Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle

The Medieval MysTical TradiTion in england

exeTer syMposiuM viii

Papers read at Charney Manor, July 2011

Edited by E. A. Jones

D. S. BREWER

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93

AUTHORITY AND EXEMPLARITY IN HENRY SUSO AND RICHARD ROLLE

STEVEN ROZENSKI, JR

The Works of TWo exeMplary figures of fourteenth-century spirituality, Henry Suso and Richard Rolle, grant us insight into some of the most significant commonalities between the devotional cultures of fourteenth-century England and Germany. The reception history of the two authors demonstrates their skill in composing narratives and creating characters which subsequent generations of readers found compelling aides to their spiritual development and contemplative practices. The similarities between the two authors, while to a certain extent rooted in some of their common sources, nevertheless testify to the popularity of a particular type of self-fashioning as both author and eponymous character. Both this strategy of authorial self-presentation and the array of thematic commonalities they share can shape our understanding of the role their texts played in the process of transmission and translation of spiritual concepts between England and Germany in the later Middle Ages. Suso and Rolle, besides their many thematic and structural similarities, also had particular success in capturing the attention of readers and translators both religious and lay from the second half of the fourteenth century until the beginning of the seventeenth.

In particular, one of the central points of commonality between Suso and Rolle lies in what I term ‘devotional mobility’. By this I mean not only the instances of physical and spiritual mobility inherent in both (for instance, Rolle’s account of wandering between insufficiently solitary hermitages and Suso’s persecution while on trips to provincial chapters demonstrate the role of physical mobility in their self-descriptions; both explore the directional framework of spiritual ascent within the space of the visionary event as a type of spiritual mobility). Rather, I stress their mobility as devotional authors in catering to vastly different readerships over the course of their careers. This is especially evident in their ability to move between Latin and the vernacular, the ways in which their reception histories both manifest considerable adaptation by regional audiences, the circulation of their manuscripts across Europe in service of varying devotional and theological aims, and most concretely in the translation process itself, as their ideas are transferred into new languages and new local devotional cultures.

Firstly, however, their popular success: several hundred manuscripts of Suso’s works survive, both in their original Latin and Middle High German, and translated into nearly every vernacular in Europe.1 Before 1500, his works were printed in Aalst

1 Besides its English reception – most thoroughly discussed in Dirk Schultze, ‘The Seven

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94 Steven Rozenski, Jr

(Belgium), London, Delft, Schoonhoven (the Netherlands), Venice, Magdeburg, Nürnberg, twice in Augsburg, thrice in Cologne, and four times in Paris. According to the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, 272 of these incunabula survive.2 This omits, however, the wide use of Suso in excerpts as a source-text (in the Speculum devotorum and Nicholas Love’s Mirror, for instance), as well as the use of his passion meditation and his liturgy, which is only beginning to be fully charted. In the Netherlands, for instance, his passion meditation (the third book of the Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit) was translated and re-translated eleven times, surviving in at least 274 manuscripts.3 And the liturgical Cursus de aeterna sapientia (the third book of the Horologium sapientiae) was translated into Dutch by Geert Grote and included in his vernacular book of hours – the text survives independently in 354 manuscripts,4 and as a part of the Book of Hours in over 800 copies.5

Ralph Hanna’s recent descriptive catalogue of the 123 English-language manuscripts of Richard Rolle’s work has considerably furthered our understanding of the reception of this foundational figure of English literature.6 Rolle’s Latin works also circulated beyond England, although research on their continental

Points of True Love and Everlasting Wisdom: A Middle English Translation of Henry Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae, Edited from Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn II.5’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald, 2005) – the dissemination of the Horologium consists of Middle French (76 manuscripts and fragments in at least two versions), Middle Dutch (13 manuscripts, including manuscripts containing only fragments), Italian (25 manuscripts, 1511 Venice printing), Czech (8 manuscripts), Swedish (2 different translations – one of which was written or transcribed by Vadstena sisters – in 5 manuscripts altogether), Danish and Hungarian (1 manuscript each), and possibly Polish versions. My gratitude to Stephen Mitchell for the information on the Scandinavian reception, which differs significantly from the account in the critical edition of Pius Künzle (Heinrich Seuses Horologium Sapientiae (Freiburg, 1977)). Künzle lists 233 Latin manuscripts, including 19 fragments, as well as 88 manuscripts attested at some point but now missing. One has recently been recovered: see Mikhail Kharkov, ‘Eine Version von Heinrich Seuses Horologium Sapientiae aus der Bibliotheca Apollonia (Handschrift UFB Erfurt-Gotha, Dep. Erf. CA 4° 144)’, Heinrich-Seuse-Jahrbuch 2 (2009), 95–103.

2 Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke, online at www.gesamtkatalogderwiegendrucke.de.3 José van Aelst’s definitive studies of the history of this text are Passie voor het Lijden: De

‘Hundert Betrachtungen und Begehrungen’ van Henricus Suso en de oudste drie bewerkingen uit de Nederlanden (Leuven, 2005) and Vruchten van de Passie: De laatmiddeleeuwse passieliteratuur verkend aan de hand van Suso’s ‘Honderd artikelen’ (Hilversum, 2011). For the complex genealogy of the translations (from Suso’s Middle High German first into a southern dialect of Middle Dutch (in Groenendaal), then into Latin by Willem Jordaens, then from Latin into a northern Middle Dutch dialect, and so on), see Schema 1 in van Aelst, Passie voor het Lijden.

4 Stephanus Axters, Bibliotheca dominicana neerlandica manuscripta 1224–1500 (Leuven, 1970), pp. 186–99, 213–42 and 310–17.

5 Concerted research into Suso’s pan-European reception is just beginning, led by the OPVS (Oeuvres pieuses vernaculaires à succès) research group of the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Paris (see www.opvs.fr for information about the project).

6 The English Manuscripts of Richard Rolle: A Descriptive Catalogue (Exeter, 2010). He includes manuscripts of the Speculum spiritualium: while the bulk of the text is in Latin, the final chapter of book II consists of extracts from Rolle’s Form of Living in English. For an edition and discussion of this chapter, see E. A. Jones, ‘A Chapter from Richard Rolle in Two Fifteenth-Century Compilations’, Leeds Studies in English 27 (1997), pp. 139–62.

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95Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle

reception is still ongoing; the earliest printing of most of his biblical commentaries, for example, was in 1535/6 in Cologne by the Dominican Johannes Faber, in the service of the Counter-Reformation.7 Denis Renevey goes beyond considering the vast number of extant Rolle manuscripts, however, to establish ‘the ease with which he moved from one genre to another, translating, transposing, and adapting his material and his sources according to the genre and the particular audience that each entailed’ which made him ‘the like of a Chaucer in the field of religious literature’.8 Examining the central devotional and pastoral concerns of Rolle and Suso in tandem illuminates the interests, concerns and reading practices of a substantial subset of late-medieval readers.

Despite the history of nationalistic impulses separating medieval writers into discrete language groups, the artificiality of these categories might be seen most clearly in the exceedingly mobile, international and interlingual culture of late-medieval devotional literature. In considering Henry Suso, Richard Rolle and their particular representations of authorial selfhood, it is evident that they both share a deep-seated concern with their self-presentation as author, the methods by which they acquire status as authoritative figures and ultimately the construction of their author-character as an exemplary figure competing with Christ as the ideal model for imitation.

Just as Paul encouraged the Corinthians to follow his example of following Christ (I Corinthians 11: 1), so too Rolle and Suso present their eponymous characters as offering especially persuasive and edifying models for imitation. Whatever one wishes to make of the possible historicity of the events they describe in their works, the wide readership of the texts themselves in the late Middle Ages attests to the significance and popularity of the self-fashioning of a devout hermit or a ‘servant of Eternal Wisdom’ as author and exemplar for the reader. Suso, for example, presents both himself and his ‘spiritual daughter’, Elsbeth Stagel, as faithfully following in Christ’s footsteps throughout his corpus. He in turn offers his texts as models for the devout to read and imitate; worried by the possibility of excerpted fragments of his work circulating beyond his control and being misinterpreted, he compiles his writings into what he self-confidently calls The Exemplar.

The self presented by Suso and Rolle in their texts is a self-consciously exemplary one; their reports of mystical experience are designed to be instructional insofar as they might be replicated by the contemplative reader (perhaps, indeed, in the act of reading itself). In this, both had to grapple with turning their particular representations of experience into more universally applicable models, a process which Nicholas Watson notes took some time: not until the Emendatio vitae do

7 Much work remains to be done on Rolle’s continental reception. See A. I. Doyle, ‘Carthusian Participation in the Movement of Works of Richard Rolle between England and Other Parts of Europe in the 14th and 15th Centuries’, in Kartäusermystik und Mystiker, vol. II, ed. James Hogg, Analecta Carthusiana 55 (Salzburg, 1981), pp. 109–20. For Rolle’s reception in Bohemia, see Michael van Dussen, From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2012).

8 Denis Renevey, ‘Richard Rolle’, in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden and Roger Ellis (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 63–74, p. 64.

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we see ‘how Rolle’s spiritual life, on which he has expended so much ink and praise, fits into a wider pattern and is not the idiosyncratic thing it has seemed; . . . it becomes itself the pattern for all who aspire to holiness to follow, whether or not they aspire to the solitary life’.9 Similarly, the preface to the Vita, in claiming to describe Suso’s initial reluctance to allow Elsbeth Stagel to transcribe their conversation until divine intervention demanded he consent, reveals not only the necessity of maintaining an air of humility when presenting his life story as an exemplar, but also divine desire to have readers overcome whatever differences they might see between their own situations and Suso’s in the greater goal of following in Suso’s footsteps.

Rather than looking in their texts for autobiographical clues, then, I am interested in their creation of a narrative that, while it seems inevitably to have led readers and commentators to biographical assumptions, is much more significant for the exemplary self it produced for its contemporary audience. These narrativised, eponymous characters, whatever their historical veracity, reveal the interests of contemporary devotional readers and the kind of piety the authors hope their readers would subsequently emulate. We can see their success even in the margins of books: Jeffrey Hamburger has pointed out a marginal drawing which copies a woodcut of Suso in a 1482 incunabulum – one reader’s reaction to encountering The Exemplar was to treat even the author-portrait itself as an exemplar to be copied.10 So important is the identification of author-character with text that the colophon in Bodleian Library MS Laud 528 (Incendium amoris) even places a hermit’s head between Rolle’s name and Jesus’ (Figure 1). In this manuscript the image of the man validates the text; later on we will see that the presence of a book titled ‘Ego’ can help to affirm the authority of an otherwise anonymous hermit.

In Rolle, perhaps the best evidence of the success of the association of autobiography with author is in the Officium, a liturgical document composed to create an office for his feast day were he to be canonised. The interest in Rolle as an individual can be seen in Uppsala University MS C. 621, ff. 103–5, a fairly early (c. 1400) copy of the Officium that was owned by Vadstena, the motherhouse of the Bridgettine order: the scribe eliminated the liturgical portions of the work, retaining only the readings describing saintly moments in Rolle’s life, and introduces it simply as ‘de vita eius’.11

The characters ‘Suso’ and ‘Rolle’ are at the heart of their respective textual projects. In the Ego dormio, for instance, we find the narrator speaking directly to the reader: ‘Forþi þat I loue þe, I wowe þe, þat I myght haue þe as I wold, nat to me, bot to my Lord. I wil becom a messager to brynge þe to his bed þat hath mad þe and boght þe, Crist, þe kynges son of heuyn, for he wil wed þe if þou wil loue

9 Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, 1991), p. 209.10 Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘Medieval Self-fashioning: Authorship, Authority, and Autobiography in

Suso’s Exemplar’, in his The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany, pp. 233–78, p. 234 (and figure 5.1, p. 235).

11 Hope Emily Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole (New York, 1927), p. 53.

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hym.’12 In the immediacy and intimacy of this language, both Rolle’s voice and Christ’s offer of love are made present to the reader. Through the immediacy of Rolle’s presence (both in the implied orality of the prosimetric text and the direct address of the reader in the second person), Rolle himself makes a pilgrimage to the reader and offers to continue this journey by preparing each of us to become the bride of the Canticle – and, ultimately, bringing us to Christ’s bridal bed.

Although the more unmediated model of imitational-devotional life developed in, for instance, Thomas van Kempen’s Imitatio Christi or the Pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes vitae Christi would also gain tremendous popularity throughout Europe, the strategies of exemplarism employed by Rolle and Suso retained enormous interest for late-medieval readers. Part of their rhetorical effectiveness, however, can be linked to an ongoing re-theorising of the processes of textual production. In the thirteenth century, Bonaventure developed an influential four-fold hierarchy of involvement with a text: the scriptor merely copies what he is given, the compilator draws together various works, adding nothing of his own, the commentator ‘strives to explain the views of others, adding something of his own by way of explanation. Finally and most importantly, the auctor writes de suo but draws on the statements of other men to support his own views’.13 Rather than seeing only direct links between divine auctoritas and human auctores, these

12 Richard Rolle: Prose and Verse, ed. S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson, EETS os 293, p. 26, lines 6–10.13 Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later

Middle Ages (Aldershot, 1988), pp. 94–5. On the consideration of poetic authorship in religious lyric, see Michelle Bolduc’s ‘The Poetics of Authorship and Vernacular Religious Devotion’, in The Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan Karant-Nunn (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 125–43.

Figure 1. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Laud 528, fol. 97v (detail).With permission of the Bodleian Library, The University of Oxford.

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more subtle Bonaventurean distinctions recognise the varying levels of creativity and choice involved in medieval book production.

In addition, however, Bonaventure’s Neoplatonic metaphysics stresses the role of the causa exemplaris – an addition to the four Aristotelian causae, and employed in pointed opposition to the growing influence of Aristotelianism.14 Exemplarism firstly refers to the expression of the divine ideas in the created world, in which they diversely reflect the unity of the creator in the multiplicity of creation (already in Seneca the Platonic ‘idea’ is treated as a fifth, exemplar cause).15 Just as the idea (exemplar) in the mind of the artisan is subsequently present by means of the likeness (similitude) of the work produced, so too the manifestations of the divine ideas in creation imply varying degrees of participation in – and assimilation by – their exemplar.16 For Bonaventure, it is Eternal Wisdom in which the likeness between Creator and creature is most particularly forged; in the following century Suso would use his spiritual marriage to this feminine embodiment of Jesus-as-Wisdom as the central theme of the Horologium sapientiae.17

The concept of the exemplar cause, widespread in Dominican scholasticism as well, is linked to the type of self-referential writing central to Rolle and Suso’s authorial and devotional project in which authorial experience can trump ancient auctoritas. Peter Ulrich writes,

One does not find the causa exemplaris in the Aristotelian four causes. It is first introduced into theological argumentation by Albertus Magnus and Thomas [Aquinas]. There it stands, however, coequal with the Aristotelian causes. It distinguishes itself, however, in contrast to the standard formal causes as a causa formalis extra rem in which its self-formation (formatio) is manifested not in an inherent manner (per modum inhaerentiae) but rather by means of imitation (per modum imitationis).18

14 ‘Aristotle well knows that there is a fight to the death between Plato and himself; so he attacks exemplarism with sarcasm and rancour . . . and that is why the central point of (Bonaventurean) metaphysics is also the subject of the deepest obscurity in Aristotle. All light springs from exemplarism and all darkness from the denial of it.’ Etienne Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, trans. Dom Illtyd Trethowan and Frank Sheed (Paterson NJ, 1965), p. 129.

15 Epistle LXV, ‘On the First Cause’, in Seneca, vol. IV, Epistles 1–65, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA, 1917).

16 See Leonard J. Bowman, ‘The Cosmic Exemplarism of Bonaventure’, Journal of Religion 55 (1975), 181–98. A similar understanding of the exemplarism of the divine ideas can be found in Thomas Aquinas: ‘when an idea acts as an exemplar, the thing that it forms is in a certain respect also assimilated to the agent who possesses the idea’: Gregory Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington DC, 2008), p. 26.

17 ‘Omnis enim creatura ex natura est illius aeternae sapientiae quaedam effigies et similitudo.’ Itinerarium mentis in Deum II.12, in Opera omnia S. Bonaventurae, vol. V (Quaracchi, 1891), p. 303. Indeed, Bonaventure specifically associates Eternal Wisdom’s productivity in exemplarism with the fecundity of the created world: ‘in sapientia aeterna est ratio fecunditatis ad concipiendum, producendum et pariendum quidquid est de universitate legum; omnes enim rationes exemplares concipiuntur ab aeterno in vulva aeternae sapientiae seu utero’ (from Gilson, The Philosophy of St. Bonaventure, p. 146 n. 28). On the uses of ‘image’ and ‘similitude’ in Suso’s Horologium and Thomas Hoccleve’s translation of these terms, see Steven Rozenski, Jr, ‘“Your Ensaumple and Your Mirour”: Hoccleve’s Amplification of the Imagery and Intimacy of Henry Suso’s Ars Moriendi’, Parergon 25 (2008), 1–16.

18 ‘Die causa exemplaris findet sich nicht unter den vier Ursachen des Aristoteles. Erst von Albert Magnus und Thomas wird sie in die theologische Argumentation eingeführt. Dort

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Albertus Magnus – teacher of Eckhart (who in turn taught Suso at the Dominican studium generale in Cologne) – and Aquinas incorporated into their theology a cause which externalises change and makes possible willed action through participation in the divine ideas.19

By placing the mode of participation and transformation in the very act of imitating an exemplar-model, Bonaventure, Albert and Thomas created the potential for a new understanding of creative authorship both divine and human, one in which traditional standards of auctoritas are subsumed by the importance of the individual experiences of the auctor and their exemplary impression on the mind of the reader. From a different angle, but with the same emphasis on the role of personal experience (or rather, the authorial claim thereto), the Bernardine ‘Book of Experience’ similarly operates at the intersection of experiential and textual authority. Annie Sutherland describes this process at work in Richard Rolle’s writing as a ‘mutually informing and validating’ ‘hermeneutical loop’ in which textual-biblical tradition validates mystic experience and the Rollean triad of fervor–dulcor–canor is in turn legitimated by scriptural precedent.20

Similarly, Watson argues that Rolle’s sense of authority is a potential attribute of human experience itself, if such experience is (or can be described in such a way as to make it seem) genuine, powerful, meaningful and important enough to merit serious consideration. . . . in the fourteenth century, this sense of significance was reserved especially for private and affective experiences, which, under the proper conditions, could come to be regarded as having importance for everyone, and thus as contributing to (perhaps even modifying) the tradition from which they sprang.21

Hence Rolle and Suso’s constant invocation of their own experiences can be seen as a reaction to this new understanding of authorship in which a textual causa exemplaris lends the character of the author within the text a new significance for the reader (and potential imitator).

Following in part from these developments is the distinction between auctor (from augere, to produce) and actor (from agere, to do) that arises in the late Middle Ages: writers increasingly began to mention themselves in their texts, creating a ‘bibliographic ego’ or a self-portrayed, eponymous actor in the text of which they are auctor. These moments of authorial self-inclusion offer glimpses

steht sie aber gleichrangig neben den aristotelischen Ursachen. Sie zeichnet sich dadurch aus, daß sie im Gegensatz zur gewöhnlichen Formalursachen eine causa formalis extra rem ist, wobei sich die Gleichgestaltung (formatio) mit dieser Ursache nicht auf inhärente Weise (per modum inhaerentiae), sondern in der Nachfolge (per modum imitationis) vollzieht.’ Imitatio et configuratio: Die Philosophia spiritualis Heinrich Seuses als Theologie der Nachfolge des Christus passus (Regensburg, 1995), p. 158.

19 See especially Summa theologica I, q. 44, a. 3 (Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, Doctoris Angelici, Opera omnia, Leonine edition, Rome, 1882–).

20 Annie Sutherland, ‘Biblical Text and Spiritual Experience in the English Epistles of Richard Rolle’, Review of English Studies 56 (2005), 695–711, pp. 705–6. The Bernardine notion is perhaps best summarised by Richard Kieckhefer, There Once was a Serpent: A History of Theology in Limericks (Winchester, 2010): ‘A book that I most recommend / is the book of experience, my friend. / Get the latest edition, / for living tradition / is worth it, whatever you spend’ (p. 36).

21 Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, p. 22.

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of what medieval authors thought about the very process of textual creation in which they were engaged. And, as Michel de Certeau writes of specifically mystical authority based on the narrator’s report of experience, these references establish ‘a narrativizing of the speaker, an endless circulation around that productive agency, that infinite and uninsured locus, the “I”’.22 In Rolle and Suso, prolonged meditations on their roles as author and exemplar depend heavily on these autocitations; their claims to experience aim to guarantee the authority of the texts which describe those experiences.23

In the case of Henry Suso, his presence as actor within the text is essential to his mystical project. In the Briefbüchlein (Little Book of Letters), Suso states his case plainly: ‘Lord, what I read about before, I have now experienced’ (‘Herr, daz ich hie vor laz, daz han ich nu enpfunden’, B 376).24 He has read his exempla, experienced what was described in those books, and now has the experiential authority to forge himself as an exemplar. In the Vita, however, the protagonist is only referred to in the third-person, usually simply as the diener. And yet a rubric found in most manuscripts tells us ‘here begins the first part of this book, which is called the Suso’ (‘Hie vahet an daz erste tail dizz bůches, daz da haisset der Súse’, B 7).25 Rolle, more active in his use of the first-person, seems to have a similar goal in mind: ‘to enshrine his account of the spiritual life as a legitimate addition to the canon of writing on the subject, and to enrol him as a member of an elite club of contemplative auctores’.26 In both cases, self-presentation as an authority takes the form of a unique experience that can be represented as repeatable by the devout reader.

Suso the auctor and Suso the actor – what Alois Haas terms ‘empirischem Ich’ and ‘literarischem Rollen-Ich’ – are always in a dialectical relationship between theory and practice.27 Haas emphasises the importance of the transparence of the relationship between Suso the auctor as identical to Suso the diener or actor: ‘the credibility of the narrator depends on the transparency he dispenses between his text and his existence. This transparency is exactly that which motivates Suso’s

22 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago, 1992), p. 179.23 A process that Watson rightly notes leads to a tautology that must be carefully concealed: ‘it

is vital to the apologetic effectiveness of the Incendium Amoris that Rolle assert his sanctity as convincingly as possible and stress the exemplary character of his experience . . . Rolle has to rely on his own powers of persuasion and self-presentation to convince the reader; he has to be his own investigator and witness in a canonization process, conducted unofficially, with himself as subject’ (Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, p. 124).

24 References to Suso’s Middle High German texts will be taken from Karl Bihlmeyer’s critical edition (Heinrich Seuse. Deutsche Schriften (Stuttgart, 1907)) and will be cited parenthetically by ‘B’ followed by the page number.

25 Werner Williams-Krapp disputes the authority of this, however, arguing that Suso never names himself in the main body of the Vita in order to make the Servant an everyman, rather than a bearer of autobiographical or auto-hagiographical information: ‘Henry Suso’s Vita between Mystagogy and Hagiography’, in Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe 1200–1500, ed. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 35–47.

26 Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority, p. 219.27 Nim din selbes war: Studien zur Lehre von der Selbsterkenntnis bei Meister Eckhart, Johannes

Tauler, und Heinrich Seuse (Freiburg, 1971), p. 156.

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literary-theoretical consideration of the difference between reality and higher truth in the text’.28 Or, as Bernard McGinn summarises, ‘the Life presents an intricate interplay between the purported empirical “I”, the subtly crafted literary “I”, and finally the mystical and vanishing “I”’.29 Whereas Suso the auctor in the Büchlein der Wahrheit puzzles over the nature of mystical union with God, Suso the actor in the Vita offers us a concrete example of the imitation of Christ that can in turn lead the reader to this same union with the divine.

Richard Rolle adopts a similar strategy in what Paul Theiner calls a ‘careful manipulation of the distance between the narrator and both his subject and audience’.30 Rolle too depends on the validity of his portrayal of his own experiences in authorising and authenticating his textual production, while still needing to generalise his autobiographical references in order to make them accessible for wider imitation and replication. The quest for authorial exemplarity requires a constant, careful negotiation between self-reference, humility, and universal appeal. And yet when the narrator is acting specifically as the transmitter of the mystical vision, ‘the use of the first-person escalates, even as he mingle[s] “I” and “we” together quite casually, suggesting that the reader and the author are presumed to be joined against the world’.31 Rolle emphatically, grammatically invites the reader to participate with him and the lovers of God in castigating the lovers of the world.

As mentioned earlier, in both Suso and Rolle there is an identification of the author with his book – a textual instantiation of the author upon which the work’s authority rests and its claims to exemplarity depend. A Rollean example can also be found in the well-known iconography of British Library, MS Additional 37049: fol. 37r (Figure 2) bears a nearly full-column image in which a hermit – with the divine monogram in red on his chest, noted since Wolfgang Riehle as a Susonian crossover – seated on a boulder holds an open book in his lap which simply reads ego.32 Brantley sees in this a reference to Rolle’s famous epistle: ‘ego dormio et cor meum vigilat’: surely part of the explanation, as fol. 52v contains a portrait of an extremely similar hermit, also with the divine monogram on his chest and a book in his lap – and ‘armonia odas canora’ above him, with a speech bubble leading below the figure to the text ‘I syt & synge of luf langy(n)g / þ(a)t i(n) my breste is

28 ‘die Glaubwürdigkeit des Redenden hängt an der Durchsichtigkeit, die er zwischen seinem Text und seiner Existenz walten läßt. Gerade diese Durchsichtigkeit ist es, die Seuse zu seinen literaturtheoretischen Überlegungen über die Differenz zwischen Realität und höherer Wahrheit im Text antreibt’ (Kunst rechter Gelassenheit: Themen und Schwerpunkte von Heinrich Seuses Mystik (Bern, 1995), p. 202).

29 Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, vol. IV of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York, 2005), p. 203.

30 The Contra Amatores Mundi of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. and trans. Paul F. Theiner (Berkeley, 1968), p. 21.

31 Ibid., pp. 22–4.32 See Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance

in Late Medieval England (Chicago, 2007). The discussion of this image can be found on pp. 143–6, with fol. 37r reproduced on p. 144 (figure 4.9). Wolfgang Riehle mentions the presence of manuscript illuminations representing the divine monogram on Rolle’s chest in The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (London, 1981), p. 32.

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Figure 2. British Library, MS Additional 37049, fol. 37r (detail).© British Library Board

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bred. Ihu my kynge + my ioyinge. When wer I to þe ledde. Richard Hampole’.33 But in the context of Suso’s self-identification as the Vita, ‘the book called the Suso’, the ego here can also be seen as a statement of authorial presence within the book: I am the book, in reading the book you experience my exemplary presence, a presence which you can then imitate and follow.34

Andrew Albin writes convincingly in support of this argument; he expands his interpretation to the three angels above the hermit who serve to reinforce the importance of authorial presence in terms of musicality. The scroll they hold bears notation which is ‘accurately represented and fully singable’, and indeed offers a melisma which is associated with a number of Sanctus settings. Albin writes that ‘the c4 clef [the scribe] uses in each of the staves indicates music written for low male voices – a further means of inviting the codex’s predominantly male and musically literate audience to sing familiar melodies written in their vocal range’.35 An image-text that was thought to represent Carthusian silence instead represents ‘the complex echoic loop of canor’s reception and emission: the song, performed by heavenly choirs, descends in the direction of the curving page into Rolle’s body, where his heartfelt fervoric praise becomes and offers back up canor, precisely what occurs pictorially above his head’.36

Early in the Vita, the Suso-character acts as auctor (or, more accurately, a simple scriptor) on the parchment of his flesh by taking his stylus and bloodily carving the sacred monogram IHS above his heart; the resulting scarification provides him with solace in times of persecution. Later on his spiritual daughter – Elsbeth Stagel – imitates his authorship, albeit in a different medium: she sews the monogram in red silk on small pieces of cloth and shares them with others. By mimicking his authorship, she follows in his imitation of the suffering of Christ. But by changing the medium, she offers the reader a model of textual transmission that occludes the extremism of Suso’s bloody act.

This mediation, seen through the lens of ‘the self-conscious identification with the feminine that was to mark [Suso’s] entire career’,37 was no doubt an integral part of Suso’s popularity in the later Middle Ages. Acting as a mediator of the imitation of Christ, Suso provides a model for imitation that is neither as explicitly male as Christ nor as feminine as the Virgin Mary or his beloved Sapientia; this appealing ambiguity for Suso’s female audience even found expression in some manuscript illuminations of the diener. In fact, Werner Williams-Krapp has argued that this exemplarity was designed to limit self-castigation among Dominican nuns: the first part of the Vita, detailing a host of gruesome self-mortifications, closely match those found in Elsbeth of Oye’s Revelations – but Eternal Wisdom ultimately tells Suso

33 Figures 4.6 and 4.7 in Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness.34 Indeed, MS Add. 37049 contains five couplets quoting the Horologium sapientiae on fol. 28

and chapters 5 and part of 4 of the Seven Poyntes (i.e. Horologium sapientiae II.ii and II.iii) on fols 39–42.

35 Andrew Albin, ‘Auralities: Sound Cultures and the Experience of Hearing in Late Medieval England’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Brandeis University, 2010), p. 171.

36 Ibid., p. 170.37 Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary, p. 238.

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to put them aside as unnecessary.38 Rolle too discusses his own pastoral care of women in careful terms, employing standard caveats concerning carnal temptation in order to intimate that he is not to be imitated in this particularly delicate matter.39

Indeed, immediately after he lists dozens of sententiae from the Apophthegmata patrum, Suso himself suggests that Stagel not precisely follow the suffering he inflicts on himself in imitation of Christ and the Desert Fathers: ‘The beloved Christ did not say “take up my cross”, he said: “everyone must take up his own cross!”’ (‘Der lieb Cristus sprach nút: “nement min krúz uf úch,” er sprach: “ieder mensch neme sin krúz uf sich!”’, B 107). The asceticism to be emulated, however exemplary, must still be appropriately matched to the capabilities of each devotee.

Suso’s concerns about authorship are especially evident in the prologue to the Exemplar. It begins straightforwardly and confidently: ‘In disem exemplar stand geschriben vier gůtú büchlú’ (‘in this exemplar four good books are written’) (B 3). The text to be copied and the life to be copied are fused in this title; the numerical correspondence with the four Gospels leaves little doubt as to Suso’s own personal model. He goes on to explain his rationale for creating this compilation of writings done over the course of his life:

wan aber daz selb büchli und etlichú me siner bücher nu lange in verren und in nahen landen von mengerley unkunnenden schribern und schriberin ungantzlich abgeschriben sind, . . . dar umb hat sú der diener der ewigen wisheit hie zů samen gesezzet und wol gerihtet, daz man ein gereht exemplar vinde nach der wise, als sú ime dez ersten von gote in luhten. (B 4)But because this same book – and others of his – have been incompletely copied [or: copied in excerpts] in lands far and near by many unskilled male and female scribes, . . . thus the servant of Eternal Wisdom has gathered them together and ordered them properly so that one might find a correct exemplar in just the manner in which God first enlightened him.

Here, the scriptorial sense of exemplar comes to the fore in Suso’s attempt to control the text’s transmission. Excerpted and misattributed works seem to have been proliferating, as ever; in the decades after Meister Eckhart’s posthumous condemnation in 1329 concerns about wholeness of codices must have been especially prevalent among the Dominicans. The entirety of the work, this prologue claims, was divinely inspired in precisely the order in which Suso has now arranged it; subsequent copyists must be certain to preserve this.40

38 Williams-Krapp, ‘Henry Suso’s Vita between Mystagogy and Hagiography’, p. 41.39 In the Incendium amoris, ch. 29, for instance: ed. Margaret Deansley (Manchester, 1915),

pp. 226–30.40 Needless to say, Suso’s works were constantly excerpted, condensed, adapted, and translated

throughout the fifteenth century. Curiously, just after the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom (the second of the four books of the Exemplar) there appears the formulaic message to a future scribe one would expect at the end of the work: he must ‘alles sament eigenlich an worten und sinnen schriben, als es hie stat, und nút dar zů noh dur von legen noh dú wort verwandlen, und sol es denne einest oder zwirunt hier ab durnehtklich rihten, und sol nút sunders dar us schriben, denne die hundert betrahtung ze hindrost; die schrib dar us, ob er well’ (‘write everything complete with regards to words and sense, as it stands here, and not put anything in before or after, or change the words. He should then check it carefully once or twice, and not copy any special pieces separately, except the hundred adages at the end, those he can excerpt if he wants to’) (B 325). Suso must have either anticipated the independent

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In a similarly defensive gesture – and perhaps allied with the aforementioned diffusion of authorial responsibility within the narrative of the Vita – Suso seeks approval for his project (which, but for concern about the decline of piety in his day, he would have otherwise preferred to have been published posthumously) from an authority within his order. He describes choosing only the most difficult and puzzling articles from his texts (a preemptory echo of the dossier-compilation process that preceded a heresy trial?) and presenting this florilegium difficile to a Master Bartholomew, a Dominican superior. After gathering up the scattered pieces of his circulating texts in order to fix them in a single exemplar, he then turns to an important Dominican to secure the legitimacy of the most abstruse passages; Bartholomew reassures Suso that they will be received ‘altogether like a secret sweet kernel from the holy Scriptures’ (‘alles sament als ein togenlicher süzzer kerne uss der heiligen schrift’, B 5). Not an innovative, potentially dangerous creation, these writings instead issue forth from the divine exemplar of all texts: Scripture.

When Suso has reassembled ‘aller höhsten sinne und die aller úberswenksten materien’ (‘all the highest-minded and enthusiastic materials’) with the ‘gemain lere’ (‘common teachings’) (B 5) he once again plans to turn to Master Bartholomew for an imprimatur. Although this is hampered by Bartholomew’s death, he appears to Suso in a vision (after Suso begs Eternal Wisdom herself for an answer) and reveals to him ‘daz es gotes gůter wille were’ (‘that it was God’s good will’) that the Exemplar be circulated (‘gemainsamet’) among ‘allen gůtherzigen menschen’ (‘all good-hearted people’) (B 6). Thus the Exemplar, its text gathered whole, is approved by authorities both earthly and heavenly. The potentially unstable text is fixed fast; its content is safely orthodox.

It is important to keep this self-described anxiety in mind throughout the course of the present argument: despite what we might think as Suso’s more authoritative position as a member of the Dominican order, this and other similar passages pepper the Vita with Suso’s own effort to obtain credibility and legitimacy as an author. And despite Rolle’s more unorthodox lifestyle and the concomitant need to establish himself – through claims to mystical experience – as a spiritual author, Suso felt a similar need in his authorial career. It is unlikely that this can be entirely attributed to Eckhart’s heresy condemnation, or Suso’s desire to present himself as figure of Christic persecution and misunderstanding; it can instead reflect what John van Engen, referring to European Christendom as a whole, has referred to as the ‘multiple options’ of the late-medieval Church: a localisation of diverse religious movements and a growing ‘theological engagement with issues of practice’.41 Suso’s wish to avoid the look of innovation, then, is a strategy akin to Rolle’s scorn

dissemination of the Latin version of the text, or have already planned to circulate the Latin Horologium sapientiae separately.

41 ‘Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church’, Church History 77 (2008), 257–84, p. 279. He proposes this term as an alternative to ‘laicisation’ or ‘reformation’, instead emphasising the immense regional energy of the local Church; he sees the treatment of Lollards and the Modern Devout on a local level as ‘not “disfunctionality” but a new form of functioning within Christendom, whatever the limitations in a particular region, university, or religious house’ (p. 264).

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for those who do not believe their contemporaries can be as pious or authoritative as the ancients: in both instances it is a privileging of the present-day experience, whatever its basis in traditions of contemplative practice, and a wish to represent a spiritual life achievable through contemporary imitation of the two authors.

Suso deploys similar strategies in rehabilitating the reputation of his beloved teacher, Meister Eckhart. Evidently deeply stung by Pope John XXII’s bull of condemnation, In agro dominico, Suso offers us a glimpse at the darker side of textual circulation as he creates an exemplary misreader, the ‘nameless wild one’. Reversing the elaborate techniques of authorial self-fashioning and ekphrasis so dominant in the bulk of the text, Suso leaves this heretical reader-character faceless and unnamed. He is, however, noted to be ‘subtle in his words but inexperienced in his works’ (‘subtil an sinen worten und waz aber ungeůbet an sinen werken’, B 352), perhaps recalling Gregory the Great’s distinction that exemplary works are far more valuable than exemplary words.42 Suso speaks to this shadowy figure:

‘Wannen bist du?’ Es sprach: ‘ich kam nie dannen’. Er sprach: ‘sag mir, waz bist du?’ Es sprach: ‘ich bin niht.’ Er sprach: ‘waz wilt du?’ Es antwúrte und sprach: ‘ich wil nút.’’ (B 352)‘Where are you from?’ It said: ‘I never came from anywhere.’ He said: ‘Tell me, what are you?’ It said: ‘I am nothing.’ He said: ‘What do you want?’ It said: ‘I want nothing.’

Here we see the exact opposite of the autocitation and authorial self-naming we see elsewhere in Suso and Rolle. This deliberately obscure actor goes on to cite some of the articles listed in Eckhart’s condemnation, doing his best to associate them with the putative practices and beliefs of the ‘Heresy of the Free Spirit’. Suso refutes him time and again, valiantly putting an orthodox spin on these arguably heterodox passages.

Elsewhere, even the scarring of the flesh above his heart is seen as inadequate; he expresses a wish to gild his heart itself – an image that does not appear in any of the manuscript illustrations of Suso, and yet surprisingly is present on Rolle’s chest on fol. 8v of British Library MS Cotton Faustina B.VI (Pt. II)! Suso writes, ‘O Lord, would that I could carve you on my heart, would that I could melt you into the innermost parts of my heart and soul with golden letters so that you could never be separated from me [or: erased in me]!’ (‘Owe herr, könd ich dich uf min herz gezeichen, könde ich dich in daz innigoste mins herzen und miner sele mit guldinen bůchstaben gesmelzen, daz du niemer in mir vertilget wurdist!’, B 228). Union with God is understood in shockingly textual, authorial (and surprisingly non-transcendent) terms – gastronomic metaphors of scriptural rumination seem the closest analogues. In this passage, however, the God-as-Word is seen as penetrating the diener to the very heart; one might imagine the gilt letters themselves as primarily scriptural building-blocks, but also the very elements of the Exemplar itself. Suso has already turned himself into a text through the Vita (‘the book called the Suso’); here God provides the alphabetic foundation for such

42 ‘Sit rector operatione praecipuus, ut vitae viam subditis vivendo denuntiet, et grex, qui pastoris vocem moresque sequitur, per exempla melius quam per verba gradiatur.’ Gregory the Great, Cura Pastoralis 2.3 (PL 77.28).

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a project. Written with such divinely formed letters, the Suso-text cannot but be a perfect exemplar for its readers.

Indeed, a literal ruminatio provides a central scene to the Vita: while sitting in his cell in the winter, he hears a voice telling him to open the window and ‘lůg und lern!’ (‘look and learn!’) (B 58). There he sees a dog

der lúf enmitten in dem krúzgang und trůg ein verschlissen fůsstůch umbe in dem munde, und hat wunderlich geberde mit dem fůstůch; er warf es uf, er warf es nider, und zarte löcher dar in’. (B 228)running through the cloisters, carrying a tattered doormat in his mouth; and he had a strange manner with the doormat: he threw it up, he threw it to the ground, and he ripped holes in it.43

This, he is told, is exactly what will happen to him in the mouths of his fellow Dominicans; he must learn to endure suffering patiently and passively, just like the doormat.44 Given the high rag content of paper of his time,45 Suso-the-doormat can also be understood as materially identical to Suso-the-text: this in turn forces the reader to consider his own rumination of the Suso-text, giving us another example of the worst reader imaginable.

It is in the depths of despair – in the soul lamenting its separation from God – that Suso finds his most ambitious, even somewhat presumptuous authorial project:

Wer git mir des himels breit permit, des mers tieffi ze tinkten, lob und gras ze vedren, daz ich volschribe min herzleid und daz unwiderbrinklich ungemach, daz mir daz leitlich scheiden von minem geminten hat getan! (B 212–13)Who will give me the breadth of heaven as a parchment, the depths of the sea as ink, leaf and grass as quills, that I might describe fully my heart’s suffering and the irreparable ills that this terrible separation from my beloved has done to me!

Here Suso imagines only the entirety of creation itself as sufficient for the text of his suffering. The entire book of creation is in need of revision by Suso the auctor and actor – and yet it will tell only of the sorrow of Suso’s separation from God. Here, the grandiose universality of Suso’s authorial vision points towards an awareness of author not only as creator but also, perhaps more importantly, an almost frenetically mobile force of adaptation and revision. Although Suso typically writes himself as an imitation of Christ or Mary, here he casts himself unmistakably, as an author writing across the breadth of heaven, as the first person of the Trinity (and this despite the fact that his soul here is speaking as a woman, describing herself as the bride of the Father). Throughout the Exemplar we see Suso grappling with his

43 This theme leads to an amusingly tautological piece of advice in the Little Book of Letters: ‘Daz fůstůch zúrnet mit nieman, wie man im tůt, wan es ein fůstůch ist’ (‘A doormat gets angry with no-one, no matter what someone does to it, because it is a doormat’) (B 363).

44 Hildegard Elisabeth Keller notes the implicit, commonplace pun here (domini-canes); she also remarks that the illustration of this scene in the Einsiedeln manuscript (Cod. 710(322)) even replicates the Dominican habit in the coloration of the dog. ‘Zorn – Prüfstein der Exemplarität? Eine Fallstudie zum Exemplar und seinen Paratexten’, in Anima und sêle: Darstellungen und Systematisierungen von Seele im Mittelalter, ed. Katharina Philipowski and Anne Prior (Berlin, 2006), pp. 221–48, p. 240–1.

45 He does explicitly mention writing on paper at one point: ‘Do dis alles bereit und an papyr geschriben waz’ (‘when all this was ready and written on paper’) (B 322).

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role as author and exemplar; in writing himself into the text as actor he presents the reader with an at times confusing – but always robustly desirable – array of imitative choices.

Despite these representations of hesitation and uncertainty, the Exemplar was widely received across Europe as a shining mirror of a text in which late-medieval readers could see themselves clearly and transform themselves into the images they found therein. Rolle’s popularity too testifies to the effectiveness of an authorial strategy that emphasises readerly participation in and replication of the experiences of the narrator-figure; the amplification of this imitative and experiential relationship between reader and writer is the central element of spiritual authorship for both Suso and Rolle. In their cultivation of this relationship – paradoxically both textual and experiential – they seized upon widespread popular devotional interests and provided readers in England, Germany and across Europe with ideal exempla to copy.

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Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle

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Transcript of Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle