This article argues that Julian of Norwich’s visionary text, The Revelation of Divine Love, develops a distinctive account of contemplation through rhetorical analysis of bodily posture. It begins by looking at contemplative ethics in earlier medieval writers, from Gregory the Great to Richard Rolle, who used upright posture to represent the human capacity for contemplation and resistance to postlapsarian “inclination.” Julian’s own account emerges through her theologically innovative exegesis of a parable shown to her when she first received her visions in 1373. In the parable, Julian sees a lord whose servant has been injured in a fall, which she interprets as an allegory of the fall in Genesis 3. By comparing the servant to Julian’s own physical condition and posture at the beginning of the Revelation, we can see Julian’s implicit identification with the servant as a fellow contemplative. This in turn reveals Julian’s contribution to late-medieval contemplative theology: a vision of contemplative desire as a wound that enlarges the soul rather than a moral deficiency requiring correction.
“William Dunbar’s Liturgical Poetics,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 43 (2021)
Long hailed as one of the most technically gifted poets of the later Middle Ages, William Dunbar held a special interest in the lyric effects that could be generated through the appropriation of liturgical texts. This essay analyzes poems that are usually separated in categorizing Dunbar’s corpus — parodies, laments, and meditations — to show that Dunbar exploits the rhetorically capacious first-person of liturgy in order to theorize the fashioning of his own poetic voice. He does so, moreover, by building on a tradition of liturgical adaptation he inherited from the fifteenth century, including poets such as John Audelay and William Litchfield. Dunbar’s experiments with liturgical language and form reveal a heretofore unacknowledged poetic agenda: to expand the audience and performance possibilities of liturgically-inflected, linguistically hybrid religious lyrics. He pursues this agenda in two complementary ways: by theorizing the linguistic toggling required in a bilingual devotional culture, as we see in his Marian anthem, “Ane Ballat of Our Lady”; and by re-composing the calendrical rhythms of liturgy in a distinctly lyric mode.
Keywords lyric, liturgy, Dunbar, form, clerical poetry, intimate speech
DeVan Ard 