Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2026
This chapter reveals a tendency in MS Ashmole 61 for objects to encourage self-reflection in their human neighbours and to provide opportunities for penance and redemption. In this section of the manuscript, the widespread necessity of such assistance is re-emphasised. Here, human error is witnessed in the wounds on Christ’s body (Wounds and Sins), the extent of humans’ misappropriation of other material agents to support their own luxury (Vanity) and of self-imposed human spiritual exile (The Sinner’s Lament and The Adulterous Falmouth Squire), with the human soul infecting the human body and producing the tangible pains of hell (Prick of Conscience Minor), leading to perhaps the most emotionally wrenching poem in the collection (Maidstone’s Seven Penitential Psalms), expressed through the material effects of tears of contrition and in contrast to the incorrupt non-human animals with whom humans share the earth. This section of Ashmole 61 is a reminder that the weakness of one element in a morality-assemblage was understood as extending to and potentially harming all.
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