Mary C. Erler

Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England

Acknowledgments Prologue Introduction: Dinahs story 1. Ownership and transmission of books: womens religious communities 2. The library of a London vowess: Margery de Nerford 3. A Norwich widow and her devout society: Margaret Purdans 4. Orthodoxy: the Fettyplace sisters at Syon 5. Heterodoxy: anchoress Katherine Manne and abbess Elizabeth Throckmorton 6. Women owners or religious incunabula: the physical evidence Epilogue Appendices Notes Select bibliography Indexes.

“A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422): Reform and the Politics of Female Visions

The anonymous author of this dictated letter, probably a Nunnaminster anchoress, bears comparison with her contemporary Margery Kempe, and thus enlarges our knowledge of the English female visionary tradition. Yet the anchoress reveals a different kind of spiritual reading and provides a more unmediated voice than Kempe’s, while her vision’s condemnation of the state of religious life seems to have encountered less opposition than Margery’s message. Investigation of the six clerics who were the first recipients of the 1422 “Revelation of Purgatory” shows a conservative, orthodox group, two of them highly placed members of Lancastrian ducal familia. Part of a conversation about reform in the last years of Henry IV’s reign, the vision’s positioning in historic Winchester with its traditional interlocking of secular and spiritual power, and its indebtedness to St. Birgitta’s Revelations, recently introduced to England, may have validated its violent rhetoric of purgatorial punishment.

A Revelation of Purgatory

In a three-part vision that began on the night of 10 August 1422, an anonymous woman saw a nun named Margaret suffering in purgatory and eventually entering the gate of paradise.1 Afterwards, the revelation was either recounted personally by the visionary or sent as a dictated letter to six men, her spiritual directors and members of her circle. All of them can be identified, as can the visionary herself.2 Recent work has situated her as a member of the large and famous abbey of St Mary Winchester, or Nunnaminster, in Hampshire — an Anglo-Saxon women s foundation.3 Scholars have thought it likely that she was either a nun there or an ‘unattached holy woman’, but it seems most probable that she was the unnamed Winchester anchoress consulted by Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, in another connection the year before the vision. In January 1421 the earl had sent two men, one of them the anchorite chaplain of Guy s Cliff, a hermitage patronized by the earls of Warwick, to visit this woman, paying their expenses of 13s 4d. Several months later in May of the same year the Winchester anchoress was brought to London to meet with the earl while Parliament was in session. This time Warwick s accounts show that he spent £2 6s 8d for the anchoress’stransportation, for her three-day maintenance in London, and for a reward.4 It seems likely that the Winchester anchoress whom Warwick consulted twice in 1421 was the author of A Revelation of Purgatory in 1422. Her narrative in that year refers to previous visions: ‘I saw al be peynes whiche wer showed to me many tymes before as ʒe, fadyr, knew wel by my tellynge’ (p. 59).

The Guildhall Library, Robert Bale and the writing of London history†

The careers of four of Londons late medieval chroniclers – Robert Bale, Richard Arnold, Robert Fabyan and Edward Hall – show the entree to City administration that facilitated the writing of the Citys narrative. More importantly, points of connection among these writers suggest the borrowings, physical and intellectual, that the presence of Londons administrative library at the Guildhall made possible. This article focuses in particular on Robert Bale (c.1410–73), correcting some errors in his biography, and on his personal compilation (now Trinity College Dublin, MS. 509), its movements and its possible influence on other London chronicles.

London Commercial Theatre 1500–1576

When the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project was founded in 1975, it announced its intention to locate, transcribe and edit the evidence of English dramatic activity before 1642. It soon became apparent that the comparative scarcity of (new) dramatic texts meant that the project’s great contribution, broadly speaking, would be its research into the performance practices of communities. The chapter that follows, the product of work as a REED editor, offers such a perspective. Like the rest of this volume’s second section, it asks what archival work can tell us about performance. Its particular focus is economic.