The Community of the Church: Religious Lyrics and the English Mystics

The next two chapters are about religious literature. In this chapter I will look at some of the most expressive and sophisticated of all medieval writing in English: the texts in which religious men and women describe their inner lives and encourage others to try their own spiritual journeys. Here I am not talking about the homiletic texts, and the dramatisations of Bible stories written to educate the laity, which I discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. The largest community of writers and readers in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England lived in religious houses: the monks, canons, friars and nuns, who spent some of every day in reading, prayer and meditation. Most of these could read Latin, and so had access to more than a thousand years of European religious teaching — or at least to those texts which were available in their community’s library. Some developed into very sophisticated writers themselves, whose Latin ranged from the technical and academic, to the personal and imaginative. But not all those in religious communities were proficient in Latin, particularly if they were only on the verge of joining an Order, and it was for new and apprentice (novice) monks and nuns that the male English mystics I will be discussing wrote texts in English, perhaps to encourage their vocations.