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7 - Meditatio/Meditation
- from Part II - Key Terms
- Edited by Amy Hollywood, Patricia Z. Beckman, St Olaf College, Minnesota
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism
- Published online:
- 05 December 2012
- Print publication:
- 17 September 2012, pp 157-166
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Summary
In the Christian tradition, meditatio (meditation) has long been considered an essential element of the contemplative life. Meditation is almost always seen as training or preparation for the higher activity of prayer or contemplation, an intermediate stage rather than an end in itself. In considering meditation, it is useful to distinguish between meditation as a practice or spiritual exercise and meditation as a written form. The latter includes narratives that often are or claim to be the product of the writer’s personal experience and serve the didactic function of providing models to imitate or inspiration for those seeking to practice meditation in pursuit of the contemplative life. It would be mistaken, however, to consider meditatio as a well-defined literary genre or formal category in the Middle Ages. The term is loosely applied to a range of works in both prose and verse and is often not used in connection with works for which it would seem appropriate, at least according to the modern understanding of the term. The element of private self-examination seems to be a common denominator, but there is considerable variation.
In the early Middle Ages, meditation as an activity is almost exclusively associated with monasticism, and later developments reflect these monastic origins. The monastic rules of the early Middle Ages mention meditatio as a spiritual exercise most frequently in connection with the reading of a text, as Jean LeClercq explains, and it is clear that the term means something other than its modern sense of private thought or solitary reflection. In early monasticism, meditari, the Latin verb related to meditatio, usually means the private recitation of a text, with a view toward memorizing it. The text most likely to be meditated upon in this fashion was a biblical text, often the Psalms, which were central to the liturgical life of the monastery. It is important to note that meditation in this sense is never free-form speculation or associational thinking but is always tied specifically to a text.
7 - Walter Hilton
- Edited by Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden, Roger Ellis
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- Book:
- Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2005, pp 87-100
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Summary
WALTER Hilton is one of the most important religious writers of late-medieval England. He was especially popular in the fifteenth century and, with the advent of printing, continued to be read well into the sixteenth. He succeeded in appealing to a relatively broad cross-section of lay and clerical readership by espousing a moderate, safely orthodox approach to matters of spirituality and religious practice. Hilton left a variety of works, the longest and most popular of which is the Scale of Perfection, a comprehensive treatise on the contemplative life written in English for a woman who had taken religious orders. Although the established details of Hilton's life are meagre, we are nevertheless fortunate in knowing more about him than we do of many medieval authors. The date and place of Hilton's birth are unknown, but a date in the 1340s seems likely. There is good reason to believe he studied canon law, probably at Cambridge. He probably spent some time as a religious hermit before joining the order of Augustinian Canons. He died in 1396 at the Augustinian Priory of Thurgarton, in Nottinghamshire.
Besides the Scale, Hilton's English works include On the Mixed Life (to which we shall return later), a brief book of instruction for a layman on how to lead a ‘mixed’ life combining aspects of both active and contemplative lives while at the same time maintaining a secular existence. Also Hilton's are the brief treatise Of Angel's Song, which critiques what to Hilton is a mistaken understanding of the mystical experience as bodily or physical, and a work known as Eight Chapters on Perfection , a treatise dealing with, among other topics, the dangers that beset the person attempting to lead a contemplative life. Hilton also is likely to have been the author of separate English commentaries on Psalm 90 (beginning ‘Qui habitat’ in the Vulgate version) and Psalm 91 (‘Bonum est’). It is much less likely that he wrote a commentary on the ‘Benedictus’ (Luke 1: 68–80).
In common with many of his contemporaries, Hilton wrote in Latin as well as English. His surviving Latin works are usually in the form of semi-public letters written to address specific, often controversial topics.
The Monk's Tale
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- By Thomas H. Bestul, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Edited by Robert M. Correale, Mary Hamel
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- Book:
- Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales: vol. I
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 25 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 14 February 2002, pp 409-448
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Summary
The Monk's Tale is a collection of seventeen stories describing the fall of great men or women (or in one case, an angel) from good fortune into permanent misery. The individual narratives vary in length from a single stanza of eight lines to sixteen stanzas for the longest story (Zenobia). In the Prologue of the Tale, the Monk calls such stories tragedies, a term that is elaborated upon in the first stanza of the Tale and again in the last. Tragedy is a type of narrative describing the fall of those in high rank through trust in Fortune (derived from the Roman goddess Fortuna), who is capricious and inevitably withdraws her gifts. The stories are told as a warning to others not to trust in the “blynd prosperitee” offered by Fortune (VII 1997). The theory of tragedy embodied in the Tale, particularly its connection with Fortune and its emphasis on moral instruction, seems to reflect late medieval definitions of tragedy as a narrative form. The philosophical conception of Fortune that lies behind this theory of tragedy, together with the association of Fortune with the fall of the great, was well known in the Middle Ages, authoritatively expressed in the De consolatione philosophiae of Boethius, a work Chaucer translated.
The general conception of a collection of tales on the downfall of the great Chaucer seems to have been taken from the De casibus virorum illustrium (“On the Falls of Illustrious Men”) of Giovanni Boccaccio. This indebtedness appears to be indirectly acknowledged in several of the manuscripts, which include the title De casibus virorum at either the beginning or the end of the Tale. The epigraph to the Tale in the Riverside Chaucer is: “Heere bigynneth the Monkes Tale De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.” On the basis of the manuscript evidence, it is likely, but not certain, that Chaucer himself was responsible for this apparent confirmation of an obligation to Boccaccio. Within the Prologue and the Tale themselves, however, Chaucer never names Boccaccio, and at line 2325, the Monk-narrator inexplicably suggests that Petrarch was his source, even though the story of Zenobia that is being told closely follows Boccaccio in certain of its details.