The works of two exemplary figures of fourteenth-century spirituality, Henry Suso and Richard Rolle, grant us insight into some of the most significant commonalities between the devotional cultures of fourteenth-century England and Germany. The reception history of the two authors demonstrates their skill in composing narratives and creating characters which subsequent generations of readers found compelling aides to their spiritual development and contemplative practices. The similarities between the two authors, while to a certain extent rooted in some of their common sources, nevertheless testify to the popularity of a particular type of self-fashioning as both author and eponymous character. Both this strategy of authorial self-presentation and the array of thematic commonalities they share can shape our understanding of the role their texts played in the process of transmission and translation of spiritual concepts between England and Germany in the later Middle Ages. Suso and Rolle, besides their many thematic and structural similarities, also had particular success in capturing the attention of readers and translators both religious and lay from the second half of the fourteenth century until the beginning of the seventeenth.

In particular, one of the central points of commonality between Suso and Rolle lies in what I term ‘devotional mobility’. By this I mean not only the instances of physical and spiritual mobility inherent in both (for instance, Rolle's account of wandering between insufficiently solitary hermitages and Suso's persecution while on trips to provincial chapters demonstrate the role of physical mobility in their self-descriptions; both explore the directional framework of spiritual ascent within the space of the visionary event as a type of spiritual mobility).

The argument of this paper is that recovering the biblical word behold and the work of silence - the model of the mind - it entails is crucial to understanding ancient, patristic and medieval texts. The word behold is a liminal word; it signals the threshold of contemplation, where the self-conscious mind stops analysing and becomes attentively receptive, open in an ungrasping and self-emptying way to irruption from the deep mind. Examples of this process will be drawn from Richard of St Victor's Mystical Ark, The Cloud of Unknowing and Julian's Long Text.

In the latter chapters of the second book of The Scale of Perfection, Walter Hilton enumerates the special graces that accompany the gift of reformation in faith and feeling, which he describes as the union of knowledge and love in their object, Christ, the perfection of meekness, and the clear sight of the ghostly eye. Among these graces, in chapter 43, he discusses the gift of interpretation of Scriptures:

For years we have wondered if Margery Kempe could read – or at least what access to literacy she had. Why have we not wondered the following: How did Kempe count and perform mathematical operations? What did she count, and why? What kind of numeracies did Kempe possess or have access to? How did numbers and mathematical operations shape her experiences?

Numeracy, or what Americans refer to as ‘quantitative literacy’, can be defined as one's ability to understand and apply mathematical operations to everyday tasks, as well as the familiarity with mathematical concepts. Numeracy includes such wide-ranging concepts and applications as the measurement of time, money, space, shape, probability, patterns, quantity, predictions and orders of magnitude. Like literacy, numeracy is a social practice, governed and shaped in great part by gender, social status, occupation, and so on, and can be practised in a number of different settings, including the civil, the professional and the leisurely.

Basic numeracy played an important part in late-medieval spiritual practices. Thomas Lentes has argued that number lay at the root of the ‘arithmetic of salvation’: ‘Religious life was not merely marked by quantification and multiplication; rather, counting appeared as an essential component of the practice of piety’. This obsession with enumeration is often equated with the rise of mercantilism, and a number of Kempe scholars have understood the Book in this context.

THE SYMPOSIUM also received brief reports on some work in progress. Barbara Zimbalist (University of California Davis) is developing an argument that, through the representation of Christ's apocryphal speech in the vernacular, women's visionary texts reflect a growing desire for access to the Word of God among lay readers. Through the development of Christ's voice as a mode of devotional discourse, women's visionary texts make a distinct contribution to the increasingly varied modes of vernacular devotion, and offer readers opportunity for textual processes of imitatio Christi founded on Christ's identity as speaker and evangelist - an alternative to the more widely acknowledged tradition of passion-based, corporeally realised modes of affective piety offen attributed to women. By reading the long tradition of Christ's extra-biblical speech as texts that evoked specific interpretative hermeneutics, she is arguing for a more nuanced understanding of vernacular devotion within late-medieval literacy and a more inclusive view of the varied textual traditions - including women's visionary texts - that contributed to the changing literary landscape of vernacular devotional in the later Middle Ages.

Laura Kalas Williams (University of Exeter) is working on a project examining conceptualisations of pain in the writings of Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe and their relationship with paradigms of physiology and illness in medieval medical writing. Noting that the internal, esoteric and ineffable qualities of both physical pain and visionary experience mark an ontological correlation that has received surprisingly little scholarly attention, Williams is conducting the first detailed examination of maternalised pain in these texts, with a particular consideration of the perception of surrogate or adoptive pain.

After a longer than anticipated break in the series, the eighth Exeter Symposium took place at Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, between 17 and 20 July 2011. The twelve papers that formed the basis for discussions at the Symposium are collected here.

As always, the canonical ‘Middle English Mystics’ are represented: indeed, there is a ‘full house’ of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the Cloud-author, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The volume begins with Vincent Gillespie's exploration of light, colour and sight in Julian of Norwich. Over the past twenty years, literary scholars have been demonstrating the possibilities of medieval optical theory as an interpretative angle on Middle English poetry, but (even though contemplatio is at root a matter of looking) Gillespie's is the first sustained and detailed attempt to bring perspectival optics, theories of intromission and extramission (and various syntheses of the two), and distinctions between light as it is perceived and the transcendent Light, to one of our mystical authors. Julian, not for the first time, emerges as an extraordinarily well-informed, as well as theologically and philosophically subtle, thinker.

Gillespie's occasional collaborator in work on Julian (including the important and ever-stimulating essay on ‘The Apophatic Image’ in MMTE V), Maggie Ross, writes on beholding, a word often used as a thoughtless synonym for seeing, but which, in its biblical and medieval usage, indicates more than that, a kind of silent and reverent receptivity.

The Pore Caitif as a reformist text

ThePore Caitif is a late-fourteenth-century Middle English devotional compilation extant in more than forty complete or partial copies. This voluminous work, aptly described as ‘a comprehensive … manual of doctrine and devotion’, includes fourteen tracts, commencing with syllabus material and tracts on patience and temptation, moving into Rolle-inspired meditations on desire for Jesus and love of Jesus, and finally treating topics such as the active and contemplative lives and chastity. This all sounds very orthodox, yet the work's history is complicated. Thirteen copies of the Pore Caitif have been called ‘Lollard manuscripts’ because they contain ‘certain interpolations and omissions that may be interpreted as ‘Lollard’ in sympathy: for instance, the omission of the passage that declares that ‘ymagis schulen be as kalendars to lewide folk’ or the passage that allows oaths as lawful under certain circumstances’. In this paper I analyse one such volume, British Library, MS Harley 2322, which contains a Pore Caitif text with these sorts of textual variants as well as two separate Wycliffite interpolations. Looking in detail at two tracts of the Pore Caitif as they appear in this book, I work to envision the role of this volume in early-fifteenth-century Wycliffite devotional life, and I simultaneously use this manuscript as a window into the late-fourteenth-century reformist origins of the Pore Caitif.

For all its unpacey ponderousness, when Chaucer's Boece renders passages of De consolatione philosophiae dealing with the ascent of the soul towards divine light and the transcendent Good, it reveals a delicate theological intelligence consonant with the devotional temper of contemporary mainstream piety. The maker of the Boke of Coumfort, an early-fifteenth-century Middle English prose version of book I of De consolatione drawing on Chaucer, was likewise willing to turn the Latin text to a more devotional end than was the case in the original. Nowhere is the pious recharging of the source more decisively advertised in both these vernacular versions than in their re-presenting, at the very outset of the work, of Lady Philosophy herself. In the original we read that on the hem of her gown are embroidered two symbolic Greek letters: ‘Π Grecum, in suppremo margine Θ’ (‘a Greek pi, and in the top border a theta’). These uncontroversially stand for Practica and Theoretica – practical and theoretical (that is, speculative) philosophy. But when Chaucer gets to this passage he puts a radically different interpretation on those sartorial letters. Following Jean de Meun's Livres de confort de philosophie, he glosses the Greek letters not just with their counterparts from the Latin alphabet, but also with a telling expositio sententie that equates them with the active and contemplative lives respectively:

In chapters 83 and 84 of her Long Text, with a hard-won confidence and expositional clarity that is the fruit of many years of reflection and rumination on her showings, Julian of Norwich finally presents her ‘even-cristen’ with the apotheosis of her thinking about the three core properties of God ‘in which the strength and effect of all the revelation stondith; and thei were seene in every shewing’:

On one level they appear to be unexceptionable restatements of an essentially Augustinian metaphysics of desire for union with God. Taken out of their narrative context in the unfolding psychodrama of her struggle to develop an appropriate way of beholding her showings, the force of these comments might appear muted, almost conventional. But Julian finesses the Neoplatonism of the Augustinian tradition through the highly personal lexis of her struggle to express and articulate the distinctiveness of her own showings and her fastidious attempts to record, reflect on and represent the nature of her fleeting ability to attend to and grasp their meanings and valencies.

Often internalising wider cultural concerns and anxieties, asceticism is a phenomenon enacted on the body with the intent of altering the mind. Yet while it is a practice almost universal in application, it is somewhat elusive in definition. Not all self-inflicted pain is ascetic. What some cultures perceive as exceptional behaviour others consider necessary rites of passage. Harm can be inflicted through inspiration from gods or from demons, through sanctity or madness; it can be moderate or extreme. Nevertheless, while different societies have different conceptions and expectations of the body and its rituals, none accepts it in an unmodified state and none views it as unconnected to higher cultural and spiritual concerns. Emile Durkheim writes that:

Durkheim's definition makes two important observations, firstly, that asceticism differs from popular forms of piety, and secondly, that the ascetic has not achieved perfection, but is engaged, through negation, in the transformation of both his spiritual and corporeal capacities. Indeed, modern conceptions of ascesis have elevated it to a notable position in cultural theory, especially in terms of societal structures, discipline and identity. Gavin Flood adds a further dimension to the definition offered by Durkheim which demonstrates the power of asceticism to define not only individuals but wider cultural identities.

Although Richard Whytford (1495–1555), academic and brother of Syon Abbey, spent a great deal of time producing materials in Middle English for an audience of religious (for example, translating the Rule of St Augustine and the Martiloge in Englysshe, as well as writing the comprehensive Pype or Tonne of the Lyfe of Perfection), he is also known for the works he wrote appealing to a broader audience: the best of which is A Work for Householders, as well as A Daily Exercise and Experience of Death and Preparation for Communion, circulating in manuscript and print in the 1530s. Whereas the works directed towards a religious audience provided extensive instructions on the contemplative life, Whytford's texts for a general audience either targeted specific interests for laypeople - such as preparing for communion and structuring the spiritual life of one's household - or offered practical, universal advice on devotions and pious practices for spiritually minded people. As well as being published separately, Whytford's treatises were collected in anthologies in the 1530s: his translations of The Golden Epistle and two pseudo-Bonaventuran ABCs were published several times; and his compositions A Work for Householders, A Preparation for Communion and A Daily Exercise of Death often were collected together.

Whytford's vernacular instructions for the print audience were prolific and popular, gaining a reputation from his being a Syon brother and connected with the influential lay community associated with Syon Abbey: before joining Syon he had a successful career at Cambridge, enjoyed a stint studying in Paris, and developed connections with such influential figures as Lord Mountjoy, Richard Fox and Erasmus.