In this book, Steven Rozenski sets himself the admirable goal of “reinvigorat[ing] our understanding of popular piety and its most popular literary manifestations over the course of three crucial centuries” (3). To do this, he analyzes the literary oeuvre of four contemplative writers, one English and three continental European, whose works were disseminated widely in England in the late medieval and early modern period: Henry Suso, Richard Rolle, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas à Kempis. As Rozenski demonstrates, the popularity and influence of the works of these writers, as measured in numbers of surviving translations into English, of manuscripts and citations by other writers, is far greater than that of other writers and works (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example, or The Book of Margery Kempe, each of which survives in a single manuscript from the dialectal backwaters of late medieval England) that loom much larger in present-day readers’ understanding of the literature of their times.
Part of Rozenski’s goal is to recuperate the translation of works originally written in other languages as a valid part of the literary production of late medieval England. As a prime example, he compares the place that the works of Suso and Rolle, in both the vernacular and Latin, played in the literature of continental European piety as well as in England. The comparison is apt, although the argument is pressed a little far at times: the role of devotion to the Holy Name of Jesus in the works of both writers is congruent, but the gender fluidity of Suso’s texts is far greater than that of Rolle’s, and Rolle’s emphasis on the mystical experience of “heat, sweetness, and song” (68) is far greater than Suso’s. Rozenski rightly emphasizes the sensuality of the descriptions of mystical experience in both writers, and particularly the role of celestial music as the height of that experience.
In his second chapter, Rozenski details closely the imprint of Suso’s writings in England, as measured both in the Seven Points of True Love and Everlasting Wisdom, the abbreviated translation of theHorologium Sapientiae, and in numerous translated extracts--including particularly the often-translated “Ars moriendi” chapter, most notably translated in the fourth section of Thomas Hoccleve’s “Series,” in the play of “Wisdom,” in the Carthusian historical meditations of Oxford MS e Museo 160, in the death meditations of bishop John Fisher, awaiting his execution for failing to take the Oath of Succession to King Henry VIII, and on into a number of post-Reformation texts. In this section, one of the greatest strengths of Rozenski’s work--the close reading of manuscripts--becomes particularly evident. The third chapter performs the same kind and degree of analysis of the pre-and post-Reformation literary traces of the Italian visionary mystic Catherine of Siena in England; the fourth chapter does the same with The Imitation of Christ.
In his conclusion, Rozenski returns to the general questions with which he began, looking at ideas of canon formation and “popularity” of texts on the basis of their actual transmission, rather than projecting the post-print characterization of circulation of texts in manuscript as a pre-print form of “coterie publication” as scholars of post-print literature so often tend to do. As Rozenski demonstrates, looking at the transmission of the texts he examines in terms of their actual circulation over time, rather than the reverse-teleology that reads the past as not yet the present, enables a very different criticism.