language, structure, form, and generic history, but also places this analysis in the context of relevant book-historical details, such as a particular manuscript context or book production process. The first chapter is occupied with how material texts are represented in book-craft recipes, where their methods of creation and constituent ingredients are described. This provides a vital foundation for the rest of the thesis, introducing the significance of the material text’s properties, and illustrating how a set of ideas about the material text is evident even before its construction. The following four chapters then examine how material texts are referred to in different texts or genres of religious literature: the ‘Long’ and ‘Short’ Charters of Christ, devotional lyrics, sermons, and The Book of Margery Kempe.
This thesis expands and enriches the existing corpus of research on ideas about the material text, which includes the studies of Ernst Robert Curtius, Jesse Gellrich, Eric Jager, and Jeffrey Hamburger. It works to contribute to understandings of the material text as an object, and the place of the material text in late medieval devotional culture. It argues that whilst some of the metaphors and images were employed to elicit an affective response, they were also used in order to cognitively illustrate particular relationships between the divine and the human. It concludes that references to material texts often blur the distinction between different kinds of written forms, taking advantage of their shared material qualities but disparate practical uses, and shows that references to material texts were not necessarily self-reflexive about the physical materials on which texts were written, but were reflective of immaterial ideas about material texts.