From three different half-centuries and three different regions in continental Europe, Suso, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas à Kempis demonstrate three considerably different paths towards the transmission of piety and the process of translating devotional theology in trans-Reformation England. Yet far more connects them than divides them, united as they are in their popularity, whether in manuscript or in early print – and united, too, by their relative exclusion in so many venues of contemporary canonicity. What, then, do canonicity and popularity mean for the study of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? How can texts such as these be reincorporated into contemporary literary studies? While translation studies and interest in female authorship have brought some of the texts in this book to the attention of wider scholarly communities in recent decades (particularly Catherine of Siena) broader studies of the interaction between devotion, translation, and literature are still rare. By looking at devotional culture and devotional mobility in England and the Continent from this perspective, as well examining the history of the books that were most widely read across Western Europe, this study has demonstrated what we might consider a new canon of “popular” literature that deserves a central position in our understanding of literary history. From this perspective, England is neither marginal nor insular, but was a thriving part of a textual culture which incorporated Continental mysticism into a broader discourse concerning the role of reading in shaping ethical behavior, the status and authority of revelatory visions, and, ultimately, the salvation of souls.
In all these cases, the status of the “author” is not a one-dimensional march from mind to page, from medieval manuscript to contemporary monograph. Neither pages, nor minds, nor languages are that straightforward – in any time period. And, as is entirely unsurprising for any medieval text, the layers of compiling, translating, copying, reporting, and editing all variously contribute to the intermingled, hybrid spiritual text as it was experienced then, and as it is read today – all these interconnected facets of what Sarah Poor calls “cloaking the body in text.” Just as medievalists have, for the better part of a half-century, been able to recognize the forces at work in limiting medieval literature by employing post-Romantic ideals of authorship, so too do the barriers between source text and translation, life and Life, Latin and vernacular, medieval and “Renaissance,” seem increasingly restrictive to me. There is far, far more to be gained by looking across languages, genres, types of textual production, and the boundaries of periodization than there is to be lost.
By studying the transreformation history of the translation of the texts in this study, and recalibrating our understanding of how translation functions as a positive form of intellectual production, we encounter an otherwise missing link between the visionaries and prophets of high and late medieval Europe and, for instance, the seventeenth-century prophetic figures of Quakerism, Methodist spirituality in the eighteenth, and New World visionaries from the late sixteenth century onwards. Similarly, the extraordinary diversity of gender imagery in representations of Jesus in the texts studied here evince an understanding of divine gender that is far closer to contemporary ideals of genderfluidity and performativity than one might otherwise have expected. In reconsidering canonicity, popularity, and mobility in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we might also see a turn away from the affective and the vernacular in the study of devotion. While these have undoubtedly proved rifts laden with ore in recent decades, yet they too often reinforce existing canons and notions of popularity, excluding lesser-known texts and non-insular literary traditions. By instead focusing on aurality, gender, and translation across regions and across time periods, I hope this book can reframe discussion of what Rolle, Suso, Catherine, and Kempis meant to readers in England and across Europe for centuries – and what they might mean to us today.
