Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, c. 1100–c. 1530

For more than two decades, Denis Renevey has been tracing the various uses of—and forms of devotion to—the Holy Name of Jesus in the religious literature of later medieval England.1 Elaborating on the biblical notion that the Name itself should be reverenced (cf. especially Phil. 2.10: “At the name of Jesus, every knee should bow”), later medieval writers treated the Name as a mantra-like focus of meditation and prayer, as a kind of spiritual medicine, and as a textual object to be approached with dread and love. “Jesus” or “Iħs” was thus at once “a linguistic or visual sign” and “a devotional tool triggering affective responses,” and even, in some cases, Renevey suggests, “allowing access to an imageless apophatic dimension” (5). In the present monograph Renevey draws on his long experience with this material to offer a survey of these various ways of approaching the Name in medieval English religious literature. As such, this book will be an indispensable tool for future research, a necessary starting-point for anyone studying this devotion and these texts. At the same time, Renevey offers a compelling literary and devotional history, teasing out from often fragmentary or oblique evidence the larger contours of how the cult of the Holy Name developed in England—a history that neatly positions devotion to the Name amid some of the major trends in Latin Christianity between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.In chapter 1, Renevey sets out the major sources to which later medieval writers had seemingly constant recourse in their discussions of the Name. Chief among these is Bernard of Clairvaux’s fifteenth sermon on the Song of Songs, focusing on the phrase, “Your name is oil poured out.” Bernard’s effusions—that “every food of the mind is dry if not dipped in that oil, tasteless if not seasoned by that salt,” that any text has no “relish unless it tells of Jesus,” and that “Jesus to me is honey in the mouth, music in the ear, a song in the heart”—are quoted and adapted across many of the texts discussed in later chapters (see, e.g., 96, 119, 162, 166, etc.); to the examples gathered by Renevey I could add a perhaps unexpected quotation in John Wyclif’s postil on Matthew.2 It is therefore unsurprising that the twelfth-century Latin poem discussed in chapter 2, Dulcis Iesu memoria, is often attributed to Bernard. After treating the poem itself, Renevey sets out its various Anglo-French translations and adaptations. (Middle English versions are mentioned, but discussion is generally reserved for a section in chapter 3, 98–102). The remainder of chapter 2 then takes up the contributions made by members of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century, in their sermons and, especially, their Anglo-French and Anglo-Latin poetry. Here Renevey focuses above all on the works of John of Howden OFM (fl. 1268/69–75), and it can only be hoped that his admirable treatment of Howden—perhaps the most sustained discussion of his Latin since Raby’s History of Christian-Latin Poetry—will encourage more readers to explore this author’s corpus.3Following further discussion of Anglo-French and Middle English lyrics, chapter 3 dwells on the English mystic Richard Rolle (d. 1349), whose writings at once reveal the prominent place of devotion to the Name in Rolle’s own contemplative practice, and encourage—at times in quite florid terms—similar devotion on the part of Rolle’s readers. Renevey’s discussion is rich and quite useful, though I should register my disagreement with one particular claim. Throughout this discussion, Renevey repeatedly argues that it is Rolle’s “silent utter[ing]” of the Name “which triggers the continuous hearing of heavenly song within his mind” (108)—that is, meditation on the Name of Jesus “triggers” or “causes” the experience of hearing angelic song (canor), which Rolle believed to be the pinnacle of contemplation in the present life. (The word “trigger” is repeated on 111, 117, and 118, and the recitation of the Name is described as an “active cause” of song on 113 and a “causal factor” on 120). I have trouble finding Rolle anywhere being so clear about causation. Arguably the most direct of Rolle’s statements concerning the relationship between devotion to the Name and further contemplative experience comes in Incendium Amoris, 15, where he writes, “Puto tamen neminem illud accepturum nisi specialiter nomen Iesu diligat et in tantum honoret, ut ab eius memoria numquam excepto sompno recedere permittat. Cui hoc facere datum est, estimo quod et illud assequetur” [Yet I believe that no one will receive this (i.e., the gift of heavenly song) except those who especially love the Name of Jesus and honor it to such a degree that, apart from when they are sleeping, they never permit it to pass away from their memory. I think that, when someone has been given the ability to do the one, the other will follow].4 Continuous devotion to the Name is here presented as a precondition of the experience of song, and Rolle clearly thinks that a contemplative who has been able to achieve the one (itself presented as a divine gift: datum est) will inevitably (though when?) enjoy the other. As throughout his corpus, Rolle holds out the delights of supreme contemplative experience to encourage readers to take up more familiar forms of devotion: reading the psalms, imagining scenes of the Passion, meditating on the Holy Name.The remainder of chapter 3 and almost all of chapter 4 are devoted to assessing the influence of Rolle’s devotion to the Name on later Middle English and Anglo-Latin religious writers. Renevey describes various compilations of Rolle’s writings, the criticisms of and clarifications to Rolle’s view of the contemplative life set out by Walter Hilton (d. 1396), the adaptation of Rolle’s ideas by Richard Methley OCarth (d. 1527/28), and the place of Rollean excerpts in the Exhortacion that forms the final section of the Middle English Disce mori. Just as significantly, however, Renevey emphasizes that, at the end of the fourteenth century and into the fifteenth century, devotion to the Holy Name need not be Rollean devotion—that is, Middle English writers (e.g., the author of the Chastising of God’s Children) continued to craft elaborate meditations on the Name without showing any signs of having read Rolle. Finally, in chapter 5, Renevey takes up the place of the Name in the Book of Margery Kempe (before 1438) and the Meditations upon the Seven Days of the Week by Dame Eleanor Hull (d. ca. 1460), before turning to texts more or less closely associated with the institution of the Feast of the Holy Name in England (in 1488 in Canterbury and 1489 in York). The discussion of Kempe in particular is intriguing, insofar as Renevey charts the many references to the Name that could otherwise easily be overlooked by readers of the Book, but which were noted, with enthusiasm, by the fourth annotator of its single surviving manuscript.It is worth, finally, dwelling on the task Renevey sets for himself. The book does not aim to be a history of the cult of the Holy Name in medieval England, but neither is it a narrow literary history. It does not simply seek (for example) to identify the sources and influence of Rolle’s writings on the Name. Instead, the Dulcis Iesu memoria and the many writings of the Hermit of Hampole serve as two centering points, two major interventions in the history of a larger (and looser) tradition of literature at once inspired by and written to support devotion to the Name. Dulcis Iesu memoria and the Rollean corpus are unusually sophisticated and sustained responses to this devotional impulse, and they therefore (like Bernard’s sermon) did much to shape the efforts of subsequent writers—and, we might imagine, the lived experience of later devotees. But they are not coextensive with the larger textual expression of devotion to the Name, and Renevey is to be commended for the care he has taken to include materials that might have fallen by the wayside: e.g., the Greek “Office of the most sweet Jesus” preserved in a twelfth-century manuscript (36–39), or the excerpt from a letter of St. Anselm which, though not about the Name, circulates with a compilation of extracts from Rolle’s Latin (142–44). Approaching the necessarily obscure relationship between literary texts and the history of devotional practice with subtlety and care, Renevey has curated an archive of material on a particularly significant aspect of literary-devotional history, a resource from which we will benefit for a long time to come

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