The hospitals of late medieval England defy easy categorization. They were institutions of charity, medical care, and liturgical commemoration. At the same time, hospitals were cultural spaces sponsoring the performance of drama, the composition of medical texts, and the reading of devotional works. Such practices both reflected and connected the disparate groups—regular religious, ill and poor people, well-off retirees—that congregated in hospitals. In this book, I argue that hospitals constitute unique yet neglected sources for late medieval English literary and cultural history. Taking a new approach to literary history and its institutional contexts, I highlight hospitals as porous sites whose practices translated into textual engagements with some of urban society’s most pressing concerns: charity, health, devotion, and commerce. Within these institutions, medical compendia treated the alarming bodies of women, and religious anthologies translated Augustinian devotional practices for lay readers. Looking outward, religious drama and socially charged poetry publicized and interrogated hospitals’ caring functions within urban charitable economies.
The primary texts included in this study range from the canonical (the York play, John Lydgate’s poetry) to the obscure (the Breviarium Bartholomei, Copland’s Hye Way to the Spyttell Hous). Hospitals provided the auspices, audiences, and authors of such disparate literary works, propelling these texts into urban social life. Between about 1350 and 1550, English hospitals saw massive changes in their fortunes, from the devastation of the Black Death, to various fifteenth-century reform initiatives, to the creeping dissolutions of religious houses under Henry VIII and Edward VI. In the heated decades of the 1530s and 40s, when religious regimes hinged upon rhetorical choices, public strategies of representation might translate into a hospital’s demise or its survival. My study investigates how hospitals defined and defended themselves with texts, and in some cases reinvented themselves in the sixteenth century, using literary means to negotiate changed religious landscapes.
Historians of English hospitals, including Carole Rawcliffe and Miri Rubin, have offered detailed accounts of individual English hospitals and traced the late medieval histories of poor relief and medical care in which these institutions figured. Literary historian Theresa Coletti has considered hospitals as sites for religious performance in the mass and liturgy and proposed the East Anglian hospital as a context for “devotional theater.” Some pioneering studies have investigated the copying and exchange of religious books at hospitals, yet it remains true today, as Rawcliffe argued in 2002, that “the ownership and use of books by hospitals is . . . a neglected area of research.” To date there has been no book-length account of hospitals in relation to English literary and cultural practice. Rawcliffe has also noted that scholars have not always attended carefully to how hospital culture was constituted because so much artistic evidence of English hospital life was destroyed during the Dissolution years. Hospital cultural practices, she suggests, are due for a “radical reassessment.” I contribute to this reassessment by mapping the literary histories of three premodern English hospitals: St. Leonard’s, York; St. Bartholomew’s, London; and St. Mark’s, Bristol. Founded in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, respectively, by the later medieval period all were Augustinian institutions, located in England’s three most populous cities. These hospitals are distinguished by well-documented histories and rich surviving archives. And although they shared certain liturgical and cultural assumptions, their differing resident populations, caring functions, and positions within their home cities made for distinct trajectories during the fraught centuries of my study.
The range of texts that I include in The Medieval Hospital—drama, history, medical treatise, poetry, devotional prose in Latin and Middle English—reflects the diversity of the three hospitals’ populations and the range of their social interventions. Amid this variety, two important themes stand out: the importance of the Augustinian Order and its spirituality to the literary lives of the three hospitals, and the prominence of women within hospitals, as residents, patrons, and readers. I will suggest that a distinctive Augustinian approach to regulation, reading, and spirituality may have guided some of the canons in charge, influencing the construction of lay devotional practice and spiritual friendships within the three hospitals. Also crucial are the hospitals’ roles as homes for women, manifesting differently in each case. Women were objects of intense concern and, in some cases, powerful agents within hospitals. Hospitals offered shelter to women at vulnerable stages of life and extremes of the social spectrum: destitute pregnant single women and affluent widows congregated at St. Bartholomew’s. Within the hospital, texts were composed and copied to advise both groups. Nurses served as the primary caregivers at hospitals, and though they left few written records, at the sixteenth-century refoundation of St. Bartholomew’s the matron became a figure of signal importance. Women, in a variety of roles and life stages, formed a constant object of hospitals’ care and were central to their textual cultures.
